I personally think that quite a large part of the HN community will find or have already found enjoyment in the game. So I wanted to share the release of the 1.0 version.
Ooh, I found 100ish hours of enjoyment over two weeks or so. Good thing I lost interest after I launched the rocket (the endgame), otherwise my productivity would have been gone forever.
The achievements in the game are a lot of fun to go after - they're mostly the right amount of painful/challenging and interesting to make you actually want to try for them.
That being said, I've put more than a few thousand hours into the game over the past few years and I think the base game finally got stale enough for me to move on to something else right as they're reaching 1.0, but that's okay. (The big problem for me is that I've been sinking a lot of time into mods like Seablock and after nearly 100 hours into this run I can't see starting over from scratch again just to be on 1.0. I'm not even sure I want to finish this run either knowing I'm unlikely to see bug fixes in the Seablock mod packs, and they definitely could use some work.)
I think the "Lazy Bastard" achievement is probably the worst in the beginning, it's quite an interesting one, though, since you later notice how much easier your life has become because you had to automate every little thing properly in the beginning.
I can't lie - this was one of the harder ones for me to figure out. I eventually found the speed running community to be quite good at this, as rain9441 would stream his 100% runs (that is, getting all of the achievements in one go), and it gave me a good hint on how exactly LB was supposed to work - I kept on screwing up saving the necessary crafts for oil refineries, since the way the game was setup before you literally couldn't build oil refineries in the machines you had, so you had to save a certain amount of crafts for them.
But yeah, it's just a good balance of "wow how the !#( does this work" to "ohhh I'm so glad it works this way."
Honestly no. I really want to like Civ 6 but it's such a departure from earlier installments that I can't see myself pouring much more time into it. It's a fundamental design change where you're almost forced to play the same in a certain way that I just really don't like, combined with lots of nitpicky problems that earlier installments just didn't have due to being better balanced and better designed. (I think my comment on Twitter still stands - it feels like 2K really Sims 4'd this game right up.)
Played Satisfactory and couldn't get into it - it's just worse Factorio, capitalizing on the popularity of that game with good 3D assets but trading it for terrible planning, crafting and perspective.
I've considered using some of my funemployment time to write one of these kinds of games as I think I have a unique angle that hasn't been explored to death as of recently, but haven't committed to it.
I assume you will not be happy if we tell you that there are mods that drastically increase the granularity of production processes and will make you easily work 200h on a single map before ever launching a rocket..?
I think my loss of interest was more about discovering the entire tech tree, I don't think making things harder will be enough to draw me back. I know there are mods that add technologies, though, maybe those are worth trying.
Well, it sounds like you got plenty of value from the game so maybe moving on isn’t the worst thing. I love Factorio, but there’s so much out there demanding my time maybe it’s best that I also lost interest eventually.
There are some numerical upgrades which can be repeated indefinitely at increasing costs -- robot speed, mining productivity, damage for various weapon types, etc.
It's 'infinite' on a technicality. Having your last few technologies on repeat all so your investment in tech-making infrastructure doesn't completely go to waste just barely qualifies, nothing more.
It feels like the only reason they even left it in the game was that it became a bit of a measurement of how well your design scales past the end game - I cannot tell you how many otherwise meaningless 'X000 science per minute' base videos there are on YouTube, but the number is not insignificant. Most of the time it's just 'bot speed++' over and over again, since that's how many of those bases work without running into extreme update per minute (UPM) problems.
I was the same, as soon as I launched a rocket I was done.
3 years later I played a multiplayer once a week with my buddies during COVID lockdown, as soon as we launched again I got bored. They are going again with more friends and I just join the discord for the chat, I don’t open the game up.
I don’t like solve the same fundamental problem over and over again so, I launched the rocket, done.
I think it is good design for a game to give a sense of closure to the player. You have reached the major goal of the game. Now you can move on to other things and it feels good.
I still boot the game from time to time when I want a low energy activity. I go through the moves. Bootstrap base, then smelting arrays, etc. I try to innovate on some designs a bit (mainly to make things more modular/scalable and avoid having one big resource bus). I find it relaxing.
I never played these kinds of programming games, I avoid them like the plague. I just know they would ruin my life. I don't even want to watch videos about them, that'd be like trying a drug just to see what it's like. Nope nope nope...
It's odd. Personally, I take xanax for anxiety, and have never had the urge to take it for recreational purposes. I moderate my alcohol intake, and smoke up very sparingly... a gram lasts months to me.
Certain videogames, on the other hand, can easily become a big problem for me. Weird stuff.
It's the game to teach people what technical debt and refactoring is.
When you start building your factory, you think about how to get first steps just done (ship it!). Over time complexity and scope of your factory increases, but old code, I mean old machines, are still there, getting in the way.
You can choose to ignore it and work around it using underground belts and similar solutions, or you can take on a proper refactoring, limiting your progress in the short term.
It also impressively shows the other side of things, where you can keep your factory running on hotfixes until pretty much the end of the game.
You can most certainly launch a rocket (i.e. ship your final product) with any kind of setup but if you want to build a sustainable rocket launching platform, you will most likely have to nuke production (as in, you can literally nuke your production) and re-build it.
Nuking your starter base is silly unless you're on death world and have some impenetrable defense set up that's hard to attain elsewhere without significant work. Usually to start a fresh megabase you just load up a car and drive a couple minutes to a new location. Then you can keep supplying the construction materials of the megabase with your starter base. (To those unfamiliar: yes, "the end of the game" -- launching a rocket -- is really the start of the game to seasoned players, so the initial base you launch the first rockets with is commonly called the starter base.)
The starter base is probably a UPS sink. Nuke that trash, it's not worth the flock of construction robots to disassemble it.
The point of the late late game is to minimize UPS (updates per second). It becomes memory bandwindth bound at some point. It demonstrates what's possible with today's technology. In comparison, Microsoft Word can not keep up with my typing in a new, blank document.
A starter base on the order of up to say 100-200 spm usually doesn't have much of a ups impact at all in my experience but I guess it could be on wimpier hardware. Or if you rely too heavily on logistics robots, but I think people usually don't go mass logistics until later.
I haven't played in a long while and never quite got a rocket launched(can't recall why). Any tips for getting to that point very fast without feeling like cheating the phase?
Depends - Some games like this are addictive and great fun for programmers too. I played "Spacechem" to death. It's effectively a two-thread, multiprocess, visual turing-alike machine with an organic chemistry theme. It's awesome.
Several Zachtronics games are just "programming, but intentionally annoying".
I don't really see the appeal compared to ordinary programming. My favorite programming game has actually been a flash game where your goal was to transform binary strings (represented as sequences of blue/red dots) into other binary strings. You were still writing in Befunge, but the rest of it came off as trying to be helpful to the extent possible, rather than giving you a goal and then disabling the tools you'd want to use to get there.
It's one of the games I was thinking of as "programming, but intentionally annoying". Checking my installation, I seem to have completed the first three chapters.
Some things off the top of my head that I find annoying:
- Puzzles start feeling like they're asking more for busywork than for puzzle-solving. I enjoy thinking about "how do I do this?" I don't enjoy thinking "well, I know exactly what I want to do, but it's a huge slog to actually go through the motions."
- You can't rotate the thing that accepts a polymer. So if you end up making the correct thing, but your orientation is off, you get to manually re-lay every part of your machine, instead.
- Everything uses the same clock.
- You can't even apply purely mechanical fixes for everything using the same clock, like a three-arm grabber with one of the arms cut off. There goes the conceit that the rules are justified by the theme.
I like that Opus Magnum scores you separately on time, space, and monetary cost. That was a good idea. I like working out fundamental minimums for how quickly I can produce something (based on the source pieces I'm allowed...) and designing something that can achieve that. The animation of a completed machine is fun to watch.
I think the monetary-cost mechanic seems underdeveloped.
> Puzzles start feeling like they're asking more for busywork than for puzzle-solving. I enjoy thinking about "how do I do this?" I don't enjoy thinking "well, I know exactly what I want to do, but it's a huge slog to actually go through the motions."
Wow, I just finished the first level and I can already tell that I'm going to love this game. Tightly crafted puzzle games are my favorite genre - thanks for mentioning this one.
I much prefer Spacechem. Opus Magnum has the control separated from the machine, so it’s easy to optimise all the timings. With Spacechem, you have to play with having the red Waldo control the blue, because the blue already has a command at that point.
I guess it’s like Harvard vs. Von Neumann. Harvard is more practical, but Von Neumann allows more fun hacks.
I feel like there are different types of constraints. Some are useful for creativity (limited number of specific resources), some are annoying (making you work harder to achieve known goal).
I stopped playing exapunks because of this before the end. The limited instruction set, limits on movements, etc. are cool - they force new solutions. Not having functions or advanced templates is just annoying - I need to implement the same thing multiple times, by copy-pasting.
They're the line for me. Factorio is fun, Zachtronic not so much. And within those: Opus Magnum was better than others because the presentation appealed to me. Factorio I do not play "efficiently" because the "just plop blueprints and let bots handle it" style is boring - I much more enjoy organically grown chaos. Sometimes play challenges with artificial limitations.
I see Zachrtonics games as just the fun part of programming. Programming, but you don't need to mess with build files, tooling, unit testing, deployment, maintenance, customers, PMs, etc... It's just the puzzle solving part of programming, which is my favorite part of programming.
I liked the idea of these games but I was the opposite. I couldn't shake the feeling that it was just work. I found myself procrastinating them. Wish I could enjoy the puzzles more.
Though I already have weekend programming projects that are more fulfilling and work towards something more concrete than "yay, solved a puzzle", and the games just made me wonder why I wasn't putting this time into those hobby projects. Factorio made me feel this way too.
On the other hand, I've been playing Morrowind lately (OpenMW) which gives me a nice mental break from programming. Apart from the fact that I couldn't help but write a parser for its game files once I saw how simple and documented the format was. Bit more fulfilling to have a `tes3_parser.go` at the end of my puzzle-solving session than to have solved some contrived TIS-100 puzzles for a fantasy computer.
Factorio was fun at first, but then it quickly felt like a pencil and paper optimization problem for something that doesn't even exist. Whether that tickles your fancy or not is probably like whether cilantro tastes like soap to you or not.
Yeah. I recently bought a game on steam where you create and manage a startup. You have to do stuff like research landing page, hire devs, ux people etc. About 10 mins in I was just thinking that my time would be better spent actually doing this stuff rather than doing it in a game.
This. I would even suggest it might be good training to coop with the manager if it was a possibility. I bet manager would learn quickly whats a technical debt, why it shouldn't be ignored and that sometimes high level goals cannot be pursued directly. Also devs would learn quickly that sometimes we have to stop the crazy conveyors doing binary operations on the payload and just keep it simple.
Exactly my review. I usually play it when work is slow to keep my brain entertained, but when I get proper work at work - factorio is no longer my friend. Game is like drugs - ill just do small updates to my fab - boom its 4am.
Factorio is like programming. But without management or customers messing anything up. You are in full control of the whole project and have fairly clear requirements. That makes it a lot more enjoyable.
Sounds like you could get the same thing by writing a real software project to scratch some itch you have. Sure, other users might come eventually and, but you can just ignore those and keep building what you like.
Or alternatively take a Moore's law view: the original factory remains there forever, eclipsed by the much larger, more orderly and modular, one build next to it.
Walk speed is a surprisingly big constraint on the early game, until you get various upgrades; you build a small factory because you don't want to walk round a larger one.
exactly, the original factory is likely the construction/logistic bot production center, it'd be slow but not necessarily inefficient, so it can stay while the bot build the modular factory elsewhere
This is actually what ruins the game for me. I get to a place where I need to recreate large chunks of the factory and it just feels too much like work.
It's one of those games that I wish I could love, but whenever I attempt to start it now I just remember that feeling of "ugh, why don't I instead code something, at least I'll create something".
I'm convinced that some games are actually Ender's games. Forklift simulator 2020? You're actually controlling a forklift somewhere in Germany and Hans is now out of work.
The wiki page is fine, but the video is quite literally Not Safe For Work. My German boss at the chemical company showed the whole team. Kinda gorey but in the Monty Python Black Knight sort of way, and similarly hilarious. Klaus' story is made up but it's based upon thousands of tales written in blood. Definitely gave me an enhanced appreciation for safety culture.
It really feels like a time waster until you get the drones to do those chores. I had a huge sprawl just because teching up to drones again in a new map felt like too much work.
Watching AntiElitz speedruns and going for No Spoon taught me how to sprint through the early game and get to bots and a large amount of production quickly.
Drones are a lot easier to get to now after they tweaked the sciences/tech tree, you're now able to pursue drone science immediately after green. Mods are always available if you need it immediately though.
