If anyone is interested I made a build that can make most items at the highest quality possible using a single assembler by switching the active recipe on the assembler. You just throw in the basic resources for the base items in the recipe and it just builds the whole thing at legendary quality.
It takes a bit of setup for each item you want to make though and doesn't work if the process takes more than one fluid. The default in the blueprint is to make blue circuits.
Unfortunately factorio has this mechanic where if you switch the item an assembler is making it loses progress for productivity bonuses, so this setup is not really practical for many items. Plus it takes a lot of space. But it is fascinating to see it work.
Oh boy, this is a rabbit hole I've gone down pretty hard as well. I made a python script and a separate js app for running linear solvers on the upcycling problem. I really like the author's exposition for how to setup the solve matrix, as it's the first step when understanding the quality math.
Speaking very high level, probably the most interesting and counter-intuitive thing I learned from doing these projects is that adding just a touch of speed modules can go a long way, especially at the lower quality levels. Of course, if the only thing being optimized is legendary outputs per common input, then speed is always bad. But because an upcycler works much better when the buildings and modules are themselves legendary, usually the limiting factor is the (very expensive) crafting machines, rather than the amount of input lines. Adding a touch of speed can give way more throughput for the same number of legendary crafting machines, at the cost of some wasted inputs, which isn't a big deal when you can slap down a few more cheap miners.
Yeah same! I had this essentially same writeup in drafts for my blog, and got distracted by ... factorio ... and never finished it. Glad to see the direction and findings confirmed. Excellent writeup.
Sadly, the specter of maintenance is omitted from Factorio, and acts as a limiting factor on automation in the real world...
When all of your factory bits are randomly wearing down, causing speed mismatches and stochastic outright failures, large and complex chains become limited by your ability to run around and diagnose and fix things. Things also tend to fail in novel and unexpected ways; redesigns can help mitigate some failures, while new failures may be introduced. And as reliability improves, you start seeing failures that occur on longer timescales, which more trivial failures would initially mask.
The dynamic between speed and energy was already interesting and counter-intuitive (often you wanted efficiency even though slower, because it greatly reduced POWER needs which could decrease your base size significantly).
> Factorio pretty much founded the factory video game genre
I feel very nerd sniped by this one! Factorio was heavily influenced by minecraft mods like industrialcraft2 which create factories inside of minecraft. Here's the factorio creator discussing it in 2013 https://forum.industrial-craft.net/thread/8845-factorio/
As usual, the ouroboros of culture continues, and now minecraft mods spend lots of time imitating factorio, as well as iterating from the same original seeds.
I feel nerd sniped by this too. Factory games go back to the 90s. There are probably earlier ones too, but Free Enterpri$e (https://www.mobygames.com/game/2408/free-enterprise/) is the earliest I know. In terms of factory mechanics, there are many similarities with modern factory games. Unfortunately, it feels like a game from 1996 and I'm pretty sure it's impossible to turn a profit in it.
>Factorio was heavily influenced by minecraft mods like industrialcraft2 which create factories inside of minecraft.
Can't forget dwarf fortress, the freeware game that inspired Minecraft. Written by two Asperger's brothers. It was super heartwarming when, after times they had to stop working on the game and move down lawns to make a living, they finally published on steam and became independent.
It seems like KittiFox Games was what they needed. Hooked them up with graphic artists, helped them publish the game, make the updates more regular and "meaty" (I'm guessing working as a sort of an agent). I'm guessing not everyone in the industry is an EA or that french assasins creed studio.
I might not be 100% correct, but the game is now even somehow multithreading, improving performance and introducing some bugs.
The difference between Washing and Upcycling is enormous. That does fit my observations, it's nice to see it quantified.
Another aspect that is nice to see quantified is how big the effect of better quality modules is. You likely underestimate that initially since it's not linear.
The Space Casino mentioned in the post is not possible anymore in Factorio 2.1. Which is experimental at the moment, but I'd assume will be released soon. And experimental Factorio tends to be as stable or more as the stable versions of other games.
Some folks say: "if you don't like it, don't use it?" same holds for LDS where you can also argue that throwing a piece of legendary plastic in lava shouldn't produce legendary steel and copper.
Well, I guess we'll have a small mod that reenables it for those interested; and the standard game can be the guide on gameplay balance.
Reminds me of the modded Minecraft community some years back. They'd say "MAWPC", "might as well play creative" if you were playing with unbalanced mods that made the game too easy.
I mostly play "Ascend to godhood" type packs in which the goal is to become basically omnipotent. I remember in one of them after months of play I finally made a Creative Vending Upgrade for a drawer - that's the end, you're basically god now, any drawer which could have a thing in it, can now have an unlimited amount of that thing [yes of course that includes Creative Vending Upgrades themselves]. And yeah, after ten minutes that's pretty boring, a nether star and an oak plank are now the same, but it's also the end of the game anyway so what do you expect.
There are fun twists on this idea, I am currently re-playing Star Factory in which you start with infinite supplies of four ingredients and even the ability to make clones of those infinite supplies. The goal of course is converting those four (marble, gold, dark oak, ice) into everything you need and it's important to automate everything, don't make 64 sand, make a machine which makes 1 sand per second and leave it running forever. Don't make 64 glass from the sand, make another machine which makes sand but this time feed it into a furnace and fuel the furnace with infinite oak wood, now you've got unlimited glass. And so on.
That's a good one, but, some people definitely are playing the map editor. With planning the builds taking way more time and effort than actually putting them down.
Because I wouldn't enjoy that experience, so I dont do it. In other words... I don't like it, so I don't use it. This isn't the gotcha you seem to think it is.
The devs have to balance/shape the base game around what they want the average player that is aiming to acquire legendary items to experience. In this case they felt like this player was missing out on potentially interesting build puzzles. By removing this obvious global minimum in the build space, a rich field local minima builds appears in its place which makes the legendary puzzle a harder and more varied challenge.
“Space casino” is gone from Factorio 2.1 as asteroid reprocessors don't take quality items anymore. Motivated by devs that it was 'just too easy' to get legendary items this way.
I have ruined my fun of many games by activating cheat modes. I strictly avoid them now until I have felt I have 'completed' the game to my satisfaction.
Well. On vulcanus you can't directly produce legendary plates because fluid-only recipes don't support quality. I haven't gone through the articles maths properly yet, but I'd be interested to know if it's more efficient to have a full quality pipeline from miners through to end products or if it's better to start from vulcanus 'free' normal qual plates and build from there. I suspect vulcanus probably does win, but it'd be nice to be able to simulate that.
Computing an infinite sum of matrix powers seems a bit nasty, but actually reformulating the problem as a transfer matrix (where legendary -> legendary with probability 1) let's you express the state of the system after N loops simply as $A^N x_0 = x_n$. Then, A^N can be readily computed by diagonalizing the matrix so that $A = V diag(\lambda_1, ...) V^T$. The matrix exponential means that different eigenvalues decay at different rates. The largest should be lambda_1 = 1 which will survive in the infinite N limit, and tells you the steady state solution. This machinery is a bit more general than the expectation based equations that the author solves with Gaussian elimination, and is a nice application of SVD/matrix diagonalization.
