Factorio

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Factorio is a game of factory management, in which you mine resources in an infinite 2D world, and then make an enormous automated factory to turn those resources into goods, and then turn those goods into other goods, and so on. This is made more complicated by the native inhabitants of the planet, who object to your noxious, belching industry, and so you also need to defend your stuff against the alien threat.

The game has been in development for a number of years now, and will be released on Steam on Thursday. However, the Steam release will also be seeing a slight increase in price, so if you're interested I suggest buying it now on the game's website for €15, as opposed to the $20 you'll have to pay after Thursday. There's also a demo on the website, if you just want to try it out.

I've been playing the game for over a year at this point, and it's really solid. Don't let the game's nominal "early access" status fool you! There is a great deal of content here, and it can easily consume hundreds if not thousands of hours, if it gets its hooks into you. (As it did for me! Shameless plug: I got so into it that I wrote my own calculator for the game, which I may revisit now that the Steam release seems likely to pull in a new wave of fresh players.)

There's cross-platform cooperative multiplayer, too! After the Steam release, maybe it would make sense to set up some sort of GWJ server? I've done a little bit of multiplayer, and it seems to work fairly well, as long as everyone has enough bandwidth to download the map when they connect.

The game also has good support for mods, and a healthy modding community. The vanilla game is quite solid, but there are some overhauls which significantly expand the game in a number of ways. There are also some more minor mods, like the Resource Spawning Overhaul (RSO), which changes the resource-generation algorithm in some interesting ways.

I highly recommend this game, in case that wasn't clear.

I bought into this one, um, probably about last July? I had a good time with it, but eventually stalled out when getting to the ... I think it was Tier 4 stuff. The economics in this game get quite intricate, and developing assembly lines to make all of what you need, juggling your resources between your various requirements, is not at all easy.

But, for hmm.... maybe 40 hours, it was addictive as hell. I might very well pick this back up when it goes live on Steam.

edit: and let me stress, getting your full economy going is complex. There is a LOT of stuff you can make. And that was the middle of last year; I have no idea what they've added since.

second edit: I mean, this is a game where you can literally build steam trains, and automate full loading and unloading cycles on both ends. The trains can move themselves to a pickup zone, wait until they're full (or for some period of time, if you'd prefer) and then move somewhere else, and your other machines can unload them. This can let you transport huge supplies of raw materials for very, very long distances, using far fewer build resources than just conveyor belts.

There's a downside, though: engines take fuel to work. Conveyor belts work forever for free.

Oh, and then an additional thought: this is a solid game. It runs extremely well and delivers the goods. The engine is all there. $20 strikes me as an entirely reasonable price, given the depth of what's on offer.

I found that it took starting a new factory several times before I really got a sense of how I should be planning things out from the beginning. Don't be afraid to restart! The complexity of the assembly lines you need really does start to compound as you progress up the tech tree, so it's important to know what things you need to leave room for when you set up your initial layout.

Eventually you gain the ability to move items from point to point using flying robots, and it is actually entirely viable to create a factory based entirely on these logistics robots, with no belts at all. This is the key to making truly massive megafactories, since it eliminates the problem of needing to arrange your belts in just the right way. As long as you have enough resources coming in, the bots will distribute things to where they need to go.

My current typical strategy is to start by making a relatively modest starter factory that uses belts, and then using that to bootstrap a much larger train-supplied bot-only factory. Once that factory is able to automatically produce all of its own components, then expanding the factory further is just a matter of making blueprints and clicking. At that point, the game becomes an exercise in expanding resourcing operations by clearing out alien nests and building out the rail network.

Even if you don't go all-in on bots, they can be a useful band-aid, allowing you to make up for connections that would otherwise be too annoying to make with belts, while otherwise continuing to use belts for the majority of your factory.

I tried out the demo and watched a bunch of let's play videos for this last year. I think I liked Aavak's series the best. It is a great game, and I may now have to put some real money down now that it's official.

