The article mentions one of the main appeals of factorio is you get to think like a programmer without bosses/overhead from actual work but it’s always been hard to get into games for that reason because I could just work on a side project with the same result. I really don’t understand the appeal.
I remember when Guitar Hero came out I didn't understand why anybody would play that instead of just buying a guitar. The point is the videogame itself is designed to be fun and remove plenty of other elements from the real life equivalent that focuses more on enjoyment and less on grinding it out. If you're thinking about "what have I accomplished?" instead of "I'm having so much fun!" then it might not be for you.
The other aspect is there are plenty of people that like to think like programmers, but have no experience programming and the barrier to entry for a videogame is substantially lower than even figuring out a "hello world!" program for someone who wouldn't even know how to pick a programming language.
Your comparison hits home for me. I have been playing guitar on-and-off for over a decade (OK, maybe more like trying to play guitar) and I still really enjoy Guitar Hero.
It's instant gratification: I don't have as much fun practicing at .75x speed with a metronome to learn the hard part of a piece. Instead a video game tells me how great I am at "guitar" by being able to push buttons and strum on the beat, not to mention that I hear the sounds of my favorite songs come out when I do it.
For a similar reason, I like Rocksmith (guitar hero but with a real guitar), but the gratification is not quite so instant. They gamify the practicing part but I still need to do it, otherwise the part I'm playing actually sounds bad. And sight-reading is so much harder when there are more than 5 buttons.
I can't stand Guitar Hero because it's nothing like playing a real guitar and I'm therefore no good at it. At least the Rock Band drums vaguely approximate playing a cheap e-kit and the vocal part has proper pitch detection... unfortunately a real guitar is hard to replicate with cheap plastic hardware. There's also the fact that memorizing a real song is easier than memorizing colored buttons because you can build a mental model of the song around your knowledge of music theory.
On the topic of complex games a la Factorio: I've been playing a lot of Age of Empires II with my friends lately and have come to enjoy it. I previously shied away from RTSes because I was terrified of the meta but I've gotten decent enough to consistently beat the CPU on Moderate. I have no shot of ever commanding an army of trebuchets and knights in real life so doing it on my ThinkPad via Proton is the next best thing :-D
Ha, I was watching a SOTL video earlier today to learn how to better plan my military build. I was a Fast Castle -> Boom adherent until a week or two ago because I kept getting got by the CPU rushing me during Feudal without having my defenses built... these days I basically do Dark Age the same every time then adjust my strategy based on the map, enemy civs, etc.
As someone that plays music professionally and who enjoyed Rock Band, I think that the issue is a lot of folks find satisfaction in matering skills and checking off boxes that other folks design for them.
Designing a satisfying skill progression takes a lot of work. I know what I will have to do if I, say, take up mandolin again seriously, and it's daunting- and worse, maybe it won't even lead to a satisfying or useful end... I will still do that at some point. I had the same feeling about cello or pedal steel guitar, and they all turned out okay.
At the same time I totally understand why following simple tutorials, running a preset course, climbing an established route, riding already-cleared bike trails, or playing a video game with few possible outcomes can be satisfying.
On the other hand, video games enable a wide breadth of intellectual experiences.
Being a simulated guitar hero and simulated pro skater is more enriching than the likely baseline of having zero experience with either.
And, video games can help in discovering real world passions — the number of guitarists who found their inspirational spark through Guitar Hero is likely significant. Same for Factorio or Minecraft -> programming.
If I could have got a steady hand with tweezers, I could easily have been a surgeon. Real patients probably don’t have noses that light up, which reduces distractions too!
The problem with side projects is that they do not have a well defined goal. Or they do, in which case something like Factorio won't have any appeal because you can just work on something more meaningful instead. Factorio is for people who want to keep programming but are too frustrated or cynical about the real world to do it there. If the real world was better, they would do it there. If the real world could be fixed with programming, they would do it there. Many have tried, only to discover that what they thought were technical problems are really people problems.
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? People saying "whoa, hey, great work but let's talk about this. I see here you've made assumption X about implementation area Y and that actually conflicts with the direction that we had in mind for the upcoming release, so let's talk more. To start, we'd like to see if we can explore option Z, thoughts?"
That ain't fun. It's rewarding but it ain't fun. Not like sitting down and messing with Legos in your own house is fun, or building a silly factory in Factorio is fun.
> 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!
I know a person who 2x'ed BTLE transfer speeds by herself by coming up with a new protocol to talk to iPhones w/o the need for one of Apple's security chips.
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 reader to come along.
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.
This isn’t a feasible pathway outside of a lifetime commitment, because it takes several decades to build up enough credibility to reliably advance proposals in such committee work. (Or be very lucky )
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.
Also, are there video games with ML-powered opponents or NPCs that'll act more like humans instead of the old-fashioned decision tree AIs? Seems about time. I know there are research projects that tried this for things like Starcraft 2.
Also saw Facebook's experimental Diplomacy AI. Wish that were usable the time we lost a player.
I'm looking over the sentences in the comment you replied to and I can't figure out where you would have gotten lost, can you quote the partial sentence that confused you?
It starts out as a typical programmer rant these days about AI assistants and LLM fine tuning and then goes on to complain how sadly, they don't work for this game yet. So he's forced to play it manually. How old fashioned.
Oh well if you thought someone was going to say they dislike LLMs failures so they want fewer LLMs, and instead they say they dislike LLM failures so they want LLMs to be trained more, that's not a garden path. You don't have to back up and re-process the previous words. And in particular a garden path sentence does it grammatically. You suddenly realize you were getting parts of speech wrong.
