26 ms·

The Factorio Mindset

464 points by Ariarule 5y ago

m463 5y ago
> (it should probably be renamed "Refactorio") great observation :)
Havoc 5y ago
I really like builder games (Anno series) but haven't picked up factorio due to concerns of time sink. Instead tinkering more with self-hosting stuff lately. I find it scratches the same itch - building / optimisation / problem solving vibe but has a slightly more tangible enduring value (something useful + learning)
topologie 5y ago
So, what about Dwarf Fortress? (Would anyone recommend Factorio over Dwarf Fortress?)
juice_bus 5y ago
Shopify allowing Factorio to be expensed is really interesting. Someone higher up must really like it?
- xal 5y ago
  I do :-)
  - mynegation 5y ago
    That comment must be on some HN wall of fame next to "Did you win Putnam?" classic.
    - Jalad 5y ago
      I didn't know what this was referring to, but after a little bit of digging: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079
  - midjji 5y ago
    Very cool you do this! Care to elaborate on why?
- midjji 5y ago
  A tech company focused on logistics has at least one boss or founder who really likes factorio, the game for and by programmers who like logistics? Who could have guessed^^ It is cool if they let people expense it though, but motivating the 20$ per employee cost is pretty trivial. Compared to similar expenses like a yearly fruit basket, Id wager giving programmers/logistics workers a free factorio probably has a better impact on work performance. I think op is underestimating how much people learn from games, but it is also not exactly a high bar to pass, and Id wager factorio teaches more than most.
  - jfim 5y ago
    > Id wager giving programmers/logistics workers a free factorio probably has a better impact on work performance. I'd be skeptical of that claim. I'm sure there would be at least a few engineers that showed up to work pretty tired because the factory needed more iron plates. :-)
    - midjji 5y ago
      Yeah, think I'm less assuming that people wont let it negatively affect their work, as much as assuming that the people for whom it does would have been playing something else with the same effect.
      - Aeolun 5y ago
        Not really. Factory/building games are the only ones that keep me up until 2:35 AM (at least today). This was fine when I could just sleep in until 10, but I’m fairly certain my little bundle of joy will need my attention somewhere before 8. 3 years in and still trying to figure out how to combine these things.
        midjji 5y ago
        If you figure it out, there will be a lot of interest^^. I kinda miss the "just one more turn" till sunrise sessions, but half of that is me missing that the only thing that happened the day after was a slight headache.
- shane_b 5y ago
  Tobi the CEO likes it
deltaonefour 5y ago
Every once in a while on the HN front page you get some article about a programming analogy or an entrepreneurship analogy. "Here's why the game factorio is like programming or here's why it's like life. yada yada yada" Yeah, AND this guy takes the next step and turns the analogy into a "mindset." Great. Revolutionary. First off.. analogy is amazing. Second... turning that analogy into a way of life blows my mind. Is your mind blown too? This guy is a genius. The next step, (and I've seen plenty of this on HN), is to turn that analogy into a full blown "theory" of some sort... complete with diagrams.
- dentemple 5y ago
  I mean, out of most of the analogy examples posted to HN, Factorio is actually a good one. The observations that the writer makes are all immediately apparent when you fire up the game, and there isn't anything here that I'd call a "deep cut" or a strained metaphor. Factorio can literally be renamed "Iterative Development: The Game" and players wouldn't find anything confusing about any of it.
  - deltaonefour 5y ago
    >I mean, out of most of the analogy examples posted to HN, Factorio is actually a good one I think all the analogies I've seen are good. The problem is they're obvious. They don't really bring anything new to the table. Great you identified an analogy. Big deal?
    - dentemple 5y ago
      And yet, there's always at least one HN reader who makes a comment in every popular thread that the original post is irrelevant in some way. Still, it never seems to stop people from doing it despite not "bringing anything new to the table" with their comment. So why do it?
      - deltaonefour 5y ago
        What I'm bringing to the table, is helping everyone notice that these posts bring nothing new to the table. That's the problem with these analogy posts. People like them but they don't offer anything of substance. Think about it. You identified a connection between two things, yet nothing new was introduced. You get this artificial euphoria of seeing a connection but that's it, it's just an illusion.
minihat 5y ago
My friend has 600+ hours played of Factorio. He just beat the game for the first time. I bought it, we played multiplayer. And I taught him the mantra "great is the enemy of good enough". Our run took 14 hours. I also know many people like this at work, and wish they could have the Factorio experience. If you refactor at the first sign of trouble, you remain blind to totally new to problems just around the corner.
- skipants 5y ago
  That's been my takeaway from these games, too. It really helped with my perfectionism because it makes the negative effects of it tangible; you notice how much more time you lose by trying to be perfect rather than just getting your supply of materials up and running.
  - cwkoss 5y ago
    The factorio dev team are such fantastic software engineers, I wonder if this was an emergent feature of building what they want or if there was actually intentionality in making this a common takeaway from playing the game. If you haven't, read their blog! It's a master class in release notes and development communication.
- shane_b 5y ago
  In software dev, my team has a “naive, naive, refactor” rule for this problem
  - rustyminnow 5y ago
    Could you elaborate on this rule?
    - shane_b 5y ago
      I wrote about this https://shaneburkhart.com/i/naive-naive-refactor https://shaneburkhart.com/i/naive-naive-refactor
    - 5y ago
DiabloD3 5y ago
I have over 5000 hours in Factorio. I am part of a group where several of us are over 5000 hours. Some of us have Autism. Some of us have ADHD. Some of us have both. The majority of us are in the tech industry. The companies we work at have been made to understand that the factory must grow.
- pram 5y ago
  When I play a new game of Factorio I literally stay up for like 14 hours every day until I get a lot of the rocket launch automated. It’s insane, it impacts my health for a month or so after lol
  - markedathome 5y ago
    Wait until you see the speedruns; nefrums and wargerr are currently 100% achievements in 6hrs and 5hrs27 respectively (see speedruns.com/factorio #100) Launching a rocket is down to about 90 mins without using imported blueprints.
    - Johnyma22 5y ago
      Worth mentioning AntiElitz too :) Thanks for the wargerr recommendation!
  - CyberDildonics 5y ago
    I think most people literally stay up for more than 14 hours a day.
    - conradludgate 5y ago
      Ignoring the extra 8 hours of working, so it's more like 22 hours a day
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  Factorio should be the interview test ;) Tech’s Ender’s Game. (factorio fan, but with little time to enjoy it)
leptoniscool 5y ago
Dyson Sphere Program is a similar type of game, with prettier graphics.
- saddestcatever 5y ago
  Shoutout to Satisfactory. I've seen many players that resonate with Dyson Sphere Program also enjoy Satisfactory. Not quite as in-depth as Factorio, but an amazingly, amazingly well designed game in both over experience and gameplay.
- bloqs 5y ago
  Satisfactory - even prettier
- vkou 5y ago
  The logistical puzzles in it are... Unfortunately, a lot less interesting (And these games, by design, are all about logistical puzzles. Feeding stuff into an assembler isn't interesting - getting your stuff to the point where you can feed it into an assembler is.) The logistics network is too powerful, pilers don't really change how items move around, and fluids/gases/solids are treated the same.
- bentcorner 5y ago
  Satisfactory is IMO a superior Factorio in that it drops the Tower Defense and resource-depletion mechanics. It's also in 3d. I can understand that Factorio is balanced differently but it's annoying to build up a factory and then need to do non-factory things when a resource runs out or aliens attack your base.
  - pwillia7 5y ago
    The feeling when you get coal setup for the first time...
  - kllrnohj 5y ago
    > Satisfactory is IMO a superior Factorio Early game I agree, but mid/late game I couldn't disagree more. Satisfactory desperately needs a construction bot or blueprints or something to help you build at the scales it starts pushing you towards, or you just afk forever. Also the ticket loop as the endless resource sink is far less interesting than factorio's endless research paths.
julianeon 5y ago
I often encounter this issue when it comes to programming-like games. I’m wondering if I should adjust my thinking here. 1) Hmm, this game is a lot like programming. A lot like it. 2) Maybe I should just program? That is real work & I can get done more work done, be more productive. 3) [stopped game, started programming]
- martincmartin 5y ago
  What other games are like programming?
  - Twirrim 5y ago
    Mindustry, Dyson Sphere Program, most games by Zachtronics (Spacechem, tis-100, opus magnum), etc.
  - FreeFull 5y ago
    Pretty much any Zachtronics game, for one.
  - sjmulder 5y ago
    Zachtronics games. They’re all about processes and optimisation but in quite different ways.
  - wccrawford 5y ago
    Also "Satisfactory", Factory Town, Human Resource Machine, Kubifactorium, and at least one more that I can't remember the name of at the moment. Some are more programming-like than others.
    - Firmwarrior 5y ago
      I've been on the fence about Satisfactory, but I just checked Notch's twitter and the dude is STILL sitting there playing it all day The man's rich enough to be swimming with whales or partying in space and he's sitting in his basement playing Satisfactory.. there must be something to it
ojbyrne 5y ago
Personally I feel like Factorio reveals a principle I also see at my day job. Automation is exhausting. ;-)
- mLuby 5y ago
  Growth is exhausting, no?
Aperocky 5y ago
Going to give a shoutout to https://anuke.itch.io/mindustry https://anuke.itch.io/mindustry and https://songsofsyx.com/ https://songsofsyx.com/ In particular, mindustry can actually run scripts within the game to automate a lot of things. If you like factorio you're going to like these 2 games.
- Malic 5y ago
  Let's add https://shapez.io/ https://shapez.io/ to that list!
- pwillia7 5y ago
  Obligatory Zachtronics and Screeps links. TIS and Shenzen are my favorites of the zachtronics series. I've never really gotten into screeps but it always looks so cool. https://www.zachtronics.com/ https://www.zachtronics.com/ https://screeps.com/ https://screeps.com/
  - iszomer 5y ago
    SpaceChem is where it started for me.
- iliketrains 5y ago
