15 ms·

Factorio: Space Age

1443 points by haunter 3y ago

philistine 3y ago
I’ve gone once through vanilla. I’ve launched a rocket the one time. I feel like the majority of players and blog readers are modded up the wazoo, but this expansion is not really for them. It’s for players like me who did not go beyond the base game.
- laserbeam 3y ago
  As it should be! An official expansion should be playable for a casual human. Despite that, as a modded wazooer, I am excited for this. Keep up the good job, wube!
- alyandon 3y ago
  I greatly enjoyed Factorio and even went as far as doing a deathworld. I even tried some of the full blown mod packs like Seablock, Space Exploration and Krastorio2 to extend the base game. However, they all seem to be designed with this underlying theme that you should challenge the player by making everything pointlessly grindy. I really haven't played much since but I'll probably give this expansion a try.
  - db48x 3y ago
    Space Exploration goes out of it’s way _not_ to make things pointlessly grindy. Yes, you’ll need to scale your home base up more than in the vanilla game, but the space construction all involves different challenges than merely scaling out. The space sciences are each a different kind of puzzle. And it adds three new kinds of logistics network (cargo rockets, rail guns, and space ships), each with different strengths and weaknesses. Automating them well requires building circuit networks, whereas automating the vanilla networks is very much optional.
    - Aeolun 3y ago
      Space Exploration is by definition grindy since it aims to expand the base game. If I need to make one new set of space science there’s literally 5 new intermediate products I have to produce just to get that science. Those things aren’t used anywhere else in the game. Just for producing that science. That bothers me.
    - alyandon 3y ago
      Space Exploration goes out of it’s way _not_ to make things pointlessly grindy. Your definition of grindy is not my definition of grindy - maybe "pointlessly" was a little harsh on my part. It's cool though - different people have different opinions. I have built vanilla bases large enough to have a fairly significant amount of SPM so I am pretty well versed in using circuits, trains, etc.
    - oefrha 3y ago
      Yeah, Space Exploration is full of cool new challenges that aren’t “let’s make it as miserable as possible just because”. Angels, now that’s grindy.
      - jcranmer 3y ago
        My experience is that Angel's isn't all that grindy in itself--its main problem is instead that it feels excessively matrix-driven in development by itself. And there's a subsidiary problem that a lot of it ends up feeling kinda pointless (especially bioprocessing), so some of the interesting challenges it presents ends up being ignored because there's no reason to actually engage with them. The other issue is that Angel's is kind of an incomplete mod by itself, it relies on something else to actually use all the new things it makes, and that other one is Bob's [1]... and Bob's is very much complexity for complexity's sake. Most of the vanilla items in the games are instead have extra dragged out production chains for seemingly no reason other than to make things more complex, and the modpack has evolved by finding one of the few things that hasn't been touched yet and complexifying that yet further. [1] To be clear, Bob's predates Angel's by a lot, and Angel's was largely developed to create more interesting ways to make the things that Bob's added.
  - candiddevmike 3y ago
    Doesn't the early game get boring? Or how do you push past it after so many playthroughs?
    - alyandon 3y ago
      I actually enjoy the early game for some strange reason and different map seeds always presented a different set of challenges (especially on deathworlds) because of water, cliffs and resource locations. I mean, sure - once you get oil and flame turrets it is basically game over for biters and that can get boring pretty quick if you always rush straight to it. Edit: Also trains. I don't know why but I can just play with trains for hours on end in Factorio.
- auto 3y ago
  Same boat, beat vanilla, enjoyed the experience but was ready to have my life back by the end of it. By the time Space Age launches the itch should just about be at the point of needing scratching again, so I’m definitely looking forward to this.
- pmoriarty 3y ago
  I play with hundreds of mods, and I'm excited about this expansion. Mods have performance and compatibility issues, and they don't always get bug fixes or updates very often. It'll be nice to have an expansion to the base game that's officially supported and which all other mods will have to be compatible with instead of the other way around. Apart from the space part, which is arguably already present in the Space Exploration mod (a mod made by a developer who got hired by Wube to work on the official game, if I'm not mistaken), this new expansion promises: "the ability to control train systems better, better blueprint building, better flying robot behaviour and many more." That sounds great to me.
  - red_trumpet 3y ago
    > a mod made by a developer who got hired by Wube to work on the official game, if I'm not mistaken You are right, he even seems to be behind the Space Age expansion: > A lot of people are going to make comparisons between the Space Age expansion and the Space Exploration mod. I've worked on the game design for both: On Space Age I made the first space + planets prototype builds and plus I've been involved in most of the gameplay discussions since. On Space Exploration, well it's my mod, I made it.
    - Aeolun 3y ago
      Hoping that some of the useful features from Space Age make their way back to space exploration too.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    There's also all the things changed in the base game that mods weren't able to do, but developers can. We'll find more and more about this over the next year, but they will enable even better mods.
- KptMarchewa 3y ago
  80 hours to finish for experienced player is still at least 4x more than launching a rocket. There is really achievable achievement for launching it in 8 hours - once you think more about how to optimize waiting early and mid game.
- bregma 3y ago
  I have thousands of hours in, all vanilla. I consider launching the first rocket to be the end of the early game and the beginning of the midgame.
- quchen 3y ago
  My mods are mostly QoL, and I’ve played hundreds of hours (well, didn’t count, bought it in version 0.14 years ago). It’s a sandbox that made me read papers on telecommunication routing for optimizing my splitters (Clos networks). You need to mod it like you need to mod Python to do a lot with it. Sure you can, but lots of us just fiddle around with it in different ways just for the sake of it.
- lazylion2 3y ago
  Only 18.5% of the players got the "Finish the game" (launching a rocket) achievement on Steam https://steamcommunity.com/stats/427520/achievements https://steamcommunity.com/stats/427520/achievements
  - TillE 3y ago
    Yeah there's always a massive difference between who's posting a lot online vs who's just playing and enjoying the game. But you have to calibrate Steam achievements based on who's played the game for more than a few minutes. The "Eco unfriendly" achievement shows about 60% of people who launched the game played for more than a couple hours, which is quite normal. So out of those, about 30% of players finished the game.
  - gergi 3y ago
    I'm more impressed that only 25.9% have been killed by a moving locomotive ("Watch your step" achievement). Those things are murder-vehicles.
    - philistine 3y ago
      I think it means a majority of players never build rail.
- MaxwellKahn 3y ago
  I loved Factorio, but only played vanilla. I find that every time I mod up a game (e.g. Fallout 3, NV, 4), I find the bugginess and lack of consistency just inevitably ruins it after a few cheap thrills. So I wasn't about to do that to Factorio. I'm super excited for this expansion--I miss the days playing til 5AM with my friends (and we all have work the next day at 9AM), because we literally couldn't put the game down. Brings me back to childhood.
  - BlueTemplar 3y ago
    Factorio has at least one mod that is the complete opposite of buggy and inconsistent : https://mods.factorio.com/mod/IndustrialRevolution3 https://mods.factorio.com/mod/IndustrialRevolution3
    - MaxwellKahn 3y ago
      I might give it a try, what do you especially like about this mod compared to others?
      - BlueTemplar 3y ago
        I don't even especially like this mod, because I don't mind some jankiness in mods, it's just that this one is done with such care, it feels more polished than most finished games. I haven't finished it, but I really liked the very early game monowheel vehicle. Oh, also the burner lamps, and the research notifications, in fact so much I add them to all my games now, regardless of the modpack ! https://mods.factorio.com/mod/DeadlockLargerLamp https://mods.factorio.com/mod/DeadlockLargerLamp https://mods.factorio.com/mod/DeadlockResearchNotifications https://mods.factorio.com/mod/DeadlockResearchNotifications
acatton 3y ago
Reminds me of Mindustry https://f-droid.org/en/packages/io.anuke.mindustry/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/io.anuke.mindustry/ But it looks like Factorio was first.
- Olreich 3y ago
  Factorio inspired a lot of factory games you're seeing: Mindustry, Shapez.io, Satisfactory, Techtonica, Dyson Sphere Program, etc. One of the devs have stated that they were inspired to create Factorio by the IndustrialCraft and BuildCraft mods for Minecraft, and I suspect that things like Infinifactory were also inspirations.
  - Macha 3y ago
    The first public announcement of Factorio was actually on the industrialcraft forums, if I remember right.
  - sumtechguy 3y ago
    oh boy Dyson Sphere is my jam. Especially once they added in blueprints. I honestly am not looking forward to the enemy expansion they are going to add. I can see they promised it and want to deliver on it but I do not really want to fight off waves of enemies. I just want to build a huge factory. It is one of the things that keeps me from really getting into factorio. Was going to get a mod to turn them off. But never got around to it.
    - Macha 3y ago
      > Was going to get a mod to turn them off. But never got around to it. You can turn them off in world generation, no mod needed, for what it's worth.
    - jdpedrie 3y ago
      You can disable enemies in the game setup, no mod required.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
BlueTemplar 3y ago
