In all honesty, I had to forcibly remove Factorio from my computer because it was too much of a productivity drain.I think I averaged like 60 hours a week.

The achievements in the game are a lot of fun to go after - they&#x27;re mostly the right amount of painful&#x2F;challenging and interesting to make you actually want to try for them.That being said, I&#x27;ve put more than a few thousand hours into the game over the past few years and I think the base game finally got stale enough for me to move on to something else right as they&#x27;re reaching 1.0, but that&#x27;s okay. (The big problem for me is that I&#x27;ve been sinking a lot of time into mods like Seablock and after nearly 100 hours into this run I can&#x27;t see starting over from scratch again just to be on 1.0. I&#x27;m not even sure I want to finish this run either knowing I&#x27;m unlikely to see bug fixes in the Seablock mod packs, and they definitely could use some work.)

I assume you will not be happy if we tell you that there are mods that drastically increase the granularity of production processes and will make you easily work 200h on a single map before ever launching a rocket..?

I was the same, as soon as I launched a rocket I was done.3 years later I played a multiplayer once a week with my buddies during COVID lockdown, as soon as we launched again I got bored. They are going again with more friends and I just join the discord for the chat, I don’t open the game up.I don’t like solve the same fundamental problem over and over again so, I launched the rocket, done.

Ooh, I found 100ish hours of enjoyment over two weeks or so. Good thing I lost interest after I launched the rocket (the endgame), otherwise my productivity would have been gone forever.

It&#x27;s odd. Personally, I take xanax for anxiety, and have never had the urge to take it for recreational purposes. I moderate my alcohol intake, and smoke up very sparingly... a gram lasts months to me.Certain videogames, on the other hand, can easily become a big problem for me. Weird stuff.

I never played these kinds of programming games, I avoid them like the plague. I just know they would ruin my life. I don&#x27;t even want to watch videos about them, that&#x27;d be like trying a drug just to see what it&#x27;s like. Nope nope nope...

I personally think that quite a large part of the HN community will find or have already found enjoyment in the game. So I wanted to share the release of the 1.0 version.

Nuking your starter base is silly unless you&#x27;re on death world and have some impenetrable defense set up that&#x27;s hard to attain elsewhere without significant work. Usually to start a fresh megabase you just load up a car and drive a couple minutes to a new location. Then you can keep supplying the construction materials of the megabase with your starter base. (To those unfamiliar: yes, &quot;the end of the game&quot; -- launching a rocket -- is really the start of the game to seasoned players, so the initial base you launch the first rockets with is commonly called the starter base.)

haha i love that. it just shows us that gaffa&#x2F;silver tape hotfixes are the real deal.

Once you get logistics bots you can monkey patch anything with a requester chest.

It also impressively shows the other side of things, where you can keep your factory running on hotfixes until pretty much the end of the game.You can most certainly launch a rocket (i.e. ship your final product) with any kind of setup but if you want to build a sustainable rocket launching platform, you will most likely have to nuke production (as in, you can literally nuke your production) and re-build it.

Depends - Some games like this are addictive and great fun for programmers too. I played &quot;Spacechem&quot; to death. It&#x27;s effectively a two-thread, multiprocess, visual turing-alike machine with an organic chemistry theme. It&#x27;s awesome.

Lots of programmers enjoy Factorio - personally I think it&#x27;s because it&#x27;s less annoying than work, so we do what we like minus management

I thought that about TIS-100 and Shenzhen I&#x2F;O until I played them, I recommend both

I do PCB layout, which is way more like factorio. Still I enjoy the game a lot.

Yeah. I recently bought a game on steam where you create and manage a startup. You have to do stuff like research landing page, hire devs, ux people etc. About 10 mins in I was just thinking that my time would be better spent actually doing this stuff rather than doing it in a game.

Exactly my review. I usually play it when work is slow to keep my brain entertained, but when I get proper work at work - factorio is no longer my friend. Game is like drugs - ill just do small updates to my fab - boom its 4am.

Agreed.  This game was too much like work and quickly got burnt out.

Factorio is like programming. But without management or customers messing anything up. You are in full control of the whole project and have fairly clear requirements. That makes it a lot more enjoyable.Plus, it has trains :-)

You can quickly ruin some hours of programmers if you post the wrong link.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;regexcrossword.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;regexcrossword.com&#x2F;</a>

I&#x27;m a programmer because I enjoy programming. That&#x27;s also why I enjoy Factorio.

Sounds like fun but only if you’re not a programmer, for whom it would just be work.

Walk speed is a metaphor for the AWS budget.

exactly, the original factory is likely the construction&#x2F;logistic bot production center, it&#x27;d be slow but not necessarily inefficient, so it can stay while the bot build the modular factory elsewhere

Or alternatively take a Moore&#x27;s law view: the original factory remains there forever, eclipsed by the much larger, more orderly and modular, one build next to it.Walk speed is a surprisingly big constraint on the early game, until you get various upgrades; you build a small factory because you don&#x27;t want to walk round a larger one.

You can also use the internet to find solutions to all of it!

Or input&#x2F;output, or scalability and to a limited extent security (aliens attacking weak spots).

To me it&#x27;s surprising how many games can actually be viewed like work.

Yeah but you can have robots do all the heavy lifting.

It really feels like a time waster until you get the drones to do those chores. I had a huge sprawl just because teching up to drones again in a new map felt like too much work.

I usually bootstrap a second base, make heavy use of trains, and ship materials back to original base.
At this point I generally don&#x27;t tear things down

I feel the same way, although it&#x27;s even worse with Zachtronic games (like SpaceChem for instance). At first I enjoy them because &quot;it&#x27;s just like coding&quot; but then after an hour or so I think &quot;well, it&#x27;s just like coding&quot; and I realize that I could be doing something more productive. I guess it must be like playing Guitar Hero if you&#x27;re a professional guitarist.I think these games are great at teaching people about concurrent programming, race conditions and locking though.

This isn&#x27;t a problem with the game. This is a problem you are having with games in general.I have it too, and it&#x27;s a consequence of growing up and&#x2F;or having more responsibilities.I can either play Factorio, or I can spend time with my kids. Factorio, which I love, loses every time.The only games I play now are ones I can play with my kids. ... so I set my daughter up with Starcraft 2 and am teaching her about strategy while still scratching that gaming itch.My dream is to have a multiplayer LAN based VR Elder Scrolls game to play at home with the family.

The fun is once you have the construction bots for me you can make them destroy segments and from then on you can just ghost build everything else.For example, I am playing on an OARC server, basically new players get their own base space, and I&#x27;m trying to get to my friend we both kinda picked &#x27;far away&#x27; as options so we wouldnt clash with each other, so I&#x27;ve got blueprints I keep dropping that keep expanding my logistics network + power grid northward &#x2F; westward as I make my way to him. The construction bots do all the work, my factory gets all the materials to them.I&#x27;ve taken a break since, but then once I can reach out to him I will probably build train tracks going to and from his base and mine. I&#x27;m also using the robots to build a massive base. I can just ghost place whatever I want where I want it as long as the robot tower can cover that area.

When my factory has grown so big and unwieldy that I start to feel a massive refactoring is in order but that it&#x27;s going to be too much work, I just start a new game and use the lessons I learned from the previous game to design a better factory next time.

Most players just build a new factory and then deconstruction planner their old one en masse once the new one is up....which itself isn&#x27;t all that different from software development.

I felt the same way. And then I think I want to automate it.I heard scripting is possible? Do experienced players use it, to automate things?

Likewise, and I spotted it early on so never really got into it. Systematic games are my favourite kind of game, but when it gets as raw as factorio is I suddenly snap out of immersion and realise I&#x27;m working but in a game.

