5 ms·

The Farmer Was Replaced [video]

99 points by surprisetalk 1y ago

skeltoac 1y ago
I played this! The quadcopter with the straw hat got me. Funny and great fun. At the end I was still full of ideas for optimizing my code and the dev was making breaking changes that would require a full rewrite (a good time guaranteed) but I was more compelled to go back to Factorio due to the Space Age expansion. The rest of this comment would be about Factorio but writing on HN does not help the factory to grow.
- candiddevmike 1y ago
  As someone with hours of time in Factorio pre-space age update, I've really struggled to get back into the game. I really want to build out a mega base with the new train logic, but every time I try to get into it it just feels like work. Space age seems like it had a pretty lukewarm reception, and some of the tech tree changes seem like artificial padding (cliff explosives).
  - mixel 1y ago
    Yeah, the cliff explosives being gated behind vulcanus sucks a bit but they made the cliffs a lot more bearable in 2.0 I think for a megabase run its a matter of how fast you can reach legendary and process everything in it and once you got that you can go really into megabasing this game. Sadly they nerfed trains so hard by introducing Quality since everything got better but trains stayed the same which is a shame
    - ACCount37 1y ago
      Trains still got buffed by overhead rails. Those enable very compact designs, allow for easier hookups and reduce the usual intersection/signals pain by a lot. I agree that no quality or endgame upgrades for trains is an odd choice, but I guess that's what the mods are for.
  - jpalawaga 1y ago
    For me factorio is a one playthrough kinda thing. I don’t get off on endless optimization and making it bigger for the sake of bigger, feels like work. That said, I was more than happy to build the base back from scratch in space age, and I find the expansion to be every bit as fun as the base game. So I endorse it. Especially as you already know how to do some things quicker.
  - nness 1y ago
    That was my first impression when I picked it up -- the game strongly suggests you start from the start, and re-loading a pre-Space Age save will result in many things breaking. I gave in and started over, worried I'd need to spend dozens of hours just building up to where I was before. But this wasn't the case — Space Age isn't only new content, but a complete re-balance of the original game. It is far far less grindy and requires much less baby-sitting of production. Your first space platform, the ships, and the planets, are best thought of as unique Factorio-inspired puzzles. Each planet is like a Factorio game-mode to solve, with its own restrictions to design around. I think those who have hundreds of hours in the base-game have to un-learn of the base game to pick up the DLC. Many of the complaints are pointed at the tech tree changes — they wanted an expansion on what was there, not a recreation. But for me now, I wouldn't recommend Factorio without Space Age.
  - bigstrat2003 1y ago
    I'll be honest, I don't think Space Age was all that good as an expansion. The developers really focused on giving the player new types of logistics challenges to solve, but that was never what I wanted. I wanted the same Factorio gameplay, but with more stuff to build. So out of the four new planets, the only one I actually enjoyed building on was Vulcanus (because it plays pretty much like vanilla Factorio but with new recipes). The lead dev is also well known for disliking logistics bots and wishes they had never been added to the game. And the expansion shows that, with (again) three of the four planets having mechanics to make use of bots more difficult if not outright impossible (Aquilo). All in all, the developers have a very different vision of what makes the game fun than I do, and that meant the expansion wasn't much fun for me. If I play the game more in the future, I'll probably do so with the expansion disabled.
    - Tyr42 1y ago
      Luckily, there are lots of mods which make the base game more. I really enjoyed my bobs + angels run. I'm sure it would be even more fun if you opted into quality on top to really go mad.
- vrighter 1y ago
  I had spent ages optimizing my maze solver ( https://github.com/VrIgHtEr/TheFarmerSolvedAMaze https://github.com/VrIgHtEr/TheFarmerSolvedAMaze ). Meticulously going over which operations take how many ticks. But then the dev made a bunch of breaking changes and couldn't be bothered to rewrite everything.
  - soultrees 1y ago
    Run an agent on it. This is what they excel at.
    - vrighter 1y ago
      Why the fuck would I want an AI to play my games for me?????
- __jonas 1y ago
  > the dev was making breaking changes that would require a full rewrite This is funny because I already get the feeling a lot with management sim / automation type games that I'm pretty close to doing the kind of thing I'd do at work, except only the fun parts and without getting paid. Often that's the reason I quit playing these types of games after a while - having to deal with migrating legacy code after breaking API changes would bring this feeling to a new level I bet.