I usually bootstrap a second base, make heavy use of trains, and ship materials back to original base.
At this point I generally don't tear things down
More like if a manufacturer needed to make a new product so they built an entire new factory next door and ran electric and plumbing from the old building and abandoned it.
In fact it's exactly like this because that's what the game is about.
Not sure why you're downvoted- that's how my friends and I would play multiplayer, with certain players taking "ownership" of specific raw material sources and shipping them to factories operated by other players.
Yeah, bootstraps all the way:
1. Bootstrap "base 1" to Automation 1 (Coal etc.)
2. Bootstrap "Base 2" for Red/Green science, automate building components
3. Main bus "Science Base" maybe up to first rocket (maybe some train in resources) and later repurpose for module construction.
4. Train Base to goal SPM factory
The game has some major transition points where refactoring makes sense, but often the correct solution is to tactically upgrade as much as possible, and get to the better point to rebuild.
Lol this is what a company I worked at did and they spent almost a year trying to get version 2 to parity with version 1 and finally gave up short of parity
I feel the same way, although it's even worse with Zachtronic games (like SpaceChem for instance). At first I enjoy them because "it's just like coding" but then after an hour or so I think "well, it's just like coding" and I realize that I could be doing something more productive. I guess it must be like playing Guitar Hero if you're a professional guitarist.
I think these games are great at teaching people about concurrent programming, race conditions and locking though.
Anecdote: I got my first programming job while in the middle of a SpaceChem run (previously, I was just a hobby coder). I quit the game in a few days after starting that job, as I found it required the same "brain juices" I had already depleted at the office.
But I believe, there are different types of "brain juice".
I run out of the one required for nasty bug finding, very soon, but when that one is gone (and after a short break to clear the mind) I can go on creating new code/architecture for hours.
I didn’t really see these nuances until I was diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed stimulant medication. It basically gives me a large tank of “rainbow juice” that works for any task and lasts 4-6 hours.
Going back to the parent comment, one remarkable effect of this is that I rarely desire to play video games like I used to. It seemed like I always had enough juice for video games but rarely for other life obligations, but with the rainbow juice I am just as motivated to do all that other stuff as I am to play video games.
There are online tests you can take. If you score high enough, its worth the few hundred dollars to get an official diagnoses. This is coming from someone who was diagnosed ADHD as an adult.
Seeing this comment makes me think that I should consider talking to a doctor about ADHD. I can't even focus on playing a video game for more than 30 minutes most of the time.
I’m probably on a very similar drug to OP. I take it monday-friday.
Common side effects of ADHD drugs are loss of appetite, difficulty sleeping, and increased heart rate. It basically puts you into fight or flight mode for 6 hours a day. More blood to your brain + muscles, less to everything else (digestion, immune system for example).
One weird thing about it is the first few times you take it you’ll get a feeling of euphoria, like you’re on cocaine. This is _not_ the way the drug is supposed to feel, it goes away if you stick with the same dose for a while. Some people keep going up because they think the euphoria is part of it, and that’s really dangerous.
It really does work incredibly well for me. Especially for programming, where you’re most productive when you’re not pulled out of a flow state. I went from a B average to straight A’s when I started taking it in college. It made it so easy to oranize my schedule, I just worked/studied from 8-6 every day. No late nights, no procrastination.
Personally, I have no feeling of withdrawal when I go off of it for weeks at a time. Though I have developed a bit of a psychological dependency around work, where I kind of tell myself I won’t work well without it, which becomes self-fulfilling.
It’s not all good, not all bad. Hopefully this helps!
Yes, that was a really helpful shared experience, thank you!
Basically, it enforced my point of view to only try it out, if I really think it is neccecary.
I never done cocaine, but weed.
With the right time and settings it can help me get into a flow lasting for 10+ hours. But weed really does not help mid or long term, my productivity goes into steady decline after couple of days.
And coffeine I never liked, so I prefer the natural rhythm, with varying success.
I most definitely have mixed feelings about it. Granted, I wasn't diagnosed until my mid-30s, and I like to think I accumulated a respectable pile of life accomplishments beforehand (along with some dramatic failures) so I have a pretty thorough understanding of my own performance baseline. By the time I had a career and family, my problem was no longer failing to be productive, but rather failing to be productive at the right things at the right times. The modern world is built around consistency, planning and schedules and these things cause major problems for me, as for most of us with ADHD.
Stimulants (Vyvanse in my case) are blunt instruments; they alleviate the specific behavioral problems that plague those of us with ADHD but also enhance performance in general. The biggest danger that I see in my own behavior is the tendency to forget about all the self-management practices I learned before my diagnosis. With stimulants, you can do irresponsible things like stay up late for no good reason, get four hours of sleep, and still be fairly productive once the medication kicks in. I have to be really honest with myself on a daily basis about whether I'm using it to overcome a deficit caused by ADHD, or a deficit caused by bad behavior.
The second biggest danger is developing unrealistic expectations about what I am capable of accomplishing. For example, I am currently pursuing a PhD in computer science, and the decision to do so was made by the medicated version of myself. I don't regret the decision one iota, and it's a goal I've had for many years, but I already had a long list of projects and goals when I signed up for this and I definitely deluded myself about just how many of those other commitments I'd have to set aside for a while (or forever) in order to get a PhD.
It helps to balance out the stress on different faculties. If you write code for 14 hours a day you're gonna burnout but if you balance a variety of activities it is possible to be very productive while not feeling exhausted.
If you're into that kind of metaphors, you may like the game 'Carrion'; warning, lots of pixel blood. It launched not long ago and does a great job in creating an 80s horror atmosphere. At the same time it's a relatively easy metroidvania platformer, so I find it a genuinely good activity to recover "brain juice" after coding.
I could sit here and get virtual levels and virtual money... or go raise my actual human fitness level, or go work on my actual business for actual money.
Games are an easy win to feed you nuggets of feeling like you did stuff, but a poor substitute for real life.
But there is only so much time that you can be effective at running a business or running. Some people need to relax from the stress of work and tiredness of exercise by playing games for example.
But is it all that relaxing to build and run a complex virtual factory? Sometimes if the level of difficulty is too high it can become stressful.
I understand that there's satisfaction in it. That satisfaction can be hard to get at work sometimes. At work, you can be asked to work on things you don't like, that sometimes feel even more pointless than a game.
Part of the reason why I have programming side-projects at home is because they're an outlet to get the satisfaction of building software the way I want to.
The consequences of messing up a make believe factory is essentially nothing except one’s own time loss. The consequences of messing up a real factory are obviously substantial. What games or side projects let us do sometimes is to explore and enter a more diffuse mode of thought which has some tangential benefits to other activities. Spending too much time “being productive” can be counterproductive because one can get tunnel vision too busy executing tasks instead of reimagining or optimizing those tasks. Too much time questioning the work and nothing materially important gets done either.
Eh. Time and place. People need downtime and even though I don't game much these days, I think fondly of all the hours of Starcraft and Starcraft 2 I played. And beating Xan on Godlike in Unreal Tournament 2004 (and totally cleaning up when we had lan parties) was just so fun.
Recreation is important and one form is not more "real" than another. Notwithstanding the fact that some games feel like work (and therefore suck, in my view), for those that are enjoyable, that provides value, whether it be chess, team sports or a video game.
Maybe there's something to be said for opting to lead a more creative rather than consumptive lifestyle. Ultimately though, something only matters if you think it does. My work is largely bullshit, and I can't think of a business I'd want to get into that also wouldn't feel like bullshit. I think the value I'd extract would precisely be in the connections made and the problem-solving itself. How important is another piece of enterprise software to extract money from people that no one thought they wanted until it exists?
What about a B2C app that solves a real problem for real users in a new or better way than existing apps? That seems like an easy way you can deliver real value. That's what's gotten me moving on all my personal projects so far—though granted, I haven't published/monetized them yet, just shared them with friends and family. But I get value from them and my friends and family get value from them, and that makes me feel good.
Value to someone, sure. I wouldn't necessarily see the value in it.
I do have personal projects, one to do good, others out of curiosity. Mostly out of an urgency to be creative. I don't think this carries more meaning than pure leisure.
Have you considered changing your line of work, and perhaps seeing if you can use your existing skills to help you in a new career?
I'm eyeing off a few avenues, I wouldn't mind not writing software for money anymore but it would also be cool to use my hard earned experience to my advantage. One avenue I thought of was music composition, because there are ways to automate some of it with code that I could use to provide some extra value, but it's also enough of a leap from my current career that it would be a wildly new endeavor.
Nonsensical argument unless you generally spend time you should be working gaming or spend time you could be relaxing working.
If you want to be a workaholic and spend your free time working, go right ahead.
But you will end up like my father, mid 70s with no real relationships with your family, obsessed with "completing your legacy" and a general inability to enjoy anything that isn't "work".
If that sound like fun to you, go right ahead.
Me, I'll continue to work at work and spend my free time on relaxation.
You only get one life, spending it chasing dollars and dimes is a poor life plan
I work on programming projects I find fun. What makes it recreation is that it's something I want to work on, I don't have others imposing deadlines or requirements.
A mechanic can enjoy working on his own project car in the off time.
Both of these things are productive in a way that playing games isn't, but they're still recreational. It's not spending your life chasing dimes. It's looking at the different recreational things you could be doing, and choosing the ones that also intersect with being productive and have a side-effect of helping you professionally.
Games and play -- of the "unproductive" kind -- are a fundamental and valuable human activity. Not everything has to produce something beyond mental well-being. Plus, of course, children learn by playing.
Nobody said your hobbies must be productive. But some people prefer it to be, and I don't think it's right to shame those people as if they're just chasing dimes or denying part of what it is to be human.
Productive is all relative anyway. Children learning by playing is productive, the productive part is the learning that is a byproduct. Working on a project car is fun in itself. It doesn't become less fun if the person doing it is a professional mechanic. Would you tell a person who plays games professionally in an e-sports league that they must do something else for fun?
I think it is a sign of good life when you find a way to get paid for doing what you enjoy. And if you enjoy it, then it is still fun when you do it outside of work. The productive benefits of it do not make it less fun.
I agree with both of you, to a degree. Playing a single player video game is unlikely to help you build relationships with others. And yet never stopping to enjoy life in all its variation leads to a pretty empty life, too.
> Playing a single player video game is unlikely to help you build relationships with others
I disagree. I have fond memories of discussing Zelda on the playground as a kid. Similarly, online communities are formed around basically every notable single player game. It's still a shared experience, even if it's not shared at the same moment.
Would you say the same thing about fictional books? They're generally regarded as being worth the time, but aren't they also "a poor substitute for real life." You could be having your own experiences instead of reading made-up ones. I don't see why games should be different. Certainly not all games are created equally, and some exist only to suck away time and money, but it's obvious when that's the intention.
I found with "Opus Magnum" that, yeah, it was programming of a sort, but since it was all these wacky physical devices, that it was enough unlike coding that it switched back to being a fun puzzle.
But, yeah, with "TIS-1000" it was just programming, and sort of unnecessarily (and unpleasantly) difficult programming at that.
I really enjoyed TIS-1000, possibly because of the constraints the machine and assembly language posed. Finding clever ways to work within those constraints was fun. Same sort of fun I get when writing 6502 ASM for ROM hacks on my Atari 2600.
In my day job at the time the game came out I was doing node.js microservices. So it was refreshing to work at the bit level again.
This isn't a problem with the game. This is a problem you are having with games in general.
I have it too, and it's a consequence of growing up and/or having more responsibilities.
I can either play Factorio, or I can spend time with my kids. Factorio, which I love, loses every time.
The only games I play now are ones I can play with my kids. ... so I set my daughter up with Starcraft 2 and am teaching her about strategy while still scratching that gaming itch.
My dream is to have a multiplayer LAN based VR Elder Scrolls game to play at home with the family.
I think it's a bit of both. I have that with all games too, though generally I have it less-so with games that don't take my creative energy which I would rather use for coding or arts.
I have little to no problem getting myself to play Starcraft II or other strategy games which I love. Low-effort story-based games are also easy to get into.
Depending on how old your kids are, they might enjoy playing Factorio with you. My daughter is 3, and she is always up for playing "The Train Game". She mostly enjoys telling me what colours my trains should be and where I should drive them, so I need to use a more train-based system than I would otherwise.
The fun is once you have the construction bots for me you can make them destroy segments and from then on you can just ghost build everything else.
For example, I am playing on an OARC server, basically new players get their own base space, and I'm trying to get to my friend we both kinda picked 'far away' as options so we wouldnt clash with each other, so I've got blueprints I keep dropping that keep expanding my logistics network + power grid northward / westward as I make my way to him. The construction bots do all the work, my factory gets all the materials to them.
