13 ms·

Factorio Future Plans

246 points by parsecs 6y ago

monk_e_boy 6y ago
As someone who doesn't code all day any longer, factorio really tickles that part of my brain. Every problem that needs to be overcome, every obstacle in the path, every idiotic decision I curse is something I did previously just to get things working. Then I run out of space. Or I need to pipe water in. Or a factory is outputting to the left when outputting to the right would be a better decision .... hmm ... do I move 200 componenets or just ... slap a train station in? Or 1,000 belts? ARGH! I've done it again!
- qu-everything 6y ago
  yea, the amount of times I chose to do the hacky thing just to get it working, thinking I'll fix it later... Let's just say I never learn
detaro 6y ago
These are fun "metrics": 2.7 → 0.42 → 0.34 lines of code per one buyer 0 → 2.3 → 4.4 years of playtime per resolved bug report 0 → 4 → 8 months of Steam playtime per one commit 0 → 9.1 → 37 days of Steam play for each line of code
- resonanttoe 6y ago
  They are neat! I got inexplicably a huge grin reading these. It's just cool to see how it all breaks down :D
- professor_v 6y ago
  They should write more lines of code, they'll be rich!
  - Majromax 6y ago
    I think that's literally what they intend to do with an expansion pack, after all.
- Bakary 6y ago
  If there are 0.34 lines per buyer and 37 days per line, does that mean that the average playtime could be in the proximity of 12½ days? That's impressive, and is probably much higher if you take into account the traditionally large number of Steam who don't install many of their purchases.
  - jonfw 6y ago
    I'm sure this is also affected by a large number of 'idle' hours where people are running it in the background or something
    - Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
      I did that on my first playthough. Getting those 1000 blue circuits was going to take awhile, and rather than fix my bottlenecks to speed it up, I just went to bed and let the game run overnight.
  - skykooler 6y ago
    Something that may contribute to that may be that Factorio has never been part of a Steam sale or bundle, which is where I suspect most of those "owned but never played" games come from.
speeder 6y ago
Just a helpful note for those that saw they want programmers: You must be hire-able in EU, because they can't afford to sponsor people. Sadly this doesn't include me :(
tompazourek 6y ago
> 38 870 years of combined playtime played on Steam Wow, that's some real impact, seems crazy to me.
- philjackson 6y ago
  38,000 might be me. :(
- penteract 6y ago
  It's not exclusively sold on steam, so that's an underestimate :).
  - SloopJon 6y ago
    All things being equal, I'd choose GOG over Steam, but there are some complaints about delayed updates and/or needing to register for updates on the developer's web site. Can any GOG customers comment on their experience?
k__ 6y ago
OT: Anyone here played "Dyson Sphere Program"? Is it good? How does it compare to Factorio?
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  Thanks for mentioning it. Looks fun, I may check it out. That said, here is my generic complaint for space games: could people please start making games where planets are the size of, well, planets? Or even 1/10 of a planet (like in Kerbal Space Program), but something that still reflects the sizes and distances of things in space?
  - faeyanpiraat 6y ago
    In ksp you can speed up time, otherwise it would be unplayable. Manipulating time might break other aspects of gameplay, so you are left with skewed scales of distance I guess?
    - me_me_me 6y ago
      Getting to the outside planets in KSP still take hours with max speed on. And that's 'only' 1/4 scale of the solar system :)
      - TeMPOraL 6y ago
        Not with max max speed on, but probably max you can afford without life support & electricity simulation mods breaking and killing your crew, if you're using those :).
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      Yeah, timewarp is crucial for this to work. But, looking at Dyson Sphere Program, space scenes seem to be already operating under a timewarp (which is implicit in the scaling factor). Modelling a whole solar system may be tough - planets are really big, and really really far away. But I think that, at the very least, a moon system would work. A central planet with half a dozen moons of varying sizes. Moons can be small and much closer - but they'd be still three or four orders of magnitude greater than what we see in most space games.
gigatexal 6y ago
The game is ridiculously popular and has a fan base that has means. Release paid DLCs, or even an entirely new game but keep monetizing. Free updates forever seems silly.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
  I agree. As much as free updates forever is great for those of us who get free stuff, modern games are already ludicrously inexpensive. The average new NES game would have been about $60. That's about $120 in today's money. Compare the average NES game's content and replay value to what you get today for $30.
gchadwick 6y ago
I'd really enjoy some kind of campaign expansion, a connected series of missions with specific goals and constraints. One of the tutorials, where you need to rebuild a half destroyed base (with satellite mining bases) aiming to produce a certain number of materials as the goal, is a nice example of what a campaign mission could be. I suspect they'll go off in a different direction, Factorio is more of a pure sandbox make your own fun kind of game but I think you could do some fun campaign stuff.
- Deestan 6y ago
  They had the main campaign like that for a while, but found that losing your build between missions didn't gel with how the game was supposed to be approached. https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-241 https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-241
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  They could probably fairly easily add on a progression system, expanding on top of the achievements. Like an extended tutorial.
zegl 6y ago
Factorio is my number one favourite game ever, and a large part of that is because of how open kovarex and the rest of the team has been during the whole development cycle, with the weekly development blogs etc. I've been a player for many years, and watching Factorio grow and get better over time has been very inspiring!
- gnulinux 6y ago
  Factorio is my favorite game ever as well. I never played any game more than 10 hours; except factorio in which I have... checks notes... 600 hours.
tasubotadas 6y ago
I am a big fan of Stellaris model - sizeable DLCs. This supports development of the game and introduces new exciting staff for me as a player gradually at a fast enough pace (~every 6 months).
timwaagh 6y ago
Because it's marketed as a 'big expansion pack' and not a 'dlc' they can price it at 20€ instead of 10€. Smart.