I&#x27;ve found it actually heightens the enjoyment for me. Unlike work, I can completely refactor my base from the ground up and no one will yell at me.

Completely agree, refactoring your layout is too expensive. What I typically do is just start-afresh with all the resources I have accrued from my current factory -- still fun!

I mean, if it&#x27;s too much work you didn&#x27;t plan ahead well enough (and&#x2F;or you need to get to the robots so they can do the work for you).

Roboports chained together to form large logistics networks with construction bots and blueprints (whether of your own creation or easily downloaded) my friend.If recreating a portion of your factory &quot;feels too much like work&quot; to do it really sounds like you haven&#x27;t availed yourself fully to the tools the game gives you to do it.

Had the exact same experience with Satisfactory. When you need to scale production up it becomes like a real job. You need to plan, refactor, etc.When I now see those videos on Youtube with huge factories I wonder how many hours that person has wasted. I&#x27;m not against enjoying a video game, but when the activity is so similar to real work... why not do that instead and get something real in return?

Wow I often feel that way when I do most things! I think you just have a passion for programming and it is your hobby in addition to profession.

&gt; This is actually what ruins the game for me. I get to a place where I need to recreate large chunks of the factory and it just feels too much like work.Are you using drones and blueprints?Once you unlock drones, you can create huge swaths of factories in seconds. You just need to come up with a design that works, and then replicate it.

Did you get copy&#x2F;paste going?That was when the creative:tedious ratio got rebalanced for me.

This is actually what ruins the game for me. I get to a place where I need to recreate large chunks of the factory and it just feels too much like work.It&#x27;s one of those games that I wish I could love, but whenever I attempt to start it now I just remember that feeling of &quot;ugh, why don&#x27;t I instead code something, at least I&#x27;ll create something&quot;.

Do you have a link to the channel? I&#x27;m having trouble finding it.

The people behind this game stream on Twitch, and you can see what their development process looks like.

It teaches that if you wait a while eventually some magic technology (drones, trains, faster belts etc) will allow you to bypass technical debt and&#x2F;or simply eliminate it with a single demolish command.And it teaches that humans can do whatever they want to a world, level all the forests, kill all the locals, because eventually we are going to fly away. Not our problem anymore. Space people are above the petty concerns of terrestrials.

That&#x27;s quite a take. The upgrades gives you totally different options.

You really need a combination of top-down vision combined with bottom-up implementation, mixed together with a healthy dose of pragmatism.It&#x27;s enough to know that you&#x27;ll need lots of gears and to know that you&#x27;ll need high-capacity mining eventually. But there&#x27;s no great harm from having a few extra or from having not quite enough to max out beaker production; just start the process, get some gears, get some beakers, and refine as needed. Without a little top-down vision, you&#x27;ll end up severely overproducing some things and underinvesting in others, which is no good, but you&#x27;ll never be able to build an optimal factory without first building a suboptimal one.

There&#x27;s still plenty of room for creativity even with an extreme top-down approach, like this series does: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=kQ8QDQmOoys" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=kQ8QDQmOoys</a>&gt; Over a few months I designed an entire Factorio base without testing any of it. The goal is to create a mid-sized base capable of building a megabase. A secondary goal is to not break down or rebuild anything ever.The challenge isn&#x27;t that it&#x27;s hard to figure out the ratios or math out the machines you need, it&#x27;s in getting to having the production to make that base without falling asleep waiting on things. Continual bootstrapping towards that end goal is the gameplay.

I just make labs and factories in arbitrary amounts, and then adjust the amounts later as I go based on where I see the bottlenecks. I tried getting the ratios exactly right up-front when I first started playing, but it was almost never worth the effort because I would usually outpace the production of a specific input resource (especially when I later built new factories that used one of those inputs too).

It’s for this reason I personally dislike factorio as a game. Don’t get me wrong, the game itself is fantastic, but I don’t have the patience for it.Rather, I find myself trying to build a factory top down. I write a bunch of sticky notes with material requirements and calculate backwards “how many labs do I need?” “How many gears do I need to make the beakers?” “How much do I need to mine to match that hourly throughput of gears?It’s the perfect candidate of a game to write an algorithm for. Assuming a known seed, it’s trivial to design the most efficient system based on those parameters.And at that point it just becomes work. It’s really designed as a bottom up game, but I think about problems top down and for that reason factorio drives me nuts.

And the speed runners are the ones doing waterfall design rather than agile.

Except it doesn&#x27;t have very good refactoring tools. Sometimes you need to change just one small thing about some sub-graph of your factory, but circumstances require you to re-do most of it to implement that change. This is just busy-work, and not &quot;fun&quot;, to me at least.I know later in the game more options open up, but that doesn&#x27;t help me get there.I wish for a Factorio-style game where I can just drag (groups of) machines and conveyors around, and I just pay cost for however much just changed.

I have built an entire no belt factory. It works for the most part but damn it&#x27;s slow. I do transition a lot of the technical debt from the green and red sciences so I can properly support the rest of the science development.

Probably a huge fan of microservices and cloud computing.

For me the game got so much easier when I started to construct drones. There was almost no need to build belts any more! Not sure what it says about me as a developer though...

It sort of struck me as &quot;the learn new concept&quot; vs &quot;keep doing what I know&quot;.You can get really good at burner inserters or learn about electricity.Or keep get fancy with belts... or learn about trains.or get a personal roboport and learn cut&#x2F;copy&#x2F;paste

It&#x27;s the game to teach people what technical debt and refactoring is.When you start building your factory, you think about how to get first steps just done (ship it!). Over time complexity and scope of your factory increases, but old code, I mean old machines, are still there, getting in the way.You can choose to ignore it and work around it using underground belts and similar solutions, or you can take on a proper refactoring, limiting your progress in the short term.

There is a fun minecraft modpack inspired by this game <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.curseforge.com&#x2F;minecraft&#x2F;modpacks&#x2F;manufactio" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.curseforge.com&#x2F;minecraft&#x2F;modpacks&#x2F;manufactio</a>

I bought it for €10 5 years ago, in terms for gaming value for money I think only the €10 I spent on Minecraft beats it.

For me in Factorio you have to think carefully how to place your primary (mines, power, oil) and secondary factories (factory generation, batteries, plastics, ammunition etc). Some of this placement comes from the map, but in the early game you tend to place them too close to each other, which you then need to optimise later on when other tech (like oil &amp; nuclear) become available.Just refinining oil into primary products in this game took me like a week of work and tweaking.You then get to the end of the game &amp; build a rocket, but think to yourself -- &quot;Yes, but I could maybe do all of this again but properly and without manually making things and the same mistakes&quot;. So you start another game and the whole process repeats!

Can you share a take-away example please?

Great game and it gave me quite a few insights into how systems should be designed.

One of my favourite games of all time - sometime in 2018 I overloaded myself on it though. Designing systems at my job then coming home to design systems... well it might have been fun but I think I needed more variety in my life, ha!

They are going to stop it now, no Friday facts anymore.

You can look at the dev dayries <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;factorio.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;factorio.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;</a>
They are very interresting, I&#x27;ve learnt a lot of technical things reading them.
It&#x27;s a well programmed game !

Note that there is also a demo and the binaries are DRM-free (for me the demo was a bit small to justify 30 bucks, but after playing on a friend&#x27;s version for a few week it became quite clear that I had to buy this game).

The comments here made it seem more interesting than anything on the webpage of the game. Guess I&#x27;ll have to give it a shot :D

They have a demo version, that&#x27;s free as in free beer. Try that, see if you like it!

I’ve wanted to try this for a while but I’m a bit reluctant because I’m not sure that after an entire day of systems design, refactoring, building etc I need a evening game of it.Would it be too much or still refreshing? My favorite unwind game is battlefield 4.