I've taken a break since, but then once I can reach out to him I will probably build train tracks going to and from his base and mine. I'm also using the robots to build a massive base. I can just ghost place whatever I want where I want it as long as the robot tower can cover that area.
I've just got to the point where i can use robots. How do you go about ghost building stuff? Do you have to use blueprints? Can the constrution robots just build anything for you if the mats are in chests?
You should have gotten a tutorial presented when you got bots, that'll go over over how it works.
You can just place ghost items by hand (press shift) but not much point. The advantage is being able to smack down whole bunches of machines in blueprints.
They can build anything if the products are in provider chests. They have the exact items, they won't build from intermediate materials.
It's possible to order bots to put out things for you without blueprints. You need a personal roboport, and some construction bots in your inventory. It's been a while since I played, so I don't really remember if you just place with left click, or some modifier and left click. It vastly increases the range you can reach when building manually and its an excellent qol upgrade. The more construction bots you have (up to the researched limit) the more faster it'll be, because they have to return to you to pick up the next piece.
I forgot to mention in my comment, if you hold shift when putting something down, it will ghost it. So you can have 1 of every item you need, no need for a personal robot port, and they will ghost it. The great thing about letting bots build is if you don't have all the materials they will drop it as it comes into the logistics network!
Yeah, ghost placement is what I was thinking of, thanks for the reminder! The approach you suggest requires being in the range of a logistic network however, while carried construction bots are only limited by the range you have available from the engineer.
There are tons of designs you can do with bots, some have built completely belt-less bases using them. They're limited by their speed and range however, so you always have to balance to the constraints of the tools you use.
They build from the logistics chests, and yeah by blueprints. You can also have them tear things down as well, and they wind up in logistics chests. One thing I am doing is I have two separate logistics networks, and from my main I have conveyors taking things I want to the 2nd logistics network.
You can also start a Sandbox game mode to explore everything you can do (note infinity chests are extremely useful, you pick a item in the game, and it will produce as many of them as you want perpetually, then your inserters can pull those out into conveyors simulating different parts of what you'd like your factory to look like). Definitely recommend this approach, you can explore as much as you'd like to explore.
Also note, there are a few websites with prebuilt blueprints as well.
You can copy existing sections of your factory with Ctrl-C and paste ghosts with Ctrl-V. There's also a paste buffer that you can scroll through with the mouse wheel.
When my factory has grown so big and unwieldy that I start to feel a massive refactoring is in order but that it's going to be too much work, I just start a new game and use the lessons I learned from the previous game to design a better factory next time.
Likewise, and I spotted it early on so never really got into it. Systematic games are my favourite kind of game, but when it gets as raw as factorio is I suddenly snap out of immersion and realise I'm working but in a game.
Completely agree, refactoring your layout is too expensive. What I typically do is just start-afresh with all the resources I have accrued from my current factory -- still fun!
Roboports chained together to form large logistics networks with construction bots and blueprints (whether of your own creation or easily downloaded) my friend.
If recreating a portion of your factory "feels too much like work" to do it really sounds like you haven't availed yourself fully to the tools the game gives you to do it.
Had the exact same experience with Satisfactory. When you need to scale production up it becomes like a real job. You need to plan, refactor, etc.
When I now see those videos on Youtube with huge factories I wonder how many hours that person has wasted. I'm not against enjoying a video game, but when the activity is so similar to real work... why not do that instead and get something real in return?
> This is actually what ruins the game for me. I get to a place where I need to recreate large chunks of the factory and it just feels too much like work.
Are you using drones and blueprints?
Once you unlock drones, you can create huge swaths of factories in seconds. You just need to come up with a design that works, and then replicate it.
It teaches that if you wait a while eventually some magic technology (drones, trains, faster belts etc) will allow you to bypass technical debt and/or simply eliminate it with a single demolish command.
And it teaches that humans can do whatever they want to a world, level all the forests, kill all the locals, because eventually we are going to fly away. Not our problem anymore. Space people are above the petty concerns of terrestrials.
It’s for this reason I personally dislike factorio as a game. Don’t get me wrong, the game itself is fantastic, but I don’t have the patience for it.
Rather, I find myself trying to build a factory top down. I write a bunch of sticky notes with material requirements and calculate backwards “how many labs do I need?” “How many gears do I need to make the beakers?” “How much do I need to mine to match that hourly throughput of gears?
It’s the perfect candidate of a game to write an algorithm for. Assuming a known seed, it’s trivial to design the most efficient system based on those parameters.
And at that point it just becomes work. It’s really designed as a bottom up game, but I think about problems top down and for that reason factorio drives me nuts.
You really need a combination of top-down vision combined with bottom-up implementation, mixed together with a healthy dose of pragmatism.
It's enough to know that you'll need lots of gears and to know that you'll need high-capacity mining eventually. But there's no great harm from having a few extra or from having not quite enough to max out beaker production; just start the process, get some gears, get some beakers, and refine as needed. Without a little top-down vision, you'll end up severely overproducing some things and underinvesting in others, which is no good, but you'll never be able to build an optimal factory without first building a suboptimal one.
> Over a few months I designed an entire Factorio base without testing any of it. The goal is to create a mid-sized base capable of building a megabase. A secondary goal is to not break down or rebuild anything ever.
The challenge isn't that it's hard to figure out the ratios or math out the machines you need, it's in getting to having the production to make that base without falling asleep waiting on things. Continual bootstrapping towards that end goal is the gameplay.
I just make labs and factories in arbitrary amounts, and then adjust the amounts later as I go based on where I see the bottlenecks. I tried getting the ratios exactly right up-front when I first started playing, but it was almost never worth the effort because I would usually outpace the production of a specific input resource (especially when I later built new factories that used one of those inputs too).
Except it doesn't have very good refactoring tools. Sometimes you need to change just one small thing about some sub-graph of your factory, but circumstances require you to re-do most of it to implement that change. This is just busy-work, and not "fun", to me at least.
I know later in the game more options open up, but that doesn't help me get there.
I wish for a Factorio-style game where I can just drag (groups of) machines and conveyors around, and I just pay cost for however much just changed.
For me the game got so much easier when I started to construct drones. There was almost no need to build belts any more! Not sure what it says about me as a developer though...
I have built an entire no belt factory. It works for the most part but damn it's slow. I do transition a lot of the technical debt from the green and red sciences so I can properly support the rest of the science development.
For me in Factorio you have to think carefully how to place your primary (mines, power, oil) and secondary factories (factory generation, batteries, plastics, ammunition etc). Some of this placement comes from the map, but in the early game you tend to place them too close to each other, which you then need to optimise later on when other tech (like oil & nuclear) become available.
Just refinining oil into primary products in this game took me like a week of work and tweaking.
You then get to the end of the game & build a rocket, but think to yourself -- "Yes, but I could maybe do all of this again but properly and without manually making things and the same mistakes". So you start another game and the whole process repeats!
One of my favourite games of all time - sometime in 2018 I overloaded myself on it though. Designing systems at my job then coming home to design systems... well it might have been fun but I think I needed more variety in my life, ha!
You can look at the dev dayries https://factorio.com/blog/
They are very interresting, I've learnt a lot of technical things reading them.
It's a well programmed game !
Note that there is also a demo and the binaries are DRM-free (for me the demo was a bit small to justify 30 bucks, but after playing on a friend's version for a few week it became quite clear that I had to buy this game).
I’ve wanted to try this for a while but I’m a bit reluctant because I’m not sure that after an entire day of systems design, refactoring, building etc I need a evening game of it.
Would it be too much or still refreshing? My favorite unwind game is battlefield 4.
Factorio always looked appealing. From a distance though. Never played this for the same reason I don’t do WoW and EVE online. Scared it would suck up every minute of my life.
I concur with moritonal; although you can easily spend hundreds to thousands of hours in Factorio, it is much, much easier to put down. Unlike with MMOs, the game offers you no incentive for logging back in regularly.
Try it and see how you feel after ~2 hours of gameplay.
> Try it and see how you feel after ~2 hours of gameplay.
Coincidentally "try it and see how you feel" is also how people sell heroin...
They're saying they're concerned that they might get addicted, and you're telling them to try just the tip, just to see how it feels?
I'm a big fan of Factorio but if you're concerned it could take over your life, there's definitely a chance it could.
True it's not as bad as an MMO. There's no daily quests, no social features, (though multiplayer is fun) and most importantly no lootboxes or variable ratio rewards. Doesn't mean it can't addict you for a little bit though.
Even when the game is boring, its still addictive. Kinda weird that way.
Of course its mostly only boring when you haven't yet figured out the "design patterns" of an efficient base, and/or are too lazy to tear down what you have to build them out.
No, seriously though, I'm speaking with full experience: My main WoW character has a 4-digit days playtime (and that's from several years ago; I eventually did put it down for good).
Factorio is addictive the same way that Civilization is: You want to keep going. Or like Tetris pro players, you might think about your factory when you're not playing and "see" it everywhere. But unlike WoW, you can put the game down at any time: there's no responsibilities you're taking on, there's no grind you must finish, no daily quests that reset calling you to re-do them tomorrow. The game world stops the moment you pause/exit the game.
There's no comparison to a MMO.
> Doesn't mean it can't addict you for a little bit though.
Every good game will. Every good TV show will make you want to binge. It's up to you to manage your time. I believe GP is a reasonable adult and can manage 2 hours of a game without having to check into rehab :)
Warning: unlike Civilization, Factorio UI doesn't feature a real-world clock, and AFAIK there's no mod that can add one, so unless you set an alarm or have a spouse it's really easy to get sucked up ;)
Unlike say a first person shooter factorio is limited to 60fps, so unless the slightly reduce screen realestate is an issue just run it windowed and use the system clock.
I was SURE I felt like I'd contracted Coronavirus, but it just turned out that I'd been playing Factorio for so many hours straight without pausing to eat or sleep.
I got hooked on Factorio, but for me Satisfactory was far more addictive. It had that "explore and find goodies" element that has some sort of primal addictiveness in the sense of: "Must hunt, gather food."
Factorio is like a Terry Pratchett book. It has no chapter breaks, no obvious place to stop for the night and put it down. It just keeps rolling along until the sun comes up.
>They're saying they're concerned that they might get addicted
To be clear I don't think I'm inherently vulnerable. It's more of a "let's rather not find out what happens when my love of gaming gets combined with peer pressure & reinforcement loops" consideration.
I do like the Anno series for this though. It scratches the same "city builder" itch but it has a pretty fast burn cycle. i.e. I'll spend a weekend doing little else and then lose interest for 3 months.
I never got in to Factorio, though I'd been tempted several times. I recently bought the early-access Satisfactory though which is a similar game type, mostly to support the developers (Coffee Stain) who make another game I quite enjoy (Deep Rock Galactic).
The refactoring bit hits hard, how do you structure your factory to minimise time/cost/space, can you increase throughput, do the outputs line up where you need them, how do you ensure a sufficient power supply, etc.?
Same here. I'm a former engineer and thought Factorio would be the perfect game for me, after all I do enjoy problem solving. But it just seemed like an extension of my workday.
However I love Rimworld. It's a game I keep going back too again and again. It's a great game for relaxing and unwinding. It's certainly in my top 3 list of best games of the last 10 years.
> The refactoring bit hits hard, how do you structure your factory to minimise time/cost/space, can you increase throughput, do the outputs line up where you need them, how do you ensure a sufficient power supply, etc.?
There are different 'designs'. I'd recommend a main bus design for your starter base. Basically you take key materials, like copper plates, iron plates, steel etc. and then run (multiple) full belts of them down a long line. and build your factories to the side of it, taking your input materials from the main bus.
Alternative designs (for much later in the game, if you want to buiold a megabase) are e.g. rail grid, sometimes called city block design. Looks like this: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/1as3oMAgOy4/maxresdefault.jpg
You have a grid of rail tracks with standardized squares and standardized input/output locations. Then you automate input delivery/output collection to them either by pure circuit logic, or of you don't hate yourself quite that much using the Logistic Train Network mod: https://mods.factorio.com/mods/Optera/LogisticTrainNetwork
A lot of these rules/ideas likely apply to Satisfactory, though there are additional concerns like rate-of-climb for ramps and placement of objects is not (by default without using base-plates) fixed at 90 degrees but works in (iirc) 15 degree increments. It makes things differently challenging.
Once you play Factorio enough times you find that there are some general rules of thumb you can follow, in terms of resource consumption at various stages. Once you know those, it's partly just a matter of figuring out your scale milestones.
