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Factorio 1.0

• Akronymus 6y ago
  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.
  • stingraycharles 6y ago
    In all honesty, I had to forcibly remove Factorio from my computer because it was too much of a productivity drain. I think I averaged like 60 hours a week.
    • alexktz 6y ago
      Your future RSI thanks you.
  • StavrosK 6y ago
    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.
    • awalton 6y ago
      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.)
      • cybrox 6y ago
        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.
        • awalton 6y ago
          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."
      • Dahoon 6y ago
        Did you find anything good to move on to?
        • awalton 6y ago
          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.
    • cybrox 6y ago
      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..?
      • StavrosK 6y ago
        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.
        • dkersten 6y ago
          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.
        • bregma 6y ago
          Given the tech tree is infinite, that's impressive.
          • StavrosK 6y ago
            Infinite how? Seemed pretty finite to me.
            • duskwuff 6y ago
              There are some numerical upgrades which can be repeated indefinitely at increasing costs -- robot speed, mining productivity, damage for various weapon types, etc.
          • awalton 6y ago
            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.
    • simonbarker87 6y ago
      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.
      • sbergot 6y ago
        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.
  • slazaro 6y ago
    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...
    • gibagger 6y ago
      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.
• flixic 6y ago
  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.
  • cybrox 6y ago
    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.
    • oefrha 6y ago
      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.)
      • bregma 6y ago
        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.
• bbrazil 6y ago
  I bought it for €10 5 years ago, in terms for gaming value for money I think only the €10 I spent on Minecraft beats it.
  • sshagent 6y ago
    There is a fun minecraft modpack inspired by this game https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/modpacks/manufactio https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/modpacks/manufactio
• xrisk 6y ago
  Great game and it gave me quite a few insights into how systems should be designed.
  • gotts 6y ago
    Can you share a take-away example please?
    • acallaghan 6y ago
      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!
• reedf1 6y ago
  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!
• PoissonVache 6y ago
  You can look at the dev dayries https://factorio.com/blog/ https://factorio.com/blog/ They are very interresting, I've learnt a lot of technical things reading them. It's a well programmed game !
  • louwrentius 6y ago
    They are going to stop it now, no Friday facts anymore.
• Insanity 6y ago
  The comments here made it seem more interesting than anything on the webpage of the game. Guess I'll have to give it a shot :D
  • lucb1e 6y ago
    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).
• singularvalue 6y ago
  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.
  • moviuro 6y ago
    They have a demo version, that's free as in free beer. Try that, see if you like it!
• Havoc 6y ago
  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.
  • moritonal 6y ago
    The difference is that you can put Factorio down. MMOs are very different beasts to single-player games.
  • scrollaway 6y ago
    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.
    • reificator 6y ago
      > 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.
      • Akronymus 6y ago
        For many people the "cracktorio" is just a joke. 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.
        • octorian 6y ago
          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.
• markdown 6y ago
  Must be getting lots of traffic: https://i.imgur.com/TNIeMoj.png https://i.imgur.com/TNIeMoj.png
• tech2 6y ago
  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.?
  • dunefox 6y ago
    I bought it with a friend and found it quite boring. I guess I like rimworld or dwarf fortress style games much better.
    • mosiuerbarso 6y ago
      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.
  • lawl 6y ago
    > 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 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 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 https://mods.factorio.com/mods/Optera/LogisticTrainNetwork
• raxxorrax 6y ago
  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.
  • seer 6y ago
    Oh if only I was not a programmer! 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...
    • me_me_me 6y ago
      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
• pulkitsh1234 6y ago
  Best game I have every played ! (source: trust me) 8.5 years in early access is no joke, the game is definitely something ! Some of my favourite youtube videos on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xF--1XdcOeM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xF--1XdcOeM [Self expanding factory, recursive blue prints] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feHq2Ken43M 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 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjtXHsv5E6M [Another Factorio base tour]
  • Medox 6y ago
    And mods. Lots of mods. Some very good, others also silly. A recently updated one is Renai Transportation, adding Train JUMP-tions: https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/i5yoaj/train_junctions_pfft_try_train_jumptions/ https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/i5yoaj/train_junc...
  • oefrha 6y ago
    A recent video from Nilaus that some of the audience here might find amusing: Factorio real-time dashboard using Grafana. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91rxQfpqge8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91rxQfpqge8
    • salzig 6y ago
      o m f g. Hilarious and great at the same time.