The systematic and scientific approach is absolutely warranted if you want to produce legendary quality at scale. I brute forced my way to legendary mech armor with manually steered recycler loops and wasting millions of iron and copper in the process. Since playing on a Linux developer laptop with 0GB VRam and an onboard GPU (at 60FPS!) I couldn't have scaled it much larger anyways but the entire game, it's a fever dream of optimization and I love it.
The difficulty with that is that there are people in the real world actively breaking the systems. Not maliciously, it's just how capitalism works. You can make money by seeing and exploiting inefficiencies in systems, and that changes the system. In a game like Factorio the systems are complex but they don't change under you, which makes analysis much more straightforward.
Malicious actors currently don't seem to behave much more careful than biters in Factorio, so this should align pretty well. To be fair, biter are usually not inside your base / in office.
I've had a lot of fun with stuff like this - beyond solvers for Satisfactory/DSP/etc using ILP, i've also made automatic blueprint creators for DSP, Factorio, and Satisfactory - give it a factoriolab URL, it will create a usable blueprint for it (pasteable where the games allow it, copyable where they don't)
Interestingly different - for DSP and Factorio it suffices to do legality using CP-SAT based packing and then routing separately (geometric line routing/etc). Large blueprints in DSP are complicated and sometimes require hierarchical decomposition.
Satisfactory is actually much more complicated not just because of the significantly more 3d nature, but because of the blueprint designer size limitations and the desire to not just have things clipping through other things everywhere (which the game allows for the most part but people try to avoid).
I wonder how much we could optimize real world agricultural and industrial processes if we reallocated just a tiny fraction of the energy that goes into this game.
Highly doubt it as games themselves are designed to produce this energy and motivation. It's not like we have super geniuses who are wasting their potential on games, but rather games provide a sandbox that encourage exploration, experimentation, and create intrinsic motivation loops. I feel confident saying that playing games like Factorio is a much better use of time than using social media or passively consuming media.
The real world is filled with industry know-how, real-life constraints, and monetary risk. I'm almost positive these people don't have millions of dollars lying around to invest in agriculture R&D.
If they don't, someone does, and a different reality would have them give them the money to go do that R&D. There are definitely super geniuses out there not being utilized to anywhere near their full potential because they're off on some distraction or other, but they get to choose to do that because we're all about self determination.
I'm sure they would choose real factory building instead if it was just as easy (at least, I would)
- no bureaucracy/planning conflicts, you are the sole dictator
- full vertical integration, no supply costs or land costs
- building is near-instant and perfectly reversible
- machines don't have 6 month lead times or go out of stock
- maintenance is done by magic, machines never break down
- infinite research and information to build every machine from scratch
When I play Factorio with my friends, I don't have to sit through 1 hour planning meetings where half the people don't know what game we're playing and the other half want to make all decisions by committee in a future, unscheduled meeting.
Trouble is, these factory games are fairly deterministic and are nowhere near as opaque as the real world.
Kind of like how the Travelling Salesman Problem is near impossible in a static network, it's truly impossible in real life as changing conditions constantly make the solution different, so even an instant answer isn't good enough.
I realize as I'm typing this that your thoughts are almost exactly what the more optimistic Communists thought in the Soviet Union (very laudatory towards you by the way), I really should get around to reading Red Plenty, I have a thing for bureaucratic tragedy.
> Factorio pretty much founded the factory video game genre.
I’m pretty sure Zachtronics predates Factorio. SpaceChem 2011, Factorio 2020. I like Factorio more… but SpaceChem is the more demanding puzzle and the better game.
SpaceChem is in some sense a factory game, but it's not really the same genre as Factorio. It's a puzzle game whereas Factorio is more about automation and logistics.
> Infinite sums are rather inconvenient to calculate in finite time, although this one does converge to a finite value since the terms become exponentially smaller. We could compute until the terms because small enough for an approximation, but that would be unsatisfactory when an exact solution is possible. The key insight is that it doesn’t matter how many times a given item has already been through the loop, only what quality tier it has now.
Same trick as absorbing Markov chains — solve for the fixed point instead of summing the loop. Shows up in Leontief input-output models and PageRank too.
Honestly, this is the exact article I needed to finish my Space Age run. I finished Aquilio then started building quality plants on each planet but spent many hours iterating designs. The feedback loop was slow and it was really an exercise in banging rocks together. Basic spreadsheets fail at this mechanic, which is the beauty of it.
I played Factorio a fair bit before Space Age came out, it's awesome. I played it for ages with my kid, and it's a great tool for having him think about software decisions.
However I hit a wall with the game that has a relation to how AI has upended the programming world.
Basically, I got bored, and it might be because of the automation.
In the early game, you are running around with an axe, manually putting down inserters and assemblers, manually crafting items. You eventually make some assembly lines to automatically build stuff, and the outputs then go into more and more complex recipes for which you need to organize the flow of resources.
Along the way, you gain the ability to build trains to move goods from faraway places. Along with a number of other mechanics that are introduced, this creates a bit of novelty, because you discover some slightly different requirements and you get to exercise your brain in how to connect things together.
But then at some point, you learn how to make robots. Robots can place factory components as well as just moving goods around. You make a blueprint, plonk it down, and then the robots get all the necessary pieces, and place them down for you. This completely alters the game, because a blueprint can have a huge number of pieces while still being modular. There are people with libraries of square tiles encompassing every aspect of the game, that can simply be snapped together like legos.
I got to a point where I was assembling libraries and caring more about building a good set of components than actually wiring things together into a factory. I got an auto-placement mod, which I figured was a bit like predictive text in an IDE, it saves you from having to put down inserters and turn them, that kind of micro thing that can mess up your factory if you screw it up, but is actually tedious.
Armed with my new library of everything and my auto-placement mod, I destroyed my enjoyment of the game, somehow.
I had played the game enough times to understand what was needed, and so I got to a place where I just needed to place down a mall (a special kind of factory that mainly makes components) along with the bus (assembly lines of outputs), and things kinda couldn't go wrong. I didn't do any more of the typical early-game fiddling with making ad-hoc designs, because I knew what would work, and I didn't want to do the micro. I just satisfied myself that a few belts and rail lines would be enough to glue my libraries together, and that was that.
What does this have to do with AI? Well, I hear a lot of people's complaints with AI is that they were no longer actually coding. Without the need to type out anything, the micro is gone. People were already glueing libraries together, but at least there was some delight in writing the little bits of knitting. Now, you can just execute your architecture with a prompt, and the LLM will just do it all for you. There's still a necessity of checking what comes out, but the character of the work has changed.
Very easy to optimise the fun out of Factorio. I have a hard rule: no blueprints carried forward between saves. It's more fun for me to figure out what I can design quickly that kinda works and kinda supports scaling. A lot of the time I'll just build something as a repeatable unit cell and then use copy/paste, skipping the blueprints. I think it's worth trying this out.