  - grogenaut 1y ago
    That's why I don't tend to play these games. I was about 5 hours into trs1000 when I was like man I could just learn GPU or fpga with a real editor instead but that would be useful. And stopped playing. With factorio I could be laying out circuit boards. So I did that instead.
- abtinf 1y ago
  To make a programming game true to life, it could have a prestige mechanic where you keep all your code/scripts, but the api introduces breaking changes and you have to rewrite. “Good job! Halfway through the workday on Thursday, some big brain engineer in a distant department has decided to change the order of for loop clauses in the interpreter, so now it’s “for variable declarations; variable modifications; conditional checks {}”. They adamantly refuse to revert the change because “it makes more sense to group variable stuff together”. Prod is down now. Have fun!
  - phantasmish 1y ago
    Documentation should often be wrong. There should be five options for each piece of tooling, none of which quite work the same way, all of which have a fan-base singing their praises, and three of which have critical problems you probably won't find out about until you try them. Then the one you pick gets abandoned when you're part way done. (this feature only for the Javascript and Python DLC) Example farms should use old versions of libraries that are no longer maintained. Interfacing with other farms should require manually faking a downgrade of some protocol you're using, because the older one is no longer available for you and they can't/won't upgrade. You should be forced to design certain parts of the system in ways that are harder to use and constantly break when changing other parts, just so the appearance of those parts is "on brand". This should require re-writing functionality that would otherwise be supplied "for free" by a library. When you're finally getting things how you want them, your farm should get cancelled and the whole thing abruptly burned to the ground because your parent company just decided to buy a different, existing farm instead.
    - abtinf 1y ago
      It’s like you’re an omniscient narrator for my career.
incomingpain 1y ago
Solid 2-3 hours of entertainment; assuming you know python. It's also not as complicated as I expected.
- ckdarby 1y ago
  Currently a sweet spot with Steam games if you price them correctly to the value they bring. I'm working on a very simple incremental game that has exploded in popularity called, A Game About Feeding A Black Hole.
  - unquietwiki 1y ago
    Just looked it up: looks cool & added it to wishlist. Did you happen to play "Solar 2" years back?
  - mrguyorama 1y ago
    Did you pay DangerouslyFunny on Youtube to play that or does he just play every new steam demo with incremental features? It is his business basically.
jgtrosh 1y ago
The game looks fun and pretty, but am I the only one to get triggered by the “replaced” naming? All of these eager claims to replace humans feel violently antisocial. (And in many instances hypocritical if coming from people who defensively claim “it's just a tool”…)
- gruez 1y ago
  >am I the only one to get triggered by the “replaced” naming? >All of these eager claims to replace humans feel violently antisocial Yeah they should be using corporate euphemisms like "let go" or whatever!
  - lan321 1y ago
    The farmer is taking the next step in their career journey!
  - blargthorwars 1y ago
    You're absolutely correct. A better name would be "The Farmer Was Augmented <emdash> By Your Friendly AI" <emoji "happy"> <emoji "friednship">
  - afandian 1y ago
    More like "the farmer was sent to live on the farm"
- aduwah 1y ago
  The Farmer Was Made Into Sausage By Automation
- sebstefan 1y ago
  Farming isn't artistry, society benefits from its automation Is it still bad if the farmer gets replaced?
  - 9rx 1y ago
    > Is it still bad if the farmer gets replaced? A farmer is an owner of a farm. To replace the farmer you would have to completely eliminate the entire concept of human ownership that we hold. Socialist or other community ownership structures around farms wouldn't do as that would not replace the farmer, it would make everyone a farmer. > society benefits from its automation Economies benefit from its automation. It's far less clear if societies benefit. Farm work is hard, but there is a sense of accomplishment when it is done, which is good for the psyche. The never ending "bullshit" jobs that most people seem to find themselves in nowadays has not lead to happiness.
ceving 1y ago
Is this Windows only?
- mixel 1y ago
  No the game is also fully playable on linux via Proton (About other platforms I have no clue)
  - intrikate 1y ago
    Excellent news, I can play the game on my Steam Deck with the on-screen keyboard!
  - Aachen 1y ago