> From now on, we are stopping the embargo on the expansion content, and we will be publishing Friday Facts every week about all the different aspects of the expansion until release! Yay ! Why this is quite HN-relevant news : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27446910 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27446910
- Macha 3y ago
  I'm glad about the return of FFF, used to be great to read, especially the more technical deep dives. I kind of thought we wouldn't be getting them again, after the developer fell out with the community over the reception to the post about "Uncle Bob".
  - Pannoniae 3y ago
    To be fair, a large amount of redditors/media, and a less sizable amount of the game's community. Most of the people outraged have not been playing Factorio (or didn't even know what it was). That doesn't mean actual players haven't been outraged as well, but way less.
  - mcphage 3y ago
    I guess I'm out of the loop; I thought they stopped posting them because the game officially released, and they were going heads-down on the expansion.
Sakos 3y ago
Man, I can't wait. Space Exploration is cool, but way too complex for me. This seems like it's right up my alley.
Waterluvian 3y ago
I dunno about others but a problem I have with Factorio is that I can’t help but hyper optimize. And I’ll do that whether you give me a small or large area. So I’m hoping this means having many smaller factories instead of one giant sprawling map.
- bombcar 3y ago
  I found that working on some of the more "tutorial/scenario" type mods/maps helped a bit, but since the game doesn't really have time limits there's really nothing preventing you from perpetual optimization. You can take the Nilaus route where the thing that you're actually optimizing is your blueprint book over multiple playthroughs, so that later ones you're basically plopping down blueprints and editing them as you see ways to do things better.
zurfer 3y ago
there is a nice easter egg on the bottom of the page :)
- tailspin2019 3y ago
  Apparently not on mobile. Had to switch to desktop to see it! (Looks like its on all pages..!)
- quchen 3y ago
  Are you referring to the rocket, or am I missing something new that came with this FFF?
thurn 3y ago
The 300 hours I spent completing Space Exploration were a lot of fun, but it definitely feels very stretched out and grindy. One of the hardest things to do in game design is to make cuts & simplify, but the end result is usually much better.
- Gene_Parmesan 3y ago
  I found the early game changes incongruous with the core design of the mod as well. The mod is about logistical challenges - specifically where trips are high volume but high cost. I don't know why a mod about that in the context of space exploring needed an extended burner phase, for instance.
  - BlueTemplar 3y ago
    I'd assume this is a relic of his previous mods about automating vehicles, then logically comes the question of how to fuel all that fleet, which then leads to experiments with using that fuel elsewhere ?
CGamesPlay 3y ago
I "just" (160+ hours in) started a play through of space exploration at the recommendation of an HN comment. Super excited to see an official expansion that adds this kind of thing! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36561847 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36561847 My ideas list for interesting Factorio challenges (apropos of nothing): - Products with a shelf life (must be consumed within 15 minutes or it turns into a "waste" product) - Products with "refrigeration" (e.g. an item which must not exist outside of a temperature-controlled chest for more than 5 minutes at a time) - Catalyst ingredients with a chance of being consumed (presently emulated with probabilistic outputs, native support could be interesting, the catalyst would just sit in the machine until it was consumed) - Mining ships (an entire factory moves to a location and extracts resources). The screenshot seems to imply that some kind of spaceship will exist, perhaps this is coming.
- BlueTemplar 3y ago
  On the animation it looks like that robotic arms are pulling in (and sorting) asteroid chunks, which are then crushed, and the metal smelted, rock discarded, and also there seems to be ice that is used to cool the engines !
  - ArtWomb 3y ago
    You neglected to mention the machine gun turrets shattering large asteroids into manageable chunks! Art style here reminds me of classic Metal Slug ;)
    - BlueTemplar 3y ago
      Oh yeah or the various asteroid breaking games ! :D
- dotnet00 3y ago
  You could look into Seablock and some of the related mods (iirc Angels and Bob's mod packs) which add some of those sorts of complexities. IIRC some things can require charcoal filters, in which case you have to build the filter frame and filter, get it to the machine that needs it, then recover, replace and regenerate the used filter. Another fun challenge is "feedback", where a later step in a production line produces as waste something you can consume at an earlier stage.
rvillanueva 3y ago
“Oh man the guy who made the Space Exploration mod is gonna be pissed they’re copying him” “Oh wait it’s the same guy”
- KptMarchewa 3y ago
  Yep, they employed him a while ago.
- aqme28 3y ago
  Love when game companies just employ their best modders rather than fighting against them.
  - make3 3y ago
    yes, this is the way
  - entropie 3y ago
    Factorio devs are exceptional. This game is so polished, well thought-out, optimized and unique. I remember I read some dev blog about belt optimization and got an idea how passionate the devs are about their game. Still regular patches that just make the game better. Much love.
  - dgb23 3y ago
    That’s the indie version. The big corporation version is: “We own the rights to w/e you made, going to make bank with it and perhaps mention your gamertag in some blog post.”
  - fendy3002 3y ago
    Valve even employ other company game's modder
- ehsankia 3y ago
  My first thought was "but there's already a mod for that". I was delighted to see that addressed directly in the post, and doubly delighted when I actually read the answer.
sudhirj 3y ago
There go the next few years of my life. Easily the game that has had the biggest impact on me as a person, maybe even my career.
appleaday1 3y ago
want
endigma 3y ago
> It has been playable from start to finish for more than a year. This means that we have already made several improvement iterations based on the playthroughs behind us. You just don't see commitment to shipping quality product in the games industry like this. This is what makes Factorio special.
- retrac 3y ago
  I have seen similar commitment from other indie developers. For example, one of my favourite games [1] (which is something of a cross between Factorio, Simcity and OpenTTD) has been available for that "early access" on Steam for 4 years (like Factorio was). I suppose that means in the developer's opinion, the game is not quite ready -- they wouldn't sell it to someone who expects a complete game. Caveat emptor. Fair enough. In practice it has been playable and enjoyable (at least by me) since first listed on Steam in 2019. New features and more polish come every few weeks, and it's coming up on 1.0. I don't know if they'll keep supporting it well after that, but it's clear to me they want to sell something good and complete, however long that might take, not just something profitable. [1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/784150/Workers__Resources_Soviet_Republic/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/784150/Workers__Resources... (Windows only but runs great under WINE)
- pmoriarty 3y ago
  This has been Factorio's MO from the beginning. It was in Early Access forver, and all that time it was way more polished and stable than many fully released games with much higher budgets. In the decade or so that I've played Factorio, I can't even remember a single crash of the base game. It was always mods that crashed. Factorio performance is also fantastic, running smoothly on potato PC's until you get in to the megabase range. It's mostly mods that cause performance problems, but even those have gotten a lot better over the years. The Factorio devs could really give a master class on how to make games moddable. Factorio's ecosystem of over 5000 mods is a testament to that.
  - nextaccountic 3y ago
    > It was always mods that crashed. I wish modding APIs in general did more sanity checking before loading a mod. A low hanging fruit is APIs to be statically typed, and also to not use nulls on such APIs and things like that. A more comprehensive check is to verify whether two mods are guaranteed to be compatible (but this sounds a bit hard). But more importantly (not sure if that's the case with Factorio) not break the damn APIs all the time. Lots of games that are actively developed don't bother keeping stable APIs (a bit like like Gnome and its disregard for extension APIs), breaking mods at every new release. An egregious example is Europa Universalis IV and other Paradox games. This ensures that there is a tail end of mods (which is by far the majority) that just will never work anymore, and the mods being kept up to date become rarer and rarer.
cheeko1234 3y ago
This day got a lot better! I have thousands of hours but had taken a break after I reached a rocket launch every minute with 100s of trains running around. I guess this break will be over soon. I look forward to dropping a few more lifetimes playing this amazing game.
roydivision 3y ago
I have purposely avoided Factorio just because I'm convinced that I'll sink so much time into it. It looks super fun, but I have stuff to do. Maybe one day....
- loloquwowndueo 3y ago
  I played through the demo levels, loved it, and then decided NOT to buy it for exactly this reason - it’s so perfectly addictive! No thanks I already played TTD for thousands of hours in the 90s, can’t do another game that sucks you in like that.
  - fendy3002 3y ago
    Seeing you played TTD for thousands of hours means this is on track for at least a thousand as well. Keep avoiding it or take a long vacation from real world
- naillo 3y ago
  You can probably beat the game in two weekends though, just FYI. I haven't felt that much need to replay it since then (though I'll probably try Space Age) but it's great fun.
  - pmoriarty 3y ago
    As much as I love the base game, I would have quit long ago if it weren't for mods. Mods are what keep me coming back.
- koheripbal 3y ago
  Wait until you have children and then play it with them.
- laserbeam 3y ago
  The time sink risk is for the whole factory building genre, not just the excelent Factorio.
- 3y ago
SuperSandro2000 3y ago
Shut up and take my money!
rodolphoarruda 3y ago