I've been watching let's plays of this for years. However I'll probably hold off on actually getting it until it's considered feature complete. It's not that I've burned out on the game simply watching it played to completion several times. But I can see many interface niggles that I know would frustrate me greatly if I had to do these things myself.

At it's most basic the gameplay is all about buildings that produce items. You transport items around using a complex interlacing web of conveyor belts and use little robot arms to move them in and out of storage. But the simplicity of the core gameplay belies the sheer complexity of things you can make in a factory, or make a factory do.

Here's one example, it's not quite on the same level as that water-powered Dwarf Fortress computer, but still quite impressive. Factorio recently patched in coloured lights as well.

This game gives me horrible flashbacks to my time in EVE obsessing over PI.

Must...resist!

The game is now up on Steam. There is also a new gameplay trailer:

I was thinking I might try to live-stream the game this afternoon at some point.

EDIT: Let's do this!

I had never heard of this and now I am enjoying it quite a lot. The tutorial was pretty good at teaching the game basics but oh boy does the Campaign ever throw you into the sh*t without a life-preserver. Seems to be more like a string of advanced scenarios.

Im playing in peaceful sandbox mode and enjoying myself (frustrating myself) trying to master the basics of production automation.

I like that there is a LOT more to the tech tree than was presented in the tutorial.

Im playing in peaceful sandbox mode

Yeah, I started a new campaign that way as well. I'm kinda wishing now I'd left the monsters on, but at their weakest setting, so that they'd EVENTUALLY become a threat, but it would take a really long time.

Why? Because I'm rather slow about thinking my way through the designs I want. There's a lot going on. Figuring out a reasonably efficient setup isn't a fast process, and I don't much like being under time pressure when I'm trying to do something that intricate.

But a *little* time pressure would have been okay. Nothing at all is a touch boring.

edit: oh, for those who don't know, the game tracks your pollution levels, and game monsters get steadily stronger and make new nests based on how much pollution you're generating. So you're kind of in this arms race against the critters, where you're trying to juggle your pollution levels against your defenses against your tech growth rate. And the monsters get TOUGH, kind of insanely so.

It can take a while for pollution to significantly upgrade the aliens. The other way the aliens get stronger is when you destroy their spawners. My experience is that this will upgrade the alien threat much more quickly than your pollution will.

It isn't that hard to counter the aliens. I usually handle base defense in three phases.

Phase 1: Put a few turrets guarding any place where the aliens attack. Be sure to keep them armed. Upgrade to piercing bullets as soon as possible. Put a wall around them for extra protection. This will suffice for quite a long time. If you don't go taking out too many nests, the aliens will basically just send larger and larger swarms of the weakest biters, and these can be fought off with relatively little effort. When those attacks start to get too annoying...

Phase 2: Make a tank. Use it to annihilate any nests that have the temerity to exist anywhere near your pollution cloud. Enjoy the resulting peace. This will start to upgrade the aliens, so make sure your defenses don't totally fall into disrepair. But new attacks should only come as the aliens start to create new nests. Occasionally patrol for those new nests.

Phase 3: The endgame. Build walls at choke-points well beyond the reach of your pollution cloud. Sanitize the land within the walls. The result should be equilibrium: So long as the walls don't generate pollution, the aliens will happily ignore them. They also shouldn't try to expand too near them (there is a minimum distance to your structures that the aliens will maintain when they expand). The result is, essentially, world peace... except when it comes time to expand again. But the area covered by your pollution cloud will probably be enormous, which means your walled-off area should contain quite a lot of resources.

In the steam store how much is the game in USD or other currencies? It's currently $25 CAD and I have Stardew Valley in my cart already so I figured I'd just get Factorio now. It's set to have a price hike when it releases in full and 25$ CAD is actually 5$ less than 20 Euros.

Malor wrote:
Im playing in peaceful sandbox mode

Yeah, I started a new campaign that way as well. I'm kinda wishing now I'd left the monsters on, but at their weakest setting, so that they'd EVENTUALLY become a threat, but it would take a really long time.