Mindusry scratches the same itch, but in perhaps a slightly more appealing way for me at least. Rather than the entire game being dedicated to creating one massive monolith dedicated to the one goal of rocket building or whatever, there are many different levels each where you’re just playing classic tower defense and using the layout of the map to your advantage to extract resources and kill bad guys. It’s casual and FOSS.
the expansion adds separate planets and multiple space-platforms. So it moves away from the monolith and towards multiple smaller factories. (In the end-game you probably and up with a massive monolith again, but until then you will have multiple medium-sized factories).
> ... classic tower defense and using the layout of the map to your advantage to extract resources and kill bad guys
Each new area add some unique defense-need, e.g. in space you have to shoot at incoming asteroids, and on the lava-planet, you have to build temporary mining-outposts, that get eaten by worms after a couple of minutes. (The other planes probably add something like that too, but I haven't played so far yet)
I think Factorio, Mindustry and Satisfactory is a "choose one" trio for any gamer to like. They share similar goals (factory building), but approaches are quite different.
hopefully not a spoiler given the name, but the space mod that was released on Monday opens new planets to explore, after you manage to build the rocket to space on the first level, so it's no longer an "entire game being dedicated to creating one massive monolith dedicated to the one goal of rocket building"
I do get the appeal of games, it is one of my long-time passions, but indeed that's the issue with games like Factorio specifically, they feel too much like work, so might as well do work.
This, long ago a roomate got into Factorio and after figuring out the basics ended up admitting that it felt way too much like work. This has been my reason to stay out of Factorio even though plenty of people have recommended it to me. I did a short collaborative run of Mindustry and I feel I don't need to play Factorio, plus, Counter-Strike chugs all my playing time, to me it's a bit like cocaine made a game and except for griding aim, it scratches all the right spots in my (smooth?) brain.
It's the trucking game for truckers in my mind, only a madman would play it after work.
Exactly yes, I wouldn't say it's only for engineers, it is perfect for smart people who chose a different path in life and need to feed this part of their brain with a fun simplified simulation of what it's like to be an engineer.
Of course, engineers would love this game, but we already engage in this type of activity all day much more intensely precisely because we love it, we already know how to do more interesting and valuable things with the same effort.
Similarly, I really lost the appetite for hard decision-making strategy games when I founded my startup. I was already having to take plenty of hard decisions, thank you very much, the real thing is much more interesting and more than enough.
I feel the same about another pretty chill game, Dave the Diver. It has a great feedback loop, at the beginning
Once I get successful in it, I'm like "but I should be making money in the real world, not this world" as I do have side projects. the game does turn into a slog, if you approach it that way
Dave the Diver just turns into a slog is all. It's fantastic at the start when everything is novel, and all the systems hold promise. But the systems themselves turn out to not have good gameplay loops, so right around the underwater village it starts to kinda suck, which ironically is right around when all the systems are mature enough that to play well you have a giant list of "todo" items across a variety of systems, many of which you may find boring, but are obliged to interact with anyway, sort of like real life.
The advantage a game like factorio has over DtD is that you can kind of abandon huge sections and "start fresh" while still collecting rent from the work you did earlier to fund your new excursions. I guess DtD does this to a degree, but there's a lot less freedom of intellectual movement.
This is why I like Against the Storm. It is a novel (if familiar) challenge every time, and every time you "beat the odds" the game forces you to move on to the next harder challenge, "you beat this puzzle, you need a harder on."
just looked up Against the Storm, looks like the board game Agricola, where the goal is to build and farm and survive the winter. I always found Agricola ironic, in that is masquarades as a PvP game, where your survival outcome is then compared to the other players, but its very stressful as there are not enough resources on the board for your family.
so thats what made it too much like real life for me, because you're like struggling but then pretending like you are flexing (look at the size of my house! my farm!), but really everyone barely made it at all
maybe Against the Storm as a single player journey makes more sense
I've played both, I absolutely love both, but they don't have that much to do with each other.
Against the Storm is all about setting up complex production chains, not necessarily linking them explicitly like in Factorio, but more about balancing resource availability and assigning workers. It's a lot like other resource-focused city builders like Anno, but it is very well designed to impose a constant pressure on the player, always on a rush to meet goals before the whole thing crumbles, constantly putting out fires in the system (sometimes literal fires).
The name is perfect, in that you build this complex machine, and it is constantly stress-tested by periodic hazards. It's an awesome rush to "hold-fast", scramble to desperately fix things, constantly on the edge, hoping that the storm will end soon because the whole thing is about to crumble, while rushing to fulfil the objectives so you can get out of there before it gets too bad.
Frospunk evokes this feeling really well too. I suppose Factorio is kinda similar with the alien attacks. Come to think of it, the pressure to feed the family and the final scramble for points in Agricola are not so dissimilar either.
> Once I get successful in it, I'm like "but I should be making money in the real world, not this world" as I do have side projects. the game does turn into a slog, if you approach it that way
Life is a slog if approached that way. Spending your time chasing more money instead of enjoying life is the quickest way to have a miserable existence.
I find the game motivational after a very profitable shift, in game.
But I wasn’t looking for devil’s advocate or solutions, us guys need to affirm each other’s experiences more often.
I also do enjoy very profitable sessions in life, the pursuit of money itself is fulfilling for me as it already is a massive multiplayer game pvp. Additionally, I would usually prefer to be doing entertainment options exclusive to the level of profits that have been manifested. But I love the existence that allows me to play video games with no consequence.
