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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

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.
  - bmn__ 5y ago
    Waiting for http://enwp.org/Miegakure http://enwp.org/Miegakure for 11 years and counting.
- fennecfoxen 5y ago
  Factory Town is my current go-to. Rise of Industry has its points, as does Voxel Tycoon, but Factory Town is cheery and fun and it brings back the Factorio-style logic networks (and be prepared to use them, as it takes away Factorio-style train-routing — though you gain tagging support.)
- and0 5y ago
  DSP is excellent. I beat it before Factorio, and liked it a lot more, but I then went back to Factorio to scratch the same itch and after beating it think it's a bit better. The modding support and multiplayer, especially, DSP is prettier, grander in scale, and also has a lot of niceties that come with being part of the second generation of the genre. Absolutely worth playing if you enjoy Factorio.
- mdemare 5y ago
  Anything for iOS?
  - xondono 5y ago
    There’s builderment, that is kind of a simple factorio but without creeps (or main character for that matter)
  - bduerst 5y ago
    Mindustry and Shapez IO (browser) are pretty good.
    - BbzzbB 5y ago
      I had forgot about Mindustry... What have you done to me! Loved that game and wasted way too much time on it, will have to spend some more. Edit: Looks like it even got a fair few upgrades since! You can even code in game now.
- _aphw 5y ago
  On the multiplayer side - Eco. An incredibly underrated game. You have a month of playtime to extract resources, develop your society, and be advanced enough to stop an asteroid. Leaving minimum impact is heavily encouraged, and it has the most sophisticated economic system I've seen in any computer game.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - nohr 5y ago
    Can you play Eco with 2 people?
    - kroltan 5y ago
      Not really, the game is really made for the "10s of people scale". But thanks to how it works, it doesn't need 10s of coordinated people, you can certainly just join some existing server with a friend and have an equally good time.
      - bduerst 5y ago
        This was my biggest annoyance with Eco. It really does take a community, which is disappointing because you can't scale it down to 1-4 players. Are there any mods for this?
        nja 5y ago
        They've recently revamped it so you can adjust various levels (skill increase, cap, multipliers, etc) and make it possible to play with fewer. I've actually run a couple of single-player games, completely vanilla. Fun in a different sort of way.
        bduerst 5y ago
        >I've actually run a couple of single-player games, completely vanilla. I'll have to give it another go then. Do you have any recommended settings for this?
- bduerst 5y ago
  Yep, currently playing through DSP myself, as a factorio veteran. DSP is a great successor, even more than Satisfactory. It's amazing how well the DSP devs have figured out how to scale from small factory plots to inter-planetary supply chains to galaxy-wide economies, all to build a mega project. The only thing that's really missing (and same with Satisfactory, IMO) is the punishment for expanding too far too fast, the way the bugs in Factorio operate. DSP is supposedly adding combat later though, so we'll see how it pans out.
  - enraged_camel 5y ago
    I'd like a greater focus on externalities, honestly. Oxygen Not Included does that really well IMO. Almost every production process has inputs and outputs, and a lot of the outputs are waste that you need to figure out either how to utilize as input in another process, or to dispose of safely and in a scalable way so as to avoid negative repercussions. Waste isn't just in the form of products either. For example, one of the challenges that sneaks up on new players is that heat is also a type of waste, and if you don't take steps to manage it (for example, by insulating your power generators), it can wreck your colony.
    - jeffrallen 5y ago
      Speaking of that... When people talk about limitless cheap energy from fusion reactors in 30-50 years, I wonder about goal warning from water great from all that energy consumed and turned into waste heat radiated into Earth's atmosphere.
      - sudosysgen 5y ago
        That will be a problem in a few hundred years of our energy consumption continues growing at this rate; I've done the math on this website a year or two ago.
        kuschku 5y ago
        At the rate our energy consumption is growing, even if we avoid climate change wrecking our society today, the heat waste of our energy production will start to eclipse the effects of climate change in only a few centuries, at most a millenium. Which isn’t that long of a time.
foobarian 5y ago
Satisfactory had even more of that effect on me and the kid when we played it. Perhaps because of being 3D and having all sorts of native flora and fauna that was very good at being annoying and getting in the way of construction. It essentially made it fun to destroy the native environment and replace it with concrete. It's not even that we didn't mind doing it, it's that we enjoyed it. It was kind of unsettling, since it made me think that is how I would feel if I were a 19th century British colonialist bringing "order" to various native lands.
- and0 5y ago