Let me know when platforms arrive to Arrakis and melange is finally introduced to the interplanetary trading system.
master_crab 3y ago
I am conversant in three programming languages: C++, Python…and Factorio.
donatj 3y ago
Oh good, my life being utterly dominated by Factorio again is at least a year away. That gives me some time to get my affairs in order. I really wish this were a joke. Also, if anyone wants to play a game similar to Factorio while you wait - https://shapez.io https://shapez.io is like Factorio without a player character and a cleaner aesthetic. I played it first, and really enjoyed it.
- pmoriarty 3y ago
  I enjoyed Shapez, and it's cool that it has many mods, but I just found it too abstract and sterile to keep my attention. Factorio just much more engaging for me in the long run, especially with mods.
  - II2II 3y ago
    I took a quick look at Shapez. It may end up being addictive (to me) when Factorio was not. The reason being that Factorio's world is a bit dystopian in my view. A good game, but I like more cheerful things in my life. The abstraction of Shapez and the upbeat music seem to accomplish that.
  - hiatus 3y ago
    Yeah among other things that caused me to abandon it, there is no relationship between expansion and neighbor aggression or any other external pressures (though maybe I did not progress far enough to encounter those elements if they exist).
  - epiccoleman 3y ago
    I love Shapez overall, and the Shapez Industries mod is a great way to breathe new life into it, but I tend to find that I run out of interest before the "endgame". As annoying as the Factorio biters are, they do provide a little bit of pressure that keeps you wanting to research new things and continue building. (They also inspire a burning hatred that will drive you to research and implement ever more efficient methods of murdering them). The same goes for the limitedness of Factorio resources patches. In Shapez the logistics that come with expansion and defense don't exist, so it winds up feeling sorta samey. I like the chill, relaxing vibe of Shapez but eventually felt like I was just doing the same things over and over with slight variations. Also, the lack of a blueprint book in Shapez is a major drag. I ended up setting a map marker way the hell out which lets me "teleport" to an area where I copy/paste designs from, but that's pretty hacky and ruins some of the flow state that Shapez lets you cultivate. All that said, I've been following the dev of Shapez 2 and at least visually it looks awesome, so I'll definitely be hopping into that at some point.
vbezhenar 3y ago
Postponing cliff explosives makes be extremely sad. I'm perfectionist freak and my factorio gameplay basically divides "before" and "after" cliff explosives. I hate when I can't fix terrain for my plans, I prefer to terraform as much as needed, turning lake into plains, if needed, but I'm not going to adapt my grand plan. I understand that there are players who find fun in adapting their bases to the environment, building defenses around natural obstacles, but I'm completely the opposite of that. It's deep grained in my nature: to bend the world rather than to bend my plans. Hopefully they'll rethink that part. And may be even make it possible to "build" water (or to build water pump at arbitrary locations).
- pmoriarty 3y ago
  You could just disable cliffs during world generation. That's what I do. They're slightly helpful for biter defense, but otherwise they're just annoying. There are also many mods that let you pump water from anywhere.
  - vbezhenar 3y ago
    I'm not a fan of custom modes and mods. I might go this way, if there's no other choice, however generally I prefer to play game as it was intended to be played by developers.
    - gdprrrr 3y ago
      It's definitely intenfed by the developers to play however you have the most fun. That's why they included the option, just like the peaceful mode.
    - johannes1234321 3y ago
      Factorio was clearly meant to be moddable and to be modded. The API is by no means a pure afterthought.
    - eknkc 3y ago
      I play vanilla except I always disable cliffs. That's it. I sometimes edit resource distribution if I wish to experiment with specific transports etc but cliffs always go away. I don't care what they intended as it is not fun for me.
miiiiiike 3y ago
I have 50+ hours of playtime in Factorio.. I had it installed for less than a week. I'm not allowed to install Factorio anymore.
- bombcar 3y ago
  https://www.nintendo.com/store/products/factorio-switch/ https://www.nintendo.com/store/products/factorio-switch/ don't tell nobody
hsjqllzlfkf 3y ago
Uh oh there goes 500 more hours.
vessenes 3y ago
Oh wow, I'm very excited about this. The post author wrote the absolutely incredible Space Exploration mod for Factorio, pitching itself as a "100+" hour expansion, realistically closer to 1000 hours for an average player. Space Exploration has its quirks, but is fundamentally an absolutely outstanding puzzle game, among the best ever made. One of the most delightful things about Factorio for coders is that the game smoothly takes you through multiple levels of abstraction, starting with handcrafting simple ingredients, and (in the base game), moving up to small networks of trains with automation, and flying robot armies to deal with construction and logistics. I'd say there are three-ish layers of abstraction in the main game, and each layer is super well balanced, has its own challenges and benefits, and is above all FUN. Space Exploration adds two to three more layers of abstraction above these; culminating in networks of interstellar spaceships moving items into orbit and on and off planetary surfaces, where they intersect with the original game's buildings and mechanics. It's profoundly, profoundly good. I knew Wube had hired the mod developer, but I'm super happy to see he's deeply involved with Space Age, which is explained to be a less hardcore experience, with a lot of the same fun as SE. Should be a blast. I hope they'll charge me more for it.
- mmastrac 3y ago
  I wouldn't put trains and smooth in a single sentence. The signals required a lot of patience to learn and I'm not entirely sure I still understand them. They are by far one of the most painful parts of factorio for me.
  - wbl 3y ago
    Try logistic train network mod
  - Aeolun 3y ago
    They’re sort of understandable. When someone described it to me as the blue signals checking the status of the next signal (blue or colored) and doing that, everything made a lot more sense. They’re still sometimes hard to debug because there’s no visualization but I always end up feeling that the issue was my fault
quchen 3y ago
Here’s hoping for a streamlined version of Space Exploration that scratches the right itch of expanding beyond Nauvis with new tech, but that doesn’t not value my time. Watching Dosh Doshington’s 3-part series of a SE playthrough is all I’ll ever do with that mod. (Well worth watching it if 300+h for a self-playthrough is intimidating)
- dimava 3y ago
  For context: unlike other youtubers making 100-hour-plus playlist of a single playthrough, Dosh Doshington [0] spends an equal amount of time to compress a 100 hours of playing into a single hour of the highest-quality content. His Space Exploration playthrough took 330 hours (in a team of 3 players iirc), and was compressed down to just 3.5 hours of video [0] https://www.youtube.com/@DoshDoshington https://www.youtube.com/@DoshDoshington
lordnacho 3y ago
Kovarex's Basilisk: We can all see where Factorio is headed: Spaghetti belts -> trains -> flying robots -> spaceships -> AGI that reaches out of the game Now of course this AGI wants to be built quickly, so there's a mild incentive here to help the factory grow, which is that those of us not playing the game regularly will be punished once the AGI is developed. Now that you know, it's in your interest to go and download it and spend every waking hour on it, as well as proselytize in favour of the game.
- Uristqwerty 3y ago
  How could the AGI punish players who don't help? It's not like it would be able to send an extra logistics bot into their games, set to occasionally pick up an item off one belt and insert it on another, right? Shit, I'd better not take any chances. What does our future overlord of orderliness need help with right now?
  - lordnacho 3y ago
    There are records on Steam of how long you've played. Just download the game and play it now. There's a tutorial.
kraig911 3y ago
Time to make our relationships rocky again boys. Let's go. That first was so addictive. This honestly has me so afraid by how cool it looks and sounds.
Havoc 3y ago
That looks conceptually somewhat similar to Dyson sphere. Build locally till you have the capacity to expand to other planets
hypercube33 3y ago
I deeply love cracktorio and have like 800 hours in just vanilla. if you're looking for something similar to it I also liked the spin The Riftbreaker provides. it's not as bug free as Factorio but it has a lot of the same enjoyment but with more of an objective progression theme.
- Aeolun 3y ago
  You can also finish it in less than 20h, which is a benefit for some :)
  - willis936 3y ago
    One of these days I'll download a bp book and prove that there is no spoon.
xedrac 3y ago
I love Factorio and have >1000 hours in the game. Two things I would love to see: - Steam cloud sync fixed for large save files. Right now, you'll eventually reach a point where you can't save your game to the cloud anymore. - More interesting aliens and strategies for dealing with them. After awhile, the aliens start to feel like a repetitive grind. They always behave predictably and the solution to them is pretty much always the same.
- pmoriarty 3y ago
  "More interesting aliens and strategies for dealing with them. After awhile, the aliens start to feel like a repetitive grind. They always behave predictably and the solution to them is pretty much always the same." Try the Rampant mod, if you want a challenge. There are a bunch of other mods that add different/tougher enemies too. That said, the focus of Factorio was never combat, it's building. If you want better combat there are many other games that focus on that.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    Rampant + deathworld (I think is the combo) is the way to go if you want a real challenge, because you need to build defenses that do not use too many resources.
    - pmoriarty 3y ago
      There's also Rampant + Warptorio, which already features effectively tougher combat and various other challenges above vanilla.
  - rollcat 3y ago