The stakes (there are none except ones you set for yourself)
The timeline (quick returns, but a long scale of challenges you can build up to. Lots of side projects out there with 0 users.)
You can play with friends
You can also pay 1/4 attention until you need to design something complex in the game. I find it fun, I can turn my brain off for a bit but then re/engage for the fun complex stuff.
I stopped playing as much myself because I wanted to either work on professional development (side projects, learning more) or actually make things with my hands (woodworking, chair making, fixing an old truck) that were real breaks from software engineering, and easier to share with my kids.
I feel guilty every time I turn on Factorio and basically no longer play it because I know I could have just as much enjoyment building something for the real world.
I've yet to find something I can do in the real world that's as enjoyable, accessible, affordable, and easy to pick up and put down as Factorio, or similar games (that scratch a "builder" itch). What sort of things do you have in mind?
Well the reason I enjoy Factorio in the first place is because I love automating things, not necessarily the building part. There's an endless amount of things I can automate in my life or for others, and the effort I put into building those automatons, whether is personal or professional, continues to provide value after I'm finished. I have 1k hours in Factorio, while those hours did provide value to me, that value is pretty finite. That's my logic at least, I just feel guilty playing it looking at it through that lense. I got like 50 private repositories that aren't finished, or are interesting and fun that could provide just as much satisfaction and possibly continue to provide value in my life even after I'm finished with them. Right now I'm working on a little project to buzz myself into the front door of my building via an app on my phone that triggers the buzzer in my apartment that is a weird analog system that's 60 + years old (but funnily enough is called Auth Master). Not complicated or intense, but fun and interesting and will provide a standard of living improvement for me for years to come (assuming I don't move) after I finish!
For me it's me PhD thesis. It's a drug, and there's always something to do either on the code or writing or reading. I'm even a bit disappointed by Space Age.
I play Cities Skylines for that reason I have to debug the traffic but mostly have fun building the city the way I want. Like once I feel like building a lot of tram lines, other time building train lines.
I also build side projects - but from the game I get instant gratification as I can build decent city with goal I have in one evening whereas side project to have anything I can say is pleasing takes much more time than one evening.
Games don't have annoying blockers like trying to use some new library, cities I build also did not work first times I was playing because I was noob - but even libraries frameworks I use on daily basis always have some kinks I have to figure out so it takes multiple evening anyway.
That’s funny! I play because I don’t code in my job so this scratches my itch with instant feedback. Now if only I was good at coding…i probably should do a side project
In a similar way I think more people should change a flat tire or change the oil in their car. I think it will make them more aware, but they don't have to become a mechanic.
[1] A rite of passage is a ceremony or ritual of the passage which occurs when an individual leaves one group to enter another. It involves a significant change of status in society.
There's an in-between experience with the likes of the Natural Number Game or Project Euler -- it feels like there should be so much more of that kind of thing to substitute for so much of legacy education. Most "learning games" afaik are too "schooley".
I haven't played Factorio so far; for those who haven't programmed, do you think you're learning something new and somewhat transferable?
Games are much easier than real work and provide more consistent dopamine hits with their graphics, sound effects and feeling of progression. Factorio while fun is a long way from real work.
Factorio is more fun than any side project. While it hits a similar area of the brain as programming does (the problem solving zone), it's definitely not the same.
That is debatable. I get more satisfaction from working on a side project that I know matters in the real life, outside of the gaming scene, and it is fun working on it myself, and the same thing applies here: no bosses, deadlines, etc.
Sometimes you just want to expend energy in a direction that doesn't have consequences. I hold the opposite opinion from you in that people ought to be able to turn off the "any non-productive minute of my life is wasted" mindset.
Most "side projects" have no users, other than maybe their creator, and therefore provide zero value to society. Furthermore, there's no intrinsic value in "contributing to society" — a term that is completely arbitrary, anyway. If the idea that you can improve society with your projects provides you joy, more power to you, but that's all it should boil down to: doing what you enjoy the most.
I agree that "contributing to society" has no intrinsic value. It is my own.
I feel like I waste my time when I play video games, but this is recent. I used to play a lot till age 24 or something. This feeling stops me from playing, but even if I do end up playing, I feel guilty afterwards that my time went to something that ultimately "does not matter". That said, playing something for fun is entertainment, it should matter, but I still get those feelings nevertheless. I hope this makes sense. I am not trying to argue that "fun" does not matter, I suppose I am just not so fun anymore. :P
It depends though, if I play a video game with my girlfriend it is alright.
I 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 this.
The games I play instead are wholly unrelated to my work life, such as FPS or RPG ones, where there is a clear distinction between what I can do and what I want to do.
"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 the design do something else.
> 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.
This makes me sad.
You don’t need to make software for mass appeal.
Git is weird and bizarre (especially when initially released), but it’s used and well loved.
> 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 means, e.g., you need to remember to load the grocery list before leaving the house that has the server in it and better hope your phone doesn't decide for you that the page needs to be unloaded on the way!
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?
> 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
That's... the situation as described in the post which the comment above you was responding to?
> The only downside is that internet connectivity being down means, e.g., you need to remember to load the grocery list before leaving the house that has the server in it
Wireguard or Tailscale Inc. are not magically going to resolve that situation. Does Tailscale even work locally if your internet is down or does it require their cloud for NAT punching regardless of whether you're on the server's LAN? For starters
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.
