10 ms·

Factorio 1.1 is getting close

201 points by parsecs 6y ago

jl6 6y ago
It’s such an addictive game, I’m starting to worry that the developers themselves have become addicted to developing it - literally any other dev team would have declared it finished years ago and moved on to making Factorio 2. We are very lucky they have such commitment to quality.
- LanceH 6y ago
  Factorio 2 needs to be able to delve into the RTS genre and let two people fight it between their bases with robots.
  - SteveNuts 6y ago
    This would get ALL my money
    - boogies 6y ago
      Didn’t see this before posting my sibling comment, so I edited it to replace the Free download link https://anuke.itch.io/mindustry https://anuke.itch.io/mindustry with a paid Steam one :) (not affiliated, just biased to “shill” Free software :))
  - boogies 6y ago
    IIUC Mindustry (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1127400/Mindustry/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1127400/Mindustry/) has that feature.
- heelix 6y ago
  This is one of the few games that has gotten more expensive the older it gets.
TameAntelope 6y ago
The biter pathfinding issues Nilaus is experiencing in his Death World playthrough on YouTube seem pretty rough, I don't have specific knowledge about if fixes to that issue are making it into 1.1, but I hope so. Generally, I very much enjoy watching other people play Factorio, I myself don't have the time to do it in a way I'd consider "right".
- aaronscott 6y ago
  I experience that feeling too after watching other people play. It's hard not to compare my current progress with folks that have mastered various aspects or who have been playing for years. That said - my first 100 hours or so were without outside influence and were pure fun.
aaronscott 6y ago
I enjoy that this was posted to HN. Factorio combines all the fun parts of my day job (algorithms, simple maths, tackling solvable problems) with a fairly quick reward cycle. It has some very fun scaling challenges at every level of play. For anyone interested in trying it out they have a free and feature rich demo available (either through their site or steam).
- hobby-coder-guy 6y ago
  Maths?
- yboris 6y ago
  I absolutely love that there is no cost to relocating your constructions other than the time you spend doing it. This means you can iterate, try different designs, and refactor. No pain akin to many other games' setup where you "sell" a structure for less than for what you "bought" it for.
  - MPSimmons 6y ago
    Totally agree. I bought the game after the 1.0 release and unlearning my hesitancy to do a first janky build took a while, but it was very rewarding once I got used to it.
  - vbezhenar 6y ago
    There's an implicit cost. Time is a factor for the alien evolution. So if you'll spend too much time relocating your constructions, you might fall behind aliens and will spend lots of resources to defend your base. That'll slow down your research and you'll fall behind more. Actually that's the only thing that I don't like in this game, I wish developers would rebalance the game with 0 time contribution to evolution, as I really love to spend lots of time thinking and rebuilding things and I hate that feeling that I need to move faster. I know that it's easy to change coefficients in the game creation screen, but for some reason I don't like this approach and prefer to play the game with built-in presets (also, I think, achievements are disabled with custom game presets).
drilldrive 6y ago
Meaning this in the nicest way possible, but is there more to this game than spending hours at a time micromanaging? I do that at work anyways, don't want to bring that into a hobby.
- NickBusey 6y ago
  No. But it sure is satisfying watching a new belt line get loaded for the first time.
- hackcasual 6y ago
  This game is kind of the opposite of micromanaging, though I can understand why it would seem like it is. There's an old joke about golf "The goal of the game is to play as little of it as possible," which is also very true for factorio. As you advance through the tech tree, previous things you did manually you'll automate more. There's an achievement called "Lazy Bastard" that forces you to do a bare minimum amount of manual work.
  - rstupek 6y ago
    well not exactly minimum amount of manual work, just a limited amount of handcrafting. you still have to lay out and place things down yourself (until you get robots)
  - kevincox 6y ago
    Although let's not kid ourselves. Lazy Bastard is way more work then just playing normally :D
    - mtnygard 6y ago
      It's a very particular definition of "lazy".
    - mdaniel 6y ago
