[HN Gopher] Factorio: Space Age
___________________________________________________________________
Factorio: Space Age
Author : haunter
Score : 1226 points
Date : 2023-08-25 11:50 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (factorio.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (factorio.com)
| babuloseo wrote:
| want
| amgcbus wrote:
| Being that the release date is more than a year away I wish they
| would have skipped the Switch port which seems to have been
| significantly less successful.
| seer wrote:
| > In the previous news about the expansion FFF-367, we declared
| that the content will be technically a mod taking advantage of
| the updated engine. What this means is that a lot of the
| improvements will be for all players, regardless of them having
| the expansion or not.
|
| This is such an amazing way to release a second version of a
| game! Reminds me of libraries that publish major version updates
| that don't add anything just remove deprecated stuff.
|
| Its what real refactoring is all about - changing the platform so
| that the new problems are trivial to solve. Since factorio is all
| about refactoring, I'm so happy they took this route!
| bombcar wrote:
| Cities Skylines has done this with their DLC; each "major" DLC
| came with changes to the base game that everyone got (usually
| to support the DLC) and then the DLC itself added more.
|
| So if you bought the game and never bought any DLC, you have a
| much different game now than when you first played.
| js8 wrote:
| Looking forward to it. My only wish is that they add something
| like Recursive Blueprints to the base game, so we could build von
| Neumann probes.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| Postponing cliff explosives makes be extremely sad. I'm
| perfectionist freak and my factorio gameplay basically divides
| "before" and "after" cliff explosives. I hate when I can't fix
| terrain for my plans, I prefer to terraform as much as needed,
| turning lake into plains, if needed, but I'm not going to adapt
| my grand plan.
|
| I understand that there are players who find fun in adapting
| their bases to the environment, building defenses around natural
| obstacles, but I'm completely the opposite of that. It's deep
| grained in my nature: to bend the world rather than to bend my
| plans.
|
| Hopefully they'll rethink that part. And may be even make it
| possible to "build" water (or to build water pump at arbitrary
| locations).
| jprete wrote:
| I had a similar reaction. But my read of the post is that
| rockets, space science, and other planets are now the mid-game,
| so cliff explosives are probably still mid-game tech, not end-
| game.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| You could just disable cliffs during world generation. That's
| what I do. They're slightly helpful for biter defense, but
| otherwise they're just annoying.
|
| There are also many mods that let you pump water from anywhere.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| I'm not a fan of custom modes and mods. I might go this way,
| if there's no other choice, however generally I prefer to
| play game as it was intended to be played by developers.
| gdprrrr wrote:
| It's definitely intenfed by the developers to play however
| you have the most fun. That's why they included the option,
| just like the peaceful mode.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| Factorio was clearly meant to be moddable and to be modded.
| The API is by no means a pure afterthought.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| It's not a mod. It's a setting in base game.
| eknkc wrote:
| I play vanilla except I always disable cliffs. That's it. I
| sometimes edit resource distribution if I wish to
| experiment with specific transports etc but cliffs always
| go away. I don't care what they intended as it is not fun
| for me.
| quchen wrote:
| There was a time before cliffs, and the game was fine.
| IIRC cliffs were also meant to give the explosive tree at
| least some non-warfare utility. They can be cool in the
| beginning, while later on they're a chore in my
| experience.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| Intended or not, I've found playing with mods way, way more
| fun (and much less annoying) than playing vanilla Factorio
| (which I still love, but not nearly as much as modded
| Factorio).
|
| After my first vanilla playthrough I loved the game, but
| found a bunch of things annoying or which I thought could
| be improved on. Soon after I found there were mods to
| satisfy every one of my wants and cure every one of the
| annoyances. I've played with mods ever since and love it.
|
| Want longer reach? There are mods for that.
|
| Want faster travel? There are mods for that.
|
| Want more variety in vehicles? There are mods for that.
|
| Want smarter/tougher/different enemies? There are mods for
| that.
|
| Want a complete overhaul of how the game plays? There are a
| bunch mods for that.
|
| ...and thousands of other mods beyond these.
|
| You're really missing out by avoiding mods.
| mcv wrote:
| I've played vanilla a couple of times, and recently
| started my first modded game, using Krastorio 2. That
| seemed to be the most recommended mod, and it's been
| great.
|
| Pretty much every question of "wouldn't it be cool if..."
| or "wouldn't it make more sense if..." that I ever asked
| myself playing vanilla, Krastorio 2 answers with "yes".
| Yes, it would make more sense if the car didn't run on
| coal but required more advanced fuel. Yes, it would make
| more sense if there were more ways to generate power.
| Yes, it would make more sense if complex early game
| machinery required a bit more than some metal plates. And
| yes, it would be cool if your crashed spaceship had some
| useable components.
|
| The one downside is that fighting creepers is too easy.
| The anti-material rifle has too much range, letting me
| snipe them from a position of invulnerability.
|
| Also, there's way too much chemistry possible. I'm
| completely lost in it.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" The one downside is that fighting creepers is too
| easy. The anti-material rifle has too much range, letting
| me snipe them from a position of invulnerability."_
|
| Maybe you could increase their evolution rate, pollution,
| or give the Rampant mod a try.
| mcv wrote:
| I think the better approach is to refuse to use the anti-
| material rifle. I don't think more biters that are too
| easy to kill will make the game more fun, and if I
| increase their strength to the point that the anti-
| material rifle strategy doesn't work anymore, I don't
| think any other strategy will work either.
|
| I'll have a look at the Rampant mod, though. That looks
| interesting.
| drbawb wrote:
| I did a vanilla playthrough w/ no console commands to get
| my fair share of achievements.[1] That base is from beta,
| and doesn't really function correctly anymore.[2] At this
| point I feel pretty done with the base game, though I
| suspect I'll do another "from scratch" playthrough w/ the
| expac to celebrate its launch. I have something like
| ~1100 hours in the game, and it still brings me great
| joy. Vanilla certainly owes me _nothing._ However it's
| really the joy of finding mods and playing their
| scenarios (or creating my own scenarios) that keeps me
| coming back to the game. Ironically I'm currently working
| through Space Exploration with friends; I sure hope we
| finish before the expansion!
|
| These days though I find the "burner" gameplay provides
| me very little enjoyment. I detest the "punching trees"
| phase of the game mostly because I've spent so many hours
| with my engineer at Max Power Level. (Maybe it'd be
| different if I had gotten bit by the speedrunning bug,
| and learned how to optimize that bit of the game.) Even
| my "most vanilla" playthroughs these days usually have at
| least:
|
| - "far reach"
|
| - a factory planner
|
| - some kind of warehousing/loaders
|
| - an /editor'd in crate of supplies to build power, some
| labs, and stamp down "the mall"
|
| - some kitted out modular armor and a personal roboport
| (to do the more finnicky builds; though I've watched some
| speedruns and my base building micro has gotten a lot
| better.)
|
| - LTN(!) - I love trains, and this mod's take on trains
| just gels with me.
|
| [1]: The only ones I have left are to do a "lazy bastard"
| playthrough which requires enough consideration that I
| wanted to do it by itself in a challenge run, and the
| rest are all the top tier production based time sinks,
| which I'd rather do in a map tailor generated to be a
| megabase.
| slikrick wrote:
| but you're arguing against the intention as they put it in?
| bombcar wrote:
| I really wish there was an option for "no cliffs within X
| distance" or something.
|
| My "dream world" would have the starting area for maybe 100
| blocks have some cliffs for early biter funneling and a bit
| of a challenge, then just flat world for 1000 blocks, and
| then back to cliffs.
|
| Or make it so you can manually mine cliffs very slowly before
| explosives.
| zer8k wrote:
| > . I'm perfectionist freak and my factorio gameplay basically
| divides "before" and "after" cliff explosives.
|
| I adopt the strategy of "field expedient base" which gets me to
| almost where I need to be, and then after expanding, I begin
| building a megabase with more technology and convert the field
| expedient base to a resource factory. Then I can transport
| processed resources by train to any number of places.
|
| It's not that annoying once you realize that's kind of how
| you're supposed to expand. The natural obstacles are a godsend
| once you start playing on the harder modes.
|
| Water, however, has always been a constant annoyance to me. But
| I am a purist and refuse to install mods because as far as I
| can tell the game is basically perfect without them.
| ghusbands wrote:
| > as far as I can tell the game is basically perfect without
| them
|
| Do you still have to use a sideways-facing underground belt
| to take items from one side of a belt, blocking the other
| side? Are there yet any pleasant ways to overlap belts? I
| feel like far too much effort is spent on working around odd
| limitations.
| Vvector wrote:
| I'm like you. I always disabled cliffs in the worldgen.
| rollcat wrote:
| Fortunately Factorio is the kind of game where nobody has the
| right to tell you how you're supposed to play. I'm sure if this
| change makes it to 2.0 (heck maybe even during an open beta,
| which I'm sure will drop at some point), there will be a mod
| that reshuffles the tech tree. You can also always tweak the
| mapgen parameters for Nauvis to produce less cliffs, or use a
| console command.
|
| Some of these will disable achievements, but anyway, the true
| achievement in this game is simply the number of hours you sunk
| in ;)
| ayakang31415 wrote:
| I never played Factorio, but I heard about this game and how it
| works quite a lot, and I knew instantly that if I ever touch this
| game, I will never be able to touch grass outside as it will suck
| me into its giant rabbit hole
| goatking wrote:
| You are right. That is how it is :)
| endigma wrote:
| > It has been playable from start to finish for more than a year.
| This means that we have already made several improvement
| iterations based on the playthroughs behind us.
|
| You just don't see commitment to shipping quality product in the
| games industry like this. This is what makes Factorio special.
| duxup wrote:
| I see a lot more indie dev type games that go through these
| super long development times, long early access, and really are
| committed to the game longer term.
|
| I suspect where some games might just move on these folks
| really are committed to "hey let's rewrite that" type decisions
| that don't fit in traditional commercial game development.
|
| It has been very encouraging to see that there room for an
| arguably improving quality when it comes to some games.
| fps-hero wrote:
| Early access is a great way to outsource your QA. Triple A QA
| teams number in the hundreds, but for an independent game to
| have that many people playing it is a triumph in itself.
|
| If people keep playing your game in early access, you must be
| on to something. There are tens of thousands of games people
| could be playing, but for them to pick yours means you are
| scratching an itch that can't be found elsewhere, and that
| inspires developers create great games.
|
| Early access does get flack for allowing people to release
| unfinished, often never finished games, but it's a wonderful
| test of product market fit. If people try your game and like
| it, give you feedback to improve your game so even more
| people like it, it's the ultimate positive feedback loop.
| duxup wrote:
| It certainly sets expectations and gamers have really
| adapted to it / seem to receive the whole process fairly
| well.
|
| I don't game like I used to but I was playing an early
| access game recently, got a pop up on a keyboard shortcut
| to submit a bug with a screen shot and the game state.