The difference is that you can put Factorio down. MMOs are very different beasts to single-player games.

&gt; Try it and see how you feel after ~2 hours of gameplay.Coincidentally &quot;try it and see how you feel&quot; is also how people sell heroin...They&#x27;re saying they&#x27;re concerned that they might get addicted, and you&#x27;re telling them to try just the tip, just to see how it feels?I&#x27;m a big fan of Factorio but if you&#x27;re concerned it could take over your life, there&#x27;s definitely a chance it could.True it&#x27;s not as bad as an MMO. There&#x27;s no daily quests, no social features, (though multiplayer is fun) and most importantly no lootboxes or variable ratio rewards. Doesn&#x27;t mean it can&#x27;t addict you for a little bit though.

I concur with moritonal; although you can easily spend hundreds to thousands of hours in Factorio, it is much, much easier to put down. Unlike with MMOs, the game offers you no incentive for logging back in regularly.Try it and see how you feel after ~2 hours of gameplay.

Factorio always looked appealing. From a distance though. Never played this for the same reason I don’t do WoW and EVE online. Scared it would suck up every minute of my life.

Must be getting lots of traffic: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;TNIeMoj.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;TNIeMoj.png</a>

Same here. I&#x27;m a former engineer and thought Factorio would be the perfect game for me, after all I do enjoy problem solving. But it just seemed like an extension of my workday.
However I love Rimworld. It&#x27;s a game I keep going back too again and again. It&#x27;s a great game for relaxing and unwinding. It&#x27;s certainly in my top 3 list of best games of the last 10 years.

I bought it with a friend and found it quite boring. I guess I like rimworld or dwarf fortress style games much better.

A lot of these rules&#x2F;ideas likely apply to Satisfactory, though there are additional concerns like rate-of-climb for ramps and placement of objects is not (by default without using base-plates) fixed at 90 degrees but works in (iirc) 15 degree increments. It makes things differently challenging.

Once you play Factorio enough times you find that there are some general rules of thumb you can follow, in terms of resource consumption at various stages. Once you know those, it&#x27;s partly just a matter of figuring out your scale milestones.I do three stages, a main bus starter base which is enough to fill out the tech tree and launch a rocket, and then once I&#x27;ve automated most things, then comes the first megabase, which after enough time I rip up and build the modularized, distributed megabase (mostly solving the problem of keeping train traffic spread out and avoiding long multilane belt busses). The interesting thing is that building a megabase isn&#x27;t necessarily just 10x-ing your start base, it&#x27;s actually doing things differently because how you move resources around starts to become a problem in ways you didn&#x27;t encounter at the smaller scales.

&gt; The refactoring bit hits hard, how do you structure your factory to minimise time&#x2F;cost&#x2F;space, can you increase throughput, do the outputs line up where you need them, how do you ensure a sufficient power supply, etc.?There are different &#x27;designs&#x27;. I&#x27;d recommend a main bus design for your starter base. Basically you take key materials, like copper plates, iron plates, steel etc. and then run (multiple) full belts of them down a long line. and build your factories to the side of it, taking your input materials from the main bus.See here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.factorio.com&#x2F;Tutorial:Main_bus" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.factorio.com&#x2F;Tutorial:Main_bus</a>Alternative designs (for much later in the game, if you want to buiold a megabase) are e.g. rail grid, sometimes called city block design. Looks like this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.ytimg.com&#x2F;vi&#x2F;1as3oMAgOy4&#x2F;maxresdefault.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.ytimg.com&#x2F;vi&#x2F;1as3oMAgOy4&#x2F;maxresdefault.jpg</a>You have a grid of rail tracks with standardized squares and standardized input&#x2F;output locations. Then you automate input delivery&#x2F;output collection to them either by pure circuit logic, or of you don&#x27;t hate yourself quite that much using the Logistic Train Network mod: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mods.factorio.com&#x2F;mods&#x2F;Optera&#x2F;LogisticTrainNetwork" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mods.factorio.com&#x2F;mods&#x2F;Optera&#x2F;LogisticTrainNetwork</a>

They (Coffee stain) collect data and send it to Epic (even on the steam version and even if you opt out) and doesn&#x27;t reply to GDPR requests. I&#x27;d stay clear.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;steamcommunity.com&#x2F;app&#x2F;526870&#x2F;discussions&#x2F;0&#x2F;2451595019859486526&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;steamcommunity.com&#x2F;app&#x2F;526870&#x2F;discussions&#x2F;0&#x2F;24515950...</a>

Coffee Stain is the publisher for Deep Rock Galactic, Ghost Ship Games are the developer.

I never got in to Factorio, though I&#x27;d been tempted several times. I recently bought the early-access Satisfactory though which is a similar game type, mostly to support the developers (Coffee Stain) who make another game I quite enjoy (Deep Rock Galactic).The refactoring bit hits hard, how do you structure your factory to minimise time&#x2F;cost&#x2F;space, can you increase throughput, do the outputs line up where you need them, how do you ensure a sufficient power supply, etc.?

Factorio is much easier. (Cracktorio a running joke)Its base appeal&#x2F;game loop is building new system and then doing optimization and refactoring.
As you progress through game you itch to improve things and do them better at bigger scale.You build a small setup to produce a wire.Wire is used to build next thing. Next thing is used as input for another thing, and so on.But you now need ton of wire. So you have to go back and create more wire production, but there is no space there... so you refactor or build more wire production elsewhere... but how do you connect it... and copper ore is low, need to build train to ship more ore from somewhere else... and so on and on until you realize it Sunday 10pm. Where did my weekend go?KSP forces you to learn how things work if you want to go beyond mun. Transfer orbits and plane equalization done by feel doesnt work outside of Kerbin SOI. At that stage KSP has a huge step for player to take in order to progress in game.But also you now understand a lot about rocket science. Factorio doesn&#x27;t really do that. You might learn some at intuitive level like: planning for future, leaving room for expansion, don&#x27;t do everything at once, don&#x27;t forget to build automated death traps outside you home xD

I think it&#x27;d be cool if a &quot;joint mod&quot; was created between factorio and KSP. You use factorio to get raw materials, the R&amp;D tree is shared between the games, and when you want to launch something, your available parts are whatever you&#x27;ve manufactured and loaded into the assembly building.I&#x27;m an industrial engineer and have thought about how to teach manufacturing concepts through the game. Tons of great lessons such as one piece flow, problems when you build up inventory, correctly balancing different production rates between machines, factory layout, etc.And as another commenter pointed out, sometimes you&#x27;re &quot;refactoring code&quot; and paying your technical debt.

KSP&#x27;s kOS mod package is what made the game 10x more fun for me. Everything is automated now.

Factorio only sort of deals with queuing theory, concurrency, and so on. Probably to the same extent relative to the actual depth of these subjects as Kerbal Space Program deals with aerospace concepts relative to what aerospace engineers do.But IMO that&#x27;s not actually the hardest part of Factorio. The hardest part of Factorio is the same as for software engineering: how to build something that scales and where you can still reason about it. One of the big challenges after just &quot;beating the game&quot; is hitting specific scale targets (the community calls it megabase building), and the factory sizes needed to do that definitely reach the complexity limits of human brains, so many of these players start establishing design conventions and start writing down notes and documentation and calculations for themselves.I&#x27;ve definitely done things like using a stopwatch to measure roundtrip time for a train in order to calculate latency&#x2F;throughput numbers for a supply chain in Factorio. But you rarely need to do more than back of the napkin math to be effective.