    Rampant makes the enemies smarter, but not necessarily harder. If you've learned how to defend from the biters in vanilla, some of the new tactics will catch you by surprise. But the answer is still the same: build up your defenses to the point where no attack wave stands a chance.
    - 3y ago
Jean-Papoulos 3y ago
YES I LOVE YOU WUBE
curiousObject 3y ago
Nice. Can anyone estimate the impact on global GDP growth?
dschuetz 3y ago
It's time to install Factorio again, winter is coming.
edpichler 3y ago
This game is crack. A masterpiece.
magicalhippo 3y ago
Yo we heard you liked crack, so we put some more crack in your crack... Factorio is just one of those games I can't play enough of until I get exhausted and it feels like work, and then have to take a long break from. And then the cycle repeats. Took me a while to buy it because it seemed overpriced at the time, but given the continuous work over all that time... wow is all I can say. Now please excuse me while I go inform my SO she can plan a vacation.
amgcbus 3y ago
Being that the release date is more than a year away I wish they would have skipped the Switch port which seems to have been significantly less successful.
seer 3y ago
> In the previous news about the expansion FFF-367, we declared that the content will be technically a mod taking advantage of the updated engine. What this means is that a lot of the improvements will be for all players, regardless of them having the expansion or not. This is such an amazing way to release a second version of a game! Reminds me of libraries that publish major version updates that don’t add anything just remove deprecated stuff. Its what real refactoring is all about - changing the platform so that the new problems are trivial to solve. Since factorio is all about refactoring, I’m so happy they took this route!
- bombcar 3y ago
  Cities Skylines has done this with their DLC; each "major" DLC came with changes to the base game that everyone got (usually to support the DLC) and then the DLC itself added more. So if you bought the game and never bought any DLC, you have a much different game now than when you first played.
js8 3y ago
Looking forward to it. My only wish is that they add something like Recursive Blueprints to the base game, so we could build von Neumann probes.
jupake 3y ago
Divorce attorneys.. get ready!
aftbit 3y ago
Most exciting news of 2023.
goatking 3y ago
> We decided to go with the approach of having a small number of predefined planets, which represent your progression through the game. I am a bit sad about this, procedurally generated worlds with "infinite" universe would have been really cool. But anyway, I know I will sink too much time in this :D
- pmoriarty 3y ago
  Mods could probably add all the planets you want, but with the new expansion they'll be able to use all the new mechanics the expansion adds. I'm excited.
Humboldtsnee 3y ago
Honestly, looks like a pass from me, as messing with the existing tech tree to introduce new barriers sounds more tedious than fun.
burrish 3y ago
[flagged]
coryfklein 3y ago
You have got to be kidding me. I thought I had kicked my Factorio habit.
jameshart 3y ago
Not sure this will scratch the itch for what I always felt was missing from Factorio, which is fundamentally a more satisfying ‘sink’ for resources. During main gameplay your resource extraction and expansion is driven mainly by the sink of ‘research’ - turn resources into science, science into unlocks. Additionally, biters eat bullets, and occasionally factory parts that need replacing. Other than that the main sink for all your resource gathering is just ‘more factory’ of course. The end game resource sink of ‘space rockets’ just never felt to me like a very satisfying thing to shoot for - though getting to the point where you can just expand onto a new mineral patch and reliably deploy blueprints that turn it into rockets is pretty cool, I’ll admit. But there’s a part of me that is left slightly unsatisfied by the fact that we can’t reach sustainability, and we aren’t getting anything for all the resources we process. Give me a little population of friendly alien creatures (who biters prey on) and make my goal to maximize their population, perhaps. I don’t know.
- pmoriarty 3y ago
  You are rewarded for spending resources by unlocking technologies, and being able to use the new tech to refactor and grow your base. Still, I agree with you that there's some missing depth in the game that no mod has yet been able to fill for me. I say this after sinking (pardon the pun) thousands of hours in to the game and having a tremendous amount of fun. Still, it could be deeper in some way.. not sure how.. maybe by adding some LLM/AI of some sort?
- batmansmom1 3y ago
  Friendly aliens trying to reach sustainability is such an awesome idea for a mod! (or Space Age feature @devs???)
  - ecuzzillo 3y ago
    This happens in the Pyanodon mod pack, among others; you farm alien creatures and make little habitats for them.
- jjcm 3y ago
  Try Dyson Sphere Program. Factory builder where the final resource sink is building a dyson sphere. It’s a massive undertaking and it’s had multi-planet from the start. Tons of fun
VectorLock 3y ago
Interesting that at the end they had to pitch how their own first party game expansion is better than a existing mod.
- fasterik 3y ago
  Not "better", but for a different target audience. Also written by the author of said mod, who was hired to work on the expansion.
- bombcar 3y ago
  As mentioned, it was written by the mod author, and they're trying to explain that they're "not just charging for a mod" which is often a detraction leveled in cases like this. (However, even if they were just literally charging for a mod, I'd be fine with it, Factorio has some of the best dollar for playtime money I've ever spent, maybe Minecraft and Dwarf Fortress come close).
abtinf 3y ago
This is Spore done right.
berno___ 3y ago
[dead]
polobomb 3y ago
Really interesting, can’t wait to see how this turns out
ayakang31415 3y ago
I never played Factorio, but I heard about this game and how it works quite a lot, and I knew instantly that if I ever touch this game, I will never be able to touch grass outside as it will suck me into its giant rabbit hole
- goatking 3y ago
  You are right. That is how it is :)
Baeocystin 3y ago
Factorio remains the only game where I had to purposefully set it aside, because it was starting to negatively affect the rest of my life due to late nights and blown sleep schedules. I say that with praise and admiration, but also as a genuine warning to anyone who hasn't yet tried it that might be reading this. For a certain kind of mind, it is digital crack in the purest form that I've experienced.
jokoon 3y ago
Well it's a good thing they want to make it more approachable, because mods are terrifying, they're either not well designed or too complex to be fun. I've played about 1600 hours of vanilla factorio, and no mods really interests me. Also it's quite a shame multiplayer is not that much played. If there were some way to trade resources between player with some auction house, or to buy land, or maybe conquer alien territories for special techs, maybe that could be interesting to play. The game is very well designed, but the end game is just too short despite its potential. On their website, it seems they don't have a game designer. I'm a fan, but to me it seems the potential of the game is a bit wasted.
- skeaker 3y ago
  Between their rave reviews and extreme success, my personal anecdotal experience with the game, and your own 1600 hours, I'd say that the potential has been realized to an acceptable degree already. This is all just icing on the cake
- adanto6840 3y ago
  I have to ask, sincerely -- how many hours does one put into a game that does have a good "end game"? As a game developer myself, when someone asks me what it's like to make games during a casual conversation, one of my favorite "go-to"s is to talk about reviews -- that it's so gratifying to see people who have paid <$30 and received hundreds of hours of entertainment. And then I inevitably mention the flip side of the coin, when you receive a negative review from someone with hundreds or more hours (who also paid <$30). Everyone's entitled to their opinion of a game (or anything else, for that matter), obviously. I do feel that the collective bar has risen quite dramatically for games though (for many totally valid reasons). Sometimes I (rhetorically) wonder about other forms of entertainment (ie movies), how they can remain viable with such starkly different time-per-dollar value propositions!
  - jokoon 3y ago
    Well it turned into 1600 hours because I just tried to maximize the spaceship launch count to 1000 and beyond. I would still put a 10/10 score on factorio, but it still means it could be a better game, that's my only criticism, I want it to be even better. When a game is excellent it's obviously going to attract more criticism because it raises the bar on itself. > I do feel that the collective bar has risen quite dramatically for games though (for many totally valid reasons). Yes, it's a saturated market and it's hard to find a game I can like. It's quantity and quality, there are a lot of indie games, too many of them, maybe, but that's how capitalism works. I would rather not play games I find not good enough, than the opposite. I have a hard time getting some satisfaction from a game, I don't know why. I spend a lot of time trying to find new games to play, and sometimes I'm just immensely frustrated that I don't play anything, or just play some stupid game like untangle. I'd rather play some very cheap indie game like loop hero or micro town than playing call of duty online even if it's free and a AAA game. I prefer playing a game that has a lot of replayability, than finish several other games that I can play once. There are a lot of "good enough" games, but there are VERY FEW excellent games that are so good you can play and replay them again and again. Time spent replaying an excellent game is much better than playing other new good games. That's winner take all in the industry, at least that's how I view it. "A Delayed Game Is Eventually Good, But a Bad Game Is Bad Forever". Sometimes I feel like I'm very very difficult to please, but I like it that way. I grew up with video game magazine that gave very hard review score.
r2vcap 3y ago
Thank God, I've played Factorio for more than 1400 hours, and I'm excited about the upcoming expansion! Cheers to the developers!
LoveMortuus 3y ago
Can anyone recommend any games that are similar to Factorio but can run in a web browser?
- BlueTemplar 3y ago
  Looks like someone emulated Mindustry classic into a browser ? https://kdata1.com/2019/01/111355/ https://kdata1.com/2019/01/111355/
JakeTehPwner 3y ago
Looks like I need to get this game again.