Agreed, and aside from balancers and some train grid blueprints I don't use external blueprints. There are just some things I don't like re-inventing. Sometimes if I do a back-to-back factorio game I'll bring over some blueprints but I learned early that external blueprints are the quickest way to ruin the game for me.
Same. I do use blueprints (I usually make copypasteable smelters, circuit factories and whatnot) but only in the same save, all of them get chucked when I start a new save.
And of course no copying blueprints from the internet at all.
So the first iteration of the design is always slightly wonky, so it remains fun :)
I think that's a good rule. If there's something particularly tricky I will make a blueprint and carry it between games, but it's rare. And I only use my blueprints, with the exception of belt balancers (which I'm not smart enough to figure out). Using other people's blueprints is the fastest way to kill the fun in Factorio.
That's an interesting analogy as a lot of Factorio players feel like the game becomes fun when you gets bots (to the point where there are mods so you start the game with them).
For me, the individual placing of items gets pretty tedious. Solving nuclear power is interesting once but placing the same thing a second, third or tenth time is pretty dull.
The challenge of Factorio shifts throughout the game - initially you're worrying about individual metal plates and then you're dealing with belts full and then it's entire sections of your factory. This is why the Space Age DLC is so fun, it adds an entire new dimension of worrying about getting things between planets in a timely fashion.
Eventually the final boss is UPS (basically the performance of the game on your computer). Suddenly "the factory must grow" stops being the solution to your problems and usually makes things worse.
I don't think it ever reaches "vibe coding" levels - true, you can end up not knowing how part of your factory works but it's still a lot more active than just typing in a bunch of prompts.
I've been playing with Angel's Mods and Bob's Mods (and without Space Age) and it makes the processing chains dramatically longer. I finished the game by launching a rocket many hours ago, and now I'm just upgrading all the factory sections to make it a kind of mega-base. The minimum viable product you need to launch one rocket is nothing compared to making 1000 of everything per second. Then it might be done. I installed some more mods whose balance I was concerned about, only after launching the rocket.
So far I've only been using the world-specific blueprint storage. That seems reasonable to me - you have to make things at least once in this playthrough before copying them. That would happen anyway since of course all the factories are different with the mods. Except I imported a book of balancer blueprints from the internet because spending time designing inefficient balancers did not seem fun to me.
I very much doubt the fun was found in the physical act of placing units. Instead I’d wager it was in the immediacy of the chaos, and correction of it, as you dealt with the smaller problems — and the micro-optimizations you could apply being involved with every minor detail of the system.
When you switch to blueprints, you move up the abstraction chain; there’s still some optimization in constructing blueprints but largely you’re now just plumbing… chaining together higher level components, simply ensuring inputs == output, and all the microoptimizations are hard to justify because they disrupt your blueprints. The patterns and structures have reduced to only what you’ve specified in your library (where previously you were discovering them out of the many operators the game provides).
But the literal act of placing objects wasn’t the point, yet that’s all the game has become.
I've found that for me, I lose interest in a factory game the moment I have to scale up. It's when progressing through the game means copying an existing solution to a problem and pasting it (a bunch of times) somewhere else rather than coming up with new solutions.
In general, I get bored when I've figured out the solution to a problem but it takes a long time to get it implemented. Which is also why building conveyor belts is typically my least favourite part of any factory game and why I very rarely refactor my base.
This is why I got bored of Dyson Sphere Program. Once you travel to other solar systems, all you get are resources that let you skip certain production chains. The proliferator spray then made direct insertion inefficient.
The planets in Factorio have new buildings, new mechanics, and certain resources are cheap while others are more scarce.
I've played factorio since version 0.3 and modded Minecraft since 1.0. I've always lamented the points in any playthrough where a new feature makes the old way of doing things obsolete - but in Factorio in particular, it has never actually turned out very bad. There is always enough gameplay in the next abstraction tier that it hasn't made the game boring, although it does change what it is. The ladder starts when you get burner miners (extremely early) and you never have to mine by hand again. When you get electric miners you never have to refuel them by hand again. Those are already drastic gameplay shifts you experience within the first 20 minutes. It only keeps going from there - construction bots, solar power, logistics bots. The switch from handcrafting machines to having your factory craft them for you. Oil processing. Advanced oil processing. Trains. Power armour. Modules. Quality.
In Angel's Mods, much more than in the base game, there are so many of these points where your old factory process line is obsolete and your best option is to completely dismantle it and build the newer process you just unlocked, although the old one can keep running until you get around to that. It's a nonstop circus of redesigning and rebuilding. They haven't introduced any fundamentally new mechanics mind you - that all just comes from expansions in the set of recipes and machines available (and there's a reason every Angel's modpack includes Helmod). I've never tried Pyanodon's. Bob's Inserters also makes you want to redesign your layouts every time you unlock new inserter directions.
Part of the game is designing copy-pastable layouts that you can just repeat in a row, or tile in a grid - once you get to the stage where that's practical to do. You don't build each copy individually, you let your bots do it. If your bots can't do it then make it so they can, before you can say you're at this milestone. Also trains make grid patterns or "city blocks" very practical.
> In general, I get bored when I've figured out the solution to a problem but it takes a long time to get it implemented.
Not a factory game, but the designers of Portal 2 talked about this. They noticed that in the first game there were puzzles where people would figure out what to do, but then get stuck on actually being able to do it, which was frustrating. So for the second game they endeavored to make it so that the challenge was always in the solution to the puzzle, never in executing the solution.
You might be more into Terraria, Necesse, and Core Keeper. The excessive automation of Factorio as opposed to it being a compliment to a full game always turned me off it. Modded Minecraft with tech mods was fun because it was still Minecraft underneath. I could go explore and mine by hand and then feed my pulverizers ore when I got back to base. Core Keeper strikes a decent balance as well. You can automate some stuff but it's largely unnecessary and IMO not worth the time other than putting drills on the big ore boulders and sending the ore straight to a furnace. I still sort items by hand and then use the quick stack function after a trip, like I would in Terraria.
Factorio is an unreasonably good metaphor for software engineering. I think what you experience is a simulation without a penalty for increasing entropy and complexity too much, something that isn’t possible in the real world: The more you tower up layers of abstraction and increase complexity, the more the failure rate increases, so you’re incentivised to actively lower it or avoid some approaches entirely. In addition to that, you’re bound by natural resources, and money, in a way that you are not in the game. Finally, and that might contribute to the drain: You’re solely responsible for maintaining all the abstraction layers.
Imho it's wildly ignorant to call the current SotA coding agents a slot machine. They are extremely powerful tools.
My point was: I play Factorio for fun and it reminds of me of what programming was like before AI coding. In Factorio, all the automations you build are proper abstractions that you yourself actually designed.
When I start a new game of Factorio, I want the run-around-and-chop-down-trees Minecraft-esque beginning to be over as quickly as it can be. I race to get bots and logistics going as soon as possible. Being limited to only building things that are near my character is something I find very tedious, and bots relieve that tedium almost entirely.
And that lets me focus more on the stuff that I do like to work on in the game.