- tomalpha 6y ago
  This comes across as (perhaps unintentionally?) overly cynical to me. I purchased Factorio some years ago now, and have always had the feeling that I underpaid for it over that time despite playing a lot less than some friends I know. (I think I have a mere couple of hundred hours playtime which for any other game would be crazy high!) The devs have continuously worked on it in all that time. It’s not as if they had a bunch of expensive DLC lined up from day one as some AAA titles seem to these days.
- nindalf 6y ago
  I paid $30 for 90 hours of entertainment. That's how long it took to finish one game with my friends. You'll have a hard time convincing anyone that $0.33/hour isn't amazing value for entertainment. Whatever they price their expansion at, it'll be worth the money.
  - sorahn 6y ago
    The number of hours I have in this game is measured in thousands. And the first digit is not a 1. $30 was a steal.
    - vntx 6y ago
      So was $15. I tried out and bought the game before its v1.0 release and even then the game was exceptionally stable and polished.
    - Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
      How? Do you just leave the game running 24/7 even when you're not actively playing? What do you even do? I only have 50 hours in Factorio. After I launched my rocket, I didn't know what to do next and just kinda stopped playing.
pdpi 6y ago
A good alternative if you’d rather Factorio was 3D is Satisfactory.
lawl 6y ago
Very happy with their plans. I got more than my moneys worth out of factorio and I'm happy to buy DLCs (if they're not a scam of course, which given their track record I doubt they will be). But DLCs fragment the community and thats bad. So I think a big expansion DLC is indeed the best course.
- tpxl 6y ago
  > DLCs fragment the community Some games allow all players playing the DLC if the host has it installed. I think this is a nice way of doing it without fragmentation.
  - Arrath 6y ago
    This is probably the only saving grace to Paradox's DLC model. Its a very friendly way to do it.
i5heu 6y ago
Multiplanitary Factories would be awesome. And a way to build a Dyson Sphere ;)
- mpettitt 6y ago
  You mean https://store.steampowered.com/app/1366540/Dyson_Sphere_Program/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1366540/Dyson_Sphere_Prog... ?
  - i5heu 6y ago
    Yes but in factorio :) I like Dyson Sphere Program but factorio is vastly superior in regards of gameplay IMHO.
    - tpxl 6y ago
      > factorio is vastly superior in regards of gameplay I dare say Factorio is the best game in the genre!
      - gambiting 6y ago
        You misspelled Satisfactory ;-)
        linkdd 6y ago
        IMHO, the 2D top view is a way better interface to visualize your huge factories than a subjective view in a 3D world.
        fendy3002 6y ago
        As someone with potato laptop, I am forced to disagree
        Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
        I really wanted to enjoy Satisfactory, but I found the first-person view to be frustrating to actually work with. Also not a fan of how hard it is to get around the terrain in the early game. The jet pack needs to come much much sooner in the progression.
mrviolet 6y ago
Is this game multiplayer?
- lucb1e 6y ago
  Yes. Co-op, pvp, team production challenges, modded games, you name it. The default is co-op building the factory together. Can personally recommend the wave defense. Either start a server from the GUI or setup a headless linux server. Against griefers there is a permission system (if you're not online yourself to watch out, and if you are, you could also do it the KISS way and roll back a few minutes with the non-blocking autosaves). Not sure I ever typed a comment that must have sounded so much like an ad. Just a happy player... :-)
- nindalf 6y ago
  Possibly my favourite multiplayer game of all time. I found cooperative multiplayer is much more fun than competitive multiplayer. Also, it's so well optimised that it's very inclusive. Even friends who only had potatoes instead of PCs could join and play.
- npteljes 6y ago
  Both single and multiplayer.
- skykooler 6y ago
  Interestingly, it's the only game I know of that uses deterministic coding for multiplayer - rather than updating the game state for everyone (since there are potentially tens of thousands of moving items every tick), all clients simulate it locally using code verified to be deterministic so that everyone ends up with the same view of the game.
jstanley 6y ago
I know a lot of people who enjoy this game, and I am trying to get into it at the moment. I played a couple of hours earlier this week, and this is my review: The premise of the game is excellent. You have crashlanded on a remote planet and have to start from nothing, acquire resources, build tools, build machines, automate the acquisition of resources, etc., until you have developed enough technology that you can build a spaceship and flee the planet. Wow. There are 2 things I don't like. Firstly, I don't like the "biters" that come and destroy your base. I don't really think this adds to the game in any way. It feels like it was added to the game to make it appeal to the "gamer" demographic rather than the "programmer" demographic. If I'm working away on one corner of my base trying to solve automation problems, I don't want to have to run away and piss about shooting some pointless biters who are trying to destroy my stuff. I know the answer is "that's an automation problem too! build turrets!". But I just want to calmly play the game at my own pace, I don't want to have to be attending to urgent biter problems. I stopped playing the other day after biters destroyed a load of my stuff and I no longer felt invested in the game. That's not fun for me. I want to play the game, but I don't want my stuff getting destroyed if I do a subpar job of defending it. Secondly, (and this is partly related to the biters, but not completely), I find the game surprisingly stressful. I think this comes from the interplay between short-term and long-term problems. I don't know exactly what game mechanic causes it, but I think I would find it much more enjoyable if I could calmly work on problems without having to run around topping up coal and otherwise putting out non-automatable fires. Perhaps it's just the visuals of loads of materials stacking up on conveyor belts and going to the wrong places, and the kind of visceral feeling that the problem is getting worse for every second that it's not solved. I don't know. I don't find that relaxing. I will have another go though. I love the concept, and I haven't actually got to the end of the tutorial yet. I understand that when you start the proper game you can ask for "peaceful" mode which turns off biters, which sounds ideal for me.
- Thorentis 6y ago