    If you get it working. They don't seem to have an own website, the publisher links to Steam as the only place to purchase it, and Steam says it's only supported on Windows. Surely you can work around it with VMs, emulation, or other solutions, but sadly the creator declines to support that
sd9 1y ago
I played this: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLesViK53beXfFohR1I08SsVPdtfgA_AjZ https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLesViK53beXfFohR1I08S... Skip the first video. The early game is painful if you already know how to program (they gate things like variables, loops, and functions behind unlocks). And tbh I didn’t know how to make a video or use a microphone when I made that video. I just sat down one evening and played it - I had no idea it would resonate with people the way it did. It’s a great game, and I imagine a very good way to learn programming in a goal oriented way. But I concur that there’s not a great deal of content if you already know how to program.
- shhsshs 1y ago
  Fun to see you here - I discovered this game through your videos! I think despite the lack of raw "content", I got a LOT of playtime out of this game by trying to push higher on the leaderboards.
  - sd9 1y ago
    Awesome! I've considered trying to do some hyper optimisation, taking into account the number of cycles each instruction takes - it seems that a lot of people are interested in that. That's not my natural style though. I've had plenty of criticism for not being performance sensitive, but that's not really how I unwind (although I do plenty of optimisation at work!). It could be fun to explore ingame though.
slightwinder 1y ago
Turtles are old-school, farming is the new cool. Is there a dating-option? Just asking as a Stardew Valley-friend.. OK, jokes aside. I've started playing this, when 1.0 was released some weeks ago, and this is quite good for what it is. It's doing many things the right way, like allowing coding with an external editor, having a proper coding-experience even with the built-in tools, and collectable hats. Everyone should buy this and learn the basics. It's cheap enough for most people.
nilslindemann 1y ago
I am playing this right now! A very nice, addictive game. The programming language is a kind of subset of Python. The in-game editor is still a bit clunky, but one can edit the source code in an external editor like VS Code. The game has an auto-reload option. Caution! Just because one saves the code in the external editor doesn't mean the entire game state is saved! It cost me a few unlocked upgrades the first time I closed the game, not saving because I thought it automatically does so. One has to save the game state explicitly, before closing. I already have the full game area and a max speed drone, but I'm only just about to implement planting cacti. So it'll be a while before I unlock multiple drones. But I have already implemented efficient algorithms for planting a giant Pumpkin, Sunflowers and Poly cultures. What the game could have is that dictionaries retain their insertion order and a built-in array.sort. And it is sad that the nice music stops running as soon as one starts the game.
madethemcry 1y ago
I did not play this (yet!), but just by watching this video I see how it overlaps with the coding games on https://code.org/en-US https://code.org/en-US (Hour of Code!) in terms of having a code + gaming view to solve a challenge. When I was teaching coding to kids, code.org was the to-go place besides using Scratch, to introduce coding patterns (mostly: conditional, loops). An example is the famous Minecraft labyrinth [1]. There is also a Frozen themed one. If you have kids (~6y+), that's some fun way to get started instead of diving directly into actual code. [1] https://studio.code.org/courses/mc/units/1/lessons/1/levels/1?viewAs=Instructor https://studio.code.org/courses/mc/units/1/lessons/1/levels/...
djmips 1y ago
teaching optimization this way seems ideal
mrguyorama 1y ago
I bounced off this game. It was fun and rewarding early on, as an idle game addict, but there's a massive complexity cliff. You go from "just plant the newest crop on every square" to "Okay, now you need to manage farm-wide state in a way that the tools do not support, and develop powerful planning systems and priority systems to actually yield meaningful results and higher level crops" and I just don't understand why. The reward for rewriting an entire working (nice and simple) system to a behemoth full of complex logic and systems engineering is.... another crop? At least until you get to spawn new drones which is locked off until you've already basically beaten the game for some reason? Like it feels like there is massive missing transition and purpose to that complexity. In factorio, you deal with the insanity of petrochemicals because it gives you fun toys. I found myself quite unable to engineer an entire system like that just to... improve my rate of resource growth. Somewhat.
- cheschire 1y ago
  Maybe don’t do everything at once. Try cycling through optimized whole-farm algorithms and clear() between them