Figuring out a universal assembler that keeps a list of mundane odds-and-ends in-stock. Working out that shipping from the bottomless seas of Fulgora to Vulcanus where oil is expensive can be a net positive, even though many assume that it must be a bust. Sorting out the unusual steel barrel management problems this creates. Tweaking asteroid collection, and conversion, and eventually working the kinks out of the huge space casino ships that start becoming essentially inevitable.
And the best part of those space factories: Once I have a design that is finished, I can copy and paste it. Replication is simple.
There's other parts that I avoid, like: Main buses. They're efficient, but I tend to lean towards organic spaghetti belts because that's more funner-er for me.
Or trains. I don't use them much. They're cool and all; they just don't usually scratch my itch. They promote vast expansion, but when interplanetary logistics and the space factories are going full-swing then my need to expand on any one planet dwindles considerably.
Lots of people play the game differently than I do and that's perfectly fine. Some people like to program in assembler, and some people might prefer to work in Python.
Others can't even get the syntax right. When they need software written, they can get help from a friend, hire someone to write the code for them, or (with enough of the right kinds of supervision) get a bot to do it instead.
Some people enjoy running around and chopping trees.
It's OK to operate at a very low level. It's also OK to work at a very high level. If the results are rewarding, then chances are good that they're doing it right.
>Armed with my new library of everything and my auto-placement mod, I destroyed my enjoyment of the game, somehow.
it takes a very long time to build a library of everything now with the DLC. and then there are high quality overhaul mods with far more convoluted production chains.
Factorio team looked at how Ford makes a Lincoln by making 2800 ford explorers and if none of them happen to be a Lincoln they recycle the Explorer into parts and try again, and statistically, if you do that with 2800 explorers you get one Lincoln.
I love how factorios quality system models engineering in real life. It’s so much fun having a game be about building things end up being about how to manage the endless quantities of sub-par quality items, literally thousands of times more items to destroy. Factorio became a trash management game! Endless loops of backlogged, jamming garbage and effluents because you get one Lincoln from 2800 explorers.
There is a mod to just give everything legendary stats. Fuck quality.
I've tried to get into Factorio multiple times because I really love 2D isometric games, but the learning curve is incredibly steep. In my opinion, franchises like the original Command & Conquer were much more accessible for non-hardcore gamers like myself. Factorio feels less like a game and more like managing a complex software architecture.
I can recommend turning off biters, or at least biter expansion. That way you can at least focus on building your factory, without getting distracted by attacks.
Using a main bus where your factory is built in comb like rows on one side (so you can make the bus wider on the other side) is simple and will work pretty well for the starter base (i.e until you fire your first rocket and "win" the game).
I often split my starter factory in 4 quadrants with sufficient space for belts between them:
1. Smelters
2. Main bus based factory
3. Oil processing
4. Personal fabrication and mall (especially once logistic bots become available)
Do not recommend main bus design to new players! The most fun I've in Factorio had was getting to a rocket blind and dealing with my spaghetti factory. Even mentioning any kind of pattern to new players should be avoided.
I avoided a main bus after noticing nearly all the copper went to producing circuits and low density structure, and similarly most iron for steel and green circuits - so just site those close together linked via short buses [1]. Then ship the remaining copper, iron and steel to the Science factory using single wagon trains. (That’s just for a simple one rocket per hour factory)
Would even recommend peaceful mode, biters to me always felt like the least fun part of the game, especially while still learning how things worked. It's like you have a coworker come over and interrupt whatever you were doing, except instead of doing small talk they close half your tabs, clear your browser data so you are logged out of every site, and steal your coffee mug
As a factory game vet, it's always fun to see how the big daddy factorio primes first time players in the other factory games, and you see main busses in Satisfatory (which is sub optimal because the limiting factor is belt transport capacity), and Dyson Sphere Program (viable in the early game before drone logistics, but only in the arctic poles, and irrelevant later on).
Obviously, this main bus pattern does _work_ in all the games, if sufficiently dedicated, as does having no pattern at all, if sufficiently bloody minded (johnson) about it.
The bigger problem with busses in Satisfactory is they're too fragile. One component backs up and it can wreck the bus for everybody else. Setting up the extra belts to deal with overflow at every spot ends up being more work than just running dedicated belts for each component.
I disable expa sion but also biters evolution. Without expansion and evolution biters are just the right amount of pressure for me for casual play without completely losing having to climb half of the game tech tree
For some reason I never had a problem with the biters on the default difficulty. I got the sense they were there as another ball to juggle rather than a primary antagonist. Simply building turrets around structures was enough to fend them off in the early game until I could proactively destroy their nests in the pollution zone. After I started doing that, they never bothered me again.
It's not about the challenge tbh i play rail worlds because I like trains and while it evens out long term the start is slower and I dont feel like having time based evolution is a fair or interesting. I do leave pollution based evolution tho. That feed into base design choices
I had the exact same experience as you until I finally tried it for a third time. After working through the tutorial I was completely hooked. I had quite a few hours of fun until I decided I was playing too much and had to delete it. I would agree the learning curve is fairly steep. It's not complicated, just dense.
My issue with it is the same that I have with things like Shenzhen IO. It’s fun to solve such problems but only with the right tools. Restrictions become very irritating when solving something like a programming problem, especially when it’s “refactoring” related
If anyone is interested I made a build that can make most items at the highest quality possible using a single assembler by switching the active recipe on the assembler. You just throw in the basic resources for the base items in the recipe and it just builds the whole thing at legendary quality.
https://www.reddit.com/r/FactorioBlueprints/comments/1gl5v50...
It takes a bit of setup for each item you want to make though and doesn't work if the process takes more than one fluid. The default in the blueprint is to make blue circuits.
Unfortunately factorio has this mechanic where if you switch the item an assembler is making it loses progress for productivity bonuses, so this setup is not really practical for many items. Plus it takes a lot of space. But it is fascinating to see it work.
Oh boy, this is a rabbit hole I've gone down pretty hard as well. I made a python script and a separate js app for running linear solvers on the upcycling problem. I really like the author's exposition for how to setup the solve matrix, as it's the first step when understanding the quality math.
Speaking very high level, probably the most interesting and counter-intuitive thing I learned from doing these projects is that adding just a touch of speed modules can go a long way, especially at the lower quality levels. Of course, if the only thing being optimized is legendary outputs per common input, then speed is always bad. But because an upcycler works much better when the buildings and modules are themselves legendary, usually the limiting factor is the (very expensive) crafting machines, rather than the amount of input lines. Adding a touch of speed can give way more throughput for the same number of legendary crafting machines, at the cost of some wasted inputs, which isn't a big deal when you can slap down a few more cheap miners.
Python script: https://github.com/scottmsul/FactorioQualityOptimizer
JS source: https://github.com/scottmsul/upcycle
JS app: https://scottmsul.github.io/upcycle
Yeah same! I had this essentially same writeup in drafts for my blog, and got distracted by ... factorio ... and never finished it. Glad to see the direction and findings confirmed. Excellent writeup.