  Me and my friend are actually working on a somewhat similar game called Captain of Industry [1]. The game is less about automation and scaling and more about realistic processes, mining with excavators, trucks logistics, and taking care of your workers. It's not done yet but we are quite close! [1] https://www.captain-of-industry.com/ https://www.captain-of-industry.com/ PS: To my surprise, simulation games are a lot of very technical work full of algorithms and optimizations, compared to an average SWE work in a tech company.
  - Kaytaro 5y ago
    I mean this as a compliment when I say I hope this never gets released.
  - eezurr 5y ago
TameAntelope 5y ago
Gah, this happened to me literally yesterday, where I started a new Factorio map and had to close it after like an hour because I knew a) how much time I'd be able to sink into the game and b) how similar it was to my day job, which means I could just do my day job and feel 90% of the satisfaction while also earning money doing it. Rarely does an article online hit me as directly as this one does, good work.
jugg1es 5y ago
One of my top gaming moments ever was launching the rocket in under 6 hours. I launched it at 5:59:40. Then I realized the "There is no spoon" achievement was for 7 hours (and it's now 8 hours after 1.0 launch). Love this game.
bloqs 5y ago
Please please try Satisfactory. It's a beautiful, 3D equivalent. Holds a coveted Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam.
- jerry_tk 5y ago
  There is also Dyson Sphere Program with similar reviews.
- Aeolun 5y ago
  I like Satisfactory mostly because you get to enjoy the native flora and fauna without it constantly trying to kill you.
  - ascagnel_ 5y ago
    More than just the native flora and fauna, Satisfactory dumps you in an area that's largely pleasant to be in. Factorio has a very desaturated, green-and-brown "videogame" look, and it's not all that pleasant to look at after a while.
- stackedinserter 5y ago
  Thank you for yet another reminder that it sucks to be a mac user :-)
  - neogodless 5y ago
    A "mac user" isn't who you are as a person. It's who you're being in a moment of time. If you want to play PC games, buy a machine that handles playing them and use it for those instances. In this case, it looks like they only released Satisfactory on Windows, with mostly good results playing on Linux using Proton. https://www.protondb.com/app/526870 https://www.protondb.com/app/526870 Factorio seems to run on macOS and SteamOS + Linux.
  - byvirtueof 5y ago
    Streaming clients like GeForce Now have come a long way if you want to play games as a Mac user. It's what I use to play Satisfactory and it works really well in my opinion.
easrng 5y ago
- capableweb 5y ago
  Is this based on anything at all or just border-line libel?
  - easrng 5y ago
- maydup-nem 5y ago
  Wow, if it is true, I will surely stop playing factorio, because, apparently, some prick on hackernews would think the game's lead dev is not OK, and I am always quick to pigeonhole a person based on his controversial opinion, which I happen to disagree with.
caycecan 5y ago
Recently discovered Satisfactory. It's roughly GTA2 vs GTA3 when compared to Factorio (2d top down vs 3d open world). I'd love to hear peoples thoughts on the two games and what one does well vs the other. What people get out of either.
- benlivengood 5y ago
  Satisfactory is smaller scale (resource patches far apart, most of the build being about transport and linking a few buildings together, power being harder to achieve, and overall feels resource constrained) and Factorio feels like a blank canvas to paint factory on.
- kllrnohj 5y ago
  Having sunk vastly too many hours into Factorio, and recently just about 'completing' Satisfactory, I think Factorio is the far richer factory game. Satisfactory's unexpected joy is in exploration, such as finding all the alternative recipes. However mid game starts to be a bit of a drag, and late game is borderline miserable (the Smart! mod helps tremendously but I'm talking vanilla-only experience here). In particular in satisfactory you never out-tech problems. You never get tools to help you start abstracting away details like you do in Factorio with construction bots, beacons, modules, and substations. Satisfactory makes me want to design & build pretty or well laid out factories. But since it doesn't give me any tools to help with that, I end up with just floating slabs in the sky of endlessly repeated simple connections. Factorio feels far more rewarding when you come up with clever layouts for things, as you can then copy/paste it. Or design it to be modular for later expansion. There's the metagame there if making things tileable for rapid expansion later on. Satisfactory largely doesn't have that. It's too painful to expand anything, so it's all one & done stuff
  - polski-g 5y ago
    The copy/paste/blueprint feature of Factorio has ruined every other logistics game for me. Used to love the Anno series until I got Factorio.
- AnotherGoodName 5y ago
metalrain 5y ago
I think game like Factorio shows that level of automation is kind of quantized. First there is no automation, then one resource is automated but others are not, then several are automatized, but combining them is not. There are gaps where building the next thing doesn't make sense even if it makes sense when you have little bit more resources. I think this is true in business as well. It's hard to tell when you have crossed the threshold where building the next level makes sense. You tend to use a lot of time and money to build the next level of automation and only then you can measure if it was worth it or not.
vsareto 5y ago
I just don't get this. I feel like people back port their learning experiences to games that have a similar enough structure. A nice observation, but you can't go in the reverse direction by playing Factorio to learn something tangible. Factorio doesn't have the same failure granularity as the real world and so the usefulness of the analogy/mindset just doesn't do it for me. Plus my skill can be replaced by roughly how well I can memorize other peoples' factory patterns. Don't get me wrong though, it's a great game, and probably had the same impact for its genre as Doom had for FPS games.
- outworlder 5y ago
  > A nice observation, but you can't go in the reverse direction by playing Factorio to learn something tangible What about Factorio circuits? :)
daenz 5y ago
If you want to add more of the human dynamic to resource management and refactoring, I suggest FrostPunk. While Factorio feels more like managing and scaling code, FrostPunk feels like running a startup. It's rewarding, but very stressful. 0. https://store.steampowered.com/app/323190/Frostpunk/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/323190/Frostpunk/
- buscoquadnary 5y ago
  My understanding is that ForstPunk is more like a Grimdark dystopian climate nightmare than running a startup.
  - daenz 5y ago
    You're right, the theme is a dystopian climate nightmare. The resource management, regular sacrifices, and dealing with growing human problems make it feel like a small company that is struggling to grow and succeed, which is more relatable to me.
lordnacho 5y ago
I'm literally playing Factorio right now, with my kid. Got into it over Christmas based on HN talking about it all the time. Good game to multi because I don't have to pay attention all the time. It really reminds me of software in many ways. You fiddle with tiny little things like balancing a belt, and then move on to building belt balancers. You then move up the abstractions to where you're not really placing inserters all the time. Maybe you make some blueprints and you're placing a whole set of nuke power plants in one go, or looking at trains. The kid loves it, but you can (luckily) tell the difference between what he makes and what I make. That engineer keep-stuff-organized thing takes a bit of time to hone, but he's getting there. He also understands how to find root causes now, based on looking at where there's a blockage in production and tracking back along the chain. One thing that's interesting is that the game is a bit, you know, dark. I mean we've built hell and the kid doesn't mind. Literally paved paradise with concrete. The air is black with robots, 100k of them at the moment. There's furnaces all over the place. We got rid of the steam power generation but there are huge areas of nukes all over. The natives are getting atomic bombs thrown at them constantly, it takes a while to even get to the nearest spawner. Or water that isn't green. And yet he doesn't ask about how we destroyed all the cliffs and filled in the lakes, and chopped the trees. "How should we make it bigger, dad?"
- MattRix 5y ago
  Dyson Sphere Program is a great Factorio-like that feels more optimistic and less dark. It’s still about harvesting every last resource though. On the other hand there’s Terra Nil, where the goal is to clean up a destroyed landscape and then leave it without a trace. It’s more of a puzzle game than a factory game, but still worth playing: https://vfqd.itch.io/terra-nil https://vfqd.itch.io/terra-nil
  - genewitch 5y ago
    I've been waiting for Terra Nil since August, i think. I'm always bummed out when i see someone playing a game for video, and it's "not available yet". It's almost as bad as games that have been in early access for over a year.
benlivengood 5y ago
Factorio is an SRE game if there ever was one. It comes with graphs and dashboards. You can create audible alerts. The QPS (errr, biters) will come and the factory better be ready. Success failure is a thing.
aftergibson 5y ago
Anyone else really want to get into Factorio, but an hour into it realised it just felt like work and quit?
altairprime 5y ago
In theory, finding the ‘Factorio’ aspect of production just-enough management in other games is easy; Big Pharma is a lovely example of this. But instead, I want to talk about Stardew Valley, and the psychological effects of scaling up production. There is a very popular player mod for Stardew that allows automation of all “click to perform” actions normally operated by the player: Harvest fruit from a tree, Brew honey into mead, Cook wood into coal, Age mead in cask, and so on. Essentially, it introduces the conveyor systems of any production game — Verb Noun With Machine — and uses footpaths as the invisible conveyer belts. It is possible, with careful pathing, to build a farm that is automated from harvest to sale, and generates an endless supply of any product with minimum downtime. I found that when I applied this approach to Stardew, it was really fun making it work, and once I had it all working, there just wasn’t anything left to enjoy. Not because the game doesn’t have a near-infinite list of things you can produce (especially with mods), but because it turns out that the joy I derived from Stardew is about doing things myself. And so my intricately-pathed full scale production farm sits unopened. I point this out because in tech we often forget that capacity and automation can, in some cases, be inversely proportional to enjoyment. I could apply a photo editing ML algorithm to my photo library and no doubt it would be nice, but I enjoy the act of taking a photo and fiddling with it, even if I send exponentially fewer photos to my friends. One of them has a complex multi-device “ingestion pipeline” and it treats them well for their purposes, and I’ve built one before, and it turns out I just don’t enjoy digital photography at that scale. I love playing games like Factorio (though I haven’t gotten much into it yet) for their own sake, and I don’t deny that it’s possible to enjoy the art of scaling and automating these things, and that others feel differently. But my experience with Stardew pipelines was a really useful lessons in learning what I enjoy and when I enjoy it, and when that means I shouldn’t scale it up any further.