I do three stages, a main bus starter base which is enough to fill out the tech tree and launch a rocket, and then once I've automated most things, then comes the first megabase, which after enough time I rip up and build the modularized, distributed megabase (mostly solving the problem of keeping train traffic spread out and avoiding long multilane belt busses). The interesting thing is that building a megabase isn't necessarily just 10x-ing your start base, it's actually doing things differently because how you move resources around starts to become a problem in ways you didn't encounter at the smaller scales.
They (Coffee stain) collect data and send it to Epic (even on the steam version and even if you opt out) and doesn't reply to GDPR requests. I'd stay clear.
Great game and it has come a long way. Even the early versions were quite addicting. For me this is one of the best games in the last 10 years along with Kerbal Space Program (there may be others, time is in short supply these days).
If you are not into computer games, I would still recommend to visit their site. They have "friday facts" where they describe the work they did over the week an what challenges they had to solve. It is very well written and poses interesting problems. Really interesting for software devs, even if you are not in game development.
Factorio is much easier. (Cracktorio a running joke)
Its base appeal/game loop is building new system and then doing optimization and refactoring.
As you progress through game you itch to improve things and do them better at bigger scale.
You build a small setup to produce a wire.
Wire is used to build next thing. Next thing is used as input for another thing, and so on.
But you now need ton of wire. So you have to go back and create more wire production, but there is no space there... so you refactor or build more wire production elsewhere... but how do you connect it... and copper ore is low, need to build train to ship more ore from somewhere else... and so on and on until you realize it Sunday 10pm. Where did my weekend go?
KSP forces you to learn how things work if you want to go beyond mun. Transfer orbits and plane equalization done by feel doesnt work outside of Kerbin SOI. At that stage KSP has a huge step for player to take in order to progress in game.
But also you now understand a lot about rocket science. Factorio doesn't really do that. You might learn some at intuitive level like: planning for future, leaving room for expansion, don't do everything at once, don't forget to build automated death traps outside you home xD
One of the most “high” moments I’ve ever felt in a game was the successful lunch of my first orbital craft.
That first orbit I felt so excited I had to stop the game and run around the house. I tried to explain it to my SO but she couldn’t understand why that was.
Maybe because I’ve been taught the math part of it in school, but when the rocket equation, gravity losses, earth gravity assist, drag losses etc “clicked” I actually related all of those independent things in my brain to make a tough task possible.
I got as far as visiting Jool moons but it was not as exciting. Well maybe except the first time I calculated a hochman transfer orbit to Duna.
I think it'd be cool if a "joint mod" was created between factorio and KSP. You use factorio to get raw materials, the R&D tree is shared between the games, and when you want to launch something, your available parts are whatever you've manufactured and loaded into the assembly building.
I'm an industrial engineer and have thought about how to teach manufacturing concepts through the game. Tons of great lessons such as one piece flow, problems when you build up inventory, correctly balancing different production rates between machines, factory layout, etc.
And as another commenter pointed out, sometimes you're "refactoring code" and paying your technical debt.
Factorio only sort of deals with queuing theory, concurrency, and so on. Probably to the same extent relative to the actual depth of these subjects as Kerbal Space Program deals with aerospace concepts relative to what aerospace engineers do.
But IMO that's not actually the hardest part of Factorio. The hardest part of Factorio is the same as for software engineering: how to build something that scales and where you can still reason about it. One of the big challenges after just "beating the game" is hitting specific scale targets (the community calls it megabase building), and the factory sizes needed to do that definitely reach the complexity limits of human brains, so many of these players start establishing design conventions and start writing down notes and documentation and calculations for themselves.
I've definitely done things like using a stopwatch to measure roundtrip time for a train in order to calculate latency/throughput numbers for a supply chain in Factorio. But you rarely need to do more than back of the napkin math to be effective.
Satisfactory is like a 3D version of Factorio, which lets you build huge multi-layer mega factories up into the sky. But it's not as deep and sophisticated as Factorio, and doesn't have drones or blueprints. (That would be a lot more difficult to accomplish in free-form 3D, than with Factorio's 2D tile grid.) It's kind of like the giant simple Legos for younger kids, as opposed to Factorio that's more like Lego Technic.
Satisfactory is well worth playing if you yearn for a 3D version of Factorio, but I still keep going back to Factorio, which is more like "Dwarf Fortress" in its depth and sophistication. Satisfactory's world is breathtakingly beautiful, lovingly hand-crafted by artists instead of procedurally generated, which makes it all the more satisfying to despoil and ruin with huge mega-factories belching out smoke and radiation.
This guy's videos stress testing and abusing Satisfactory are awesome:
I Produced so Much Nuclear Waste the World Is Ruined Forever - Satisfactory
I feel like if you want a 3D favtorio then going back to the mother: modded minecraft, is the best option. I have put multiple thousands of hours into industry games over the past ten years (few hours in the past two years though). Gregtech was what got me started and in some ways is still the best. GT6 is complete and a standalone game (Mechanatia I think) is currently being worked on. Factorio definitely wins on ability to automate and scale up, but it is very wide and not very deep. That is to say, there is no exponential growth power or resource requirements by moving up 5+ tech tiers. Combining many tiers with powerful automation would be a very fun combo. Modded factorio is probably the best place to look for this. For now, afaik, the biggest factorio mods are focused on going even wider.
I love Minecraft, and have played waaaay many hours of that too. But I'm not up to date on the latest mods, so thanks for the recommendations!
Both Minecraft and Factorio use grids, which make automated building with blueprints a lot easier.
But I can't imagine a good way for Satisfactory to support reusable blueprints in an unconstrained 3D world, the way Factorio does in a gridded 2D world (or the way Minecraft could in a cubic 3D world), where a big part of Satisfactory is building around the landscape, natural artifacts, and threading tangled conveyor belts around your other machines and belts and architecture.
When you're working with a 2D grid, it's easy to make reusable blueprints that you can systematically stamp out and plug together. (It's a lot like GPU programming, parallelizing tasks by spreading out the data to multiple processors, processing it in efficient units, making tradeoffs about bandwidth and buffering and transports, and merging it all back together again).
But there is so much variation in Satisfactory's 3D world and degrees of freedom in construction, that everything you build is unique and not nearly as modular and replicable as Factorio's blueprints.
On the other hand, Satisfactory's 3D building tools are fantastic (and it would be frustrating and impossible to play if they weren't so good): they make it really easy to connect up machine inputs and outputs with conveyor belts and pipes, and route them around like spaghetti code.
Here's something I posted earlier, quoting Dave Ackley on why he didn't transform his Moveable Feast Machine from 2D to 3D, who said: "I need to actually preserve one dimension to build the thing and fix it. Imagine if you had a three-dimensional computer, how you can actually fix something in the middle of it? It's going to be a bit of a challenge. So fundamentally, I'm just keeping the third dimension in my back pocket, to do other engineering."
DonHopkins 4 months ago | parent | favorite | on: Wolfram Rule 30 Prizes
Very beautiful and artistically rendered! Those would make great fireworks and weapons in Minecraft! From a different engineering perspective, Dave Ackley had some interesting things to say about the difficulties of going from 2D to 3D, which I quoted in an earlier discussion about visual programming:
David Ackley, who developed the two-dimensional CA-like "Moveable Feast Machine" architecture for "Robust First Computing", touched on moving from 2D to 3D in his retirement talk:
"Well 3D is the number one question. And my answer is, depending on what mood I'm in, we need to crawl before we fly."
"Or I say, I need to actually preserve one dimension to build the thing and fix it. Imagine if you had a three-dimensional computer, how you can actually fix something in the middle of it? It's going to be a bit of a challenge."
"So fundamentally, I'm just keeping the third dimension in my back pocket, to do other engineering. I think it would be relatively easy to imaging taking a 2D model like this, and having a finite number of layers of it, sort of a 2.1D model, where there would be a little local communication up and down, and then it was indefinitely scalable in two dimensions."
Buildcraft’s builder can stamp complicated structures, but if you want to use it in factories then every stamp will need some hands on work. Ticking tile entities have fragile metadata that don’t like getting placed by non-players. There may be workarounds, but then you need to implement a blueprint system that can handle arbitrary ticking tile entity metadata. It might not even be a good idea to do this even if you can. Anyway, assuming these are solvable problems and someone has solved them, then you could have a factorio-like experience.
The thing is, factorio came out swinging with better automation than any minecraft mod. It is much easier to place things together and have them run free. Logistics bots are an absolute game changer in industry games. The bar has been raised.
There are mods that add blueprints to Satisfactory. Kind of wonky but definitely works. I'm sure official blueprints will work fine. My gut feeling is that we will see it in Update 4 since it's the most requested feature.
Best game ever btw and this comes from a seasoned Factorio player.
I more or less beat (I escaped but haven't gone back to do stuff in the "Real world") Compact Claustrophobia recently and one of the things that ends up teaching you is a 3D composability that wouldn't really apply to the real world.
Compact Machines are pocket dimensions of fixed internal size (the first one you get is 3x3x3, the last you'll build is 13x13x13) that all exist as a single 1x1x1 cube on the outside. From inside you can reach any of the six sides of that cube with a "tunnel".
So if you've got, say, a simple basic Minecraft furnace with fuel flowing in the left, and stuff input to the top, output from the bottom, you can replace that with a 5x5x5 Compact Machine, with three tunnels inside, and any amount of complexity that fits. Maybe inside the 5x5x5 machine you turn fuel into electricity, you run four electric furnaces, and you parallelise the processing. Externally though it behaves just like the furnace... except both faster and more efficient.
The limited space in Claustrophobia (before you escape) means you feel compelled to actually solve problems in place this way, whereas normally you'd be tempted to just be lazy and add a few extra pipes here, an extra hopper there and soon it's a vast sprawling mess. When 13x13x13 seems impossibly large you cut that sort of nonsense right out.
I remember a comment from you a few months ago regarding factorio and you pointed out that it was "just" an implementation of a specific variation of a cellular automata ruleset.
I enjoyed the comment but when I went back to find it in your history I discovered that you are a prolific commenter and that I was unable to find it.
Do you remember it and if so can you link to it or expand more on which cellular automata rule set it is?
Factorio (and also games like SimCity) are not actually pure CA rules, but they combine cellular automata techniques together with many other techniques like system dynamics, etc.
Will Wright gave a great explanation of how simulation games combine different techniques together in three intersection dimensions: Topologies (agents, networks, and layers), dynamics (propagation, growth, grouping, order, allocation, mapping, specialization, and nesting), and paradigms (cybernetics, system dynamics, cellular automata, chaos theory, adaptive systems, network theory).
>Lessons in Game Design, lecture by Will Wright, Computer History Museum, November 20, 2003.
Maybe the comment I posted about Factorio and CA was this, in the discussion of John von Neumann's 29 state cellular automata rule -- It is a pure CA, and a historically interesting one that he actually designed on paper and wrote about in a book. I compared it to Factorio, in the way Factorio uses conveyor belts in four different directions to direct the flow of items, and JVN29 uses arrows in four different directions to direct the flow of signals. But you can put a lot of different kinds of things on Factorio conveyor belts, but only ones and zeros on JVN29 arrows, since it was designed to be minimal and mathematically rigorous like a Turing Machine, not practical and convenient to program and fun to play like Factorio.
>Factorio players will recognize these tapes of construction instructions as 2D "blueprints" that construction drones use to build patterns of factories and conveyor belts, etc. In Factorio, after your drones have build a blueprint in the unpowered, unsupplied state, you can connect it to the power grid, hook up pipes to deliver fluids, and run conveyor belts in and out of it to deliver resources and products, and it will immediately starts doing its thing. Playing Factorio is uncannily like von Neumann 29 state cellular automata programming, not by coincidence. So it's a great way to get your head around cellular automata programming, gpu programming, parallel programming, queuing systems, and data flow programming in general!
>Factorio Tutorial #20 - Bots, part 1 - Construction robots
>Factorio just doesn't have the ability to construct cells by spilling items off the end of conveyor belts, or destroy cells with conveyor belts, either. But maybe there's an extension for that! And John von Neumann's 29 state cellular automata doesn't have swarms of construction drones that build and tear down blueprints in parallel like Factorio does, so there are some differences. But the basic idea of grids of cells with conveyor belts carrying items between factories is the same.
>The Real Time Crossing (Buckley, p. 457, The real-time crossing organ) is like a road intersection that splits the two crossing lanes, then uses traffic ligh...
I haven't played minecraft in a while, but I really enjoyed Industrial Craft, and haven't heard of Gregtech.
I looked into it a while ago, and noticed that IC hasn't been kept up to date with the latest minecraft versions, maybe it's a dying community. Would you say GT is a spiritual successor?