> and got distracted by ... factorio ... and never finished it
If the boffin head-space consumed by Factorio never happened, we may have been building factories on distant planets by now.
Sadly, the specter of maintenance is omitted from Factorio, and acts as a limiting factor on automation in the real world...
When all of your factory bits are randomly wearing down, causing speed mismatches and stochastic outright failures, large and complex chains become limited by your ability to run around and diagnose and fix things. Things also tend to fail in novel and unexpected ways; redesigns can help mitigate some failures, while new failures may be introduced. And as reliability improves, you start seeing failures that occur on longer timescales, which more trivial failures would initially mask.
The dynamic between speed and energy was already interesting and counter-intuitive (often you wanted efficiency even though slower, because it greatly reduced POWER needs which could decrease your base size significantly).
> Factorio pretty much founded the factory video game genre
I feel very nerd sniped by this one! Factorio was heavily influenced by minecraft mods like industrialcraft2 which create factories inside of minecraft. Here's the factorio creator discussing it in 2013 https://forum.industrial-craft.net/thread/8845-factorio/
As usual, the ouroboros of culture continues, and now minecraft mods spend lots of time imitating factorio, as well as iterating from the same original seeds.
I feel nerd sniped by this too. Factory games go back to the 90s. There are probably earlier ones too, but Free Enterpri$e (https://www.mobygames.com/game/2408/free-enterprise/) is the earliest I know. In terms of factory mechanics, there are many similarities with modern factory games. Unfortunately, it feels like a game from 1996 and I'm pretty sure it's impossible to turn a profit in it.
>Factorio was heavily influenced by minecraft mods like industrialcraft2 which create factories inside of minecraft.
Can't forget dwarf fortress, the freeware game that inspired Minecraft. Written by two Asperger's brothers. It was super heartwarming when, after times they had to stop working on the game and move down lawns to make a living, they finally published on steam and became independent.
> and became independent
I haven't followed Dwarf Fortress in awhile but don't they have a publisher now?
Sorry! I meant financially independent.
It seems like KittiFox Games was what they needed. Hooked them up with graphic artists, helped them publish the game, make the updates more regular and "meaty" (I'm guessing working as a sort of an agent). I'm guessing not everyone in the industry is an EA or that french assasins creed studio.
I might not be 100% correct, but the game is now even somehow multithreading, improving performance and introducing some bugs.
The difference between Washing and Upcycling is enormous. That does fit my observations, it's nice to see it quantified.
Another aspect that is nice to see quantified is how big the effect of better quality modules is. You likely underestimate that initially since it's not linear.
The Space Casino mentioned in the post is not possible anymore in Factorio 2.1. Which is experimental at the moment, but I'd assume will be released soon. And experimental Factorio tends to be as stable or more as the stable versions of other games.
Yeah, they announced the space casino removal in one of their Friday blog posts.
https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-442
Im so glad that the Space Casino is getting removed. It being so unreasonably effective ruins the fun
Some folks say: "if you don't like it, don't use it?" same holds for LDS where you can also argue that throwing a piece of legendary plastic in lava shouldn't produce legendary steel and copper.
Well, I guess we'll have a small mod that reenables it for those interested; and the standard game can be the guide on gameplay balance.
The standard response to "if you don't like it, don't use it" should be "yes, but also why aren't you playing the map editor?"
Reminds me of the modded Minecraft community some years back. They'd say "MAWPC", "might as well play creative" if you were playing with unbalanced mods that made the game too easy.
I mostly play "Ascend to godhood" type packs in which the goal is to become basically omnipotent. I remember in one of them after months of play I finally made a Creative Vending Upgrade for a drawer - that's the end, you're basically god now, any drawer which could have a thing in it, can now have an unlimited amount of that thing [yes of course that includes Creative Vending Upgrades themselves]. And yeah, after ten minutes that's pretty boring, a nether star and an oak plank are now the same, but it's also the end of the game anyway so what do you expect.
There are fun twists on this idea, I am currently re-playing Star Factory in which you start with infinite supplies of four ingredients and even the ability to make clones of those infinite supplies. The goal of course is converting those four (marble, gold, dark oak, ice) into everything you need and it's important to automate everything, don't make 64 sand, make a machine which makes 1 sand per second and leave it running forever. Don't make 64 glass from the sand, make another machine which makes sand but this time feed it into a furnace and fuel the furnace with infinite oak wood, now you've got unlimited glass. And so on.
That's a good one, but, some people definitely are playing the map editor. With planning the builds taking way more time and effort than actually putting them down.
Well obviously you don't say it to people who are playing the map editor.
Because I wouldn't enjoy that experience, so I dont do it. In other words... I don't like it, so I don't use it. This isn't the gotcha you seem to think it is.
The devs have to balance/shape the base game around what they want the average player that is aiming to acquire legendary items to experience. In this case they felt like this player was missing out on potentially interesting build puzzles. By removing this obvious global minimum in the build space, a rich field local minima builds appears in its place which makes the legendary puzzle a harder and more varied challenge.
You can still get your preferred play style with a mod: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/bring-back-space-casino
Why patch out fun on a single player game? Simply don't use it if it's not fun...
“Space casino” is gone from Factorio 2.1 as asteroid reprocessors don't take quality items anymore. Motivated by devs that it was 'just too easy' to get legendary items this way.
Devs: No Fun Allowed!
Michael Hendricks: Next time ...
I have ruined my fun of many games by activating cheat modes. I strictly avoid them now until I have felt I have 'completed' the game to my satisfaction.
Still easy enough on Vulcanus though, thanks to infinite resources from infinite lava.
Well. On vulcanus you can't directly produce legendary plates because fluid-only recipes don't support quality. I haven't gone through the articles maths properly yet, but I'd be interested to know if it's more efficient to have a full quality pipeline from miners through to end products or if it's better to start from vulcanus 'free' normal qual plates and build from there. I suspect vulcanus probably does win, but it'd be nice to be able to simulate that.
Generate a huge load of vulcanus iron plates with speed modules, then feed that into assembler/recycler chain of iron chests (all quality).
Or, if energy/space isn't of huge concern to you: a lot of foundries with quality, and just dump anything that's not legendary into the lava.
Computing an infinite sum of matrix powers seems a bit nasty, but actually reformulating the problem as a transfer matrix (where legendary -> legendary with probability 1) let's you express the state of the system after N loops simply as $A^N x_0 = x_n$. Then, A^N can be readily computed by diagonalizing the matrix so that $A = V diag(\lambda_1, ...) V^T$. The matrix exponential means that different eigenvalues decay at different rates. The largest should be lambda_1 = 1 which will survive in the infinite N limit, and tells you the steady state solution. This machinery is a bit more general than the expectation based equations that the author solves with Gaussian elimination, and is a nice application of SVD/matrix diagonalization.
The systematic and scientific approach is absolutely warranted if you want to produce legendary quality at scale. I brute forced my way to legendary mech armor with manually steered recycler loops and wasting millions of iron and copper in the process. Since playing on a Linux developer laptop with 0GB VRam and an onboard GPU (at 60FPS!) I couldn't have scaled it much larger anyways but the entire game, it's a fever dream of optimization and I love it.