Critter management is definitely the biggest hurdle for starting players. When just starting out even a handful of turrets and some basic walls are enough to keep you safe, it's just a matter of keeping them reloaded and in good repair. Later on in the game you can construct a Maginot line and as long as your outer defences are past the limits of your pollution you will be able to reside in peace.

IIRC there should be a setting that allows you to set biter difficulty to any level, but the aliens will only turn hostile once you fire the first shot.

For me Im just not playing a base defense game, so I turn them off. Maybe later when I need more challenge but right now my challenge is 'how the f*ck do I make this new thing?' and 'well, got to tear up this whole section of base and start over'

Im starting to get the hang of some things. I learned why my 1 steam engine power generation was making all my robot grabber arms too slow to pick things up. I set up a decent 10 lab set and got it well supplied with green and red bottles for pretty quick tech gains. Im about up to creating batteries and the blue science bottles now, though Im a few re-designs away from getting that properly automated.

The peaceful option is there. Its something like 'aliens are peaceful until attacked'

Edit: Also, I'd love a sandbox option that lets me start with enough resources to skip the coal powered drills step. Its not hard, but a little time consuming to get through that.

Well I picked up the game and have progressed through the tutorial up until the train mission. The game is great, however all of my fears about the interface have been confirmed. There is one specific problem that just drives me insane. I use slot 1 for belts because it's the most convenient keybind. The game gives you a way to "reserve" that slot for belts, but then it doesn't respect this at all! It keeps dropping my belts, putting them into other slots and then when I press the key it does nothing! Argh! The main issue is that every time you select an item you have to press Q to empty your hands again. If you DON'T press Q then the game will put that item wherever the hell it wants and not back into the same spot you got it from. I'll probably learn this reflex after a while but until then it's highly aggravating when my toolbelt gets mixed up.

Here's a picture of my first real factory. The campaign scenarios don't give you a lot of control over your starting location and you tend to be short of resources or room, or both. This is the final tutorial campaign scenario where you build a plane to escape from aliens. It's also the first the map where you have a reasonably blank canvas. I managed to organize things around a main bus to distribute resources. It's still pretty roughshod and disorganized, especially the chemical stuff.
IMAGE(http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/495765098240950754/3DF3298E7A0D4788334F7E865BFE5A4DF0A9900A/)

So how many of us are playing this now? We should give the multiplayer a spin.

So I downloaded the demo. I like the premise of the game, but I feel like the control scheme really hindered my ability to enjoy it and was unintuitive. There seemed to be a lot of odd choices and I'm wondering if they have been fixed since the demo. Examples include only being able to open/close / inventory screens with a keyboard shortcut as opposed to being able to click to close. Same with movement. No mouse controlled movement only wasd. It feels like I'm playing a game from the late 90's or something. Has this stuff improved in the current build?

The full game is the same. I personally found it pretty easy to get used to the UI after a bit. Learning to press Q to 'drop' my currently selected item back to the action bar was probably the biggest hurdle, and I still habitually press ESC to dismiss the Research UI EVERY STINKING TIME, which is redundant since pressing Research closes it. ESC only then brings up the pause menu. I do this every time without fail.

I never got used to the lack of WASD controls in games like League of Legends, so I like it this way. The fully orthogonal movement helps for placement too. You can run down a straight line and drop tracks as you go without accidentally placing them above and below where you meant to. It doesnt work as well diagonally, but its pretty good. Its a nice way to get some things down quickly.

Is there a button to supply some amount of whatever an item is looking for without opening the inventory for it, the way there is to take from it (Ctrl+click in that case, handy for pulling from chests, foundries etc)? It would be handy to supply a turret with ammo quickly, for example.

polypusher wrote:

Is there a button to supply some amount of whatever an item is looking for without opening the inventory for it, the way there is to take from it (Ctrl+click in that case, handy for pulling from chests, foundries etc)? It would be handy to supply a turret with ammo quickly, for example.