  > I don't really think this adds to the game in any way. I think they are intended to push you along with development. Since they continue multiplying and evolve to become stronger if you don't destroy their bases, you need to make sure your tech develops and that you deal with them. It's meant to push you towards constantly improving your tech, rather than focusing on e.g. optimising your copper plate assembly lines for hours on end.
nindalf 6y ago
Part of me is happy about their decision to make an expansion because my friends and I can return to this amazing game in a year and enjoy a fresh experience. But I would have liked to see what else this amazing team could have done. Like maybe a city building simulation game, optimized as well as Factorio? Would have been amazing for sure.
- avereveard 6y ago
  spent hours optimizing traffic in sim city rush hours, it's a niche to be sure, but an unfulfilled one
  - Guthur 6y ago
    Cities skylines has a real good traffic simulation, some of mods make traffic control really sophisticated. Check out biffa plays YouTube channel for some great traffic optimisation.
    - lebowska 6y ago
      This is not true at all. The last SimCity was terrible in a lot of ways (online requirements, small areas, bugs, etc) but it had the best simulation out there: an one 1:1 car / population that made city and road planning a true joy for the nerdiest players like me. Literally every aspect of city planning had an impact on that simulation, and you could follow every car and knonw it was there for a reason. This means that if you have a really bad traffic state every aspect of your city goes on fire. On the other hand Cities skyline has a lot of other cool factors but traffic simulation comes really short. It is just derived from statistics of the city but there is no 1:1 link to be found, so you can just guess what aspects of the city has some coefficient on the traffic algorithm, and the worst part is that if you happen to plan something really wrong, well, nothing happens. Cars and utility veichles litterally start to DESPAWN from the road and the traffic jam goes puff. Yes the statistics go down a bit, but everything else goes on like nothing ever happened. That was the deal breaker for me
      - 6y ago
dhx 6y ago
I think one of the best parts of this game are some of the unique multiplayer mods that exist. If development was to focus on creating some really fun and polished multiplayer mods that would attract 50+ people continuously to each game, I'd happily pay a monthly/annual subscription. It's a shame though that typical multiplayer numbers are fairly low in the order of 20-40 players in each of the top 2 games, then 10-20 games averaging 5 players, and hundreds of empty games. I wonder what it could be like with a multiplayer tower defence style game with 100+ players, or with 5-10 innovative and fun multiplayer game types all filled with enough players to make each game viable? There are plenty of mods in this game that increase the number of resources, buildings, technologies, etc by a factor of 5 or more and I personally find this is far too complex and takes the fun out of the game and makes it too repetitive and clinical. Fragmenting the small-ish user community between "base game" and "DLC game" would possibly make the multiplayer experience non-existent due to low player numbers.
fake-name 6y ago
My feeling about this (and a lot of the similar games: opus magnum, spacechem, etc), is mixed. I like the idea of them, but I don't actually enjoy playing them. They feel so much like programming that I generally just go and actually work on programming projects. That way I get the same problem solving challenge, and the end result is something I can actually use. Why would I want to spend time solving made up problems when I can solve real problems in my hobby projects? These days, the games I find myself enjoying are games with a interesting story, or that are mechanically fun to play (e.g. twin stick shooters and similar).
louwrentius 6y ago
I have 2500+ hours in Factorio. I loved it. Love to read this. My 6+ year old computer can't handle the enormous factory complexes I like to build. Now I have switched over to my next hard drug addiction: -> Mindustry. <- https://anuke.itch.io/mindustry https://anuke.itch.io/mindustry Factorio + tower defence: it's awesome and runs on a potato.
- ganzsz 6y ago
  Thanks man, there goes my free time. Why did it have to have an Android version. Nice game though!
  - fendy3002 6y ago
    As good it is on mobile, the interface is so small and hard to navigate / build. Now I secretly want wube to tackle factorio mobile. Not as complex as desktop factorio of course, but I want to know what UX improvements they can achieve.
  - louwrentius 6y ago
    Hope you enjoy it.
hirundo 6y ago
I love this team and their game and have ~1k hours in it. But I hope they soon choose to do a whole new game. Incremental improvements to their masterpiece is a suboptimal use of their talents. Just a few more bulbs in an already brilliant room. A fresh start would be a bigger risk but for a possibly bigger payoff for us. I'd love to see their take on something like Universal Paperclips or Dyson Sphere. So many homages have been built to Factorio; they could return the favor.
- xmodem 6y ago
  I like the idea of an expansion. In particular, the current vanilla gameplay seems to lack any concrete goals to work towards once you get your first rocket launched - you're just expanding your base for the sake of it. Which is a lot of fun, sure.
  - vaylian 6y ago
    Launching your first rocket could trigger an alien invasion on the planet. You now have to fight much harder enemies than the biters you have dealt with so far. You and the aliens will fight over resource fields. And you have to stop them from building their base to the maximum level.
    - Cthulhu_ 6y ago
      Or they could introduce a colonization / planet skipping progression (actually I'm pretty sure there's a mod for that already), where you can load some basic resources and your engineer into a rocket to fly off. I mean what little story the game has is that you're an engineer that crashed on a planet, it would make sense that you want to get out again. They could add different planet types (like a water/island world, train world, restricted/small world, variants like that), or increase the difficulty and challenges as you progress to different planets. I'm pretty sure this already exists as a mod though.
- sandworm101 6y ago
  Yes, but one-hit wonders are more common than repeat hits. I'm reminded of Notch's post-minecraft dreams, that space game that never got off the ground. Or KSP. Monkey Squad boiled out into nothing (KSP2 is a different team). I think they should milk the cow they have by launching massive content expansions (Take my money!). Imho Factorio's next step should be into 3d. I don't mean a 3d game render, I mean factories biuld on different planes, or even a spherical planet. There is a game out there (I shall not name) that is claiming to be a multi-planet 3d version of factorio. People do want more.