  • DonHopkins 6y ago
    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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oh2oF-eZTD8 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 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 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 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vYYhL9Vt8o
• LandR 6y ago
  I love that when you click things on the site it actually responds to the click (like you've physically pressed a button).
  • barbegal 6y ago
    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/ https://jdan.github.io/98.css/ if you want to see what interfaces looked like in the early 2000s.
• KuhlMensch 6y ago
  Can we make this the UI for AWS please?
  • jiggawatts 6y ago
    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.
  • lucb1e 6y ago
    Reminds me of ps/kill/renice built in Doom: http://psdoom.sourceforge.net http://psdoom.sourceforge.net
• UK-Al05 6y ago
  This game looks appealing but when I start playing it, it feels like an extension of my job.
  • bregma 6y ago
    Yeah, I love my job, too.
• buixuanquy 6y ago
  If you like this game, I suggest you can try “Oxygen not included”
  • Deestan 6y ago
    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.
    • javert 6y ago
      You can achieve stability in Oxygen Not Included. It's not even that hard to do so.
      • hu3 6y ago
        Yeah I've watched streamers with stable bases. Old and new.
  • wcoenen 6y ago
    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.
• samvher 6y ago
  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.
  • Aeolun 6y ago
    Considering what factorio is displaying, I’ve always thought the performance is amazing. Then again, my computer is not 7 years old, but when I played it my desktop was running on an AMD Phenom.
    • samvher 6y ago
      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.
      • dmurray 6y ago
        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.
        • lucb1e 6y ago
• bregma 6y ago
  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.
  • McDuglas 6y ago
    0.18 was just Release Candidate for 1.0 - the only feature added on release is Spidertron, the rest is just fixes. I think you should update.
    • Coincoin 6y ago
      They even made 0.18 mods to be 1.0.0 compatible this way the game releases with all mods already up to date.
  • TheMerovingian 6y ago
    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.
• rvdca 6y ago
  For anyone who has wondered what would Factorio would look like in 3D, the game Satisfactory from Coffee Stains Studio would be a good idea.
• anilnayak 6y ago
  http://ghdsports.club/ http://ghdsports.club/
• anilnayak 6y ago
  https://oreotv.xyz/ https://oreotv.xyz/
• xiaodai 6y ago
  the blue print feature confuses me
  • Aeolun 6y ago
    It just gets your robots to build stuff for you so you don’t have to.
    • lucb1e 6y ago
      Or design things without committing to actually building it yet. Or hint/show others how something could be built. Or remind yourself of how you set something up last time. (I use blueprints extensively.)
• LatteLazy 6y ago
  This is like Heroin getting an upgrade. I might have to go break my computer now...
  • lebed2045 6y ago
    would be interesting to learn the nature (or psychological tricks) the game uses to become so addictive
    • simias 6y ago
      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.
      • sbennettmcleish 6y ago
        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 :) 1600+hrs in ... still pushin' all my buttons.
      • sbennettmcleish 6y ago
        oh ... and the only game where i've regularly hit 2am and thought "one more thing..."
    • rgoulter 6y ago
      Yes. 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.
• birisi 6y ago
  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.
• Cyphase 6y ago
  For anyone who doesn't know about it, Mindustry is a similar game with a more tower-defense angle. Linux, macOS, Windows, and Android. https://mindustrygame.github.io/ https://mindustrygame.github.io/ (I have no connection to the project, I've just enjoyed playing it.)
  • fendy3002 6y ago
    Man, playing it on android phone makes my head hurts. It's small...
  • jeffhuys 6y ago
    Also iOS!
    • Cyphase 6y ago
      Whoops! It's not mentioned in all the places. Thanks for the correction.
  • Dylan16807 6y ago
    If you can tolerate building the same infrastructure from scratch every level, with a need to max out production and/or do levels multiple times to get the unlock points you need. At least that's the impression I got from a couple hours of time into the demo before I threw it away in disgust. It was like minutes 15-30 of factorio on loop, plus tower defense. The tower defense was good but not enough to make up for the tedium of setting up drills. Also if I'm remembering right the conveyors were unreasonably finicky for such a core mechanic.