|
| Total win win for everyone.
| endigma wrote:
| Project Zomboid comes to mind as well
| quchen wrote:
| I think the >>literally unplayable<< meme is from Factorio, or
| was made popular by it. Bug reports on Reddit ever since I
| bought it were on the level of >>when the player is facing
| north, the shadow's animation is slightly off<<.
|
| I can't think of a single bug I've encountered across many,
| many Factorio playthroughs, some including overhaul mods.
|
| In all the release notes, there is a sizeable section of bug
| fixes; time and time again, I was surprised that there were any
| bugs.
|
| Hats off to Wube, you're a true inspiration.
| fennecbutt wrote:
| Seems like it was popular much before that based on release
| dates/https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/literally-unplayable.
| True origin unknown.
|
| I know there are a lot of peculiar and hilarious hug reports
| for games like dwarf fortress, too.
| proactivesvcs wrote:
| Not just the games industry, but software in general. Wube's
| commitment to efficiency and bug fixing is to be lauded.
| throwaway03624 wrote:
| No Man's Sky has a similar dedication. They have been
| constantly adding new features and expansions for free for the
| last 7 years. If this had been a different company, they might
| have saved some of those features for a version 2 or a paid
| DLC.
| zhynn wrote:
| They just released one of the largest updates ever adding a
| whole new NPC faction and a bunch of features. And it runs
| better on PSVR (foveated rendering) and switch (AMD
| FidelityX). It's an incredible achievement, and I keep
| dreading the inevitable post where Hello Games decides to
| move on... I hope it never happens.
| feoren wrote:
| Wait, No Man's Sky? _That_ game? Was it bought or something?
| Do they still have that liar who went on interviews and lied
| through his teeth about the game? It 's pretty rare to see a
| project based entirely on lies from a smarmy psycho liar ever
| actually go anywhere, right? Did they ever go back and
| actually implement any of the things he lied were _already_
| in the base game?
| ecuzzillo wrote:
| Yes, they did go back. They basically used all the money
| they made from the hype and used it to make it real.
| Players bought them a billboard across from their office
| saying thank you. (https://www.reddit.com/r/NoMansSkyTheGam
| e/comments/cr85av/th... ) See
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5BJVO3PDeQ for one
| rendition of the story.
| blitz_skull wrote:
| Yes, that game. You must check it out. Easily the best
| redemption arc of any game development story, ever. By a
| mile. It's insane how much content has been put into the
| game.
| dgb23 wrote:
| No Man's Sky is a redemption story.
| zhynn wrote:
| That "smarmy psycho liar" was an introverted developer-
| turned-ceo who was in over his head. He is now beloved by
| the community. Sean Murray is a legend. They have been
| over-delivering on NMS for the better part of a decade now
| without charging for anything but the base game.
|
| And yes, they implemented all of it. Everything that was
| promised and much much more. Just check out the trailer for
| Echoes that dropped yesterday (the new update for the
| game): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqpVCwwuyh8
| tarr11 wrote:
| Tears of the Kingdom went through a similar year long testing
| and refinement phase
|
| https://www.gamesradar.com/zelda-tears-of-the-kingdom-was-ba...
| [deleted]
| bryan_w wrote:
| Indeed, not to be completely throw Klei under the bus, but I
| started playing Oxygen Not Included, and the simulation quality
| is night and day. ONI has race conditions, memory corruption
| bugs, non-seeded RNG, duplication bugs. You couldn't play a
| non-glitched playthrough even if you tried. At some point,
| you're going to make an infinite spill or a liquid lock on
| complete accident.
|
| Meanwhile factorio allows you to benchmark it by opening a save
| and running it for a set number of ticks -- it's just that
| stable in its simulation.
|
| Not to say that ONI isn't a fun game, it has different elements
| (e.g. dupe management) that make it fun despite its
| instability.
| retrac wrote:
| I have seen similar commitment from other indie developers. For
| example, one of my favourite games [1] (which is something of a
| cross between Factorio, Simcity and OpenTTD) has been available
| for that "early access" on Steam for 4 years (like Factorio
| was).
|
| I suppose that means in the developer's opinion, the game is
| not quite ready -- they wouldn't sell it to someone who expects
| a complete game. Caveat emptor. Fair enough. In practice it has
| been playable and enjoyable (at least by me) since first listed
| on Steam in 2019. New features and more polish come every few
| weeks, and it's coming up on 1.0. I don't know if they'll keep
| supporting it well after that, but it's clear to me they want
| to sell something good and complete, however long that might
| take, not just something profitable.
|
| [1]
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/784150/Workers__Resources...
| (Windows only but runs great under WINE)
| pmoriarty wrote:
| This has been Factorio's MO from the beginning. It was in Early
| Access forver, and all that time it was way more polished and
| stable than many fully released games with much higher budgets.
|
| In the decade or so that I've played Factorio, I can't even
| remember a single crash of the base game. It was always mods
| that crashed.
|
| Factorio performance is also fantastic, running smoothly on
| potato PC's until you get in to the megabase range. It's mostly
| mods that cause performance problems, but even those have
| gotten a lot better over the years.
|
| The Factorio devs could really give a master class on how to
| make games moddable. Factorio's ecosystem of over 5000 mods is
| a testament to that.
| nextaccountic wrote:
| > It was always mods that crashed.
|
| I wish modding APIs in general did more sanity checking
| before loading a mod. A low hanging fruit is APIs to be
| statically typed, and also to not use nulls on such APIs and
| things like that. A more comprehensive check is to verify
| whether two mods are guaranteed to be compatible (but this
| sounds a bit hard).
|
| But more importantly (not sure if that's the case with
| Factorio) not break the damn APIs all the time. Lots of games
| that are actively developed don't bother keeping stable APIs
| (a bit like like Gnome and its disregard for extension APIs),
| breaking mods at every new release. An egregious example is
| Europa Universalis IV and other Paradox games. This ensures
| that there is a tail end of mods (which is by far the
| majority) that just will never work anymore, and the mods
| being kept up to date become rarer and rarer.
| Jenk wrote:
| I would truly love to see a game use haskell for mod APIs.
| Or perhaps erlang a better choice.
|
| As an example of just how far accessible APIs can benefit
| games/their players: The god awful language and API that
| has enabled Armed Assault franchise modders to create
| entirely new games - literally, PUBG started life as a mod
| for Armed Assault 2. Armed Assault 3 launched ten years
| ago, and there are still many new mods being produced
| today, and Bohemia have further embraced this community by
| supporting "community developed" DLCs such that modders get
| rewarded for their effort.
|
| I often wonder how much better/diverse/stable these
| innovative and entrepeneurial ventures could be with a
| "proper" API.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| The main problem with that is that there aren't nearly as
| many people who know Haskell or Erlang compared to those
| who know Lua.
|
| Lua has been a modding staple across countless games, so
| millions of gamers/modders are already familiar with it.
|
| I'm convinced that chosing Lua for modding is one of the
| main reasons Factorio has over 5000 mods now.
|
| If they'd chosen a more obscure language I'd doubt we'd
| have nearly as many.
| Jenk wrote:
| My point for choosing AA as an example was that it uses
| an entirely bespoke language, modelling system, and the
| APIs are just horrendous. Obscurity has not prevented
| (some) great things happen with/for Bohemia but I do
| wonder what greatness has been missed out because of it.
|
| As for Lua I think it is rather chicken:egg. Lua is
| popular because it is used by mod APIs, or is Lua use by
| mod APIs because it is popular?
|
| My own experience is the former. I think it is a horrible
| language (in that I argue many others are better) and
| especially difficult for new-to-programming gamers with
| great ideas to pick up. Haskell or Erlang (or Java or C#)
| with type-safe APIs would be much more educational for
| them, and provide better support IMO.
| _proofs wrote:
| this is a strange take for me to read -- i've written
| quite a decent amount of lua, and it is the first
| language i used to learn (zero programming experience
| prior)
|
| when i eventually got exposed to python (but more heavily
| C/C++, and even some lisp/pascal) and came back to lua, i
| was grateful lua did not inundate me with
| parens/primitives/modules/data-structures/grammars, and
| found the flexibility of the interpreter and also what
| lua tables present as a unified primitive for multiple
| container types to be so nice and accessible for getting
| right to flow-state.
|
| i did not have to look up another API and read about a
| set of semantics provided with a desired module, i just
| needed to know 1. what i want to achieve and 2. a single
| API: the lua table
|
| its small std library is performant and easy on the
| cognitive load, and then it plays so nicely with other
| languages and environments.
|
| have you written much lua?
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| Lua is used because it is dead simple to drop into a
| project as an extension language. It was designed to be
| easy to interoperate with C. Lua/LuaJIT is one of the
| fastest scripting languages available.
| vluft wrote:
| lua is used by mod APIs because it's very performant and
| extremely easy to embed in C/C++.
|
| > especially difficult for new-to-programming gamers with
| great ideas to pick up
|
| and you're proposing haskell or erlang as an alternative
| first programming language for somebody?
| Akronymus wrote:
| Oh, the factorio api has excellent stability along with
| informing you on startup about most
| errors/incompatibilities.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| I don't expect videogames to be the first to successfully
| solve the problem of statically checking code for
| correctness ;-) I'm astonished how stable so many mods are,
| given the environment they run in and the lack of almost
| any payment for the work.
|
| The Minecraft Java world at least starts with static types
| and memory safety. It'd be interesting to see if that
| results in a mod ecosystem that's more stable.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| For several years now, Wube has been careful to very
| clearly announce upcoming changes that might break mods :
|
| https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=70603
| tailspin2019 wrote:
| Can confirm performance is pretty good on Macs too, even
| older Intel models.
| ezfe wrote:
| That being said, it does natively support Apple Silicon as
| a side effect of being on the Switch
| EMM_386 wrote:
| > Factorio performance is also fantastic
|
| I still don't know how they pulled this off, and as a
| software engineer I've read all of the development blogs.
|
| It is still impressive that you can scale this thing to huge
| mega-bases, with things smoothly gliding down coveyer belts,
| inserters swinging, bots flying around, trains everywhere,
| biters doing biter things all over the exposed (essentially
| endless) map ... and no problem in most cases.
|
| 60 FPS/UPS.
|
| It almost seems as if the entire thing is written in
| handcrafted assembly compared to how other games perform.
|
| I'm sure parts of it are.
| duskwuff wrote:
| > It almost seems as if the entire thing is written in
| handcrafted assembly compared to how other games perform.
|
| As far as I'm aware, it's all C++.
| jupake wrote:
| Divorce attorneys.. get ready!
| acatton wrote:
| Reminds me of Mindustry
| https://f-droid.org/en/packages/io.anuke.mindustry/
|
| But it looks like Factorio was first.
| Olreich wrote:
| Factorio inspired a lot of factory games you're seeing:
| Mindustry, Shapez.io, Satisfactory, Techtonica, Dyson Sphere
| Program, etc.
