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HN folks will appreciate the entire Factorio blog. They are super open about the design of their game and it's full of micro-postmortems. https://www.factorio.

HN folks will appreciate the entire Factorio blog. They are super open about the design of their game and it's full of micro-postmortems. https://www.factorio.com/blog/ https://www.factorio.com/blog/ Also, if you're reading this, you are in a demographic that is likely to absolutely love Factorio. Go buy it, it's 20 eur/usd, you won't regret it. Some call it "Programming: The Game".

codeflo 8y ago
Oh, you will regret it. That’s like saying “Try heroin! You’ll absolutely love it.” Not technically wrong... (Edit: I’m joking. It’s a great game.)
- scrollaway 8y ago
  https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/7lfn1w/my_friend_wants_to_try_the_new_patch/ https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/7lfn1w/my_friend_... :)
- wybiral 8y ago
  It is really addictive though. When you get to the point of having little helper robots that do your bidding... Priceless.
- DonHopkins 8y ago
  But it's funny because it's true! Factorio is INCREDIBLY addictive, because it stimulates that excellent feeling you get from successfully writing and refactoring beautiful code.
  - c3534l 8y ago
    I actually organize my creations by thinking about hardware architecture, too. To me, Factorio is just a pretty graphical CPU.
- keithnz 8y ago
  yes, regret it you will. I've had it for a while and from time to time I see someone play it online and go "oh, I should go play that again".... just recently.... 7pm: I think to myself, let's do some work on my side project... but first, lets play a little factorio 3am: FU#! :/
- fredley 8y ago
  I'm ~750 hours deep, doing a SeaBlock run. I've never found a game with quite so much depth as Factorio.
- masklinn 8y ago
  > (Edit: I’m joking. It’s a great game.) It's a joke, but like all the best jokes it's one with a large grain of truth and exactly why I've held off buying Factorio for now (Frostpunk as well).
  - scrollaway 8y ago
    You're probably safer with Frostpunk. It seems much more self-contained; you'll play it through once, and then you're unlikely to pick it up again.
smichel17 8y ago
> Some call it "Programming: The Game". This is actually why I haven't bought it (yet). When I have the urge to program something, I think I'd rather put that towards building something real than playing Factorio.
- scrollaway 8y ago
  Give it a shot. It's different enough from programming. It'll tickle the "how do I solve this" circuitry. It's a puzzle game in many ways.
- Q6T46nT668w6i3m 8y ago
  I usually agree, but while it certainly feels like programming it does so in an entirely theoretical environment where both concurrency and parallelism is nearly infinite. I think that makes it feel different enough.
  - therein 8y ago
    Might as well grab an FPGA. :)
- none_to_remain 8y ago
  Sometime I think a game is too much like work, and it reflects poorly on the game. Too much grind, tedious... Factorio for me is too much like work, except I think it's a fine game, I just already often spend my day making systems to put things on queues and take them off queues, trying to keep the queues from getting full or empty...
  - santoriv 8y ago
    Exactly my experience. I feel like I'm doing DevOps automation when playing Factorio. Since I get paid hourly for my normal work .... I started wondering, "Wait, why am I not just working right now? Same thing except I get paid......" It should be called something like "Jenkins: The Game". I actually had a similar experience with Space Chem. It was fun until I realized I was playing "Procedural Spaghetti Code: The Game." I wish there was a "Functional Programming: The Game"
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
santix 8y ago
I was surprised at the minimum requirements. I don't know if I'm not up to date with current games, but from the style of it I thought it would be much lighter.
- lucb1e 8y ago
  I haven't looked at them, but anything slightly modern should do. My laptop (5 years old), the desktops in school (2-3 years old), my girlfriend's laptop (3-4 years old), my cousin's laptop (another girl with a not-so-beefy laptop), and my brother's laptop all run it fine... Most of those don't even have dedicated GPU. Sure, once you go megabase scale, after a few hundred hours of playing, most hardware will lag a little. But at that point there are millions of objects the game has to track every loop, there isn't terribly much that can be done about it. The game doesn't aggregate like OpenTTD, where the number of passengers at a train stop is just a number. Because of the way it works, every piece of iron ore in a train station in Factorio is a separate object existing somewhere. (Though they do some tricks to abstract that a bit as well, see their belt compression blog posts.)
  - DonHopkins 8y ago
    It's like a pinball machine with 6,000,000 balls in play!
  - Groxx 8y ago
    Just to echo one of the points in here: the blog is full of really great details on all this, and how they've changed things, and why. One of the best dev blogs I've ever run across.
- jcrites 8y ago
  The facilities that you create in the game can be quite large and complex. These facilities can be processing and tracking maybe tens of thousands of different individual items. There’s a lot of stimulation workload when you reach large scale. Unlike in a lot of games where the computational complexity is all graphics-oriented and done in the GPU, these computations are largely all CPU. Modern laptops should generally be fine though.
bootlooped 8y ago
> Some call it "Programming: The Game". I've heard it called Cracktorio. But yes, I have seen a lot of concepts of programming in the game.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
deathanatos 8y ago
It is actually 30 USD now, but I still think it is well worth it. (I've definitely derived 30 USD of entertainment from it!) I've bought it for myself, and gifted it to three other people. Very addicting game for programmers. The blog is quite good too, and the interactions I've seen with the developers have been excellent. There's a reddit community too: https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio There's an active modding community as well, and several of the mods are fairly extensive; I'd recommend beating the vanilla game first, though. For anyone on the fence about buying the game, there is a free demo[1]. [1]: https://www.factorio.com/download-demo https://www.factorio.com/download-demo
cabaalis 8y ago
I lost at least a week of productivity after buying factorio.
- rkuykendall-com 8y ago
  After buying Factorio, I lost January through March of this year. Worth it though. Probably the best game I've ever played.
tootie 8y ago
You could also call it the thinking person's Minecraft.
- duskwuff 8y ago
  Factorio was heavily inspired by some of the "industrial" Minecraft mods (IndustrialCraft, BuildCraft, etc). IIRC, one of the first public prototypes of the game was posted on a Minecraft forum.