    • anchpop 6y ago
      I actually much prefer their conveyors to factorio's
    • Ajedi32 6y ago
      I like both. Factorio certainly has a lot more depth to it, but Mindustry feels more streamlined. Less focus on the minutia of optimizing the factory and logistics, and more on getting everything set up as quickly as possible so you don't get overwhelmed by waves of enemies. For Factorio players, here are the biggest differences: 1. No inventory. All structures get automatically crafted as they are built and the resources taken from your central storage core. 2. No inserters. Structures that output resources output them directly into adjacent belts or other structures. This simplifies construction and can allow for amazingly compact designs if you put sufficient thought into them, but can also lead to accidentally mixing the wrong items into your belts and clogging up your production lines if you're not careful. 3. You have blueprints and the equivalent of construction bots right from the start of the game. In singleplayer, it is normal and expected that players will pause the game, queue up a bunch of things to be built, then unpause and let their ship handle the construction automatically. 4. Belts are streamlined and much faster work with. 1 lane per belt, and the UI for constructing belts includes a pathfinding algorithm allows you to easily construct a belt between two points in seconds provided you have enough resources on-hand. Crossing two belts automatically creates an intersection so resources don't mix. 5. More focus on combat. Lots of different turret options, each with their own specializations, logistical requirements, and types of enemies they are good against. The PVP and attack modes are also quite fun. 6. More arcadey. Unlike with Factorio, you aren't expected to keep growing and expanding your factory forever. There is limited space and sooner or later you're either going get overwhelmed, or retreat back into space with the resources you collected. You can finish most stages in an hour or two.
• itchyjunk 6y ago
  Games can help you figure out parts of your personality in weird ways. I used to do swimmingly with the early game with all the hack and slash building techniques all the way up to ~500 spm. Then the whole set up for trying to get to mega base got me anxious and such. I found most of my bottleneck to be electricity. Since I played on deathworld, placing solar was tedious. I knew a few different people who struggled early on a lot. They would be stuck handcrafting too much and rarely have those hack job factory setup. But once they got their early base with ~50 spm and robots going, they would start scaling up with neat little blueprints and what not. Then there were the speed runners who launch the rocket in a few hours.
  • Deestan 6y ago
    > Then there were the speed runners who launch the rocket in a few hours. It's even below 2 hours now: https://www.speedrun.com/factorio#Any https://www.speedrun.com/factorio#Any
  • awalton 6y ago
    > I found most of my bottleneck to be electricity. Since I played on deathworld, placing solar was tedious. If there's a major criticism to be had over Factorio, it's that power generation in the game is rather boring, and the Power poles and Light classes are designed somewhat poorly. Solar just doesn't scale in Vanilla - it costs too many materials for too little power, when really it should be one of the easier scalable techs (but should still require lots of research since it's a no-consumable power technology). You can get through an entire game of Factorio on nothing but coal power if you're diligent about when you expand, but most seasoned players will just burn the excess oil as power, since it's rarely a real bottleneck and oil's one of the most economical resources in the game to get setup - you build it once and... you're done. Forever. And then there's the super ridiculous late gamers who have to build nuclear because once you start talking in tens of gigawatts, there's just no way to squeeze that out of anything else and remain even close to efficient; the nukes take an absurd amount of concrete, but you're usually swimming in excess stone anyways. Trying to get there on solar is an exercise in actual pain, since you'll mine most of the map just trying to build panels and batteries... so you have energy to mine the map... The bootstrapping never ends. Some of the mods have done real work to make this better. There's a mod that has fusion as a late game tech which feels like cheating, but then there's modpacks like Seablock where you're forced to continuously rebuild power through your tech generations as there is no coal, your starting wind turbines don't make enough to get you past the first 10 hours, and each successive science step unlocks a new power generation technology that roughly feels in scale with that level of technology (from harvesting low grade algaes for biomass, to growing trees, to farming alien plants and extracting oils, and then to nuclear in the latest parts of the game). But no amount of modding can fix things so you can have a power pole that is also a lamp, so you can use Brave New World and see things through the stupid unfixable dark night without also spamming the map with build-wrecking lamps (since that mod removes your character and thus your ability to build night vision goggles).
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• lebed2045 6y ago
  unpopular opinion. I've spent several hundred hours playing this game and I think this game should be treated as an addictive drug. I know it's my own psychological problems but there's whole Reddit thread about how it ruined people's plans etc and wasted hundreds of hours of their lives. In contract, real "prohibited" substances like LSD, MDMA didn't make any negative impact on my life nor addiction. How is that? I feel like all these additive games (especially one which uses psychological tricks like Skinner box) are some equivalent of brain exploits and should be treated with great caution. Maybe labeled somehow and have a reference where all these "exploits" and risk properly explained. Can anyone explain what tricks it uses to become so addictive?