|
| One of the devs have stated that they were inspired to create
| Factorio by the IndustrialCraft and BuildCraft mods for
| Minecraft, and I suspect that things like Infinifactory were
| also inspirations.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| oh boy Dyson Sphere is my jam. Especially once they added in
| blueprints. I honestly am not looking forward to the enemy
| expansion they are going to add. I can see they promised it
| and want to deliver on it but I do not really want to fight
| off waves of enemies. I just want to build a huge factory. It
| is one of the things that keeps me from really getting into
| factorio. Was going to get a mod to turn them off. But never
| got around to it.
| Macha wrote:
| > Was going to get a mod to turn them off. But never got
| around to it.
|
| You can turn them off in world generation, no mod needed,
| for what it's worth.
| [deleted]
| jdpedrie wrote:
| You can disable enemies in the game setup, no mod required.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > It is one of the things that keeps me from really getting
| into factorio. Was going to get a mod to turn them off. But
| never got around to it.
|
| Uh...you've been able to play Factorio in a peaceful mode
| without a mod for _years_. It 's just a checkbox when
| you're creating your world.
|
| And I imagine when DSP gets the combat update, it'll have
| the same checkbox.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I am. Once you get past a certain point in DSP there's just
| no point in continuing. I've two playthroughs that ended
| roughly when I can sends ships on interplanetary errants
| without worrying abou how many warp cores I consume.
| Brybry wrote:
| My issue at that point in DSP is that performance
| severely degrades (and save files get huge too).
|
| You're penalized for building big dyson spheres (and even
| more penalized if you have graphics turned on for them).
|
| You're penalized for building on more planets/system (and
| rewarded for cleaning up old structures, even if they're
| no longer actually doing anything).
|
| I hope the combat patch comes with a lot of performance
| enhancements for existing content...
| jcranmer wrote:
| > I honestly am not looking forward to the enemy expansion
| they are going to add.
|
| I have the same trepidation in DSP, and I'm hoping they at
| least take the same tack as Factorio and allow enemies to
| be turned off entirely. While there is a little bit of fun
| in trying to design self-sustaining defense lines in
| Factorio, I never found that enjoyment worth the effort of
| having to clear out the enemies to build ever-larger
| factories.
|
| Well, except for Clusterio Gridlock event. In that event,
| given that you were starting the map with 40x mining
| productivity and similar bonuses, and were playing with
| 100+ other people, giving you awkward map layouts with high
| enemy growth was just about the only way to make it
| interesting.
| willis936 wrote:
| The spirit of the original lives on. Gregtech Community
| Edition Unofficial (GTCEu) is getting regular updates. I'm
| almost finished with my first modded minecraft run since the
| GT5U days.
|
| The GTCEu folks are great. They implemented a lot of changes
| that GT has been needing for a decade, specifically around
| closed loop control and HMI. It's close to what I idealize in
| my head for an industrial game. Maybe there's a smidge too
| much chemistry and not enough fusion.
|
| If anyone's curious to try it: the Gregtech Community Pack is
| the way to go. The questbook is near essential for anyone who
| hasn't already played through the mod. AE2 is also near
| essential. Also, I recommend prism launcher.
| bombcar wrote:
| GregTech: New Horizons is also worth a look, if only for
| the detailed quests and absolutely insane progression
| required.
| willis936 wrote:
| I did get through LV with a railcar wood farm and coke
| oven array before I called it in. I had a very diverse
| food gen and all sorts of farms. It was neat, but I have
| to say GCP with teleporting and chunk loading really
| scratches the itch without all the waiting around or
| microcrafting.
| Macha wrote:
| The first public announcement of Factorio was actually on the
| industrialcraft forums, if I remember right.
| Kiro wrote:
| I find it fascinating that you know about Mindustry but not
| Factorio. It's like being into block games but not know what
| Minecraft is.
| willis936 wrote:
| I don't like this analogy. Block games and industrial games
| all are absolutely and relatively unique. The relative
| success (and arguably quality) of minecraft compared to other
| block games is much higher than that of factorio relative to
| industrial games. This is mostly due to block games have much
| wider appeal than industrial games. All standout games in
| both categories were well thought out and required large
| effort from the creators.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| I think you misunderstood the analogy.
|
| Knowing of Mindustry but not Factorio is like knowing
| Roblox but not Minecraft.
|
| It's like knowing Arch Linux, but somehow never hearing
| about Ubuntu.
| willis936 wrote:
| It might make sense if Minecraft was only on Mac while
| Roblox was on Mac and Windows. You can only play factorio
| from a desktop while all manner of machine can play
| mindustry. There are entire audiences that do not game on
| PC.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| _Yo we heard you liked crack, so we put some more crack in your
| crack..._
|
| Factorio is just one of those games I can't play enough of until
| I get exhausted and it feels like work, and then have to take a
| long break from. And then the cycle repeats.
|
| Took me a while to buy it because it seemed overpriced at the
| time, but given the continuous work over all that time... wow is
| all I can say.
|
| Now please excuse me while I go inform my SO she can plan a
| vacation.
| aftbit wrote:
| Most exciting news of 2023.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| > From now on, we are stopping the embargo on the expansion
| content, and _we will be publishing Friday Facts every week_
| about all the different aspects of the expansion until release!
|
| Yay !
|
| Why this is quite HN-relevant news :
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27446910
| Macha wrote:
| I'm glad about the return of FFF, used to be great to read,
| especially the more technical deep dives. I kind of thought we
| wouldn't be getting them again, after the developer fell out
| with the community over the reception to the post about "Uncle
| Bob".
| Pannoniae wrote:
| To be fair, a large amount of redditors/media, and a less
| sizable amount of the game's community. Most of the people
| outraged have _not_ been playing Factorio (or didn 't even
| know what it was). That doesn't mean actual players haven't
| been outraged as well, but way less.
| mcphage wrote:
| I guess I'm out of the loop; I thought they stopped posting
| them because the game officially released, and they were
| going heads-down on the expansion.
| goatking wrote:
| > We decided to go with the approach of having a small number of
| predefined planets, which represent your progression through the
| game.
|
| I am a bit sad about this, procedurally generated worlds with
| "infinite" universe would have been really cool.
|
| But anyway, I know I will sink too much time in this :D
| pmoriarty wrote:
| Mods could probably add all the planets you want, but with the
| new expansion they'll be able to use all the new mechanics the
| expansion adds.
|
| I'm excited.
| vessenes wrote:
| Oh wow, I'm very excited about this. The post author wrote the
| absolutely incredible Space Exploration mod for Factorio,
| pitching itself as a "100+" hour expansion, realistically closer
| to 1000 hours for an average player.
|
| Space Exploration has its quirks, but is fundamentally an
| absolutely outstanding puzzle game, among the best ever made.
|
| One of the most delightful things about Factorio for coders is
| that the game smoothly takes you through multiple levels of
| abstraction, starting with handcrafting simple ingredients, and
| (in the base game), moving up to small networks of trains with
| automation, and flying robot armies to deal with construction and
| logistics. I'd say there are three-ish layers of abstraction in
| the main game, and each layer is super well balanced, has its own
| challenges and benefits, and is above all FUN.
|
| Space Exploration adds two to three more layers of abstraction
| above these; culminating in networks of interstellar spaceships
| moving items into orbit and on and off planetary surfaces, where
| they intersect with the original game's buildings and mechanics.
| It's profoundly, profoundly good.
|
| I knew Wube had hired the mod developer, but I'm super happy to
| see he's deeply involved with Space Age, which is explained to be
| a less hardcore experience, with a lot of the same fun as SE.
| Should be a blast. I hope they'll charge me more for it.
| Laremere wrote:
| > The post author wrote the absolutely incredible Space
| Exploration mod for Factorio
|
| Each section has an author, and only the Space Exploration
| section is written by the mod author. Most of the post is
| written by kovarex, who is the founder of Factorio, afaik.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Is the Factorio source code available anywhere? I would be
| really curious to see how a game like Factorio was developed
| (e.g., what parts are 'the engine' and what parts are
| scripted? how does such a complex game have so few bugs?)
| pmoriarty wrote:
| Factorio is closed-source, unfortunately. Still, you can
| read a lot about how the devs developed it on their "Friday
| Facts" posts: https://factorio.com/blog/
| bombcar wrote:
| This is actually _better_ than the raw source for
| understanding the development; you have to start at the
| beginning and read forward.
|
| Basically - tests, reproducibility, and dedication to
| tracking down "weird minor bugs" before they become
| "major show stoppers".
| Therenas wrote:
| The source is not publicly available, no. It's still being
| actively developed and sold after all. There isn't really
| much of a barrier between engine and 'scripting', it's all
| custom and integrated. The reason there are so few bugs is
| that there is a ton of effort spent on squashing them! The
| approach is basically to fix any reported issue if in any
| way reasonable.
| Zambyte wrote:
| > The source is not publicly available, no. It's still
| being actively developed and sold after all.
|
| Those two are definitely not incompatible. Take Karia[0]
| for example, which is fully Free Software[1].
|
| [0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1261430/Kandria/
|
| [1]
| https://github.com/Shirakumo/kandria/blob/master/LICENSE
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Yeah, I wish more games would use this approach, they
| could for instance have the art assets separate, or do
| what Factorio does and have matchmaking and the official
| mod portal to be DRMed. (And/Or give out the source, but
| not the compiled binaries.)
| TillE wrote:
| In addition to their very informative blogs, you can infer
| a lot based on their extensive Lua modding API:
|
| https://lua-api.factorio.com/latest/
|
| They also ship a full .pdb file with the Windows binaries
| (presumably for stack traces), so you can get a lot of
| information with dia2dump, or dig in with WinDbg.
| duskwuff wrote:
| The C++ source code to the engine isn't publicly available,
| but Wube have given access to some outside developers.
|
| The Lua source code to the "base mod" is (necessarily)
| included in the game. You can read it if you have a copy of
| the game, and the modding API is fully documented:
| https://lua-api.factorio.com/
| k12sosse wrote:
| You can turn bugs on or off when starting your world ;)
| depends on if you want to - oh, BUGS bugs, not bugs bugs.
| Aardwolf wrote:
| I'm excited for the expansion, and also for weekly Friday Facts
| again, yay! Those are a great mix of interesting technical
| content, and hype building
| 12345hn6789 wrote:
| Space exploration is not the best puzzle game ever made. Space
| exploration is not the best factorip mod ever made.
|
| Space exploration has a great presentation layer (graphics and
| UI) but the logistics challenge and gameplay challenges leave
| lots to be desired. I implore you to try many of the other high
| quality factorio mods made over the years.
|
| Pyanodons is easily the greatest factorio mod. The sheer
| quality and scale leaves SE trembling.