Slippery_John 6y ago
One thing that I would really like to see is a sort of hybrid between Factorio and a colony type game. Imagine that instead of crash landing by yourself, you crash land with an entire group of people that you have to protect and provide for while you bootstrap yourself up to getting everybody off planet. For those who don't like biters, it can provide another means of making pollution matter. For those who do, it adds another interesting complication. Along with that, I'd like to see more green energy. Wind power, for instance, could be an early game technology that competes with boilers. Naturally it would need to cost more and / or produce less. Perhaps also geothermal power that must be generated at a particular location. Of course, more could be done with water. Boats, offshore resources, aquatic biters? Depletion of water resources so you don't have a one tile pond cooling 4 nuclear reactors? Or making the water less useful the more polluted it is. So many possibilities.
- breakingcups 6y ago
  A bit like a cross between Factorio and Rimworld then?
  - TobTobXX 6y ago
    There's a RimWorld mod for something in that direction. Haven't checked it out though.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    Speaking of crosses, someone should cross Factorio and Stardew Valley. All the time I played the latter, I dreamt of being able to automate the farm.
    - pbhjpbhj 6y ago
      Minecraft with bots you could program was good fun and sounds like a similar vibe, I think I used ComputerCraft. You program turtle-bots with Lua to do mining/resource gathering/etc..
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
DonHopkins 6y ago
They should make a straight-up visual Lua programming interface within Factorio. Lua/JSON objects on conveyor belts, buildings and factories with mathematical, logical, and procedural functions. Open up a building and read and reprogram its Lua scripts! And libraries of buildings for different kinds of programming tasks, including programming drones, web services, image and signal processing (audio and video frames along the conveyor belts), scripting Factorio's simulator and user interface, orchestrating scenarios and simulations, and programming Factorio extensions themselves! Robot Odyssey re-imagined in Factorio! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_Odyssey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_Odyssey
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  You mean the Combinators and circuit network? Pretty visual already: https://wiki.factorio.com/Tutorial:Combinator_tutorial https://wiki.factorio.com/Tutorial:Combinator_tutorial I mean it basically runs doom already: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lVAFcDX4eM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lVAFcDX4eM
- jsty 6y ago
  > and programming Factorio extensions themselves Ah, good old extensionFactoryFactory, I knew that Java would come in handy one day
billfruit 6y ago
One thing I think would be a good addition to the existing gameplay would be adding RNG elements for more probabilistic / emergent behaviour like equipment failures and ageing, natural disasters, statistical variance in the performance of individual units of same types, manufacturing defects, etc. Also other things that reduce gami-ness; Gaminess kills immersion in my view.
Karawebnetwork 6y ago
One thing I always love to do whenever this site is linked is click on the "back to top" rocket button at the bottom. Such an amazing little easter egg.
Engineering-MD 6y ago
Personally I think the factorio format would work great for developing biochemical systems into cells and then multicellular organisms. It’s all about the automation, and would teach biochemistry concepts simultaneously. That would be a good spinoff that I would play.
DonHopkins 6y ago
Playing Factorio requires starting out by performing a few tasks by hand, then thinking about how to incrementally automate factories with trains, drones, combinator circuits, and blueprints, with high level modular repeatable patterns. And estimating where the break-even point is between completing a few tasks by hand, and spending the time to automate more common tasks. That evokes an article that Richard Potter wrote about "Just-in-Time Programming" in Alan Cypher's classic book (which is now online for free), "Watch What I Do: Programming by Demonstration", about when "the user attempts to write a program for a task that is already in progress": http://acypher.com/wwid http://acypher.com/wwid Watch What I Do: Programming by Demonstration. Edited by Allen Cypher. Co-edited by Daniel C. Halbert, David Kurlander, Henry Lieberman, David Maulsby, Brad A. Myers, and Alan Turransky. 1993. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England. http://acypher.com/wwid/Chapters/27JITP.html http://acypher.com/wwid/Chapters/27JITP.html Chapter 27: Just-in-Time Programming. Richard Potter. Introduction Many of the other chapters have presented advancements in programming by demonstration (PBD) by presenting PBD systems and their innovations. In other words, these chapters have presented solutions. This chapter takes another tack by discussing PBD in the context of a problem. The problem is to create a new type of programming system that overcomes the obstacles users encounter when they attempt to use present-day programming systems for just-in-time programming. This chapter defines just-in-time programming and identifies five of these obstacles: inaccessible data and operators, the effort of entering the algorithm, limited computational generality, effort of invoking the algorithm, and risk. Just-in-time programming motivates PBD research because PBD can potentially overcome several of these obstacles. Just-in-time programming is the implementing of algorithms during task-time, the time when the user is actually trying to accomplish the task. It can be characterized by a situation with the following components: - a computer user who could be either a novice user or an experienced programmer, - a task that the user is manually accomplishing and completion of which is the user's primary goal, - a repetitive subtask[1] of the task that could potentially be automated, thereby making it easier for the user to complete the task, - an algorithm that will accomplish the subtask and that the user envisioned while working on the task, - and an attempt by the user to implement the algorithm for the purpose of more effectively completing the task. In short, the goal of just-in-time programming is to allow users to profit from their task-time algorithmic insights by programming. Instead of automating with software that was carefully designed and implemented much earlier, the user recognizes an algorithm and then creates the software to take advantage of it just before it is needed, hence implementing it just in time. [...]

