I started playing factorio a few days ago because I read Sriram Krishnan’s interview with Tobi Lutke who raved about it [1]. In fact, I’ve read here on HN that you can expense factorio at Shopify :)
It’s almost a perfect game for a software developer. Unlike software which is difficult to visualize, factorio is all about the visualization. It makes it really easy to see your “hacks”, your “scaling”, and your “async”. It also makes it really easy to see your bugs as well. It’s like working on a program that is always running, in a debugger, but with the ability to dynamically add and change the running code in real time.
Another observation: it’s kind of like Excel. The sheet is always live and the sheet acts as a debugger (you see the data and not the code, you see the outputs not the transforms).
> It’s like working on a program that is always running, in a debugger, but with the ability to dynamically add and change the running code in real time.
Which is actually pretty true of actual real world environments like SmallTalk.
I’m an avid Factorio player. It is rare to see such commitment to craftsmanship that the Factorio developers demonstrate. Every aspect of the game is continually refined and improved. The game is very performant even when there tens of thousands of entities moving around at any moment.
The multiplayer gameplay also reveals a lot of fundamental truths about collaborative engineering as the player must debate architecture, prioritize and balance between the short term and the long term, join individual efforts into a group product, discover Schelling points, and so on.
oh please stop... don't take something as joyous and wonderful as Factorio and try to make it about misery. I play games like Factorio to not worry about the world's problems for a few hours.
I haven't checked the dev's actual intentions, but I'd be surprised if the misery isn't an entirely intended theme of the game. That's why the factory causes pollution, which the insects attack, earning you the aptly named achievement "It stinks and they don't like it". You're f'ing up an ecosystem with an ever growing, and maddeningly wasteful [0], contraption. Your factory is an invasive cancer of metal and plastic.
[0] The overwhelming majority of what you make gets thrown into a blender and turned into Science Juice.
I tried fucking with Factorio and watching the green world get turned into a bare brown desert full of machines was immensely depressing. I sympathized with the bugs: destroy these machines, let the world stay pleasant. I think the misery is inherent in the game already.
Factorio was one of the rare few early access games I paid for because even at like .30 I thought "This is a full game (and stable) and they still want to do more?!" Also I like the minecraft model of never changing the price. It always feels like a good buy then because it isn't instantly devalued at the next steam sale.
Factorio is freaking amazing and is my goto game. I've just gotten into the multiplayer aspects and it's completely rekindled my love after 1400 hours of game-time (according to steam, far bit of afk here to be honest). There are train worlds, mod worlds, pvp worlds, so many new and unique ways to play. One of the best parts of this game for me has been that both the depth and speed of it are totally up to you. Although many people simply try and speed run rockets or automate their factory, this is all completely optional. You can create works of art, music generators, blinking lights, even straight up computers!
One of my recent side projects has been building out a modded multiplayer server that allows me to sell plots of land to players. My idea is to create a city of player-owned museums and shops, all with the backdrop of a custom story narrative in a high-end designed mall of sorts. My inspiration for doing so has been from watching first person videos of people walking in Japan, wanting to experience that but being unable due to the lock-downs. My favorite aspect has been creating an in-game 'paid' train line that lead the player out of the dense concrete shopping district and into one of the beautiful blue and green tree parks, the visual switch-up makes the experience fantastically enjoyable. I'm not really sure I'll end up making any real income from it but the process has been a complete blast. Playing the game in this fashion feels the same as Minecraft did, just with more automation and potential for world building.
Although not strictly Factorio related, something else I've pursued within the game has been setting up a semi-interactive self in my room. I have a few small monitors all linked up playing, and I just set my character to hang out in various places online. One game sits in a train-world just cruising along, another sits in a beautifully animated forest, another still hangs out on a pristine beach that I found. Sitting inside a small room day after day due to the pandemic has been brutal but this setup has greatly improved my sense of connection to the outside. Apart from getting to look over and see something that is visually appealing (and green now that bleakness of winter is here), I'll occasionally see random people join a server and become friends trying to build something together, it's awesome! My shelf has become an interactive, aquarium, IRC, hybrid, all thanks to this game.
How does it compare to Satisfactory and Shapez.io (which is sold as a minimalistic factorio). I bought shapezio on steam some time and realized just yesterday i already collected 60h playtime on it... Now I'm thinking about digging sonewhere deeper.
I’ve played all three games and for me factorio is easily the best.