jl6 5y ago
I feel compelled to repost a comment of mine from the simutrans thread: — So, this is totally pop-evolutionary-psychology, but I think the relevant predisposition is towards hoarding. For 100,000 generations, humans (and our ancestors before then) have had to gather and store food and other supplies to see them through the winter (or other hard times). We are wired to do this because we would have died out if we didn’t. Building games let you build up your hoard of stuff (whether trains, rails, buildings, tiberium silos, green circuits, …) in a tight feedback loop that repeatedly triggers the “this is my stuff, now I am safe” dopamine response. This also explains collecting hobbies, and goes some way towards explaining the desire for wealth acquisition in general.
- imtringued 5y ago
  In keynesian economics the desire to hoard is known as liquidity preference because you want things you hoard to be immediately accessible i.e. liquid and require compensation to cease keeping something immediately available. Most physical objects deteriorate over time which makes gold inspired money an exceptionally poor way to keep track of things because the things that deteriorate disappaer but the gold that represents the things that deteriorated did not. So people hold onto gold or money without limit as it does not capture the full cost of deterioration leading to an imminent crisis in an economy that is not growing because the ponzi scheme has been exposed.
wilg 5y ago
I famously only play video games that increase GDP.
- thisiswater 5y ago
  Free exploration, experimentation, self-expression, fun?! - only in the name of GDP!
hathawsh 5y ago
I own a copy of Factorio, yet I never play it. Whenever I think about playing Factorio, I think what I really want to do is emulate biology, not industrial machinery. I want a game that lets me alter genomes slightly and try out several branches to see which ones are better for the world I'm trying to create. I want to fast forward through time so that evolution can run its course, then if I don't like the outcome, I want to be able to go back and try something else. I also want to be able to share evolutionary steps as code (in text form, not graphical!) with a community. The steps should be expressed in a functional language. Effectively, I want my quasi-biological world to take on a life of its own and I want to be able to run reversible experiments on both my worlds and other people's worlds. That's probably too much to ask. :-)
- chinchilla2020 5y ago
  There is an old game called spore that sort of did this.
- zethus 5y ago
  Think you're looking for a game like Spore or the older SimLife, both by Maxis.
- cwkoss 5y ago
  Early in my software development career, I tried building something like this. It's a really interesting problem, highly recommend trying it yourself. Even with a simple system and very modest skills: it was able to create results that surprised me, which was very rewarding. Copying previously written comment (you might also be interested in the "ALiEn – a GPU-accelerated artificial life simulation program" topic of the thread or other similar projects in the comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27476768 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27476768 --- When I was learning to program, I tried to make a toy artificial life evolution simulation. Particle organisms on a 2D plane had 'dna' which was a list of heritable traits, like size, speed, number of offspring. Bigger organisms could eat smaller organisms, but they burn energy faster. 0 energy = death. When two organisms of opposite gender collided and had sufficient energy, they'd give some of their energy split among the offspring, with each offspring's 'dna' values set to one of the parent's +/- 5%. As I was developing this, I hadn't figured out how I wanted to do food yet, so as an easy first step, I just had a constant amount of energy that was split amongst all organisms on the screen. Lots of little dots buzzing around, was kind of neat but nothing too special. I left it to run overnight. When I came back I was very surprised: previously i was running at about 30FPS - now it was running at about 4 seconds per frame. The screen was filled with dense expanding circles of tiny slow organisms emanating from where organisms had mated and nothing else. My simulation evolved to outsmart my simple food algorithm: when food is divided equally among all organisms, the best strategy is to use minimal energy and maximize offspring count. I had populated the world with a default offspring count of ~5 and they had evolved to the tens of thousands. The more offspring an organism had, the greater the amount of the energy pool would go to their offspring. It was a very cool "Life, uh, finds a way" moment - that such a simple toy simulation of evolution was able to find an unanticipated optimal solution to the environment I created overnight was very humbling and gave me a lot of respect for the power of evolution.
evmar 5y ago
I love Factorio! If you've completed enough of the base game, I can recommend Seablock (which includes AngelBob) and Space Exploration as two mods that make the game dramatically larger. I played some of Pyanodon (which is also sometimes mentioned as a big mod) but I found it kind of gratuitously complex.
annoyingnoob 5y ago
I think that a Factorio style interface for datacenter layout would be great. Saastorio. Layout your process and point it at your cloud service(s). Monitoring built in.
seanhunter 5y ago
Factorio is my favourite game of all time by a country mile. The thing that is so amazing to me is when you first play it and suddenly you realise that what you thought was the goal of the game (to launch the rocket) is literally completely irrelevant and the goal has at some point just become "to play more factorio". The factory doesn't have to grow to feed the rocket. The factory must grow because it must grow. And you're there to make it grow. Then pretty soon you've launched hundreds of rockets and you're still thinking "if I can just get my trains working a bit better, remove this bottleneck then I can expand over there..."
- IIAOPSW 5y ago
  The point of life is to automate everything so you can finally quit.
- paulmendoza 5y ago
  Try Satisfactory. It is beautiful.
impalallama 5y ago
> I used to be of the opinion that the computer game Factorio was a colossal waste of talent, burning many billions of dollars of GDP every year.... But since trying it out a bit more I’m starting to suspect that Factorio is the rare computer game to actually increase GDP. Hell of an opener that just makes me immediately dislike this guys entire worldview. Kinda also backed up by the fact that he doesn't mention the very unsubtle commentary of you basically strip mining an alien planet clean mutating the wild life into a homicidal frenzy in desperate attempt to stop you from killing their home with pollution.
- serverholic 5y ago
  Some people legitimately think the purpose of life is productivity. I see quite a few on twitter and I can't help but stare and study them like some alien lifeform.
  - brnt 5y ago
    They make for excellent employees. Promotion of this and similar values almost seem like they were designed for capitalists to exploit.
    - serverholic 5y ago
      For sure. I'd legitimately love to get inside their heads and see what makes them tick because it's a completely foreign mindset for me. I saw some recently on twitter who were discussing how they run their relationships like a corporate business... They have standups, 1on1's, scheduled relationship sync up meetings, etc. As if doing this bullshit during their day jobs wasn't enough.
      - pm90 5y ago
        “Don’t trust stuff you read on the internet”. I would be careful about this stuff as a lot of people are in the “productivity coach” market.
SamPatt 5y ago
"Step 3 Rip up large fractions of the setup and lay them out again with more straight lines and sensibility" Newb. You don't rip the first spaghetti base up and rebuild, that's a waste of time. The first base only exists to get you to the point where you can build a main belt line and then make everything nice and straight and coherent. The old base just sits abandoned, until the new belt line eventually encroachs, and then you just unceremoniously raze it.
wink 5y ago
I love programming and I hate games like Factorio where you're (to a degree) doing the same thing with logical thinking and optimization etc.pp. (I like games and I like puzzles, but this feels like work to me, in a language I hate, with an IDE I hate and with no undo). At least this article doesn't tell me I will love this and I should play it, unlike all the others. So thumbs up for the article :P
- jimbob45 5y ago
  I’m in the same boat but I wonder if that’s just because we’re programmers and anything short of perfection is time wasted for us. When you’re first starting out, it feels amazing to input two numbers, add them together, and print them out to the console. When you’re a professional programmer, it feels like you’re wasting time if you’re not defensively coding against future concerns and potential feature needs. Likewise in Factorio, I can’t enjoy success in any part of the game because I feel that any investment in one level could potentially be taking away from planning for the next level. Level, in this case, being the current level of technology researched in the game. I realize that this is irrational but I surely can’t be alone on this.
lawrenceyan 5y ago
From the footnote: > In CS terms, expanding a poorly-specced and unmaintainable Factorio base is O(log(n)) while expanding a perfectly specced one is O(n), but the coefficient on the first is massively higher. Shouldn't this be the other way around? Speccing out requires higher upfront effort, meaning a higher coefficient, but ultimately results in better long term results in overall required effort, for an O(log(n)) graph.
Tade0 5y ago
I'm consciously avoiding Factorio because I know what it would do to me. It already took one of our team members. As for automation: I'm surprised that scaling is presented as the main - or actually only - reason for automating. I for one don't automate for speed, I automate for correctness. The other day we discovered that some of the tens-of-megabytes JSONs we're reading on a regular basis have an error: single-element arrays were replaced by that element, so e.g. `[1]` would become just `1`. That was okay for the parser on the receiving end, but not for the recently introduced more efficient serializing module. I could just go over those files and search all such occurrences by comparing them to the reference type definition - would take less than an hour provided I didn't make any mistakes. But I'm only human, so I opted for something else, namely: drawing from the pile of rich manure that is the npm repository and finding modules for: 1. Generating JSON schemas from TypeScript type definitions. 2. Validating JSON files against JSON schemas. Armed with these tools I modified the files until the validator confirmed full correctness. Took longer than expected, but now not only can I guarantee that these files are error free, but any future ones as well.
- mbrameld 5y ago
