this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2024
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i have like 370 hours of factorio, and i've only really played it over the period of about. 4-5 months, though i've owned it for a year or two now.
Factorio is just one of those games. For anybody that likes open world sandbox games and technical stuff, you already own factorio, yell at me in the replies.
Have to agree. I've played through a couple of times myself and a couple times with friends. Always fun. If you've never touched mods on it I recommend taking a look. Will further diversify your playing time.
absolutely. Personally i've just been enjoying varying my playstyles over time. It's added enough variety for me so far. I will presumably also enjoy building and design different base metas over time as well, though i have only done a few things so far, so i have hundreds if not thousands of hours to go before i start to get interesting things.
Such a good game. Especially if you get a multiplayer game of people with different logistical strengths.
absolutely, especially if you play with the various multiplayer scenarios.
Ah the early times of factorio, learning everything for the first time. Those are long ago, 1700h+ now. The addiction is real.
yeah, it's like that. Took me about a 100 hours to get fully acquainted. I've had several different play-styles through my various saves, all trying different things, and seeing how they go. I'm sure it'll continue for quite some time.
Especially when the expansion with 2.0 drops.
Good choice to fast-forward your time perception
it truly is weird, how you can sit down and simply, play the game for 8 hours straight.
That might have been the opioids i was on at the time more than anything (dental work) but regardless, i got a lot of work done.
I've hit 700 tonight and still have another 200 in my current playthrough
I like factorio but the game never even asks the question of whether destroying an entire planets ecosystem just so you, one person, can get home is ethical or right.
I don’t know, it is a small thing, I totally get why people get addicted to factorio’s gameplay loop not disputing how amazing that is it is just the basic premise of the game makes me uncomfortable in it’s disinterest in the planet you are on being anything but a resource to conquered and consumed or in thinking about how you are actually the villain in this situation from the planet’s perspective.
I always felt like the fact that you get attacked by local fauna when you cause pollution was a comment on that. As in the planet recognises that you are not doing a good thing.
ironically, it seems almost as if the planet itself was designed to counter your existence. The biters literally feed on your pollution and evolve multiple magnitudes of strength, multiple times over.
yeah, but the game isn't about social commentary, it's about logistics, factory building, and to some degree, tower defense. You don't like biters? You can just disable them, you don't actually need to play with them. You can just roleplay as if you're living on mars.
I feel like if anything factorio does a great job of explaining why the human urge to industrialize exists, and makes you experience all of the negatives of it. If we're taking it like a social commentary sort of thing. Ultimately it's nothing worse than human history has done at any given point of time. By a large margin.
By the way, you might want to check out nullius, it's the inverse of the gameplay loop. The planet is barren, and you are analogous to god, you need to create everything in order for the "normal" gameplay loop to begin.
It's also kind of interesting to consider the impacts of the biters themselves, they aren't really a life form, they're more akin to a bacteria, just on a macro, insect scale. They literally only do something productive for themselves once you get in their way. Their entire evolutionary lifeform is predicated on you being a negative influence on their environment. They consume your pollution, and use it to grow and become stronger. However, left to their own devices they seem to spread across the entire planet, almost like a cancer, just without the consumption of life that is typical, because biters seem to be magic?
that's my two cents on it, i suppose.
Thank you for the thoughtful response
I mean I would accept magic, but anything less of an explanation of the biters behavior seems like a problematically reductive view of life.
Even the behavior of bacteria is complex and more nuanced than a cancerous process.
I get that it is a game, but I think these things do matter, especially for computer minded people who want to understand everything as a computer programs and recklessly ignore the reality of the environment around them. Media like this severs the salience of the surrounding landscape to people, and contextualizes it simply as a resource to exploit.
Idk, I mean factorio is amazing, I totally get why people love it, and I know the focus of the game isn’t on this but still…
magic is definitely an option, but we're talking about an entire field of science here. How are we supposed to define something without reductive reasoning? The only other real possibility would be religious in nature.