codeflo 8y ago

Oh, you will regret it. That’s like saying “Try heroin! You’ll absolutely love it.” Not technically wrong... (Edit: I’m joking. It’s a great game.)

scrollaway 8y ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/7lfn1w/my_friend_wants_to_try_the_new_patch/ https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/7lfn1w/my_friend_... :)
wybiral 8y ago
It is really addictive though. When you get to the point of having little helper robots that do your bidding... Priceless.
DonHopkins 8y ago
But it's funny because it's true! Factorio is INCREDIBLY addictive, because it stimulates that excellent feeling you get from successfully writing and refactoring beautiful code.
- c3534l 8y ago
  I actually organize my creations by thinking about hardware architecture, too. To me, Factorio is just a pretty graphical CPU.
keithnz 8y ago
yes, regret it you will. I've had it for a while and from time to time I see someone play it online and go "oh, I should go play that again".... just recently.... 7pm: I think to myself, let's do some work on my side project... but first, lets play a little factorio 3am: FU#! :/
fredley 8y ago
I'm ~750 hours deep, doing a SeaBlock run. I've never found a game with quite so much depth as Factorio.
masklinn 8y ago
> (Edit: I’m joking. It’s a great game.) It's a joke, but like all the best jokes it's one with a large grain of truth and exactly why I've held off buying Factorio for now (Frostpunk as well).
- scrollaway 8y ago
  You're probably safer with Frostpunk. It seems much more self-contained; you'll play it through once, and then you're unlikely to pick it up again.

smichel17 8y ago

> Some call it "Programming: The Game". This is actually why I haven't bought it (yet). When I have the urge to program something, I think I'd rather put that towards building something real than playing Factorio.