|
| https://mods.factorio.com/user/pyanodon
|
| https://mods.factorio.com/mod/SeaBlock
|
| https://mods.factorio.com/mod/AngelBob
|
| https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Krastorio2
|
| https://mods.factorio.com/mod/exotic-industries
|
| https://mods.factorio.com/mod/IndustrialRevolution3
|
| I'd say nearly every single one of these mods has quality on
| par with Space Exploration.
| saberience wrote:
| Just having a lot of complexity or scale doesn't mean a game
| or mod is good. In fact, just making something complex or
| "big" is the easy part. Designing something so it is actually
| fun, well designed and challenging while not being
| frustrating, tiresome, or simply just a giant time sink, is
| much much harder.
|
| Pyanodons isn't fun to play, it's just too much, ridiculously
| complex recipes for the sake of it, quality of life features
| removed or pushed out late into the game just for artificial
| difficulty and pain. Most players never complete it and give
| up not even 10% into the game, which generally isn't the sign
| of a well designed game.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| What QoL did pY _remove_ ??
|
| Also for instance construction bots now come "earlier", in
| red science (though due to the extra complexity, probably
| still a bit "later" ?).
|
| In recent versions you also get at the start filter
| inserters that do not require any power.
| coryfklein wrote:
| So looking at /user/pyanodon, there doesn't even appear to be
| a mod named "Pyanodons", but rather he's made a whole bunch
| of different mods. Which one are you recommending? All of
| them at once?
| EMM_386 wrote:
| Unless you are extremely experienced with Factorio and want
| a challenge that will last you close to another _1,000
| hours_ (at least) ... don 't even attempt Pyanodons.
|
| It's for a very specific type of hardcore player and very
| few people have actually finished it.
|
| This is the flowchart for ONE science (space) ... one.
| There are numerous sciences.
|
| https://i.imgur.com/JCVVTjn.jpg
| dimava wrote:
| See https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/5677182718231183
| 47/10... flowchart
|
| 4, 7, or all 9 mods depending on how long game you are
| looking for
| pmoriarty wrote:
| I tried SeaBlock, but aborted my playthrough before long
| because it was too boring. I'm enjoying K2, though.
|
| Don't think I'll want to try Space Exploration if it's even
| worse than SeaBlock.
| X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
| > Don't think I'll want to try Space Exploration if it's
| even worse than SeaBlock.
|
| I would really recommend SE above SeaBlock, IMO SeaBlock
| feels like it throws away almost all of the recipies you
| know & doesn't give you much new to reward you, I felt like
| it was more like some random fanfic. Where as SE felt like
| it was a poorly edited directors cut of the original movie.
| There's way too much & it's audience is really the people
| that _wanted_ a 4h movie with 6 different subplots. Also
| lacking the polish of the original, but still very much in
| the spirit.
| kzrdude wrote:
| SE kind of has fantastic polish on its own - its new
| features like cargo rockets work flawlessly IMO, but
| sure, it has not been cut down to reasonable length.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| Most of these mods are "make the middle game more complex".
| Nothing wrong with that! Krastorio is my favorite of the ones
| you mention. Space Exploration is unusual in creating an
| interesting game after the main game, taking you to
| completely new places and gameplay modes. Seablock is also a
| little like that, only it makes the beginning of the game
| totally different instead of the end.
|
| It's great how many deep and interesting mods Factorio has
| allowed.
| koheripbal wrote:
| I'd love a mod that actually respected the true
| materials/engineering recipes in real life.
|
| Obviously, you can't recreate the complete complexity of
| all global supply chains, but it would be nice for a mod to
| get a little closer.
|
| Standard factorio glosses over way too much to be
| considered educational, which is what i need before I get
| my son addicted with me. (Yes, i know standard Factorio
| still has a lot to offer - i just want more detail)
| Tyr42 wrote:
| You might enjoy Angel's Petrochemical. It's a bit closer
| and I felt very accomplished when I made a lot of
| plastic.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Most of the overhaul mods get closer, more or less
| depending on the mod :
|
| https://youtu.be/dY2nxVNBHQs?&t=3m41s
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethyldichlorosilane
|
| There are also mods that make it more realistic in a
| different way :
|
| https://mods.factorio.com/mod/belt-overflow
| fattless wrote:
| Fair but id offer that having more "realistic" recipies
| and those details would still offer far less than
| understanding and practicing the engineering process.
| Finding efficient solutions to your problems and
| engineering them over and over again for efficiency
| teaches excellent problem solving and engineering skills
| that would be hugely beneficial, imo more important than
| learning the specific materials that make each item irl.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Warptorio is to be noted, for the way it radically changes
| what the game is about, closer to the Factorio scenarios,
| and even somewhat compatible with the overhaul mods !
|
| https://mods.factorio.com/mod/warptorio2
|
| > Factorio but you build your factory in a restricted space
| that teleports yourself, the platform, and everything on it
| to a new and uncharted planet in an unknown corner of
| space, time and the universe while constantly under attack
| from enemies. This mod increases the difficulty of factorio
| by making construction harder and making biters a more
| significant threat, resulting in a unique experience of
| factorio'ing in a tight space and under pressure, almost
| like a tower defence game.
|
| Speaking of scenarios, let's not forget that Factorio has a
| PvP mode ! (Better use a PvP balance mod though...)
|
| https://youtu.be/DBn9IQTxIvY
| X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
| Angel+Bob & SeaBlock just seem masochistic to me. I have had
| the most fun with SE + K2.
|
| I haven't tried pyanodon because it doesn't seem like it was
| made to be played as a game but rather shown off as a
| testimate to how far you can take things
| sterlind wrote:
| Pyanodons is a unique experience. Everything has dozens of
| steps. In the base game, circuit boards are made from copper
| wire and iron plates, whereas in Pyanodons, you need formica
| for the PCB substrate, which requires tree nurseries to make
| wood and a full coal cracking facility to produce creosote, a
| glassworks, half a dozen different metals, not to mention
| _pick and place machines_ and all other sorts of
| intermediates. And that 's just baby steps.
|
| But it's flawed in other ways. In particular, a lot of the Py
| building sprites hide what's behind them. In the base game,
| all the sprites aren't taller than their footprint, but they
| are in Py, which makes them unwieldy and easy to lose things.
| And what's fun is building these huge production lines, but
| there's no easy way to tear up your old base and reconfigure
| things until you hit bots, which is waaaay down the line.
|
| In short, Py is wonderful and I've never played any sort of
| game like it before, but it has unnecessary rough edges from
| a game design perspective, aside from its masochism.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Construction bots are pushed earlier in red science, though
| getting there might be about the same challenge as the
| whole of vanilla !
|
| Though I would recommend using at least Picker Extended for
| its semi-automatic filling of placed blueprints.
|
| https://mods.factorio.com/mod/PickerExtended
| lsaferite wrote:
| I love many aspects of SE, but I'd _love_ if most of them
| were stand-alone mods that were built up into a mod pack. For
| instance, all of the pylons are great! The condenser turbine
| I think is a much nicer solution for nuclear power.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| Space Exploration is a fantastic mod and I thought it was great
| news when the company hired the developer. Excited to see the
| result is pretty much exactly what I hoped for! I appreciate
| the dev's comments about the differences, how the new Space Age
| will be accessible to more players.
| bombcar wrote:
| I really liked his distinction between "normal game" and
| "what the modded players want" - you have a similar
| distinction in Minecraft and it's important for modded
| players to realize and remember that the normal game _shouldn
| 't_ be the modded one, they are different markets (and the
| modded players are the ones who go out of their way to 'get
| more').
| [deleted]
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| Another game that is very much about abstraction levels is the
| text quest Hadean Lands[1]. Inform 7 source (not open but)
| available[2]!
|
| [1] https://hadeanlands.com/
|
| [2] https://hadeanlands.com/src/ (spoilers) (duh)
| mmastrac wrote:
| I wouldn't put trains and smooth in a single sentence. The
| signals required a lot of patience to learn and I'm not
| entirely sure I still understand them.
|
| They are by far one of the most painful parts of factorio for
| me.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| I just use city-block blueprints and never really worry about
| signals.
|
| However, the foolproof advice I've gotten from r/Factorio has
| been to put chain signals at the entrance and exit to every
| junction, and to make sure there's enough space for your
| longest train to stop behind a rail signal (and you wouldn't
| mind having it stop there).
|
| I can also recommend the cybersyn mod (or LTN). Once you
| understand one of these mods it makes dealing with trains
| much less of a hassle.
| mcv wrote:
| Trains are my favourite part of the game, and I always make
| myself a massive bowl of train spaghetti. I love watching
| my trains automatically find their way across my messy maze
| of train tracks.
|
| My simple rules:
|
| * Trains can only stop on the section after a regular
| signal. If you don't want a train to be able to stop in a
| certain place (like on an intersection), don't use a
| regular signal in front of it.
|
| * Make sure trains have places where they can stop. This
| will mostly be stations, but that's not enough. Actually,
| I've been wondering if it might be enough for stations that
| are only visited by a single train; then the train would
| only go if it has a clear path straight to its destination.
| Maybe I should give this a try. For me, however, the
| straights outside the intersections are usually fine places
| for trains to stop. But for better throughput and less
| blockage, there should probably multiple tracks, and
| special tracks for trains waiting to enter a station
| currently occupied by another train.
|
| * Trains cannot pass a signal on their left if there's not
| also a signal on their right. You can use this to make
| certain tracks single-direction. Single-direction is good
| and easier than double-direction, so of course I mix them,
| because I'm not playing this game because I like things
| easy.
|
| * Don't forget to give your trains a place to refuel! This
| is actually the part I mess up the most.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| For refueling I've recently been using the cybersyn mod,
| which let's you easily create a refueling stations that
| your trains will automatically go to when they're low on
| fuel (with exactly how "low" they need to be being
| configurable in the mod settings).
|
| I just plop down a refueling station, and a requester
| station next to it that refuels the refueler and I'm
| done. Don't have to worry about it again.
| mcv wrote:
| I always make them refuel at one of their regular stops.
| There's usually a source of fuel nearby, so I just route
| a small part of that along all the engines.
|
| But sometimes I forget, and sometimes there's no fuel
| nearby.
| knome wrote:
| My most complex train system had every train carry a
| single item type, and a large central trainyard. trains
| won't leave without an active destination. so all of the
| destinations for dropping off a type had the same name,
| and similarly the pick ups and would be disabled by
| circuits if their dropoffs were more than a quarter or so
| full. so if something needed green electronics, it would
| activate its DropOffGreenElectronics, the train would
| leave the yard, or sometimes 2-3 as at the time I didn't
| have any way of limiting it and one train wasn't enough
| to service all of the delivery points with my single car
| trains. the thundering herd problem[1] was real. the
| first train would get there, rest would go home.
| everything refueled at the home terminal, which had a
| stop for the coal train on it. each train had (dropoff(X)
| -> pickup(X) -> rest(X)) for their instructions. it
| worked pretty well.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thundering_herd_problem
| red_admiral wrote:
| Not necessarily at the exit.