Oh if only I was not a programmer!KSP has taught me so much about subjects I was interested in, but afraid to put in the time in - rocket science&#x2F;engineering, orbital mechanics etc.I’ve not tried Factorio myself but I’d wager it will try to teach me stuff I mostly already know - queue theory, concurrency, automation...

Great game and it has come a long way. Even the early versions were quite addicting. For me this is one of the best games in the last 10 years along with Kerbal Space Program (there may be others, time is in short supply these days).If you are not into computer games, I would still recommend to visit their site. They have &quot;friday facts&quot; where they describe the work they did over the week an what challenges they had to solve. It is very well written and poses interesting problems. Really interesting for software devs, even if you are not in game development.

And mods. Lots of mods. Some very good, others also silly.A recently updated one is Renai Transportation, adding Train JUMP-tions:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;factorio&#x2F;comments&#x2F;i5yoaj&#x2F;train_junctions_pfft_try_train_jumptions&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;factorio&#x2F;comments&#x2F;i5yoaj&#x2F;train_junc...</a>

o m f g. Hilarious and great at the same time.

A recent video from Nilaus that some of the audience here might find amusing: Factorio real-time dashboard using Grafana.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=91rxQfpqge8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=91rxQfpqge8</a>

I feel like if you want a 3D favtorio then going back to the mother: modded minecraft, is the best option.  I have put multiple thousands of hours into industry games over the past ten years (few hours in the past two years though).  Gregtech was what got me started and in some ways is still the best.  GT6 is complete and a standalone game (Mechanatia I think) is currently being worked on.  Factorio definitely wins on ability to automate and scale up, but it is very wide and not very deep.  That is to say, there is no exponential growth power or resource requirements by moving up 5+ tech tiers.  Combining many tiers with powerful automation would be a very fun combo.  Modded factorio is probably the best place to look for this.  For now, afaik, the biggest factorio mods are focused on going even wider.

&gt; I still keep going back to Factorio, which is more like &quot;Dwarf Fortress&quot; in its depth and sophistication.If Factorio and Dwarf Fortress had a baby I would adopt it without hesitation and raise it as my favourite child and sole heir.

I have tears of laughter.  These videos truly are awesome.

Ah, but i waited 8.5 years to play factory, no way I&#x27;m going to play prerelease satisfactory.

I actually don’t like the hand crafted nature of the map because it severely limits replayability. Sure it’s damn pretty but once you explore once and learn the interesting&#x2F;valuable spots, the sense of awe and wonder that comes from exploration just vanishes.

Satisfactory is like a 3D version of Factorio, which lets you build huge multi-layer mega factories up into the sky. But it&#x27;s not as deep and sophisticated as Factorio, and doesn&#x27;t have drones or blueprints. (That would be a lot more difficult to accomplish in free-form 3D, than with Factorio&#x27;s 2D tile grid.) It&#x27;s kind of like the giant simple Legos for younger kids, as opposed to Factorio that&#x27;s more like Lego Technic.Satisfactory is well worth playing if you yearn for a 3D version of Factorio, but I still keep going back to Factorio, which is more like &quot;Dwarf Fortress&quot; in its depth and sophistication. Satisfactory&#x27;s world is breathtakingly beautiful, lovingly hand-crafted by artists instead of procedurally generated, which makes it all the more satisfying to despoil and ruin with huge mega-factories belching out smoke and radiation.This guy&#x27;s videos stress testing and abusing Satisfactory are awesome:I Produced so Much Nuclear Waste the World Is Ruined Forever - Satisfactory<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Oh2oF-eZTD8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Oh2oF-eZTD8</a>I Built a 600 Meter Human Cannon That Ends All Existence - Satisfactory<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=t2X3wlvoShg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=t2X3wlvoShg</a>I Made the Game Unplayable with This Gravity-Destroying Tractor Ball Pit - Satisfactory<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=sTvAmwnhIxM" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=sTvAmwnhIxM</a>I Crippled the Game by Building to the Heavens - Satisfactory gameplay - Let&#x27;s Game It Out<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=X77MHTOEwXo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=X77MHTOEwXo</a>What Happens When You Let a Maniac Build a Factory - Satisfactory gameplay - Let&#x27;s Game It Out<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=5vYYhL9Vt8o" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=5vYYhL9Vt8o</a>

Despite programming-adjacent elements it&#x27;s just a sandbox game.If you don&#x27;t enjoy the core idea of playing in a souped-up sandbox you probably won&#x27;t enjoy it.

For example with Zachtronics games (very programming-puzzle-esque games), I doubt I could play it for long. It would be similar to messing about with an Esolang, but more structured. While I enjoy using Esolangs, I can only ever do it in short bursts, and I imagine the same would hold if I started playing a Zachtronics game.  
For Factorio, it is just barely different enough from regular programming (due to various parts, such as the grid based nature of reality, etc) that if I am in the right mood I could play it quite easily for several hours. Yet, if I am in the wrong mood&#x2F;state-of-mind, then I will constantly compare it to what I am coding and likely stop playing after an hour.  
I will say that Factorio is far more distilled in it&#x27;s problem solving nature than you&#x27;ll usually get with programming, which can make it scratch that itch of solving something. While I still enjoy Factorio after playing it for some hours, I&#x27;m more likely to code now than I am to play it. Still quite enjoyable and worth the money and possibly the time, though.

Do you like games at all? Almost any game would be “more efficient” if you could just write code to declare yourself the victor. Games - for that matter, pretty much any leisure pursuit whatsoever - are not about efficiency.

I find it kind of weird that programmers seem to like this game. I tried playing it for a bit and all I could think of was how much more efficient things would be if I could just write code instead of running around on a map to achieve the same thing.The whole game seemed like a forced distillation of programming into a form that can be consumed by the masses.

Any x86_64 Windows, Mac, or Linux machine will play it.  Bigger factories will bog down on lesser hardware.

I highly recommend using a USB mouse if playing on a laptop.

Do you need a PC to play this game or does it work on any laptop?

Best game I have every played ! (source: trust me)
8.5 years in early access is no joke, the game is definitely something !Some of my favourite youtube videos on it:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=xF--1XdcOeM" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=xF--1XdcOeM</a> [Self expanding factory, recursive blue prints]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=feHq2Ken43M" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=feHq2Ken43M</a> [Factorio Rocket ballet, for reference it took me 30 hours to launch a single rocket]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=1KoV_Zk2IRs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=1KoV_Zk2IRs</a> [Factorio base tour, this base looks like a CPU die when zoomed out]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=jjtXHsv5E6M" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=jjtXHsv5E6M</a> [Another Factorio base tour]

Up until circa 2006 all interfaces were made that way. Web forms and native interfaces all had inputs resembling real buttons. See 98.css <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jdan.github.io&#x2F;98.css&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jdan.github.io&#x2F;98.css&#x2F;</a> if you want to see what interfaces looked like in the early 2000s.

I love that when you click things on the site it actually responds to the click (like you&#x27;ve physically pressed a button).

I had a co-worker who used to joke about that, but now that I&#x27;ve spent 4 weeks making a JSON template for basically just two VMs, I&#x27;m starting to take his idea more seriously.Fundamentally, the product is similar, but everyone far prefers the Factorio UX over fifty pages of serialised REST objects.

Reminds me of ps&#x2F;kill&#x2F;renice built in Doom: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;psdoom.sourceforge.net" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;psdoom.sourceforge.net</a>

This game looks appealing but when I start playing it, it feels like an extension of my job.

You can achieve stability in Oxygen Not Included. It&#x27;s not even that hard to do so.

Note that while they are both fun and share many features like logistic systems and machines, they are wildly different in approach.Oxygen Not Included is an inherently unstable system, and it&#x27;s a frantic race to juggle all the spinning plates while your colony falls more and more apart. The better you get at the game, the further you can stretch it before it succumbs to starvation, disease, lack of air or death by overheating.Factorio (in regular mode) has a system that it is possible to keep stable at all times, and once you get a handle on the enemies you play the game at your own pace.