All we know, or more specifically, all i know about the biters is that they're a seemingly persistent, constant across any given world. They don't seem to be feeding on anything. They don't even consume the player when killed. They seem to be explicitly aggressive against the player, for who knows what reason. They seem to benefit explicitly, and massively from pollution, and they also seem to direct targeted attacks towards the source of that pollution, all of which in an evolutionary sense would take billions of years. So presumably, there must be more than one person on this planet, and this must be a very regular cycle. Or perhaps it's a sort of multiverse deal where this simply loops forever?
yeah, i mostly just meant it in comparison to like tigers, or something. We hate ants, wasps, and insects in general, we seem to have little problem killing them on the regular, however when it comes to things like tigers, we seem less receptive to it. It's certainly an interesting choice to base the biters on an insectoid type species.
It's definitely interesting, but i feel like exploitation of resources is probably the only good setting for this game. We can look at something like shapez for instance, similar to factorio, but it's a sterile environment, where you produce shapes. Suddenly that seems even more dystopian by nature. Are you just a dude shipped to a massive sterile warehouse and told to create various different shapes as a method of commoditization? Who knows.
At least with resource exploitation, there's a very clear driving path, there's an entirely independent motivation (not being on that planet, because lore wise, you crashed there, and aren't supposed to be there, and how else are you supposed to leave without exploiting resources? Sure you could wait for someone else, but they also exploited resources, and them arriving isn't a guarantee, so you might as well keep busy and do it yourself.) Though to be clear, i haven't played shapez, so maybe there is some kind of weird lore behind it, i'm assuming there isn't.
I always like to think of it from the perspective of something like a lion. Killing animals for sustenance. At the end of the day, we all must cause some level of destruction to progress. In this case we cause very little destruction once we do leave, because inevitably the base will cripple, run out of power, and the biters will overrun it, destroying everything in it's place, claiming it as theirs again, and expanding back over it. Just at an extremely high level of evolution now instead.
There is an eventual yin to every yang.
Don't worry, it's fiction. It's not real. No actual planets were harmed in the making of this game.
Oh thanks! I didn’t even realize factorio wasn’t real!
facepalm silly me
Well ackshually... One was.
I'm a big fps/3d spaces person. I gravitated to satisfactory. As far as I'm concerned, it's the same thing but 3D.
Love satisfactory. It is super addictive to me though, especially with mods. It just provides multiple angles to play from.
Sometimes I wanna build a factory, sometimes I wanna play homemaker, sometimes I just wanna organize shit/ make it more efficient.
I'm currently enjoying Foundry right now. It is a nice blend of a few different games.
Foundry is on my radar. I might wait for satisfactory to hit 1.0, play that for a few months, then switch over to foundry.
It looks good though. IIRC it's early access and what I've seen of it, I kinda want to give it a bit to get closer to complete before I jump in.
i don't own satisfactory, though it does seem interesting, i feel like factorio is the precursor to satisfactory in a way.
It's more primal to the human urge to industrialize.
That's a fair assessment IMO. They're all related games.
I personally haven't played factorio, but I know enough about it to prefer satisfactory.
A few friends of mine are getting into Palworld and getting away from satisfactory. IDK, it seems a bit too different to me.
any reason specifically you prefer satisfactory?
I think i'd have to look into satisfactory more, but factorio is more explicitly focused on the gameplay loop, and meta elements of the game itself. Having really good balance, great game design, and super functional gameplay styles.
Whereas satisfactory seems to focus more on the game itself, less than the gameplay styles. I.E. the game creates the gameplay style, the player will follow, as opposed to in factorio, it's explicitly designed around having certain styles of gameplay, which make it very easy to adopt and utilize.
Not to say that you can't with satisfactory, it just seems like it would be a lot more work. Like in factorio i have a set of rail blueprints that are perfect. Space optimally, designed optimally, and work optimally, they're designed so that i can just plonk them down and do as little work as possible and have them functional. I'm not sure satisfactory has that level of gameplay.
Satisfactory has added blueprints. They've been part of the game for a while. You can design, build and disassemble blueprints wholesale. They're not super large, which is part of the challenge. For something like a rail line, the placement of blueprints won't connect the rail line together even if you put a rail from end to end; so those blueprints usually are all the infrastructure surrounding a rail line, and the rail line is run down the infra after the blueprint is built.