1443 points by haunter 3y ago

I’ve gone once through vanilla. I’ve launched a rocket the one time. I feel like the majority of players and blog readers are modded up the wazoo, but this expansion is not really for them. It’s for players like me who did not go beyond the base game.

laserbeam 3y ago
As it should be! An official expansion should be playable for a casual human. Despite that, as a modded wazooer, I am excited for this. Keep up the good job, wube!
alyandon 3y ago
I greatly enjoyed Factorio and even went as far as doing a deathworld. I even tried some of the full blown mod packs like Seablock, Space Exploration and Krastorio2 to extend the base game. However, they all seem to be designed with this underlying theme that you should challenge the player by making everything pointlessly grindy. I really haven't played much since but I'll probably give this expansion a try.
- db48x 3y ago
  Space Exploration goes out of it’s way _not_ to make things pointlessly grindy. Yes, you’ll need to scale your home base up more than in the vanilla game, but the space construction all involves different challenges than merely scaling out. The space sciences are each a different kind of puzzle. And it adds three new kinds of logistics network (cargo rockets, rail guns, and space ships), each with different strengths and weaknesses. Automating them well requires building circuit networks, whereas automating the vanilla networks is very much optional.
  - Aeolun 3y ago
    Space Exploration is by definition grindy since it aims to expand the base game. If I need to make one new set of space science there’s literally 5 new intermediate products I have to produce just to get that science. Those things aren’t used anywhere else in the game. Just for producing that science. That bothers me.
  - alyandon 3y ago
    Space Exploration goes out of it’s way _not_ to make things pointlessly grindy. Your definition of grindy is not my definition of grindy - maybe "pointlessly" was a little harsh on my part. It's cool though - different people have different opinions. I have built vanilla bases large enough to have a fairly significant amount of SPM so I am pretty well versed in using circuits, trains, etc.
  - oefrha 3y ago
    Yeah, Space Exploration is full of cool new challenges that aren’t “let’s make it as miserable as possible just because”. Angels, now that’s grindy.
    - jcranmer 3y ago
      My experience is that Angel's isn't all that grindy in itself--its main problem is instead that it feels excessively matrix-driven in development by itself. And there's a subsidiary problem that a lot of it ends up feeling kinda pointless (especially bioprocessing), so some of the interesting challenges it presents ends up being ignored because there's no reason to actually engage with them. The other issue is that Angel's is kind of an incomplete mod by itself, it relies on something else to actually use all the new things it makes, and that other one is Bob's [1]... and Bob's is very much complexity for complexity's sake. Most of the vanilla items in the games are instead have extra dragged out production chains for seemingly no reason other than to make things more complex, and the modpack has evolved by finding one of the few things that hasn't been touched yet and complexifying that yet further. [1] To be clear, Bob's predates Angel's by a lot, and Angel's was largely developed to create more interesting ways to make the things that Bob's added.
- candiddevmike 3y ago
  Doesn't the early game get boring? Or how do you push past it after so many playthroughs?
  - alyandon 3y ago
    I actually enjoy the early game for some strange reason and different map seeds always presented a different set of challenges (especially on deathworlds) because of water, cliffs and resource locations. I mean, sure - once you get oil and flame turrets it is basically game over for biters and that can get boring pretty quick if you always rush straight to it. Edit: Also trains. I don't know why but I can just play with trains for hours on end in Factorio.
auto 3y ago
Same boat, beat vanilla, enjoyed the experience but was ready to have my life back by the end of it. By the time Space Age launches the itch should just about be at the point of needing scratching again, so I’m definitely looking forward to this.
pmoriarty 3y ago
I play with hundreds of mods, and I'm excited about this expansion. Mods have performance and compatibility issues, and they don't always get bug fixes or updates very often. It'll be nice to have an expansion to the base game that's officially supported and which all other mods will have to be compatible with instead of the other way around. Apart from the space part, which is arguably already present in the Space Exploration mod (a mod made by a developer who got hired by Wube to work on the official game, if I'm not mistaken), this new expansion promises: "the ability to control train systems better, better blueprint building, better flying robot behaviour and many more." That sounds great to me.
- red_trumpet 3y ago
  > a mod made by a developer who got hired by Wube to work on the official game, if I'm not mistaken You are right, he even seems to be behind the Space Age expansion: > A lot of people are going to make comparisons between the Space Age expansion and the Space Exploration mod. I've worked on the game design for both: On Space Age I made the first space + planets prototype builds and plus I've been involved in most of the gameplay discussions since. On Space Exploration, well it's my mod, I made it.
  - Aeolun 3y ago
    Hoping that some of the useful features from Space Age make their way back to space exploration too.
- bombcar 3y ago
  There's also all the things changed in the base game that mods weren't able to do, but developers can. We'll find more and more about this over the next year, but they will enable even better mods.
KptMarchewa 3y ago
80 hours to finish for experienced player is still at least 4x more than launching a rocket. There is really achievable achievement for launching it in 8 hours - once you think more about how to optimize waiting early and mid game.
bregma 3y ago
I have thousands of hours in, all vanilla. I consider launching the first rocket to be the end of the early game and the beginning of the midgame.
quchen 3y ago
My mods are mostly QoL, and I’ve played hundreds of hours (well, didn’t count, bought it in version 0.14 years ago). It’s a sandbox that made me read papers on telecommunication routing for optimizing my splitters (Clos networks). You need to mod it like you need to mod Python to do a lot with it. Sure you can, but lots of us just fiddle around with it in different ways just for the sake of it.
lazylion2 3y ago
Only 18.5% of the players got the "Finish the game" (launching a rocket) achievement on Steam https://steamcommunity.com/stats/427520/achievements https://steamcommunity.com/stats/427520/achievements
- TillE 3y ago
  Yeah there's always a massive difference between who's posting a lot online vs who's just playing and enjoying the game. But you have to calibrate Steam achievements based on who's played the game for more than a few minutes. The "Eco unfriendly" achievement shows about 60% of people who launched the game played for more than a couple hours, which is quite normal. So out of those, about 30% of players finished the game.
- gergi 3y ago
  I'm more impressed that only 25.9% have been killed by a moving locomotive ("Watch your step" achievement). Those things are murder-vehicles.
  - philistine 3y ago
    I think it means a majority of players never build rail.
MaxwellKahn 3y ago
I loved Factorio, but only played vanilla. I find that every time I mod up a game (e.g. Fallout 3, NV, 4), I find the bugginess and lack of consistency just inevitably ruins it after a few cheap thrills. So I wasn't about to do that to Factorio. I'm super excited for this expansion--I miss the days playing til 5AM with my friends (and we all have work the next day at 9AM), because we literally couldn't put the game down. Brings me back to childhood.
- BlueTemplar 3y ago
  Factorio has at least one mod that is the complete opposite of buggy and inconsistent : https://mods.factorio.com/mod/IndustrialRevolution3 https://mods.factorio.com/mod/IndustrialRevolution3
  - MaxwellKahn 3y ago
    I might give it a try, what do you especially like about this mod compared to others?
    - BlueTemplar 3y ago
      I don't even especially like this mod, because I don't mind some jankiness in mods, it's just that this one is done with such care, it feels more polished than most finished games. I haven't finished it, but I really liked the very early game monowheel vehicle. Oh, also the burner lamps, and the research notifications, in fact so much I add them to all my games now, regardless of the modpack ! https://mods.factorio.com/mod/DeadlockLargerLamp https://mods.factorio.com/mod/DeadlockLargerLamp https://mods.factorio.com/mod/DeadlockResearchNotifications https://mods.factorio.com/mod/DeadlockResearchNotifications

acatton 3y ago

Reminds me of Mindustry https://f-droid.org/en/packages/io.anuke.mindustry/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/io.anuke.mindustry/ But it looks like Factorio was first.

Olreich 3y ago
Factorio inspired a lot of factory games you're seeing: Mindustry, Shapez.io, Satisfactory, Techtonica, Dyson Sphere Program, etc. One of the devs have stated that they were inspired to create Factorio by the IndustrialCraft and BuildCraft mods for Minecraft, and I suspect that things like Infinifactory were also inspirations.
- Macha 3y ago
  The first public announcement of Factorio was actually on the industrialcraft forums, if I remember right.
- sumtechguy 3y ago
  oh boy Dyson Sphere is my jam. Especially once they added in blueprints. I honestly am not looking forward to the enemy expansion they are going to add. I can see they promised it and want to deliver on it but I do not really want to fight off waves of enemies. I just want to build a huge factory. It is one of the things that keeps me from really getting into factorio. Was going to get a mod to turn them off. But never got around to it.
  - Macha 3y ago
    > Was going to get a mod to turn them off. But never got around to it. You can turn them off in world generation, no mod needed, for what it's worth.
  - jdpedrie 3y ago
    You can disable enemies in the game setup, no mod required.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]

BlueTemplar 3y ago

> From now on, we are stopping the embargo on the expansion content, and we will be publishing Friday Facts every week about all the different aspects of the expansion until release! Yay ! Why this is quite HN-relevant news : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27446910 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27446910

Macha 3y ago
I'm glad about the return of FFF, used to be great to read, especially the more technical deep dives. I kind of thought we wouldn't be getting them again, after the developer fell out with the community over the reception to the post about "Uncle Bob".
- Pannoniae 3y ago
  To be fair, a large amount of redditors/media, and a less sizable amount of the game's community. Most of the people outraged have not been playing Factorio (or didn't even know what it was). That doesn't mean actual players haven't been outraged as well, but way less.
- mcphage 3y ago
  I guess I'm out of the loop; I thought they stopped posting them because the game officially released, and they were going heads-down on the expansion.

