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The Factorio Mindset

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Re: The Factorio Mindset

#131

Post by outworlder »

and0 wrote: post #127
foobarian wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Satisfactory had even more of that effect on me and the kid when we played it. Perhaps because of being 3D and having all sorts of native flora and fauna that was very good at being annoying and getting in the way of construction. It essentially made it fun to destroy the native environment and replace it with concrete. It's not even that we didn't mind doing it, it's that we enjoyed it. It was kind of unsettling, si…

Satisfactory was fun for a while, and I want to try the v5 features still, but even as an FPS vet I get headaches and frustrations trying to do accurate placement of buildings, let alone tightly optimal. Amazing graphics optimizations, considering the dynamic lighting and how many objects are rendered.

The 'zooping' or whatever they call that allows you to build multiple things at a time is outstanding. Enormous time saver.

With a few exceptions, I think building placement is outstanding. Hold alt and it snaps, even if the other building is far away, with audio cues. Conveyor belts give a dopamine hit every time I place a long one. That is with foundations of course. Without them you get the spaghetti mess.

What is more difficult than Factorio is that there are no blueprints or robots to build stuff for you. Also, the terrain doesn't help, we can't just destroy cliffs. But that's also interesting.

Re: The Factorio Mindset

#132

Post by evmar »

I love Factorio!

If you've completed enough of the base game, I can recommend Seablock (which includes AngelBob) and Space Exploration as two mods that make the game dramatically larger. I played some of Pyanodon (which is also sometimes mentioned as a big mod) but I found it kind of gratuitously complex.

Re: The Factorio Mindset

#133

Post by outworlder »

gmadsen wrote: post #86
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.

honest question, but is factorio not a similar itch to programming? I always feel with these type of games, that my time would be better spent working on a personal software project, where i get reasonably similar enjoyment, more satisfaction, and presumably more transferable skills.

It is like crack for programmers.

> that my time would be better spent working on a personal software project, where i get reasonably similar enjoyment, more satisfaction, and presumably more transferable skills.

Sure. Maybe your time would be better spent working overtime too. Factorio is a game, and focus on the fun parts. Battling NPM dependencies after a full work day is not fun, it's just more work. There are some days when you are just cranking out code and not worrying about much else, but those days are not necessarily the norm.

Re: The Factorio Mindset

#134

Post by 0xffff2 »

bentcorner wrote: post #52
leptoniscool wrote: post #19

Dyson Sphere Program is a similar type of game, with prettier graphics.

Satisfactory is IMO a superior Factorio in that it drops the Tower Defense and resource-depletion mechanics. It's also in 3d. I can understand that Factorio is balanced differently but it's annoying to build up a factory and then need to do non-factory things when a resource runs out or aliens attack your base.

I actually think the resource depletion mechanics are the one thing missing from Satisfactory. Constantly adjusting to keep the raw materials flowing in is one of the things that keeps Factorio from getting stale for me.

Re: The Factorio Mindset

#135

Post by dragontamer »

leetcrew wrote: post #121
dragontamer wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

maybe we are talking past each other, but I'd say clean interfaces and bots are very important even if you don't want to tear down the original factory. you want to be able to double production of high volume products with a couple copy-pastes. can't really do this if you have some gnarly IO setup. I agree clean layouts inside of functional units is unnecessary. land is cheap; just make something that works and cp it…

> you want to be able to double production of high volume products with a couple copy-pastes.

In my experience, no.

Any high-volume production needs to be built from the ground up from smelters (or even miners) on downwards.

If you have 1-belts of iron feeding your factory and then want to expand, the easiest way to do so is to build a parallel +1 belt of iron (including the 70+ smelters and 50+ miners somewhere else) somewhere.

The terrain and issues of that other area (ie: water, cliffs, trees, etc. etc.) will be different. You can only legitimately "copy/paste" designs if you have an advanced set of terrain modifiers: landfill to erase water, cliff-explosives to erase cliffs, and flamethrowers to erase trees. (Chopping by hand takes too long. Even bots take too long in many situations to erase trees, especially at low-bot speed levels).

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If you try to "logically" add it to your factory (originally designed for only 1-belt), you end up with non-obvious starvation points everywhere.

Its far easier to declare the entire "logical belt" region to be a cohesive design (from mines to smelter to assembly machines to science to labs: beginning to end of the entire process).

There's an additional bonus to this: belting the "end-product sciences" is very easy and low-throughput. Instead of "moving your factory" around, it makes far more sense to "move your science belts" around.