  • tomashubelbauer 6y ago
    I think you meant to write Skinner box. I wasn't familiar with the term and noticed the typo while looking up what it was.
    • lebed2045 6y ago
      yes, my bad. Fixed it. I like this video explanation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWtvrPTbQ_c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWtvrPTbQ_c
      • lucb1e 6y ago
        I watched the whole thing and still have no idea what Skinner boxes are beyond that it has something to do with making people want to push a proverbial button one more time. So how do you actually do that? What ways do games do this? They mentioned some loot drops but I never played a game with loot drops and so don't know what that means either. (The only gaming context I have for the word loot, aside from the dictionary definition, is loot boxes, a word which doesn't make any sense to me: what did you plunder to get that loot---other than your wallet, that is?) Looking at Wikipedia instead, the Skinner Box page says about games: > Slot machines and online games are sometimes cited as examples of human devices that use sophisticated operant schedules of reinforcement to reward repetitive actions. So I guess it's just about wanting to play the game more because it's fun and it's not some magic method that game designers use to get more eyeballs for a not-so-fun game (the way that the linked video explained it)?
• swiley 6y ago
  Games like this and openttd are how I fail classes and lose jobs.
  • lucb1e 6y ago
    And make friends!
• billfruit 6y ago
  I did take a look at it very early on in Early Access. I sort of did not like that it was so deterministic, like many games of the type. If there was randomness like machines churning out defective parts, machines ageing due to wear and tear etc it would have been more interesting, would even perhaps lead to more interesting tradeoffs. Some type of risk vs reward decisions were not there, which to me is generally a fun component of games.
  • otr 6y ago
    I'm sure there are mods (https://mods.factorio.com/ https://mods.factorio.com/) like that, and if not feel free to write one (https://wiki.factorio.com/Modding#Creating_mods https://wiki.factorio.com/Modding#Creating_mods). edit: now that I think about it factorio is purposely deterministic because otherwise it would break multiplayer almost totally.
    • billfruit 6y ago
      May be possible that it can be modded in, but I get a feeling would likely break the game, and things will go out of balance, since the core game perhaps was not designed for such probabilistic behaviour. Actually some amount of probabilistic behaviour including variation in the quality and rate of outputs of machines, even atleast variability between the different instances of the machines of the same type would have made it vastly more interesting is my view.
      • bspammer 6y ago
        There is probabilistic behaviour in the game for reprocessing uranium [1], presumably they found a way to keep the RNG in lockstep across clients. I'm pretty certain it's possible to make a mod that does what you've described, but I'm also pretty certain it would make the game less fun :P [1] https://wiki.factorio.com/Kovarex_enrichment_process https://wiki.factorio.com/Kovarex_enrichment_process
  • lucb1e 6y ago
    That's exactly why I like Factorio more than, say, prison architect. Where in Factorio you make your items move over conveyor belts, in PA prisoners/guards/etc. move in really stupid ways and you constantly have hallways clogging up on the rightmost tile while otherwise being empty (for example; there are many more aspects that are yolo in PA versus 'exact' in Factorio). Heck, one of the silly parts of Factorio is having to move your miners when the mine runs out. That's kind of "breaking down", though it's also predictable, and even that feels like re-doing work I've already done! It's really not my thing. Seeing your perspective, I'm not sure this is unifiable into a game that both sides would like. I guess we just like different kinds of games.
• zokier 6y ago
  As someone who tried it 5-6 years ago when it first popped up in my bubble, reached end-game and got bored, is there some summary of how the game has changed since? Of course listing every single change doesn't make sense, but any big changes to the core game?
  • db48x 6y ago
    The early prototypes really nailed the core gameplay loop. The biggest changes since then have been to smooth out the complexity of the various subsystems, vastly increase performance so that you can have a vastly larger factory, and to introduce new types of puzzles such as the nuclear reactors. Blueprints were added fairly early on, followed by straight-up copy and paste a few years later, and they really changed the game. In the earliest prototypes, doubling the speed of your research required manually placing down all the belts and assemblers in order to double the size of your factory. With blueprints doubling the size of your factory is a much higher-level puzzle of cloning the pieces and plumbing them together, rather than the lower-level grind of placing a thousand machines. Trains were added at some point as well, which gives you a long-range transport capability. The circuit network was added so that your factory can make automated decisions without your direct involvement. And the UI has been greatly improved as well.