      I believe that's true of all the achievements -- I'd guess that's why they're "achievements" (although I believe some games include normal game milestones as achievements just for the dopamine hit)
eCa 6y ago
The fact that belt building wasn't done in line (and not possible to do in line) was actually one of my big pet peeves[1]. In a game done with so much attention to detail, this always felt like a big omission. [1] Before I stopped playing due to it taking so much time
- hackcasual 6y ago
  Belt spraying is actually a valid building strategy especially if you're doing something like building a bus
  - jcranmer 6y ago
    Yeah, this is definitely a situation where both UX approaches are completely valid, and it's hard for me to justify one over the other all the time.
    - hackcasual 6y ago
      Would be nice if they had a setting that was like "straight lines only in spidertron." By the time I've got a spider, then I'm usually laying buses down via blueprints
  - eCa 6y ago
    Agreed, I would probably have hidden this behind ctrl (or similar) to give the player a choice.
  - yboris 6y ago
    I have enabled the mod which lets you place items as far as your screen shows. So you can spray far into the distance (without having to be nearby).
- jluxenberg 6y ago
  Pro tip: to build in a line before 1.1, click to place a belt and then move the character in a cardinal direction with one of W/S/A/D while holding the mouse button down. You can lay a straight line of any item this way (including e.g. pipe, etc)
freehunter 6y ago
Factorio is one of a handful of games I really wish I could play more but 1) I don’t spend enough time at my desktop to actually play it and 2) Could work very well on a tablet so it could be played anywher. Fortunately a lot of games on that list (Civilization VI, Prison Architect, FTL, etc) have been ported to tablets, but I’m really waiting on Factorio and Rimworld. I know these small developers don’t have an infinite budget so I don’t expect anything of them unless it makes sense for their team, but unfortunately it does mean I’m less likely to play them. Which is a big shame because I’m pretty sure I would love Factorio.
- dragontamer 6y ago
  There's no way a Tablet can give a good Factorio experience. Fundamentally, the user-interface is baked into the game. Every button-click, every key, has a purpose. Lets list the things that you must do in Factorio: 1. Move the avatar -- WASD keys + shoot + weapon select. The combat system includes grenades of various types, auto-firing machineguns, and deployment of various "combat bots". Given the typical tablet gestures (click, click-and-hold, two-finger press, etc. etc.), there's simply not enough gestures to handle all movement and battle commands. 2. Building -- Even in combat, building items is common. I often build power-poles + electric turrets as part of my combat push into biter-land. Buildings can be rotated (4-rotations), shadow-built (you don't place a real building: just a shadow of one. Then a bot places a real one at a later time), or copy/pasted. Given the typical tablet gestures (click, click-and-hold, two-finger press, etc. etc.), there's simply not enough gestures to handle all building commands. 3. Advanced UIs -- #1 and #2 give you an idea of how detailed the controls of Factorio are. But this extends dramatically to all entities in the game. Editing an inserter? That's a custom GUI (inserter filters, inserter stack sizes, inserter direction, inserter-rotation). Building a train-track? Custom GUI. Combinator logic? Custom GUI. Train-scheduling? Custom GUI. ----- Maybe a Factorio could be rebuilt from scratch on the Tablet form factor. But I severely doubt it. Almost every key on the keyboard is bound to a command, all mouse buttons (zoom, scroll, right-click, left click, and more) are bound to commands. And there are even "vi-like" hotkeys for the shortcut bar, allowing you to swap custom items into your toolbelt because we still don't have enough buttons to do things in Factorio. A hypothetical "Tablet Factorio" would have to grossly simplify mechanics, and reduce the number of "modes" the game has. Its hard to tell that all these modes exist in Factorio, because the UI just so naturally teaches you the hotkeys and the buttons to push in all circumstances. But when you break it down, there's "too many modes" to really cram into a GUI. And mind you: unlike Civilization, Factorio is Realtime. Biters are FAR faster than the player in the early game, they bum-rush you and block your movement. Every fraction of a second you waste with controls is another biter that comes up to start nom-noming you. Touch-screen interfaces are just too slow for combat. ------- EDIT: And all of these GUIs interact with each other in "logical" ways. If you want to drive a tank (or even a train) while ordering bots to deploy blueprinted Laser Turrets, you can do that in Factorio. But maybe the biter swarm was stronger than you expected, so you're going to retreat. You disable your personal roboport, swap out for some exoskeletons (+Speed), exit the tank, load a nuclear bomb into the rocket launcher, then run back to your base while nuking the biters who are chasing you. You can seamlessly transition between situations, realtime. All the GUIs of Factorio interact with each other seamlessly.