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Its very hard to turn a "1-belt of iron + 1-belt of copper" factory into a "2-belt of iron + 2-belt of copper". Very very difficult, you really shouldn't be trying to find space for the extra belt or smelters.

Just "soft abandon" the base, and build your 2nd belt of iron + 2nd belt of copper elsewhere. Then build 2-belts of your red+green+blue+purple science (or whatever outputs your old base were doing) to lead to the new science center. "Abandon" the old science center as well (since the "old science" center won't have the extra science to advance forward).

"Abandoning" the science center means that all that space opens up for you to move your science-belts to the necessary location towards the new science center. Maybe you need to plow through some old areas but it'd be easier to do this from an "abandonment" mindset rather than a "cleanup" mindset.

---------

The only way you "cleanly" have room for that 2nd line of copper or iron, is if you magically remembered to leave room for the 70-smelters before you built the base. This is unreasonable.

EDIT: I guess you use yellow/red belts in the early game. 24-smelters per yellow belt of production. 48-smelters per red belt of production. 72-smelters per blue belt of production.

How do you grow 24-furnaces into 48? Doubling the size if you upgrade from yellow to red? (Or upgrading from 1x yellow to 2x yellow?). Its non-trivial to run that many lines through the middle of already-built factory areas.

And unless you planned for it, 24-additional furnaces is a non-trivial amount of space.

Re: The Factorio Mindset

#136

Post by psyc »

and0 wrote: post #127
foobarian wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Satisfactory had even more of that effect on me and the kid when we played it. Perhaps because of being 3D and having all sorts of native flora and fauna that was very good at being annoying and getting in the way of construction. It essentially made it fun to destroy the native environment and replace it with concrete. It's not even that we didn't mind doing it, it's that we enjoyed it. It was kind of unsettling, si…

Satisfactory was fun for a while, and I want to try the v5 features still, but even as an FPS vet I get headaches and frustrations trying to do accurate placement of buildings, let alone tightly optimal. Amazing graphics optimizations, considering the dynamic lighting and how many objects are rendered.

Satisfactory is in my top 3 of all time, just ahead of Factorio. 2200 hours vs 1600 in the latter. I like it for the 3D exploration and hand crafted map. I love that (if you don’t cheat yourself out of it by abusing ramps) you can spend hours on expeditions through treacherous terrain to get to the next resource.

However my gripes are the same as yours. Placement is an unwanted meta-game that they ought to remove via better QoL features. The existing alignment, snapping, picking, and repeating features are inadequate for a game like this.

Re: The Factorio Mindset

#137

Post by lowbloodsugar »

gmadsen wrote: post #86
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.

honest question, but is factorio not a similar itch to programming? I always feel with these type of games, that my time would be better spent working on a personal software project, where i get reasonably similar enjoyment, more satisfaction, and presumably more transferable skills.

Winter 2020 I started learning factorio. Winter 2021 I started learning Rust. Same level of frustration at times, same level of joy =) "Bah I'm doing it all wrong! .... Ah that's way better"

Re: The Factorio Mindset

#139

Post by quirkot »

cwkoss wrote: post #38
toomuchtodo wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Factorio should be the interview test ;) Tech’s Ender’s Game. (factorio fan, but with little time to enjoy it)

I would love to see ~ "Factorio - 524 RPM base, trains only no drones" on a resume Or heck, even completing either Angels or SpaceEx mods show a serious amount of dedication, "self-starter-ness" and competence in reading documentation. I've put 5000+ hours in and fell off spaceex in the green space science - so much depth.

Been playing Space Exploration mod with some friends for a little over a year on the same map now. Mabye ~300-400 hours into it and just starting to get naquitie feeling solid. Absolutely enormous scale to it

Re: The Factorio Mindset

#140

Post by outworlder »

0xffff2 wrote: post #55
electroly wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Factorio is right on the cusp for me. SpaceChem, too. TIS-100 was a bomb for me; if I'm literally writing code, it better end up in a GitHub repo. With Factorio for me, I always reach a point where I know how I'm going to scale up, and then I lose interest in actually doing so. Just knowing that I could do it is satisfying enough.

I love construction/management games but I very rarely "finish" them for exactly this reason. The moment I can see exactly how I would go about making it to the end goal, I'm done.

I haven't identified with a HN thread in quite a while. The moment I understand how to do something or that it's possible, I'll drop it. That includes my personal projects.
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