246 points by parsecs 6y ago

As someone who doesn't code all day any longer, factorio really tickles that part of my brain. Every problem that needs to be overcome, every obstacle in the path, every idiotic decision I curse is something I did previously just to get things working. Then I run out of space. Or I need to pipe water in. Or a factory is outputting to the left when outputting to the right would be a better decision .... hmm ... do I move 200 componenets or just ... slap a train station in? Or 1,000 belts? ARGH! I've done it again!

qu-everything 6y ago
yea, the amount of times I chose to do the hacky thing just to get it working, thinking I'll fix it later... Let's just say I never learn

detaro 6y ago

These are fun "metrics": 2.7 → 0.42 → 0.34 lines of code per one buyer 0 → 2.3 → 4.4 years of playtime per resolved bug report 0 → 4 → 8 months of Steam playtime per one commit 0 → 9.1 → 37 days of Steam play for each line of code

resonanttoe 6y ago
They are neat! I got inexplicably a huge grin reading these. It's just cool to see how it all breaks down :D
professor_v 6y ago
They should write more lines of code, they'll be rich!
- Majromax 6y ago
  I think that's literally what they intend to do with an expansion pack, after all.
Bakary 6y ago
If there are 0.34 lines per buyer and 37 days per line, does that mean that the average playtime could be in the proximity of 12½ days? That's impressive, and is probably much higher if you take into account the traditionally large number of Steam who don't install many of their purchases.
- jonfw 6y ago
  I'm sure this is also affected by a large number of 'idle' hours where people are running it in the background or something
  - Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
    I did that on my first playthough. Getting those 1000 blue circuits was going to take awhile, and rather than fix my bottlenecks to speed it up, I just went to bed and let the game run overnight.
- skykooler 6y ago
  Something that may contribute to that may be that Factorio has never been part of a Steam sale or bundle, which is where I suspect most of those "owned but never played" games come from.

speeder 6y ago

Just a helpful note for those that saw they want programmers: You must be hire-able in EU, because they can't afford to sponsor people. Sadly this doesn't include me :(

tompazourek 6y ago

> 38 870 years of combined playtime played on Steam Wow, that's some real impact, seems crazy to me.

philjackson 6y ago
38,000 might be me. :(
penteract 6y ago
It's not exclusively sold on steam, so that's an underestimate :).
- SloopJon 6y ago
  All things being equal, I'd choose GOG over Steam, but there are some complaints about delayed updates and/or needing to register for updates on the developer's web site. Can any GOG customers comment on their experience?

k__ 6y ago

OT: Anyone here played "Dyson Sphere Program"? Is it good? How does it compare to Factorio?

TeMPOraL 6y ago
Thanks for mentioning it. Looks fun, I may check it out. That said, here is my generic complaint for space games: could people please start making games where planets are the size of, well, planets? Or even 1/10 of a planet (like in Kerbal Space Program), but something that still reflects the sizes and distances of things in space?
- faeyanpiraat 6y ago
  In ksp you can speed up time, otherwise it would be unplayable. Manipulating time might break other aspects of gameplay, so you are left with skewed scales of distance I guess?
  - me_me_me 6y ago
    Getting to the outside planets in KSP still take hours with max speed on. And that's 'only' 1/4 scale of the solar system :)
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      Not with max max speed on, but probably max you can afford without life support & electricity simulation mods breaking and killing your crew, if you're using those :).
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    Yeah, timewarp is crucial for this to work. But, looking at Dyson Sphere Program, space scenes seem to be already operating under a timewarp (which is implicit in the scaling factor). Modelling a whole solar system may be tough - planets are really big, and really really far away. But I think that, at the very least, a moon system would work. A central planet with half a dozen moons of varying sizes. Moons can be small and much closer - but they'd be still three or four orders of magnitude greater than what we see in most space games.

gigatexal 6y ago

The game is ridiculously popular and has a fan base that has means. Release paid DLCs, or even an entirely new game but keep monetizing. Free updates forever seems silly.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
I agree. As much as free updates forever is great for those of us who get free stuff, modern games are already ludicrously inexpensive. The average new NES game would have been about $60. That's about $120 in today's money. Compare the average NES game's content and replay value to what you get today for $30.

gchadwick 6y ago

I'd really enjoy some kind of campaign expansion, a connected series of missions with specific goals and constraints. One of the tutorials, where you need to rebuild a half destroyed base (with satellite mining bases) aiming to produce a certain number of materials as the goal, is a nice example of what a campaign mission could be. I suspect they'll go off in a different direction, Factorio is more of a pure sandbox make your own fun kind of game but I think you could do some fun campaign stuff.

Deestan 6y ago
They had the main campaign like that for a while, but found that losing your build between missions didn't gel with how the game was supposed to be approached. https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-241 https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-241
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
They could probably fairly easily add on a progression system, expanding on top of the achievements. Like an extended tutorial.

zegl 6y ago

Factorio is my number one favourite game ever, and a large part of that is because of how open kovarex and the rest of the team has been during the whole development cycle, with the weekly development blogs etc. I've been a player for many years, and watching Factorio grow and get better over time has been very inspiring!

gnulinux 6y ago
Factorio is my favorite game ever as well. I never played any game more than 10 hours; except factorio in which I have... checks notes... 600 hours.

tasubotadas 6y ago

I am a big fan of Stellaris model - sizeable DLCs. This supports development of the game and introduces new exciting staff for me as a player gradually at a fast enough pace (~every 6 months).

timwaagh 6y ago

Because it's marketed as a 'big expansion pack' and not a 'dlc' they can price it at 20€ instead of 10€. Smart.