The heat management is one of my biggest frustrations with the ONI gameplay loop. You go from gradually adding niceties to the base like lighting and plumbing to immediately needing some unholy water-cooled system that uses more power than the rest of the base combined, is stupid expensive in refined metals, and doesn&#x27;t even permanently solve the problem because soon the heatsink waste pool is boiling and searing any dupe that walks past the general area. Oh and you have to do all this before the greenhouse gets slightly too warm and dooms the colony to starvation.

I was a bit annoyed by photosynthesis not working as expected. In one of my first games, I used algae to create oxygen. However, this did not remove carbon dioxide, and the overall gas pressure in my base mysteriously kept increasing. I know it&#x27;s not a physics simulator, but given the name of the game I expected a bit more realism around oxygen production.Overall the game is a strange mix of physics sim and quirks that don&#x27;t make sense. For example, industry produces heat and heat spreads as expected. Solid, liquid and gas phase changes happen more or less as expected, leading to fun stuff like steam explosions. But then heat can be deleted in unphysical ways, heat can&#x27;t 
be radiated away into space like in the real world etc.

In the planned DLC they plan to significantly rework space and introduce playable asteroids, so rockets will be use as a logistic system between your main base and space outposts.On your other points, it looks like you simply haven&#x27;t understood game systems deep enough.&gt;you&#x27;ll run out of stuff fairly soonGeysers can support really large bases and other materials you can get from space missions, which are powered either by oil wells or water geysers. It&#x27;s a great simplification that you can built self-powering oxygen generators, which consume water and produce oxygen with some leftover hydrogen.&gt;the heat it createsAquatuners + steam turbine setup solves all heat issues. And you can cool metal refineries output directly inside steam rooms which power stem turbine (by using oil or petroleum for coolant).&gt;the meteors that destroy anything you put on the surfaceBunker doors + radars + a tiny bit of automation. I think that radar mechanics are unnecessary complex and not explained properly, but once you understand it, they are quite easy to use.&gt;the crappy power generation methodsEven without advanced sour gas&#x2F;petroleum power setups it&#x27;s really easy to get a TON of power generation. In mid and late game I usually sit on top of so much power generation and unfortunately game does not have any power sink game mechanics.

ONI has me super frustrated but without the challenge and success part. I reached the surface once when setting the map to super easy and discovered that there was nothing fun there, either. It&#x27;s fun for a little bit to get things running, but you can&#x27;t make it a closed loop system (at least at first) and you&#x27;ll run out of stuff fairly soon. I thought that with enough research you&#x27;d get there, and you might, but the way of storing liquids or gases for processing, the heat it creates, the meteors that destroy anything you put on the surface, the crappy power generation methods to pump it all around... I just didn&#x27;t get that game. Factorio I played for thousands of hours and I&#x27;m still not tired of it.

ONI is deeply frustrating if you have an understanding of thermodynamics. It doesn&#x27;t map in any reasonable way onto actual physics. One of the main mechanisms for managing heat is a plant that destroys heat.To me it feels incredibly hacky and ruins the game.

If you like this game, I suggest you can try “Oxygen not included”

Yes I definitely didn&#x27;t mean for this to sound as a complaint, I think for what it is it&#x27;s quite lightweight. It&#x27;s just that it seemed to be using a single core and if they managed to make it multi-core perhaps it could be even more performant now.

Considering what factorio is displaying, I’ve always thought the performance is amazing.Then again, my computer is not 7 years old, but when I played it my desktop was running on an AMD Phenom.

They&#x27;ve made a lot of performance improvements, but it&#x27;s still bounded by memory bandwidth and splitting updates across multiple cores would actually slow that down due to memory access contention.

The devs were constantly optimizing the game. They&#x27;ve added a lot of performance tunings, options for video compression, etc.
You should give it a shot, maybe download a factory built by someone else to evaulate performance.

Just opened up my largest base (21k&#x2F;m copper) and it&#x27;s using 6% of my 8 core cpu. That&#x27;s around 108% of a single core, but the load is spread quite evenly with the highest cpu utilization at 28% with the rest hovering around 10%. I&#x27;d say it&#x27;s very well parallelized currently.

Does anyone know if performance&#x2F;efficiency of the game has gotten better over time? I played it quite a bit ~2 years ago or so, but my 7 year old MBP got really hot and very slow by the time I started using blueprints. From what I read at the time the game was very dependent on single-threaded CPU performance. Maybe they found a way to make better use of multiple cores?I really want to pick it up again but am not excited to start a new factory if I know I won&#x27;t be able to complete it.

They even made 0.18 mods to be 1.0.0 compatible this way the game releases with all mods already up to date.

0.18 was just Release Candidate for 1.0 - the only feature added on release is Spidertron, the rest is just fixes. I think you should update.

I just finished a 10K SPM base. Finishing a base that big is like finally releasing a product that was in development for a year. I don&#x27;t know what to do with myself now that its all finished.

I&#x27;m stuck on 0.18 until I reach 1000 SPM. Real soon now, I just need to improve my iron throughput to relieve a bottleneck in flying robot frame production then I can turn to working out the rocket control units not meeting production quota.

For anyone who has wondered what would Factorio would look like in 3D, the game Satisfactory from Coffee Stains Studio would be a good idea.

Or design things without committing to actually building it yet.Or hint&#x2F;show others how something could be built.Or remind yourself of how you set something up last time.(I use blueprints extensively.)

It just gets your robots to build stuff for you so you don’t have to.

You always have a next step, a next upgrade to look forward to. It&#x27;s an uninterrupted treadmill from building your first mine to building you hundredth mega-factory. That&#x27;s how even quasi non-games like Cookie Clicker can become addictive. It&#x27;s effectively a Skinner&#x27;s box.Gameplay-wise Factorio is a lot more interesting that Cookie Clicker of course.

Yes.I don&#x27;t think the developers intend it to suck up so much time. I think they want to make something that&#x27;s fun.But I don&#x27;t think there&#x27;s anything to the game that malicious developers don&#x27;t already know.I think, insofar as it&#x27;s fair to call Factorio addictive, it&#x27;s because there&#x27;s a constant feeling of &quot;just one more thing&quot; (or &quot;just one more game&quot;). There&#x27;s is constant and continuous frontier of optimization opportunities. But, at the same time, there&#x27;s also effort&#x2F;delay in getting the rewards of the effort. -- I think that feedback loop is what people loved about the 2012 XCom Enemy Unknown.I think it&#x27;s possible to play in a healthy way. But, I guess if the feeling of &quot;my factory isn&#x27;t good&quot; and &quot;I suck&quot; drives the behaviour, then that&#x27;d be unhealthy.

would be interesting to learn the nature (or psychological tricks) the game uses to become so addictive

This is like Heroin getting an upgrade.  I might have to go break my computer now...

For those who like this I would also recommend Mindustry, a similar game which is open source and available for mobile. I actually have spent quite a lot of time with it.

Man, playing it on android phone makes my head hurts. It&#x27;s small...

Whoops! It&#x27;s not mentioned in all the places. Thanks for the correction.