There's plenty of quirks with it, as I'm sure there are in factorio, and there's no "perfect way" to do anything. A core mechanic in satisfactory is alternate recipes. I'll give you an example. Screws are an early item that's usually a pain point for new players early game. To get them, you have to mine iron, smelt it into iron ingots, then construct rods from those ingots, and finally, convert the rods into screws. It's a pretty involved recipe for the early game. Most other recipes are more simple, concrete is raw limestone, constructed to concrete directly, it's a two machine setup to get it rolling. Rods are another, and plates are similar to rods (both three machine setups, miner, smelter, constructor). Screws require at least four.
There's a popular alternative recipe called cast screws, which creates screws from iron ingots directly. Not only that, but you get more screws per ingot than the vanilla recipe.
To take that example further, there's an alternate for ingots, which is a "pure" ingot, which uses a mid-game machine, the refinery, to combine raw iron and water, and produce iron ingots, which has a higher yield than simply smelting the raw material.
So you can do the og recipes, and build a field of miners, smelters, and constructors (to make rods, then screws), so that you get enough screws in sufficient quantities, or, with a little legwork and some alternative recipes, you can use the pure iron ingot alternate, and cast screw alternate, and get a lot more with a lot fewer machines, and fewer iron nodes (less raw iron).
There's Infinity variant building methodologies, from building right on the ground, to large towers filled with many floors of machines to do the work. The layout can be chaotic and spaghetti, inefficient and a mess, to varying levels of perfect input to perfect output, building a variety of things continually.
You can focus on design, or efficiency, or simply the speed at which you can throw things together. The options are endless.
You can rush towards coal, fuel, or nuclear power, or flatten all of the biodiversity of the map into biofuel and run everything on plant and animal matter.
Personally, I focus on alternative recipes early on, as well as logistics (faster conveyor belts, etc), and power (mainly coal/fuel)... Collecting biomass generally sucks IMO, plus the nature in the game is quite lovely and I don't like to destroy more than I have to.
With the verticality, you can have production floors of machines where the inputs and outputs go into the floor, out of sight, into logistics floors below, to be carted around between machines, and to storage crates, or whatever you need. If you run out of space, you can expand, or build more floors above your current build and expand that way.
Trying to solve logistical issues in three dimensions can be a challenge.
There's caves to explore, a variety of wild animals of varying strengths and abilities in the game, even some that are radioactive, or spew toxic gas. There's even flower looking plants that kind of stand up when you come nearby, and if you hang out near them, they emit toxic gases too... Or you can play on passive mode where the fauna generally ignore that you exist unless you attack them.
I could keep going, there's a lot of interesting stuff in the game, including a lot of things we don't have the story about (they've had placeholders in the game that won't be explained until 1.0 gets released, hopefully later this year). I have over 970 hours in the game and I will be starting a brand new save once 1.0 is available. I'm certain I will be playing that for many more hours to come.
If you want to know anything specific, please ask. I can point you at beginner friendly YouTubers, or streamers that push the game to its absolute (and ridiculous) limits with mods, or anything in-between. I can also just discuss the mechanics or what we know of the story so far.
For me, satisfactory is an extension of the same concepts I enjoy and employ for my profession. I'm in IT, and getting everything working just right, then seeing everything working perfectly is the take away I like to get from doing a thing. Troubleshooting it when it's not operating correctly, and ensuring everything stays running 24/7, is huge.
yeah i know it has blueprints, i'm just saying it feels more like it's been shoehorned in than it has designed to be integrated fully, as it has in factorio.
there are definitely some quirks, but for all intents and purposes, anything you want to do with blueprints, can be done with blueprints. You can align them globally to the world chunk size, to make your blueprinting incredibly idiot proof, you can align it relative to the blueprints dimensions itself and change how that alignment is configured and setup, such that it will perfectly paste continuations in perpetuity, until you let go of the shift button. One thing about factorio that doesn't exist outside of it is that the devs don't settle for "good enough" they either do it right, or implement it so minimally that it can't be wrong. A good example of this would be robots, they have an incredibly minimal implementation, though annoying, it's forgivable because of how simple they are. Where as something like blueprints, basically anything you could ask for, is already inside of a blueprint. The one thing i want, is better blueprint navigation, because it doesn't support forward and backward navigation quite perfectly, and that's it.