There are a number of options. They're all spelled out (and reconfigurable) in the game options, but I'll repeat them here:

With an entity's inventory open:

  • Shift-click will move an entire stack.
  • Control-click will move all of that item type.
  • Shift-right-click will transfer half of a stack.
  • While holding a stack of items, you can right click to move one item at a time.

While holding a stack of items in the game world:

  • You can control-click directly on an entity to place the stack inside of it.
  • You can control-right-click to transfer half of the stack.

In addition, right-clicking on a stack in any inventory window will pick up half of the stack. There may also be other combinations I'm not remembering off-hand.

So far the only objectively bad control setup I've come across is F for picking up items off the ground. In order to pick up a lot of items or items on a belt you have to hold down F and use the WSAD keys to move around and you quickly run out of fingers. I'll have to figure out another key that I can hit with my thumb that isn't already bound to something.

That's what you get for clinging to WASD. In ESDF land, the plucky Z key services that need handily. How about Mouse4/5?

I've had extra buttons on my mouse for at least a decade and have still not gotten accustomed to using them in anything. I briefly did when playing Planetside 2 but after that those skills drifted away.

polypusher wrote:

I've had extra buttons on my mouse for at least a decade and have still not gotten accustomed to using them in anything. I briefly did when playing Planetside 2 but after that those skills drifted away.

I have two thumb buttons on my mouse and I use them all the time. Games tend to bind things to Mouse 3 like Zoom, Target Enemy etc. It comes in handy to have a thumb button in cases where games require both of those keys because you can assign all targeting tasks to the mouse and leave the keyboard free for other things. In the case of MWO thumb buttons also allows me to bind more weapon groups to the mouse, I use the thumb buttons only for "click" activations like missile launchers because I find that my aim gets worse when I have to squeeze the mouse sideways vs holding down LMB or RMB.

One bind that stays consistent over all of my games is that the rear thumb button (which is closest to my thumb) has always been my voice comm keybind for Ventrilo, Teamspeak, L4D, Discord etc.

I picked this up and am really enjoying it so far. I have largish, messy complex which is very inefficiently making red and green science.

Something I saw in the tips that is really helpful, user the middle mouse button on your toolbar to set the item for that space. That really minimizes how much items travel around.

I've just started this oil thing and it seems like there is no oil power station? At least nothing that uses liquid oil, it looks like you can process it into solid fuel and use that in the boilers.

Yonder wrote:

I picked this up and am really enjoying it so far. I have largish, messy complex which is very inefficiently making red and green science.

Something I saw in the tips that is really helpful, user the middle mouse button on your toolbar to set the item for that space. That really minimizes how much items travel around.

I've just started this oil thing and it seems like there is no oil power station? At least nothing that uses liquid oil, it looks like you can process it into solid fuel and use that in the boilers.

Yeah. There are only two kinds of power plant: Steam and solar. Steam power will work off of anything you can burn. I highly recommend switching to the oil-based solid fuel as soon as you're able, since it has over three times the energy per unit of fuel that coal does (25 MJ vs. 8 MJ). It's also renewable, to a point: Oil deposits will never completely deplete, their yield will just drop over time until reaching the minimum of 0.1 oil/second.

But in the long term, I also highly recommend switching to solar panels plus accumulators. Once a factory is large enough, it can actually be difficult to come up with enough fuel to keep enough boilers lit to power the whole thing. Solar power is free, once built, and if you pair it with electric furnaces, you basically get to stop worrying about fuel entirely, except for vehicles.

Tamren wrote:

I have two thumb buttons on my mouse and I use them all the time.

I always forget about those. I finally clued in when someone suggested using them for floor up/down in XCOM, which worked brilliantly. (scrollwheel for zoom, button 4 for up, button 5 for down.)

Oh, I think I used one of them for run toggle in WoW; that might have been a native setting I happened to spot, though, rather than anything of my own devising.