Maybe it's time to fire up the servers this weekend :)
Honestly I used to hate Gregtech when it was in modpacks I used to play with my friends for making things grindy, but playing Factorio gave me appreciation for what GT was trying to do. More large scale automation, but at the time we were too used to magic box mods that let you upgrade to faster magic boxes to realise.
My feeling is the modding scene as a whole and the people in it were much less mature in those days. See also fights between mod authors breaking people's worlds for unsupported combinations or attempts to block use in specific modpacks etc. And the ubiquitious overly modular mod so they could put each component behind its own adfly link.
GT was an add-on to IC2 and its development ran alongside IC2 during IC2’s hayday. There have been six official GT versions, but the latest one is on 1.7.10.
GT5 had an expansion to it made (GT5U) that was so great that it inspired the creation of GT New Horizons (GTNH).
GTNH is the currently the most active GT community, but it goes a little off the grind deep end imo. There has been a large amount of effort to balance every recipe in a huge number of mods and it’s great fun if you’ve already played through GT a few times.
GT Community Edition (GTCE) is a fan recreation of GT5 in contemporary versions of MC. The last I saw, the maintainer had bad vision and was not receptive to feedback. It is not worthy of the GT name.
Mining and crafting is a fine primary loop. It inspires zen much more than factorio. The more advanced tech mods require automation. I have never needed to set up a bang-bang controller for my fuel burner or spreadsheet out perfectly matched rates to avoid overflow/underflow issues in Factorio. In some ways modded minecraft demands more automation engineering, and I find that fun.
Advancing in minecraft tech trees grants more powerful mining tools so you can clear entire veins in minutes, or set up quarries that mine everything to bedrock (with the sorting and processing system being a fun challenge).
Factorio certainly cuts the chuff and opens up the ability to physically scale up to an absurd size. The controls work is less needed, but the geometric layout is more critical. Since minecraft bases are expected to be small, advancements in tech must be in faster, small machines.
I'd sure hate to work on a product with that guy working in QA! Oh the bug reports he would generate! The Satisfactory developers must have a dartboard with his face on it.
I actually don’t like the hand crafted nature of the map because it severely limits replayability. Sure it’s damn pretty but once you explore once and learn the interesting/valuable spots, the sense of awe and wonder that comes from exploration just vanishes.
I find it kind of weird that programmers seem to like this game. I tried playing it for a bit and all I could think of was how much more efficient things would be if I could just write code instead of running around on a map to achieve the same thing.
The whole game seemed like a forced distillation of programming into a form that can be consumed by the masses.
For example with Zachtronics games (very programming-puzzle-esque games), I doubt I could play it for long. It would be similar to messing about with an Esolang, but more structured. While I enjoy using Esolangs, I can only ever do it in short bursts, and I imagine the same would hold if I started playing a Zachtronics game.
For Factorio, it is just barely different enough from regular programming (due to various parts, such as the grid based nature of reality, etc) that if I am in the right mood I could play it quite easily for several hours. Yet, if I am in the wrong mood/state-of-mind, then I will constantly compare it to what I am coding and likely stop playing after an hour.
I will say that Factorio is far more distilled in it's problem solving nature than you'll usually get with programming, which can make it scratch that itch of solving something. While I still enjoy Factorio after playing it for some hours, I'm more likely to code now than I am to play it. Still quite enjoyable and worth the money and possibly the time, though.
Do you like games at all? Almost any game would be “more efficient” if you could just write code to declare yourself the victor. Games - for that matter, pretty much any leisure pursuit whatsoever - are not about efficiency.
Oh I do play a bunch of games. I have no problem enjoying strategy games like Civ, EU4 or base builders like RimWorld. Factorio is just too much like programming for me to find joy in it.
I think it's the difference between what feels like work and what feels like an emotional resonance. Or I guess, whether you end up enjoying the process, or the outcome.
For example Doom Eternal is basically, IMO, one of the best games ever made, because it's one of the only games where the combat loop gets a physiological response from me. I can't play it at all if I'm in the wrong headspace, but it's amazing when I'm in the right one.
Factorio really has to hit the same sort of "zing!" feel. Programming-wise for me, it's the feeling of unbridled power at just tearing things apart to refactor. Because that's a hell of a different feel to the day job.
I played it on a 2012 MBP; only started lagging at the very end right before I managed to launch a rocket (which broke my addiction to it, thankfully).
Up until circa 2006 all interfaces were made that way. Web forms and native interfaces all had inputs resembling real buttons. See 98.css https://jdan.github.io/98.css/ if you want to see what interfaces looked like in the early 2000s.
I had a co-worker who used to joke about that, but now that I've spent 4 weeks making a JSON template for basically just two VMs, I'm starting to take his idea more seriously.
Fundamentally, the product is similar, but everyone far prefers the Factorio UX over fifty pages of serialised REST objects.
Note that while they are both fun and share many features like logistic systems and machines, they are wildly different in approach.
Oxygen Not Included is an inherently unstable system, and it's a frantic race to juggle all the spinning plates while your colony falls more and more apart. The better you get at the game, the further you can stretch it before it succumbs to starvation, disease, lack of air or death by overheating.
Factorio (in regular mode) has a system that it is possible to keep stable at all times, and once you get a handle on the enemies you play the game at your own pace.
I was a bit annoyed by photosynthesis not working as expected. In one of my first games, I used algae to create oxygen. However, this did not remove carbon dioxide, and the overall gas pressure in my base mysteriously kept increasing. I know it's not a physics simulator, but given the name of the game I expected a bit more realism around oxygen production.
Overall the game is a strange mix of physics sim and quirks that don't make sense. For example, industry produces heat and heat spreads as expected. Solid, liquid and gas phase changes happen more or less as expected, leading to fun stuff like steam explosions. But then heat can be deleted in unphysical ways, heat can't
be radiated away into space like in the real world etc.
The heat management is one of my biggest frustrations with the ONI gameplay loop. You go from gradually adding niceties to the base like lighting and plumbing to immediately needing some unholy water-cooled system that uses more power than the rest of the base combined, is stupid expensive in refined metals, and doesn't even permanently solve the problem because soon the heatsink waste pool is boiling and searing any dupe that walks past the general area. Oh and you have to do all this before the greenhouse gets slightly too warm and dooms the colony to starvation.
Heat management is super easy with aquatuner and steam turbine, you only need some steel and plastic, which are not so hard to get. Personally for me ONI heat-management is one of minor dissapointments, I think it would have been much more fun and deep if this system was more physically accurate.
ONI has me super frustrated but without the challenge and success part. I reached the surface once when setting the map to super easy and discovered that there was nothing fun there, either. It's fun for a little bit to get things running, but you can't make it a closed loop system (at least at first) and you'll run out of stuff fairly soon. I thought that with enough research you'd get there, and you might, but the way of storing liquids or gases for processing, the heat it creates, the meteors that destroy anything you put on the surface, the crappy power generation methods to pump it all around... I just didn't get that game. Factorio I played for thousands of hours and I'm still not tired of it.
In the planned DLC they plan to significantly rework space and introduce playable asteroids, so rockets will be use as a logistic system between your main base and space outposts.
On your other points, it looks like you simply haven't understood game systems deep enough.
>you'll run out of stuff fairly soon
Geysers can support really large bases and other materials you can get from space missions, which are powered either by oil wells or water geysers. It's a great simplification that you can built self-powering oxygen generators, which consume water and produce oxygen with some leftover hydrogen.
>the heat it creates
Aquatuners + steam turbine setup solves all heat issues. And you can cool metal refineries output directly inside steam rooms which power stem turbine (by using oil or petroleum for coolant).
>the meteors that destroy anything you put on the surface
Bunker doors + radars + a tiny bit of automation. I think that radar mechanics are unnecessary complex and not explained properly, but once you understand it, they are quite easy to use.
>the crappy power generation methods
Even without advanced sour gas/petroleum power setups it's really easy to get a TON of power generation. In mid and late game I usually sit on top of so much power generation and unfortunately game does not have any power sink game mechanics.
ONI is deeply frustrating if you have an understanding of thermodynamics. It doesn't map in any reasonable way onto actual physics. One of the main mechanisms for managing heat is a plant that destroys heat.
To me it feels incredibly hacky and ruins the game.
Does anyone know if performance/efficiency of the game has gotten better over time? I played it quite a bit ~2 years ago or so, but my 7 year old MBP got really hot and very slow by the time I started using blueprints. From what I read at the time the game was very dependent on single-threaded CPU performance. Maybe they found a way to make better use of multiple cores?
I really want to pick it up again but am not excited to start a new factory if I know I won't be able to complete it.
Yes I definitely didn't mean for this to sound as a complaint, I think for what it is it's quite lightweight. It's just that it seemed to be using a single core and if they managed to make it multi-core perhaps it could be even more performant now.
I think it's still largely single-threaded. They value complete determinism: you should never get a different game state one tick later based on a CPU race condition. This is for easier debugging, repeatable testing, accurate multiplayer simulation - and also just that it fits the theme of the game, players expect to be able to design certain systems to work deterministically. This design decision has a performance cost, of course.
Still there have been major performance improvements, including parallelism-lite. And just the fact that it's mainly the same engine that ran on low-spec computers from 6 years ago means it should run very smoothly on modern machines - not all of the Moore's law improvements since then have been about parallelism.
I wouldn't say 'largely'. There are definitely single-threaded parts and if you have 64 really slow cores then you won't get 64 times as many FPS (or UPS, really) as with 1 core running at 64x speed, but that's with all software.
If you have a somewhat reasonable per-core speed, multiple cores should all be loaded with work. Personally I can't say that I've noticed it helped, but that's anecdotal and I've seen the improvements as they came in incrementally rather than in one big jump from some old single-threaded version to 1.0.
> including parallelism-lite
What does that mean? When I look it up I get results for some other game with a similar name.
> What does that mean? When I look it up I get results for some other game with a similar name.
I didn't mean to refer to any established term. I meant parallelization by breaking the game up into systems, e.g. I believe the electrical system can run completely separately to the main thread without losing the deterministic guarantees, while I would think of full parallelization as allowing each assembler or inserter to be simulated in its own thread.
Maybe there's a more established term for this? Parallelization through doing different types of things at the same time, rather than doing many copies of the same thing at the same time.
They've made a lot of performance improvements, but it's still bounded by memory bandwidth and splitting updates across multiple cores would actually slow that down due to memory access contention.
The devs were constantly optimizing the game. They've added a lot of performance tunings, options for video compression, etc.
You should give it a shot, maybe download a factory built by someone else to evaulate performance.
Just opened up my largest base (21k/m copper) and it's using 6% of my 8 core cpu. That's around 108% of a single core, but the load is spread quite evenly with the highest cpu utilization at 28% with the rest hovering around 10%. I'd say it's very well parallelized currently.
I'm stuck on 0.18 until I reach 1000 SPM. Real soon now, I just need to improve my iron throughput to relieve a bottleneck in flying robot frame production then I can turn to working out the rocket control units not meeting production quota.
I just finished a 10K SPM base. Finishing a base that big is like finally releasing a product that was in development for a year. I don't know what to do with myself now that its all finished.
You always have a next step, a next upgrade to look forward to. It's an uninterrupted treadmill from building your first mine to building you hundredth mega-factory. That's how even quasi non-games like Cookie Clicker can become addictive. It's effectively a Skinner's box.
Gameplay-wise Factorio is a lot more interesting that Cookie Clicker of course.
It's an uninterrupted treadmill cos you just spent 3 hours extra doing seventeen other things and realise you still haven't actually "fixed the copper" or whatever the heck it was you were meant to be doing :)
I don't think the developers intend it to suck up so much time. I think they want to make something that's fun.
But I don't think there's anything to the game that malicious developers don't already know.
I think, insofar as it's fair to call Factorio addictive, it's because there's a constant feeling of "just one more thing" (or "just one more game"). There's is constant and continuous frontier of optimization opportunities. But, at the same time, there's also effort/delay in getting the rewards of the effort. -- I think that feedback loop is what people loved about the 2012 XCom Enemy Unknown.
I think it's possible to play in a healthy way. But, I guess if the feeling of "my factory isn't good" and "I suck" drives the behaviour, then that'd be unhealthy.
For those who like this I would also recommend Mindustry, a similar game which is open source and available for mobile. I actually have spent quite a lot of time with it.
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[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 342 ms ] threadI think I averaged like 60 hours a week.
That being said, I've put more than a few thousand hours into the game over the past few years and I think the base game finally got stale enough for me to move on to something else right as they're reaching 1.0, but that's okay. (The big problem for me is that I've been sinking a lot of time into mods like Seablock and after nearly 100 hours into this run I can't see starting over from scratch again just to be on 1.0. I'm not even sure I want to finish this run either knowing I'm unlikely to see bug fixes in the Seablock mod packs, and they definitely could use some work.)