  Satisfactory was fun for a while, and I want to try the v5 features still, but even as an FPS vet I get headaches and frustrations trying to do accurate placement of buildings, let alone tightly optimal. Amazing graphics optimizations, considering the dynamic lighting and how many objects are rendered.
  - outworlder 5y ago
    The 'zooping' or whatever they call that allows you to build multiple things at a time is outstanding. Enormous time saver. With a few exceptions, I think building placement is outstanding. Hold alt and it snaps, even if the other building is far away, with audio cues. Conveyor belts give a dopamine hit every time I place a long one. That is with foundations of course. Without them you get the spaghetti mess. What is more difficult than Factorio is that there are no blueprints or robots to build stuff for you. Also, the terrain doesn't help, we can't just destroy cliffs. But that's also interesting.
  - psyc 5y ago
    Satisfactory is in my top 3 of all time, just ahead of Factorio. 2200 hours vs 1600 in the latter. I like it for the 3D exploration and hand crafted map. I love that (if you don’t cheat yourself out of it by abusing ramps) you can spend hours on expeditions through treacherous terrain to get to the next resource. However my gripes are the same as yours. Placement is an unwanted meta-game that they ought to remove via better QoL features. The existing alignment, snapping, picking, and repeating features are inadequate for a game like this.
jamesgreenleaf 5y ago
If Factorio took place on Earth, that would be pretty dark. But, remember the backstory is that you've crash-landed your spaceship on an alien world filled with giant hostile insects who will attack you when you get too close, even if you build nothing and never pollute. Hardly a paradise!
- 8note 5y ago
  Is that not a description of colonial America?
- totoglazer 5y ago
  Doesn’t that make it even worse? You invade, destroy the environment, and the beings that lived there don’t like it. So you commit genocide and unilaterally decide to destroy the planet.
- hermitcrab 5y ago
  Wouldn't you be a bit hostile if aliens landed on your world and started exploiting it?
  - avereveard 5y ago
    it's quite easy to put a dent in the "poor good alien" narrative: stand around doing nothing. once enough time passes, biters will kill you irregardless. mind it does take a while for them to come get you, but they will come: https://i.imgur.com/GFxUvu4.png https://i.imgur.com/GFxUvu4.png so the engineer motive is clear: survival, not invasion. besides, the aliens are an infestation, not part of the ecosystem; as a matter of fact, alien left to their own device will expand and kill the planet biomass. aliens are there to consume, no less than the engineer.
    - taneq 5y ago
      > aliens are there to consume, no less than the engineer. Same as all other life really.
vaylian 5y ago
> And yet he doesn't ask about how we destroyed all the cliffs and filled in the lakes, and chopped the trees. I guess it's because he knows that it's just a game. And there's nothing in the game's rules that allows you to befriend the natives. There's simply no other choice that is rewarded other than expansion and domination, because the natives will always be hostile when you get close to them. Plus: The natives expand too. From time to time new biter bases spawn.
serverholic 5y ago
I think that's a bit of a weak point. When I play a violent video game I don't want to kill people in real life. He probably just knows it's a game.
danbolt 5y ago
Trying to plan things with only solar panels has this Puritan work ethic feeling for me.
SigmundA 5y ago
I kind of like that its dark, the aliens attack because of the pollution you create, and yet still the factory grows and I clear the hives with better weaponry. Its has some connection to reality that cuts deep and yet I want to play more get my SPM to go higher, it feels like everything wrong with modern life depressing and fun at the same time.
photochemsyn 5y ago
That's probably a good educational point in favor of the game, as it introduces the concept that material and energy scarcity can exert fundamental control over industrial production levels.
ornornor 5y ago
> the game is a bit, you know, dark That’s what really bothered me with this game. I’ve tried playing it in the past but this kept me from liking it and continuing. It’s depressing enough we’re doing some version of that in real life, but at least I’m not fully responsible for it. In the game, I am causing it and am 100% responsible for it. I don’t know why they did it that way. It could just as well have been without this destructive and deathly element. Oh well, I have other hobbies.
p_l 5y ago
For a time I played multiplayer using, IIRC, a mod called Nauvis Day. Combined with some of our other mainstay mod choices (Rampant) it made it very important to track and deal with pollution, though of course it didn't make it into really pro-ecological setup - It just made all sorts of waste and pollution a problem you had to manage (Rampant does it as well, as it makes bugs hardcore and much more intelligent, but Nauvis upped the scale on pollution management). On one hand, before we disabled it for being buggy i nearly made a bunch of things perfect (if energy intensive) recycled, OTOH I found we had a nuclear artillery shells and trains that could fire them... Then built a pipeline to make the shells and started cleansing...

