I don't agree with "Factorio is like work". The grind is no different to me than playing Diablo. It feels like a comparison that programmers love to tout because it makes for a memeable and relatable story but at its core it's just like any other gameplay loop.
How 'Factorio' seduced Silicon Valley and me
311–320 of 437 posts
Re: How 'Factorio' seduced Silicon Valley and me
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same here. Also Factorio AFAIK has no good copilot. Sadly the best LLMs are not fine-tuned on Factorio so my productivity takes a massive hit when moving from side projects to Factorio.
Are there any popular games with copilot like AI suggestions being part of the core gameplay?
There are some LLM-powered services that claim to be copilot for games.
From what I can tell, it seems like generally they're doing RAG over the game's wiki, and then reading it to you in an attractive-lady voice.
Re: How 'Factorio' seduced Silicon Valley and me
#313I know lots of people who play Factorio but for me, I guess it just feels too much like work? Whenever I play it, I get the distinct feeling that I could instead do the same thing but productively instead, such as by contributing to my OSS projects (sometimes, maybe even for profit instead). I never got into these types of programmatic games for precisely this reason but I'd like to understand other perspectives on t…
Its just fun. "Okay wth, today we're going to make the entire base solar powered" When making software that's supposed to be used, you can't mess around that much. At the end of the day, someone has to use it and if its weird it'll be bad. But in Factorio? Nobody is using it so sure, make it bizzare. Change the rules, let yourself go. Don't test the design just send it. Bored? Too challenging? Don't bother finishing…
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Re: How 'Factorio' seduced Silicon Valley and me
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You don’t need to make software for mass appeal. Hear, hear. I would tell you all about the tools my household runs on but it is as you say. Still gives me a lot of satisfaction to make stuff that makes life better, and for someone more adventurous than me it might also be something you can use to try out new technologies or build something for on your CV. The only downside is that internet connectivity being down…
It fascinates me how someone like you manage to build all these tooling to run your house, but still struggle with > need to remember to load the grocery list before leaving the house that has the server in it ^ remote access and > better hope your phone doesn't decide for you that the page needs to be unloaded on the way ^ unreliable tech
Phones being unreliable and making data-tossing decisions without your involvement is indeed the complaint I meant to share. It has been a pet peeve about Android since day one and it has only gotten worse (websites like dontkillmyapp come to mind); would hope that being aware of the downsides helps us fix or reliably work around the issue one day
I don't understand the first point though, do you mean I should set up remote access? Because that's definitely there, it's just that if the uplink is down on the ISP's side or whatever, then you can't access the system outside the house. Or if I were to host it outside the house, then you just shift the SPOF to a different location. What are you suggesting or pointing out exactly?
Re: How 'Factorio' seduced Silicon Valley and me
#315Earlier quoted context omitted.
What would you do?
Syncthing to sync the grocery list to your phone whenever it is on the home WiFi. Any changes will be updated when you next get back home. I use this with obsidian and it's a game changer, removing need for the cloud
> Any changes will be updated when you next get back home [...] removing need for the cloud
More than one person can be in the grocery store. Syncing a file does not work because you overwrite each other's changes; this is what we started with but this is why I made (what I call) multiplayer groceries in the first place
And note that I also don't need a "cloud"; it's hosted on my own system rather than someone else's
Re: How 'Factorio' seduced Silicon Valley and me
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
What kinda depth are you missing from DSP and Satisfactory? And what do you mean by "camera"? There's also Shapez 1 and 2, which is like the essence of Factorio abstracted into shapes and colors. Shapez 2 has more mining and trains and multiple levels.
Not OP, but my guess for what they meant by "camera" is the fact that Factorio is largely a 2D top-down view with relatively little impedance to jumping to another part of the factory to work on it (especially with the QoL stuff added in 2.0). In Satisfactory or DSP, fixing a remote part of the factory--even trying to diagnose problems remotely--is a chore, and there's precious little you can do to actually speed the…
For DSP I made a rule for myself: if I have to travel to another planet, I have to bring enough material to increase (ideally double) the production of a resource. That made traveling feel more useful.
Course that means I often had oversupply.
Re: How 'Factorio' seduced Silicon Valley and me
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
Making Bluetooth 10% more energy efficient in the next few revisions is a terrible example because you absolutely cannot just tackle that by yourself. Not because it's technically hard, but because it's actually a people problem in disguise! If you just walk up to the mailing list with the complete designs, documents, experimental results, schematics, trade offs, feasibility studies, you know what you're going to get…
Well of course it would take a literal super genius to actually accomplish successfully this via individual submission. Nobody is going to believe anyone short of that bar would have even fully understood the bluetooth specification. So even a regular genius, 99.9th percentile HN user, would have a starting credibility of roughly zero. But there are likely infinitely many waiting for that 99.9999th percentile HN read…
No one is waiting for super geniuses. They are just trying to use groups of people to solve hard problems instead of relying on individuals. It's amazing what people can accomplish by working together.
Re: How 'Factorio' seduced Silicon Valley and me
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s funny because I don’t enjoy Factorio for the same reason you do - it quickly feels like work - but I never get the feeling I could be doing something more productive instead. I just think the core gameplay loop of Factorio is tedious and that it’s specifically designed for people who don’t mind that. The gameplay is fun at first. You have a ressource and something you want to produce. You look at the ratio of th…
If you're looking for more novelty, there are a lot of mods that add cool new complexities. I like the Seablock pack - the core premise is that you crash land on a water world, and need to extract all your resources from water. The production loops are much more complicated (you start having to deal with byproduct management just an hour or two in), but in return there's almost no enemy time pressure. It also include…
The core gameplay loop is still very much the same. More complex recipe is not really a more complex game. It just means more of the same planning and calculation but with more variables - which is to say more tedium not more fun.
Re: How 'Factorio' seduced Silicon Valley and me
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
What would you do?
We keep a postit list next to the breadmaker and write stuff down when we need to get something. Then when it is time to go shopping, we simply peel off the list and away we go. I am getting disgusted by people who need to have that screen in their hand, all waking hours.
My apologies that using available technology to improve upon suboptimal solutions disgusts you. In case it helps to know why "that screen" improves upon paper in the first place:
- I'm not always home when I decide to want to buy something, so then I couldn't write it on that paper
- We go shopping together most of the time. That screen lets you check items off and sync that to the other person's that screen. Alternatively, there is a mode where it gives each participant a subset of the items so you don't get duplicate things
- That screen can give you the list in the right order if you just tell the app one time what layout a store has (e.g. first the bread and breakfast things, then the cooling section, then the freezer section.. those sorts of categories)
- That screen can also work with a map function where it does a traveling salesperson problem to find a good path to walk down to get each item, but this requires entering the location of everything rather than just having everything broadly categorized
- That screen suggests things you frequently buy, so it's one tap for what you commonly need
- That screen can temporarily hide items you are going to get in the next store, so you can glance and see that the list is clear and you're good to go check out and then unhide the things when you enter the next store
- That screen can automatically add items from recipes you've added
- You have that screen anyway. The pen and paper, on the other hand, are consumables
We could forego all these benefits for, eh, not being "glued", whatever the advantage in that is. It's not like I'm getting distracted by notifications in the store if that's what you're worried about
Re: How 'Factorio' seduced Silicon Valley and me
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
It fascinates me how someone like you manage to build all these tooling to run your house, but still struggle with > need to remember to load the grocery list before leaving the house that has the server in it ^ remote access and > better hope your phone doesn't decide for you that the page needs to be unloaded on the way ^ unreliable tech
What would you do?
open apple notes and type in my grocery list and go blissfully about my day