    • lurker458 6y ago
      in addition there are several mods that increase the depth of the production tree and materials used
      • db48x 6y ago
        True! I've been playing Space Exploration (https://mods.factorio.com/mod/space-exploration https://mods.factorio.com/mod/space-exploration) recently.
      • osipovas 6y ago
        If you'd like to increase the depth of the production tree, consider checking out Pyanodon's mods: https://mods.factorio.com/user/pyanodon https://mods.factorio.com/user/pyanodon
• scrumbledober 6y ago
  A huge congratulations to one of the best and hardest working dev teams out there on one of the most unique, challenging, and fun games I've ever played. I have put far more hours into factorio than any other single player game. It is an inspiring work. Reading the Friday facts blogs has also been one of my favorite development blogs.
• kissiel 6y ago
  I think this game made me a better engineer. I'm not saying it was worth investing hundreds of hours, but it was fun playing. One of very few games I really enjoyed in the last decade.
• NKosmatos 6y ago
  It would be good to watch managers, CEOs, CTOs or other higher management playing Factorio. I would pay for a Twitch/Youtube stream with Elon, Bezos, Mark, Nadella, Gates and other "famous" people to see how they play such games. On a second thought, that would make a good documentary/interview, seeing how high profile managers and engineers handle similar games, what they enjoy in their spare time :-)
  • hirundo 6y ago
    Since Musk and Bezos are actually building rockets I'd think they'd find a simulation to be less fun in comparison. But maybe they'd enjoy it the way a chess grandmaster enjoys playing blitz as relaxation during a break in a tournament game.
    • slimginz 6y ago
      Musk has joked in the past in some Reddit AMAs that he models all his rockets in Kerbal Space Program first so who knows.
      • halfFact 6y ago
        This is more likely to be marketing than reality. If he really works 100 hours a week.
        • sujinge9 6y ago
          Maybe modeling rockets in Kerbal is part of that 100hrs of work.
    • simonebrunozzi 6y ago
      Musk is already playing a game; it's called "the simulation", and we're all in it. I'm not joking; according to him, we are most likely in a simulation. [0] [0]: https://www.space.com/41749-elon-musk-living-in-simulation-rogan-podcast.html https://www.space.com/41749-elon-musk-living-in-simulation-r...
  • 6y ago
• rgoulter 6y ago
  I played one game of Factorio that took about 30 hours; I 'almost' finished then decided I was done with that. Then, when I was between jobs, I thought "oh, I see how I could do a better job; I'll just play one more game.." and my playtime quickly went up to 120 hours. I was writing TODO-lists in a book, etc. (The "craft no more than X items by hand" achievement was fun). I mean, +1 to both "if you're on here you'll love it" and "if you're on here, be careful you don't spend too much time on it".
  • ecmascript 6y ago
    Recently, my gf found me still awake at 05:00 playing factorio. Had completely forgot the time and thought it was closer to 02:00. That's when I realized that I had to stop playing the game because it is so addictive. I simply can't play that game in moderation.
    • andrewjrhill 6y ago
      Oxygen Not Included has the same sort of effect for me and my experience with that game has kept me from picking up Factorio. Once you start getting into ONI's automation tools and design optimization; time just ceases to exist. It remains the first and only game I have ever fully removed from my Steam library (not just uninstalled) after purchase.
      • Mangalor 6y ago
        +1 ONI. Truly a black hole that manages to warp time itself. Also maddening being an early fan in beta, then repeatedly throwing out whole designs, plans and game files as they kept adding new things in the game and changing them.
      • nomercy400 6y ago
        ONI is great, yet one 'game' is much longer than Factorio. I bet you can launch a rocket much sooner in Factorio than in ONI. Also, I found Factorio easier and less stressful than ONI. There's no real 'lose' case and the progress feels faster.
      • 6y ago
• secondcoming 6y ago
  I only discovered factorio a few weeks ago, bought it immediately after playing the demo. Great stuff. What's especially impressive is how little CPU it uses and my GPU's fans don't go mental.
  • lucb1e 6y ago
    Meanwhile my decent laptop runs a base producing 1000 science per minute at ~40fps... enjoy 60fps while it lasts ;)
    • secondcoming 6y ago
      I hope I get that far!
