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The Factorio Mindset

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Re: The Factorio Mindset

#231

Post by pm90 »

kortilla wrote: post #225
impalallama wrote: post #183

> I used to be of the opinion that the computer game Factorio was a colossal waste of talent, burning many billions of dollars of GDP every year.... But since trying it out a bit more I’m starting to suspect that Factorio is the rare computer game to actually increase GDP. Hell of an opener that just makes me immediately dislike this guys entire worldview. Kinda also backed up by the fact that he doesn't mention the…

> he doesn't mention the very unsubtle commentary of you basically strip mining an alien planet clean mutating the wild life into a homicidal frenzy in desperate attempt to stop you from killing their home with pollution. People who get hung up on this are pretty shallow though. It’s such a tiring trope of “oh no, look at how bad colonialism is”. There is a lot of good stuff to discuss about the game beyond the sopho…

The game allows one to disable the wildlife, no mods required, so it’s possible to focus solely on game without dealing with it at all.

However. I do think it’s a pretty amazing mechanic that the game designers put in the game, and is a great tool to shine light on the darkest aspect of the human race: our unbelievable capacity to subdue and destroy.

Factorio isn’t just about being dropped in a war zone and shooting the bad guys. It’s about scaling up destruction to a planetary scale. Often unintentionally (pollution) but also intentionally (nukes). These are all very rich and interesting things to speculate on, none of it is “shallow”.

Re: The Factorio Mindset

#232

Post by lawrenceyan »

From the footnote: > In CS terms, expanding a poorly-specced and unmaintainable Factorio base is O(log(n)) while expanding a perfectly specced one is O(n), but the coefficient on the first is massively higher.

Shouldn't this be the other way around? Speccing out requires higher upfront effort, meaning a higher coefficient, but ultimately results in better long term results in overall required effort, for an O(log(n)) graph.

Re: The Factorio Mindset

#233

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

aarmenaa wrote: post #128
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…

I got sucked into Satisfactory a while back. After about 100 hours in the game, I was standing at the top of a cliff looking at my creation and said to myself "I'm the worst ecological disaster this planet has ever seen." I'm planning to start a new save soon, and I think I'm going to try playing with some self-imposed rules, like not removing vegetation. Not as much, anyways. I'm not exactly a budding architect; whe…

I had that moment of clarity when I got the chainsaw, and again when I looked over my giant field of coal generators.

Re: The Factorio Mindset

#234

Post by photochemsyn »

lordnacho wrote: post #78

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 inser…

That's probably a good educational point in favor of the game, as it introduces the concept that material and energy scarcity can exert fundamental control over industrial production levels.

Re: The Factorio Mindset

#235

Post by pm90 »

serverholic wrote: post #214
brnt wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They make for excellent employees. Promotion of this and similar values almost seem like they were designed for capitalists to exploit.

For sure. I'd legitimately love to get inside their heads and see what makes them tick because it's a completely foreign mindset for me. I saw some recently on twitter who were discussing how they run their relationships like a corporate business... They have standups, 1on1's, scheduled relationship sync up meetings, etc. As if doing this bullshit during their day jobs wasn't enough.

“Don’t trust stuff you read on the internet”.

I would be careful about this stuff as a lot of people are in the “productivity coach” market.

Re: The Factorio Mindset

#236

Post by poulpy123 »

martincmartin wrote: post #22
julianeon wrote: post #20

I often encounter this issue when it comes to programming-like games. I’m wondering if I should adjust my thinking here. 1) Hmm, this game is a lot like programming. A lot like it. 2) Maybe I should just program? That is real work & I can get done more work done, be more productive. 3) [stopped game, started programming]

What other games are like programming?

less commonly cited are : - turing complete - The signal state - Screeps - Adventure land - Bitburner

The be fair the 3 last are more programming than like :)

Re: The Factorio Mindset

#237

Post by louwrentius »

Aperocky wrote: post #25

Going to give a shoutout to https://anuke.itch.io/mindustry and https://songsofsyx.com/ In particular, mindustry can actually run scripts within the game to automate a lot of things. If you like factorio you're going to like these 2 games.

Mindustry is highly recommended for sure.

Re: The Factorio Mindset

#238

Post by Tade0 »

I'm consciously avoiding Factorio because I know what it would do to me. It already took one of our team members.

As for automation: I'm surprised that scaling is presented as the main - or actually only - reason for automating. I for one don't automate for speed, I automate for correctness.

The other day we discovered that some of the tens-of-megabytes JSONs we're reading on a regular basis have an error: single-element arrays were replaced by that element, so e.g. `[1]` would become just `1`. That was okay for the parser on the receiving end, but not for the recently introduced more efficient serializing module.

I could just go over those files and search all such occurrences by comparing them to the reference type definition - would take less than an hour provided I didn't make any mistakes. But I'm only human, so I opted for something else, namely: drawing from the pile of rich manure that is the npm repository and finding modules for:

1. Generating JSON schemas from TypeScript type definitions.

2. Validating JSON files against JSON schemas.

Armed with these tools I modified the files until the validator confirmed full correctness. Took longer than expected, but now not only can I guarantee that these files are error free, but any future ones as well.

Re: The Factorio Mindset

#239

Post by godshatter »

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.

A good example of this in Satisfactory (haven't played Factorio) is balancers vs. manifolds. The idea is that you have factory components that need to feed other factory components at a certain speed to get to 100% efficiency. One way to do that is to place the correct number of splitters and mergers to get the right ratios based on the output rate of the various components and the input rate of the others (the balancer way). The other way (the manifold way) is to just hook up one factory component that needs to feed another and let it run until it has filled up it's buffer. Then add a splitter to take the overflow and repeat until you are at 100%. Do this for all inputs. A complicated balancer looks like a drawing of a Christmas tree made of balancers and mergers and takes up a lot of space. A manifold is just a line of constructors or whatever with splitters in front of them going from one output to one input.

You can put up a manifold without doing any math and just stop adding factory components when it can't feed the next building. You can sink hours into just designing the perfect balancer for your situation, let alone building it. I always go the manifold way.

Re: The Factorio Mindset

#240

Post by _9omd »

iliketrains wrote: post #90
Aperocky wrote: post #25

Going to give a shoutout to https://anuke.itch.io/mindustry and https://songsofsyx.com/ In particular, mindustry can actually run scripts within the game to automate a lot of things. If you like factorio you're going to like these 2 games.

Me and my friend are actually working on a somewhat similar game called Captain of Industry [1]. The game is less about automation and scaling and more about realistic processes, mining with excavators, trucks logistics, and taking care of your workers. It's not done yet but we are quite close! [1] https://www.captain-of-industry.com/ PS: To my surprise, simulation games are a lot of very technical work full of algor…

Wow, this looks really good, nice work.
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