|
| Normal signal: train stops if there's a train in the
| section ahead (or it's reserved for another train on a
| conflicting path), otherwise train goes.
|
| Chain signal: train stops here until it can get a mutex on
| a path past another non-chain signal.
|
| So if you have rail sections (small letters) and signals
| (capitals) a - A - b - B - c - C - d in a row on a plain
| line and A/B are chain signals and C is regular, then
| trains from the left will stop at A until the train can
| grab all sections b, c, d in one go.
|
| That's why chain signals at the entrance to a junction are
| good (prevents a train stopping on the junction) but you
| want regular ones at the exit, at least if some plain line
| follows.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| "Chain in, rail out" is the standard advice. However, if
| you search around r/Factorio you'll see there's debate
| about whether that's the best advice for beginners.
|
| Chain both in and out is supposedly the foolproof method,
| and apart from stations, rail signals are just an
| optimization.
|
| Though I've played a lot of Factorio, I've never really
| felt the need to dive deeply in to signals, and I'm happy
| to just use the foolproof method and leave more optimized
| solutions for those who need them.
| kzrdude wrote:
| The train needs to reserve the whole next contiguous
| sequence of chain signals to be able to go, so the
| foolproof method makes it sound like each train reserves
| the whole path from one station to another. It makes
| sense, but I like to do the optimizations, then, and
| allowing trains to stop in longer stretches where they
| can.
| mcv wrote:
| I prefer to see it as regular signals designate the next
| segment as a segment where trains are allowed to wait. If
| you don't want trains to stop in that segment, don't put
| a regular signal in front of it.
|
| And of course you don't want trains stopping on
| intersections, because they'll block everybody, so you
| always put chain signals in front of intersections.
| oefrha wrote:
| Vanilla trains are absolutely pitiful for megabases, and
| annoying even for midsized bases. I simply consider LTN part
| of the base game.
| bombcar wrote:
| LTN is really nice, but it is "fun" (for some people, like
| me) to build a LTN-like network in vanilla before using LTN
| going forward.
|
| Once you've "figured it out" it's much easier to drop down
| "smart stations" instead of building them yourself each
| time.
|
| Just like I recommend players who want to do city blocks
| build their _own_ blueprints instead of just loading up
| someone 's (even if you later switch to someone's standard
| blueprint, you'll at least understand the _why_ ).
|
| And of course, it's a sandbox game! You could just download
| a completed map, but there's no fun in that.
| EMM_386 wrote:
| > I wouldn't put trains and smooth in a single sentence.
|
| I had over 500 hours in Factorio before I felt comfortable
| with signalling. I got so frusturated with it originally I
| just ignored it as best I could.
|
| But the "chain in, rail out" thing as others are mentioning
| really is the key. It's not always as perfectly simple as
| that, but it's a very good starting point.
|
| You break everything up into blocks ... if you place a chain
| signal right before an intersection and a rail signal on the
| way out, you'll be there for most situations.
|
| Most.
|
| My most complex map has about 50 trains running and all
| intersecting each other and so far, everything is running
| smoothly on that one. No trains slamming into each other and
| everything running efficiently as far as I can tell. Almost
| all of it is just that "chain in, rail out" thing.
| guhidalg wrote:
| Repeat after me: "Chain IN, Rail OUT"
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZDmzFKhPI0
|
| It's basically a visual version of the classic deadlock
| conditions. Chain signals create dependencies between locks,
| and the locks themselves (the rail signals) have to be
| granular enough to keep large sections of the rail network
| available to acquire. The confusing part about the chain
| signals is the blue state: the train will use its pathfinding
| to read forward of the signal and it will move if the path it
| needs to take is available. You have to look forward of the
| signal to see if the rail signal for the path the train wants
| to take is green or not.
| infogulch wrote:
| If you just want to have trains and move on, I made a
| complete tiling rail kit a few years ago:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/i2szgb/tiling_uti.
| ..
|
| > 2-way 6-wide right hand rail system on a global 60-tile
| grid with interoperable 90deg & 45deg variants. Intended to
| be simple, complete, & hard to misuse.
|
| > Features: rotational symmetry, red&green wired poles,
| landfill, blueprints for Through, Turn, Tee, Junction, and
| U-Turn for both 90deg & 45deg, 90deg/ 45deg transition
| blueprints
|
| > Tiling is based on large power poles, 60 is the max
| distance between 3 poles in a straight line, or 5 poles
| diagonally.
|
| Here's a big example with all the rail components slapped
| together for a demo: https://i.imgur.com/84P9nO0.png
|
| I also made the simplest tiling nuclear blueprint kit: https:
| //www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/gp0jmb/infogulchs...
| wbl wrote:
| Try logistic train network mod
| Aeolun wrote:
| They're sort of understandable. When someone described it to
| me as the blue signals checking the status of the next signal
| (blue or colored) and doing that, everything made a lot more
| sense. They're still sometimes hard to debug because there's
| no visualization but I always end up feeling that the issue
| was my fault
| pmoriarty wrote:
| Blue signals just mean that some, but not all, segments
| ahead are blocked by a signal.
|
| Also, this video[1] by Soulless Gaming on _" How to Fix
| Train Path Errors"_ has a lot of useful tips on
| train/signal troubleshooting.
|
| [1] - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gmsep-xJXkI
| freeone3000 wrote:
| The stuck train is your visualization :P
| xedrac wrote:
| There's certainly a learning curve - it's a form of
| programming that must be learned.
| mmastrac wrote:
| .
| TuringTourist wrote:
| I would argue that train signalling is not intentionally
| obfuscated as brainfuck is however. Just a different form
| of thinking.
| bombcar wrote:
| I think it's pretty clear from the blog posts that they
| _tried_ to make trains as simple as they could, and it 's
| as complex as it is now because that's the simplest it
| can be without having actual errors and bugs.
| moviuro wrote:
| > The signals required a lot of patience to learn and I'm not
| entirely sure I still understand them.
|
| Chain signals before an intersection; regular signals after
| those, and on the track to split the track for multiple
| trains simultaneously.
|
| See: https://wiki.factorio.com/Tutorial:Train_signals if you
| haven't already.
| drewmate wrote:
| Another major stumbling block for train signals once you
| get the basics down is segment length. Signals indicate
| whether the next segment is occupied, not whether any given
| train will fit in there (and potentially block a segment or
| intersection behind it.)
|
| I frequently set up tracks with segments as large as my
| longest train, but then end up having to add an
| intersection here or there, breaking up segments into
| smaller sizes. This is the root of most of my train woes
| (aside from LTN issues, which are a whole other issue!)
| jcranmer wrote:
| > Signals indicate whether the next segment is occupied,
| not whether any given train will fit in there (and
| potentially block a segment or intersection behind it.)
|
| That's what chain signals are for. If a train waiting at
| a signal causes issues, replace the previous signal with
| a chain signal to prevent the train from problematically
| waiting at the signal.
| dimava wrote:
| The best available explanation, think "20% of things that
| cover 80% of cases", is DoshDoshington's [Factorio Trains
| Explained in Less Than Three
| Minutes](https://youtube.com/watch?v=DG4oD4iGVoY)
| Baeocystin wrote:
| Factorio remains the only game where I had to purposefully set it
| aside, because it was starting to negatively affect the rest of
| my life due to late nights and blown sleep schedules.
|
| I say that with praise and admiration, but also as a genuine
| warning to anyone who hasn't yet tried it that might be reading
| this. For a certain kind of mind, it is digital crack in the
| purest form that I've experienced.
| Sakos wrote:
| Man, I can't wait. Space Exploration is cool, but way too complex
| for me. This seems like it's right up my alley.
| burrish wrote:
| [flagged]
| VectorLock wrote:
| Interesting that at the end they had to pitch how their own first
| party game expansion is better than a existing mod.
| bombcar wrote:
| As mentioned, it was written by the mod author, and they're
| trying to explain that they're "not just charging for a mod"
| which is often a detraction leveled in cases like this.
|
| (However, even if they _were_ just literally charging for a
| mod, I 'd be fine with it, Factorio has some of the best dollar
| for playtime money I've ever spent, maybe Minecraft and Dwarf
| Fortress come close).
| fasterik wrote:
| Not "better", but for a different target audience. Also written
| by the author of said mod, who was hired to work on the
| expansion.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I dunno about others but a problem I have with Factorio is that I
| can't help but hyper optimize. And I'll do that whether you give
| me a small or large area. So I'm hoping this means having many
| smaller factories instead of one giant sprawling map.
| bombcar wrote:
| I found that working on some of the more "tutorial/scenario"
| type mods/maps helped a bit, but since the game doesn't really
| have time limits there's really nothing preventing you from
| perpetual optimization.
|
| You can take the Nilaus route where the thing that you're
| actually optimizing is your _blueprint book_ over multiple
| playthroughs, so that later ones you 're basically plopping
| down blueprints and editing them as you see ways to do things
| better.
| zurfer wrote:
| there is a nice easter egg on the bottom of the page :)
| tailspin2019 wrote:
| Apparently not on mobile. Had to switch to desktop to see it!
|
| (Looks like its on all pages..!)
| quchen wrote:
| Are you referring to the rocket, or am I missing something new
| that came with this FFF?
| coryfklein wrote:
| You have got to be kidding me. I thought I had kicked my Factorio
| habit.
| berno___ wrote:
| [dead]
| miiiiiike wrote:
| I have 50+ hours of playtime in Factorio.. I had it installed for
| less than a week. I'm not allowed to install Factorio anymore.
| bombcar wrote:
| https://www.nintendo.com/store/products/factorio-switch/ don't
| tell nobody
| cheeko1234 wrote:
| This day got a lot better! I have thousands of hours but had
| taken a break after I reached a rocket launch every minute with
| 100s of trains running around.
|
| I guess this break will be over soon. I look forward to dropping
| a few more lifetimes playing this amazing game.
| hsjqllzlfkf wrote:
| Uh oh there goes 500 more hours.
| quchen wrote:
| Here's hoping for a streamlined version of Space Exploration that
| scratches the right itch of expanding beyond Nauvis with new
| tech, but that doesn't not value my time.
|
| Watching Dosh Doshington's 3-part series of a SE playthrough is
| all I'll ever do with that mod. (Well worth watching it if 300+h
| for a self-playthrough is intimidating)
| dimava wrote:
| For context: unlike other youtubers making 100-hour-plus
| playlist of a single playthrough, Dosh Doshington [0] spends an
| equal amount of time to compress a 100 hours of playing into a
| single hour of the highest-quality content.
|
| His Space Exploration playthrough took 330 hours (in a team of
| 3 players iirc), and was compressed down to just 3.5 hours of
| video
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/@DoshDoshington
| roydivision wrote:
| I have purposely avoided Factorio just because I'm convinced that
| I'll sink so much time into it. It looks super fun, but I have
| stuff to do.