  I think scaling is presented as the main - or actually only - reason for automating because it's actually the only reason for automating in the game. Nothing that you can automate in the game can be done incorrectly.
_9omd 5y ago
My problem with games like Factorio (and more recently Oxygen no Included), is that after I get addicted and get up past 100 hours of gameplay I start to question what the hell I'm doing with my life. Up until that point it's great fun designing, building, and optimizing, but then a switch in my head flips. I start to become anxious about the fact that I was excited about getting better at skills in a virtual world. Usually around this time I start watching videos of more advanced builds, and then become increasingly depressed about the idea of sinking 1000+ hours into a game, when I could just be building something in the real world, or out riding my bike. This is usually the time I put the game down and never play it again. I think the problem for me is that these games give me the illusion of learning, building, and accomplishing things, which my little engineer brain loves. But once I come out of the haze of addiction, I realize it's nothing more than an illusion, and I just stomach going on.
- colechristensen 5y ago
  Optimizing and organizing are skills that you develop and can practice by gaming, there are plenty of transferable skills, and opportunities to learn from what sticks you up (from one side: i spend so much time optimizing i don’t get anything done, from the other: my stuff is such a mess it’s not getting much done) You can like doing something and then realize you’re spending more time on it than you want and stop, both things are fine.
- dota_fanatic 5y ago
  Yeah, I feel you. However, remember that these are games. It's fun to play. It's unlikely in real-life that you will get the opportunity to control resources and strategy on the level that Factorio and such offer. Enjoy the opportunity to build. To imagine and see where your imagination takes you. It's good practice, mental exercise. Much like with story-telling in the form of books and movies, playing (good) games is an opportunity to learn about yourself and reality, and then grow in response. You are the player of games. Be mindful so the game doesn't play you. ;) It sounds like you're doing well to recognize "enough," when the trade-offs don't make sense anymore, though a bit late. Maybe next time you'll slow down before anxiety need kick in. Good luck, have fun!
- 5y ago
desireco42 5y ago
I got addicted to Dyson Sphere Program... already clocked in 100s of hours, pretty much embarrassed to admit how much I play the game. Restarted it few times to apply what I learned. It is still early in the game, they keep adding things but that thing is really amazing and provided fun to me that I didn't feel in the game for a long time.
zouhair 5y ago
> I used to be of the opinion that the computer game Factorio was a colossal waste of talent, burning many billions of dollars of GDP every year. I dunno if the author is joking or not, but I heard this argument over and over. Am I in the minority to think that it's totally insane that everything should revolve around raising the GDP? I feel smart people working at Facebook or Google working hard at finding new ways to serve more ads to more people is the huge waste of talent.
- pm90 5y ago
  A charitable interpretation is that it’s an attempt to continue the spectacular growth of labor efficiency that has lifted large sections of the world out of poverty. Doesn’t change that it’s rather silly to constantly think of individual actions’ effect on a macroeconomic measure.
  - zouhair 5y ago
    Labor efficiency didn't lift anyone from poverty, social policies did. We are more efficient than any time in history but we still have to work full time to survive.
  - imtringued 5y ago
    Productivity growth and economic growth aren't the same thing. If you have the first but not the second you have more free time. (assuming a demurrage currency and land value taxes)
- mbrodersen 5y ago
  I agree. GDP is the new religion. All must be sacrificed to increase it.
mbrodersen 5y ago
I love Factorio. One of my top 10 best games ever. I am currently playing Satisfactory as well. It is equally good and share a lot of things with Factorio but also has a nice exploratory feel to it.
optimalsolver 5y ago
"How Much Are Games Like Factorio And EVE Online Sapping Away The Intellectual Potential Of Humanity?" https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/ml00ac/how_much_are_games_like_factorio_and_eve_online/ https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/ml00ac/how_... >I often wonder if these specific types of games are redirecting a nontrivial amount of human intellectual output into a deadend. They're explicitly geared to lure in the kind of obsessive tinkerer types who've historically driven scientific and engineering progress. Only now, there's little to no payoff for the rest of humanity if they spend thousands of hours consumed by one of these games. What's Newton's modern equivalent doing right now? Probably perfecting a build order in Stellaris.
wly_cdgr 5y ago
This person sounds absolutely insane going on about GDP lost to people enjoying themselves. That said Factorio is much more psychopathic than GTA has ever been
deleted 5y ago
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pmoriarty 5y ago
To anyone bored with vanilla Factorio, I'd strongly recommend trying out some of its hundreds of mods. As much as I love vanilla Factorio, mods make it 10x better for me, and solve all sorts of little complaints and annoyances in the vanilla game. If there's something in the vanilla game you don't like or want to improve, odds are there's already a mod that fixes it for you.
- srcreigh 5y ago
  What are your fav mods?
  - pmoriarty 5y ago
    Most of the mods I use are utility and convenience mods... here are some of my favorites: = Todo List - don't know how I ever lived without this mod, which I use to keep track of what I need to do next... absolutely essential for larger bases. I really wish it could be used 100% from the keyboard, but it's still good despite requiring the use of a mouse. = Angel's Addons - Storage Options - the only one of the Angel mods I use... it gives me much larger storage containers, like warehouses, so I don't have to bother with the annoyance of dealing with lots of tiny containers = Attila's Zoom Mod - lets me zoom much further out than the vanilla game does, also lets me view specific positions on the map very quickly and reliably = Auto Deconstruct - marks drills for deconstruction once the resources they're mining run out... just a nice little convenience mod that stays out of the way 99% of the time, and simply makes the game just a little bit smoother in that I don't have to manually find any of the drills that need deconstructing = Belt reverser - quickly reverse belts... saves so much time. This should really be in the base game. = Bob's adjustable inserters - a quick and easy way to adjust where inserters pick up and drop off to... should also really be part of the vanilla game = Closest first - make construction bots build and deconstruct close things first.. don't know why this isn't the default = Even Distribution - super useful way of quickly distributing resources over many consumers, instead of loading resources to one consumer at a time.. should also be in the base game, imo = Exploration Vehicle 1.1 - lets vehicles run over and destroy trees and rocks in the way = Explosive Termites - quickly destroy annoying trees. There's a Tree Deleter mod I used to use until it stopped working. That was good too, and even faster than the termites. = Far Reach - some might consider it cheating, but I just find it annoying and a waste of time to always run back and forth across the screen to do something... this lets me do it from anywhere on the screen.. with a zoom mod, my reach becomes even greater.. both of these together with some turrets make fighting vanilla biters too easy, so if you want to fight biters with this combination I'd recommend using a biter enhancement mod like Rampant to make the biters more of a challenge = Fill4Me - auto-fill items with fuel/ammo when you place them... very convenient. See the above note on the Far Reach mod, as this is another mod that together with Far Reach and the zoom mod makes fighting the biters too easy. = Ingos Advanced Start - gives you a bunch of bots and an exoskeleton to start with.. I love this, as I really don't enjoy the slow speed and slow construction/deconstruction rate that I'm stuck with in the early game... this lets me get to the fun parts of the game faster. Not recommended for one's first playthrough, but I find it essential afterwards. = Inventory Repair - uses repair packs auto repair items in one's inventory.. another nice convenience mod that just does the right thing without interaction = Laser Lines - super useful for aligning stuff perfectly = Land Mover - dig holes to make landfill... with the Far Reach and a zoom mod using landfill will let you make 100% secure barriers against biters. Some might consider this cheating, others a welcome relief. I just turned off biters completely eventually, so it doesn't matter to me now, but the mod is still useful to me for crossing lakes and the like. = LTN - Logistics Train Network - not an easy mod to learn to use, but totally worth it for large train networks, and my favorite of mods of its kind, but I'd use it with LTN Combinator and LTN Content Reader for more convenience = Miniloader - very quick loaders and unloaders that don't impact UPS nearly as much as some similar mods = Nixie Tubes - a nice way to display info about various signals = Power+: Power Utilization Meter - adds signals showing useful information about your power networks = Splatter Guard - keeps you from being run over by trains.. there are a bunch of other mods like this, which I haven't tried... probably anything that does the same thing will be good enough = Squeak Through - absolutely essential mod that lets you walk through tight spaces you otherwise couldn't = Train Network for Players - an easy way to call a passenger train to your location = Vacuum Cleaner - quickly pick up stuff on belts or from the ground.. much more convenient than the vanilla method = Where is my body - shows where you died... lots of mods to do this sort of thing.. any of them are probably good. Something like this should probably be part of the vanilla game too. I use many, many, many more mods (over 100 in total).. but this should be a good start for just about anyone. I've also disabled biters in my games, because I just find them annoying at this point, but when I had them enabled I also liked to use the Rampant mod to make them more challenging, and a bunch of improved weapon mods like Modular Turrets, which I remember liking.
ehnto 5y ago
> I used to be of the opinion that the computer game Factorio was a colossal waste of talent, burning many billions of dollars of GDP every year. Oh no, the GDP! I appreciate most of the rest of the article, but the premise that it's value is tied to it's ability to influence one economic metric is a very flawed lens to view the world through.
paulmendoza 5y ago
Satisfactory is a less frustrating version of Factorio.
thepuppet33r 5y ago
I think a missing factor here that hasn't really been brought up is Teambuilding. Factorio lends itself to multiplayer very well, and a team working together to solve problems that are not dissimilar to the coding projects they have at work can be easily worth $20.