99 points by surprisetalk 1y ago

I played this! The quadcopter with the straw hat got me. Funny and great fun. At the end I was still full of ideas for optimizing my code and the dev was making breaking changes that would require a full rewrite (a good time guaranteed) but I was more compelled to go back to Factorio due to the Space Age expansion. The rest of this comment would be about Factorio but writing on HN does not help the factory to grow.

candiddevmike 1y ago
As someone with hours of time in Factorio pre-space age update, I've really struggled to get back into the game. I really want to build out a mega base with the new train logic, but every time I try to get into it it just feels like work. Space age seems like it had a pretty lukewarm reception, and some of the tech tree changes seem like artificial padding (cliff explosives).
- mixel 1y ago
  Yeah, the cliff explosives being gated behind vulcanus sucks a bit but they made the cliffs a lot more bearable in 2.0 I think for a megabase run its a matter of how fast you can reach legendary and process everything in it and once you got that you can go really into megabasing this game. Sadly they nerfed trains so hard by introducing Quality since everything got better but trains stayed the same which is a shame
  - ACCount37 1y ago
    Trains still got buffed by overhead rails. Those enable very compact designs, allow for easier hookups and reduce the usual intersection/signals pain by a lot. I agree that no quality or endgame upgrades for trains is an odd choice, but I guess that's what the mods are for.
- jpalawaga 1y ago
  For me factorio is a one playthrough kinda thing. I don’t get off on endless optimization and making it bigger for the sake of bigger, feels like work. That said, I was more than happy to build the base back from scratch in space age, and I find the expansion to be every bit as fun as the base game. So I endorse it. Especially as you already know how to do some things quicker.
- nness 1y ago
  That was my first impression when I picked it up -- the game strongly suggests you start from the start, and re-loading a pre-Space Age save will result in many things breaking. I gave in and started over, worried I'd need to spend dozens of hours just building up to where I was before. But this wasn't the case — Space Age isn't only new content, but a complete re-balance of the original game. It is far far less grindy and requires much less baby-sitting of production. Your first space platform, the ships, and the planets, are best thought of as unique Factorio-inspired puzzles. Each planet is like a Factorio game-mode to solve, with its own restrictions to design around. I think those who have hundreds of hours in the base-game have to un-learn of the base game to pick up the DLC. Many of the complaints are pointed at the tech tree changes — they wanted an expansion on what was there, not a recreation. But for me now, I wouldn't recommend Factorio without Space Age.
- bigstrat2003 1y ago
  I'll be honest, I don't think Space Age was all that good as an expansion. The developers really focused on giving the player new types of logistics challenges to solve, but that was never what I wanted. I wanted the same Factorio gameplay, but with more stuff to build. So out of the four new planets, the only one I actually enjoyed building on was Vulcanus (because it plays pretty much like vanilla Factorio but with new recipes). The lead dev is also well known for disliking logistics bots and wishes they had never been added to the game. And the expansion shows that, with (again) three of the four planets having mechanics to make use of bots more difficult if not outright impossible (Aquilo). All in all, the developers have a very different vision of what makes the game fun than I do, and that meant the expansion wasn't much fun for me. If I play the game more in the future, I'll probably do so with the expansion disabled.
  - Tyr42 1y ago
    Luckily, there are lots of mods which make the base game more. I really enjoyed my bobs + angels run. I'm sure it would be even more fun if you opted into quality on top to really go mad.
vrighter 1y ago
I had spent ages optimizing my maze solver ( https://github.com/VrIgHtEr/TheFarmerSolvedAMaze https://github.com/VrIgHtEr/TheFarmerSolvedAMaze ). Meticulously going over which operations take how many ticks. But then the dev made a bunch of breaking changes and couldn't be bothered to rewrite everything.
- soultrees 1y ago
  Run an agent on it. This is what they excel at.
  - vrighter 1y ago
    Why the fuck would I want an AI to play my games for me?????
__jonas 1y ago
> the dev was making breaking changes that would require a full rewrite This is funny because I already get the feeling a lot with management sim / automation type games that I'm pretty close to doing the kind of thing I'd do at work, except only the fun parts and without getting paid. Often that's the reason I quit playing these types of games after a while - having to deal with migrating legacy code after breaking API changes would bring this feeling to a new level I bet.
- grogenaut 1y ago
  That's why I don't tend to play these games. I was about 5 hours into trs1000 when I was like man I could just learn GPU or fpga with a real editor instead but that would be useful. And stopped playing. With factorio I could be laying out circuit boards. So I did that instead.
abtinf 1y ago
To make a programming game true to life, it could have a prestige mechanic where you keep all your code/scripts, but the api introduces breaking changes and you have to rewrite. “Good job! Halfway through the workday on Thursday, some big brain engineer in a distant department has decided to change the order of for loop clauses in the interpreter, so now it’s “for variable declarations; variable modifications; conditional checks {}”. They adamantly refuse to revert the change because “it makes more sense to group variable stuff together”. Prod is down now. Have fun!
- phantasmish 1y ago
  Documentation should often be wrong. There should be five options for each piece of tooling, none of which quite work the same way, all of which have a fan-base singing their praises, and three of which have critical problems you probably won't find out about until you try them. Then the one you pick gets abandoned when you're part way done. (this feature only for the Javascript and Python DLC) Example farms should use old versions of libraries that are no longer maintained. Interfacing with other farms should require manually faking a downgrade of some protocol you're using, because the older one is no longer available for you and they can't/won't upgrade. You should be forced to design certain parts of the system in ways that are harder to use and constantly break when changing other parts, just so the appearance of those parts is "on brand". This should require re-writing functionality that would otherwise be supplied "for free" by a library. When you're finally getting things how you want them, your farm should get cancelled and the whole thing abruptly burned to the ground because your parent company just decided to buy a different, existing farm instead.
  - abtinf 1y ago
    It’s like you’re an omniscient narrator for my career.