scrollaway 8y ago
Give it a shot. It's different enough from programming. It'll tickle the "how do I solve this" circuitry. It's a puzzle game in many ways.
Q6T46nT668w6i3m 8y ago
I usually agree, but while it certainly feels like programming it does so in an entirely theoretical environment where both concurrency and parallelism is nearly infinite. I think that makes it feel different enough.
- therein 8y ago
  Might as well grab an FPGA. :)
none_to_remain 8y ago
Sometime I think a game is too much like work, and it reflects poorly on the game. Too much grind, tedious... Factorio for me is too much like work, except I think it's a fine game, I just already often spend my day making systems to put things on queues and take them off queues, trying to keep the queues from getting full or empty...
- santoriv 8y ago
  Exactly my experience. I feel like I'm doing DevOps automation when playing Factorio. Since I get paid hourly for my normal work .... I started wondering, "Wait, why am I not just working right now? Same thing except I get paid......" It should be called something like "Jenkins: The Game". I actually had a similar experience with Space Chem. It was fun until I realized I was playing "Procedural Spaghetti Code: The Game." I wish there was a "Functional Programming: The Game"

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

santix 8y ago

I was surprised at the minimum requirements. I don't know if I'm not up to date with current games, but from the style of it I thought it would be much lighter.

lucb1e 8y ago
I haven't looked at them, but anything slightly modern should do. My laptop (5 years old), the desktops in school (2-3 years old), my girlfriend's laptop (3-4 years old), my cousin's laptop (another girl with a not-so-beefy laptop), and my brother's laptop all run it fine... Most of those don't even have dedicated GPU. Sure, once you go megabase scale, after a few hundred hours of playing, most hardware will lag a little. But at that point there are millions of objects the game has to track every loop, there isn't terribly much that can be done about it. The game doesn't aggregate like OpenTTD, where the number of passengers at a train stop is just a number. Because of the way it works, every piece of iron ore in a train station in Factorio is a separate object existing somewhere. (Though they do some tricks to abstract that a bit as well, see their belt compression blog posts.)
- DonHopkins 8y ago
  It's like a pinball machine with 6,000,000 balls in play!
- Groxx 8y ago
  Just to echo one of the points in here: the blog is full of really great details on all this, and how they've changed things, and why. One of the best dev blogs I've ever run across.
jcrites 8y ago
The facilities that you create in the game can be quite large and complex. These facilities can be processing and tracking maybe tens of thousands of different individual items. There’s a lot of stimulation workload when you reach large scale. Unlike in a lot of games where the computational complexity is all graphics-oriented and done in the GPU, these computations are largely all CPU. Modern laptops should generally be fine though.

bootlooped 8y ago

> Some call it "Programming: The Game". I've heard it called Cracktorio. But yes, I have seen a lot of concepts of programming in the game.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

deathanatos 8y ago

It is actually 30 USD now, but I still think it is well worth it. (I've definitely derived 30 USD of entertainment from it!) I've bought it for myself, and gifted it to three other people. Very addicting game for programmers. The blog is quite good too, and the interactions I've seen with the developers have been excellent. There's a reddit community too: https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio There's an active modding community as well, and several of the mods are fairly extensive; I'd recommend beating the vanilla game first, though. For anyone on the fence about buying the game, there is a free demo[1]. [1]: https://www.factorio.com/download-demo https://www.factorio.com/download-demo

cabaalis 8y ago

I lost at least a week of productivity after buying factorio.

rkuykendall-com 8y ago
After buying Factorio, I lost January through March of this year. Worth it though. Probably the best game I've ever played.

tootie 8y ago

You could also call it the thinking person's Minecraft.

duskwuff 8y ago
Factorio was heavily inspired by some of the "industrial" Minecraft mods (IndustrialCraft, BuildCraft, etc). IIRC, one of the first public prototypes of the game was posted on a Minecraft forum.