Live data from Hacker News

Factorio: Space Age

factorio.com

271–280 of 363 posts

Re: Factorio: Space Age

#271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The spirit of the original lives on. Gregtech Community Edition Unofficial (GTCEu) is getting regular updates. I'm almost finished with my first modded minecraft run since the GT5U days. The GTCEu folks are great. They implemented a lot of changes that GT has been needing for a decade, specifically around closed loop control and HMI. It's close to what I idealize in my head for an industrial game. Maybe there's a smi…

GregTech: New Horizons is also worth a look, if only for the detailed quests and absolutely insane progression required.

I did get through LV with a railcar wood farm and coke oven array before I called it in. I had a very diverse food gen and all sorts of farms. It was neat, but I have to say GCP with teleporting and chunk loading really scratches the itch without all the waiting around or microcrafting.

Re: Factorio: Space Age

#272

Oh wow, I'm very excited about this. The post author wrote the absolutely incredible Space Exploration mod for Factorio, pitching itself as a "100+" hour expansion, realistically closer to 1000 hours for an average player. Space Exploration has its quirks, but is fundamentally an absolutely outstanding puzzle game, among the best ever made. One of the most delightful things about Factorio for coders is that the game…

Space exploration is not the best puzzle game ever made. Space exploration is not the best factorip mod ever made. Space exploration has a great presentation layer (graphics and UI) but the logistics challenge and gameplay challenges leave lots to be desired. I implore you to try many of the other high quality factorio mods made over the years. Pyanodons is easily the greatest factorio mod. The sheer quality and scal…

Pyanodons is a unique experience. Everything has dozens of steps. In the base game, circuit boards are made from copper wire and iron plates, whereas in Pyanodons, you need formica for the PCB substrate, which requires tree nurseries to make wood and a full coal cracking facility to produce creosote, a glassworks, half a dozen different metals, not to mention pick and place machines and all other sorts of intermediates. And that's just baby steps.

But it's flawed in other ways. In particular, a lot of the Py building sprites hide what's behind them. In the base game, all the sprites aren't taller than their footprint, but they are in Py, which makes them unwieldy and easy to lose things. And what's fun is building these huge production lines, but there's no easy way to tear up your old base and reconfigure things until you hit bots, which is waaaay down the line.

In short, Py is wonderful and I've never played any sort of game like it before, but it has unnecessary rough edges from a game design perspective, aside from its masochism.

Re: Factorio: Space Age

#273
post #42

Oh good, my life being utterly dominated by Factorio again is at least a year away. That gives me some time to get my affairs in order. I really wish this were a joke. Also, if anyone wants to play a game similar to Factorio while you wait - https://shapez.io is like Factorio without a player character and a cleaner aesthetic. I played it first, and really enjoyed it.

Or Mindustry, which is open source: https://mindustrygame.github.io/

Mindustry has two "planets" and they play entirely differently. The newer one, Erekir, is a mix of Factorio, tower defense and RTS elements.

I actually liked it a bit more than Factorio, because it is less complex.

I didn’t really like the first planet though (Serpulo) and stopped after playing through Erekir twice.

Re: Factorio: Space Age

#274

Not sure this will scratch the itch for what I always felt was missing from Factorio, which is fundamentally a more satisfying ‘sink’ for resources. During main gameplay your resource extraction and expansion is driven mainly by the sink of ‘research’ - turn resources into science, science into unlocks. Additionally, biters eat bullets, and occasionally factory parts that need replacing. Other than that the main sink…

There just needs to be a gamemode which makes the game more about base defense and resource usage in defending the base. Currently you can just spam lasers and win no problem. Imagine something like 7 days of constant biter attacks on all fronts, with biters much stronger as well. A relentless strain on the economy of your base more than anything, with there being a real need for repair bots to fully repair and remak…

Sounds a bit like the Wave Defense scenario. It is available within the game: https://wiki.factorio.com/Wave_defense

Re: Factorio: Space Age

#275
post #101

I love Factorio and have >1000 hours in the game. Two things I would love to see: - Steam cloud sync fixed for large save files. Right now, you'll eventually reach a point where you can't save your game to the cloud anymore. - More interesting aliens and strategies for dealing with them. After awhile, the aliens start to feel like a repetitive grind. They always behave predictably and the solution to them is pretty m…

> - Steam cloud sync fixed for large save files. Right now, you'll eventually reach a point where you can't save your game to the cloud anymore. The only way to achieve that is if WUBE ran their own save servers.