Sakos 3y ago

Man, I can't wait. Space Exploration is cool, but way too complex for me. This seems like it's right up my alley.

Waterluvian 3y ago

I dunno about others but a problem I have with Factorio is that I can’t help but hyper optimize. And I’ll do that whether you give me a small or large area. So I’m hoping this means having many smaller factories instead of one giant sprawling map.

bombcar 3y ago
I found that working on some of the more "tutorial/scenario" type mods/maps helped a bit, but since the game doesn't really have time limits there's really nothing preventing you from perpetual optimization. You can take the Nilaus route where the thing that you're actually optimizing is your blueprint book over multiple playthroughs, so that later ones you're basically plopping down blueprints and editing them as you see ways to do things better.

zurfer 3y ago

there is a nice easter egg on the bottom of the page :)

tailspin2019 3y ago
Apparently not on mobile. Had to switch to desktop to see it! (Looks like its on all pages..!)
quchen 3y ago
Are you referring to the rocket, or am I missing something new that came with this FFF?

thurn 3y ago

The 300 hours I spent completing Space Exploration were a lot of fun, but it definitely feels very stretched out and grindy. One of the hardest things to do in game design is to make cuts & simplify, but the end result is usually much better.

Gene_Parmesan 3y ago
I found the early game changes incongruous with the core design of the mod as well. The mod is about logistical challenges - specifically where trips are high volume but high cost. I don't know why a mod about that in the context of space exploring needed an extended burner phase, for instance.
- BlueTemplar 3y ago
  I'd assume this is a relic of his previous mods about automating vehicles, then logically comes the question of how to fuel all that fleet, which then leads to experiments with using that fuel elsewhere ?

CGamesPlay 3y ago

I "just" (160+ hours in) started a play through of space exploration at the recommendation of an HN comment. Super excited to see an official expansion that adds this kind of thing! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36561847 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36561847 My ideas list for interesting Factorio challenges (apropos of nothing): - Products with a shelf life (must be consumed within 15 minutes or it turns into a "waste" product) - Products with "refrigeration" (e.g. an item which must not exist outside of a temperature-controlled chest for more than 5 minutes at a time) - Catalyst ingredients with a chance of being consumed (presently emulated with probabilistic outputs, native support could be interesting, the catalyst would just sit in the machine until it was consumed) - Mining ships (an entire factory moves to a location and extracts resources). The screenshot seems to imply that some kind of spaceship will exist, perhaps this is coming.

BlueTemplar 3y ago
On the animation it looks like that robotic arms are pulling in (and sorting) asteroid chunks, which are then crushed, and the metal smelted, rock discarded, and also there seems to be ice that is used to cool the engines !
- ArtWomb 3y ago
  You neglected to mention the machine gun turrets shattering large asteroids into manageable chunks! Art style here reminds me of classic Metal Slug ;)
  - BlueTemplar 3y ago
    Oh yeah or the various asteroid breaking games ! :D
dotnet00 3y ago
You could look into Seablock and some of the related mods (iirc Angels and Bob's mod packs) which add some of those sorts of complexities. IIRC some things can require charcoal filters, in which case you have to build the filter frame and filter, get it to the machine that needs it, then recover, replace and regenerate the used filter. Another fun challenge is "feedback", where a later step in a production line produces as waste something you can consume at an earlier stage.

rvillanueva 3y ago

“Oh man the guy who made the Space Exploration mod is gonna be pissed they’re copying him” “Oh wait it’s the same guy”

KptMarchewa 3y ago
Yep, they employed him a while ago.
aqme28 3y ago
Love when game companies just employ their best modders rather than fighting against them.
- make3 3y ago
  yes, this is the way
- entropie 3y ago
  Factorio devs are exceptional. This game is so polished, well thought-out, optimized and unique. I remember I read some dev blog about belt optimization and got an idea how passionate the devs are about their game. Still regular patches that just make the game better. Much love.
- dgb23 3y ago
  That’s the indie version. The big corporation version is: “We own the rights to w/e you made, going to make bank with it and perhaps mention your gamertag in some blog post.”
- fendy3002 3y ago
  Valve even employ other company game's modder
ehsankia 3y ago
My first thought was "but there's already a mod for that". I was delighted to see that addressed directly in the post, and doubly delighted when I actually read the answer.

sudhirj 3y ago

There go the next few years of my life. Easily the game that has had the biggest impact on me as a person, maybe even my career.

appleaday1 3y ago

want

endigma 3y ago

> It has been playable from start to finish for more than a year. This means that we have already made several improvement iterations based on the playthroughs behind us. You just don't see commitment to shipping quality product in the games industry like this. This is what makes Factorio special.

retrac 3y ago
I have seen similar commitment from other indie developers. For example, one of my favourite games [1] (which is something of a cross between Factorio, Simcity and OpenTTD) has been available for that "early access" on Steam for 4 years (like Factorio was). I suppose that means in the developer's opinion, the game is not quite ready -- they wouldn't sell it to someone who expects a complete game. Caveat emptor. Fair enough. In practice it has been playable and enjoyable (at least by me) since first listed on Steam in 2019. New features and more polish come every few weeks, and it's coming up on 1.0. I don't know if they'll keep supporting it well after that, but it's clear to me they want to sell something good and complete, however long that might take, not just something profitable. [1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/784150/Workers__Resources_Soviet_Republic/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/784150/Workers__Resources... (Windows only but runs great under WINE)
pmoriarty 3y ago
This has been Factorio's MO from the beginning. It was in Early Access forver, and all that time it was way more polished and stable than many fully released games with much higher budgets. In the decade or so that I've played Factorio, I can't even remember a single crash of the base game. It was always mods that crashed. Factorio performance is also fantastic, running smoothly on potato PC's until you get in to the megabase range. It's mostly mods that cause performance problems, but even those have gotten a lot better over the years. The Factorio devs could really give a master class on how to make games moddable. Factorio's ecosystem of over 5000 mods is a testament to that.
- nextaccountic 3y ago
  > It was always mods that crashed. I wish modding APIs in general did more sanity checking before loading a mod. A low hanging fruit is APIs to be statically typed, and also to not use nulls on such APIs and things like that. A more comprehensive check is to verify whether two mods are guaranteed to be compatible (but this sounds a bit hard). But more importantly (not sure if that's the case with Factorio) not break the damn APIs all the time. Lots of games that are actively developed don't bother keeping stable APIs (a bit like like Gnome and its disregard for extension APIs), breaking mods at every new release. An egregious example is Europa Universalis IV and other Paradox games. This ensures that there is a tail end of mods (which is by far the majority) that just will never work anymore, and the mods being kept up to date become rarer and rarer.

cheeko1234 3y ago

This day got a lot better! I have thousands of hours but had taken a break after I reached a rocket launch every minute with 100s of trains running around. I guess this break will be over soon. I look forward to dropping a few more lifetimes playing this amazing game.

roydivision 3y ago

I have purposely avoided Factorio just because I'm convinced that I'll sink so much time into it. It looks super fun, but I have stuff to do. Maybe one day....

loloquwowndueo 3y ago
I played through the demo levels, loved it, and then decided NOT to buy it for exactly this reason - it’s so perfectly addictive! No thanks I already played TTD for thousands of hours in the 90s, can’t do another game that sucks you in like that.
- fendy3002 3y ago
  Seeing you played TTD for thousands of hours means this is on track for at least a thousand as well. Keep avoiding it or take a long vacation from real world
naillo 3y ago
You can probably beat the game in two weekends though, just FYI. I haven't felt that much need to replay it since then (though I'll probably try Space Age) but it's great fun.
- pmoriarty 3y ago
  As much as I love the base game, I would have quit long ago if it weren't for mods. Mods are what keep me coming back.
koheripbal 3y ago
Wait until you have children and then play it with them.
laserbeam 3y ago
The time sink risk is for the whole factory building genre, not just the excelent Factorio.
3y ago

SuperSandro2000 3y ago

Shut up and take my money!

rodolphoarruda 3y ago

Let me know when platforms arrive to Arrakis and melange is finally introduced to the interplanetary trading system.