But yeah, it's just a good balance of "wow how the !#( does this work" to "ohhh I'm so glad it works this way."
Played Satisfactory and couldn't get into it - it's just worse Factorio, capitalizing on the popularity of that game with good 3D assets but trading it for terrible planning, crafting and perspective.
I've considered using some of my funemployment time to write one of these kinds of games as I think I have a unique angle that hasn't been explored to death as of recently, but haven't committed to it.
It feels like the only reason they even left it in the game was that it became a bit of a measurement of how well your design scales past the end game - I cannot tell you how many otherwise meaningless 'X000 science per minute' base videos there are on YouTube, but the number is not insignificant. Most of the time it's just 'bot speed++' over and over again, since that's how many of those bases work without running into extreme update per minute (UPM) problems.
3 years later I played a multiplayer once a week with my buddies during COVID lockdown, as soon as we launched again I got bored. They are going again with more friends and I just join the discord for the chat, I don’t open the game up.
I don’t like solve the same fundamental problem over and over again so, I launched the rocket, done.
I still boot the game from time to time when I want a low energy activity. I go through the moves. Bootstrap base, then smelting arrays, etc. I try to innovate on some designs a bit (mainly to make things more modular/scalable and avoid having one big resource bus). I find it relaxing.
Certain videogames, on the other hand, can easily become a big problem for me. Weird stuff.
When you start building your factory, you think about how to get first steps just done (ship it!). Over time complexity and scope of your factory increases, but old code, I mean old machines, are still there, getting in the way.
You can choose to ignore it and work around it using underground belts and similar solutions, or you can take on a proper refactoring, limiting your progress in the short term.
You can most certainly launch a rocket (i.e. ship your final product) with any kind of setup but if you want to build a sustainable rocket launching platform, you will most likely have to nuke production (as in, you can literally nuke your production) and re-build it.
The point of the late late game is to minimize UPS (updates per second). It becomes memory bandwindth bound at some point. It demonstrates what's possible with today's technology. In comparison, Microsoft Word can not keep up with my typing in a new, blank document.
I don't really see the appeal compared to ordinary programming. My favorite programming game has actually been a flash game where your goal was to transform binary strings (represented as sequences of blue/red dots) into other binary strings. You were still writing in Befunge, but the rest of it came off as trying to be helpful to the extent possible, rather than giving you a goal and then disabling the tools you'd want to use to get there.
http://pleasingfungus.com/Manufactoria/
Probably my favourite flash game.
It's even less of a game, but I also had a lot of fun with http://incredible.pm .
Some things off the top of my head that I find annoying:
- Puzzles start feeling like they're asking more for busywork than for puzzle-solving. I enjoy thinking about "how do I do this?" I don't enjoy thinking "well, I know exactly what I want to do, but it's a huge slog to actually go through the motions."
- You can't rotate the thing that accepts a polymer. So if you end up making the correct thing, but your orientation is off, you get to manually re-lay every part of your machine, instead.
- Everything uses the same clock.
- You can't even apply purely mechanical fixes for everything using the same clock, like a three-arm grabber with one of the arms cut off. There goes the conceit that the rules are justified by the theme.
I like that Opus Magnum scores you separately on time, space, and monetary cost. That was a good idea. I like working out fundamental minimums for how quickly I can produce something (based on the source pieces I'm allowed...) and designing something that can achieve that. The animation of a completed machine is fun to watch.
I think the monetary-cost mechanic seems underdeveloped.
I think you will enjoy this puzzle game:
http://qrostar.skr.jp/en/jelly/
Don't let the cutesy graphics fool you, this is a masterpiece in puzzle design.
In case you are not on Windows or don't want to download the exe for some reason right now, you can try this html simplified version
https://avorobey.github.io/jelly/
I guess it’s like Harvard vs. Von Neumann. Harvard is more practical, but Von Neumann allows more fun hacks.
Finding the most optimal solution in real programming is impossible because the scope is always enormous.
Pretty much everything programming isn’t in the real world.
It's also much easier to find a solution if you know there is a good solution to be found.
I stopped playing exapunks because of this before the end. The limited instruction set, limits on movements, etc. are cool - they force new solutions. Not having functions or advanced templates is just annoying - I need to implement the same thing multiple times, by copy-pasting.
Though I already have weekend programming projects that are more fulfilling and work towards something more concrete than "yay, solved a puzzle", and the games just made me wonder why I wasn't putting this time into those hobby projects. Factorio made me feel this way too.
On the other hand, I've been playing Morrowind lately (OpenMW) which gives me a nice mental break from programming. Apart from the fact that I couldn't help but write a parser for its game files once I saw how simple and documented the format was. Bit more fulfilling to have a `tes3_parser.go` at the end of my puzzle-solving session than to have solved some contrived TIS-100 puzzles for a fantasy computer.
https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Tes3Mod:Mod_File_Format
Factorio was fun at first, but then it quickly felt like a pencil and paper optimization problem for something that doesn't even exist. Whether that tickles your fancy or not is probably like whether cilantro tastes like soap to you or not.
Plus, it has trains :-)
Which will run over the programmer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8SBp4SyvLc&t=1m17s
https://regexcrossword.com/
https://rampion.github.io/RegHex/
Walk speed is a surprisingly big constraint on the early game, until you get various upgrades; you build a small factory because you don't want to walk round a larger one.
It's one of those games that I wish I could love, but whenever I attempt to start it now I just remember that feeling of "ugh, why don't I instead code something, at least I'll create something".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forklift_Driver_Klaus_%E2%80...
The wiki page is fine, but the video is quite literally Not Safe For Work. My German boss at the chemical company showed the whole team. Kinda gorey but in the Monty Python Black Knight sort of way, and similarly hilarious. Klaus' story is made up but it's based upon thousands of tales written in blood. Definitely gave me an enhanced appreciation for safety culture.
Forklift simulator is a game you can buy: https://store.steampowered.com/app/939450/Forklift_Simulator...
Short films have been made about this, and of course Ender's Game.
Of course I'm also doing it in VR and with a steering wheel setup
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/10/dont-...
[1] https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Construction_Drones
[2] https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Nanobots
The WR time to launch a rocket and get 'space science', the final science is currently about 1hr46m.
In fact it's exactly like this because that's what the game is about.
The game has some major transition points where refactoring makes sense, but often the correct solution is to tactically upgrade as much as possible, and get to the better point to rebuild.
Seablock playthrough once updated for 1.0.
I think these games are great at teaching people about concurrent programming, race conditions and locking though.
I run out of the one required for nasty bug finding, very soon, but when that one is gone (and after a short break to clear the mind) I can go on creating new code/architecture for hours.
Going back to the parent comment, one remarkable effect of this is that I rarely desire to play video games like I used to. It seemed like I always had enough juice for video games but rarely for other life obligations, but with the rainbow juice I am just as motivated to do all that other stuff as I am to play video games.
If only my insurance covered mental health...
I do struggle a lot at times with focus, but I rather try to balance it with good and healthy livestyle. Lots of sleep. Exercise, meditation ..
But I have a toddler boy, who can mess with sleep and rhythm a lot, so having the possibility of a "rainbow juice" is definitely tempting.
Have you noticed bad side effects? Do you allways take ritalin(?) for work? Or just on special occacions?
Common side effects of ADHD drugs are loss of appetite, difficulty sleeping, and increased heart rate. It basically puts you into fight or flight mode for 6 hours a day. More blood to your brain + muscles, less to everything else (digestion, immune system for example).
One weird thing about it is the first few times you take it you’ll get a feeling of euphoria, like you’re on cocaine. This is _not_ the way the drug is supposed to feel, it goes away if you stick with the same dose for a while. Some people keep going up because they think the euphoria is part of it, and that’s really dangerous.
It really does work incredibly well for me. Especially for programming, where you’re most productive when you’re not pulled out of a flow state. I went from a B average to straight A’s when I started taking it in college. It made it so easy to oranize my schedule, I just worked/studied from 8-6 every day. No late nights, no procrastination.
Personally, I have no feeling of withdrawal when I go off of it for weeks at a time. Though I have developed a bit of a psychological dependency around work, where I kind of tell myself I won’t work well without it, which becomes self-fulfilling.
It’s not all good, not all bad. Hopefully this helps!
Basically, it enforced my point of view to only try it out, if I really think it is neccecary.
I never done cocaine, but weed.
With the right time and settings it can help me get into a flow lasting for 10+ hours. But weed really does not help mid or long term, my productivity goes into steady decline after couple of days.
And coffeine I never liked, so I prefer the natural rhythm, with varying success.
Stimulants (Vyvanse in my case) are blunt instruments; they alleviate the specific behavioral problems that plague those of us with ADHD but also enhance performance in general. The biggest danger that I see in my own behavior is the tendency to forget about all the self-management practices I learned before my diagnosis. With stimulants, you can do irresponsible things like stay up late for no good reason, get four hours of sleep, and still be fairly productive once the medication kicks in. I have to be really honest with myself on a daily basis about whether I'm using it to overcome a deficit caused by ADHD, or a deficit caused by bad behavior.
The second biggest danger is developing unrealistic expectations about what I am capable of accomplishing. For example, I am currently pursuing a PhD in computer science, and the decision to do so was made by the medicated version of myself. I don't regret the decision one iota, and it's a goal I've had for many years, but I already had a long list of projects and goals when I signed up for this and I definitely deluded myself about just how many of those other commitments I'd have to set aside for a while (or forever) in order to get a PhD.
That is my problem right now, too. I am just scared, that medication really does not help me long term, for all the reasons you mentioned.
Thank you, for sharing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoon_theory
Look into Ego Depletion. There's academic disagreement over just how "consumable" willpower is. My assessment of SOTA is:
- ego/willpower is finite/depletable
- Most people have more or less the same amount of it as the average. People with "more willpower" typically are more efficient with it
- non-neurotypicals and those that "don't fit in society" (ADHD, ASD, bipolar, trans, nonbinary, anxiety, OCD) often spend much willpower on "passing"
- it's linked to everything from blood sugar levels, insulin levels, brain blood flow, dopamine levels, D1/D2 activation ratios, and probably gut microbiome
I could sit here and get virtual levels and virtual money... or go raise my actual human fitness level, or go work on my actual business for actual money.
Games are an easy win to feed you nuggets of feeling like you did stuff, but a poor substitute for real life.
I understand that there's satisfaction in it. That satisfaction can be hard to get at work sometimes. At work, you can be asked to work on things you don't like, that sometimes feel even more pointless than a game.
Part of the reason why I have programming side-projects at home is because they're an outlet to get the satisfaction of building software the way I want to.
Real life is fun too. But games are part of life.
Maybe there's something to be said for opting to lead a more creative rather than consumptive lifestyle. Ultimately though, something only matters if you think it does. My work is largely bullshit, and I can't think of a business I'd want to get into that also wouldn't feel like bullshit. I think the value I'd extract would precisely be in the connections made and the problem-solving itself. How important is another piece of enterprise software to extract money from people that no one thought they wanted until it exists?
I do have personal projects, one to do good, others out of curiosity. Mostly out of an urgency to be creative. I don't think this carries more meaning than pure leisure.
I'm eyeing off a few avenues, I wouldn't mind not writing software for money anymore but it would also be cool to use my hard earned experience to my advantage. One avenue I thought of was music composition, because there are ways to automate some of it with code that I could use to provide some extra value, but it's also enough of a leap from my current career that it would be a wildly new endeavor.
If you want to be a workaholic and spend your free time working, go right ahead.
But you will end up like my father, mid 70s with no real relationships with your family, obsessed with "completing your legacy" and a general inability to enjoy anything that isn't "work".
If that sound like fun to you, go right ahead.
Me, I'll continue to work at work and spend my free time on relaxation.
You only get one life, spending it chasing dollars and dimes is a poor life plan
A mechanic can enjoy working on his own project car in the off time.
Both of these things are productive in a way that playing games isn't, but they're still recreational. It's not spending your life chasing dimes. It's looking at the different recreational things you could be doing, and choosing the ones that also intersect with being productive and have a side-effect of helping you professionally.
Productive is all relative anyway. Children learning by playing is productive, the productive part is the learning that is a byproduct. Working on a project car is fun in itself. It doesn't become less fun if the person doing it is a professional mechanic. Would you tell a person who plays games professionally in an e-sports league that they must do something else for fun?
I think it is a sign of good life when you find a way to get paid for doing what you enjoy. And if you enjoy it, then it is still fun when you do it outside of work. The productive benefits of it do not make it less fun.
I disagree. I have fond memories of discussing Zelda on the playground as a kid. Similarly, online communities are formed around basically every notable single player game. It's still a shared experience, even if it's not shared at the same moment.
