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The Factorio Mindset

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Re: The Factorio Mindset

#71

Post by vsareto »

I just don't get this. I feel like people back port their learning experiences to games that have a similar enough structure. A nice observation, but you can't go in the reverse direction by playing Factorio to learn something tangible. Factorio doesn't have the same failure granularity as the real world and so the usefulness of the analogy/mindset just doesn't do it for me.

Plus my skill can be replaced by roughly how well I can memorize other peoples' factory patterns.

Don't get me wrong though, it's a great game, and probably had the same impact for its genre as Doom had for FPS games.

Re: The Factorio Mindset

#72

Post by dragontamer »

FeistyOtter wrote: post #53
minihat wrote: post #8

My friend has 600+ hours played of Factorio. He just beat the game for the first time. I bought it, we played multiplayer. And I taught him the mantra "great is the enemy of good enough". Our run took 14 hours. I also know many people like this at work, and wish they could have the Factorio experience. If you refactor at the first sign of trouble, you remain blind to totally new to problems just around the corner.

In what situations did this mantra help? I am the same as your friend, I have like 100 hours and I have never reached the endgame, always unsatisfied with my factory.

Construction Bots can automatically "tear down" your trash areas, and unlocks the "copy" and "paste" buttons, meaning you rebuild the areas much faster.

Bots are roughly blue-science, or the ~halfway point of the tech tree.

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So everything "Before" construction bots can be basically seen as a "prototype" or "throwaway" factory. Everything "after" construction bots is also a prototype, because you can just hit the "deconstruct planner" and tear everything down automatically and reconstruct from scratch whenever you want.

If everything is a prototype, then perfection doesn't matter. Instead, you're "pursuing" perfection, teardown whenever you think you have a better grand plan, and copy/paste the design back if you make a mistake (or Ctrl-z / undo your decisions as needed. Etc. etc.)

Re: The Factorio Mindset

#73

Post by midjji »

Aeolun wrote: post #62
midjji wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, think I'm less assuming that people wont let it negatively affect their work, as much as assuming that the people for whom it does would have been playing something else with the same effect.

Not really. Factory/building games are the only ones that keep me up until 2:35 AM (at least today). This was fine when I could just sleep in until 10, but I’m fairly certain my little bundle of joy will need my attention somewhere before 8. 3 years in and still trying to figure out how to combine these things.

If you figure it out, there will be a lot of interest^^. I kinda miss the "just one more turn" till sunrise sessions, but half of that is me missing that the only thing that happened the day after was a slight headache.

Re: The Factorio Mindset

#74

Post by pram »

DiabloD3 wrote: post #10

I have over 5000 hours in Factorio. I am part of a group where several of us are over 5000 hours. Some of us have Autism. Some of us have ADHD. Some of us have both. The majority of us are in the tech industry. The companies we work at have been made to understand that the factory must grow.

When I play a new game of Factorio I literally stay up for like 14 hours every day until I get a lot of the rocket launch automated. It’s insane, it impacts my health for a month or so after lol

Re: The Factorio Mindset

#75

Post by maydup-nem »

easrng wrote: post #61

Quoted post unavailable.

Wow, if it is true, I will surely stop playing factorio, because, apparently, some prick on hackernews would think the game's lead dev is not OK, and I am always quick to pigeonhole a person based on his controversial opinion, which I happen to disagree with.

Re: The Factorio Mindset

#76

Post by dragontamer »

leetcrew wrote: post #70
FeistyOtter wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what situations did this mantra help? I am the same as your friend, I have like 100 hours and I have never reached the endgame, always unsatisfied with my factory.

as you unlock more technologies, it becomes increasingly easy to refactor/maintain a large factory. ex: bots are a major inflection point in the game. you could scale up petroleum processing and red circuits before getting bots (you need these two things to make them), but that involves a lot of manual effort. it's usually better to do a barely sufficient (but tileable!) petroleum and rc setup, then immediately fix i…

Cleanliness doesn't really matter, because space is infinite.

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So long as you've unlocked enough military (ie: shotgun in the early game, or tank in the mid-game), you can just clear out more room and then build there. (Shotgun has significant pierce-damage, enough to kill the alien bases. Tank also has significant pierce damage and impact-damage, allowing you to win against small / medium aliens through the midgame rather easily and cheaply)

Don't even "tear down" your oldbase. Just fully abandon it and move elsewhere. Even without bots, there's no penalty to "just leaving".

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Bots / deconstruction planner is more of a thing if you're tired of cleaning out biter-territory and want to "recycle" your old areas.

Re: The Factorio Mindset

#78

Post by lordnacho »

I'm literally playing Factorio right now, with my kid. Got into it over Christmas based on HN talking about it all the time. Good game to multi because I don't have to pay attention all the time.

It really reminds me of software in many ways. You fiddle with tiny little things like balancing a belt, and then move on to building belt balancers. You then move up the abstractions to where you're not really placing inserters all the time. Maybe you make some blueprints and you're placing a whole set of nuke power plants in one go, or looking at trains.

The kid loves it, but you can (luckily) tell the difference between what he makes and what I make. That engineer keep-stuff-organized thing takes a bit of time to hone, but he's getting there. He also understands how to find root causes now, based on looking at where there's a blockage in production and tracking back along the chain.

One thing that's interesting is that the game is a bit, you know, dark. I mean we've built hell and the kid doesn't mind. Literally paved paradise with concrete. The air is black with robots, 100k of them at the moment. There's furnaces all over the place. We got rid of the steam power generation but there are huge areas of nukes all over. The natives are getting atomic bombs thrown at them constantly, it takes a while to even get to the nearest spawner. Or water that isn't green.

And yet he doesn't ask about how we destroyed all the cliffs and filled in the lakes, and chopped the trees.

"How should we make it bigger, dad?"

Re: The Factorio Mindset

#79

Post by buscoquadnary »

daenz wrote: post #77

If you want to add more of the human dynamic to resource management and refactoring, I suggest FrostPunk. While Factorio feels more like managing and scaling code, FrostPunk feels like running a startup. It's rewarding, but very stressful. 0. https://store.steampowered.com/app/323190/Frostpunk/

My understanding is that ForstPunk is more like a Grimdark dystopian climate nightmare than running a startup.

Re: The Factorio Mindset

#80

Post by benlivengood »

caycecan wrote: post #65

Recently discovered Satisfactory. It's roughly GTA2 vs GTA3 when compared to Factorio (2d top down vs 3d open world). I'd love to hear peoples thoughts on the two games and what one does well vs the other. What people get out of either.

Satisfactory is smaller scale (resource patches far apart, most of the build being about transport and linking a few buildings together, power being harder to achieve, and overall feels resource constrained) and Factorio feels like a blank canvas to paint factory on.
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