I would elect the people that does this kind of analysis and management for President.
At least playing Factorio 18 hours a day would keep them out of our faces for the duration of their term in office.
Technocratic abilities do not necessarily make for good presidents. See, for example, Herbert Hoover.
So, you basically want an economist to be President? Not unreasonable, and certainly not unheard of. At least the pool of candidates is pretty large.
Bartlet / Hoynes '98!
The difficulty with that is that there are people in the real world actively breaking the systems. Not maliciously, it's just how capitalism works. You can make money by seeing and exploiting inefficiencies in systems, and that changes the system. In a game like Factorio the systems are complex but they don't change under you, which makes analysis much more straightforward.
Malicious actors currently don't seem to behave much more careful than biters in Factorio, so this should align pretty well. To be fair, biter are usually not inside your base / in office.
So, you want a team comprised of Factorio players and tabletop RPG players.
I've had a lot of fun with stuff like this - beyond solvers for Satisfactory/DSP/etc using ILP, i've also made automatic blueprint creators for DSP, Factorio, and Satisfactory - give it a factoriolab URL, it will create a usable blueprint for it (pasteable where the games allow it, copyable where they don't)
Interestingly different - for DSP and Factorio it suffices to do legality using CP-SAT based packing and then routing separately (geometric line routing/etc). Large blueprints in DSP are complicated and sometimes require hierarchical decomposition.
Satisfactory is actually much more complicated not just because of the significantly more 3d nature, but because of the blueprint designer size limitations and the desire to not just have things clipping through other things everywhere (which the game allows for the most part but people try to avoid).
I am nerd snipped
You can make the descriptive / non-math text in LaTeX look better in math mode by using \text{} e.g. $T_\text{products}=...$!
I wonder how much we could optimize real world agricultural and industrial processes if we reallocated just a tiny fraction of the energy that goes into this game.
Highly doubt it as games themselves are designed to produce this energy and motivation. It's not like we have super geniuses who are wasting their potential on games, but rather games provide a sandbox that encourage exploration, experimentation, and create intrinsic motivation loops. I feel confident saying that playing games like Factorio is a much better use of time than using social media or passively consuming media.
The real world is filled with industry know-how, real-life constraints, and monetary risk. I'm almost positive these people don't have millions of dollars lying around to invest in agriculture R&D.
If they don't, someone does, and a different reality would have them give them the money to go do that R&D. There are definitely super geniuses out there not being utilized to anywhere near their full potential because they're off on some distraction or other, but they get to choose to do that because we're all about self determination.
I'm sure they would choose real factory building instead if it was just as easy (at least, I would) - no bureaucracy/planning conflicts, you are the sole dictator - full vertical integration, no supply costs or land costs - building is near-instant and perfectly reversible - machines don't have 6 month lead times or go out of stock - maintenance is done by magic, machines never break down - infinite research and information to build every machine from scratch
When I play Factorio with my friends, I don't have to sit through 1 hour planning meetings where half the people don't know what game we're playing and the other half want to make all decisions by committee in a future, unscheduled meeting.
Modernized agriculture runs on 1-2% margins, it is already super optimized.
Agreed, and a lot of the volatility comes from weather which is an unknown that can swing wildly.
Trouble is, these factory games are fairly deterministic and are nowhere near as opaque as the real world.
Kind of like how the Travelling Salesman Problem is near impossible in a static network, it's truly impossible in real life as changing conditions constantly make the solution different, so even an instant answer isn't good enough.
I realize as I'm typing this that your thoughts are almost exactly what the more optimistic Communists thought in the Soviet Union (very laudatory towards you by the way), I really should get around to reading Red Plenty, I have a thing for bureaucratic tragedy.
> Factorio pretty much founded the factory video game genre.
I’m pretty sure Zachtronics predates Factorio. SpaceChem 2011, Factorio 2020. I like Factorio more… but SpaceChem is the more demanding puzzle and the better game.
SpaceChem is in some sense a factory game, but it's not really the same genre as Factorio. It's a puzzle game whereas Factorio is more about automation and logistics.
Factorio's charm lies in the constant pursuit of better. True 'quality' means tearing it all down and rebuilding cleaner.
> Infinite sums are rather inconvenient to calculate in finite time, although this one does converge to a finite value since the terms become exponentially smaller. We could compute until the terms because small enough for an approximation, but that would be unsatisfactory when an exact solution is possible. The key insight is that it doesn’t matter how many times a given item has already been through the loop, only what quality tier it has now.
Isn't the matrix
...? L isn't invertible, but 1 - L is.There is another very interesting post on this, but abusing the rng of factorio to always get what you want, amazing work...
https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/1weddwd/tired_of_...
It was discussed here at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49674451 . Frankly I was sure this is the dupe, just based by the title.
Same trick as absorbing Markov chains — solve for the fixed point instead of summing the loop. Shows up in Leontief input-output models and PageRank too.
Honestly, this is the exact article I needed to finish my Space Age run. I finished Aquilio then started building quality plants on each planet but spent many hours iterating designs. The feedback loop was slow and it was really an exercise in banging rocks together. Basic spreadsheets fail at this mechanic, which is the beauty of it.
Have you tried Helmod?
I played Factorio a fair bit before Space Age came out, it's awesome. I played it for ages with my kid, and it's a great tool for having him think about software decisions.
However I hit a wall with the game that has a relation to how AI has upended the programming world.
Basically, I got bored, and it might be because of the automation.
In the early game, you are running around with an axe, manually putting down inserters and assemblers, manually crafting items. You eventually make some assembly lines to automatically build stuff, and the outputs then go into more and more complex recipes for which you need to organize the flow of resources.
Along the way, you gain the ability to build trains to move goods from faraway places. Along with a number of other mechanics that are introduced, this creates a bit of novelty, because you discover some slightly different requirements and you get to exercise your brain in how to connect things together.
But then at some point, you learn how to make robots. Robots can place factory components as well as just moving goods around. You make a blueprint, plonk it down, and then the robots get all the necessary pieces, and place them down for you. This completely alters the game, because a blueprint can have a huge number of pieces while still being modular. There are people with libraries of square tiles encompassing every aspect of the game, that can simply be snapped together like legos.
I got to a point where I was assembling libraries and caring more about building a good set of components than actually wiring things together into a factory. I got an auto-placement mod, which I figured was a bit like predictive text in an IDE, it saves you from having to put down inserters and turn them, that kind of micro thing that can mess up your factory if you screw it up, but is actually tedious.
Armed with my new library of everything and my auto-placement mod, I destroyed my enjoyment of the game, somehow.
I had played the game enough times to understand what was needed, and so I got to a place where I just needed to place down a mall (a special kind of factory that mainly makes components) along with the bus (assembly lines of outputs), and things kinda couldn't go wrong. I didn't do any more of the typical early-game fiddling with making ad-hoc designs, because I knew what would work, and I didn't want to do the micro. I just satisfied myself that a few belts and rail lines would be enough to glue my libraries together, and that was that.