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.
- bmn__ 5y ago
  Waiting for http://enwp.org/Miegakure http://enwp.org/Miegakure for 11 years and counting.
fennecfoxen 5y ago
Factory Town is my current go-to. Rise of Industry has its points, as does Voxel Tycoon, but Factory Town is cheery and fun and it brings back the Factorio-style logic networks (and be prepared to use them, as it takes away Factorio-style train-routing — though you gain tagging support.)
and0 5y ago
DSP is excellent. I beat it before Factorio, and liked it a lot more, but I then went back to Factorio to scratch the same itch and after beating it think it's a bit better. The modding support and multiplayer, especially, DSP is prettier, grander in scale, and also has a lot of niceties that come with being part of the second generation of the genre. Absolutely worth playing if you enjoy Factorio.
mdemare 5y ago
Anything for iOS?
- xondono 5y ago
  There’s builderment, that is kind of a simple factorio but without creeps (or main character for that matter)
- bduerst 5y ago
  Mindustry and Shapez IO (browser) are pretty good.
  - BbzzbB 5y ago
    I had forgot about Mindustry... What have you done to me! Loved that game and wasted way too much time on it, will have to spend some more. Edit: Looks like it even got a fair few upgrades since! You can even code in game now.
_aphw 5y ago
On the multiplayer side - Eco. An incredibly underrated game. You have a month of playtime to extract resources, develop your society, and be advanced enough to stop an asteroid. Leaving minimum impact is heavily encouraged, and it has the most sophisticated economic system I've seen in any computer game.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- nohr 5y ago
  Can you play Eco with 2 people?
  - kroltan 5y ago
    Not really, the game is really made for the "10s of people scale". But thanks to how it works, it doesn't need 10s of coordinated people, you can certainly just join some existing server with a friend and have an equally good time.
    - bduerst 5y ago
      This was my biggest annoyance with Eco. It really does take a community, which is disappointing because you can't scale it down to 1-4 players. Are there any mods for this?
      - nja 5y ago
        They've recently revamped it so you can adjust various levels (skill increase, cap, multipliers, etc) and make it possible to play with fewer. I've actually run a couple of single-player games, completely vanilla. Fun in a different sort of way.
        bduerst 5y ago
        >I've actually run a couple of single-player games, completely vanilla. I'll have to give it another go then. Do you have any recommended settings for this?
bduerst 5y ago
Yep, currently playing through DSP myself, as a factorio veteran. DSP is a great successor, even more than Satisfactory. It's amazing how well the DSP devs have figured out how to scale from small factory plots to inter-planetary supply chains to galaxy-wide economies, all to build a mega project. The only thing that's really missing (and same with Satisfactory, IMO) is the punishment for expanding too far too fast, the way the bugs in Factorio operate. DSP is supposedly adding combat later though, so we'll see how it pans out.
- enraged_camel 5y ago
  I'd like a greater focus on externalities, honestly. Oxygen Not Included does that really well IMO. Almost every production process has inputs and outputs, and a lot of the outputs are waste that you need to figure out either how to utilize as input in another process, or to dispose of safely and in a scalable way so as to avoid negative repercussions. Waste isn't just in the form of products either. For example, one of the challenges that sneaks up on new players is that heat is also a type of waste, and if you don't take steps to manage it (for example, by insulating your power generators), it can wreck your colony.
  - jeffrallen 5y ago
    Speaking of that... When people talk about limitless cheap energy from fusion reactors in 30-50 years, I wonder about goal warning from water great from all that energy consumed and turned into waste heat radiated into Earth's atmosphere.
    - sudosysgen 5y ago
      That will be a problem in a few hundred years of our energy consumption continues growing at this rate; I've done the math on this website a year or two ago.
      - kuschku 5y ago
        At the rate our energy consumption is growing, even if we avoid climate change wrecking our society today, the heat waste of our energy production will start to eclipse the effects of climate change in only a few centuries, at most a millenium. Which isn’t that long of a time.

foobarian 5y ago

Satisfactory had even more of that effect on me and the kid when we played it. Perhaps because of being 3D and having all sorts of native flora and fauna that was very good at being annoying and getting in the way of construction. It essentially made it fun to destroy the native environment and replace it with concrete. It's not even that we didn't mind doing it, it's that we enjoyed it. It was kind of unsettling, since it made me think that is how I would feel if I were a 19th century British colonialist bringing "order" to various native lands.