I won't go so far as to say I'm disgusted by what others do, but I am increasingly resenting having to use my phone for myriad tasks that shouldn't require a phone in the first place. Like unlocking my apartment door. It's obviously so that someone can get a recurring cut where they would have once provided a one-time semi-permanent solution (like a key, or a notepad).
I mean, maybe some of this will be blunted over time as open source slowly eats away at these utilities, but until then I view my phone like a grenade, or a drug, or a slot machine, or a money-eater.
My apartment recently moved over to “smart locks” and I immediately noped out (app is slow), choosing to memorize the codes instead. This was clearly an afterthought since about 40% of the time touches are missed when using the keypads.
Why anyone wanted to unlock their door with their phone instead of tapping a fob, I’m not sure, but the only interesting feature (temp access for friends) doesn’t seem worth it.
"Why anyone wanted to unlock their door with their phone instead of tapping a fob, "
I would want to do it with my phone because then I only have to have one thing to carry around with me. I haven't carried a key ring in years. I don't even carry a wallet these days. It's really quite useful. Way fewer trips back to fetch the keys/wallet, etc.
> I would want to do it with my phone because then I only have to have one thing to carry around with me.
I would prefer this to be a keyring over a phone for aforementioned reasons. Secondly, the app is buggy and often just fails to work. Third, it takes a good deal of time to take out the phone and fumble around with the software.
Maybe, but if you really don’t want to carry stuff around then it’s optimal to just type the code in (…which is why it makes zero sense that the keypads suck. except that they were being cheap.)
Then what I'm carrying around is a bunch of codes in my head which is its own form of baggage, or I re-use the codes and that comes with the same risks as reusing passwords has. Using the phone for everything has risks too, but I think not much differently than a password manager does, and most phones I've used have a reasonable device recovery process (not that I've had to use them or have expertise in that area...).
Carrying a single thing (which has a bunch of other uses than just access control) doesn't feel like a burden to me.
That said, I don't disagree at all that the typical keypad for access control on everything pretty much sucks. My front door has like 4 buttons only and does the telephone keyboard thing of using the same button for multiple 'numbers' in your code. Time to jump on amazon to look for a decent front door lock that works with my phone :)
> It's obviously so that someone can get a recurring cut
As the person who started this discussion about needing software for household things, let me be clear that this is not the sort of situation I'm talking about! The things I use, I either made or maintain myself because it's my hobby. Nobody needs to use them who doesn't want to and there is no cut. I think the conversation diverges here as this is not the same situation! Probably anyone would agree that being forced to use something or other is very different from being able to use something or other.
In the part of the world where I currently live there are cafes/restaurants that have a menu ONLY in the form a QR code that leads to some shitty slow and laggy webpage with the actual menu. I can't express how much I hate this.
Why do I even need a smartphone the go to a restaurant and eat something? Why would anyone effectively refusing service to people who don't have smartphones or do not want to use them? If I need their service and have money to pay for it why would they put additional obstacles in my way? What's their motivation for scaring of a potential customer using totally arbitrary criteria that has nothing to do with the service they provide?
This. And then getting shouted at or (less than politely) talked down to for wanting to talk to the staff for how they deal allergies. Only to finally load the menu, show them the information isn’t there, and promptly walk out.
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
I'm getting the distinct impression that handwriting human language may be beyond the basic capabilities of the Modern Human.
Seems to be memory and basic cognitive difficulties such as "sorting" whatever that means when actually buying the stuff in the store. I've been buying stuff in stores constantly for 50 years and I'm very fast, without aid.
But boy howdy these devices sound like just the tool for people with actual cognitive difficulties; we should make definitely sure that they have them. Might be a problem though on the data entry side.
Yeah, as a last resort that is a good suggestion. On a proper computer you could even use "save page as" and have it run the javascript so you can use all of the functionality (e.g., checking items off, or temporarily hiding when you're planning to get them in the next store) except that the syncing will fail until you get back home, which would be okay then.
It's a rare situation though, otherwise it would have been worth it to make a proper app that caches all data locally rather than a webpage
> You don’t need to make software for mass appeal.
Some people, like myself, enjoy writing code but need a purpose to write code. If I don’t have a reason, or problem to solve, I can’t just sit down and start coding.
Honestly, that fits into the same boat for me. I like fixing problems for people and I’m not particularly creative in the classical sense. So messing with visual effects for the sake of it doesn’t really do it for me. Weirdly, if someone needed it for something, I’d probably pull a 60 hour shift to figure it all out ;-P
I mean, what is “useful” in the sense of “paying the bills” is quite different from “useful” in the sense of social utility - and what you _perceive_ as social utility is a whole other thing on top of that, that’s only _hopefully_ somewhat aligned with the actual thing.
Working on something that feels like it’s only useful as a way to extract money is incredibly unrewarding in my experience, to the point of increasing my feeling of burnout.
Useful does not mean mass appeal. The software I got paid the most to write is used by a handful of people on a manufacturing site and 99.9999999999% of the public will never see it.
It solved a problem they had and I’m proud of it but yea it’s incredibly niche and useful to a very select few people.
I don’t disagree and, to be honest, that kind of work is something I really enjoy.
I’m mostly, personally, talking about building toy apps or hacking my microwave to play Doom. Not throwing shade at those who do, it’s just not what motivates me.
> You don’t need to make software for mass appeal.
In Factorio, the things you make don't need to have *any* appeal. It's just fun.