|
| Maybe one day....
| marricks wrote:
| Totally, just try EVE for a bit to blow some time.
|
| Less sarcastically, it killed a couple weeks of my life, but it
| does have a natural ending point. If you don't get into modding
| or ramp up the difficulty it's not too bad to pull away from
| the brink.
| troupo wrote:
| My personal problem with these games is that it feels too much
| like programming an work, and I do all that at work :)
| organsnyder wrote:
| The difference for me is at work, I need to deal with code
| reviews, users, and aligning with business objectives. In
| Factorio, if I decide to refactor my entire base because I
| want to improve something, I'm free to do so (as long as I
| keep the biters in mind).
| scubbo wrote:
| I have long-believed that programmers can be divided into two
| camps:
|
| * "Factorio is just like what I do at work all day - why
| would I do that in my free time?" * "Factorio is all the best
| bits of what I enjoy about work, with none of the bad bits
| (obfuscated errors, meetings, dependencies on other teams,
| politics) - I want to do this forever!"
|
| Personally I'm in the latter camp, but the former are
| certainly not wrong.
| epiccoleman wrote:
| I totally get this perspective. My first foray into Factorio
| ended abruptly when I realized I'd made a total mess and was
| now signed up for a bunch of miserable refactoring.
|
| Later, I realized that was the wrong approach - just go build
| a new factory somewhere. It's fun to take a more "hacky"
| approach to Factorio than I allow myself at work sometimes.
|
| Of course, that was when the game really got its hooks into
| me, and I quit after a few dozen hours when I realized that I
| was scratching the same itch that I could use for side
| projects and other learning.
|
| It's a balance, idk. I'll definitely play the new expansion
| at some point, but I do find myself feeling a bit strange
| when I'm spending time learning how to do something
| ultimately worthless when I could be using the same kind of
| mental energy to build something tangible or learn some new
| skill.
| birracerveza wrote:
| Stay away if you value your time. It's not a joke when they
| call it cracktorio. Especially on the Deck...
| res0nat0r wrote:
| I really like this game but the colors are hell on my eyes.
| I'd like to play more but I have such a hard time trying to
| figure out sometimes what is connecting where. I wish this
| had some nice bright colors and I would for sure play much
| more.
| mdaniel wrote:
| You may enjoy Dyson Sphere Program, then, as it has a much
| brighter palette and (currently) no biters. I have yet to
| figure out why I like DSP more than Factorio but I just do.
| It's more _fun_ to me
| res0nat0r wrote:
| Yep, I bought that and have played it a bit! I like the
| graphics much more for sure. I need to get back to
| digging in some more as I've barely gotten off the
| ground.
| mdaniel wrote:
| Both games have a "lull period" in them, just at
| different stages of progression in my experience. But the
| "game changer"(heh) for me was when I realized that I
| really needed to start DSP games by spacing out things
| waaaaaaay more than one might think necessary at the
| time. Every time I've been glad to have the extra space
| when I needed to add more production or rework something
| and didn't have to tear down the whole city to do it
| unglaublich wrote:
| On the Steam deck? How? With external KB and mouse?
| lawn wrote:
| I haven't played Factorio (yet...), but the trackpads work
| surprisingly well for other mouse based games such as
| Planet Coaster, FTL, point and click games etc.
|
| While I wouldn't play RTS games on it, the pads combined
| with the fantastic steam input that lets you rebind any
| button to any keypress (or a macro of presses) makes it so
| you can be fairly sure you can play most mouse
| keyboard+mouse games on it.
| kimbernator wrote:
| It has native controller support as well, evidenced by the
| fact that it is also available on switch.
| kevincox wrote:
| They made some UI tweaks to make it work well on the Steam
| Deck. https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-370
|
| I haven't tried it but I've heard that it is completely
| playable, although I'm sure not as convenient as using a
| mouse and keyboard.
| snthd wrote:
| Controller support landed in June, a long time after that
| blog post.
|
| https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?p=586148#p58614
| 8
| redundantly wrote:
| Probably because you can pick up and play anywhere at any
| time.
|
| Playing on a PC vs the Deck (or other similar portable) is
| like the difference between being an addict and the dealer
| using their own product.
| jayshua wrote:
| Custom input map with extensive radial menus and layers.
| jnwatson wrote:
| I'm personally not a fan, but lots of folks report that
| factorio works fine on the deck.
| cwkoss wrote:
| Has anyone tried Space Exploration mod on steam deck? Does it
| run alright?
|
| I've been meaning to try it, but also know its going to suck
| me in hard if it works well, so have been waiting for the
| right time.
| naillo wrote:
| Tangent but if you 'value' your time but don't use the time
| to entertain yourself I'm not sure you're using it right.
| marcusverus wrote:
| The concern isn't that entertainment is bad, it's that
| Factorio is _so entertaining_ that it tends to get its
| claws into you, making it difficult to turn off. If someone
| struggles with time management or self-control, avoiding
| Factorio is perfectly reasonable.
| MerelyMortal wrote:
| Entertaining one's self is not the end-all, be-all.
| [deleted]
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| I played through the demo levels, loved it, and then decided
| NOT to buy it for exactly this reason - it's so perfectly
| addictive! No thanks I already played TTD for thousands of
| hours in the 90s, can't do another game that sucks you in like
| that.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| We've had two people at work take days off in the wake of being
| told about factorio lol
| naillo wrote:
| You can probably beat the game in two weekends though, just
| FYI. I haven't felt that much need to replay it since then
| (though I'll probably try Space Age) but it's great fun.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| As much as I love the base game, I would have quit long ago
| if it weren't for mods.
|
| Mods are what keep me coming back.
| koheripbal wrote:
| Wait until you have children and then play it with them.
| laserbeam wrote:
| The time sink risk is for the whole factory building genre, not
| just the excelent Factorio.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| They don't call it "cracktorio" for nothing.
| Humboldtsnee wrote:
| Honestly, looks like a pass from me, as messing with the existing
| tech tree to introduce new barriers sounds more tedious than fun.
| xedrac wrote:
| I love Factorio and have >1000 hours in the game. Two things I
| would love to see:
|
| - Steam cloud sync fixed for large save files. Right now, you'll
| eventually reach a point where you can't save your game to the
| cloud anymore.
|
| - More interesting aliens and strategies for dealing with them.
| After awhile, the aliens start to feel like a repetitive grind.
| They always behave predictably and the solution to them is pretty
| much always the same.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > - Steam cloud sync fixed for large save files. Right now,
| you'll eventually reach a point where you can't save your game
| to the cloud anymore.
|
| The only way to achieve that is if WUBE ran their own save
| servers.
| willis936 wrote:
| Or changed their saves to be more sparse. Why not have save
| files store seed + world settings + delta? I've noticed that
| generating mostly empty map space by shooting exploratory
| artillery shots caused save files to jump to 100s of MB.
|
| My saving grace is that I always host a dedicated server so
| no one is responsible for save file distribution other than
| myself (which is easy enough to automatically sync to
| interested clients).
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" More interesting aliens and strategies for dealing with
| them. After awhile, the aliens start to feel like a repetitive
| grind. They always behave predictably and the solution to them
| is pretty much always the same."_
|
| Try the Rampant mod, if you want a challenge. There are a bunch
| of other mods that add different/tougher enemies too.
|
| That said, the focus of Factorio was never combat, it's
| building. If you want better combat there are many other games
| that focus on that.
| bombcar wrote:
| Rampant + deathworld (I think is the combo) is the way to go
| if you want a real challenge, because you need to build
| defenses that do not use too many resources.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| There's also Rampant + Warptorio, which already features
| effectively tougher combat and various other challenges
| above vanilla.
| lordnacho wrote:
| Kovarex's Basilisk:
|
| We can all see where Factorio is headed: Spaghetti belts ->
| trains -> flying robots -> spaceships -> AGI that reaches out of
| the game
|
| Now of course this AGI wants to be built quickly, so there's a
| mild incentive here to help the factory grow, which is that those
| of us not playing the game regularly will be punished once the
| AGI is developed.
|
| Now that you know, it's in your interest to go and download it
| and spend every waking hour on it, as well as proselytize in
| favour of the game.
| Uristqwerty wrote:
| How could the AGI punish players who don't help? It's not like
| it would be able to send an extra logistics bot into their
| games, set to occasionally pick up an item off one belt and
| insert it on another, right? Shit, I'd better not take any
| chances. What does our future overlord of orderliness need help
| with right now?
| lordnacho wrote:
| There are records on Steam of how long you've played.
|
| Just download the game and play it now. There's a tutorial.
| thurn wrote:
| The 300 hours I spent completing Space Exploration were a lot of
| fun, but it definitely feels very stretched out and grindy. One
| of the hardest things to do in game design is to make cuts &
| simplify, but the end result is usually much better.
| Gene_Parmesan wrote:
| I found the early game changes incongruous with the core design
| of the mod as well. The mod is about logistical challenges -
| specifically where trips are high volume but high cost. I don't
| know why a mod about that in the context of space exploring
| needed an extended burner phase, for instance.
| CGamesPlay wrote:
| I "just" (160+ hours in) started a play through of space
| exploration at the recommendation of an HN comment. Super excited
| to see an official expansion that adds this kind of thing!