But, yeah, with "TIS-1000" it was just programming, and sort of unnecessarily (and unpleasantly) difficult programming at that.
In my day job at the time the game came out I was doing node.js microservices. So it was refreshing to work at the bit level again.
I have it too, and it's a consequence of growing up and/or having more responsibilities.
I can either play Factorio, or I can spend time with my kids. Factorio, which I love, loses every time.
The only games I play now are ones I can play with my kids. ... so I set my daughter up with Starcraft 2 and am teaching her about strategy while still scratching that gaming itch.
My dream is to have a multiplayer LAN based VR Elder Scrolls game to play at home with the family.
I have little to no problem getting myself to play Starcraft II or other strategy games which I love. Low-effort story-based games are also easy to get into.
For example, I am playing on an OARC server, basically new players get their own base space, and I'm trying to get to my friend we both kinda picked 'far away' as options so we wouldnt clash with each other, so I've got blueprints I keep dropping that keep expanding my logistics network + power grid northward / westward as I make my way to him. The construction bots do all the work, my factory gets all the materials to them.
I've taken a break since, but then once I can reach out to him I will probably build train tracks going to and from his base and mine. I'm also using the robots to build a massive base. I can just ghost place whatever I want where I want it as long as the robot tower can cover that area.
You can just place ghost items by hand (press shift) but not much point. The advantage is being able to smack down whole bunches of machines in blueprints.
They can build anything if the products are in provider chests. They have the exact items, they won't build from intermediate materials.
Edit: fixed a typo
There are tons of designs you can do with bots, some have built completely belt-less bases using them. They're limited by their speed and range however, so you always have to balance to the constraints of the tools you use.
You can also start a Sandbox game mode to explore everything you can do (note infinity chests are extremely useful, you pick a item in the game, and it will produce as many of them as you want perpetually, then your inserters can pull those out into conveyors simulating different parts of what you'd like your factory to look like). Definitely recommend this approach, you can explore as much as you'd like to explore.
Also note, there are a few websites with prebuilt blueprints as well.
It takes a lot of the tedium away when you made a miscalculation and need to be just a little bit closer or further from something.
Now you can cut, move over 1 and paste.
I've also found it really nice for rails. If you want a t-junction, just go away from everything and make a 90-degree rail curve. Then cut it.
Then go back to where you wanted the t-junction and paste in the curve and rotate it and paste again to get perfectly lined up sections of track.
and then you can have blueprints and upgrade planners and destruction planners.
upgrade planners let you convert say all slow belts to fast belts and leave the inserters alone.
destruction planners let you remove only walls but leave the electrical towers and rails alone.
it just goes deeper and deeper.
...which itself isn't all that different from software development.
I heard scripting is possible? Do experienced players use it, to automate things?
If recreating a portion of your factory "feels too much like work" to do it really sounds like you haven't availed yourself fully to the tools the game gives you to do it.
When I now see those videos on Youtube with huge factories I wonder how many hours that person has wasted. I'm not against enjoying a video game, but when the activity is so similar to real work... why not do that instead and get something real in return?
Because dopamine :).
Are you using drones and blueprints?
Once you unlock drones, you can create huge swaths of factories in seconds. You just need to come up with a design that works, and then replicate it.
That was when the creative:tedious ratio got rebalanced for me.
There are no past videos there but you can follow him.
And it teaches that humans can do whatever they want to a world, level all the forests, kill all the locals, because eventually we are going to fly away. Not our problem anymore. Space people are above the petty concerns of terrestrials.
Rather, I find myself trying to build a factory top down. I write a bunch of sticky notes with material requirements and calculate backwards “how many labs do I need?” “How many gears do I need to make the beakers?” “How much do I need to mine to match that hourly throughput of gears?
It’s the perfect candidate of a game to write an algorithm for. Assuming a known seed, it’s trivial to design the most efficient system based on those parameters.
And at that point it just becomes work. It’s really designed as a bottom up game, but I think about problems top down and for that reason factorio drives me nuts.
It's enough to know that you'll need lots of gears and to know that you'll need high-capacity mining eventually. But there's no great harm from having a few extra or from having not quite enough to max out beaker production; just start the process, get some gears, get some beakers, and refine as needed. Without a little top-down vision, you'll end up severely overproducing some things and underinvesting in others, which is no good, but you'll never be able to build an optimal factory without first building a suboptimal one.
> Over a few months I designed an entire Factorio base without testing any of it. The goal is to create a mid-sized base capable of building a megabase. A secondary goal is to not break down or rebuild anything ever.
The challenge isn't that it's hard to figure out the ratios or math out the machines you need, it's in getting to having the production to make that base without falling asleep waiting on things. Continual bootstrapping towards that end goal is the gameplay.
I know later in the game more options open up, but that doesn't help me get there.
I wish for a Factorio-style game where I can just drag (groups of) machines and conveyors around, and I just pay cost for however much just changed.
You can get really good at burner inserters or learn about electricity.
Or keep get fancy with belts... or learn about trains.
or get a personal roboport and learn cut/copy/paste
Just refinining oil into primary products in this game took me like a week of work and tweaking.
You then get to the end of the game & build a rocket, but think to yourself -- "Yes, but I could maybe do all of this again but properly and without manually making things and the same mistakes". So you start another game and the whole process repeats!
Would it be too much or still refreshing? My favorite unwind game is battlefield 4.
Try it and see how you feel after ~2 hours of gameplay.
Coincidentally "try it and see how you feel" is also how people sell heroin...
They're saying they're concerned that they might get addicted, and you're telling them to try just the tip, just to see how it feels?
I'm a big fan of Factorio but if you're concerned it could take over your life, there's definitely a chance it could.
True it's not as bad as an MMO. There's no daily quests, no social features, (though multiplayer is fun) and most importantly no lootboxes or variable ratio rewards. Doesn't mean it can't addict you for a little bit though.
For me? I am actually serious about the addicting nature of the game.
The gameplay loop is just so rewarding, so that addiction is easy.
Of course its mostly only boring when you haven't yet figured out the "design patterns" of an efficient base, and/or are too lazy to tear down what you have to build them out.
No, seriously though, I'm speaking with full experience: My main WoW character has a 4-digit days playtime (and that's from several years ago; I eventually did put it down for good).
Factorio is addictive the same way that Civilization is: You want to keep going. Or like Tetris pro players, you might think about your factory when you're not playing and "see" it everywhere. But unlike WoW, you can put the game down at any time: there's no responsibilities you're taking on, there's no grind you must finish, no daily quests that reset calling you to re-do them tomorrow. The game world stops the moment you pause/exit the game.
There's no comparison to a MMO.
> Doesn't mean it can't addict you for a little bit though.
Every good game will. Every good TV show will make you want to binge. It's up to you to manage your time. I believe GP is a reasonable adult and can manage 2 hours of a game without having to check into rehab :)
[0] https://mods.factorio.com/mod/clock
Two hours of a game? Yes.
Two hours of Factorio? Not a chance. Unless they don’t make it past 30 minutes in the first place ;)
To be clear I don't think I'm inherently vulnerable. It's more of a "let's rather not find out what happens when my love of gaming gets combined with peer pressure & reinforcement loops" consideration.
I do like the Anno series for this though. It scratches the same "city builder" itch but it has a pretty fast burn cycle. i.e. I'll spend a weekend doing little else and then lose interest for 3 months.
The refactoring bit hits hard, how do you structure your factory to minimise time/cost/space, can you increase throughput, do the outputs line up where you need them, how do you ensure a sufficient power supply, etc.?
There are different 'designs'. I'd recommend a main bus design for your starter base. Basically you take key materials, like copper plates, iron plates, steel etc. and then run (multiple) full belts of them down a long line. and build your factories to the side of it, taking your input materials from the main bus.
See here: https://wiki.factorio.com/Tutorial:Main_bus
Alternative designs (for much later in the game, if you want to buiold a megabase) are e.g. rail grid, sometimes called city block design. Looks like this: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/1as3oMAgOy4/maxresdefault.jpg
You have a grid of rail tracks with standardized squares and standardized input/output locations. Then you automate input delivery/output collection to them either by pure circuit logic, or of you don't hate yourself quite that much using the Logistic Train Network mod: https://mods.factorio.com/mods/Optera/LogisticTrainNetwork
I do three stages, a main bus starter base which is enough to fill out the tech tree and launch a rocket, and then once I've automated most things, then comes the first megabase, which after enough time I rip up and build the modularized, distributed megabase (mostly solving the problem of keeping train traffic spread out and avoiding long multilane belt busses). The interesting thing is that building a megabase isn't necessarily just 10x-ing your start base, it's actually doing things differently because how you move resources around starts to become a problem in ways you didn't encounter at the smaller scales.
https://steamcommunity.com/app/526870/discussions/0/24515950...
If you are not into computer games, I would still recommend to visit their site. They have "friday facts" where they describe the work they did over the week an what challenges they had to solve. It is very well written and poses interesting problems. Really interesting for software devs, even if you are not in game development.
KSP has taught me so much about subjects I was interested in, but afraid to put in the time in - rocket science/engineering, orbital mechanics etc.
I’ve not tried Factorio myself but I’d wager it will try to teach me stuff I mostly already know - queue theory, concurrency, automation...
Its base appeal/game loop is building new system and then doing optimization and refactoring. As you progress through game you itch to improve things and do them better at bigger scale.
You build a small setup to produce a wire.
Wire is used to build next thing. Next thing is used as input for another thing, and so on.
But you now need ton of wire. So you have to go back and create more wire production, but there is no space there... so you refactor or build more wire production elsewhere... but how do you connect it... and copper ore is low, need to build train to ship more ore from somewhere else... and so on and on until you realize it Sunday 10pm. Where did my weekend go?
KSP forces you to learn how things work if you want to go beyond mun. Transfer orbits and plane equalization done by feel doesnt work outside of Kerbin SOI. At that stage KSP has a huge step for player to take in order to progress in game.
But also you now understand a lot about rocket science. Factorio doesn't really do that. You might learn some at intuitive level like: planning for future, leaving room for expansion, don't do everything at once, don't forget to build automated death traps outside you home xD
It's much worse really, it's Sunday, two weeks later.
That first orbit I felt so excited I had to stop the game and run around the house. I tried to explain it to my SO but she couldn’t understand why that was.
Maybe because I’ve been taught the math part of it in school, but when the rocket equation, gravity losses, earth gravity assist, drag losses etc “clicked” I actually related all of those independent things in my brain to make a tough task possible.
I got as far as visiting Jool moons but it was not as exciting. Well maybe except the first time I calculated a hochman transfer orbit to Duna.
Oh, the world we'd be living in... one can only dream.
I'm an industrial engineer and have thought about how to teach manufacturing concepts through the game. Tons of great lessons such as one piece flow, problems when you build up inventory, correctly balancing different production rates between machines, factory layout, etc.
And as another commenter pointed out, sometimes you're "refactoring code" and paying your technical debt.
But IMO that's not actually the hardest part of Factorio. The hardest part of Factorio is the same as for software engineering: how to build something that scales and where you can still reason about it. One of the big challenges after just "beating the game" is hitting specific scale targets (the community calls it megabase building), and the factory sizes needed to do that definitely reach the complexity limits of human brains, so many of these players start establishing design conventions and start writing down notes and documentation and calculations for themselves.
I've definitely done things like using a stopwatch to measure roundtrip time for a train in order to calculate latency/throughput numbers for a supply chain in Factorio. But you rarely need to do more than back of the napkin math to be effective.
Some of my favourite youtube videos on it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xF--1XdcOeM [Self expanding factory, recursive blue prints]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feHq2Ken43M [Factorio Rocket ballet, for reference it took me 30 hours to launch a single rocket]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KoV_Zk2IRs [Factorio base tour, this base looks like a CPU die when zoomed out]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjtXHsv5E6M [Another Factorio base tour]
A recently updated one is Renai Transportation, adding Train JUMP-tions:
https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/i5yoaj/train_junc...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91rxQfpqge8
Satisfactory is well worth playing if you yearn for a 3D version of Factorio, but I still keep going back to Factorio, which is more like "Dwarf Fortress" in its depth and sophistication. Satisfactory's world is breathtakingly beautiful, lovingly hand-crafted by artists instead of procedurally generated, which makes it all the more satisfying to despoil and ruin with huge mega-factories belching out smoke and radiation.