464 points by Ariarule 5y ago

m463 5y ago

> (it should probably be renamed "Refactorio") great observation :)

I really like builder games (Anno series) but haven't picked up factorio due to concerns of time sink. Instead tinkering more with self-hosting stuff lately. I find it scratches the same itch - building / optimisation / problem solving vibe but has a slightly more tangible enduring value (something useful + learning)

topologie 5y ago

So, what about Dwarf Fortress? (Would anyone recommend Factorio over Dwarf Fortress?)

juice_bus 5y ago

Shopify allowing Factorio to be expensed is really interesting. Someone higher up must really like it?

xal 5y ago
I do :-)
- mynegation 5y ago
  That comment must be on some HN wall of fame next to "Did you win Putnam?" classic.
  - Jalad 5y ago
    I didn't know what this was referring to, but after a little bit of digging: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079
- midjji 5y ago
  Very cool you do this! Care to elaborate on why?
midjji 5y ago
A tech company focused on logistics has at least one boss or founder who really likes factorio, the game for and by programmers who like logistics? Who could have guessed^^ It is cool if they let people expense it though, but motivating the 20$ per employee cost is pretty trivial. Compared to similar expenses like a yearly fruit basket, Id wager giving programmers/logistics workers a free factorio probably has a better impact on work performance. I think op is underestimating how much people learn from games, but it is also not exactly a high bar to pass, and Id wager factorio teaches more than most.
- jfim 5y ago
  > Id wager giving programmers/logistics workers a free factorio probably has a better impact on work performance. I'd be skeptical of that claim. I'm sure there would be at least a few engineers that showed up to work pretty tired because the factory needed more iron plates. :-)
  - midjji 5y ago
    Yeah, think I'm less assuming that people wont let it negatively affect their work, as much as assuming that the people for whom it does would have been playing something else with the same effect.
    - Aeolun 5y ago
      Not really. Factory/building games are the only ones that keep me up until 2:35 AM (at least today). This was fine when I could just sleep in until 10, but I’m fairly certain my little bundle of joy will need my attention somewhere before 8. 3 years in and still trying to figure out how to combine these things.
      - midjji 5y ago
        If you figure it out, there will be a lot of interest^^. I kinda miss the "just one more turn" till sunrise sessions, but half of that is me missing that the only thing that happened the day after was a slight headache.
shane_b 5y ago
Tobi the CEO likes it

deltaonefour 5y ago

Every once in a while on the HN front page you get some article about a programming analogy or an entrepreneurship analogy. "Here's why the game factorio is like programming or here's why it's like life. yada yada yada" Yeah, AND this guy takes the next step and turns the analogy into a "mindset." Great. Revolutionary. First off.. analogy is amazing. Second... turning that analogy into a way of life blows my mind. Is your mind blown too? This guy is a genius. The next step, (and I've seen plenty of this on HN), is to turn that analogy into a full blown "theory" of some sort... complete with diagrams.

dentemple 5y ago
I mean, out of most of the analogy examples posted to HN, Factorio is actually a good one. The observations that the writer makes are all immediately apparent when you fire up the game, and there isn't anything here that I'd call a "deep cut" or a strained metaphor. Factorio can literally be renamed "Iterative Development: The Game" and players wouldn't find anything confusing about any of it.
- deltaonefour 5y ago
  >I mean, out of most of the analogy examples posted to HN, Factorio is actually a good one I think all the analogies I've seen are good. The problem is they're obvious. They don't really bring anything new to the table. Great you identified an analogy. Big deal?
  - dentemple 5y ago
    And yet, there's always at least one HN reader who makes a comment in every popular thread that the original post is irrelevant in some way. Still, it never seems to stop people from doing it despite not "bringing anything new to the table" with their comment. So why do it?
    - deltaonefour 5y ago
      What I'm bringing to the table, is helping everyone notice that these posts bring nothing new to the table. That's the problem with these analogy posts. People like them but they don't offer anything of substance. Think about it. You identified a connection between two things, yet nothing new was introduced. You get this artificial euphoria of seeing a connection but that's it, it's just an illusion.

minihat 5y ago

My friend has 600+ hours played of Factorio. He just beat the game for the first time. I bought it, we played multiplayer. And I taught him the mantra "great is the enemy of good enough". Our run took 14 hours. I also know many people like this at work, and wish they could have the Factorio experience. If you refactor at the first sign of trouble, you remain blind to totally new to problems just around the corner.

skipants 5y ago
That's been my takeaway from these games, too. It really helped with my perfectionism because it makes the negative effects of it tangible; you notice how much more time you lose by trying to be perfect rather than just getting your supply of materials up and running.
- cwkoss 5y ago
  The factorio dev team are such fantastic software engineers, I wonder if this was an emergent feature of building what they want or if there was actually intentionality in making this a common takeaway from playing the game. If you haven't, read their blog! It's a master class in release notes and development communication.
shane_b 5y ago
In software dev, my team has a “naive, naive, refactor” rule for this problem
- rustyminnow 5y ago
  Could you elaborate on this rule?
  - shane_b 5y ago
    I wrote about this https://shaneburkhart.com/i/naive-naive-refactor https://shaneburkhart.com/i/naive-naive-refactor
  - 5y ago

DiabloD3 5y ago

I have over 5000 hours in Factorio. I am part of a group where several of us are over 5000 hours. Some of us have Autism. Some of us have ADHD. Some of us have both. The majority of us are in the tech industry. The companies we work at have been made to understand that the factory must grow.

pram 5y ago
When I play a new game of Factorio I literally stay up for like 14 hours every day until I get a lot of the rocket launch automated. It’s insane, it impacts my health for a month or so after lol
- markedathome 5y ago
  Wait until you see the speedruns; nefrums and wargerr are currently 100% achievements in 6hrs and 5hrs27 respectively (see speedruns.com/factorio #100) Launching a rocket is down to about 90 mins without using imported blueprints.
  - Johnyma22 5y ago
    Worth mentioning AntiElitz too :) Thanks for the wargerr recommendation!
- CyberDildonics 5y ago
  I think most people literally stay up for more than 14 hours a day.
  - conradludgate 5y ago
    Ignoring the extra 8 hours of working, so it's more like 22 hours a day
toomuchtodo 5y ago
Factorio should be the interview test ;) Tech’s Ender’s Game. (factorio fan, but with little time to enjoy it)

leptoniscool 5y ago

Dyson Sphere Program is a similar type of game, with prettier graphics.

saddestcatever 5y ago
Shoutout to Satisfactory. I've seen many players that resonate with Dyson Sphere Program also enjoy Satisfactory. Not quite as in-depth as Factorio, but an amazingly, amazingly well designed game in both over experience and gameplay.
bloqs 5y ago
Satisfactory - even prettier
vkou 5y ago
The logistical puzzles in it are... Unfortunately, a lot less interesting (And these games, by design, are all about logistical puzzles. Feeding stuff into an assembler isn't interesting - getting your stuff to the point where you can feed it into an assembler is.) The logistics network is too powerful, pilers don't really change how items move around, and fluids/gases/solids are treated the same.
bentcorner 5y ago
Satisfactory is IMO a superior Factorio in that it drops the Tower Defense and resource-depletion mechanics. It's also in 3d. I can understand that Factorio is balanced differently but it's annoying to build up a factory and then need to do non-factory things when a resource runs out or aliens attack your base.
- pwillia7 5y ago
  The feeling when you get coal setup for the first time...
- kllrnohj 5y ago
  > Satisfactory is IMO a superior Factorio Early game I agree, but mid/late game I couldn't disagree more. Satisfactory desperately needs a construction bot or blueprints or something to help you build at the scales it starts pushing you towards, or you just afk forever. Also the ticket loop as the endless resource sink is far less interesting than factorio's endless research paths.

julianeon 5y ago

I often encounter this issue when it comes to programming-like games. I’m wondering if I should adjust my thinking here. 1) Hmm, this game is a lot like programming. A lot like it. 2) Maybe I should just program? That is real work & I can get done more work done, be more productive. 3) [stopped game, started programming]

martincmartin 5y ago
What other games are like programming?
- Twirrim 5y ago
  Mindustry, Dyson Sphere Program, most games by Zachtronics (Spacechem, tis-100, opus magnum), etc.
- FreeFull 5y ago
  Pretty much any Zachtronics game, for one.
- sjmulder 5y ago
  Zachtronics games. They’re all about processes and optimisation but in quite different ways.
- wccrawford 5y ago
  Also "Satisfactory", Factory Town, Human Resource Machine, Kubifactorium, and at least one more that I can't remember the name of at the moment. Some are more programming-like than others.
  - Firmwarrior 5y ago
    I've been on the fence about Satisfactory, but I just checked Notch's twitter and the dude is STILL sitting there playing it all day The man's rich enough to be swimming with whales or partying in space and he's sitting in his basement playing Satisfactory.. there must be something to it

ojbyrne 5y ago

Personally I feel like Factorio reveals a principle I also see at my day job. Automation is exhausting. ;-)

mLuby 5y ago
Growth is exhausting, no?

Aperocky 5y ago

Going to give a shoutout to https://anuke.itch.io/mindustry https://anuke.itch.io/mindustry and https://songsofsyx.com/ https://songsofsyx.com/ In particular, mindustry can actually run scripts within the game to automate a lot of things. If you like factorio you're going to like these 2 games.