I actually much prefer their conveyors to factorio&#x27;s

I like both. Factorio certainly has a lot more depth to it, but Mindustry feels more streamlined. Less focus on the minutia of optimizing the factory and logistics, and more on getting everything set up as quickly as possible so you don&#x27;t get overwhelmed by waves of enemies.For Factorio players, here are the biggest differences:1. No inventory. All structures get automatically crafted as they are built and the resources taken from your central storage core.2. No inserters. Structures that output resources output them directly into adjacent belts or other structures. This simplifies construction and can allow for amazingly compact designs if you put sufficient thought into them, but can also lead to accidentally mixing the wrong items into your belts and clogging up your production lines if you&#x27;re not careful.3. You have blueprints and the equivalent of construction bots right from the start of the game. In singleplayer, it is normal and expected that players will pause the game, queue up a bunch of things to be built, then unpause and let their ship handle the construction automatically.4. Belts are streamlined and much faster work with. 1 lane per belt, and the UI for constructing belts includes a pathfinding algorithm allows you to easily construct a belt between two points in seconds provided you have enough resources on-hand. Crossing two belts automatically creates an intersection so resources don&#x27;t mix.5. More focus on combat. Lots of different turret options, each with their own specializations, logistical requirements, and types of enemies they are good against. The PVP and attack modes are also quite fun.6. More arcadey. Unlike with Factorio, you aren&#x27;t expected to keep growing and expanding your factory forever. There is limited space and sooner or later you&#x27;re either going get overwhelmed, or retreat back into space with the resources you collected. You can finish most stages in an hour or two.

If you can tolerate building the same infrastructure from scratch every level, with a need to max out production and&#x2F;or do levels multiple times to get the unlock points you need.At least that&#x27;s the impression I got from a couple hours of time into the demo before I threw it away in disgust. It was like minutes 15-30 of factorio on loop, plus tower defense. The tower defense was good but not enough to make up for the tedium of setting up drills.Also if I&#x27;m remembering right the conveyors were unreasonably finicky for such a core mechanic.

Mindustry is an amazing game once you get tired of Factorio but want something similar. I much prefer Mindustry&#x27;s timed-wave combat to Factorio&#x27;s, but Factorio is more in-depth in the industrial processing&#x2F;logistics side.In Steam I have roughly the same amount of hours in both.

I first started playing it on a laptop during a long train ride late last year, after having briefly checked it out on Android at some prior point. It definitely passed the time well.

I got into playing Mindustry on plane rides sometime last year and it has the amazing ability to make a 5 hour cross continental flight go by in an instant.

The best part about Mindustry is that at some point you can stop fiddling with the map and just launch with the resources you have. A playthrough for a map is a few hours tops, maybe 3-4 if you&#x27;re grinding some mineral or want to try something fancy.Factory on the other hand... I uninstalled after my first quick playtest ended with my SO waking up and wondering why I&#x27;m already awake at 8 in the morning (trick is: don&#x27;t go to sleep and optimize the factory just a little bit longer).The last game that did this for me was Civ3 and I almost lost a job then, never played a Civ game since =)

I love both. It was frustrating to always begin from zero, but with blueprints, your best structures can outlive the reset, and the maps usually require something unique anyway.

For anyone who doesn&#x27;t know about it, Mindustry is a similar game with a more tower-defense angle. Linux, macOS, Windows, and Android.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mindustrygame.github.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mindustrygame.github.io&#x2F;</a>(I have no connection to the project, I&#x27;ve just enjoyed playing it.)

&gt; Then there were the speed runners who launch the rocket in a few hours.It&#x27;s even below 2 hours now: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.speedrun.com&#x2F;factorio#Any" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.speedrun.com&#x2F;factorio#Any</a>

You can install the mod that merges lamps and power poles or the one that makes it always day.

&gt; I found most of my bottleneck to be electricity. Since I played on deathworld, placing solar was tedious.If there&#x27;s a major criticism to be had over Factorio, it&#x27;s that power generation in the game is rather boring, and the Power poles and Light classes are designed somewhat poorly. Solar just doesn&#x27;t scale in Vanilla - it costs too many materials for too little power, when really it should be one of the easier scalable techs (but should still require lots of research since it&#x27;s a no-consumable power technology).You can get through an entire game of Factorio on nothing but coal power if you&#x27;re diligent about when you expand, but most seasoned players will just burn the excess oil as power, since it&#x27;s rarely a real bottleneck and oil&#x27;s one of the most economical resources in the game to get setup - you build it once and... you&#x27;re done. Forever.And then there&#x27;s the super ridiculous late gamers who have to build nuclear because once you start talking in tens of gigawatts, there&#x27;s just no way to squeeze that out of anything else and remain even close to efficient; the nukes take an absurd amount of concrete, but you&#x27;re usually swimming in excess stone anyways. Trying to get there on solar is an exercise in actual pain, since you&#x27;ll mine most of the map just trying to build panels and batteries... so you have energy to mine the map... The bootstrapping never ends.Some of the mods have done real work to make this better. There&#x27;s a mod that has fusion as a late game tech which feels like cheating, but then there&#x27;s modpacks like Seablock where you&#x27;re forced to continuously rebuild power through your tech generations as there is no coal, your starting wind turbines don&#x27;t make enough to get you past the first 10 hours, and each successive science step unlocks a new power generation technology that roughly feels in scale with that level of technology (from harvesting low grade algaes for biomass, to growing trees, to farming alien plants and extracting oils, and then to nuclear in the latest parts of the game).But no amount of modding can fix things so you can have a power pole that is also a lamp, so you can use Brave New World and see things through the stupid unfixable dark night without also spamming the map with build-wrecking lamps (since that mod removes your character and thus your ability to build night vision goggles).

Games can help you figure out parts of your personality in weird ways. I used to do swimmingly with the early game with all the hack and slash building techniques all the way up to ~500 spm. Then the whole set up for trying to get to mega base got me anxious and such. I found most of my bottleneck to be electricity. Since I played on deathworld, placing solar was tedious.I knew a few different people who struggled early on a lot. They would be stuck handcrafting too much and rarely have those hack job factory setup. But once they got their early base with ~50 spm and robots going, they would start scaling up with neat little blueprints and what not.Then there were the speed runners who launch the rocket in a few hours.

yes, my bad. Fixed it. I like this video explanation <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=tWtvrPTbQ_c" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=tWtvrPTbQ_c</a>

I think you meant to write Skinner box. I wasn&#x27;t familiar with the term and noticed the typo while looking up what it was.

I mostly agree with this, but.Watching 100 hours of TV a year is probably not excessive. Watching 100 hours of TV a week would be unhealthy.
If there are people who lack self control such that playing games adversely affects their personal lives, then (without accusing the developer of malicious intent) something unhealthy has gone on.I can&#x27;t say I really agree with &quot;x hours on entertainment like games is x hours wasted&quot;.I think the comparison &quot;it&#x27;s more detrimental than illegal drugs&quot; is thoughtless rhetoric. Maybe a better comparison could be &#x27;empty calories&#x27;. -- I would agree I enjoyed playing Factorio more than I&#x27;ve enjoyed many other games, though.

Watching television for hours every day is at a minimum a bad idea and often an addiction. Many people would go crazy without a signal. Just look at how many people can&#x27;t even function under COVID! As if being alone with your thoughts or with your family could ever be a problem for a healthy individual or family.

People watch over a thousand hours of TV per year so if time spent was sufficient criteria for addiction we would be a pretty afflicted population. Think of how addicted I&#x27;d be to showering! I do it every day!I would encourage you to be less hard on yourself. Think of a good game like a hobby. People play hundreds of hours of golf too and still find the time to lead productive lives.

Plus the code is ROCK SOLID and always has been -- it hardly ever crashes. Yet it&#x27;s like a pinball machine with 5 million balls in play, and still amazingly fast.Also the beautiful hires Czechnological artwork.It&#x27;s top-notch design, execution, and graphics.

Since the game costs a straight $30 up front and has no in-app purchases, subscriptions, or ads, there’s really no incentive for the developers to use “tricks” to make it addictive. It’s just what I’d call an old-fashioned “good game.”

isn&#x27;t the same for lets say an app development?