If you have more fun making random wonky software, that's great for you and I'm happy for you. But I personally find Factorio to be more fun than software when I'm trying to enjoy my days off. (at least, some of the time. Sometimes I have fun making software too but only if I have that 'itch'. With Factorio, it's fun even if I don't have an itch)
Maybe it's just rose-tinted-glasses, but I remember a time when software was split between "IBM-Corpo" culture, and zany SV/MIT/Caltech culture where people threw things at the wall and proceeded when stuff stuck.
It kind of saddens me that it feels like it's now only IBM-Corpo, and everyone feels the need to be ever-productive and adhere to strict rules and schema.
tl;dr : I remember when the fun Factorio game was qbasic.exe and no one blinked about it. We all had fun.
> It kind of saddens me that it feels like it's now only IBM-Corpo
I think about this whenever I see a new open source library hosted on its own domain with a polished and slick promo material. I really don't mean to throw shade at designers for making nice designs, but it just feels weird and corporate-y to me that the polish is a priority.
There are, of course, open source projects that serve as a hook for selling SaaS products, which is corporate by nature and thus doesn't trigger the same feeling in me.
the permaculture of: patches in emails; binaries on usenet; releases / of sources on maybe less savoury personal web sites
otoh lack of basically centralized source control / git / hub / lab etc would also be missed dearly
depending on context: corporate polish can be fine; especially if software "is infra"; let truly (?) fun inconsequential software be messy and / or fun if sparks joy
apropos permaculture: i enjoyed TIS-100 but never got interested by factorio (maybe its art?) but anyways i'd personally find it more interesting to see more declarative / triggered simulation / play out in ever interesting ways
so maybe biologic systems over industry in space?
maybe there exist such games already? they do in my mind at least; i should look into current simulation frameworks maybe and read up on ecology
TIS-100 was one example of the general context of "programming in games" or "games as programming" which I've actually played and enjoyed. I get that Factorio has a different game loop and broader sandbox than TIS-100, so I can see where you're coming from. Factorio, on the outset however, hasn't quite gripped me. Again, it might be this particular one's art and overall setup, but TBH I also think that outside of constrained puzzling as you say, I'm much more inclined to work on all those little side projects desperately waiting for attention...
In some ways, this reminds me of Guitar Hero and its set of games. As great as those are for getting into music, once you're already into it, it can feel like time that could have been better spent on deliberate practice or at least some good old jamming for fun. I do love games, as long as they don't take up too much time and have an ending. In an earlier life I've already burned plenty of midnight oil on similarly "open ended" play (4X and other strategy or construction games are the worst traps for me). I'd rather finish BG3 at some point - at least that one has a definitive end to the player's story and is a bit more of a change of scenery from what I do for a living (building and optimizing systems).
Then again... maybe I'll finally try Satisfactory which I own through Humble Choice IIRC; or maybe I should avoid doing that at all costs for the reasons above... ;)
Not long after his immersion in LIFE, Gosper himself got a glimpse of the limits of the tight circle the hackers had drawn. It happened in the man-made daylight of the 1972 Apollo 17 moon shot. He was a passenger on a special cruise to the Caribbean, a “science cruise” timed for the launch, and the boat was loaded with sci-fi writers, futurists, scientists of varying stripes, cultural commentators, and, according to Gosper, “an unbelievable quantity of just completely empty-headed cruise-niks.”
Gosper was there as part of Marvin Minsky’s party. He got to engage in discussion with the likes of Norman Mailer, Katherine Anne Porter, Isaac Asimov, and Carl Sagan, who impressed Gosper with his Ping-Pong playing. For real competition, Gosper snuck in some forbidden matches with the Indonesian crewmen, who were by far the best players on the boat.
Apollo 17 was to be the first manned space shot initiated at night, and the cruise boat was sitting three miles off Cape Kennedy for an advantageous view of the launch. Gosper had heard all the arguments against going to the trouble of seeing a liftoff—why not watch it on television, since you’ll be miles away from the actual launching pad? But when he saw the damn thing actually lift off, he appreciated the distance. The night had been set ablaze, and the energy peak got to his very insides. The shirt slapped on his chest, the change in his pocket jingled, and the PA system speakers broke from their brackets on the viewing stand and dangled by their power cords. The rocket, which of course never could have held to so true a course without computers, leapt into the sky, hell-bent for the cosmos like some flaming avenger, a Spacewar nightmare; the cruise-niks were stunned into trances by the power and glory of the sight. The Indonesian crewmen went berserk. Gosper later recalled them running around in a panic and throwing their Ping-Pong equipment overboard, “like some kind of sacrifice.”
The sight affected Gosper profoundly. Before that night, Gosper had disdained NASA’s human-wave approach toward things. He had been adamant in defending the AI lab’s more individualistic form of hacker elegance in programming, and in computing style in general. But now he saw how the real world, when it got its mind made up, could have an astounding effect. NASA had not applied the Hacker Ethic, yet it had done something the lab, for all its pioneering, never could have done. Gosper realized that the ninth-floor hackers were in some sense deluding themselves, working on machines of relatively little power compared to the computers of the future—yet still trying to do it all, change the world right there in the lab. And since the state of computing had not yet developed machines with the power to change the world at large—certainly nothing to make your chest rumble as did the NASA operation—all that the hackers wound up doing was making Tools to Make Tools. It was embarrassing.
Gosper’s revelation led him to believe that the hackers could change things—just make the computers bigger, more powerful, without skimping on expense. But the problem went even deeper than that. While the mastery of the hackers had indeed made computer programming a spiritual pursuit, a magical art, and while the culture of the lab was developed to the point of a technological Walden Pond, something was essentially lacking.