Malic 5y ago
Let's add https://shapez.io/ https://shapez.io/ to that list!
pwillia7 5y ago
Obligatory Zachtronics and Screeps links. TIS and Shenzen are my favorites of the zachtronics series. I've never really gotten into screeps but it always looks so cool. https://www.zachtronics.com/ https://www.zachtronics.com/ https://screeps.com/ https://screeps.com/
- iszomer 5y ago
  SpaceChem is where it started for me.
iliketrains 5y ago
Me and my friend are actually working on a somewhat similar game called Captain of Industry [1]. The game is less about automation and scaling and more about realistic processes, mining with excavators, trucks logistics, and taking care of your workers. It's not done yet but we are quite close! [1] https://www.captain-of-industry.com/ https://www.captain-of-industry.com/ PS: To my surprise, simulation games are a lot of very technical work full of algorithms and optimizations, compared to an average SWE work in a tech company.
- Kaytaro 5y ago
  I mean this as a compliment when I say I hope this never gets released.
- eezurr 5y ago

TameAntelope 5y ago

Gah, this happened to me literally yesterday, where I started a new Factorio map and had to close it after like an hour because I knew a) how much time I'd be able to sink into the game and b) how similar it was to my day job, which means I could just do my day job and feel 90% of the satisfaction while also earning money doing it. Rarely does an article online hit me as directly as this one does, good work.

jugg1es 5y ago

One of my top gaming moments ever was launching the rocket in under 6 hours. I launched it at 5:59:40. Then I realized the "There is no spoon" achievement was for 7 hours (and it's now 8 hours after 1.0 launch). Love this game.

bloqs 5y ago

Please please try Satisfactory. It's a beautiful, 3D equivalent. Holds a coveted Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam.

jerry_tk 5y ago
There is also Dyson Sphere Program with similar reviews.
Aeolun 5y ago
I like Satisfactory mostly because you get to enjoy the native flora and fauna without it constantly trying to kill you.
- ascagnel_ 5y ago
  More than just the native flora and fauna, Satisfactory dumps you in an area that's largely pleasant to be in. Factorio has a very desaturated, green-and-brown "videogame" look, and it's not all that pleasant to look at after a while.
stackedinserter 5y ago
Thank you for yet another reminder that it sucks to be a mac user :-)
- neogodless 5y ago
  A "mac user" isn't who you are as a person. It's who you're being in a moment of time. If you want to play PC games, buy a machine that handles playing them and use it for those instances. In this case, it looks like they only released Satisfactory on Windows, with mostly good results playing on Linux using Proton. https://www.protondb.com/app/526870 https://www.protondb.com/app/526870 Factorio seems to run on macOS and SteamOS + Linux.
- byvirtueof 5y ago
  Streaming clients like GeForce Now have come a long way if you want to play games as a Mac user. It's what I use to play Satisfactory and it works really well in my opinion.

easrng 5y ago

capableweb 5y ago
Is this based on anything at all or just border-line libel?
- easrng 5y ago
maydup-nem 5y ago
Wow, if it is true, I will surely stop playing factorio, because, apparently, some prick on hackernews would think the game's lead dev is not OK, and I am always quick to pigeonhole a person based on his controversial opinion, which I happen to disagree with.

caycecan 5y ago

Recently discovered Satisfactory. It's roughly GTA2 vs GTA3 when compared to Factorio (2d top down vs 3d open world). I'd love to hear peoples thoughts on the two games and what one does well vs the other. What people get out of either.

benlivengood 5y ago
Satisfactory is smaller scale (resource patches far apart, most of the build being about transport and linking a few buildings together, power being harder to achieve, and overall feels resource constrained) and Factorio feels like a blank canvas to paint factory on.
kllrnohj 5y ago
Having sunk vastly too many hours into Factorio, and recently just about 'completing' Satisfactory, I think Factorio is the far richer factory game. Satisfactory's unexpected joy is in exploration, such as finding all the alternative recipes. However mid game starts to be a bit of a drag, and late game is borderline miserable (the Smart! mod helps tremendously but I'm talking vanilla-only experience here). In particular in satisfactory you never out-tech problems. You never get tools to help you start abstracting away details like you do in Factorio with construction bots, beacons, modules, and substations. Satisfactory makes me want to design & build pretty or well laid out factories. But since it doesn't give me any tools to help with that, I end up with just floating slabs in the sky of endlessly repeated simple connections. Factorio feels far more rewarding when you come up with clever layouts for things, as you can then copy/paste it. Or design it to be modular for later expansion. There's the metagame there if making things tileable for rapid expansion later on. Satisfactory largely doesn't have that. It's too painful to expand anything, so it's all one & done stuff
- polski-g 5y ago
  The copy/paste/blueprint feature of Factorio has ruined every other logistics game for me. Used to love the Anno series until I got Factorio.
AnotherGoodName 5y ago

metalrain 5y ago

I think game like Factorio shows that level of automation is kind of quantized. First there is no automation, then one resource is automated but others are not, then several are automatized, but combining them is not. There are gaps where building the next thing doesn't make sense even if it makes sense when you have little bit more resources. I think this is true in business as well. It's hard to tell when you have crossed the threshold where building the next level makes sense. You tend to use a lot of time and money to build the next level of automation and only then you can measure if it was worth it or not.

vsareto 5y ago

I just don't get this. I feel like people back port their learning experiences to games that have a similar enough structure. A nice observation, but you can't go in the reverse direction by playing Factorio to learn something tangible. Factorio doesn't have the same failure granularity as the real world and so the usefulness of the analogy/mindset just doesn't do it for me. Plus my skill can be replaced by roughly how well I can memorize other peoples' factory patterns. Don't get me wrong though, it's a great game, and probably had the same impact for its genre as Doom had for FPS games.

outworlder 5y ago
> A nice observation, but you can't go in the reverse direction by playing Factorio to learn something tangible What about Factorio circuits? :)

daenz 5y ago

If you want to add more of the human dynamic to resource management and refactoring, I suggest FrostPunk. While Factorio feels more like managing and scaling code, FrostPunk feels like running a startup. It's rewarding, but very stressful. 0. https://store.steampowered.com/app/323190/Frostpunk/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/323190/Frostpunk/

buscoquadnary 5y ago
My understanding is that ForstPunk is more like a Grimdark dystopian climate nightmare than running a startup.
- daenz 5y ago
  You're right, the theme is a dystopian climate nightmare. The resource management, regular sacrifices, and dealing with growing human problems make it feel like a small company that is struggling to grow and succeed, which is more relatable to me.

lordnacho 5y ago

I'm literally playing Factorio right now, with my kid. Got into it over Christmas based on HN talking about it all the time. Good game to multi because I don't have to pay attention all the time. It really reminds me of software in many ways. You fiddle with tiny little things like balancing a belt, and then move on to building belt balancers. You then move up the abstractions to where you're not really placing inserters all the time. Maybe you make some blueprints and you're placing a whole set of nuke power plants in one go, or looking at trains. The kid loves it, but you can (luckily) tell the difference between what he makes and what I make. That engineer keep-stuff-organized thing takes a bit of time to hone, but he's getting there. He also understands how to find root causes now, based on looking at where there's a blockage in production and tracking back along the chain. One thing that's interesting is that the game is a bit, you know, dark. I mean we've built hell and the kid doesn't mind. Literally paved paradise with concrete. The air is black with robots, 100k of them at the moment. There's furnaces all over the place. We got rid of the steam power generation but there are huge areas of nukes all over. The natives are getting atomic bombs thrown at them constantly, it takes a while to even get to the nearest spawner. Or water that isn't green. And yet he doesn't ask about how we destroyed all the cliffs and filled in the lakes, and chopped the trees. "How should we make it bigger, dad?"

MattRix 5y ago
Dyson Sphere Program is a great Factorio-like that feels more optimistic and less dark. It’s still about harvesting every last resource though. On the other hand there’s Terra Nil, where the goal is to clean up a destroyed landscape and then leave it without a trace. It’s more of a puzzle game than a factory game, but still worth playing: https://vfqd.itch.io/terra-nil https://vfqd.itch.io/terra-nil
- genewitch 5y ago
  I've been waiting for Terra Nil since August, i think. I'm always bummed out when i see someone playing a game for video, and it's "not available yet". It's almost as bad as games that have been in early access for over a year.

benlivengood 5y ago

Factorio is an SRE game if there ever was one. It comes with graphs and dashboards. You can create audible alerts. The QPS (errr, biters) will come and the factory better be ready. Success failure is a thing.

aftergibson 5y ago

Anyone else really want to get into Factorio, but an hour into it realised it just felt like work and quit?

altairprime 5y ago

In theory, finding the ‘Factorio’ aspect of production just-enough management in other games is easy; Big Pharma is a lovely example of this. But instead, I want to talk about Stardew Valley, and the psychological effects of scaling up production. There is a very popular player mod for Stardew that allows automation of all “click to perform” actions normally operated by the player: Harvest fruit from a tree, Brew honey into mead, Cook wood into coal, Age mead in cask, and so on. Essentially, it introduces the conveyor systems of any production game — Verb Noun With Machine — and uses footpaths as the invisible conveyer belts. It is possible, with careful pathing, to build a farm that is automated from harvest to sale, and generates an endless supply of any product with minimum downtime. I found that when I applied this approach to Stardew, it was really fun making it work, and once I had it all working, there just wasn’t anything left to enjoy. Not because the game doesn’t have a near-infinite list of things you can produce (especially with mods), but because it turns out that the joy I derived from Stardew is about doing things myself. And so my intricately-pathed full scale production farm sits unopened. I point this out because in tech we often forget that capacity and automation can, in some cases, be inversely proportional to enjoyment. I could apply a photo editing ML algorithm to my photo library and no doubt it would be nice, but I enjoy the act of taking a photo and fiddling with it, even if I send exponentially fewer photos to my friends. One of them has a complex multi-device “ingestion pipeline” and it treats them well for their purposes, and I’ve built one before, and it turns out I just don’t enjoy digital photography at that scale. I love playing games like Factorio (though I haven’t gotten much into it yet) for their own sake, and I don’t deny that it’s possible to enjoy the art of scaling and automating these things, and that others feel differently. But my experience with Stardew pipelines was a really useful lessons in learning what I enjoy and when I enjoy it, and when that means I shouldn’t scale it up any further.