Or changed their saves to be more sparse. Why not have save files store seed + world settings + delta? I've noticed that generating mostly empty map space by shooting exploratory artillery shots caused save files to jump to 100s of MB.

My saving grace is that I always host a dedicated server so no one is responsible for save file distribution other than myself (which is easy enough to automatically sync to interested clients).

Re: Factorio: Space Age

#276

Oh wow, I'm very excited about this. The post author wrote the absolutely incredible Space Exploration mod for Factorio, pitching itself as a "100+" hour expansion, realistically closer to 1000 hours for an average player. Space Exploration has its quirks, but is fundamentally an absolutely outstanding puzzle game, among the best ever made. One of the most delightful things about Factorio for coders is that the game…

I wouldn't put trains and smooth in a single sentence. The signals required a lot of patience to learn and I'm not entirely sure I still understand them. They are by far one of the most painful parts of factorio for me.

If you just want to have trains and move on, I made a complete tiling rail kit a few years ago:

https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/i2szgb/tiling_uti...

> 2-way 6-wide right hand rail system on a global 60-tile grid with interoperable 90° & 45° variants. Intended to be simple, complete, & hard to misuse.

> Features: rotational symmetry, red&green wired poles, landfill, blueprints for Through, Turn, Tee, Junction, and U-Turn for both 90° & 45°, 90°/ 45° transition blueprints

> Tiling is based on large power poles, 60 is the max distance between 3 poles in a straight line, or 5 poles diagonally.

Here's a big example with all the rail components slapped together for a demo: https://i.imgur.com/84P9nO0.png

I also made the simplest tiling nuclear blueprint kit: https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/gp0jmb/infogulchs...

Re: Factorio: Space Age

#277

Not sure this will scratch the itch for what I always felt was missing from Factorio, which is fundamentally a more satisfying ‘sink’ for resources. During main gameplay your resource extraction and expansion is driven mainly by the sink of ‘research’ - turn resources into science, science into unlocks. Additionally, biters eat bullets, and occasionally factory parts that need replacing. Other than that the main sink…

This is exactly why I liked Dune. it had this concept where you had to pay regularly the emperor to maintain "peace"

Re: Factorio: Space Age

#278
post #100

I deeply love cracktorio and have like 800 hours in just vanilla. if you're looking for something similar to it I also liked the spin The Riftbreaker provides. it's not as bug free as Factorio but it has a lot of the same enjoyment but with more of an objective progression theme.

You can also finish it in less than 20h, which is a benefit for some :)

One of these days I'll download a bp book and prove that there is no spoon.

Re: Factorio: Space Age

#279

I’ve gone once through vanilla. I’ve launched a rocket the one time. I feel like the majority of players and blog readers are modded up the wazoo, but this expansion is not really for them. It’s for players like me who did not go beyond the base game.

Only 18.5% of the players got the "Finish the game" (launching a rocket) achievement on Steam https://steamcommunity.com/stats/427520/achievements

I'm more impressed that only 25.9% have been killed by a moving locomotive ("Watch your step" achievement). Those things are murder-vehicles.

Re: Factorio: Space Age

#280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't like this analogy. Block games and industrial games all are absolutely and relatively unique. The relative success (and arguably quality) of minecraft compared to other block games is much higher than that of factorio relative to industrial games. This is mostly due to block games have much wider appeal than industrial games. All standout games in both categories were well thought out and required large effor…

I think you misunderstood the analogy. Knowing of Mindustry but not Factorio is like knowing Roblox but not Minecraft. It's like knowing Arch Linux, but somehow never hearing about Ubuntu.

It might make sense if Minecraft was only on Mac while Roblox was on Mac and Windows. You can only play factorio from a desktop while all manner of machine can play mindustry. There are entire audiences that do not game on PC.
Post reply on HN