• aljungberg 6y ago
  Great game. Without being critical of the team's awesome accomplishment, I do wonder if there's something to be learnt here about software development productivity. How did the Coffee Stain guys develop Satisfactory apparently so much faster than the Factorio guys? Factorio started in 2013. Satisfactory started development in 2016 and released 2019. At the time Satisfactory was released it seemed already more advanced than Factorio -- and after only having been developed for half as long. (The visual complexity of Coffee Stain's game is off the charts compared to Factorio. Factorio has a board game style whereas Satisfactory is a modern 3D game. Look at the launch trailers.) Coffee Stain has about 25 employees working on 2 games (Goat Simulator and Satisfactory), Wube Software has 15 employees working on 1 game (Factorio). Having read Factorio's dev blogs I feel like there might have been a bit of not invented here syndrome. They wrote their own UI toolkit for instance. Maybe they kept inventing technologies while Coffee Stain found ways to reuse existing tools?
  • Deestan 6y ago
    The comparison isn't completely valid. Satisfactory is not yet released, and still in Early Access. Factorio was in EA and enjoyable by 2016. The Factorio team has slowly grown to its current size - for a few years it was just one or two people and no funding. Coffeestain was a fully formed team with some funding.
    • aljungberg 6y ago
      At the point of comparison in 2016, both games were in early access, and, I think, both games were enjoyable. Factorio had a more complex late game in terms of available structures and they had liquid pipes which is a major feature. But Satisfactory also had some things Factorio did not like varied terrain, automated trucks and some interesting first person elements. You're right about the early funding. Factorio started out with just €21,626 of crowd funding. But after a while they do seem to have reached similar levels given the comparable staffing levels they have now.
  • maxpro 6y ago
    I don't think you can really compare both of these games... both are about building factories, but that's it. Factorio is another world of complexity comparing to Satisfactory
• barbs 6y ago
  Relevant Vice article: Why Do We Play Video Games That Feel Like Work? https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/4x38aq/why-do-we-play-video-games-that-simulate-work https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/4x38aq/why-do-we-play-vid...
• Koshkin 6y ago
  But, do you get to destroy other people's factories? (If not, where's fun?)
  • lucb1e 6y ago
    Sure, pvp exists. It's not the most popular mode (co-op is the default and most popular way to play), but there is full support for this kind of scenario or mod: each object in the game is of a 'force' and you can't do things like open chests or mine (pick up) objects belonging to other forces (enemies). That's also how biters and player-built objects work. There is even a pvp scenario built into the game if I'm not mistaken and setting up a server is very easy (either with the in-game GUI or, if that's more your thing, with the dedicated server on Linux).
• drhodes 6y ago
  Sounds like Danny Elfman wrote the music to the 2 minute video :) has strong resemblance to the simpsons / beetlejuice / men in black, couldn't imagine a better fit.
• aminozuur 6y ago
  Why is this Red Alert 2-like game on the top of HN?
  • drchickensalad 6y ago
    It's nothing at all like that.
  • carry_bit 6y ago
    If it's not clear from the other comments, Factorio is basically the closest you get to injecting pure engineering joy into your veins. Given HN's audience, there are a lot of fans here.
• drivers99 6y ago
  I like to look at my factory in terms of the Theory of Constraints. Improving anything besides the bottleneck is a waste. Find the bottleneck and fix that one thing, then figure out what the new bottleneck is. Avoid creating excess inventory (buffer chests).
  • Symmetry 6y ago
    That's The Goal.
  • chillacy 6y ago
    Yup, not unlike how actual factories operate apparently. It's also a never ending process because once you unblock one bottleneck, a new one is revealed somewhere else. That the primary challenge in the game is an emergent phenomenon of producer/consumer systems is what makes it so beautiful of a game.
• fs2 6y ago
  Looks like fun and it's a game that's been on my watchlist for years. But I've reached an age where I'm pretty sure that once I finish the rocket and escape the planet (that's what seems to be the main goal) I'll never play it again. Just can't be bothered anymore by endless grinding and optimizing. Addictive games like MMOs and building games stopped being addictive for me once I figure out how it works.
  • Dahoon 6y ago
    That doesn't mean it isn't worth playing the games. Time you enjoy wasting isn't wasted time.