jl6 5y ago

I feel compelled to repost a comment of mine from the simutrans thread: — So, this is totally pop-evolutionary-psychology, but I think the relevant predisposition is towards hoarding. For 100,000 generations, humans (and our ancestors before then) have had to gather and store food and other supplies to see them through the winter (or other hard times). We are wired to do this because we would have died out if we didn’t. Building games let you build up your hoard of stuff (whether trains, rails, buildings, tiberium silos, green circuits, …) in a tight feedback loop that repeatedly triggers the “this is my stuff, now I am safe” dopamine response. This also explains collecting hobbies, and goes some way towards explaining the desire for wealth acquisition in general.

imtringued 5y ago
In keynesian economics the desire to hoard is known as liquidity preference because you want things you hoard to be immediately accessible i.e. liquid and require compensation to cease keeping something immediately available. Most physical objects deteriorate over time which makes gold inspired money an exceptionally poor way to keep track of things because the things that deteriorate disappaer but the gold that represents the things that deteriorated did not. So people hold onto gold or money without limit as it does not capture the full cost of deterioration leading to an imminent crisis in an economy that is not growing because the ponzi scheme has been exposed.

wilg 5y ago

I famously only play video games that increase GDP.

thisiswater 5y ago
Free exploration, experimentation, self-expression, fun?! - only in the name of GDP!

hathawsh 5y ago

I own a copy of Factorio, yet I never play it. Whenever I think about playing Factorio, I think what I really want to do is emulate biology, not industrial machinery. I want a game that lets me alter genomes slightly and try out several branches to see which ones are better for the world I'm trying to create. I want to fast forward through time so that evolution can run its course, then if I don't like the outcome, I want to be able to go back and try something else. I also want to be able to share evolutionary steps as code (in text form, not graphical!) with a community. The steps should be expressed in a functional language. Effectively, I want my quasi-biological world to take on a life of its own and I want to be able to run reversible experiments on both my worlds and other people's worlds. That's probably too much to ask. :-)

chinchilla2020 5y ago
There is an old game called spore that sort of did this.
zethus 5y ago
Think you're looking for a game like Spore or the older SimLife, both by Maxis.
cwkoss 5y ago
Early in my software development career, I tried building something like this. It's a really interesting problem, highly recommend trying it yourself. Even with a simple system and very modest skills: it was able to create results that surprised me, which was very rewarding. Copying previously written comment (you might also be interested in the "ALiEn – a GPU-accelerated artificial life simulation program" topic of the thread or other similar projects in the comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27476768 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27476768 --- When I was learning to program, I tried to make a toy artificial life evolution simulation. Particle organisms on a 2D plane had 'dna' which was a list of heritable traits, like size, speed, number of offspring. Bigger organisms could eat smaller organisms, but they burn energy faster. 0 energy = death. When two organisms of opposite gender collided and had sufficient energy, they'd give some of their energy split among the offspring, with each offspring's 'dna' values set to one of the parent's +/- 5%. As I was developing this, I hadn't figured out how I wanted to do food yet, so as an easy first step, I just had a constant amount of energy that was split amongst all organisms on the screen. Lots of little dots buzzing around, was kind of neat but nothing too special. I left it to run overnight. When I came back I was very surprised: previously i was running at about 30FPS - now it was running at about 4 seconds per frame. The screen was filled with dense expanding circles of tiny slow organisms emanating from where organisms had mated and nothing else. My simulation evolved to outsmart my simple food algorithm: when food is divided equally among all organisms, the best strategy is to use minimal energy and maximize offspring count. I had populated the world with a default offspring count of ~5 and they had evolved to the tens of thousands. The more offspring an organism had, the greater the amount of the energy pool would go to their offspring. It was a very cool "Life, uh, finds a way" moment - that such a simple toy simulation of evolution was able to find an unanticipated optimal solution to the environment I created overnight was very humbling and gave me a lot of respect for the power of evolution.

evmar 5y ago

I love Factorio! If you've completed enough of the base game, I can recommend Seablock (which includes AngelBob) and Space Exploration as two mods that make the game dramatically larger. I played some of Pyanodon (which is also sometimes mentioned as a big mod) but I found it kind of gratuitously complex.

annoyingnoob 5y ago

I think that a Factorio style interface for datacenter layout would be great. Saastorio. Layout your process and point it at your cloud service(s). Monitoring built in.

seanhunter 5y ago

Factorio is my favourite game of all time by a country mile. The thing that is so amazing to me is when you first play it and suddenly you realise that what you thought was the goal of the game (to launch the rocket) is literally completely irrelevant and the goal has at some point just become "to play more factorio". The factory doesn't have to grow to feed the rocket. The factory must grow because it must grow. And you're there to make it grow. Then pretty soon you've launched hundreds of rockets and you're still thinking "if I can just get my trains working a bit better, remove this bottleneck then I can expand over there..."

IIAOPSW 5y ago
The point of life is to automate everything so you can finally quit.
paulmendoza 5y ago
Try Satisfactory. It is beautiful.

impalallama 5y ago

> I used to be of the opinion that the computer game Factorio was a colossal waste of talent, burning many billions of dollars of GDP every year.... But since trying it out a bit more I’m starting to suspect that Factorio is the rare computer game to actually increase GDP. Hell of an opener that just makes me immediately dislike this guys entire worldview. Kinda also backed up by the fact that he doesn't mention the very unsubtle commentary of you basically strip mining an alien planet clean mutating the wild life into a homicidal frenzy in desperate attempt to stop you from killing their home with pollution.

serverholic 5y ago
Some people legitimately think the purpose of life is productivity. I see quite a few on twitter and I can't help but stare and study them like some alien lifeform.
- brnt 5y ago
  They make for excellent employees. Promotion of this and similar values almost seem like they were designed for capitalists to exploit.
  - serverholic 5y ago
    For sure. I'd legitimately love to get inside their heads and see what makes them tick because it's a completely foreign mindset for me. I saw some recently on twitter who were discussing how they run their relationships like a corporate business... They have standups, 1on1's, scheduled relationship sync up meetings, etc. As if doing this bullshit during their day jobs wasn't enough.
    - pm90 5y ago
      “Don’t trust stuff you read on the internet”. I would be careful about this stuff as a lot of people are in the “productivity coach” market.

SamPatt 5y ago

"Step 3 Rip up large fractions of the setup and lay them out again with more straight lines and sensibility" Newb. You don't rip the first spaghetti base up and rebuild, that's a waste of time. The first base only exists to get you to the point where you can build a main belt line and then make everything nice and straight and coherent. The old base just sits abandoned, until the new belt line eventually encroachs, and then you just unceremoniously raze it.

wink 5y ago

I love programming and I hate games like Factorio where you're (to a degree) doing the same thing with logical thinking and optimization etc.pp. (I like games and I like puzzles, but this feels like work to me, in a language I hate, with an IDE I hate and with no undo). At least this article doesn't tell me I will love this and I should play it, unlike all the others. So thumbs up for the article :P

jimbob45 5y ago
I’m in the same boat but I wonder if that’s just because we’re programmers and anything short of perfection is time wasted for us. When you’re first starting out, it feels amazing to input two numbers, add them together, and print them out to the console. When you’re a professional programmer, it feels like you’re wasting time if you’re not defensively coding against future concerns and potential feature needs. Likewise in Factorio, I can’t enjoy success in any part of the game because I feel that any investment in one level could potentially be taking away from planning for the next level. Level, in this case, being the current level of technology researched in the game. I realize that this is irrational but I surely can’t be alone on this.

lawrenceyan 5y ago

From the footnote: > In CS terms, expanding a poorly-specced and unmaintainable Factorio base is O(log(n)) while expanding a perfectly specced one is O(n), but the coefficient on the first is massively higher. Shouldn't this be the other way around? Speccing out requires higher upfront effort, meaning a higher coefficient, but ultimately results in better long term results in overall required effort, for an O(log(n)) graph.

Tade0 5y ago

I'm consciously avoiding Factorio because I know what it would do to me. It already took one of our team members. As for automation: I'm surprised that scaling is presented as the main - or actually only - reason for automating. I for one don't automate for speed, I automate for correctness. The other day we discovered that some of the tens-of-megabytes JSONs we're reading on a regular basis have an error: single-element arrays were replaced by that element, so e.g. `[1]` would become just `1`. That was okay for the parser on the receiving end, but not for the recently introduced more efficient serializing module. I could just go over those files and search all such occurrences by comparing them to the reference type definition - would take less than an hour provided I didn't make any mistakes. But I'm only human, so I opted for something else, namely: drawing from the pile of rich manure that is the npm repository and finding modules for: 1. Generating JSON schemas from TypeScript type definitions. 2. Validating JSON files against JSON schemas. Armed with these tools I modified the files until the validator confirmed full correctness. Took longer than expected, but now not only can I guarantee that these files are error free, but any future ones as well.

mbrameld 5y ago
I think scaling is presented as the main - or actually only - reason for automating because it's actually the only reason for automating in the game. Nothing that you can automate in the game can be done incorrectly.