The world.
As much as the hackers tried to make their own world on the ninth floor, it could not be done. The movement of key people was inevitable. And the harsh realities of funding hit Tech Square in the seventies: ARPA, adhering to the strict new Mansfield Amendment passed by Congress, had to ask for specific justification for many computer projects. The unlimited funds for basic research were drying up; ARPA was pushing some pet projects like speech recognition (which would have directly increased the government’s ability to mass-monitor phone conversations abroad and at home). Minsky thought the policy was a “losing” one, and distanced the AI lab from it. But there was no longer enough money to hire anyone who showed exceptional talent for hacking. And slowly, as MIT itself became more ensconced in training students for conventional computer studies, the Institute’s attitude to computer studies shifted focus somewhat. The AI lab began to look for teachers as well as researchers, and the hackers were seldom interested in the bureaucratic hassles, social demands, and lack of hands-on machine time that came with teaching courses.
Levy, Steven. Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution - 25th Anniversary Edition
Thundering towers blasting into space is a primal thrill... but what if the hackers can do all of that with some aluminum foil, duct tape, and other things found in every garage workshop?
Big and flashy bets are expensive, many small bets are a far, far better way to explore the design space, especially now that we can share all the results with almost no cost.
The hacker culture is still there but hacker social media (unless carefully curated) is flooded with optimized content to the point where the cool stuff is hard to find and you only see the grifter techs.
There’s loads of hacker spirit still alive in the homelab and home automation space just to give one example.
Having lots of fun tinkering with Proxmox, Wled, Shelly devices to manipulate electric rollers, and more. Couldn’t quite get Valetudo running on my robot vacuum (my model isn’t the easiest to hack) but the concept is so cool. Triggering automations With dirt cheap NFC tags or a cheap wireless numpad is so satisfying.
Building an *arr stack is another area where there’s tons of amazing creativity online and the hacker spirit still lives on.
You don't even have to look per se. The YouTube aglo provides me a lot of interesting content that isn't especially high quality or production value. I do take an effort to ignore click bait as much as possible and click "don't recommend channel" for things like MKBHD and LTT, because those crowd out original content if you let them.
What do you mean, back! There's more than ever! We're overflowing with talented peeps hacking on cool things, writing nice blogs publishing zines, and so forth and on!
The formerly-counterculture conventions got so cult and big they grew a counter-counterculture of smaller places.
Outside the walls of the AI SaaS grind. There be life.
Used? Certainly. Well loved? Oh boy do I disagree.
I think it's an extremely powerful tool, and it's worth knowing how to wield it well, but that power comes at the expense of user friendliness, especially for junior devs who don't have an intuition of git internals and how commands map to them.
The core of Git is incredibly simple and elegant (content addressable database). It's an amazing approach to how to represent the data that needs representing.
The UI is the challenging bit, and that's because Linus just slapped something on to demonstrate it, expecting that a proper UI would be built over the plumbing he'd created.
Rebasing, reflogs, pickaxes, 3 way merges, merge directions, the fact that merge directions are reversed during rebases, are all weird things that are pretty specific to git.
At least as far as how they’re presented
> First time I hear such nonsense
You don’t seem to listen very closely. Linus himself recognized git’s perceived weirdness in a talk he gave about it years ago.
I don't understand, I can make whatever software I want, for whatever purpose, and it can still be impactful, depending on the user. It feels way more impactful than anything I can make in Factorio or similar.
When I asked Kovařík about this, he brought up Euro Truck Simulator, a wilfully mundane game about hauling cargo. The developers, who are friends of his, once told him that many of their most enthusiastic players are ... truckers. Truckers who spend their time off from their trucking jobs pretending to do more trucking ... a lot of people actually enjoy the work they do. They just don’t always enjoy their jobs that much, because of all the things that get in the way of the work.
If you like Power Wash Simulator, you'll LOVE the relaxing meditative idle game Paint Drying Simulator, and the exquisite organic fractal patina of its sequel, Paint Peeling Simulator. ;)
No, it’s boring to use cheap personal attacks (like I responded to) instead of actually engaging. If I wanted to read that, I could find it in YouTube comments.
It depends on whether you make software for a living or for OSS. One does not preclude the other, even if one is rarer. Given my situation, as I had initially stated, I am part of the latter. Even still, were I the former, I still don't get why one would work "for free" basically, especially in terms of a game versus real life.
If you’re building oss with no users, or just for yourself, you’re functionally doing something more like art than coding in terms of how you prioritize and execute.
Here's to hoping things like Patreon and GitHub Sponsors make it more common. These platforms could truly change the way things are done in the software world. Given enough sponsors, I could quit my job and focus on free software every day.
Of course not. I think you misunderstand, if a game is too similar to real life, I am unsure why I should play it, whereas if it is fairly different, such as an FPS, it becomes much more fun for me. My question is primarily on the former, of why people seem to play a game that basically is like work but has no benefit for them. If it's fun for them, then that's fine, but my question more, why is it fun for them in the first place? That's really what I want to figure out.
Sometimes it's fun to do things when there's no real world consequence attached to failure and experimentation even if the mechanics are similar to something we do for work.
I sometimes do project euler puzzles for fun. I'm a CS professor - this starts to feel kinda close to my job. But it's relaxing and there's no pressure and no one is affected when I screw up; I just get to keep kicking at it, or put it down. The freedom makes a big difference.