Designing big factories in Satisfactory feels awkward - it’s very hard to refactor and redesign because the buildings are so big and you need to build them one by one. The engineer in me is always vaguely dissatisfied with what I make in satisfactory. Satisfactory’s world is beautiful to explore - but that makes it a different sort of game.
And shapez was ok, but it lacks factorio’s loop. In factorio you build things out of what you mine and construct. Shapez needs its artificial level structure to motivate you to do anything - and I find that much less satisfying because it saps my intrinsic motivation. Factorio feels grounded in the world, whereas shapez feels like a puzzle game with almost no constraints.
The factorio modding scene is also incredible. Their are so many alternate ways to play factorio - complete with way deeper tech trees, or a base that teleports between planets every 10 minutes, Seaworld - where you start on a tiny island with nothing but ocean in every direction. And as others have mentioned, the game is rock solid. Multiplayer is an absolute blast.
That was my experience with Satisfactory as well. Factorio's greatest gameplay achievement is taking away mundane things once you've mastered them to the point of mind-numbing repetition. It's a sliding window, whereas Satisfactory just keeps piling on more layers of complexity without really abstracting anything away, save only for the running around with a chainsaw to keep your generators running.
In spite of the years of careful optimization, aggressive multithreading and 2d sprite-based graphics, Factorio still needs a pretty good computer to keep up 60 UPS (simulation updates per second) when you have a truly gigantic factory.
I have to imagine that if you tried to take a Factorio mega-factory (like a 1 rocket per minute factory) and load up the equivalent in Satisfactory, with its 3d graphics and off-the-shelf rigid body dynamics, it would crash to desktop immediately.
Don’t get me wrong, Satisfactory looks like a fun game! But nothing can match Factorio’s depth.
In this case, I will tell you that I don't think that Satisfactory is better than Factorio. I was incredibly excited for the idea of 3D Factorio, but so far, it just leaves me asking, "What's the point"? It doesn't get me anywhere near as excited as a new build in Factorio.
If you want 3D Factorio just get Minecraft and a modpack like Omnifactory or Skyfactory or Gregtech New Horizons. Minecraft is something that easy to keep coming back because of the large modding community.
If you want want an economy simulation MMO then checkout prosperous universe.
for something that scratches a similar itch, but is much more constrained and puzzle like (in a good way) try Infinifactory. It actually predates Factorio and all of the games mentioned and is very much worth playing.
coffee stain studios in general are phenomenal at delivering exactly what they promise. whether that's a balanced, fun factory automation sim or a game where goats lick stuff for no reason.
So I tried it for 5 minutes and didn’t get into it. How much time do I need to spend to make it to fall for it? Or am I the minority who didn’t vibe off it at the beginning?
How much did you automate before you quit? Because everything, on almost every level of abstraction, is automatable. That, to me, is a lot of the appeal. If you manually mine more than the first few minutes in the game, you are doing something wrong. It's like Minecraft but with many many more levels in the tech tree, and it is automated.
My experience was it clicked pretty much immediately. I think if you don't get it by the time you're on green science, then it might just not be for you.
I initially played through the tutorial levels (that you can get for free) before buying the full game, and I think that helped a lot; it's a very keyboard-centric interface that takes awhile to get used to and isn't likely to appeal to everyone. But the tutorials are pretty good.
Also, a lot of the stuff that's kind of tedious and awkward, like laying out complex belt systems, gets a lot easier when you get construction bots and can start building from blueprints. It's like a different game from that point.
A theme of the game seems to be to make the player do things that are hard or laborious but which can be accomplished in an easier way by using the the tools at hand more effectively, or eventually the problems can be worked around with new technology. It's not quite like a puzzle game where you have to solve each problem in front of you correctly before you can advance; rather you can keep advancing until the point where you're overwhelmed by technical debt (e.g. you end up spending most of your time running around fixing train deadlocks).
Not everything that's awkward or hard is a deliberate game mechanic, though. In the 1.1 release they've said they're planning to change some things that have been pain points for users.
I would say the game is very much like a CLI - you might at first recoil at the visual style, but almost immediately you understand why - there's going to be a LOT of stuff on the screen, and your little simple man and his simple stuff leads to a simple way of assaying what is happening where.
I would say to enjoy the game you really have to play it to the point where you build robots. Factorio is a game that is amazing for many reasons, but to me the main one is exponential growth.