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36561847
|
| My ideas list for interesting Factorio challenges (apropos of
| nothing):
|
| - Products with a shelf life (must be consumed within 15 minutes
| or it turns into a "waste" product)
|
| - Products with "refrigeration" (e.g. an item which must not
| exist outside of a temperature-controlled chest for more than 5
| minutes at a time)
|
| - Catalyst ingredients with a chance of being consumed (presently
| emulated with probabilistic outputs, native support could be
| interesting, the catalyst would just sit in the machine until it
| was consumed)
|
| - Mining ships (an entire factory moves to a location and
| extracts resources). The screenshot seems to imply that some kind
| of spaceship will exist, perhaps this is coming.
| adamwong246 wrote:
| It's basically impossible to track individual items in that
| way. Ask me how I know!
| CGamesPlay wrote:
| How do you know?
|
| I imagine that two useful tools would be belt sorters and
| inserters that filtered by a configurable shelf life
| threshold.
| Arnavion wrote:
| >Mining ships (an entire factory moves to a location and
| extracts resources).
|
| https://mods.factorio.com/mod/warptorio2 is sort of that,
| though the focus is specifically on rushing to do as much as
| possible before the factory inevitably moves to a new location.
| pphysch wrote:
| > Catalyst ingredients with a chance of being consumed
| (presently emulated with probabilistic outputs, native support
| could be interesting, the catalyst would just sit in the
| machine until it was consumed)
|
| Not sure how interesting this would be. There is already coal,
| and Factorio is all about large-scale automation, so whether
| coal lasts for 10 recipes or has a 10% chance of being consumed
| on each recipe is almost irrelevant.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| You could look into Seablock and some of the related mods (iirc
| Angels and Bob's mod packs) which add some of those sorts of
| complexities.
|
| IIRC some things can require charcoal filters, in which case
| you have to build the filter frame and filter, get it to the
| machine that needs it, then recover, replace and regenerate the
| used filter.
|
| Another fun challenge is "feedback", where a later step in a
| production line produces as waste something you can consume at
| an earlier stage.
| Akronymus wrote:
| For me, nothing beats angelbobs + the angel industry settings
| for the science and component overhauls.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| On the animation it looks like that robotic arms are pulling in
| (and sorting) asteroid chunks, which are then crushed, and the
| metal smelted, rock discarded, and also there seems to be ice
| that is used to cool the engines !
| ArtWomb wrote:
| You neglected to mention the machine gun turrets shattering
| large asteroids into manageable chunks! Art style here
| reminds me of classic Metal Slug ;)
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Oh yeah or the various asteroid breaking games ! :D
| SuperSandro2000 wrote:
| Shut up and take my money!
| Jean-Papoulos wrote:
| YES I LOVE YOU WUBE
| curiousObject wrote:
| Nice. Can anyone estimate the impact on global GDP growth?
| polobomb wrote:
| Really interesting, can't wait to see how this turns out
| dschuetz wrote:
| It's time to install Factorio again, winter is coming.
| edpichler wrote:
| This game is crack. A masterpiece.
| rvillanueva wrote:
| "Oh man the guy who made the Space Exploration mod is gonna be
| pissed they're copying him"
|
| "Oh wait it's the same guy"
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| Yep, they employed him a while ago.
| aqme28 wrote:
| Love when game companies just employ their best modders rather
| than fighting against them.
| entropie wrote:
| Factorio devs are exceptional. This game is so polished, well
| thought-out, optimized and unique. I remember I read some dev
| blog about belt optimization and got an idea how passionate
| the devs are about their game.
|
| Still regular patches that just make the game better. Much
| love.
| make3 wrote:
| yes, this is the way
| dgb23 wrote:
| That's the indie version.
|
| The big corporation version is: "We own the rights to w/e you
| made, going to make bank with it and perhaps mention your
| gamertag in some blog post."
| ehsankia wrote:
| My first thought was "but there's already a mod for that". I
| was delighted to see that addressed directly in the post, and
| doubly delighted when I actually read the answer.
| sudhirj wrote:
| There go the next few years of my life. Easily the game that has
| had the biggest impact on me as a person, maybe even my career.
| jokoon wrote:
| Well it's a good thing they want to make it more approachable,
| because mods are terrifying, they're either not well designed or
| too complex to be fun. I've played about 1600 hours of vanilla
| factorio, and no mods really interests me.
|
| Also it's quite a shame multiplayer is not that much played. If
| there were some way to trade resources between player with some
| auction house, or to buy land, or maybe conquer alien territories
| for special techs, maybe that could be interesting to play.
|
| The game is very well designed, but the end game is just too
| short despite its potential.
|
| On their website, it seems they don't have a game designer. I'm a
| fan, but to me it seems the potential of the game is a bit
| wasted.
| adanto6840 wrote:
| I have to ask, sincerely -- how many hours does one put into a
| game that _does_ have a good "end game"?
|
| As a game developer myself, when someone asks me what it's like
| to make games during a casual conversation, one of my favorite
| "go-to"s is to talk about reviews -- that it's so gratifying to
| see people who have paid <$30 and received hundreds of hours of
| entertainment. And then I inevitably mention the flip side of
| the coin, when you receive a negative review from someone with
| hundreds or more hours (who also paid <$30).
|
| Everyone's entitled to their opinion of a game (or anything
| else, for that matter), obviously. I do feel that the
| collective bar has risen quite dramatically for games though
| (for many totally valid reasons).
|
| Sometimes I (rhetorically) wonder about other forms of
| entertainment (ie movies), how they can remain viable with such
| starkly different time-per-dollar value propositions!
| skeaker wrote:
| Between their rave reviews and extreme success, my personal
| anecdotal experience with the game, and your own 1600 hours,
| I'd say that the potential has been realized to an acceptable
| degree already. This is all just icing on the cake
| jameshart wrote:
| Not sure this will scratch the itch for what I always felt was
| missing from Factorio, which is fundamentally a more satisfying
| 'sink' for resources.
|
| During main gameplay your resource extraction and expansion is
| driven mainly by the sink of 'research' - turn resources into
| science, science into unlocks.
|
| Additionally, biters eat bullets, and occasionally factory parts
| that need replacing.
|
| Other than that the main sink for all your resource gathering is
| just 'more factory' of course.
|
| The end game resource sink of 'space rockets' just never felt to
| me like a very satisfying thing to shoot for - though getting to
| the point where you can just expand onto a new mineral patch and
| reliably deploy blueprints that turn it into rockets is pretty
| cool, I'll admit.
|
| But there's a part of me that is left slightly unsatisfied by the
| fact that we can't reach sustainability, and we aren't _getting_
| anything for all the resources we process.
|
| Give me a little population of friendly alien creatures (who
| biters prey on) and make my goal to maximize their population,
| perhaps. I don't know.
| jjcm wrote:
| Try Dyson Sphere Program. Factory builder where the final
| resource sink is building a dyson sphere. It's a massive
| undertaking and it's had multi-planet from the start. Tons of
| fun
| sizzle wrote:
| Slimsounds akin to the paperclip optimizer
| Crystalin wrote:
| This is exactly why I liked Dune. it had this concept where you
| had to pay regularly the emperor to maintain "peace"
| fasterik wrote:
| Factorio is basically a sandbox game that generates logistical
| puzzles for the player. If you get bored of solving logistical
| puzzles, including those that self-imposed challenges and mods
| are able to offer, then I think what you really want is a
| different game.
| vanboxel wrote:
| Several versions ago, there was a mod (maybe called
| "homeworld") that had a sink of you sending various resources
| through a portal back "home". It started simple with N iron
| plates, but then they wanted 10N oil barrels, and eventually
| red circuits. It also added some farming resources (which were
| affected by local pollution, so you had to plan where to put
| them). It was fun to have little goals, but I don't know that
| it's been updated recently.
| batmansmom1 wrote:
| Friendly aliens trying to reach sustainability is such an
| awesome idea for a mod! (or Space Age feature @devs???)
| ecuzzillo wrote:
| This happens in the Pyanodon mod pack, among others; you farm
| alien creatures and make little habitats for them.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| You are rewarded for spending resources by unlocking
| technologies, and being able to use the new tech to refactor
| and grow your base.
|
| Still, I agree with you that there's some missing depth in the
| game that no mod has yet been able to fill for me. I say this
| after sinking (pardon the pun) thousands of hours in to the
| game and having a tremendous amount of fun.
|
| Still, it could be deeper in some way.. not sure how.. maybe by
| adding some LLM/AI of some sort?
| rosmax_1337 wrote:
| There just needs to be a gamemode which makes the game more
| about base defense and resource usage in defending the base.
| Currently you can just spam lasers and win no problem.
|
| Imagine something like 7 days of constant biter attacks on all
| fronts, with biters much stronger as well. A relentless strain
| on the economy of your base more than anything, with there
| being a real need for repair bots to fully repair and remake
| certain sections of the perimeter as it gets destroyed by
| perhaps some special baneling-esque biter.
|
| Add to this the idea that things get infinitely more and more
| difficult over time, and you instead compete for places on a
| leaderboard of like "survived 400 days and 14 hours".
| c7DJTLrn wrote:
| I've always craved something like this too.
|
| Of course, you can crank the biter difficulty, but you only
| get two outcomes: it's too hard and you can never build a
| base that lasts more than an hour, or you manage to arm
| yourself from the beginning and biters stop being a problem
| very quickly.
|
| I'd really like biters to be a threat I need to pay _some_
| attention to for the duration of the game. Evolution isn 't
| really a factor because as you say, once you have laser
| turrets, you're set. Even red bullets suffice.
| chienandalou wrote:
| Sounds a bit like the Wave Defense scenario. It is available
| within the game: https://wiki.factorio.com/Wave_defense
| politician wrote:
| You're looking for the Warptorio2 mod. "Build your base on a
| platform that warps from planet to planet and escape biters
| before they overwhelm you."
|
| https://mods.factorio.com/mod/warptorio2
| dgb23 wrote:
| I think not being able to reach true sustainability might be a
| core concept here.
|
| Don't forget, we're playing the Bad Guy here, who tirelessly
| exploits a foreign ecosystem and kills its inhabitants en
| masse. We quickly lose sight of the initial goal of escaping
| and just keep building _more_ only to be able to build even
| more quickly at scale.
|
| The community motto is: "The factory must grow!"
| kraig911 wrote:
| Time to make our relationships rocky again boys. Let's go. That
| first was so addictive. This honestly has me so afraid by how
| cool it looks and sounds.
| rodolphoarruda wrote:
| Let me know when platforms arrive to Arrakis and melange is
| finally introduced to the interplanetary trading system.
| master_crab wrote:
| I am conversant in three programming languages: C++, Python...and
| Factorio.
| donatj wrote:
| Oh good, my life being utterly dominated by Factorio again is at
| least a year away. That gives me some time to get my affairs in
| order.
|
| I really wish this were a joke.
|
| Also, if anyone wants to play a game similar to Factorio while
| you wait - https://shapez.io is like Factorio without a player
| character and a cleaner aesthetic. I played it first, and really
| enjoyed it.
| dimava wrote:
| And it also has an update nearing the end of development est
| 2024) - Shapez 2 [0] , rebuild in 3D (with 3d belt layers same
| as Dyson has) with new features
|
| [0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/2162800/shapez_2/
| babypuncher wrote:
| I might also recommend Satisfactory. It is essentially Factorio
| in first person. I think it actually has a better tutorial for
| people who are just getting into this kind of game.
| epiccoleman wrote:
| I've been really interested in Satisfactory, but the last
| time I looked, they didn't have blueprints - and I really
| can't imagine playing one of these kinds of games without
| some way of repeating designs. It _looks_ awesome though, and
| I 'd love to get a server running with a few friends.
| babypuncher wrote:
| They have blueprints now, and they are pretty handy.
|
| The game is still in early access, but it is feeling pretty
| close to a 1.0 product. The next major update is moving the
| game to Unreal Engine 5.
|
| What I really like about this game is that you can build
| vertically, a feature afforded by being in 3D. It allows
| for some truly massive and beautiful factory designs.
| ooterness wrote:
| Satisfactory added a blueprint system in Update 7, circa
| November 2022.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Two other factory builders that have slipped under the radar:
|
| Dyson Sphere Program - I love it because it has the cleaner
| look of Satisfactory, but in a 3rd person view. I could never
| get used to Satisfactory's first person view. It just doesn't
| work well for making a factory. DSP also has you go between
| multiple solar systems to fetch materials.