this is actually one of the things i appreciate about factorio, to my knowledge in the vanilla game, there are no alternative solutions or recipes. You make gears with two iron plates. There are different tiers of assemblers and modules, but those are the only things that change that. Everything is balanced to be self contained perfectly. It's annoying sometimes, for example boilers burn solid fuel, but not liquid fuel, it's not a huge deal because you can just make solid fuel, but it's somewhat annoying because of pollution. Ideally burning solid fuel would be less polluting, though it isn't in vanilla, i'm sure it could be modded in. But generally, the balance is really good, very well thought out, and explicitly designed around building and manufacturing things. Which makes for a really nice gameplay experience. I'm sure satisfactory is similar in that regard though. (a lot of factorio mods will introduce alternate recipes btw)
same thing in factorio, like i mentioned with modules, you can just put three prod 3 modules into the rocket silo and make it 25% cheaper, or you can stack prod everywhere in your manufacturing line up, reducing your usage of raw material by at least 50% total.
this is actually one of the interesting things for me with factorio, there is a very explicit gameplay advancement. You could get to end game on coal power, sure. But the game really incentivizes you to at the very least, build solar power, if not nuclear power. Once you get to solar research, your power costs immediately start to increase significantly, building yellow and purple science basically double your raw material costs, while doubling the production of your factory. You need lots more power if you want that to go over well. You often go from about 50MW on blue science, to 500MW on a full 60spm base. It can be a little strict but the game is designed around it so well it's not a huge concern of mine.
this is probably the most interesting thing to me about satisfactory, the fact that you can just immediately stuff things into an additional dimension is huge. Factorio kind of has this with a few mods, like warehousing, though it's different. Though in factorio everything is just 2D, which makes for a rather aesthetic building style, as well as pretty clearly demonstrating where everything is, as well as where bottlenecks and problems are, which i find rather nice.
personally i'm not a huge lore fan, i like to follow along with it as i play, if i ever do though. As for questions, one thing i'm kind of curious about, though i've never looked into is building logistics. Do materials just magically materialize out of thin air from your base/root storage? Or do you have to do a bunch of handling logistics to cart materials and buildings from one place to another as you build stuff like you do in factorio. That's probably my biggest gripe with factorio, though it does have robots, i find them lacking in aspects.
it's similar for me, although i find factorio is sterilized a bit more, as far as my general taste goes. It's more interesting for me on a macro level, than on a specifics level, for me i really enjoy experimenting with different play style metas in factorio, i've gone from belt based mega base, to bot based belted megabase, to train logistic based megabase, to presumably in the future, a proper belted mega base, and a proper bot based megabase. As well as all of the various overhaul mods and play style changes you can make to make it more interesting to play.
Factorio is lot less about the individual build, although you can still hyper optimize those, and i do that from time to time, and more about figuring out how to fit them together effectively. Anybody can build an oil setup, it's integrating it properly into all of your other stuff that makes it hard.
So, to address your question, raw materials only come from nodes, which require miners. Obviously miners require power, but produce raw materials (output via a belt) indefinitely. The rate of extraction depends on the quality/purity of the node (poor/normal/pure) and the level of the miner. Miners can be placed anywhere there is a node. So building smaller modular factories is definitely possible and one of many legitimate strategies.
I think that answers the question, let me know if I misunderstood. I'm not 100% familiar with all the factorio mechanics so I'm not totally sure if I fully understood the question.
Between locations, you can move materials by truck, train, or drone. You can run trucks across the ground or build roads.
When it comes to generation, coal plants can burn just about anything solid, from raw coal to more complex materials derived from by-products of oil production. Fuel generators take any liquid fuel, from regular fuel, turbo fuel, and even liquid biofuel. Additionally there's a bunch of different ways to arrive at each type of fuel, for solids, you can use refineries to refine coal or petroleum waste into compacted coal or similar, and with liquid fuel, there's blenders and refineries, recipes for turbo blend fuel, heavy fuel, even turbo heavy fuel, diluted fuel, and packaged fuel too (used for jetpacks and vehicles). It gets.... Complicated.