tomalpha 6y ago
This comes across as (perhaps unintentionally?) overly cynical to me. I purchased Factorio some years ago now, and have always had the feeling that I underpaid for it over that time despite playing a lot less than some friends I know. (I think I have a mere couple of hundred hours playtime which for any other game would be crazy high!) The devs have continuously worked on it in all that time. It’s not as if they had a bunch of expensive DLC lined up from day one as some AAA titles seem to these days.
nindalf 6y ago
I paid $30 for 90 hours of entertainment. That's how long it took to finish one game with my friends. You'll have a hard time convincing anyone that $0.33/hour isn't amazing value for entertainment. Whatever they price their expansion at, it'll be worth the money.
- sorahn 6y ago
  The number of hours I have in this game is measured in thousands. And the first digit is not a 1. $30 was a steal.
  - vntx 6y ago
    So was $15. I tried out and bought the game before its v1.0 release and even then the game was exceptionally stable and polished.
  - Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
    How? Do you just leave the game running 24/7 even when you're not actively playing? What do you even do? I only have 50 hours in Factorio. After I launched my rocket, I didn't know what to do next and just kinda stopped playing.

pdpi 6y ago

A good alternative if you’d rather Factorio was 3D is Satisfactory.

lawl 6y ago

Very happy with their plans. I got more than my moneys worth out of factorio and I'm happy to buy DLCs (if they're not a scam of course, which given their track record I doubt they will be). But DLCs fragment the community and thats bad. So I think a big expansion DLC is indeed the best course.

tpxl 6y ago
> DLCs fragment the community Some games allow all players playing the DLC if the host has it installed. I think this is a nice way of doing it without fragmentation.
- Arrath 6y ago
  This is probably the only saving grace to Paradox's DLC model. Its a very friendly way to do it.

i5heu 6y ago

Multiplanitary Factories would be awesome. And a way to build a Dyson Sphere ;)

mpettitt 6y ago
You mean https://store.steampowered.com/app/1366540/Dyson_Sphere_Program/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1366540/Dyson_Sphere_Prog... ?
- i5heu 6y ago
  Yes but in factorio :) I like Dyson Sphere Program but factorio is vastly superior in regards of gameplay IMHO.
  - tpxl 6y ago
    > factorio is vastly superior in regards of gameplay I dare say Factorio is the best game in the genre!
    - gambiting 6y ago
      You misspelled Satisfactory ;-)
      - linkdd 6y ago
        IMHO, the 2D top view is a way better interface to visualize your huge factories than a subjective view in a 3D world.
      - fendy3002 6y ago
        As someone with potato laptop, I am forced to disagree
      - Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
        I really wanted to enjoy Satisfactory, but I found the first-person view to be frustrating to actually work with. Also not a fan of how hard it is to get around the terrain in the early game. The jet pack needs to come much much sooner in the progression.

mrviolet 6y ago

Is this game multiplayer?

lucb1e 6y ago
Yes. Co-op, pvp, team production challenges, modded games, you name it. The default is co-op building the factory together. Can personally recommend the wave defense. Either start a server from the GUI or setup a headless linux server. Against griefers there is a permission system (if you're not online yourself to watch out, and if you are, you could also do it the KISS way and roll back a few minutes with the non-blocking autosaves). Not sure I ever typed a comment that must have sounded so much like an ad. Just a happy player... :-)
nindalf 6y ago
Possibly my favourite multiplayer game of all time. I found cooperative multiplayer is much more fun than competitive multiplayer. Also, it's so well optimised that it's very inclusive. Even friends who only had potatoes instead of PCs could join and play.
npteljes 6y ago
Both single and multiplayer.
skykooler 6y ago
Interestingly, it's the only game I know of that uses deterministic coding for multiplayer - rather than updating the game state for everyone (since there are potentially tens of thousands of moving items every tick), all clients simulate it locally using code verified to be deterministic so that everyone ends up with the same view of the game.

jstanley 6y ago

I know a lot of people who enjoy this game, and I am trying to get into it at the moment. I played a couple of hours earlier this week, and this is my review: The premise of the game is excellent. You have crashlanded on a remote planet and have to start from nothing, acquire resources, build tools, build machines, automate the acquisition of resources, etc., until you have developed enough technology that you can build a spaceship and flee the planet. Wow. There are 2 things I don't like. Firstly, I don't like the "biters" that come and destroy your base. I don't really think this adds to the game in any way. It feels like it was added to the game to make it appeal to the "gamer" demographic rather than the "programmer" demographic. If I'm working away on one corner of my base trying to solve automation problems, I don't want to have to run away and piss about shooting some pointless biters who are trying to destroy my stuff. I know the answer is "that's an automation problem too! build turrets!". But I just want to calmly play the game at my own pace, I don't want to have to be attending to urgent biter problems. I stopped playing the other day after biters destroyed a load of my stuff and I no longer felt invested in the game. That's not fun for me. I want to play the game, but I don't want my stuff getting destroyed if I do a subpar job of defending it. Secondly, (and this is partly related to the biters, but not completely), I find the game surprisingly stressful. I think this comes from the interplay between short-term and long-term problems. I don't know exactly what game mechanic causes it, but I think I would find it much more enjoyable if I could calmly work on problems without having to run around topping up coal and otherwise putting out non-automatable fires. Perhaps it's just the visuals of loads of materials stacking up on conveyor belts and going to the wrong places, and the kind of visceral feeling that the problem is getting worse for every second that it's not solved. I don't know. I don't find that relaxing. I will have another go though. I love the concept, and I haven't actually got to the end of the tutorial yet. I understand that when you start the proper game you can ask for "peaceful" mode which turns off biters, which sounds ideal for me.

