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What is interesting about Factorio

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Re: What is interesting about Factorio

#111

Post by teddyh »

potatochup wrote: post #58
jaggederest wrote: post #40

I found > There's gotta be some innate machine-focused "interest in things" that this is tapping. I've never taken apart or rebuilt a machine, but this gets me anyway. fairly sad. Factorio is fun, but it's a pale shadow of the experience of making even relatively simple machines work better or differently. Even getting a 2-stroke motor that has a dirty filter running again is immensely satisfying.

Kinda. But then you don't have the right o-ring and the store is closed until Monday. And you mixed up the BSF and UNC threads on your carbs. And the cloth wiring is intermittently shorting out. Computers are nice in some ways.

“The reason is that, in other fields, people have to deal with the perversity of matter. You are designing circuits or cars or chemicals, you have to face the fact that these physical substances will do what they do, not what they are supposed to do. We in software don't have that problem, and that makes it tremendously easier. We are designing a collection of idealized mathematical parts which have definitions. They do exactly what they are defined to do.

And so there are many problems we don't have. For instance, if we put an if statement inside of a while statement, we don't have to worry about whether the if statement can get enough power to run at the speed it's going to run. We don't have to worry about whether it will run at a speed that generates radio frequency interference and induces wrong values in some other parts of the data. We don't have to worry about whether it will loop at a speed that causes a resonance and eventually the if statement will vibrate against the while statement and one of them will crack. We don't have to worry that chemicals in the environment will get into the boundary between the if statement and the while statement and corrode them, and cause a bad connection. We don't have to worry that other chemicals will get on them and cause a short-circuit. We don't have to worry about whether the heat can be dissipated from this if statement through the surrounding while statement. We don't have to worry about whether the while statement would cause so much voltage drop that the if statement won't function correctly. When you look at the value of a variable you don't have to worry about whether you've referenced that variable so many times that you exceed the fan-out limit. You don't have to worry about how much capacitance there is in a certain variable and how much time it will take to store the value in it.

All these things are defined a way, the system is defined to function in a certain way, and it always does. The physical computer might malfunction, but that's not the program's fault. So, because of all these problems we don't have to deal with, our field is tremendously easier.”

— Richard Stallman, 2001: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/stallman-mec-india.html#conf9

Re: What is interesting about Factorio

#112

Post by squiffy »

pmoriarty wrote: post #78

For anyone here who's only played vanilla Factorio (ie. Factorio without mods), you should really try it with mods.. the mods enhance the game in so many ways (from eliminating annoyances, to making things more convenient, to adding way, way, way more content). I absolutely loved the base game, but the mods made it 10 times better for me.

Would you have a small list of recommended mods for someone like me with ~50 hours in Factorio? Thanks.

Re: What is interesting about Factorio

#113

Post by nixle »

I find myself playing factorio every few months. I play and play and play until at some point i realize that I'm fooling myself: Adding that extra steel production plant, with all the blueprinting, train routing and refactoring that is involved... I'm no longer escaping work. Actual Work now seems like less effort. And that's when I'm cured for a few months.

Re: What is interesting about Factorio

#114

Post by suyjuris »

Mengkudulangsat wrote: post #18

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 is less CPU intensive than other types of energy (thus saving the actual environment, interestingly). Factorio is incredibly well-optimised, but at some point this starts to matter.

Re: What is interesting about Factorio

#115

Post by have_faith »

fouc wrote: post #6

As someone that stopped playing games in university, I've found it weirdly hard to get back into games many years later. Factorio seems like the type of game I would've liked as a teenager, but now it just feels like work to me. As do most interesting games. It seems like there's a learning curve to games that I don't want to spend the time dealing with anymore.

I still follow and keep upto date with most gaming releases but for some reason find the vast majority of them underwhelming these days. Lots of well made time sinks which when I was younger is probably all I wanted but now I'm always looking for something special and never finding it.

Re: What is interesting about Factorio

#116

Post by anentropic »

Mengkudulangsat wrote: post #18

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.

sounds like a bad case of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_rhetoric

Re: What is interesting about Factorio

#119

Post by q3k »

billfruit wrote: post #46

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..

Late-game mechanics (bots, etc) actually turn the game into an RTS and allow you to grow from this 'move around your factory' gameplay mode into 'plan and deploy dozens of remote factories straight from the map view'.

Re: What is interesting about Factorio

#120

Post by Faark »

waynesonfire wrote: post #102
kccqzy wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> have a seriously good planning ability to create something that doesn't instantly turn in to a spaghetti If you only design factories from scratch by yourself, that's akin to being handed an assembler programming manual as your only reading material and building up every programming abstraction yourself. You likely won't discover the best abstractions. After a while playing factorio I decided to watch experts play…

at least on the initial play through, i think that would ruin the game for me. i personally would prefer to discover the patterns on my own, or at least to the best of my ability. it's tempting, but i've become aware that reaching for the strategy guide tends to be a huge spoiler. I picked up Pillars of Eternity a while back and couldn't get past the character creation screen without looking up strategies for charact…

Totally get that. In RPGs I still sometimes have the habit of reloading if things don't go as planned and feel like this ruins the fun for me. Getting rid of engrained habits is hard :/

On the other hand, I really like having spaghetti factories. Having the same few pattern repeat a bazillion times just looks boring. Would love to stumble over my first saves, since those were the most organically grown. But back then I believe saves were stored in the install dir and i most certainly have uninstalled my "non-steam version" since.

Thankfully, by now I mostly internalized that planning the perfect factory will actually take me more time than just building something good enough and upgrading/replacing it later.

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