and0 5y ago
Satisfactory was fun for a while, and I want to try the v5 features still, but even as an FPS vet I get headaches and frustrations trying to do accurate placement of buildings, let alone tightly optimal. Amazing graphics optimizations, considering the dynamic lighting and how many objects are rendered.
- outworlder 5y ago
  The 'zooping' or whatever they call that allows you to build multiple things at a time is outstanding. Enormous time saver. With a few exceptions, I think building placement is outstanding. Hold alt and it snaps, even if the other building is far away, with audio cues. Conveyor belts give a dopamine hit every time I place a long one. That is with foundations of course. Without them you get the spaghetti mess. What is more difficult than Factorio is that there are no blueprints or robots to build stuff for you. Also, the terrain doesn't help, we can't just destroy cliffs. But that's also interesting.
- psyc 5y ago
  Satisfactory is in my top 3 of all time, just ahead of Factorio. 2200 hours vs 1600 in the latter. I like it for the 3D exploration and hand crafted map. I love that (if you don’t cheat yourself out of it by abusing ramps) you can spend hours on expeditions through treacherous terrain to get to the next resource. However my gripes are the same as yours. Placement is an unwanted meta-game that they ought to remove via better QoL features. The existing alignment, snapping, picking, and repeating features are inadequate for a game like this.

jamesgreenleaf 5y ago

If Factorio took place on Earth, that would be pretty dark. But, remember the backstory is that you've crash-landed your spaceship on an alien world filled with giant hostile insects who will attack you when you get too close, even if you build nothing and never pollute. Hardly a paradise!

8note 5y ago
Is that not a description of colonial America?
totoglazer 5y ago
Doesn’t that make it even worse? You invade, destroy the environment, and the beings that lived there don’t like it. So you commit genocide and unilaterally decide to destroy the planet.
hermitcrab 5y ago
Wouldn't you be a bit hostile if aliens landed on your world and started exploiting it?
- avereveard 5y ago
  it's quite easy to put a dent in the "poor good alien" narrative: stand around doing nothing. once enough time passes, biters will kill you irregardless. mind it does take a while for them to come get you, but they will come: https://i.imgur.com/GFxUvu4.png https://i.imgur.com/GFxUvu4.png so the engineer motive is clear: survival, not invasion. besides, the aliens are an infestation, not part of the ecosystem; as a matter of fact, alien left to their own device will expand and kill the planet biomass. aliens are there to consume, no less than the engineer.
  - taneq 5y ago
    > aliens are there to consume, no less than the engineer. Same as all other life really.

vaylian 5y ago

> And yet he doesn't ask about how we destroyed all the cliffs and filled in the lakes, and chopped the trees. I guess it's because he knows that it's just a game. And there's nothing in the game's rules that allows you to befriend the natives. There's simply no other choice that is rewarded other than expansion and domination, because the natives will always be hostile when you get close to them. Plus: The natives expand too. From time to time new biter bases spawn.

serverholic 5y ago

I think that's a bit of a weak point. When I play a violent video game I don't want to kill people in real life. He probably just knows it's a game.

danbolt 5y ago

Trying to plan things with only solar panels has this Puritan work ethic feeling for me.

SigmundA 5y ago

I kind of like that its dark, the aliens attack because of the pollution you create, and yet still the factory grows and I clear the hives with better weaponry. Its has some connection to reality that cuts deep and yet I want to play more get my SPM to go higher, it feels like everything wrong with modern life depressing and fun at the same time.

photochemsyn 5y ago

That's probably a good educational point in favor of the game, as it introduces the concept that material and energy scarcity can exert fundamental control over industrial production levels.

ornornor 5y ago

> the game is a bit, you know, dark That’s what really bothered me with this game. I’ve tried playing it in the past but this kept me from liking it and continuing. It’s depressing enough we’re doing some version of that in real life, but at least I’m not fully responsible for it. In the game, I am causing it and am 100% responsible for it. I don’t know why they did it that way. It could just as well have been without this destructive and deathly element. Oh well, I have other hobbies.

p_l 5y ago

For a time I played multiplayer using, IIRC, a mod called Nauvis Day. Combined with some of our other mainstay mod choices (Rampant) it made it very important to track and deal with pollution, though of course it didn't make it into really pro-ecological setup - It just made all sorts of waste and pollution a problem you had to manage (Rampant does it as well, as it makes bugs hardcore and much more intelligent, but Nauvis upped the scale on pollution management). On one hand, before we disabled it for being buggy i nearly made a bunch of things perfect (if energy intensive) recycled, OTOH I found we had a nuclear artillery shells and trains that could fire them... Then built a pipeline to make the shells and started cleansing...