Trust me
It’s been a while since I did a factorio run…

Okay I’ve nearly managed to automate green science
Not bad in 4hours!
Having way too much time in both, I view stardew as a gateway drug. It hooks you with cozy vibes but for sure rewards min/maxing. At least you don’t have to worry about UPS limitations!
It’s all fun and games and cozy vibes until you get that ancient seed.
Then you find yourself calculating if you should go home or pass out 100 levels deep in a remote cavern in a desert for a chance of getting something to pet your goats
BTW, it’s okay to ignore the story on Stardew Valley. Never let anyone tell you you’re playing it wrong. There’s no such thing.
Yeah half of the fun is just focusing on what makes you happy in that game.
I hate that devs put options in games and people think you’re bad for choosing it. Heaven forbid I want to experience Undertale’s genocide route or Stardew’s Joja story.
I like my idea for a Factorio movie.
An engineer crash lands on a planet during a corporate visitation to another planet. Desperate, he finds his company’s schematic drive on factory creation. He builds his way up to a satellite, which is preprogrammed to beam his SOS home. Relieved, he hits the button to launch it, watches it go up.
Then, looks down at everything he got to build on his own, with no oversight, no managerial correction, all his own efficiency. He’s even made his own greenhouses to make his own food. Automated a logistics bot to attempt a new mix of coffee each morning, warmed by residual nuclear reactor heat.
Something stirs in him, and he “accidentally” veers the satellite 8 degrees off course. It sheers against the atmosphere and burns to a crisp, its wreckage destroying his semiconductor production (which is then rebuilt automatically within the hour). The engineer resumes his next project.
From there, eventually a passing ship does a scan of the planet, curiously finding it inhabited and very industrialized. They send a lander to the surface to investigate. It’s shot down by a fleet of hundreds of missiles.
The issue goes to Earth’s military command. They have no idea who is on this planet but need to take the threat seriously. Another scouting contingent is deployed, able to land on a safer side of the planet, but on the way down, they spot a “city” in which buildings are arranged in the words “GO AWAY”.
Landing, the scouts work out that the nearby bots are from the corp’s schematics, and slowly work out what happened. They attempt a few more efforts to extract the engineer, now as a prisoner for shooting down a craft, but the “war” continues.
Eventually, a psychologist is able to ask the engineer about his feelings of loneliness on the planet. He replies that he’s been alone for far longer than his space flight, and even on Earth no one connected with him - machines just made sense. He curses his company’s greed for infinite growth, and declares the planet is off limits.
The psychologist accepts his terms - but also ridicules him, since his factory exhibits the same pointless growth as his company. And so, he remains, a prisoner of his own planet.
Bravo man. I like it!
In my head this works quite well as an animated short film.
Yeah if the movie industry got their hands on it, Jack Black would be the engineer and the machines would talk (or act like animals that perfectly understand him and communicate effectively via body language) and the psychologist would end up an unlikely love interest that ends up remaining with him and his wacky machines at the end of the movie.
And after the conclusion, there will be a shot of his love interest looking at something in horror and saying, “ew, bugs!”, setting up the sequel that never gets made because the people who would like it aren’t drawn to Factorio, and those who are drawn to Factorio are disappointed that the only thing it has to do with Factorio is that it has machines. The execs played the game for 5 minutes and came up with a building system that involves him quickly building things by hand and Harvey Cavil quit production two weeks in, once it was clear they didn’t care about the actual lore.
Would still watch
Sounds like an origin story for Dr. Robotnik.
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You know they wrote like a whole article about why they don’t put it on sale and it’s not about it being ‘beneath’ them?
You know they’ve gone on record and encouraged piracy, and they have a free demo if you’re still not convinced to just try it?
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It’s worth it without a sale too. Mostly, because if you allow it to, it will make sure you will never need to buy another game again.
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You can, of course, take cheap games over an exceptionally good game. That’s your choice. Just don’t expect a lot of people agreeing with that choice.
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It seems to me that, if you’re not willing to read their reasoning for it, not willing to pirate it, not willing to play the free demo, then you’re not actually interested in playing Factorio. You’re just here to start shit.
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Please don’t ascribe emotions to me, as I don’t ascribe emotions to you. I do not foam at the mouth over anything EA says because I don’t listen to or care about what EA says; I don’t play EA games.
Just as a bit of a sanity check for both of us, can you tell me what Wube’s reasoning is?