Vaslo 6y ago
If I can make a recommendation for folks who like this game. I have been playing a game called Dual Universe and I think it fits this exact crowd. It has a heavy industry component where you can build a simple amount of machines or hundreds of them. More so I think the folks of this site would enjoy some of the realism of space flight. While some rules are bent, you need to do actual physics calcs to get your ship flying into space to escape gravity depending on weight etc. Still in beta but reminds me a lot of factorio and I think it will move closer and closer towards it. Warning that if you are into sci-fi and problem solving that Dual Universe will be a time sink.
- blargmaster42_8 6y ago
  It's a MMO thus is will be grinding, f that.
- LEARAX 6y ago
  That appears to be a Windows-only game using a fairly pricey subscription model. Looking at gameplay of it, it seems to have potential, but it also looks very janky and unfinished. Maybe after a few more years of development.
- asdfman123 6y ago
  I was probably better off not knowing about this. "Satisfactory" is also really good for people who like this kind of game and are looking to lose 80+ hours.
  - psyc 6y ago
    Satisfactory is blowing my mind right now. What a time to be alive.
    - asdfman123 6y ago
      Sorry
  - waterhouse 6y ago
    On an earlier thread, someone posted several links to this guy doing insane things with Satisfactory, which are exceptionally entertaining. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jEjA00O8z0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jEjA00O8z0 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2X3wlvoShg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2X3wlvoShg
louwrentius 6y ago
I'm far beyond the point of having any shame about the fact that I have about 2500 hours in this game. This game only starts when you launch your first rocket. Building huge Megabases is where the real fun lies for me, and that's probably true for most players. Trying for a target such as consumption of 10K science packs per minute, sustained. The size of that kind of factory is beyond anything, but it is awesome. Unfortunately, I'm discovering that my DDR3 era PC can't cope with such large bases, I need faster gear...
- sandworm101 6y ago
  2500? Noob. You aren't serious about factorio until you are measuring your case for a threadripper mobo.
  - improof 6y ago
    racist!!
  - leetcrew 6y ago
    maybe I'm taking this post too seriously, but I thought the consensus was that factorio is mostly bottlenecked on memory bandwidth?
    - Dylan16807 6y ago
      In that case still threadripper for more memory channels, but specifically a low-core version? But in that case you can do even better than building your own. The OEM-only WX line has 8-channel memory, and the cheapest one is a reasonable 12 cores.
      - leetcrew 6y ago
        good point! kind of absurd, but then again I'm the type of person to buy a 9700k and overclock it to 5GHz just to get more frames in csgo.
- psyc 6y ago
hirundo 6y ago
I love this game and have 1k+ hours in it. But version 1.0 is a mature, fully realized game. It's a great game, and enough. Out of pure selfishness I'd like to see this brilliant team call it done, and start on their next big thing.
- BenoitP 6y ago
  My secret wish is that they start working on Factorio 2 with a new item state-memoizing game engine. Let me explain. Conway's game of life organisms' different states can be memoized. Starting the simulation slowly, an engine can memoize the following computations. This is what Hashlife [1] does. Quoting from Wikipedia: "the rapid increase in speed is often described as "exploding"." So much so that this kind of thing is possible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP5-iIeKXE8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP5-iIeKXE8 Simulating the next ticks just entail looking up the future. Except for things the users touch. Since Factorio is a game about reaching the next scale of automation, I believe this is a worthy follow-up to Factorio 1. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashlife https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashlife
  - dexwiz 6y ago
    That sounds interesting, but what is the game here? Fractal factories where you build the internals, it memoizes a series of states, and then you can use that as a black box when building the layer above? Actually that does sound pretty cool.
    - BenoitP 6y ago
      Oh, I forgot to mention that megabases currently are CPU limited. A truly new kind of megabase would be enabled by it.
      - dexwiz 6y ago
        SpaceChem had a similar version of this. You started by building individual factories and later puzzles had you assembling multiple factories together. You could choose to try to cram several steps into few, complex factories, or spread out simple steps over many factories. I think SpaceChem is similar to Factorio, in that there is no single solution. The designer of SpaceChem said he just tried to create interesting problems, but didn't spend too much time going through possible solutions. Factorio is similar, in that there are set recipes, but how you move from one to another is completely up to you.
tdy721 6y ago
If you have played this game. I highly recommend scrolling to the bottom of this page to take a look.
AceJohnny2 6y ago
Anecdote: I was just last night trying to debug a relatively complex nuclear power plant blueprint [1]. Nuclear plants can be complicated in the game because they will consume their (expensive!) fuel even if it's not necessary, so people have constructed sophisticated logic systems to only feed fuel to the power plants when it's actually required. For some reason, the blueprint I copied wouldn't feed new fuel into the power plants, and my factory ground to a halt for lack of power! Not being fluent in Factorio's logic networks, I spent a couple hours trying to understand the logic connections and operations that made this system work. And just as I write this, I find that a modified copy [2] (don't call it a fork :p) of the blueprint calls out my issue explicitly: if there is no fuel available to refuel, the system will wedge itself and effectively need to be rebooted! The whole experience was amusingly similar to my job ^^; [1] https://www.factorio.school/view/-LGzh1rL3S0dU-eJHfcr https://www.factorio.school/view/-LGzh1rL3S0dU-eJHfcr [2] https://www.factorio.school/view/-La0aDEtd6Y4XlrpCfgW https://www.factorio.school/view/-La0aDEtd6Y4XlrpCfgW
- wyldfire 6y ago
  >if there is no fuel available to refuel, the system will wedge itself and effectively need to be rebooted! Komrade, clearly there is nothing wrong with the design. You just forgot to press the AZ-5 button.
- jcranmer 6y ago
  There's a pretty simple solution to the power problem: You can measure the flow of steam in the system by dropping two tanks in series in the pipe and finding their difference in level--the difference is proportional to the amount of steam being consumed. After some experimentation in creative mode, I found the difference level that corresponds to the need to enable another reactor. Then I set up the inserters to each plant to only take in new fuel cells when the steam draw exceeds the relevant threshold. This does have some waste in that it doesn't count for hysteresis, and it doesn't try to prevent the reactors from filling up, but at the level of megabase I had, that level of waste wasn't an issue for me.
  - AgentME 6y ago
eeZah7Ux 6y ago
No mention of Mindustry?
loosetypes 6y ago
This game looks amazing. While Empire Earth never seemed to get quite as big as many other rts games, I think certain macro-management aspects of gameplay flew under the radar. For example: 1-click to set units to explore; when multiple units were selected they would fan out to decrease fog of war. Multi unit formation setting, to dictate the spread factor between units when moving and fighting. Setting indefinite patrol loops (although I think I recall other games having this?). It’s been a while since I’ve played the genre, and it seems like factorio’s really nailed the set and forget - but allow tinkering - for base management. What I want is similar automation for army control, that’s always the piece that gets tiresome with, for example, Starcraft for me. Ultimately, I want to write a script for my civilization and be able to step into the fold to take over manual control as necessary. And then update my script. If that’s too much, being able to just define action buttons that execute scripts for selections of a certain composition. And of course to run it in a a competitive environment against other people and see what we can all come up with :)
dpc_pw 6y ago
Ah... Factorio. The best job you'll ever have.