    • lucb1e 6y ago
      I don't know anyone who launched their first rocket faster than most story-based games that you pay €60 for and get one or two dozen hours of content if you're lucky. Factorio is half the price for more hours of entertainment, even if you never touch it again after your first rocket launch (assuming you do enjoy it until the first rocket launch and don't put it away before then). A minority of players (like me) likes to continue expanding and optimizing after the first rocket launch, but indeed most people go play something else first and start another map later, perhaps with friends. On your second run, you'll build a much better factory. Not necessarily because you like optimizing so much, but now that you know the game you can do things much better and most people enjoy seeing that they really made progress in learning how to play a game.
  • kllrnohj 6y ago
    > But I've reached an age where I'm pretty sure that once I finish the rocket and escape the planet (that's what seems to be the main goal) I'll never play it again. It'll still probably take you a good 40+ hours to do that. Which is fantastic entertainment value for $30. Looking at the steam global achievements, 16.1% of people have finished the game at all (mid-game achievements are sitting around ~40-50%). There's then 2 other achievements - finish the game in under 15 hours, and finish the game in under 8 hours. Only 2.1% and 1.6% have those achievements, respectively. I'm also a "finish the game & put it down forever" type of person, but I've come back to Factorio multiple times. Helped tremendously by the map generator settings letting you basically "skip" parts of the game you don't like, or double-down on ones you do like. Enjoyed the trains? Make the ore patches more spread out, but larger so that your train installs are both more necessary and are more permanent. Enjoy being forced to improvise base layouts? Ramp up the cliff generator. Hate cliffs? Disable them. Feeling stressed from the external pressure that enemies provide? Disable them. Etc...
• benlivengood 6y ago
  Factorio; the only game I've seen with timeseries, graphs, tiered alarms and notifications, and you get to automate yourself out of a job. It's like SRE 101. I love it of course.
• atum47 6y ago
  it's very inspiring to see factorio in the first place on HN. It's been a while that I'm trying to publish a successful game. I read that the version 1.0 took you 8.5 years. Do you mind talking a little bit about that? Were you always funded? Did you had any investors?
• avery42 6y ago
  I think it's fairly well-known at this point, but I find it interesting that the game will never be on sale [0]: > We state it on our steam page, but people are still asking about it so I want to state it officially. We don't plan any Factorio sale. I'm aware, that the sale can make a lot of money in a short period of time, but I believe that it is not worth it in the long run, and since we are not in financial pressure we can afford to think in the long run. We don't like sales for the same reason we don't like the 9.99 prices. We want to be honest with our customers. When it costs 20, we don't want to make it feel like 10 and something. The same is with the sale, as you are basically saying, that someone who doesn't want to waste his time by searching for sales or special offers has to pay more. I like their reasoning, and I think it helps to show how focused they are on the quality of the game (as well as, you know, 8 years of early access). [0] https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-140 https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-140
  • markus_zhang 6y ago
    It's an interesting and strong technique I actually hope more games take on, even as a player.
    • fileeditview 6y ago
      I also like it. But I doubt that most games can afford to take a stand like that. Only the most well received can do this IMHO. There are always people only secondarily interested in a game. Maybe it's not their first priority genre or whatever. If the game company needs to convert as many customers as possible, staying with the same price forever probably won't work out.
      • thendrill 6y ago
        Exactly.... Making bad games and then making money off said bad games is just bad for everyone.
        • Alupis 6y ago
          I think sadly this mindset really limits their playerbase, and will ultimately expedite the decline of the game and online community. Steam Sales have a massive effect on games - thousands of new players try the game simply because it happens to be 15% off today or whatever. Even the "Free Weekend" play converts thousands of players that find the game fun. It makes trying out a new indie-type game feel less like a risk. Now that Factorio has real competition in this type of building game (Satisfactory - which I highly recommend if you liked Factorio), they might discover their principled stance against any Sale might waver a bit. To each their own I suppose. One day, Factorio will be on sale... once the playerbase dries up and they desperately try to inject life into the game. Or not... maybe they let it wilt away... which would be a real shame.
• grensley 6y ago
  I always find I start running out of patience for the game once I get to fluids.
• stormbeard 6y ago
  I used to love this game, but stopped playing once I heard about Satisfactory. It just takes things to a different level.
  • octorian 6y ago
    I've spent some time playing Satisfactory, but the first-person view often makes it too cumbersome to actually organize/align everything properly.
  • munchbunny 6y ago
    Satisfactory scratches the same itches, but it's a less deep game than Factorio. That's not a bad thing (Rimworld vs. Dwarf Fortress comes to mind), but personally the transition to 3-D didn't do much for me, and the reduced complexity of production layouts in Satisfactory made it less interesting for me.
