41–50 of 312 posts
My computer gaming has been pretty modest for the past 6 or 7 years. An hour here or there, mostly on the weekends. I don’t really get absorbed in games that much anymore. Factorio is something different. I started playing it on a Saturday morning. Slept a few hours that night. When the sun started rising Monday morning I realized I should probably try to get a little sleep before heading into the office. Never had t…
If anyone is looking for an immersive game to play I would recommend Subnautica.
> It's also extremely addictive to engineers. Quite the understatement. Pretty much every engineer that I've introduced to the game has played for at least 40 hours.
I love making stuff as a hobby, and reading all the good reviews this game had it seemed like a great way to kill a few spare hours. But I just couldn't gell with the game.It just seemed like I was back at work but now not getting paid for my time.
For me, Rimworld is where it's at.
I think the biggest hook for Factorio is that it's an _actual_ visual programming language. So much of what we do day to day ignores this (dominant!) mode of perception. It's extremely refreshing to be able to simply look at a system to reason about it. (as an aside, I think this is also why the Zachtronics games are so effective)
I seriously struggle with factorio, You have to have a seriously good planning ability to create something that doesn't instantly turn in to a spaghetti. I always end up having to scale up things and then having no room. I find text based programming to be much much simpler. If I need to add more somewhere, I can, my text editor will push everything else out of the way.
Real visual programming languages allow building and collapsing abstractions and don't add space constraints.
You could just as easily say "text coding is so hard because if I realize I missed a character I have to start the entire file again; it would be nice if I were using something other than 'cat > file.c <<EOF', like visual blocks that could be rearranged later.
I think the biggest hook for Factorio is that it's an _actual_ visual programming language. So much of what we do day to day ignores this (dominant!) mode of perception. It's extremely refreshing to be able to simply look at a system to reason about it. (as an aside, I think this is also why the Zachtronics games are so effective)
I seriously struggle with factorio, You have to have a seriously good planning ability to create something that doesn't instantly turn in to a spaghetti. I always end up having to scale up things and then having no room. I find text based programming to be much much simpler. If I need to add more somewhere, I can, my text editor will push everything else out of the way.
As a bonus, FasterStart also takes away the grind of cutting trees by hand. I use it just for that. Few things annoy me more than having to take a break from building a factory to mindlessly holding right-click and pressing movement keys for a while because RNGesus decided to put a rainforest in the way of my expansion. It's the video-game equivalent of being broken out of a programming flow to sit in a pointless 2-hour meeting.
Another option is to use a mod like Factorissimo2 [2] which lets you put factories inside a building and move the entire building around. Buildings can also be nested so that you can group, say, all buildings related to iron ore -> iron plates inside one outer building. ( * ) Factorissimo2 was invaluable when I played a game with Angel's mods, because with Angel's the process of getting iron plates from iron ore starts off as a one-stage process but eventually becomes like a ten-stage process. There was no way I was going to lay that out on ground level while still accounting for future expansion.
[1]: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/FasterStart
[2]: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Factorissimo2
( * ) IIRC this is disabled by default because people think it's unrealistic. I just pretend a nested building is an upper floor in the third dimension and the belt connections are freight elevators.
One annoying aspect in Factorio in the short time that I have played it was that there is a player character, who needs to move to each location before an object can be placed there. It adds a degree of tedium in building, if having requiring the player sprite to move about..
Apparently the devs added a reach limit to prevent people from keeping their factory going by manual loading for hours and hours; since I don't do that, there's no harm in it.
This game made me empathize less and less with environmentalists. Forests are an impediment to a transport network. Wildlife are pests. Renewable energy has extremely low ROI.
Solar + storage lowers your pollution and the pests. I wish there were a way to restore the environment like planting trees in order to also remove the pests.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You have to give the game some time. If it's good (like Factorio is) it might just pull you in. You also need to be in the right mood for that particular game. Sometimes you have to try a game many times until get pulled in.
I’ve tried several times but it just repels me. It has the worst tutorial I’ve ever seen and all the inventory management is just super awkward with weird UI. That’s coming from someone with hundreds of hours in OpenTTD and the like