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.