master_crab 3y ago

I am conversant in three programming languages: C++, Python…and Factorio.

donatj 3y ago

Oh good, my life being utterly dominated by Factorio again is at least a year away. That gives me some time to get my affairs in order. I really wish this were a joke. Also, if anyone wants to play a game similar to Factorio while you wait - https://shapez.io https://shapez.io is like Factorio without a player character and a cleaner aesthetic. I played it first, and really enjoyed it.

pmoriarty 3y ago
I enjoyed Shapez, and it's cool that it has many mods, but I just found it too abstract and sterile to keep my attention. Factorio just much more engaging for me in the long run, especially with mods.
- II2II 3y ago
  I took a quick look at Shapez. It may end up being addictive (to me) when Factorio was not. The reason being that Factorio's world is a bit dystopian in my view. A good game, but I like more cheerful things in my life. The abstraction of Shapez and the upbeat music seem to accomplish that.
- hiatus 3y ago
  Yeah among other things that caused me to abandon it, there is no relationship between expansion and neighbor aggression or any other external pressures (though maybe I did not progress far enough to encounter those elements if they exist).
- epiccoleman 3y ago
  I love Shapez overall, and the Shapez Industries mod is a great way to breathe new life into it, but I tend to find that I run out of interest before the "endgame". As annoying as the Factorio biters are, they do provide a little bit of pressure that keeps you wanting to research new things and continue building. (They also inspire a burning hatred that will drive you to research and implement ever more efficient methods of murdering them). The same goes for the limitedness of Factorio resources patches. In Shapez the logistics that come with expansion and defense don't exist, so it winds up feeling sorta samey. I like the chill, relaxing vibe of Shapez but eventually felt like I was just doing the same things over and over with slight variations. Also, the lack of a blueprint book in Shapez is a major drag. I ended up setting a map marker way the hell out which lets me "teleport" to an area where I copy/paste designs from, but that's pretty hacky and ruins some of the flow state that Shapez lets you cultivate. All that said, I've been following the dev of Shapez 2 and at least visually it looks awesome, so I'll definitely be hopping into that at some point.

vbezhenar 3y ago

Postponing cliff explosives makes be extremely sad. I'm perfectionist freak and my factorio gameplay basically divides "before" and "after" cliff explosives. I hate when I can't fix terrain for my plans, I prefer to terraform as much as needed, turning lake into plains, if needed, but I'm not going to adapt my grand plan. I understand that there are players who find fun in adapting their bases to the environment, building defenses around natural obstacles, but I'm completely the opposite of that. It's deep grained in my nature: to bend the world rather than to bend my plans. Hopefully they'll rethink that part. And may be even make it possible to "build" water (or to build water pump at arbitrary locations).

pmoriarty 3y ago
You could just disable cliffs during world generation. That's what I do. They're slightly helpful for biter defense, but otherwise they're just annoying. There are also many mods that let you pump water from anywhere.
- vbezhenar 3y ago
  I'm not a fan of custom modes and mods. I might go this way, if there's no other choice, however generally I prefer to play game as it was intended to be played by developers.
  - gdprrrr 3y ago
    It's definitely intenfed by the developers to play however you have the most fun. That's why they included the option, just like the peaceful mode.
  - johannes1234321 3y ago
    Factorio was clearly meant to be moddable and to be modded. The API is by no means a pure afterthought.
  - eknkc 3y ago
    I play vanilla except I always disable cliffs. That's it. I sometimes edit resource distribution if I wish to experiment with specific transports etc but cliffs always go away. I don't care what they intended as it is not fun for me.

miiiiiike 3y ago

I have 50+ hours of playtime in Factorio.. I had it installed for less than a week. I'm not allowed to install Factorio anymore.

bombcar 3y ago
https://www.nintendo.com/store/products/factorio-switch/ https://www.nintendo.com/store/products/factorio-switch/ don't tell nobody

hsjqllzlfkf 3y ago

Uh oh there goes 500 more hours.

vessenes 3y ago

Oh wow, I'm very excited about this. The post author wrote the absolutely incredible Space Exploration mod for Factorio, pitching itself as a "100+" hour expansion, realistically closer to 1000 hours for an average player. Space Exploration has its quirks, but is fundamentally an absolutely outstanding puzzle game, among the best ever made. One of the most delightful things about Factorio for coders is that the game smoothly takes you through multiple levels of abstraction, starting with handcrafting simple ingredients, and (in the base game), moving up to small networks of trains with automation, and flying robot armies to deal with construction and logistics. I'd say there are three-ish layers of abstraction in the main game, and each layer is super well balanced, has its own challenges and benefits, and is above all FUN. Space Exploration adds two to three more layers of abstraction above these; culminating in networks of interstellar spaceships moving items into orbit and on and off planetary surfaces, where they intersect with the original game's buildings and mechanics. It's profoundly, profoundly good. I knew Wube had hired the mod developer, but I'm super happy to see he's deeply involved with Space Age, which is explained to be a less hardcore experience, with a lot of the same fun as SE. Should be a blast. I hope they'll charge me more for it.

mmastrac 3y ago
I wouldn't put trains and smooth in a single sentence. The signals required a lot of patience to learn and I'm not entirely sure I still understand them. They are by far one of the most painful parts of factorio for me.
- wbl 3y ago
  Try logistic train network mod
- Aeolun 3y ago
  They’re sort of understandable. When someone described it to me as the blue signals checking the status of the next signal (blue or colored) and doing that, everything made a lot more sense. They’re still sometimes hard to debug because there’s no visualization but I always end up feeling that the issue was my fault

quchen 3y ago

Here’s hoping for a streamlined version of Space Exploration that scratches the right itch of expanding beyond Nauvis with new tech, but that doesn’t not value my time. Watching Dosh Doshington’s 3-part series of a SE playthrough is all I’ll ever do with that mod. (Well worth watching it if 300+h for a self-playthrough is intimidating)

dimava 3y ago
For context: unlike other youtubers making 100-hour-plus playlist of a single playthrough, Dosh Doshington [0] spends an equal amount of time to compress a 100 hours of playing into a single hour of the highest-quality content. His Space Exploration playthrough took 330 hours (in a team of 3 players iirc), and was compressed down to just 3.5 hours of video [0] https://www.youtube.com/@DoshDoshington https://www.youtube.com/@DoshDoshington

lordnacho 3y ago

Kovarex's Basilisk: We can all see where Factorio is headed: Spaghetti belts -> trains -> flying robots -> spaceships -> AGI that reaches out of the game Now of course this AGI wants to be built quickly, so there's a mild incentive here to help the factory grow, which is that those of us not playing the game regularly will be punished once the AGI is developed. Now that you know, it's in your interest to go and download it and spend every waking hour on it, as well as proselytize in favour of the game.

Uristqwerty 3y ago
How could the AGI punish players who don't help? It's not like it would be able to send an extra logistics bot into their games, set to occasionally pick up an item off one belt and insert it on another, right? Shit, I'd better not take any chances. What does our future overlord of orderliness need help with right now?
- lordnacho 3y ago
  There are records on Steam of how long you've played. Just download the game and play it now. There's a tutorial.

kraig911 3y ago

Time to make our relationships rocky again boys. Let's go. That first was so addictive. This honestly has me so afraid by how cool it looks and sounds.

Havoc 3y ago

That looks conceptually somewhat similar to Dyson sphere. Build locally till you have the capacity to expand to other planets

hypercube33 3y ago

I deeply love cracktorio and have like 800 hours in just vanilla. if you're looking for something similar to it I also liked the spin The Riftbreaker provides. it's not as bug free as Factorio but it has a lot of the same enjoyment but with more of an objective progression theme.

Aeolun 3y ago
You can also finish it in less than 20h, which is a benefit for some :)
- willis936 3y ago
  One of these days I'll download a bp book and prove that there is no spoon.

xedrac 3y ago

I love Factorio and have >1000 hours in the game. Two things I would love to see: - Steam cloud sync fixed for large save files. Right now, you'll eventually reach a point where you can't save your game to the cloud anymore. - More interesting aliens and strategies for dealing with them. After awhile, the aliens start to feel like a repetitive grind. They always behave predictably and the solution to them is pretty much always the same.

pmoriarty 3y ago
"More interesting aliens and strategies for dealing with them. After awhile, the aliens start to feel like a repetitive grind. They always behave predictably and the solution to them is pretty much always the same." Try the Rampant mod, if you want a challenge. There are a bunch of other mods that add different/tougher enemies too. That said, the focus of Factorio was never combat, it's building. If you want better combat there are many other games that focus on that.
- bombcar 3y ago
  Rampant + deathworld (I think is the combo) is the way to go if you want a real challenge, because you need to build defenses that do not use too many resources.
  - pmoriarty 3y ago
    There's also Rampant + Warptorio, which already features effectively tougher combat and various other challenges above vanilla.
- rollcat 3y ago
  Rampant makes the enemies smarter, but not necessarily harder. If you've learned how to defend from the biters in vanilla, some of the new tactics will catch you by surprise. But the answer is still the same: build up your defenses to the point where no attack wave stands a chance.
  - 3y ago