Yup, Factorio is addictive in the same way that reaching flow (the psychological state) is addictive. It&#x27;s a game to experience the joy of problem solving.

Ironically I don&#x27;t think there are any underhanded tricks in Factorio to make it more addictive. There are certainly no loot boxes or randomized rewards. What it does have is a series of tasks that escalate in complexity. Completing these tasks well gives a feeling of great satisfaction, and the result is a single enormous machine of your own individual design. If that&#x27;s a bad thing, then we&#x27;ll have to make engineering itself a controlled substance.

This is an excellent answer. When you read their blog you realize that all those points have guided the current design of the game. There was multiple iteration of the tech tree to invite the player gently into the different &quot;phases&quot; of the game. (see <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.factorio.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;post&#x2F;fff-275" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.factorio.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;post&#x2F;fff-275</a>).They carefully thought about the name of things, the cost of things to communicate clearly to a new player what he is supposed to do next (manufacture new thing, ramp up the production of old thing, etc).

Will Wright has a great quote on game design that I can&#x27;t find, but it&#x27;s something like &quot;What makes games fun is when the player has as many choices as possible, and all of them are good choices.&quot;I think factorio succeeds in this well: there are always many things to do which will improve things, so you have to try to optimize which is is the best decision to advance furthest with a given amount of time.

Yeah, when I went from copper and iron moving on belts to belts and inserters as items moving on belts I started to realize the rabbit hole was getting pretty deep.

&gt; Can anyone explain what tricks it uses to become so addictive?Good game design.In particular, I see a few broad strokes of good game design here:* There are always a variety of tasks to accomplish of varying scope and complexity. If a player doesn&#x27;t feel like adding on the next stage of the factory, they can perform other maintenance tasks like cleaning up local bottlenecks or aesthetic optimization (e.g. straightening out a section of the power network).* Almost every single problem is directly caused by the player&#x27;s own actions, through a logical chain of events that&#x27;s obvious once the player becomes familiar with the game. Why is the widget facility starved for inputs? Because the player previously split off 3&#x2F;4 of the bolts for other production. The resulting challenges (see the point above) become meaningful because of the history, giving the game a level of intrinsic motivation that is usually reserved for sim games like city builders.* There&#x27;s no single &quot;right way&quot; to win. Some players treat the game as a size&#x2F;speed challenge, to produce the most stuff in the fastest time; others look towards the most efficient or compact layouts; still others are content to reach the basic &quot;win&quot; condition (launching a single rocket) with a bare minimum of facilities and a lot of patience. The game doesn&#x27;t condescend to the player to explain at them that their playstyle is wrong.* The game separates &quot;doing something&quot; and &quot;doing something at scale,&quot; but it makes the player progress to the latter eventually. As a more concrete example, the player can build the first few science packs (progression tokens) in their inventory, Minecraft style, but they very quickly need to set up automation to produce the ever-increasing required number in a timely way. Over a typical game, the most central aspects of production will go through three or four wholesale renovations as the player designs around different bottlenecks. It&#x27;s a kind of intrinsic progression that I&#x27;ve seen no other game replicate -- even if you had access to all the whiz-bang shinies at the start of the game, the fixed costs of using them would still push the player to a &quot;starter base -&gt; big base&quot; progression.In some ways, it might be better to treat Factorio not as a single game that is &#x27;won&#x27; or &#x27;lost&#x27; through arbitrary rules, but instead as a hobby. &quot;I&#x27;ve spent several hundred hours playing with model trains&quot; doesn&#x27;t sound outlandish.

It&#x27;s clear what you meant, but I just wanted to touch on a nuance: Skinner boxes can be deterministic. &quot;Skinner box&quot; in the context of games generally just refers to the game design feeding you a steady drip of reward cycles.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Operant_conditioning_chamber" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Operant_conditioning_chamber</a>Loot box mechanics (aka gambling, or randomized reward systems) are what the worst offenders are usually exploiting.

I&#x27;m curious actually, is uranium processing not deterministic? Does it not depend on the seed? Or is that seed only for the map and does it not influence other random events like biters and uranium?The first multiplayer versions basically synchronised with each other and then ran independently, just executing the keyboard input from other players basically. No central server calling the shots. This was hell development-wise, but I think that concept hasn&#x27;t changed too much actually: you may have a central server that tells your client whether you can really pick up an item from a chest or whether it&#x27;s already gone, but the local simulation is still local (it&#x27;s not as if there is an incoming video stream or stream of all entities that have moved; far from it, it&#x27;s a handful of kilobytes per second). The random engines almost have to be synchronized as I never noticed more data traffic during biter attacks or such.

I hate Skinner box games too, but Factorio is definitely not one of them. The entire game aside from uranium processing is completely deterministic.

&gt;real &quot;prohibited&quot; substances like LSD, MDMA didn&#x27;t make any negative impact on my life nor addiction.I&#x27;m sure you are different (or at least think so yourself) but I have never heard anyone who use drugs that says otherwise before they have stopped using them completely. Also &quot;ruined plans&quot; versus &quot;ruined lifes&quot; is quite a difference. It cannot be a big surprise that someone who gets addicted to a game might also be a drug user. Addiction is not really about the drug itself but the person.

unpopular opinion.I&#x27;ve spent several hundred hours playing this game and I think this game should be treated as an addictive drug. I know it&#x27;s my own psychological problems but there&#x27;s whole Reddit thread about how it ruined people&#x27;s plans etc and wasted hundreds of hours of their lives. In contract, real &quot;prohibited&quot; substances like LSD, MDMA didn&#x27;t make any negative impact on my life nor addiction. How is that?I feel like all these additive games (especially one which uses psychological tricks like Skinner box) are some equivalent of brain exploits and should be treated with great caution. Maybe labeled somehow and have a reference where all these &quot;exploits&quot; and risk properly explained. Can anyone explain what tricks it uses to become so addictive?

Games like this and openttd are how I fail classes and lose jobs.

May be possible that it can be modded in, but I get a feeling 
would likely break the game, and things will go out of balance, since the core game perhaps was not designed for such probabilistic behaviour.Actually some amount of probabilistic behaviour including variation in the quality and rate of outputs of machines, even atleast variability between the different instances of the machines of the same type would have made it vastly more interesting is my view.

I&#x27;m sure there are mods (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mods.factorio.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mods.factorio.com&#x2F;</a>) like that, and if not feel free to write one (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.factorio.com&#x2F;Modding#Creating_mods" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.factorio.com&#x2F;Modding#Creating_mods</a>).edit: now that I think about it factorio is purposely deterministic because otherwise it would break multiplayer almost totally.

That&#x27;s exactly why I like Factorio more than, say, prison architect. Where in Factorio you make your items move over conveyor belts, in PA prisoners&#x2F;guards&#x2F;etc. move in really stupid ways and you constantly have hallways clogging up on the rightmost tile while otherwise being empty (for example; there are many more aspects that are yolo in PA versus &#x27;exact&#x27; in Factorio). Heck, one of the silly parts of Factorio is having to move your miners when the mine runs out. That&#x27;s kind of &quot;breaking down&quot;, though it&#x27;s also predictable, and even that feels like re-doing work I&#x27;ve already done! It&#x27;s really not my thing.Seeing your perspective, I&#x27;m not sure this is unifiable into a game that both sides would like. I guess we just like different kinds of games.

I think that&#x27;s what the purpose of the game&#x27;s enemies are: To give the player a meta-task that disrupts the abstract factory building mode that players can get stuck in.