_9omd 5y ago

My problem with games like Factorio (and more recently Oxygen no Included), is that after I get addicted and get up past 100 hours of gameplay I start to question what the hell I'm doing with my life. Up until that point it's great fun designing, building, and optimizing, but then a switch in my head flips. I start to become anxious about the fact that I was excited about getting better at skills in a virtual world. Usually around this time I start watching videos of more advanced builds, and then become increasingly depressed about the idea of sinking 1000+ hours into a game, when I could just be building something in the real world, or out riding my bike. This is usually the time I put the game down and never play it again. I think the problem for me is that these games give me the illusion of learning, building, and accomplishing things, which my little engineer brain loves. But once I come out of the haze of addiction, I realize it's nothing more than an illusion, and I just stomach going on.

colechristensen 5y ago
Optimizing and organizing are skills that you develop and can practice by gaming, there are plenty of transferable skills, and opportunities to learn from what sticks you up (from one side: i spend so much time optimizing i don’t get anything done, from the other: my stuff is such a mess it’s not getting much done) You can like doing something and then realize you’re spending more time on it than you want and stop, both things are fine.
dota_fanatic 5y ago
Yeah, I feel you. However, remember that these are games. It's fun to play. It's unlikely in real-life that you will get the opportunity to control resources and strategy on the level that Factorio and such offer. Enjoy the opportunity to build. To imagine and see where your imagination takes you. It's good practice, mental exercise. Much like with story-telling in the form of books and movies, playing (good) games is an opportunity to learn about yourself and reality, and then grow in response. You are the player of games. Be mindful so the game doesn't play you. ;) It sounds like you're doing well to recognize "enough," when the trade-offs don't make sense anymore, though a bit late. Maybe next time you'll slow down before anxiety need kick in. Good luck, have fun!
5y ago

desireco42 5y ago

I got addicted to Dyson Sphere Program... already clocked in 100s of hours, pretty much embarrassed to admit how much I play the game. Restarted it few times to apply what I learned. It is still early in the game, they keep adding things but that thing is really amazing and provided fun to me that I didn't feel in the game for a long time.

zouhair 5y ago

> I used to be of the opinion that the computer game Factorio was a colossal waste of talent, burning many billions of dollars of GDP every year. I dunno if the author is joking or not, but I heard this argument over and over. Am I in the minority to think that it's totally insane that everything should revolve around raising the GDP? I feel smart people working at Facebook or Google working hard at finding new ways to serve more ads to more people is the huge waste of talent.

pm90 5y ago
A charitable interpretation is that it’s an attempt to continue the spectacular growth of labor efficiency that has lifted large sections of the world out of poverty. Doesn’t change that it’s rather silly to constantly think of individual actions’ effect on a macroeconomic measure.
- zouhair 5y ago
  Labor efficiency didn't lift anyone from poverty, social policies did. We are more efficient than any time in history but we still have to work full time to survive.
- imtringued 5y ago
  Productivity growth and economic growth aren't the same thing. If you have the first but not the second you have more free time. (assuming a demurrage currency and land value taxes)
mbrodersen 5y ago
I agree. GDP is the new religion. All must be sacrificed to increase it.

mbrodersen 5y ago

I love Factorio. One of my top 10 best games ever. I am currently playing Satisfactory as well. It is equally good and share a lot of things with Factorio but also has a nice exploratory feel to it.

optimalsolver 5y ago

"How Much Are Games Like Factorio And EVE Online Sapping Away The Intellectual Potential Of Humanity?" https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/ml00ac/how_much_are_games_like_factorio_and_eve_online/ https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/ml00ac/how_... >I often wonder if these specific types of games are redirecting a nontrivial amount of human intellectual output into a deadend. They're explicitly geared to lure in the kind of obsessive tinkerer types who've historically driven scientific and engineering progress. Only now, there's little to no payoff for the rest of humanity if they spend thousands of hours consumed by one of these games. What's Newton's modern equivalent doing right now? Probably perfecting a build order in Stellaris.

wly_cdgr 5y ago

This person sounds absolutely insane going on about GDP lost to people enjoying themselves. That said Factorio is much more psychopathic than GTA has ever been

deleted 5y ago

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pmoriarty 5y ago

To anyone bored with vanilla Factorio, I'd strongly recommend trying out some of its hundreds of mods. As much as I love vanilla Factorio, mods make it 10x better for me, and solve all sorts of little complaints and annoyances in the vanilla game. If there's something in the vanilla game you don't like or want to improve, odds are there's already a mod that fixes it for you.

srcreigh 5y ago
What are your fav mods?
- pmoriarty 5y ago
  Most of the mods I use are utility and convenience mods... here are some of my favorites: = Todo List - don't know how I ever lived without this mod, which I use to keep track of what I need to do next... absolutely essential for larger bases. I really wish it could be used 100% from the keyboard, but it's still good despite requiring the use of a mouse. = Angel's Addons - Storage Options - the only one of the Angel mods I use... it gives me much larger storage containers, like warehouses, so I don't have to bother with the annoyance of dealing with lots of tiny containers = Attila's Zoom Mod - lets me zoom much further out than the vanilla game does, also lets me view specific positions on the map very quickly and reliably = Auto Deconstruct - marks drills for deconstruction once the resources they're mining run out... just a nice little convenience mod that stays out of the way 99% of the time, and simply makes the game just a little bit smoother in that I don't have to manually find any of the drills that need deconstructing = Belt reverser - quickly reverse belts... saves so much time. This should really be in the base game. = Bob's adjustable inserters - a quick and easy way to adjust where inserters pick up and drop off to... should also really be part of the vanilla game = Closest first - make construction bots build and deconstruct close things first.. don't know why this isn't the default = Even Distribution - super useful way of quickly distributing resources over many consumers, instead of loading resources to one consumer at a time.. should also be in the base game, imo = Exploration Vehicle 1.1 - lets vehicles run over and destroy trees and rocks in the way = Explosive Termites - quickly destroy annoying trees. There's a Tree Deleter mod I used to use until it stopped working. That was good too, and even faster than the termites. = Far Reach - some might consider it cheating, but I just find it annoying and a waste of time to always run back and forth across the screen to do something... this lets me do it from anywhere on the screen.. with a zoom mod, my reach becomes even greater.. both of these together with some turrets make fighting vanilla biters too easy, so if you want to fight biters with this combination I'd recommend using a biter enhancement mod like Rampant to make the biters more of a challenge = Fill4Me - auto-fill items with fuel/ammo when you place them... very convenient. See the above note on the Far Reach mod, as this is another mod that together with Far Reach and the zoom mod makes fighting the biters too easy. = Ingos Advanced Start - gives you a bunch of bots and an exoskeleton to start with.. I love this, as I really don't enjoy the slow speed and slow construction/deconstruction rate that I'm stuck with in the early game... this lets me get to the fun parts of the game faster. Not recommended for one's first playthrough, but I find it essential afterwards. = Inventory Repair - uses repair packs auto repair items in one's inventory.. another nice convenience mod that just does the right thing without interaction = Laser Lines - super useful for aligning stuff perfectly = Land Mover - dig holes to make landfill... with the Far Reach and a zoom mod using landfill will let you make 100% secure barriers against biters. Some might consider this cheating, others a welcome relief. I just turned off biters completely eventually, so it doesn't matter to me now, but the mod is still useful to me for crossing lakes and the like. = LTN - Logistics Train Network - not an easy mod to learn to use, but totally worth it for large train networks, and my favorite of mods of its kind, but I'd use it with LTN Combinator and LTN Content Reader for more convenience = Miniloader - very quick loaders and unloaders that don't impact UPS nearly as much as some similar mods = Nixie Tubes - a nice way to display info about various signals = Power+: Power Utilization Meter - adds signals showing useful information about your power networks = Splatter Guard - keeps you from being run over by trains.. there are a bunch of other mods like this, which I haven't tried... probably anything that does the same thing will be good enough = Squeak Through - absolutely essential mod that lets you walk through tight spaces you otherwise couldn't = Train Network for Players - an easy way to call a passenger train to your location = Vacuum Cleaner - quickly pick up stuff on belts or from the ground.. much more convenient than the vanilla method = Where is my body - shows where you died... lots of mods to do this sort of thing.. any of them are probably good. Something like this should probably be part of the vanilla game too. I use many, many, many more mods (over 100 in total).. but this should be a good start for just about anyone. I've also disabled biters in my games, because I just find them annoying at this point, but when I had them enabled I also liked to use the Rampant mod to make them more challenging, and a bunch of improved weapon mods like Modular Turrets, which I remember liking.

ehnto 5y ago

> I used to be of the opinion that the computer game Factorio was a colossal waste of talent, burning many billions of dollars of GDP every year. Oh no, the GDP! I appreciate most of the rest of the article, but the premise that it's value is tied to it's ability to influence one economic metric is a very flawed lens to view the world through.

paulmendoza 5y ago

Satisfactory is a less frustrating version of Factorio.

thepuppet33r 5y ago

I think a missing factor here that hasn't really been brought up is Teambuilding. Factorio lends itself to multiplayer very well, and a team working together to solve problems that are not dissimilar to the coding projects they have at work can be easily worth $20.