Thank you for beeing the voice of reason. Factorio have just improved and improved over the years. A game that have been neglected for a decade needs sales ofcourse. Factorio is not that.
I do not know how, but factorio is better value for money then all the gratis games i have on steam.Absolutely. I first got Factorio in the high seas and played it quite a while like that. Eventually I realized it was definitely worth the money and bought it. It’s great value for the money and it’s not expensive at all.
I do not know how, but factorio is better value for money then all the gratis games i have on steam.
“Time is money” applies to games too. A game that’s wasting your time is still not good value, even if it’s free.
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Fucking hell dude. The fact that you frame it in terms of going on sale is absolutely insane. The marketers have turned your brain to absolute mush. You could have said “it’s too expensive” but no, you won’t buy it because it’s never on sale. You don’t care how fun it will be and whether it’s worth the cost, only that the current price will never be arbitrarily less than some earlier price.
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Boy is this a take and a half. So instead of asking a price they think is fair, they should ask more, and arbitrarily reduce that on occasion to manipulate you into buying the product through FOMO, and that’s consumer friendly?
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It is more anti-customer to hold your price at a certain level and offer discounts so you both:
- get to charge above what most people think is a fair price to suckers who don’t pay attention to sales
- sell to people who think a lower amount is all the game is worth
- sell to people who others are not likely to even buy the game because they see a “great deal” and don’t want to miss out.
Your position seems to be based on two things:
- “Everyone” else does it this way, so any developer who doesn’t must be an asshole, so you won’t buy the game
- Old games need to be available for a lower price
1 is obviously wrong. It doesn’t matter what other studios do except that their marketing as so cooked your brain you can’t see any alternative.
- Is reasonable but you know, I’d sure prefer that old games just reduced their price, you know, like they used to instead of perpetual sales you have to watch out for.
Factorio is 5 and a half years old and costs £30. In that time it has had a number of major updates, and players typically play it for hundreds or thousands of hours, and it is rated extremely highly. Evaluate it on that basis rather than on some utterly irrational standard that has literally nothing to do with what you actually pay or how much fun you actually might have.
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You haven’t even bothered to write any text to try and defend this absurd, idiotic idea that the two choices available are “sales” or “full price forever”.
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Your “point” is not fucking true. Games can (and routinely used to) permanently discount their RRP as they got older.
They only stopped doing that because temporary discounts make more money. It works so well that they’ve conned you into believing that doing so is the only possibility, and pro-consumer.
Your excuses for not reading do explain why you’re like this.
🏴☠️ yar
I’m playing it for a week now and even using a modlist with automation mod to play it like factorio.
Satisfactory > Factorio
Once you start riding your powerlines as zip lines you’ll never want to go back.
NGU, NGU Industries, Anti-idle idle game.
As a person who plays both of these games frequently, this is very accurate.
Same here honestly
Then Satisfactory is in the corner with a hooded cloak calling them both amateurs.
Satisfactory is just frustrating because of having to do manual work around the clunky mechanics.
Factorio is just frustrating because of having your own creations in the way all the time. adding another floor above it is much less clunky. and you can make it pretty ❤️
real talk: did you ever get to blueprints?
Ah, but blueprints and drones make it easy to move said creations especially with things being top down :p
Not yet, I got frustrated by combination of little things. But the idea of nuclear is keeping interested in coming back.
i guess both games become a different beasts once blueprints come into play
its where satisfactory also takes off in the architectural department… to a point where getting into Minecraft again is harder after
if you just want to make raw factories without any decorations i assume a top down game is better
I had the same feeling about it. I just got angry playing it.
Oh yeah, the game where you end up blueprinting entire sub-bases and copy-pasting them is “amateur” compared to Satisfactory 🙄
I like Satisfactory but it’s so much more shallow than factorio, especially when mods get involved. It’s also poorly optimized (at least compared to factorio, which I don’t think any game has come close to in that regard). It’s a fun game to play once or twice, or for people who don’t have much time to sink into it, but it gets boring pretty quickly imo. Factorio on the other hand has some of it’s most popular mods take 100+ hours to complete.
There are lots of stories like Last Starfighter where someone is recruited through video games for some fantastical job and some General or something is like “You have the highest score ever, only you can save us!” Always seemed pretty far fetched to me.
But if we were going to another galaxy and they wanted someone to lay out production infrastructure? I could totally see recruiting based on most playtime on steam for Satisfactory.