201 points by parsecs 6y ago

jl6 6y ago

It’s such an addictive game, I’m starting to worry that the developers themselves have become addicted to developing it - literally any other dev team would have declared it finished years ago and moved on to making Factorio 2. We are very lucky they have such commitment to quality.

LanceH 6y ago
Factorio 2 needs to be able to delve into the RTS genre and let two people fight it between their bases with robots.
- SteveNuts 6y ago
  This would get ALL my money
  - boogies 6y ago
    Didn’t see this before posting my sibling comment, so I edited it to replace the Free download link https://anuke.itch.io/mindustry https://anuke.itch.io/mindustry with a paid Steam one :) (not affiliated, just biased to “shill” Free software :))
- boogies 6y ago
  IIUC Mindustry (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1127400/Mindustry/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1127400/Mindustry/) has that feature.
heelix 6y ago
This is one of the few games that has gotten more expensive the older it gets.

TameAntelope 6y ago

The biter pathfinding issues Nilaus is experiencing in his Death World playthrough on YouTube seem pretty rough, I don't have specific knowledge about if fixes to that issue are making it into 1.1, but I hope so. Generally, I very much enjoy watching other people play Factorio, I myself don't have the time to do it in a way I'd consider "right".

aaronscott 6y ago
I experience that feeling too after watching other people play. It's hard not to compare my current progress with folks that have mastered various aspects or who have been playing for years. That said - my first 100 hours or so were without outside influence and were pure fun.

aaronscott 6y ago

I enjoy that this was posted to HN. Factorio combines all the fun parts of my day job (algorithms, simple maths, tackling solvable problems) with a fairly quick reward cycle. It has some very fun scaling challenges at every level of play. For anyone interested in trying it out they have a free and feature rich demo available (either through their site or steam).

hobby-coder-guy 6y ago
Maths?
yboris 6y ago
I absolutely love that there is no cost to relocating your constructions other than the time you spend doing it. This means you can iterate, try different designs, and refactor. No pain akin to many other games' setup where you "sell" a structure for less than for what you "bought" it for.
- MPSimmons 6y ago
  Totally agree. I bought the game after the 1.0 release and unlearning my hesitancy to do a first janky build took a while, but it was very rewarding once I got used to it.
- vbezhenar 6y ago
  There's an implicit cost. Time is a factor for the alien evolution. So if you'll spend too much time relocating your constructions, you might fall behind aliens and will spend lots of resources to defend your base. That'll slow down your research and you'll fall behind more. Actually that's the only thing that I don't like in this game, I wish developers would rebalance the game with 0 time contribution to evolution, as I really love to spend lots of time thinking and rebuilding things and I hate that feeling that I need to move faster. I know that it's easy to change coefficients in the game creation screen, but for some reason I don't like this approach and prefer to play the game with built-in presets (also, I think, achievements are disabled with custom game presets).

drilldrive 6y ago

Meaning this in the nicest way possible, but is there more to this game than spending hours at a time micromanaging? I do that at work anyways, don't want to bring that into a hobby.

NickBusey 6y ago
No. But it sure is satisfying watching a new belt line get loaded for the first time.
hackcasual 6y ago
This game is kind of the opposite of micromanaging, though I can understand why it would seem like it is. There's an old joke about golf "The goal of the game is to play as little of it as possible," which is also very true for factorio. As you advance through the tech tree, previous things you did manually you'll automate more. There's an achievement called "Lazy Bastard" that forces you to do a bare minimum amount of manual work.
- rstupek 6y ago
  well not exactly minimum amount of manual work, just a limited amount of handcrafting. you still have to lay out and place things down yourself (until you get robots)
- kevincox 6y ago
  Although let's not kid ourselves. Lazy Bastard is way more work then just playing normally :D
  - mtnygard 6y ago
    It's a very particular definition of "lazy".
  - mdaniel 6y ago
    I believe that's true of all the achievements -- I'd guess that's why they're "achievements" (although I believe some games include normal game milestones as achievements just for the dopamine hit)