What does this have to do with AI? Well, I hear a lot of people's complaints with AI is that they were no longer actually coding. Without the need to type out anything, the micro is gone. People were already glueing libraries together, but at least there was some delight in writing the little bits of knitting. Now, you can just execute your architecture with a prompt, and the LLM will just do it all for you. There's still a necessity of checking what comes out, but the character of the work has changed.
Very easy to optimise the fun out of Factorio. I have a hard rule: no blueprints carried forward between saves. It's more fun for me to figure out what I can design quickly that kinda works and kinda supports scaling. A lot of the time I'll just build something as a repeatable unit cell and then use copy/paste, skipping the blueprints. I think it's worth trying this out.
Agreed, and aside from balancers and some train grid blueprints I don't use external blueprints. There are just some things I don't like re-inventing. Sometimes if I do a back-to-back factorio game I'll bring over some blueprints but I learned early that external blueprints are the quickest way to ruin the game for me.
> no blueprints carried forward between saves
I use exactly 3 exceptions between saves:
1. First generation ship to just get me to space
2. Second generation ship to get me to the other planets
3. Third generation ship to get me to the Shattered Planet
Everything else, I'm with you. I don't use blueprints between saves.
With how much of a pain it is to deal with building in space, I'd rather just use the same blueprint.
Same. I do use blueprints (I usually make copypasteable smelters, circuit factories and whatnot) but only in the same save, all of them get chucked when I start a new save. And of course no copying blueprints from the internet at all.
So the first iteration of the design is always slightly wonky, so it remains fun :)
I think that's a good rule. If there's something particularly tricky I will make a blueprint and carry it between games, but it's rare. And I only use my blueprints, with the exception of belt balancers (which I'm not smart enough to figure out). Using other people's blueprints is the fastest way to kill the fun in Factorio.
That's an interesting analogy as a lot of Factorio players feel like the game becomes fun when you gets bots (to the point where there are mods so you start the game with them).
For me, the individual placing of items gets pretty tedious. Solving nuclear power is interesting once but placing the same thing a second, third or tenth time is pretty dull.
The challenge of Factorio shifts throughout the game - initially you're worrying about individual metal plates and then you're dealing with belts full and then it's entire sections of your factory. This is why the Space Age DLC is so fun, it adds an entire new dimension of worrying about getting things between planets in a timely fashion.
Eventually the final boss is UPS (basically the performance of the game on your computer). Suddenly "the factory must grow" stops being the solution to your problems and usually makes things worse.
I don't think it ever reaches "vibe coding" levels - true, you can end up not knowing how part of your factory works but it's still a lot more active than just typing in a bunch of prompts.
I've been playing with Angel's Mods and Bob's Mods (and without Space Age) and it makes the processing chains dramatically longer. I finished the game by launching a rocket many hours ago, and now I'm just upgrading all the factory sections to make it a kind of mega-base. The minimum viable product you need to launch one rocket is nothing compared to making 1000 of everything per second. Then it might be done. I installed some more mods whose balance I was concerned about, only after launching the rocket.
So far I've only been using the world-specific blueprint storage. That seems reasonable to me - you have to make things at least once in this playthrough before copying them. That would happen anyway since of course all the factories are different with the mods. Except I imported a book of balancer blueprints from the internet because spending time designing inefficient balancers did not seem fun to me.
I very much doubt the fun was found in the physical act of placing units. Instead I’d wager it was in the immediacy of the chaos, and correction of it, as you dealt with the smaller problems — and the micro-optimizations you could apply being involved with every minor detail of the system.
When you switch to blueprints, you move up the abstraction chain; there’s still some optimization in constructing blueprints but largely you’re now just plumbing… chaining together higher level components, simply ensuring inputs == output, and all the microoptimizations are hard to justify because they disrupt your blueprints. The patterns and structures have reduced to only what you’ve specified in your library (where previously you were discovering them out of the many operators the game provides).
But the literal act of placing objects wasn’t the point, yet that’s all the game has become.
I've found that for me, I lose interest in a factory game the moment I have to scale up. It's when progressing through the game means copying an existing solution to a problem and pasting it (a bunch of times) somewhere else rather than coming up with new solutions.
In general, I get bored when I've figured out the solution to a problem but it takes a long time to get it implemented. Which is also why building conveyor belts is typically my least favourite part of any factory game and why I very rarely refactor my base.
This is why I got bored of Dyson Sphere Program. Once you travel to other solar systems, all you get are resources that let you skip certain production chains. The proliferator spray then made direct insertion inefficient.
The planets in Factorio have new buildings, new mechanics, and certain resources are cheap while others are more scarce.
I've played factorio since version 0.3 and modded Minecraft since 1.0. I've always lamented the points in any playthrough where a new feature makes the old way of doing things obsolete - but in Factorio in particular, it has never actually turned out very bad. There is always enough gameplay in the next abstraction tier that it hasn't made the game boring, although it does change what it is. The ladder starts when you get burner miners (extremely early) and you never have to mine by hand again. When you get electric miners you never have to refuel them by hand again. Those are already drastic gameplay shifts you experience within the first 20 minutes. It only keeps going from there - construction bots, solar power, logistics bots. The switch from handcrafting machines to having your factory craft them for you. Oil processing. Advanced oil processing. Trains. Power armour. Modules. Quality.
In Angel's Mods, much more than in the base game, there are so many of these points where your old factory process line is obsolete and your best option is to completely dismantle it and build the newer process you just unlocked, although the old one can keep running until you get around to that. It's a nonstop circus of redesigning and rebuilding. They haven't introduced any fundamentally new mechanics mind you - that all just comes from expansions in the set of recipes and machines available (and there's a reason every Angel's modpack includes Helmod). I've never tried Pyanodon's. Bob's Inserters also makes you want to redesign your layouts every time you unlock new inserter directions.
Part of the game is designing copy-pastable layouts that you can just repeat in a row, or tile in a grid - once you get to the stage where that's practical to do. You don't build each copy individually, you let your bots do it. If your bots can't do it then make it so they can, before you can say you're at this milestone. Also trains make grid patterns or "city blocks" very practical.
> In general, I get bored when I've figured out the solution to a problem but it takes a long time to get it implemented.
Not a factory game, but the designers of Portal 2 talked about this. They noticed that in the first game there were puzzles where people would figure out what to do, but then get stuck on actually being able to do it, which was frustrating. So for the second game they endeavored to make it so that the challenge was always in the solution to the puzzle, never in executing the solution.
You might be more into Terraria, Necesse, and Core Keeper. The excessive automation of Factorio as opposed to it being a compliment to a full game always turned me off it. Modded Minecraft with tech mods was fun because it was still Minecraft underneath. I could go explore and mine by hand and then feed my pulverizers ore when I got back to base. Core Keeper strikes a decent balance as well. You can automate some stuff but it's largely unnecessary and IMO not worth the time other than putting drills on the big ore boulders and sending the ore straight to a furnace. I still sort items by hand and then use the quick stack function after a trip, like I would in Terraria.