In any case, I'm okay with F for grab in Factorio because I'm always running in one orthogonal direction while grabbing (taking things off belts), so it hasn't been much of an issue. If I were trying to grab on the diagonal, though, that would be awkward. Putting the function somewhere on the mouse does seem like a good idea.

Diagonal grabbing or having to run back and forth to pick up a bunch of items is indeed a pain in the ass. Thankfully the only item where you have to do that all the time picks up automatically.

My first attempt at a red and green science farm was, as mentioned, inefficient. In the interests of startup time I didn't do what I set up a shared resource loop system rather than keeping everything regimented and separate. Iron and Copper plates were smelted and provided as input to a big loop, and then that loop created cogs, red science, wire, electronic circuits, and treadmills. Outputs were put right back on to the single loop.

The necessary components for inserters were plucked out of this big loop and placed on a small loop that just created those. The inserters and treadmills were plucked out of that loop and the enormous loop respectively on to another loop that just made green science.

The red science and green science were plucked out of the enormous loop and the green science loop respectively, and placed in to the lab loop.

I'm sure that veteran players can identity the failure point of this scheme. First of all the combination of all inputs meant that a surplus of one input could cause there to be no room for the scarcer input, exacerbating the problem and slowing production even more, causing a greater surplus of the first input, etc. The second is that the loop can be so clogged with inputs that the outputs can't be placed back on to the loop, also halting production.

Also, the fact that I had to use smart inserters to pluck out the necessary goods meant that splits weren't happening equally. For example, the Inserter loop plucked what it needed out of the greater loop really early, which meant that the raw plates it needed only continued through to the rest of the loop when several went through at the same time.

I patched this issue by adding a redistribution center to the end/beginning of the loop. At the plate entrance those plates and all of the leftover intermediaries went past smart inserters that grabbed out everything that came through and sorted them into their own crates. After the first pass through there was a splitter, and half of them went through for a separate pass to help mitigate gluts. That last half kept going on, so that there would always be motion. It swung back by the crates where normal inserters put everything back. The effect was to keep a relatively constant and balanced amount of materials in the loop, keeping things rolling, the items that weren't created very fast were kept in circulation, and the almost all of the surplus copper plates and wire were removed. All I had to do was stop by occasionally to remove the surplus from the chest. Oh, also the results of this feeding system were dropped into the inner lane, so that the lane almost all the assemblers used as output would stay clear.

This was not at all perfect, but I had to stop by and reset it much less frequently, and the setup overall made it simpler to reset when it did get clogged. I also had some copper overflow stuff set up earlier that I could turn on to help mitigate the clogging when needed.

So this was better, and it worked in that the science slowly trickled in while I got the barebones oil industry started up, but after that point I went through to revisit it properly.

It took awhile, but I realigned everything so that inputs never mixed together (at least on the same lane), each factory only had the inputs it needed, the outputs were never mixed with inputs, and splitters were used instead of inserters for the mixers, so that even when one resource was in short supply everything that needed it would get some portion of it.

Takes a lot more room, and getting the items all over the place without mixing is a pain, but wow did science production take off flying after that, enormous change when you are doing it right.

I've played this game for a pretty long time at this point, so I have red/green science production pretty much down to a T. I've got a screenshot of my current setup over here, if you want to take a look. Given sufficient iron and copper supplies, that setup should produce each of them at a rate of 30 items/minute.

Hah. You can't overstate how much simpler that one is than mine. Mine has the "advantage" of allowing independent access to all of the intermediate products, but seeing how clean that all ended up makes me realize that the pros don't outweigh the cons, it would be better to just create the necessary intermediates for the next project in that project area.

Especially since my current design makes it very difficult to expand intermediate production, so if I did add a new production line that used, say, iron cogs, it would be difficult to expand iron cog production in place to account for that.

I'll see if I can post a screenshot tonight.

That is a nice red/green science setup. I used one similar to what Aavak and Shenryyr setup in their tutorial. Yours seems much cleaner.

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