Just did the first speed run achievement for factorio. Just under 14.5 hours for satellite launch. Sorta...
Realized about half way through that the real achievement can't be done in peaceful mode. Still happy with my speed though. My base is a complete mess though but it worked.
Is anyone playing this on the Steam Deck? I can play it but the touch/mouse controls are a bit finicky. Any suggestions?
Is anyone playing this on the Steam Deck? I can play it but the touch/mouse controls are a bit finicky. Any suggestions?
On reddit there have been a couple posts about alternative control schemes that people have made and liked. But I forget the names.
So I bit the bullet and tore-down my entire base. Rebuilding it from first principles that focus of excess production of intermediaries rather than just-in-time production per Science assembly. My initial base was also built around on-site iron and copper, whereas now I need to train it in. We'll see how it goes.
I find making liquid processing set-ups very rewarding, much more so than belt/conveyor ones.
So nice to read about Factorio from a fresh perspective! Glad to hear you're enjoying it, Math! Keep the updates coming. The factory must grow!!!
Breaking down that first factory... We've all been there! 
The first three or so times I played I got so annoyed with factorio I uninstalled the game entirely. Then hours later I would think. Well what if I... Then reinstall it.
Breaking down that first factory... We've all been there! :D
And the second factory, and the third factory, and....
Back on the Factorio train, as it were, after a bit of a hiatus.
I've built my Rocket Silo and have begun to inch toward launch percent-by-percent. At the moment I'm using a LOT of logistics bots to ferry rocket ingredients around, since my base was entirely configured for research production and I don't want to tear it up once more.
I'm really enjoying the logistics network. Having a personal roboport is such a timesaver! I still don't understand how construction works with the bots though.
Generally speaking, logistics bots move items between chests (like provider to requester) and/or your personal inventory, and construction bots will build things on ghost entities (blueprints, or shift-clicking something), repair items if repair kits are available, and deconstruct entities marked foe deconstruction. They are two different bots that do different jobs. Also, construction bots only work within the green and orange range, and logistics only within orange. To increase the logistic bot range, make sure the orange boxes are touching and you see the dashed lines connecting roboports.
Generally speaking, logistics bots move items between chests (like provider to requester) and/or your personal inventory, and construction bots will build things on ghost entities (blueprints, or shift-clicking something), repair items if repair kits are available, and deconstruct entities marked foe deconstruction. They are two different bots that do different jobs. Also, construction bots only work within the green and orange range, and logistics only within orange. To increase the logistic bot range, make sure the orange boxes are touching and you see the dashed lines connecting roboports.
Yeah, I've got a good handle on the logistics side. I can't figure out how to place ghost buildings without actually having enough materials to build a real building though. Or it all supposed to be blueprint-based at that point?
Three ways to place ghost buildings: by placing blueprints, by placing a building normally but holding shift, and when biters destroy a building it leaves a ghost.
So as a small convenience you can make use of construction bots by shift -placing buildings, which allows you to build beyond your normal range. But the real value is blueprints - say you're laying out a smelting line, if you make the design tileable you can place one tile manually and then copy-paste the rest, and the bots will go to work.
Then the final use for construction bots is on defense - they can replenish walls destroyed by enemies, or if given access to repair packs they'll fly around repairing damage.
Launched my rocket a couple days ago, actually. Started a brand new game after doing a bit (ok, a lot) of reading various guides. It's definitely going much quicker the second time around, mostly because I know to a) give myself plenty of space to grow and b) dramatically overproduce basic ingredients like plates.
Well 124 hours later I've finished both my second and third games. This last one was a "ribbon world" and lots of fun. I added a few QoL mods and made generous use of blueprints from the community.
The nice thing about ribbon worlds is that you have only two "fronts" to worry about. I just pushed my walls further out whenever I needed space. The downside is that resources are a little scarce. I never did find any uranium...
What height size did you set? That looks really cool.
What height size did you set? That looks really cool.
It is 256 tiles high. This gave me room for two rows of 100x100 "city blocks" and then a decent space at the bottom for trains.
Put another ~40 hours in (tinkering with various overhaul mods like Bob's, ANgels, SE and K2) and think the fever is breaking.
Thus, any recommendations for another game in this genre? 
Satisfactory and Dyson Sphere Simulator are Factorio but 3D
Shapez is Factorio but highly minimized
Mindustry is Factorio but more enemy wave focused (and the only one with good mobile ports)
Autonauts is not really Factorio but plays with automating tasks in chains of product creation that's worth checking out, and gives you a very tiny amount of coding experience via visual scripting at the same time.
All of the above are a lot of fun
Of these, Shapez and Mindustry are the most literally like Factorio
Automachef looks similar to Factorio at first, and it tests your conveyor layout efficiency. It's about constructing robot-automated kitchens dispensing food to passerby.
But really it's a series of puzzles with much tighter constraints than Factorio, and on a much smaller scale by orders of magnitude. It's pretty good on the Switch. I think I got about halfway through before being distracted away by something else.
Factory Town is another fun one for me. Simple graphics and is 3d. Has some light town elements and people to manage. I enjoyed it enough to beat the main mission.
The whole article I was thinking 'this is just Space Exploration mod'. I'm glad they addressed that at the end, and was surprised the author is also the mod author. That's very cool.
They hint that 'there's some things Space Exploration just cannot do'. I suppose after reading that and having played to the end of Space Exploration (and if you haven't played it, it really is a 200-500 hour thing) I suppose I'm more excited about Space Exploration 2 (inevitable!) than Space Age.
I could never really got into space exploration. It was always a bit too much for me. So this looks much more my speed.
I still haven't launched the rocket, but this might spur me to do it with a slightly faster main game experience. Or I might just make a speed run friendly map in the current game.
New feature in Friday's news: quality. In short- most items can be of increased quality which makes them 30/60/90/150% better at whatever they do. New "quality modules" can increase the odds of getting higher-quality items, and some of the tiers are locked until you do research that comes on later planets. There's also a recycler which gives you 25% of the materials back from whatever you feed into it. This whole thing will be optional, but "Typically, people who want to just finish the game are more likely to not touch quality much, while those who want to build a big factory will have very good reasons to use it."
At first glance I am disappointed. I don't like randomness in Factorio, even if you can sort of compensate for it with the recyclers. It seems like it's adding a vertical dimension of grinding where you just wait for high-quality items to "drop". The horizontal grinding - building more factory - is fun because you're building stuff; the quality grind is just setting up recyclers and filters and then waiting. Then there's micromanagement of where exactly to put the best parts also sounds more like work than fun.
I'm not sure if I'll turn it off entirely, or just let it run and see where the quality pieces go.
That was my reaction too. Building the factory is fun, waiting for the RNG to give you resources isn't.
Personally I think it sounds really cool. I guess it will feel like uranium mining, where despite the rarity you know high quality drops will accrue reliably on any production line that runs full-time. So it wouldn't really make sense to "farm" quality on a dedicated line that recycles all the regular outputs, except maybe at the extreme endgame. But it would make sense even early on to put quality modules onto a mass-production line you're running anyway, so that as rare drops pile up you have new options to think about.
Also, this is the factorio devs - I reckon if anyone can get the design right it's probably them...
I mean I basically always ignore modules. So if this is meh it seems to be equally ignorable.
That said recycling to get rid of old crud is great.
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