That movie gave me legit anxiety as a kid. I had this subtle fear that my high score on games at the local arcade or bowling alley would draw me into some deep shit.
I’d keep getting screwed because in RL, you need to build supports before the building they support, not as an afterthought to make it look more realistic.
“Need a bridge? Zoop mode, aaaaand it’s done!” Longest part of building a bridge comes from finding or fighting things on the way.
Don’t forget to call Josh from Let’s Game it Out to create forward outposts that the enemy will find first
If you want to know what could go wrong with anything you’ve built, just leave Josh alone with it for a few minutes.
A planned economy created by factorio players is as genius as it is frightening
“Pack it up, space is cancelled.”
“What, why?”
“We left you alone for a week and now every square inch of this planet is completely covered in factories. It’s unlivable. We’ll have to get the Planet Crafter guy to terraform a new planet and start over.”
Joel from Arrowhead looks up
“Covered in factories you say? Sounds like a breeding ground for Automatons.”
🎵Buh buh buh bunhh🎵
“Hey there it’s Josh from Let’s Game It Out.”
Dear god! Who sent him .
Get the Minecraft Reclamation lady to fix it
Hand over the reins of one nation each to the top players of: Factorio, EVE Online, Dwarf Fortress, HOI4, Minecraft, Kerbal Space Program, Cities Skylines, etc.
City skylines would be the best place to live, and would have a natural friendship with factorio.
It would be a bit weird making a bowl of cereal and having a freight train blast up to your house at 200mph, a robot flies out of the depot just past the dog park, skims above the pedestrian walkways at just under the speed of sound, unloads the single stack of of cereal boxes that the train is carrying and sticks it in your pantry before they both vanish just as fast. You only had a half a box of raisin bran left and you hit the resupply threshold.
Guess I need to finally play Factorio.
I would recommend it. It can take a minute your first time through to get to some of the intense optimization stuff, but a lot of it’s there really early.
The dominant gameplay loop by far is “you have tools. There’s a new problem to solve with those tools that’s hard/tedious. Solving it means you can make tools that make the problem easier. Goto step one”.
Don’t forget Terraria :)
Oh God what fresh hell are you planning on putting people into‽
“Yeah you got a house! It’s got a trapdoor over there as an entrance, a single chair like structure in the corner and a flat top lamp in the other one. I am particularly proud of that one because it’s both cheap, provides just enough light to count and can technically be used as a flat surface!”
Yeah, same here. Nothing beats building a massive industrial complex from scratch
Praise the Omnissiah!
Oxygen not included - more evil than factorico - at least for me.
I have never felt more like a mad scientist. Beautiful game.
It’s my top game these days, and there’s always more to learn
It is an amazing adhd game :)
ONI has amazing “process engineering” where you take some substance, use a machine to transform it into another, feed it into a third, etc.
But, what’s extra great about it is that it also includes a pretty basic, but still fully functional simulation of chemistry and physics. So, you can feed oil to the oil refinery to get petroleum, but it’s only 50% efficient. If you want a more efficient process you can boil the petroleum instead by dropping oil onto something hot. But doing that generates petroleum that’s at hundreds of degrees so you need to cool it down. So, instead of just doing that, you can pre-heat the oil coming into the boiler using the petroleum that the boiler produces, creating a counter-flow heat exchanger that cools the petroleum while pre-heating the oil.
Factorio is great at making you automate to save time. Endless map, with more and bigger resource piles as you move away.
ONI is about fighting entropy. Everything starts in a nice and easy to use format, but as you use it, you make all this waste heat and matter. It’s about finding ways to use all the waste products, or build natural means to convert materials by running pipes through areas of excess heat.
Yeah, good description. Fighting Entropy is really the trick that makes ONI great. I just love how at the beginning heat isn’t even on your radar as something to worry about. You might not even know that the heat overlay exists. But, by the mid-game if you don’t start handling heat suddenly everything starts breaking.
Also, the size is another big difference. Factorio has that endless map where you just keep expanding your conveyor belts. The further out you go, the more you have to worry about aliens, but after a while that isn’t much of an issue. Meanwhile in ONI as you start making bigger and bigger colonies, it starts to feel cramped.