The "solving an interesting problem" part of my job is the part I love. It's the other stuff I need a break from sometimes. :)
I think I can answer this to some extend. I kinda feel like you do, that playing factorio is time that I could more productively spend on side projects (especially considering how much time it costs), but I don’t kill bugs in side projects, don’t build train lines, don’t build spaceships. I play factorio because the dopamine hit when something comes together is nearly the same, but the actions I take are different enough to stay fun.
Also, I just think it’s good to not look at something that’s too much like work once in a while. Even if factorio is closer than many other things.
It's fun to solve problems. How do I optimize this sub-factory? - That's the same fun as "how do I optimize this function" but instead of a green light from my test runner one gets a colorful display of a working factory with a visible result. The fact that I reduced memory usage of that function by 10% I don't see in that way. And probably both both are equal in benefit to humanity's progress (zero)
> 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.
Sue you do. And you’re not obliged to keep it in some workable form just because they use it, they can use something else.
>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.
More counter-examples: LaTeX, vim, Regex, Blender, SAP, most Unix CLIs...
I feel the same way, I was building something in a game 10 years ago and I thought to myself, “I’m putting all this effort into this game and at the end I won’t really have anything to show for it and this feels like the same energy I use when programming, let me program instead”.
This thought changed me from someone who plays games to someone who makes games.
The only real game I find entertaining and fun these days is Rocket League, everything else feels slow and boring or I could be using this energy for something else.
> I’m putting all this effort into this game and at the end I won’t really have anything to show for it
You will have something to show for it: Joy.
If your only interest is to invest effort into producing something that provides some kind of physical value, then of course work will be more interesting than games.
Development has fun parts and it has tedious parts. The tedious parts are what usually makes for a good product. Factorio removes that part; because it is not about producing a product, it's about having fun.
> Not sure if it’s a blessing or a curse.
That's up to you, but for me it'd be a curse, not being able to do thing just for fun anymore, because of always feeling a pressure to be productive.
> Development has fun parts and it has tedious parts. The tedious parts are what usually makes for a good product. Factorio removes that part; because it is not about producing a product, it's about having fun.
Factorio also has tons of tedious parts. It really isn't all that different in that regard in my experience.
There are many games these days that are designed to have a certain element of tediousness (grind) in them, because this gives you the sense of being productive without actually producing anything.
> That's up to you, but for me it'd be a curse, not being able to do thing just for fun anymore, because of always feeling a pressure to be productive.
I don't think they mean to say they always feel a pressure to be productive. If it costs you exactly the same amount of energy and you get the same amount of joy from it, then why would you not choose an activity that produces something of enduring value?
> Factorio also has tons of tedious parts. It really isn't all that different in that regard in my experience.
I would say that the only boring part is before you get bots. Then your role shifts from builder to designer. All the tools given to you (ctrl+c/x, up/downgrade planners, rail autocomplete, ...) just make building effortles, and most of your time is spent in design, analyzing and debugging your factory, while the changes are done for you as you work.
You're discounting the joy you get from actually solving a problem for yourself and other people which can provide serious long term satisfaction and monetary rewards.
For diversion, I try disconnecting from screens and doing something healthy that involves the use of my physical body. I find walking, hiking, swimming and running very enjoyable. I'm also a big fan of tennis, racquetball and table tennis. I still play video games occasionally when there's not an option to engage with the physical world for diversion but I really prefer chess to most modern video games.
> You're discounting the joy you get from actually solving a problem for yourself and other people which can provide serious long term satisfaction and monetary rewards.
Key word: can.
You can also waste your time and end up with something no one will use. In fact, that's the likely outcome — there are many repos on Github with 0 stars, after all. Factorio is designed to reward you for your efforts. The real world has no such guarantees.
Programming can still beat most games in terms of joy. I just miss that burst of satisfaction from completing something in programming because it’s never really done just good enough for production.
Factorio and other open ended optimization games scratch the same itch as programming without any payoff. Speed running feels different because execution is so important optimal changes over time, and you get a finite endpoint.
You're discounting what's actually being said here, and said by many people.
I don't play Factorio for the same basic reason as so many others in this thread: it's too much like programming, and I want to use that energy actually programming. Something I enjoy very much, something which has paid every expense I've had for the last fifteen years, and something which directly produces value for other people.
I also pick up a little handheld most evenings and play games on it. Lately, Puzzle Bobble and Galaxian. Scratches a different itch.
The dichotomy between 'play Factorio' and 'program computer' does not reduce to the dichotomy between 'have fun' and 'joylessly pursue productive endeavors'. Clearly for some people Factorio doesn't produce the former dichotomy in the first place, and more power to 'em. For others it does, and the conclusion that this means we don't like fun is simply invalid.
If this is coming from the feeling that you’re not useful in the meantime - pretty curse that has positive effect on your pro life as a benefit. Makes me miserable though.
In the meantime I always could choose between similar joys based on future professional benefits like programming vs gaming. Factorio is like programming so for me I play it whenever I can with my friends (aka almost never), but otherwise I am programming
I feel exactly the same. I don't think the problems you solve in factorio are that complex, they are just tedious. It feels like calculations that a calculator can do. It is utterly boring to me personally, I can simply write a program or come up with a formula once I know what I need to make to calculate how much of everything I need. I also like to play simpler games which stimulates more of a lower part of my brain (motor control shit that feels good) no need to think too much in these game since I do a lot of that in my real life job. I have mostly been working on research problems where you can't generally write these rules for how to solve a particular subproblem and that feels like actual problem solving I just don't get when people say they love the problem solving aspect of the game. I mean if you think solving simple mathematical optimization problems that already have a solution "problem solving" then good for you. The average game time is too long and it is just not worth my time.