Thorentis 6y ago
> I don't really think this adds to the game in any way. I think they are intended to push you along with development. Since they continue multiplying and evolve to become stronger if you don't destroy their bases, you need to make sure your tech develops and that you deal with them. It's meant to push you towards constantly improving your tech, rather than focusing on e.g. optimising your copper plate assembly lines for hours on end.

nindalf 6y ago

Part of me is happy about their decision to make an expansion because my friends and I can return to this amazing game in a year and enjoy a fresh experience. But I would have liked to see what else this amazing team could have done. Like maybe a city building simulation game, optimized as well as Factorio? Would have been amazing for sure.

avereveard 6y ago
spent hours optimizing traffic in sim city rush hours, it's a niche to be sure, but an unfulfilled one
- Guthur 6y ago
  Cities skylines has a real good traffic simulation, some of mods make traffic control really sophisticated. Check out biffa plays YouTube channel for some great traffic optimisation.
  - lebowska 6y ago
    This is not true at all. The last SimCity was terrible in a lot of ways (online requirements, small areas, bugs, etc) but it had the best simulation out there: an one 1:1 car / population that made city and road planning a true joy for the nerdiest players like me. Literally every aspect of city planning had an impact on that simulation, and you could follow every car and knonw it was there for a reason. This means that if you have a really bad traffic state every aspect of your city goes on fire. On the other hand Cities skyline has a lot of other cool factors but traffic simulation comes really short. It is just derived from statistics of the city but there is no 1:1 link to be found, so you can just guess what aspects of the city has some coefficient on the traffic algorithm, and the worst part is that if you happen to plan something really wrong, well, nothing happens. Cars and utility veichles litterally start to DESPAWN from the road and the traffic jam goes puff. Yes the statistics go down a bit, but everything else goes on like nothing ever happened. That was the deal breaker for me
    - 6y ago

dhx 6y ago

I think one of the best parts of this game are some of the unique multiplayer mods that exist. If development was to focus on creating some really fun and polished multiplayer mods that would attract 50+ people continuously to each game, I'd happily pay a monthly/annual subscription. It's a shame though that typical multiplayer numbers are fairly low in the order of 20-40 players in each of the top 2 games, then 10-20 games averaging 5 players, and hundreds of empty games. I wonder what it could be like with a multiplayer tower defence style game with 100+ players, or with 5-10 innovative and fun multiplayer game types all filled with enough players to make each game viable? There are plenty of mods in this game that increase the number of resources, buildings, technologies, etc by a factor of 5 or more and I personally find this is far too complex and takes the fun out of the game and makes it too repetitive and clinical. Fragmenting the small-ish user community between "base game" and "DLC game" would possibly make the multiplayer experience non-existent due to low player numbers.

fake-name 6y ago

My feeling about this (and a lot of the similar games: opus magnum, spacechem, etc), is mixed. I like the idea of them, but I don't actually enjoy playing them. They feel so much like programming that I generally just go and actually work on programming projects. That way I get the same problem solving challenge, and the end result is something I can actually use. Why would I want to spend time solving made up problems when I can solve real problems in my hobby projects? These days, the games I find myself enjoying are games with a interesting story, or that are mechanically fun to play (e.g. twin stick shooters and similar).

louwrentius 6y ago

I have 2500+ hours in Factorio. I loved it. Love to read this. My 6+ year old computer can't handle the enormous factory complexes I like to build. Now I have switched over to my next hard drug addiction: -> Mindustry. <- https://anuke.itch.io/mindustry https://anuke.itch.io/mindustry Factorio + tower defence: it's awesome and runs on a potato.

ganzsz 6y ago
Thanks man, there goes my free time. Why did it have to have an Android version. Nice game though!
- fendy3002 6y ago
  As good it is on mobile, the interface is so small and hard to navigate / build. Now I secretly want wube to tackle factorio mobile. Not as complex as desktop factorio of course, but I want to know what UX improvements they can achieve.
- louwrentius 6y ago
  Hope you enjoy it.

hirundo 6y ago

I love this team and their game and have ~1k hours in it. But I hope they soon choose to do a whole new game. Incremental improvements to their masterpiece is a suboptimal use of their talents. Just a few more bulbs in an already brilliant room. A fresh start would be a bigger risk but for a possibly bigger payoff for us. I'd love to see their take on something like Universal Paperclips or Dyson Sphere. So many homages have been built to Factorio; they could return the favor.

xmodem 6y ago
I like the idea of an expansion. In particular, the current vanilla gameplay seems to lack any concrete goals to work towards once you get your first rocket launched - you're just expanding your base for the sake of it. Which is a lot of fun, sure.
- vaylian 6y ago
  Launching your first rocket could trigger an alien invasion on the planet. You now have to fight much harder enemies than the biters you have dealt with so far. You and the aliens will fight over resource fields. And you have to stop them from building their base to the maximum level.
  - Cthulhu_ 6y ago
    Or they could introduce a colonization / planet skipping progression (actually I'm pretty sure there's a mod for that already), where you can load some basic resources and your engineer into a rocket to fly off. I mean what little story the game has is that you're an engineer that crashed on a planet, it would make sense that you want to get out again. They could add different planet types (like a water/island world, train world, restricted/small world, variants like that), or increase the difficulty and challenges as you progress to different planets. I'm pretty sure this already exists as a mod though.
sandworm101 6y ago
Yes, but one-hit wonders are more common than repeat hits. I'm reminded of Notch's post-minecraft dreams, that space game that never got off the ground. Or KSP. Monkey Squad boiled out into nothing (KSP2 is a different team). I think they should milk the cow they have by launching massive content expansions (Take my money!). Imho Factorio's next step should be into 3d. I don't mean a 3d game render, I mean factories biuld on different planes, or even a spherical planet. There is a game out there (I shall not name) that is claiming to be a multi-planet 3d version of factorio. People do want more.