I did take a look at it very early on in Early Access. I sort of did not like that it was so deterministic, like many games of the type.If there was randomness like machines churning out defective parts, machines ageing due to wear and tear etc it would have been more interesting, would even perhaps lead to more interesting tradeoffs. Some type of risk vs reward decisions were not there, which to me is generally a fun component of games.

in addition there are several mods that increase the depth of the production tree and materials used

The early prototypes really nailed the core gameplay loop. The biggest changes since then have been to smooth out the complexity of the various subsystems, vastly increase performance so that you can have a vastly larger factory, and to introduce new types of puzzles such as the nuclear reactors. Blueprints were added fairly early on, followed by straight-up copy and paste a few years later, and they really changed the game. In the earliest prototypes, doubling the speed of your research required manually placing down all the belts and assemblers in order to double the size of your factory. With blueprints doubling the size of your factory is a much higher-level puzzle of cloning the pieces and plumbing them together, rather than the lower-level grind of placing a thousand machines. Trains were added at some point as well, which gives you a long-range transport capability. The circuit network was added so that your factory can make automated decisions without your direct involvement. And the UI has been greatly improved as well.

&gt; Nuclear bombs can be used to one-shot endgame biter bases.Forget biters, nuclear bombs quickly remove large numbers of trees, which are the true enemy!On a more serious note, there have also been countless quality of life improvements, like high-resolution graphics, reworked UI, or copy-and-paste (literally just Ctrl-C &#x2F; Ctrl-V, I have used it even without robots, its so convenient). If you have radar coverage, the map allows zooming in fully (rendered just like the normal view) and you can place blueprints and issue deletion commands anywhere on the map without moving.Incidentally, you can also order artillery strikes to play a &#x27;prank&#x27; on your unsuspecting friend who is standing motionlessly. (Which is why I made a habit out of standing close to the most expensive thing in the vicinity.)

Endgame options have grossly improved. Overall, combat has been automated at endgame (artillery trains automatically destroy, and automatically explore the map for you). Nuclear bombs can be used to one-shot endgame biter bases.&quot;Alien Tech&quot; has been removed. All technology options are built traditionally, and now have 7-tiers with names. Red, Green, Grey, blue, Purple, Yellow, and White (aka: Space&#x2F;Infinite research).Infinite research are ~7 or so techs at endgame which go on infinitely. +Weapon damage for the most part, but there is also +Productivity (which makes mines last longer and mine faster).In effect, the core gameplay loop has been extended into an infinite endgame loop. The late game techs are extremely powerful and automate everything that was boring ~5 years ago (ie: killing biters became boring. So its now fully automated with artillery trains).

As someone who tried it 5-6 years ago when it first popped up in my bubble, reached end-game and got bored, is there some summary of how the game has changed since? Of course listing every single change doesn&#x27;t make sense, but any big changes to the core game?

A huge congratulations to one of the best and hardest working dev teams out there on one of the most unique, challenging, and fun games I&#x27;ve ever played. I have put far more hours into factorio than any other single player game. It is an inspiring work. Reading the Friday facts blogs has also been one of my favorite development blogs.

I think this game made me a better engineer. I&#x27;m not saying it was worth investing hundreds of hours, but it was fun playing. One of very few games I really enjoyed in the last decade.

Musk has joked in the past in some Reddit AMAs that he models all his rockets in Kerbal Space Program first so who knows.

Musk is already playing a game; it&#x27;s called &quot;the simulation&quot;, and we&#x27;re all in it. I&#x27;m not joking; according to him, we are most likely in a simulation. [0][0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.space.com&#x2F;41749-elon-musk-living-in-simulation-rogan-podcast.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.space.com&#x2F;41749-elon-musk-living-in-simulation-r...</a>

Since Musk and Bezos are actually building rockets I&#x27;d think they&#x27;d find a simulation to be less fun in comparison. But maybe they&#x27;d enjoy it the way a chess grandmaster enjoys playing blitz as relaxation during a break in a tournament game.

FYI - Web of Trust marks that site as potentially harmful...

Musk would load a factory built by someone else, then sue his way into owning it (re: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meaww.com&#x2F;elon-musk-tesla-cofounder-lawsuit-settlement-original-founded-martin-eberhard-origin-story-tesla" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meaww.com&#x2F;elon-musk-tesla-cofounder-lawsuit-settleme...</a> )

Phil Salvador wrote an article about the long lost SimRefinery by Maxis Business Simulations, and somebody who read it was able to dig up a floppy disk with the original game!When SimCity got serious: the story of Maxis Business Simulations and SimRefinery<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;obscuritory.com&#x2F;sim&#x2F;when-simcity-got-serious&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;obscuritory.com&#x2F;sim&#x2F;when-simcity-got-serious&#x2F;</a>SimRefinery recovered<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;obscuritory.com&#x2F;sim&#x2F;simrefinery-recovered&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;obscuritory.com&#x2F;sim&#x2F;simrefinery-recovered&#x2F;</a>A close look at SimRefinery<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;obscuritory.com&#x2F;sim&#x2F;simrefinery-analysis&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;obscuritory.com&#x2F;sim&#x2F;simrefinery-analysis&#x2F;</a>The sprawling, must-read history of Maxis’ former “serious games” division<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;gaming&#x2F;2020&#x2F;05&#x2F;the-sprawling-must-read-history-of-maxis-former-serious-games-division&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;gaming&#x2F;2020&#x2F;05&#x2F;the-sprawling-must-re...</a>A lost Maxis “Sim” game has been discovered by an Ars reader [Updated]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;gaming&#x2F;2020&#x2F;06&#x2F;a-lost-maxis-sim-game-has-been-discovered-by-an-ars-reader-uploaded-for-all&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;gaming&#x2F;2020&#x2F;06&#x2F;a-lost-maxis-sim-game...</a>SimRefinery EXISTS! Let&#x27;s play it!<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=DZ6Cqn5rTfs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=DZ6Cqn5rTfs</a>

It would be a game changer for anyone involved with manufacturing layout for solid objects at any level of business. I&#x27;ve personally used my own perspective from playing Factorio to influence real world factory design. It&#x27;s a great way to strengthen intuition that complements knowledge and theory.

Shopify employees can even expense Factorio :-)

At least Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke plays Factorio, Starcraft etc.

Their skill is attracting and utilizing the best Factorio players, not being any good at Factorio itself.

It would be good to watch managers, CEOs, CTOs or other higher management playing Factorio. I would pay for a Twitch&#x2F;Youtube stream with Elon, Bezos, Mark, Nadella, Gates and other &quot;famous&quot; people to see how they play such games.
On a second thought, that would make a good documentary&#x2F;interview, seeing how high profile managers and engineers handle similar games, what they enjoy in their spare time :-)

Oxygen Not Included has the same sort of effect for me and my experience with that game has kept me from picking up Factorio. Once you start getting into ONI&#x27;s automation tools and design optimization; time just ceases to exist.It remains the first and only game I have ever fully removed from my Steam library (not just uninstalled) after purchase.

Recently, my gf found me still awake at 05:00 playing factorio. Had completely forgot the time and thought it was closer to 02:00. That&#x27;s when I realized that I had to stop playing the game because it is so addictive. I simply can&#x27;t play that game in moderation.

I played one game of Factorio that took about 30 hours; I &#x27;almost&#x27; finished then decided I was done with that.Then, when I was between jobs, I thought &quot;oh, I see how I could do a better job; I&#x27;ll just play one more game..&quot; and my playtime quickly went up to 120 hours. I was writing TODO-lists in a book, etc. (The &quot;craft no more than X items by hand&quot; achievement was fun).I mean, +1 to both &quot;if you&#x27;re on here you&#x27;ll love it&quot; and &quot;if you&#x27;re on here, be careful you don&#x27;t spend too much time on it&quot;.

Factorio 1.0