At a certain inflection point you can basically tear down everything you've ever built by hand, and have robots recreate it all in a minute or two.
The combination of blueprints and robots turn the game from some tedium to a game purely of mind and very little tedium.
I forgot that. Yes, I really hated it when I first played it. I got attacked and couldn't select things quickly and I died and couldn't get to my stuff anymore. I almost gave up.
It turns out the UI is fairly configurable and after I made it so right click cancels I sort of adapted.
But yes, when I first played it the UI was horrible. It needs some sane defaults like more common RTS games.
It does actually get a lot of hype in tech circles. I tried it recently and found it to be addictive as advertised, but in all the wrong ways. Programmers kept going on and on about how great it was, but all I saw was ever increasing complexity for no real reason. I launched the rocket and haven't touched it since. I think I would have enjoyed it more if bots were available much earlier in the tech tree or something.
The game makes you think that the goal is to launch a rocket with a satellite aboard. And when you do, you get the “Congratulations!” message. But you also get a counter in the UI, showing how many rockets you’ve launched (Just 001?). And you get 1000 white science, which up until this point had never been seen in the game...
...and after a few minutes, a new goal comes to mind: Launch one rocket every minute. And that’s when the deep game begins. You’ll need massive power production and manufacturing infrastructure, you’ll start using the online calculators to figure out ratios of this to that, and when you get to 1 rocket per minute, you’ll want to see if you can design a system that does that while running completely untouched for 24 hours.
Just the thought of further scaling the beast of a factory I made, again, to deal with all the added complexity makes me want to purge that game from my Steam account. No thanks, I am not interested in additional slog for its own sake.
At a certain point I definitely get to the “wait, I’m just managing complexity in a game, if I’m gonna do this, I should actually make something” thought, and then I stop. But there’s something really satisfying about watching a huge but well oiled mechanism perform its motions, and that’s why I personally like this game.
I experienced exactly what you meant on my first run. Launched a rocket after a lot of slog, and lost interest after that. But I never got to actually use eg the nuclear tech very much, which itself makes me want to go back and try it again.
Personally, I wish there were more combat/enemy dynamics involved rather than “just” insectoids swarming the base. And that’s just one angle: other compelling reasons to build more efficient factories would have made me want to go back too.
I try every now and then to start from scratch, but just the idea of starting from the basics seems so daunting and not motivating enough so I kinda just give up after the first day.
For me Factorio is a way to safely confront my feelings about ever increasing complexity and mess and somehow get past them to find strength to improve things.
They are very different games IMHO, to the point that I find it difficult to name what outside some superficial UI similarity and a vague survival setting (that many factorio players disable entirely) is similar.
I’ve sunk a lot of time into both games. They’re complimentary to each other.
Factorio is fantastic if you love automation and building complex production pipelines. The game gives you incredible control over building and controlling the manufacturing of stuff. The main motivation is to optimize that, and there are many avenues to do so. You care very little about your “person” (the being that you control) except to keep it alive.
Rimworld is much more rich in what you can choose to do, since it’s primarily a story generation game. You have a lot less control over your manufacturing pipeline. You also have to deal with the humanity of your pawns, who need to eat, sleep and enjoy recreation. You have to keep them alive through natural disasters and raids. Your pawns may die but the story doesn’t end there.
They’re really different games. When I get upset with stupidity of pawns and want more precise automation, I switch to factorio. When I get bored with the dreariness of an automated factory churning out trinkets, I switch to rimworld.
Factorio has a veneer of RTS but its challenge and interest comes from factory design and managing queues of supply and demand (if you want to think about it like that). It layers complexity on complexity.
Rimworld is all about character management and anecdote creation in my view. The challenge and interest is about managing randomness and character driven conflict in a game designed to produce conflict.
Factorio is almost exclusively about factory building and automation.
Rimworld is much more of a social/survival game, with hunting, gathering, cooking, diseases, invaders, exploration, character emotions, etc.
Factorio has basically none of that; it's much more about plumbing together inputs and outputs into increasingly complex and useful items. The survival aspect of Factorio is just that you are surrounded by bugs that will attack you if you pollute too much or antagonize them.
Actual video from the game doesn't qualify as hype! And the code is rock solid and wicked efficient.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DR01YdFtWFI&ab_channel=Facto...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVvXv1Z6EY8&ab_channel=Facto...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqaAjgpsoW8&ab_channel=Facto...