With satisfactory, you can build small and just wait, or build big and use a lot of power, and things get finished much faster.
With progression, there's two main sections, milestones and phases. Each phase unlocks more tiers of milestones, and each milestone unlocks more buildables which will allow you to complete future milestones and phases. You can complete them in whatever order you want, but some of the progression requires that certain milestones get completed before progress can be made. In that way, there's some linearity with the progression.
The first person perspective of the game and the three dimensional design is what draws me towards satisfactory more than factorio. I'd happily give you a personal tour of one of the multiplayer servers I play on and host. No pressure, I just thought I'd offer in case you wanted to ask questions and get shown around the game by someone.
It just seems like you would enjoy the game. If you ultimately decide to play, that's fine, if not, no worries.
i have a rough understanding of this part, my question was more so "do i have to cart a billion thingamajigs from point A to B in order to build a thing" It's already a thing in factorio, so it wouldn't be a deal breaker, but i feel like satisfactory is the type of game to make this a non problem.
similar to factorio, though factorio is more restricted, which i like. There are four directions (8 if you include diagonal rails) and there are explicit tiles that machines and belts take up, which often means you can make super braindead blueprints.
For example, earlier today, i just shit out a blueprint book with a bunch of perfectly tiling walls, where everything aligns perfectly, all based on absolute positioning, so i can easily plonk them down anywhere, and know that i can make my walls line up as needed without having to think about it, along with that i made a roboport blueprint that coincides on the half grid of the wall prints. So that i can print it down inside of the wall without it being in the way, while still having it align perfectly and be super clean.
I imagine you can do similar things in satisfactory, but i suppose this is probably my minecraft roots coming out to play with this one. I'm sure the 3rd dimension and less restriction would be fun, is there any sort of grid alignment? Or is everything manual, i think that would be the one big thing i'd miss, is the ability to align things automatically.
sounds about right. I'd definitely enjoy that if i got into it.
it's definitely interesting, but the thing about factorio that makes me really like it, is that the game seems to be explicitly designed around being a factory builder, where as something like satisfactory is more a 3d open world sandbox game that is also a factory builder, but then again i also havent played it so.
If i ever do buy the game i probably won't take you up on the offer because i'll be too busy figuring the game out already, lol.
For grids, there is a "world grid" which players were given access to some time ago, if you build properly on the world grid, then when you meet up one section from a factory to another section from another factory, they'll meet properly.
I always use the world grid to get a starting point before laying anything down. I don't want to struggle later on trying to make things fit, and doing it this way it's a no brainer.
For rail lines, they're completely dynamic, if you want to build it into a pretzel, you can do that. I'm not sure the trains would love it, but you can easily do that. There's actually a problem most new players have that after going around a corner, their rail line goes all wavy because the rail curves a little bit depending on where you place it, and what it's attached to. The solution is, at the end of the curve, when you have your ending point, remove the last section of rail at the curve, then build a perfectly straight section of rail where it will continue, then rebuild the last bit of the curve. This ensures the next section will start perfectly straight and any curve in the rail will be isolated to where the rail is meant to be curved. Then continue building as normal and the rest of the line will be straight.
Of course the rail lines can go up/down as much as you want (within the bounds of the world), so it's not uncommon to see sky bridges with long rail lines that span most of the map. In that configuration, either very tall conveyor lifts being materials up/down from stations on the line, or there's long, looped spirals of track to bring trains down to stations. I've seen both, and both methods are valid.
There will be train and truck stations frequently above or below factories for transit. I've also seen long bridges of conveyor belts bringing materials from one place to another. The main benefits to conveyors over trains/trucks/drones is that they're very consistent and don't require any additional power or fuel to run (trucks need fuel, trains use power), but a lot of people think they're ugly, so trains or trucks are common. I'm more of a fan of consistency so I tend to do conveyors, but I don't fault anyone for making different choices. Trains always need infrastructure, at least a rail line, trucks usually need some kind of infrastructure, though, not always. Drones don't need any, so if you want to preserve nature in the game, you can go that way, but drones are very late-game and require batteries which are difficult to build in sufficient quantities. Not impossible, but not easy either.