Slippery_John 6y ago

One thing that I would really like to see is a sort of hybrid between Factorio and a colony type game. Imagine that instead of crash landing by yourself, you crash land with an entire group of people that you have to protect and provide for while you bootstrap yourself up to getting everybody off planet. For those who don't like biters, it can provide another means of making pollution matter. For those who do, it adds another interesting complication. Along with that, I'd like to see more green energy. Wind power, for instance, could be an early game technology that competes with boilers. Naturally it would need to cost more and / or produce less. Perhaps also geothermal power that must be generated at a particular location. Of course, more could be done with water. Boats, offshore resources, aquatic biters? Depletion of water resources so you don't have a one tile pond cooling 4 nuclear reactors? Or making the water less useful the more polluted it is. So many possibilities.

breakingcups 6y ago
A bit like a cross between Factorio and Rimworld then?
- TobTobXX 6y ago
  There's a RimWorld mod for something in that direction. Haven't checked it out though.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  Speaking of crosses, someone should cross Factorio and Stardew Valley. All the time I played the latter, I dreamt of being able to automate the farm.
  - pbhjpbhj 6y ago
    Minecraft with bots you could program was good fun and sounds like a similar vibe, I think I used ComputerCraft. You program turtle-bots with Lua to do mining/resource gathering/etc..
Cthulhu_ 6y ago

DonHopkins 6y ago

They should make a straight-up visual Lua programming interface within Factorio. Lua/JSON objects on conveyor belts, buildings and factories with mathematical, logical, and procedural functions. Open up a building and read and reprogram its Lua scripts! And libraries of buildings for different kinds of programming tasks, including programming drones, web services, image and signal processing (audio and video frames along the conveyor belts), scripting Factorio's simulator and user interface, orchestrating scenarios and simulations, and programming Factorio extensions themselves! Robot Odyssey re-imagined in Factorio! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_Odyssey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_Odyssey

Cthulhu_ 6y ago
You mean the Combinators and circuit network? Pretty visual already: https://wiki.factorio.com/Tutorial:Combinator_tutorial https://wiki.factorio.com/Tutorial:Combinator_tutorial I mean it basically runs doom already: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lVAFcDX4eM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lVAFcDX4eM
jsty 6y ago
> and programming Factorio extensions themselves Ah, good old extensionFactoryFactory, I knew that Java would come in handy one day

billfruit 6y ago

One thing I think would be a good addition to the existing gameplay would be adding RNG elements for more probabilistic / emergent behaviour like equipment failures and ageing, natural disasters, statistical variance in the performance of individual units of same types, manufacturing defects, etc. Also other things that reduce gami-ness; Gaminess kills immersion in my view.

Karawebnetwork 6y ago

One thing I always love to do whenever this site is linked is click on the "back to top" rocket button at the bottom. Such an amazing little easter egg.

Engineering-MD 6y ago

Personally I think the factorio format would work great for developing biochemical systems into cells and then multicellular organisms. It’s all about the automation, and would teach biochemistry concepts simultaneously. That would be a good spinoff that I would play.

DonHopkins 6y ago

Playing Factorio requires starting out by performing a few tasks by hand, then thinking about how to incrementally automate factories with trains, drones, combinator circuits, and blueprints, with high level modular repeatable patterns. And estimating where the break-even point is between completing a few tasks by hand, and spending the time to automate more common tasks. That evokes an article that Richard Potter wrote about "Just-in-Time Programming" in Alan Cypher's classic book (which is now online for free), "Watch What I Do: Programming by Demonstration", about when "the user attempts to write a program for a task that is already in progress": http://acypher.com/wwid http://acypher.com/wwid Watch What I Do: Programming by Demonstration. Edited by Allen Cypher. Co-edited by Daniel C. Halbert, David Kurlander, Henry Lieberman, David Maulsby, Brad A. Myers, and Alan Turransky. 1993. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England. http://acypher.com/wwid/Chapters/27JITP.html http://acypher.com/wwid/Chapters/27JITP.html Chapter 27: Just-in-Time Programming. Richard Potter. Introduction Many of the other chapters have presented advancements in programming by demonstration (PBD) by presenting PBD systems and their innovations. In other words, these chapters have presented solutions. This chapter takes another tack by discussing PBD in the context of a problem. The problem is to create a new type of programming system that overcomes the obstacles users encounter when they attempt to use present-day programming systems for just-in-time programming. This chapter defines just-in-time programming and identifies five of these obstacles: inaccessible data and operators, the effort of entering the algorithm, limited computational generality, effort of invoking the algorithm, and risk. Just-in-time programming motivates PBD research because PBD can potentially overcome several of these obstacles. Just-in-time programming is the implementing of algorithms during task-time, the time when the user is actually trying to accomplish the task. It can be characterized by a situation with the following components: - a computer user who could be either a novice user or an experienced programmer, - a task that the user is manually accomplishing and completion of which is the user's primary goal, - a repetitive subtask[1] of the task that could potentially be automated, thereby making it easier for the user to complete the task, - an algorithm that will accomplish the subtask and that the user envisioned while working on the task, - and an attempt by the user to implement the algorithm for the purpose of more effectively completing the task. In short, the goal of just-in-time programming is to allow users to profit from their task-time algorithmic insights by programming. Instead of automating with software that was carefully designed and implemented much earlier, the user recognizes an algorithm and then creates the software to take advantage of it just before it is needed, hence implementing it just in time. [...]