eCa 6y ago

The fact that belt building wasn't done in line (and not possible to do in line) was actually one of my big pet peeves[1]. In a game done with so much attention to detail, this always felt like a big omission. [1] Before I stopped playing due to it taking so much time

hackcasual 6y ago
Belt spraying is actually a valid building strategy especially if you're doing something like building a bus
- jcranmer 6y ago
  Yeah, this is definitely a situation where both UX approaches are completely valid, and it's hard for me to justify one over the other all the time.
  - hackcasual 6y ago
    Would be nice if they had a setting that was like "straight lines only in spidertron." By the time I've got a spider, then I'm usually laying buses down via blueprints
- eCa 6y ago
  Agreed, I would probably have hidden this behind ctrl (or similar) to give the player a choice.
- yboris 6y ago
  I have enabled the mod which lets you place items as far as your screen shows. So you can spray far into the distance (without having to be nearby).
jluxenberg 6y ago
Pro tip: to build in a line before 1.1, click to place a belt and then move the character in a cardinal direction with one of W/S/A/D while holding the mouse button down. You can lay a straight line of any item this way (including e.g. pipe, etc)

freehunter 6y ago

Factorio is one of a handful of games I really wish I could play more but 1) I don’t spend enough time at my desktop to actually play it and 2) Could work very well on a tablet so it could be played anywher. Fortunately a lot of games on that list (Civilization VI, Prison Architect, FTL, etc) have been ported to tablets, but I’m really waiting on Factorio and Rimworld. I know these small developers don’t have an infinite budget so I don’t expect anything of them unless it makes sense for their team, but unfortunately it does mean I’m less likely to play them. Which is a big shame because I’m pretty sure I would love Factorio.

dragontamer 6y ago
There's no way a Tablet can give a good Factorio experience. Fundamentally, the user-interface is baked into the game. Every button-click, every key, has a purpose. Lets list the things that you must do in Factorio: 1. Move the avatar -- WASD keys + shoot + weapon select. The combat system includes grenades of various types, auto-firing machineguns, and deployment of various "combat bots". Given the typical tablet gestures (click, click-and-hold, two-finger press, etc. etc.), there's simply not enough gestures to handle all movement and battle commands. 2. Building -- Even in combat, building items is common. I often build power-poles + electric turrets as part of my combat push into biter-land. Buildings can be rotated (4-rotations), shadow-built (you don't place a real building: just a shadow of one. Then a bot places a real one at a later time), or copy/pasted. Given the typical tablet gestures (click, click-and-hold, two-finger press, etc. etc.), there's simply not enough gestures to handle all building commands. 3. Advanced UIs -- #1 and #2 give you an idea of how detailed the controls of Factorio are. But this extends dramatically to all entities in the game. Editing an inserter? That's a custom GUI (inserter filters, inserter stack sizes, inserter direction, inserter-rotation). Building a train-track? Custom GUI. Combinator logic? Custom GUI. Train-scheduling? Custom GUI. ----- Maybe a Factorio could be rebuilt from scratch on the Tablet form factor. But I severely doubt it. Almost every key on the keyboard is bound to a command, all mouse buttons (zoom, scroll, right-click, left click, and more) are bound to commands. And there are even "vi-like" hotkeys for the shortcut bar, allowing you to swap custom items into your toolbelt because we still don't have enough buttons to do things in Factorio. A hypothetical "Tablet Factorio" would have to grossly simplify mechanics, and reduce the number of "modes" the game has. Its hard to tell that all these modes exist in Factorio, because the UI just so naturally teaches you the hotkeys and the buttons to push in all circumstances. But when you break it down, there's "too many modes" to really cram into a GUI. And mind you: unlike Civilization, Factorio is Realtime. Biters are FAR faster than the player in the early game, they bum-rush you and block your movement. Every fraction of a second you waste with controls is another biter that comes up to start nom-noming you. Touch-screen interfaces are just too slow for combat. ------- EDIT: And all of these GUIs interact with each other in "logical" ways. If you want to drive a tank (or even a train) while ordering bots to deploy blueprinted Laser Turrets, you can do that in Factorio. But maybe the biter swarm was stronger than you expected, so you're going to retreat. You disable your personal roboport, swap out for some exoskeletons (+Speed), exit the tank, load a nuclear bomb into the rocket launcher, then run back to your base while nuking the biters who are chasing you. You can seamlessly transition between situations, realtime. All the GUIs of Factorio interact with each other seamlessly.