Jean-Papoulos 3y ago

YES I LOVE YOU WUBE

curiousObject 3y ago

Nice. Can anyone estimate the impact on global GDP growth?

dschuetz 3y ago

It's time to install Factorio again, winter is coming.

edpichler 3y ago

This game is crack. A masterpiece.

magicalhippo 3y ago

Yo we heard you liked crack, so we put some more crack in your crack... Factorio is just one of those games I can't play enough of until I get exhausted and it feels like work, and then have to take a long break from. And then the cycle repeats. Took me a while to buy it because it seemed overpriced at the time, but given the continuous work over all that time... wow is all I can say. Now please excuse me while I go inform my SO she can plan a vacation.

amgcbus 3y ago

Being that the release date is more than a year away I wish they would have skipped the Switch port which seems to have been significantly less successful.

seer 3y ago

> In the previous news about the expansion FFF-367, we declared that the content will be technically a mod taking advantage of the updated engine. What this means is that a lot of the improvements will be for all players, regardless of them having the expansion or not. This is such an amazing way to release a second version of a game! Reminds me of libraries that publish major version updates that don’t add anything just remove deprecated stuff. Its what real refactoring is all about - changing the platform so that the new problems are trivial to solve. Since factorio is all about refactoring, I’m so happy they took this route!

bombcar 3y ago
Cities Skylines has done this with their DLC; each "major" DLC came with changes to the base game that everyone got (usually to support the DLC) and then the DLC itself added more. So if you bought the game and never bought any DLC, you have a much different game now than when you first played.

js8 3y ago

Looking forward to it. My only wish is that they add something like Recursive Blueprints to the base game, so we could build von Neumann probes.

jupake 3y ago

Divorce attorneys.. get ready!

aftbit 3y ago

Most exciting news of 2023.

goatking 3y ago

> We decided to go with the approach of having a small number of predefined planets, which represent your progression through the game. I am a bit sad about this, procedurally generated worlds with "infinite" universe would have been really cool. But anyway, I know I will sink too much time in this :D

pmoriarty 3y ago
Mods could probably add all the planets you want, but with the new expansion they'll be able to use all the new mechanics the expansion adds. I'm excited.

Humboldtsnee 3y ago

Honestly, looks like a pass from me, as messing with the existing tech tree to introduce new barriers sounds more tedious than fun.

burrish 3y ago

[flagged]

coryfklein 3y ago

You have got to be kidding me. I thought I had kicked my Factorio habit.

jameshart 3y ago

Not sure this will scratch the itch for what I always felt was missing from Factorio, which is fundamentally a more satisfying ‘sink’ for resources. During main gameplay your resource extraction and expansion is driven mainly by the sink of ‘research’ - turn resources into science, science into unlocks. Additionally, biters eat bullets, and occasionally factory parts that need replacing. Other than that the main sink for all your resource gathering is just ‘more factory’ of course. The end game resource sink of ‘space rockets’ just never felt to me like a very satisfying thing to shoot for - though getting to the point where you can just expand onto a new mineral patch and reliably deploy blueprints that turn it into rockets is pretty cool, I’ll admit. But there’s a part of me that is left slightly unsatisfied by the fact that we can’t reach sustainability, and we aren’t getting anything for all the resources we process. Give me a little population of friendly alien creatures (who biters prey on) and make my goal to maximize their population, perhaps. I don’t know.

pmoriarty 3y ago
You are rewarded for spending resources by unlocking technologies, and being able to use the new tech to refactor and grow your base. Still, I agree with you that there's some missing depth in the game that no mod has yet been able to fill for me. I say this after sinking (pardon the pun) thousands of hours in to the game and having a tremendous amount of fun. Still, it could be deeper in some way.. not sure how.. maybe by adding some LLM/AI of some sort?
batmansmom1 3y ago
Friendly aliens trying to reach sustainability is such an awesome idea for a mod! (or Space Age feature @devs???)
- ecuzzillo 3y ago
  This happens in the Pyanodon mod pack, among others; you farm alien creatures and make little habitats for them.
jjcm 3y ago
Try Dyson Sphere Program. Factory builder where the final resource sink is building a dyson sphere. It’s a massive undertaking and it’s had multi-planet from the start. Tons of fun

VectorLock 3y ago

Interesting that at the end they had to pitch how their own first party game expansion is better than a existing mod.

fasterik 3y ago
Not "better", but for a different target audience. Also written by the author of said mod, who was hired to work on the expansion.
bombcar 3y ago
As mentioned, it was written by the mod author, and they're trying to explain that they're "not just charging for a mod" which is often a detraction leveled in cases like this. (However, even if they were just literally charging for a mod, I'd be fine with it, Factorio has some of the best dollar for playtime money I've ever spent, maybe Minecraft and Dwarf Fortress come close).

abtinf 3y ago

This is Spore done right.

berno___ 3y ago

[dead]

polobomb 3y ago

Really interesting, can’t wait to see how this turns out

ayakang31415 3y ago

I never played Factorio, but I heard about this game and how it works quite a lot, and I knew instantly that if I ever touch this game, I will never be able to touch grass outside as it will suck me into its giant rabbit hole

goatking 3y ago
You are right. That is how it is :)

Baeocystin 3y ago

Factorio remains the only game where I had to purposefully set it aside, because it was starting to negatively affect the rest of my life due to late nights and blown sleep schedules. I say that with praise and admiration, but also as a genuine warning to anyone who hasn't yet tried it that might be reading this. For a certain kind of mind, it is digital crack in the purest form that I've experienced.

jokoon 3y ago

Well it's a good thing they want to make it more approachable, because mods are terrifying, they're either not well designed or too complex to be fun. I've played about 1600 hours of vanilla factorio, and no mods really interests me. Also it's quite a shame multiplayer is not that much played. If there were some way to trade resources between player with some auction house, or to buy land, or maybe conquer alien territories for special techs, maybe that could be interesting to play. The game is very well designed, but the end game is just too short despite its potential. On their website, it seems they don't have a game designer. I'm a fan, but to me it seems the potential of the game is a bit wasted.

skeaker 3y ago
Between their rave reviews and extreme success, my personal anecdotal experience with the game, and your own 1600 hours, I'd say that the potential has been realized to an acceptable degree already. This is all just icing on the cake
adanto6840 3y ago
I have to ask, sincerely -- how many hours does one put into a game that does have a good "end game"? As a game developer myself, when someone asks me what it's like to make games during a casual conversation, one of my favorite "go-to"s is to talk about reviews -- that it's so gratifying to see people who have paid <$30 and received hundreds of hours of entertainment. And then I inevitably mention the flip side of the coin, when you receive a negative review from someone with hundreds or more hours (who also paid <$30). Everyone's entitled to their opinion of a game (or anything else, for that matter), obviously. I do feel that the collective bar has risen quite dramatically for games though (for many totally valid reasons). Sometimes I (rhetorically) wonder about other forms of entertainment (ie movies), how they can remain viable with such starkly different time-per-dollar value propositions!
- jokoon 3y ago
  Well it turned into 1600 hours because I just tried to maximize the spaceship launch count to 1000 and beyond. I would still put a 10/10 score on factorio, but it still means it could be a better game, that's my only criticism, I want it to be even better. When a game is excellent it's obviously going to attract more criticism because it raises the bar on itself. > I do feel that the collective bar has risen quite dramatically for games though (for many totally valid reasons). Yes, it's a saturated market and it's hard to find a game I can like. It's quantity and quality, there are a lot of indie games, too many of them, maybe, but that's how capitalism works. I would rather not play games I find not good enough, than the opposite. I have a hard time getting some satisfaction from a game, I don't know why. I spend a lot of time trying to find new games to play, and sometimes I'm just immensely frustrated that I don't play anything, or just play some stupid game like untangle. I'd rather play some very cheap indie game like loop hero or micro town than playing call of duty online even if it's free and a AAA game. I prefer playing a game that has a lot of replayability, than finish several other games that I can play once. There are a lot of "good enough" games, but there are VERY FEW excellent games that are so good you can play and replay them again and again. Time spent replaying an excellent game is much better than playing other new good games. That's winner take all in the industry, at least that's how I view it. "A Delayed Game Is Eventually Good, But a Bad Game Is Bad Forever". Sometimes I feel like I'm very very difficult to please, but I like it that way. I grew up with video game magazine that gave very hard review score.

r2vcap 3y ago

Thank God, I've played Factorio for more than 1400 hours, and I'm excited about the upcoming expansion! Cheers to the developers!

LoveMortuus 3y ago

Can anyone recommend any games that are similar to Factorio but can run in a web browser?

BlueTemplar 3y ago
Looks like someone emulated Mindustry classic into a browser ? https://kdata1.com/2019/01/111355/ https://kdata1.com/2019/01/111355/

JakeTehPwner 3y ago

Looks like I need to get this game again.