Factorio is an unreasonably good metaphor for software engineering. I think what you experience is a simulation without a penalty for increasing entropy and complexity too much, something that isn’t possible in the real world: The more you tower up layers of abstraction and increase complexity, the more the failure rate increases, so you’re incentivised to actively lower it or avoid some approaches entirely. In addition to that, you’re bound by natural resources, and money, in a way that you are not in the game. Finally, and that might contribute to the drain: You’re solely responsible for maintaining all the abstraction layers.
For pre AI software engineering yes.
You're still responsible for maintenance post-AI and it's harder because now it's filtered through a slot machine.
Imho it's wildly ignorant to call the current SotA coding agents a slot machine. They are extremely powerful tools.
My point was: I play Factorio for fun and it reminds of me of what programming was like before AI coding. In Factorio, all the automations you build are proper abstractions that you yourself actually designed.
Programming is still like that. Skilled programmers are still writing their own code because LLMs suck at it.
When I start a new game of Factorio, I want the run-around-and-chop-down-trees Minecraft-esque beginning to be over as quickly as it can be. I race to get bots and logistics going as soon as possible. Being limited to only building things that are near my character is something I find very tedious, and bots relieve that tedium almost entirely.
And that lets me focus more on the stuff that I do like to work on in the game.
Figuring out a universal assembler that keeps a list of mundane odds-and-ends in-stock. Working out that shipping from the bottomless seas of Fulgora to Vulcanus where oil is expensive can be a net positive, even though many assume that it must be a bust. Sorting out the unusual steel barrel management problems this creates. Tweaking asteroid collection, and conversion, and eventually working the kinks out of the huge space casino ships that start becoming essentially inevitable.
And the best part of those space factories: Once I have a design that is finished, I can copy and paste it. Replication is simple.
There's other parts that I avoid, like: Main buses. They're efficient, but I tend to lean towards organic spaghetti belts because that's more funner-er for me.
Or trains. I don't use them much. They're cool and all; they just don't usually scratch my itch. They promote vast expansion, but when interplanetary logistics and the space factories are going full-swing then my need to expand on any one planet dwindles considerably.
Lots of people play the game differently than I do and that's perfectly fine. Some people like to program in assembler, and some people might prefer to work in Python.
Others can't even get the syntax right. When they need software written, they can get help from a friend, hire someone to write the code for them, or (with enough of the right kinds of supervision) get a bot to do it instead.
Some people enjoy running around and chopping trees.
It's OK to operate at a very low level. It's also OK to work at a very high level. If the results are rewarding, then chances are good that they're doing it right.
(Anyway, the birds are singing again.)
>Armed with my new library of everything and my auto-placement mod, I destroyed my enjoyment of the game, somehow.
it takes a very long time to build a library of everything now with the DLC. and then there are high quality overhaul mods with far more convoluted production chains.
Games. Best way to learn!
Factorio team looked at how Ford makes a Lincoln by making 2800 ford explorers and if none of them happen to be a Lincoln they recycle the Explorer into parts and try again, and statistically, if you do that with 2800 explorers you get one Lincoln.
I love how factorios quality system models engineering in real life. It’s so much fun having a game be about building things end up being about how to manage the endless quantities of sub-par quality items, literally thousands of times more items to destroy. Factorio became a trash management game! Endless loops of backlogged, jamming garbage and effluents because you get one Lincoln from 2800 explorers.
There is a mod to just give everything legendary stats. Fuck quality.
I've tried to get into Factorio multiple times because I really love 2D isometric games, but the learning curve is incredibly steep. In my opinion, franchises like the original Command & Conquer were much more accessible for non-hardcore gamers like myself. Factorio feels less like a game and more like managing a complex software architecture.
I can recommend turning off biters, or at least biter expansion. That way you can at least focus on building your factory, without getting distracted by attacks.
Using a main bus where your factory is built in comb like rows on one side (so you can make the bus wider on the other side) is simple and will work pretty well for the starter base (i.e until you fire your first rocket and "win" the game).
I often split my starter factory in 4 quadrants with sufficient space for belts between them:
1. Smelters
2. Main bus based factory
3. Oil processing
4. Personal fabrication and mall (especially once logistic bots become available)
Do not recommend main bus design to new players! The most fun I've in Factorio had was getting to a rocket blind and dealing with my spaghetti factory. Even mentioning any kind of pattern to new players should be avoided.
I avoided a main bus after noticing nearly all the copper went to producing circuits and low density structure, and similarly most iron for steel and green circuits - so just site those close together linked via short buses [1]. Then ship the remaining copper, iron and steel to the Science factory using single wagon trains. (That’s just for a simple one rocket per hour factory)
[1] Cu -> Circuits -> LDS <- Steel <- Fe
I don't this that applies here, since the person I gave the tip to was so overwhelmed that they gave up.
Would even recommend peaceful mode, biters to me always felt like the least fun part of the game, especially while still learning how things worked. It's like you have a coworker come over and interrupt whatever you were doing, except instead of doing small talk they close half your tabs, clear your browser data so you are logged out of every site, and steal your coffee mug
As a factory game vet, it's always fun to see how the big daddy factorio primes first time players in the other factory games, and you see main busses in Satisfatory (which is sub optimal because the limiting factor is belt transport capacity), and Dyson Sphere Program (viable in the early game before drone logistics, but only in the arctic poles, and irrelevant later on).
Obviously, this main bus pattern does _work_ in all the games, if sufficiently dedicated, as does having no pattern at all, if sufficiently bloody minded (johnson) about it.
The bigger problem with busses in Satisfactory is they're too fragile. One component backs up and it can wreck the bus for everybody else. Setting up the extra belts to deal with overflow at every spot ends up being more work than just running dedicated belts for each component.
I disable expa sion but also biters evolution. Without expansion and evolution biters are just the right amount of pressure for me for casual play without completely losing having to climb half of the game tech tree
For some reason I never had a problem with the biters on the default difficulty. I got the sense they were there as another ball to juggle rather than a primary antagonist. Simply building turrets around structures was enough to fend them off in the early game until I could proactively destroy their nests in the pollution zone. After I started doing that, they never bothered me again.
It's not about the challenge tbh i play rail worlds because I like trains and while it evens out long term the start is slower and I dont feel like having time based evolution is a fair or interesting. I do leave pollution based evolution tho. That feed into base design choices
> Factorio feels less like a game and more like managing a complex software architecture.
There is literally a mod [0] for integrating Factorio with Grafana. Yep.
[0] https://github.com/remijouannet/graftorio2
oh fuck you
edit: got it working
edit2: how is it 4 am
Factorio in a nutshell!
I had the exact same experience as you until I finally tried it for a third time. After working through the tutorial I was completely hooked. I had quite a few hours of fun until I decided I was playing too much and had to delete it. I would agree the learning curve is fairly steep. It's not complicated, just dense.
Did you try the tutorial?
My issue with it is the same that I have with things like Shenzhen IO. It’s fun to solve such problems but only with the right tools. Restrictions become very irritating when solving something like a programming problem, especially when it’s “refactoring” related