• karpathy 6y ago
  Addicting and dangerous. When I was in the thick of it my nights were restless as my brain continued to spin on my factory and various ideas for its refactoring. I also suddenly can't not see our global economy and its gradual automation as a massive ongoing MMORPG game of Factorio. The end state then becomes as clear as the state of my final factory - we'd feed raw renewable energy into the system and automatically manufacture an abundance of all goods that people desire. Maybe they all just pop out of the automaton and we gradually lose ability to understand it, fix it, improve it, etc. Depressing. :)
  • akozak 6y ago
    It's sort of that way today, except there are disempowered wage workers powering it all and not-so-clean energy.
    • Meph504 6y ago
      A large element of factorio is that as you scale up, you generate more pollution, and then slaughter the native population of the planet because they try and stop you from destroying their world. It's an aspect of the game I think most doesn't seem to give a lot of thought.
      • pm90 6y ago
        I think this is the most brilliant aspects of the game. Throughout history, colonization has always required the demonization of the colonized people. Savages, barbarians, white mans burden etc. Now a typical factorio player would be aghast for murdering humanoids to take over their resources ( or maybe they wouldn’t? Could be an interesting mod!). But we know those slimy brainless insects are just reactive monsters. But even more... if you play the game, the early waves of the natives can actually do a lot of damage if you aren’t too careful, and can even kill ya. So the game instructs you to absolutely hate these creatures and to fear them. And when you finally build a base large enough to defend itself from hordes and hordes of natives, you feel rather proud, rather than feeling aghast at the carnage. There is a visceral hatred the game has taught you for these “enemies”.
• jeremyis 6y ago
  This is one of the most clever and engaging games I’ve ever played. When myself and some friends discovered it, it ate up hundreds of hours of our time in the matter of a few months .... per person. It’s basically visual programming with monsters.
• EndXA 6y ago
  An interesting AMA with the founder of Factorio from a few years back: https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/6e6tkw/im_the_founder_of_factorio_kovarex_ama/ https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/6e6tkw/im_the_fou...
• wadkar 6y ago
  If you want to see how complex and yet beautiful this game can get, checkout Nilaus’ Factorio Master Class on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLV3rF--heRVu2xlDGZiRbdb7nbwzM9Vyz https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLV3rF--heRVu2xlDGZiRb... He also made those designs with community participation on his Twitch stream if you’re into watching old streams. I believe he is one of the best Factorio content creator. I also want to mention about how Factorio developers have been continuously blogging their weekly updates, FFF - Friday Factorio Facts throughout the development. They’re really interesting and show how the game evolved and it’s history.
• spiral90210 6y ago
  One of the single greatest games for programmers ever written. Buy it.
• mdoms 6y ago
  The problem with these very long early access periods is that I was deeply bored with this game well before the final release. I can't imagine I'm the only one.
• novaRom 6y ago
  Wish to have this on mobile phone...
• ffrtffff 6y ago
  Fff
• bootlooped 6y ago
  If you scroll through the Steam reviews it's not infrequent to see people with over 1,000 hours in this game. I've seen one person with over 11,000 hours in game.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
  Most of that website works without JavaScript!
• a6h 6y ago
  I'm genuinely afraid of trying this game.
• miguelmota 6y ago
  There's so much overlap between programming and Factorio which is probably why I enjoy playing it. It's like visually creating algorithms. You get to build and compose things from smaller pieces and then create larger things on top of previously built machines and so on while also learning how things work along the way.
• all_blue_chucks 6y ago
  Blocked by Windows Smart Screen Filter. Curious way to manage a release.
• iamjohnsears 6y ago
  Heard about this game from Tobi Lutke on a podcast. Bought the early access version while I was in bed recovering from surgery and promptly lost track of the next eight hours. Didn't play for a couple weeks after that, then lost a weekend. Terrific game-- it really does build the muscle to search for the bottleneck in any process.
• ezoe 6y ago
  I wasted 2000 hours for this game. Highly addictive.
• cabite 6y ago
  How good is this game as an introduction to programming for kids ?
• simonebrunozzi 6y ago
  Provocation: if I ever do another (tech) startup in the future, I want to only hire that have played Factorio (I haven't). I would be curious to see if the company can be wildly successful solely based on this criterion.