I tend to build a road with conveyors hanging underneath. The road is for me to get there and to provide the necessary structure to place the conveyors.
One thing I've heard of that factorio has that satisfactory lacks is the idea of pollution. In satisfactory, you can spew all the toxic gases you want and the environment doesn't change at all. Plants still grow and the world keeps looking the same. IDK, it's a difference I know about.
The first-person style of satisfactory is more like building in Minecraft (I would assume) so getting things lined up is sometimes a challenge until you get to the hoverpack. But the hoverpack requires power, and to get it, you have to be within a certain proximity to a power post.
In any case. I was thinking the tour would be a "before you buy" kind of thing, maybe over discord or something, where I can stream my game and you can ask whatever questions you want, and I can show you the mechanics. If you're not interested, that's fine. There's plenty of that kind of tour content on YouTube too if you want to look around.
For transporting materials, you don't have to. If you build modular factories right next to where your nodes are you can produce your items and store them at that location. The only down side is that when you need that stuff you'll have to go to that location and pick up what you need. A lot of players like to build a resource hub and dump all their finished products into bins there, so they have a single location to go to when building anything. Just pick up whatever mats you need, and head out.
I have a lot more I could say about the nuances of design and structure in such a place, but it's all up to the person playing for what they want to do to put it all together. I tend to keep cramming too much into too small of a space and I have to engineer my way around the limitations. I need to plan better.
Anyways, I hope you enjoy factorio, as I enjoy satisfactory. My offer stands if you change your mind. If you ever buy the game and want to play some mp, let me know, I usually have a server running.
This is actually kind of interesting to me, because in factorio belts are an option, you can certainly use them, but they are almost definitely more annoying (or atleast more strict) than using trains or bots, you get access to bots just after trains, though you don't get logistics until end game science (so you can compare them pretty closely to drones, though the batteries are fairly cheap)
also, one thing that i've seen in satisfactory is all the little "tidbits" that you have to sometimes do, you mentioned it with the curved rails for trains, that kind of stuff is why i really like factorio, because it has almost none of that. Rails are a little funky sometimes, but there are only straight rails and curved rails, so it's only going to be so wrong. Super fiddly stuff is something i often find really annoying though. I assume a lot of that stuff will either, eventually be fixed, or is not a significant problem since you can just play the game around it and ignore it most of the time.
There are no vehicles, unless you play with AAI vehicles or something, so those aren't an option, but generally rails are a literal "paste and place" type building option, you can plonk shit down wherever, as long as you're connected to your rail network and have those materials on the rail line, it will service what you want.
yeah, it's pretty minor, and there are things like efficiency modules which actually counteract about 80% of your pollution when used properly (as well as power consumption, though it's not usually causing pollution, because of solar and nuclear power) Really pollution is just meant to make the biters angry so they attack you, their attacks are actually a function of how much pollution they consume, as well as their evolution. Which has a handful of stages in increasing orders of magnitude, though it does also damage trees, trees will absorb a set amount of pollution continually, and regularly, however if you go above that, you will damage the trees, and the trees will no longer be capable of absorbing as much pollution, leading to more biter attacks, more than likely. Usually trees get in the way more than anything, and it's also worth noting that ground tiles also absorb pollution, grass does quite a bit, sand does less, landfill does none, but nuclear "tiles" (ones that were hit with an atomic bomb) will absorb very little pollution, which is a way of making landfill absorb pollution. Water absorbs very little as well, biters tend to path around water alot, unless you landfill it or something.
You can also just turn it off, if you want, as with most things in factorio, the world is very configurable, since it's all procedural.
ah i see, i probably won't take you up on it then, it's a factory builder, so i can only hate it so little after all.
absolutely, same to you, i've been working on getting a proper megabase setup, i currently have 120spm, and i'm fixing more for something like, 500SPM now. So i need a considerable jump in resources and production, which is what im working on setting up right now.
I like the Shapez too
i have shapez kicking around somewhere, seems interesting, havent played it though.
Satisfactory isn't bad either, but factorio wins in my book.