The factorio dev blog has some good reads about finding the right balance of tedium as driving mechanism to figure out automation and also needing the game to be enjoyable. Basically the moment an activity becomes stale they want you to be able to automate it
This just sounds like Factorio with Angel’s mods…
I do not want to admit how much time it took to build a working boiler. My magma volcano was under powered so the whole cooling with the oil generators didn’t work.
Then I moved (destroyed the old one) and built a brand new in the core layer. Now that worked. But meanwhile my hydrogen production and oxygen generayors died down because the natural gas geysers and the excess co2 clogged my airways…Yeah, a minor deviation from a working contraption can mean it fails completely. They’re often really unforgiving. But, they’re so satisfying when they work.
Oh man, ONI is the one I managed to get into for a while. I find the physics/chemistry simulation the most interesting. Having the environment itself trying its hardest to kill you is very fascinating. One doesn’t need any space aliens, the space itself is immensely hostile.
I do love that the biggest challenge is your own incompetence. If you don’t know what to look out for, if you forfot to fix something, ifyou don’t build contingencies… Everything is your own fault :D
Factorio is like an addiction… I hate this game and I hate myself for not being able to stop playing it.
Reminder that Factorio director have an history of problematic statements (rape, racism, homophobia)
Really? Which one? I hadn’t heard about anything - sucks if true
E: looks like Kovarik had some controversial comments that might be worth looking into if folks are considering buying Factorio
Kovarex defend teachers sleeping with their students and one of his dev (Uncle Bob?) who made racist and homophobic post, Kovarex said that he don’t care since this is not important for the job.
Most of this post have now been deleted
No. He was discussing something technical and linked an article by uncle bob, someone tried to argue about uncle bob being a bad person. kovarex said that him being a piece of shit doesn’t mean the technical thing he is describing in the article is wrong.
This is a really forced smear campaign against him that’s being pushed by russian and tankies accounts of Wube came out in support of Ukraine.
It’s a shame how many people here are willing to just pretend those statements don’t exist and handwave then away because they like the game.
Also, the game has never gone on sale, and in fact saw a price INCREASE years after launch. $30 was already a bit steep for a game like this when there are tons of similar indie RTS’s for $10-$20 that go on sale, and they increased it to $35. And then added a $30 DLC on top of that. If you’re looking for a good value RTS- Dwarf Fortress is free, and if you want you can pay $30 for the nicer version and support devs who, afaik, do not have such controversy attached.
Doesn’t affect me cause I pirate everything anyway.
Here’s a couple of articles regarding the director.
https://nichegamer.com/attempts-to-cancel-factorio-dev-backfire-players-and-positive-reviews-swell/
https://nichegamer.com/factorio-founder-kovarex-interview-cancel-culture-and-secret-support/Kovarex’s responses to the criticism he has received seem entirely reasonable.
Recommending an article by an alleged bigot, on an entirely technical subject, does not make the recommender a bigot by association.
This is an example of a problematic statement. Due to one link to a technical paper. You try to paint kovarex with the actions of another person. Claiming a “history of problematic statements” is just a blatant lie. This type of slander is imho a more problematic statement then kovarex linking of a technical paper.
I myself have never researched the history of every author, on every webpage i have ever linked to. It is just not a reasonable ask.
:( like wtf man
Satisfactory it is then
+1 for Satisfactory. It is more than satisfactory
It’s a good game, but I’m much more into factorio. It’s just much easier to manage a factory when seen top down.
I like the fun and challenge of having to work around the 3d terrain. It does cause some super ugly results sometimes, but that is part of the fun
Yeah, the 3d is what makes it amazing for me. I have a 15 level factory going, and it’s so much fun to shoot stuff up and down levels.
Just to give a bit of context to this allegation, Kovarex linked an article written by Uncle Bob, who has made some awful statements.
When called out for this, Kovarex asserted that it’s irrelevant because the article he linked wasn’t to do with any of that.
He didn’t defend Uncle Bob’s statements just that it didn’t make him (Kovarex) worthy of cancelling because of it and how Internet culture means that everyone has to be an enemy or ally with no room for any nuance.
Wait, so someone is criticizing Factorio because someone who worked on Factorio linked to an article written by someone who has, at some point in the past, made awful statements?
Man, that’s some bullshit.
I can’t imagine that line of thinking in, say, science
“Yeah, very interesting article but it is rejected because you cited an article made by someone who once coauthored another article with a racist individual”
Wow my drug dealer is an asshole, shocker.

