This guy's videos stress testing and abusing Satisfactory are awesome:
I Produced so Much Nuclear Waste the World Is Ruined Forever - Satisfactory
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oh2oF-eZTD8
I Built a 600 Meter Human Cannon That Ends All Existence - Satisfactory
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2X3wlvoShg
I Made the Game Unplayable with This Gravity-Destroying Tractor Ball Pit - Satisfactory
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTvAmwnhIxM
I Crippled the Game by Building to the Heavens - Satisfactory gameplay - Let's Game It Out
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X77MHTOEwXo
What Happens When You Let a Maniac Build a Factory - Satisfactory gameplay - Let's Game It Out
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vYYhL9Vt8o
Both Minecraft and Factorio use grids, which make automated building with blueprints a lot easier.
But I can't imagine a good way for Satisfactory to support reusable blueprints in an unconstrained 3D world, the way Factorio does in a gridded 2D world (or the way Minecraft could in a cubic 3D world), where a big part of Satisfactory is building around the landscape, natural artifacts, and threading tangled conveyor belts around your other machines and belts and architecture.
When you're working with a 2D grid, it's easy to make reusable blueprints that you can systematically stamp out and plug together. (It's a lot like GPU programming, parallelizing tasks by spreading out the data to multiple processors, processing it in efficient units, making tradeoffs about bandwidth and buffering and transports, and merging it all back together again).
But there is so much variation in Satisfactory's 3D world and degrees of freedom in construction, that everything you build is unique and not nearly as modular and replicable as Factorio's blueprints.
On the other hand, Satisfactory's 3D building tools are fantastic (and it would be frustrating and impossible to play if they weren't so good): they make it really easy to connect up machine inputs and outputs with conveyor belts and pipes, and route them around like spaghetti code.
Here's something I posted earlier, quoting Dave Ackley on why he didn't transform his Moveable Feast Machine from 2D to 3D, who said: "I need to actually preserve one dimension to build the thing and fix it. Imagine if you had a three-dimensional computer, how you can actually fix something in the middle of it? It's going to be a bit of a challenge. So fundamentally, I'm just keeping the third dimension in my back pocket, to do other engineering."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22304110
Dave Ackley, who developed the Moveable Feast Machine, had some interesting thoughts about moving from 2D to 3D grids of cells: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21131468
DonHopkins 4 months ago | parent | favorite | on: Wolfram Rule 30 Prizes
Very beautiful and artistically rendered! Those would make great fireworks and weapons in Minecraft! From a different engineering perspective, Dave Ackley had some interesting things to say about the difficulties of going from 2D to 3D, which I quoted in an earlier discussion about visual programming:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18497585
David Ackley, who developed the two-dimensional CA-like "Moveable Feast Machine" architecture for "Robust First Computing", touched on moving from 2D to 3D in his retirement talk:
https://youtu.be/YtzKgTxtVH8?t=3780
"Well 3D is the number one question. And my answer is, depending on what mood I'm in, we need to crawl before we fly."
"Or I say, I need to actually preserve one dimension to build the thing and fix it. Imagine if you had a three-dimensional computer, how you can actually fix something in the middle of it? It's going to be a bit of a challenge."
"So fundamentally, I'm just keeping the third dimension in my back pocket, to do other engineering. I think it would be relatively easy to imaging taking a 2D model like this, and having a finite number of layers of it, sort of a 2.1D model, where there would be a little local communication up and down, and then it was indefinitely scalable in two dimensions."
"A...
The thing is, factorio came out swinging with better automation than any minecraft mod. It is much easier to place things together and have them run free. Logistics bots are an absolute game changer in industry games. The bar has been raised.
The kind you can easily stamp out rows of, and then hook up easily to standardized busses.
You can sacrifice some space and efficiency and cost for modularity and ease of building big banks of them with robots.
Best game ever btw and this comes from a seasoned Factorio player.
Compact Machines are pocket dimensions of fixed internal size (the first one you get is 3x3x3, the last you'll build is 13x13x13) that all exist as a single 1x1x1 cube on the outside. From inside you can reach any of the six sides of that cube with a "tunnel".
So if you've got, say, a simple basic Minecraft furnace with fuel flowing in the left, and stuff input to the top, output from the bottom, you can replace that with a 5x5x5 Compact Machine, with three tunnels inside, and any amount of complexity that fits. Maybe inside the 5x5x5 machine you turn fuel into electricity, you run four electric furnaces, and you parallelise the processing. Externally though it behaves just like the furnace... except both faster and more efficient.
The limited space in Claustrophobia (before you escape) means you feel compelled to actually solve problems in place this way, whereas normally you'd be tempted to just be lazy and add a few extra pipes here, an extra hopper there and soon it's a vast sprawling mess. When 13x13x13 seems impossibly large you cut that sort of nonsense right out.
I enjoyed the comment but when I went back to find it in your history I discovered that you are a prolific commenter and that I was unable to find it.
Do you remember it and if so can you link to it or expand more on which cellular automata rule set it is?
Will Wright gave a great explanation of how simulation games combine different techniques together in three intersection dimensions: Topologies (agents, networks, and layers), dynamics (propagation, growth, grouping, order, allocation, mapping, specialization, and nesting), and paradigms (cybernetics, system dynamics, cellular automata, chaos theory, adaptive systems, network theory).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdgQyq3hEPo&t=35m50s
>Lessons in Game Design, lecture by Will Wright, Computer History Museum, November 20, 2003.
Maybe the comment I posted about Factorio and CA was this, in the discussion of John von Neumann's 29 state cellular automata rule -- It is a pure CA, and a historically interesting one that he actually designed on paper and wrote about in a book. I compared it to Factorio, in the way Factorio uses conveyor belts in four different directions to direct the flow of items, and JVN29 uses arrows in four different directions to direct the flow of signals. But you can put a lot of different kinds of things on Factorio conveyor belts, but only ones and zeros on JVN29 arrows, since it was designed to be minimal and mathematically rigorous like a Turing Machine, not practical and convenient to program and fun to play like Factorio.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22727228
>Von Neumann Universal Constructor (wikipedia.org) 90 points by amjd 4 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 29 comments
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_universal_construc...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22738598
>[...]
>Factorio players will recognize these tapes of construction instructions as 2D "blueprints" that construction drones use to build patterns of factories and conveyor belts, etc. In Factorio, after your drones have build a blueprint in the unpowered, unsupplied state, you can connect it to the power grid, hook up pipes to deliver fluids, and run conveyor belts in and out of it to deliver resources and products, and it will immediately starts doing its thing. Playing Factorio is uncannily like von Neumann 29 state cellular automata programming, not by coincidence. So it's a great way to get your head around cellular automata programming, gpu programming, parallel programming, queuing systems, and data flow programming in general!
>Factorio Tutorial #20 - Bots, part 1 - Construction robots
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLOyk55uI2Y&t=19m32s
>Factorio just doesn't have the ability to construct cells by spilling items off the end of conveyor belts, or destroy cells with conveyor belts, either. But maybe there's an extension for that! And John von Neumann's 29 state cellular automata doesn't have swarms of construction drones that build and tear down blueprints in parallel like Factorio does, so there are some differences. But the basic idea of grids of cells with conveyor belts carrying items between factories is the same.
Also I wrote some more about JVN32:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22737079
>The Real Time Crossing (Buckley, p. 457, The real-time crossing organ) is like a road intersection that splits the two crossing lanes, then uses traffic ligh...
I looked into it a while ago, and noticed that IC hasn't been kept up to date with the latest minecraft versions, maybe it's a dying community. Would you say GT is a spiritual successor?
Maybe it's time to fire up the servers this weekend :)
A good entry point for GT is, I'd say, Gregblock.
GT5 had an expansion to it made (GT5U) that was so great that it inspired the creation of GT New Horizons (GTNH).
GTNH is the currently the most active GT community, but it goes a little off the grind deep end imo. There has been a large amount of effort to balance every recipe in a huge number of mods and it’s great fun if you’ve already played through GT a few times.
GT Community Edition (GTCE) is a fan recreation of GT5 in contemporary versions of MC. The last I saw, the maintainer had bad vision and was not receptive to feedback. It is not worthy of the GT name.
I decided to go with Thermal Expansion/Dynamics/Foundation instead though. Also for 1.12.2.
Advancing in minecraft tech trees grants more powerful mining tools so you can clear entire veins in minutes, or set up quarries that mine everything to bedrock (with the sorting and processing system being a fun challenge).
Factorio certainly cuts the chuff and opens up the ability to physically scale up to an absurd size. The controls work is less needed, but the geometric layout is more critical. Since minecraft bases are expected to be small, advancements in tech must be in faster, small machines.
If Factorio and Dwarf Fortress had a baby I would adopt it without hesitation and raise it as my favourite child and sole heir.
The whole game seemed like a forced distillation of programming into a form that can be consumed by the masses.
If you don't enjoy the core idea of playing in a souped-up sandbox you probably won't enjoy it.
For example Doom Eternal is basically, IMO, one of the best games ever made, because it's one of the only games where the combat loop gets a physiological response from me. I can't play it at all if I'm in the wrong headspace, but it's amazing when I'm in the right one.
Factorio really has to hit the same sort of "zing!" feel. Programming-wise for me, it's the feeling of unbridled power at just tearing things apart to refactor. Because that's a hell of a different feel to the day job.
The game is beautifully optimized and will run quite well on a potato.
Fundamentally, the product is similar, but everyone far prefers the Factorio UX over fifty pages of serialised REST objects.
Oxygen Not Included is an inherently unstable system, and it's a frantic race to juggle all the spinning plates while your colony falls more and more apart. The better you get at the game, the further you can stretch it before it succumbs to starvation, disease, lack of air or death by overheating.
Factorio (in regular mode) has a system that it is possible to keep stable at all times, and once you get a handle on the enemies you play the game at your own pace.
Overall the game is a strange mix of physics sim and quirks that don't make sense. For example, industry produces heat and heat spreads as expected. Solid, liquid and gas phase changes happen more or less as expected, leading to fun stuff like steam explosions. But then heat can be deleted in unphysical ways, heat can't be radiated away into space like in the real world etc.
On your other points, it looks like you simply haven't understood game systems deep enough.
>you'll run out of stuff fairly soon
Geysers can support really large bases and other materials you can get from space missions, which are powered either by oil wells or water geysers. It's a great simplification that you can built self-powering oxygen generators, which consume water and produce oxygen with some leftover hydrogen.
>the heat it creates
Aquatuners + steam turbine setup solves all heat issues. And you can cool metal refineries output directly inside steam rooms which power stem turbine (by using oil or petroleum for coolant).
>the meteors that destroy anything you put on the surface
Bunker doors + radars + a tiny bit of automation. I think that radar mechanics are unnecessary complex and not explained properly, but once you understand it, they are quite easy to use.
>the crappy power generation methods
Even without advanced sour gas/petroleum power setups it's really easy to get a TON of power generation. In mid and late game I usually sit on top of so much power generation and unfortunately game does not have any power sink game mechanics.
To me it feels incredibly hacky and ruins the game.
I really want to pick it up again but am not excited to start a new factory if I know I won't be able to complete it.
Then again, my computer is not 7 years old, but when I played it my desktop was running on an AMD Phenom.
Still there have been major performance improvements, including parallelism-lite. And just the fact that it's mainly the same engine that ran on low-spec computers from 6 years ago means it should run very smoothly on modern machines - not all of the Moore's law improvements since then have been about parallelism.
If you have a somewhat reasonable per-core speed, multiple cores should all be loaded with work. Personally I can't say that I've noticed it helped, but that's anecdotal and I've seen the improvements as they came in incrementally rather than in one big jump from some old single-threaded version to 1.0.
> including parallelism-lite
What does that mean? When I look it up I get results for some other game with a similar name.
I didn't mean to refer to any established term. I meant parallelization by breaking the game up into systems, e.g. I believe the electrical system can run completely separately to the main thread without losing the deterministic guarantees, while I would think of full parallelization as allowing each assembler or inserter to be simulated in its own thread.
Maybe there's a more established term for this? Parallelization through doing different types of things at the same time, rather than doing many copies of the same thing at the same time.
Or hint/show others how something could be built.
Or remind yourself of how you set something up last time.
(I use blueprints extensively.)
Gameplay-wise Factorio is a lot more interesting that Cookie Clicker of course.
1600+hrs in ... still pushin' all my buttons.
I don't think the developers intend it to suck up so much time. I think they want to make something that's fun.
But I don't think there's anything to the game that malicious developers don't already know.
I think, insofar as it's fair to call Factorio addictive, it's because there's a constant feeling of "just one more thing" (or "just one more game"). There's is constant and continuous frontier of optimization opportunities. But, at the same time, there's also effort/delay in getting the rewards of the effort. -- I think that feedback loop is what people loved about the 2012 XCom Enemy Unknown.
I think it's possible to play in a healthy way. But, I guess if the feeling of "my factory isn't good" and "I suck" drives the behaviour, then that'd be unhealthy.