incomingpain 1y ago

Solid 2-3 hours of entertainment; assuming you know python. It's also not as complicated as I expected.

ckdarby 1y ago
Currently a sweet spot with Steam games if you price them correctly to the value they bring. I'm working on a very simple incremental game that has exploded in popularity called, A Game About Feeding A Black Hole.
- unquietwiki 1y ago
  Just looked it up: looks cool & added it to wishlist. Did you happen to play "Solar 2" years back?
- mrguyorama 1y ago
  Did you pay DangerouslyFunny on Youtube to play that or does he just play every new steam demo with incremental features? It is his business basically.

jgtrosh 1y ago

The game looks fun and pretty, but am I the only one to get triggered by the “replaced” naming? All of these eager claims to replace humans feel violently antisocial. (And in many instances hypocritical if coming from people who defensively claim “it's just a tool”…)

gruez 1y ago
>am I the only one to get triggered by the “replaced” naming? >All of these eager claims to replace humans feel violently antisocial Yeah they should be using corporate euphemisms like "let go" or whatever!
- lan321 1y ago
  The farmer is taking the next step in their career journey!
- blargthorwars 1y ago
  You're absolutely correct. A better name would be "The Farmer Was Augmented <emdash> By Your Friendly AI" <emoji "happy"> <emoji "friednship">
- afandian 1y ago
  More like "the farmer was sent to live on the farm"
aduwah 1y ago
The Farmer Was Made Into Sausage By Automation
sebstefan 1y ago
Farming isn't artistry, society benefits from its automation Is it still bad if the farmer gets replaced?
- 9rx 1y ago
  > Is it still bad if the farmer gets replaced? A farmer is an owner of a farm. To replace the farmer you would have to completely eliminate the entire concept of human ownership that we hold. Socialist or other community ownership structures around farms wouldn't do as that would not replace the farmer, it would make everyone a farmer. > society benefits from its automation Economies benefit from its automation. It's far less clear if societies benefit. Farm work is hard, but there is a sense of accomplishment when it is done, which is good for the psyche. The never ending "bullshit" jobs that most people seem to find themselves in nowadays has not lead to happiness.

ceving 1y ago

Is this Windows only?