|
| Captain of Industry - The only factory builder that feels like
| it takes place in today's time. Has the unique mechanic that
| mining for materials actually deforms the terrain, and that
| excess dirt/stone can be used to expand your island. When I
| last played, the tutorial was lacking, but this may have been
| fixed by now. Also, anyone experienced with factory builders
| probably won't need much tutorial anyways.
|
| One thing I like about both of those that Factorio doesn't have
| (and I think desperately needs!) is the ability for belts to
| have more than 2 layers. At the very least, I often found
| myself wishing I could have longer underground belts in
| Factorio.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" I often found myself wishing I could have longer
| underground belts in Factorio."_
|
| I hate to beat the modding horse in to the ground, but, yeah,
| I'm pretty sure there are mods for this. Try searching for
| "belts" on the mod portal and you'll probably find a bunch
| that do what you want.
|
| In my experience, whenever I've wondered if there might be a
| mod for something I wanted, the answer has been "yes, there
| already is one, and more."
|
| It actually takes some serious creativity to come up with an
| interesting idea which hasn't already been turned in to a mod
| in Factorio.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| I enjoyed Shapez, and it's cool that it has many mods, but I
| just found it too abstract and sterile to keep my attention.
| Factorio just much more engaging for me in the long run,
| especially with mods.
| epiccoleman wrote:
| I love Shapez overall, and the Shapez Industries mod is a
| great way to breathe new life into it, but I tend to find
| that I run out of interest before the "endgame".
|
| As annoying as the Factorio biters are, they do provide a
| little bit of pressure that keeps you wanting to research new
| things and continue building. (They also inspire a burning
| hatred that will drive you to research and implement ever
| more efficient methods of murdering them). The same goes for
| the limitedness of Factorio resources patches.
|
| In Shapez the logistics that come with expansion and defense
| don't exist, so it winds up feeling sorta samey. I like the
| chill, relaxing vibe of Shapez but eventually felt like I was
| just doing the same things over and over with slight
| variations.
|
| Also, the lack of a blueprint book in Shapez is a major drag.
| I ended up setting a map marker way the hell out which lets
| me "teleport" to an area where I copy/paste designs from, but
| that's pretty hacky and ruins some of the flow state that
| Shapez lets you cultivate.
|
| All that said, I've been following the dev of Shapez 2 and at
| least visually it looks awesome, so I'll definitely be
| hopping into that at some point.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| I turn off biters in most of my playthroughs, and set all
| my resources up to 200%, and I still much prefer Factorio
| played this way to Shapez.
|
| Shapez was fun for a handful of hours, but I really don't
| see myself spending hundreds, nevermind thousands of hours
| on it like I have on Factorio.
| hiatus wrote:
| Yeah among other things that caused me to abandon it, there
| is no relationship between expansion and neighbor aggression
| or any other external pressures (though maybe I did not
| progress far enough to encounter those elements if they
| exist).
| II2II wrote:
| I took a quick look at Shapez. It may end up being addictive
| (to me) when Factorio was not. The reason being that
| Factorio's world is a bit dystopian in my view. A good game,
| but I like more cheerful things in my life. The abstraction
| of Shapez and the upbeat music seem to accomplish that.
| WA wrote:
| Or Mindustry, which is open source:
| https://mindustrygame.github.io/
|
| Mindustry has two "planets" and they play entirely differently.
| The newer one, Erekir, is a mix of Factorio, tower defense and
| RTS elements.
|
| I actually liked it a bit more than Factorio, because it is
| less complex.
|
| I didn't really like the first planet though (Serpulo) and
| stopped after playing through Erekir twice.
| abtinf wrote:
| This is Spore done right.
| Havoc wrote:
| That looks conceptually somewhat similar to Dyson sphere. Build
| locally till you have the capacity to expand to other planets
| philistine wrote:
| I've gone once through vanilla. I've launched a rocket the one
| time. I feel like the majority of players and blog readers are
| modded up the wazoo, but this expansion is not really for them.
|
| It's for players like me who did not go beyond the base game.
| lazylion2 wrote:
| Only 18.5% of the players got the "Finish the game" (launching
| a rocket) achievement on Steam
|
| https://steamcommunity.com/stats/427520/achievements
| TillE wrote:
| Yeah there's always a massive difference between who's
| posting a lot online vs who's just playing and enjoying the
| game. But you have to calibrate Steam achievements based on
| who's played the game for more than a few minutes.
|
| The "Eco unfriendly" achievement shows about 60% of people
| who launched the game played for more than a couple hours,
| which is quite normal. So out of those, about 30% of players
| finished the game.
| gergi wrote:
| I'm more impressed that _only_ 25.9% have been killed by a
| moving locomotive ( "Watch your step" achievement). Those
| things are murder-vehicles.
| laserbeam wrote:
| As it should be! An official expansion should be playable for a
| casual human.
|
| Despite that, as a modded wazooer, I am excited for this. Keep
| up the good job, wube!
| alyandon wrote:
| I greatly enjoyed Factorio and even went as far as doing a
| deathworld.
|
| I even tried some of the full blown mod packs like Seablock,
| Space Exploration and Krastorio2 to extend the base game.
| However, they all seem to be designed with this underlying
| theme that you should challenge the player by making everything
| pointlessly grindy.
|
| I really haven't played much since but I'll probably give this
| expansion a try.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Doesn't the early game get boring? Or how do you push past it
| after so many playthroughs?
| alyandon wrote:
| I actually enjoy the early game for some strange reason and
| different map seeds always presented a different set of
| challenges (especially on deathworlds) because of water,
| cliffs and resource locations.
|
| I mean, sure - once you get oil and flame turrets it is
| basically game over for biters and that can get boring
| pretty quick if you always rush straight to it.
|
| Edit: Also trains. I don't know why but I can just play
| with trains for hours on end in Factorio.
| db48x wrote:
| Space Exploration goes out of it's way _not_ to make things
| pointlessly grindy. Yes, you'll need to scale your home base
| up more than in the vanilla game, but the space construction
| all involves different challenges than merely scaling out.
| The space sciences are each a different kind of puzzle. And
| it adds three new kinds of logistics network (cargo rockets,
| rail guns, and space ships), each with different strengths
| and weaknesses. Automating them well requires building
| circuit networks, whereas automating the vanilla networks is
| very much optional.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Space Exploration is by definition grindy since it aims to
| expand the base game. If I need to make one new set of
| space science there's literally 5 new intermediate products
| I have to produce just to get that science. Those things
| aren't used anywhere else in the game. Just for producing
| that science. That bothers me.
| alyandon wrote:
| Space Exploration goes out of it's way _not_ to make things
| pointlessly grindy.
|
| Your definition of grindy is not my definition of grindy -
| maybe "pointlessly" was a little harsh on my part. It's
| cool though - different people have different opinions. I
| have built vanilla bases large enough to have a fairly
| significant amount of SPM so I am pretty well versed in
| using circuits, trains, etc.
| oefrha wrote:
| Yeah, Space Exploration is full of cool new challenges that
| aren't "let's make it as miserable as possible just
| because". Angels, now that's grindy.
| jcranmer wrote:
| My experience is that Angel's isn't all that grindy in
| itself--its main problem is instead that it feels
| excessively matrix-driven in development by itself. And
| there's a subsidiary problem that a lot of it ends up
| feeling kinda pointless (especially bioprocessing), so
| some of the interesting challenges it presents ends up
| being ignored because there's no reason to actually
| engage with them.
|
| The other issue is that Angel's is kind of an incomplete
| mod by itself, it relies on something else to actually
| use all the new things it makes, and that other one is
| Bob's [1]... and Bob's is very much complexity for
| complexity's sake. Most of the vanilla items in the games
| are instead have extra dragged out production chains for
| seemingly no reason other than to make things more
| complex, and the modpack has evolved by finding one of
| the few things that hasn't been touched yet and
| complexifying that yet further.
|
| [1] To be clear, Bob's predates Angel's by a lot, and
| Angel's was largely developed to create more interesting
| ways to make the things that Bob's added.
| oefrha wrote:
| By Angel's I meant Angel's + Bob's, I don't think anyone
| ever recommended Angel's alone.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| 80 hours to finish for experienced player is still at least 4x
| more than launching a rocket. There is really achievable
| achievement for launching it in 8 hours - once you think more
| about how to optimize waiting early and mid game.
| quchen wrote:
| My mods are mostly QoL, and I've played hundreds of hours
| (well, didn't count, bought it in version 0.14 years ago). It's
| a sandbox that made me read papers on telecommunication routing
| for optimizing my splitters (Clos networks). You need to mod it
| like you need to mod Python to do a lot with it. Sure you can,
| but lots of us just fiddle around with it in different ways
| just for the sake of it.
| auto wrote:
| Same boat, beat vanilla, enjoyed the experience but was ready
| to have my life back by the end of it. By the time Space Age
| launches the itch should just about be at the point of needing
| scratching again, so I'm definitely looking forward to this.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| I play with hundreds of mods, and I'm excited about this
| expansion.
|
| Mods have performance and compatibility issues, and they don't
| always get bug fixes or updates very often. It'll be nice to
| have an expansion to the base game that's officially supported
| and which all other mods will have to be compatible with
| instead of the other way around.
|
| Apart from the space part, which is arguably already present in
| the Space Exploration mod (a mod made by a developer who got
| hired by Wube to work on the official game, if I'm not
| mistaken), this new expansion promises:
|
| _" the ability to control train systems better, better
| blueprint building, better flying robot behaviour and many
| more."_
|
| That sounds great to me.
| red_trumpet wrote:
| > a mod made by a developer who got hired by Wube to work on
| the official game, if I'm not mistaken
|
| You are right, he even seems to be behind the Space Age
| expansion:
|
| > A lot of people are going to make comparisons between the
| Space Age expansion and the Space Exploration mod. I've
| worked on the game design for both: On Space Age I made the
| first space + planets prototype builds and plus I've been
| involved in most of the gameplay discussions since. On Space
| Exploration, well it's my mod, I made it.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Hoping that some of the useful features from Space Age make
| their way back to space exploration too.
| bombcar wrote:
| There's also all the things changed _in the base game_ that
| mods weren 't able to do, but developers can. We'll find more
| and more about this over the next year, but they will enable
| _even better mods_.
| bregma wrote:
| I have thousands of hours in, all vanilla. I consider launching
| the first rocket to be the end of the early game and the
| beginning of the midgame.
| hypercube33 wrote:
| I deeply love cracktorio and have like 800 hours in just vanilla.
| if you're looking for something similar to it I also liked the
| spin The Riftbreaker provides. it's not as bug free as Factorio
| but it has a lot of the same enjoyment but with more of an
| objective progression theme.
| Aeolun wrote:
| You can also finish it in less than 20h, which is a benefit for
| some :)
| willis936 wrote:
| One of these days I'll download a bp book and prove that
| there is no spoon.
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