Vaslo 6y ago

If I can make a recommendation for folks who like this game. I have been playing a game called Dual Universe and I think it fits this exact crowd. It has a heavy industry component where you can build a simple amount of machines or hundreds of them. More so I think the folks of this site would enjoy some of the realism of space flight. While some rules are bent, you need to do actual physics calcs to get your ship flying into space to escape gravity depending on weight etc. Still in beta but reminds me a lot of factorio and I think it will move closer and closer towards it. Warning that if you are into sci-fi and problem solving that Dual Universe will be a time sink.

blargmaster42_8 6y ago
It's a MMO thus is will be grinding, f that.
LEARAX 6y ago
That appears to be a Windows-only game using a fairly pricey subscription model. Looking at gameplay of it, it seems to have potential, but it also looks very janky and unfinished. Maybe after a few more years of development.
asdfman123 6y ago
I was probably better off not knowing about this. "Satisfactory" is also really good for people who like this kind of game and are looking to lose 80+ hours.
- psyc 6y ago
  Satisfactory is blowing my mind right now. What a time to be alive.
  - asdfman123 6y ago
    Sorry
- waterhouse 6y ago
  On an earlier thread, someone posted several links to this guy doing insane things with Satisfactory, which are exceptionally entertaining. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jEjA00O8z0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jEjA00O8z0 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2X3wlvoShg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2X3wlvoShg

louwrentius 6y ago

I'm far beyond the point of having any shame about the fact that I have about 2500 hours in this game. This game only starts when you launch your first rocket. Building huge Megabases is where the real fun lies for me, and that's probably true for most players. Trying for a target such as consumption of 10K science packs per minute, sustained. The size of that kind of factory is beyond anything, but it is awesome. Unfortunately, I'm discovering that my DDR3 era PC can't cope with such large bases, I need faster gear...

sandworm101 6y ago
2500? Noob. You aren't serious about factorio until you are measuring your case for a threadripper mobo.
- improof 6y ago
  racist!!
- leetcrew 6y ago
  maybe I'm taking this post too seriously, but I thought the consensus was that factorio is mostly bottlenecked on memory bandwidth?
  - Dylan16807 6y ago
    In that case still threadripper for more memory channels, but specifically a low-core version? But in that case you can do even better than building your own. The OEM-only WX line has 8-channel memory, and the cheapest one is a reasonable 12 cores.
    - leetcrew 6y ago
      good point! kind of absurd, but then again I'm the type of person to buy a 9700k and overclock it to 5GHz just to get more frames in csgo.
psyc 6y ago

hirundo 6y ago

I love this game and have 1k+ hours in it. But version 1.0 is a mature, fully realized game. It's a great game, and enough. Out of pure selfishness I'd like to see this brilliant team call it done, and start on their next big thing.

