The Factorio Mindset

> great is the enemy of good enough

One-man Factorio is a lot different than big-team Factorio. As a single factory-developer, you need to be startup-like and remember that your time in the present is the most valuable resource.

So always automate everything the first time, because you WILL need more of that component. But do it in a quick and dirty and unscalable manner so you can move on to something else. Start with box-fed production lines; when you're sick and tired of refilling the boxes, it's time to re-do it better.

Build a system to support this throwaway development, where you can tear things down later and replace them and it keeps working. Start with a narrow bus, not eight lanes each for iron and copper — but keep it open for expansion downstream. When you run out of space near the start of the bus, don't just move things a few tiles to squeeze in an incremental upgrade: build a much bigger production line further downstream. You'll have more and better components to do it right.

And always, always, always, keep your interconnects separate from your production components. You don't need a single straight-line bus like some people think, right angles and parallels and grids are fine, but if your belts are snaking through something else, it's real hard to tear down that something-else, and it's real hard to scale up. Encapsulation is important.

And when you're finally scaling up like crazy, ready for the big leagues, use a high-throughput component someone else developed and have your robots install it.

Here's a Terraform provider for you-

https://registry.terraform.io/providers/efokschaner/factorio...

In factorio, you have all the information and tools right in front of you. Everything is transparent. There are no black box failures. If there's a problem, you can and will find the source of it and be able to fix it. It satisfies the building+problem solving itch without the painful parts of programming, eg broken dependencies, slow build times, putting an = instead of a ==.

So, yes, programming is of course more productive, but that's not really the point of leisure time.

There is a fine line between "this game exercises the same parts of my brain as my day job, but with a vastly different set of restrictions and consequences" and "I stare at a screen exercising this part of my brain all goddamn day and the last thing I want to do in my leisure time is stare at a screen using this part of my brain even more".

I am an artist; I flirted briefly with Minecraft for a while, then looked up from a flawed first attempt at an underwater glass dome at 3AM, decided I would much rather exercise my creativity in a realm where I can show it to other people and maybe make some money from it, and uninstalled Minecraft forever.

> I care about things like latency

Good luck bootstrapping your first Kovarex U235 units!

A properly done Kovarex U235 takes about 2-hours to bootstrap itself. By this point in the game, you need to be able to "predict" how the factory will work in 2+ hours of latency and make sure things work as expected. (Or I guess you can blueprint copy/paste from an internet forum... but I find that "my own designs" are what make Factorio fun)

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Once you're able to "predict" how the factory works in 2, 3, 4 hour scales, a lot of good designs open up. You focus on throughput and *eventual* designs... willing to wait 3 hours to get things done.

And by "wait", I mean go play somewhere else for those 2 hours. There's always more work to do, a design that takes 3 hours to complete _AUTOMATICALLY_, but only 5 minutes of manual / human input is superior to a design that takes 10-minutes of human effort but completes in 15 minutes.

The #1 resource in Factorio is player-attention. You should be laying out designs, and then _LEAVING_ in most situations. You let the bots complete the area and come back to "verify" when they're done.