mixel 1y ago
No the game is also fully playable on linux via Proton (About other platforms I have no clue)
- intrikate 1y ago
  Excellent news, I can play the game on my Steam Deck with the on-screen keyboard!
- Aachen 1y ago
  If you get it working. They don't seem to have an own website, the publisher links to Steam as the only place to purchase it, and Steam says it's only supported on Windows. Surely you can work around it with VMs, emulation, or other solutions, but sadly the creator declines to support that

sd9 1y ago

I played this: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLesViK53beXfFohR1I08SsVPdtfgA_AjZ https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLesViK53beXfFohR1I08S... Skip the first video. The early game is painful if you already know how to program (they gate things like variables, loops, and functions behind unlocks). And tbh I didn’t know how to make a video or use a microphone when I made that video. I just sat down one evening and played it - I had no idea it would resonate with people the way it did. It’s a great game, and I imagine a very good way to learn programming in a goal oriented way. But I concur that there’s not a great deal of content if you already know how to program.

shhsshs 1y ago
Fun to see you here - I discovered this game through your videos! I think despite the lack of raw "content", I got a LOT of playtime out of this game by trying to push higher on the leaderboards.
- sd9 1y ago
  Awesome! I've considered trying to do some hyper optimisation, taking into account the number of cycles each instruction takes - it seems that a lot of people are interested in that. That's not my natural style though. I've had plenty of criticism for not being performance sensitive, but that's not really how I unwind (although I do plenty of optimisation at work!). It could be fun to explore ingame though.

slightwinder 1y ago

Turtles are old-school, farming is the new cool. Is there a dating-option? Just asking as a Stardew Valley-friend.. OK, jokes aside. I've started playing this, when 1.0 was released some weeks ago, and this is quite good for what it is. It's doing many things the right way, like allowing coding with an external editor, having a proper coding-experience even with the built-in tools, and collectable hats. Everyone should buy this and learn the basics. It's cheap enough for most people.

nilslindemann 1y ago

I am playing this right now! A very nice, addictive game. The programming language is a kind of subset of Python. The in-game editor is still a bit clunky, but one can edit the source code in an external editor like VS Code. The game has an auto-reload option. Caution! Just because one saves the code in the external editor doesn't mean the entire game state is saved! It cost me a few unlocked upgrades the first time I closed the game, not saving because I thought it automatically does so. One has to save the game state explicitly, before closing. I already have the full game area and a max speed drone, but I'm only just about to implement planting cacti. So it'll be a while before I unlock multiple drones. But I have already implemented efficient algorithms for planting a giant Pumpkin, Sunflowers and Poly cultures. What the game could have is that dictionaries retain their insertion order and a built-in array.sort. And it is sad that the nice music stops running as soon as one starts the game.

madethemcry 1y ago

I did not play this (yet!), but just by watching this video I see how it overlaps with the coding games on https://code.org/en-US https://code.org/en-US (Hour of Code!) in terms of having a code + gaming view to solve a challenge. When I was teaching coding to kids, code.org was the to-go place besides using Scratch, to introduce coding patterns (mostly: conditional, loops). An example is the famous Minecraft labyrinth [1]. There is also a Frozen themed one. If you have kids (~6y+), that's some fun way to get started instead of diving directly into actual code. [1] https://studio.code.org/courses/mc/units/1/lessons/1/levels/1?viewAs=Instructor https://studio.code.org/courses/mc/units/1/lessons/1/levels/...

djmips 1y ago

teaching optimization this way seems ideal

mrguyorama 1y ago

I bounced off this game. It was fun and rewarding early on, as an idle game addict, but there's a massive complexity cliff. You go from "just plant the newest crop on every square" to "Okay, now you need to manage farm-wide state in a way that the tools do not support, and develop powerful planning systems and priority systems to actually yield meaningful results and higher level crops" and I just don't understand why. The reward for rewriting an entire working (nice and simple) system to a behemoth full of complex logic and systems engineering is.... another crop? At least until you get to spawn new drones which is locked off until you've already basically beaten the game for some reason? Like it feels like there is massive missing transition and purpose to that complexity. In factorio, you deal with the insanity of petrochemicals because it gives you fun toys. I found myself quite unable to engineer an entire system like that just to... improve my rate of resource growth. Somewhat.

cheschire 1y ago
Maybe don’t do everything at once. Try cycling through optimized whole-farm algorithms and clear() between them