BenoitP 6y ago
My secret wish is that they start working on Factorio 2 with a new item state-memoizing game engine. Let me explain. Conway's game of life organisms' different states can be memoized. Starting the simulation slowly, an engine can memoize the following computations. This is what Hashlife [1] does. Quoting from Wikipedia: "the rapid increase in speed is often described as "exploding"." So much so that this kind of thing is possible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP5-iIeKXE8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP5-iIeKXE8 Simulating the next ticks just entail looking up the future. Except for things the users touch. Since Factorio is a game about reaching the next scale of automation, I believe this is a worthy follow-up to Factorio 1. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashlife https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashlife
- dexwiz 6y ago
  That sounds interesting, but what is the game here? Fractal factories where you build the internals, it memoizes a series of states, and then you can use that as a black box when building the layer above? Actually that does sound pretty cool.
  - BenoitP 6y ago
    Oh, I forgot to mention that megabases currently are CPU limited. A truly new kind of megabase would be enabled by it.
    - dexwiz 6y ago
      SpaceChem had a similar version of this. You started by building individual factories and later puzzles had you assembling multiple factories together. You could choose to try to cram several steps into few, complex factories, or spread out simple steps over many factories. I think SpaceChem is similar to Factorio, in that there is no single solution. The designer of SpaceChem said he just tried to create interesting problems, but didn't spend too much time going through possible solutions. Factorio is similar, in that there are set recipes, but how you move from one to another is completely up to you.

tdy721 6y ago

If you have played this game. I highly recommend scrolling to the bottom of this page to take a look.

AceJohnny2 6y ago

Anecdote: I was just last night trying to debug a relatively complex nuclear power plant blueprint [1]. Nuclear plants can be complicated in the game because they will consume their (expensive!) fuel even if it's not necessary, so people have constructed sophisticated logic systems to only feed fuel to the power plants when it's actually required. For some reason, the blueprint I copied wouldn't feed new fuel into the power plants, and my factory ground to a halt for lack of power! Not being fluent in Factorio's logic networks, I spent a couple hours trying to understand the logic connections and operations that made this system work. And just as I write this, I find that a modified copy [2] (don't call it a fork :p) of the blueprint calls out my issue explicitly: if there is no fuel available to refuel, the system will wedge itself and effectively need to be rebooted! The whole experience was amusingly similar to my job ^^; [1] https://www.factorio.school/view/-LGzh1rL3S0dU-eJHfcr https://www.factorio.school/view/-LGzh1rL3S0dU-eJHfcr [2] https://www.factorio.school/view/-La0aDEtd6Y4XlrpCfgW https://www.factorio.school/view/-La0aDEtd6Y4XlrpCfgW

wyldfire 6y ago
>if there is no fuel available to refuel, the system will wedge itself and effectively need to be rebooted! Komrade, clearly there is nothing wrong with the design. You just forgot to press the AZ-5 button.
jcranmer 6y ago
There's a pretty simple solution to the power problem: You can measure the flow of steam in the system by dropping two tanks in series in the pipe and finding their difference in level--the difference is proportional to the amount of steam being consumed. After some experimentation in creative mode, I found the difference level that corresponds to the need to enable another reactor. Then I set up the inserters to each plant to only take in new fuel cells when the steam draw exceeds the relevant threshold. This does have some waste in that it doesn't count for hysteresis, and it doesn't try to prevent the reactors from filling up, but at the level of megabase I had, that level of waste wasn't an issue for me.
- AgentME 6y ago

eeZah7Ux 6y ago

No mention of Mindustry?

loosetypes 6y ago

This game looks amazing. While Empire Earth never seemed to get quite as big as many other rts games, I think certain macro-management aspects of gameplay flew under the radar. For example: 1-click to set units to explore; when multiple units were selected they would fan out to decrease fog of war. Multi unit formation setting, to dictate the spread factor between units when moving and fighting. Setting indefinite patrol loops (although I think I recall other games having this?). It’s been a while since I’ve played the genre, and it seems like factorio’s really nailed the set and forget - but allow tinkering - for base management. What I want is similar automation for army control, that’s always the piece that gets tiresome with, for example, Starcraft for me. Ultimately, I want to write a script for my civilization and be able to step into the fold to take over manual control as necessary. And then update my script. If that’s too much, being able to just define action buttons that execute scripts for selections of a certain composition. And of course to run it in a a competitive environment against other people and see what we can all come up with :)

dpc_pw 6y ago

Ah... Factorio. The best job you'll ever have.