I think a lot about this in the context of video game minmaxers/netdeckers who just copy a researched, optimal behaviour. It's completely alien to me but some people really get a kick out of just being an implementer, following rote instructions exactly to the letter.
It can be but my point is when you face those types of challenges in you work and solve them you realize how much better and satisfying those challenges are in real life compared to Factorio which takes away the fun part of playing it.
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 things, what the layout you will have to put in place, how fast things will have to move. You painfully build that. It works. You feel good. Then you realise it will just be more of the same ad infinity with the first time you do train design and liquids the sole inkling of novelty. It’s all fairly simple conceptually so it gets tedious and boring quite fast (at least to me). I think part of the issue is also that I tend to play it wrong by calculating and planning - literally work for which the in game tooling is not optimal - while I think I would have more fun just winging it and fixing things as they happen.
What I mean is I think it’s not a game for everyone but I can see why it’s catnip for its intended audience.
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 includes some ingame recipe-planner mods, so it's easier to plan-then-build.
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.
I submit that if "but I could be doing something productive instead" is a common thought when you are trying to have fun, that is the problem and not Factorio. It's perfectly ok to just have fun and not build something meaningful.
I can have fun without needing to build anything meaningful at all though, but when the barriers get to close, that's when I start having an issue, in my experience. That's why I play games that don't replicate work in a sense.
I don't think they're saying that per-se, I think they're saying: it's perfectly ok to both "have fun" AND "not build something meaningful" at the same time. I don't think you need to read in that having fun necessarily excludes doing something meaningful.
While we're on the topic of assuming intent: that invented word "problematic" - problematic to whom? Something being a problem is almost always a subjective stance, not a universal truth as that word implies.
That’s why I prefer Satisfactory : it’s the same principle but it also allows you to build gigantic great and beautiful things. For me it’s the perfect mix between Factorio (for building factories) and Minecraft (for allowing you to create your environment) and, contrary to those two, it’s also aesthetically beautiful. In fact building production lines is not even what I prefer, what I prefer is organizing them in chaotically beautiful buildings.
(Don’t think I want to start a debate, I loved the 3 games and played them a lot, it’s just that Satisfactory won my heart… even the name is great).
Same here. Played both, both are extremely satisfying to play, but Satisfactory is just..... pretty. It's nice to take a break from building the factory to just explore the world too.
Concur on all points honestly. I will also add that Factorio's setting is pretty bleak, and the game is a bit too addictive to me. It's also harder to just botch things which, because I am trying to have fun and not work, is pretty laborious. In satisfactory if I messed up some spacing of belts or machines or whatever, I can just clip it, go up and over, just generally make a visual mess that works.
Not entirely sure why Factorio is more addictive. Shorter action loops, but often queing and waiting for things to happen might jiggle the brain in a more addictive way. It's not a positive feeling situation either, more like you get trapped having to do more stuff over and over again.
Agreed. Factorio is a fantastic game and it ran so Satisfactory can fly. With every update (and with release) Satisfactory keeps upping the complexity. I would be extremely happy if Factorios development helped push Satisfactory in this way and led to more maps (planets!)
I've never tried Factorio, but I found Satisfactory very boring after a few hours. It was initially fun to do some exploring and make some initial manufacturing lines. However, when I realised that to scale up the manufacturing, then I would have to place all these components by hand hundreds of times, it just felt like boring make-work, and I never turned it on again. Maybe I would have continued if there was some way of automating the building, such as some sort of 2D viewer.
Looks like you tried the game a long time ago. There is totally a way to automate building with the Blueprint Designer which basically allows you save blueprints of full buildings (or building parts or whatever you want) and to build them in one click.
In a stylistic way, yes. Not in the « what a beautiful multi floor truck station I built there, oh and btw, take this stair then on the mezzanine, take the door at the left to access the commands of the station. » way.
It’s just different games. Factorio is excellent as building production lines while Satisfactory is excellent as making feel you « in » your creations with 3D, a lot of architectural options, a really immersive sound design (quitting your noisy machine room to a corridor and hearing the sound go down when the door closes).
It’s different. But there is one important common thing with Factorio though : they are both made with a lot of love and with a lot of attention to every detail. In fact, both games could be an exemple of design and ergonomics for even professional softwares.
Same with me. When I was younger I was able to just enjoy myself without mixing irl thoughts. Unfortunately these days as an adult if I'm stuck in a game or have to chip at it in some tedious fashion, a part of my brain goes "you can spend this time learning something new or productive irl".
I think my attitude changed the games I play also. I used to play MMO when I was younger but FPS games give me that dopamine rush without any commitments.
Sadly it's only when I'm sick do I feel I'm able to just cozy up without these "you can be doing something else" thoughts and truly enjoy games for what they are, tedious or not.
> I never got into these types of programmatic games for precisely this reason but I'd like to understand other perspectives on this.
Everything you describe requires interaction with people. Those are too often toxic, incompetent, overly demanding and keep changin schedules and priorities. At least in single player games you get to drop all that crap.
Some of my most overengineered code was written after a Factorio session… maybe it’s better treated as an outlet for some urges to which you shouldn’t acquiesce :)
This. But for me it was moving into management instead of production. I don't really get to CAD/design in my day job, focusing on one of two projects with my mind for weeks on end. Instead I manage others and troubleshoot problems that arise that become impediments for my team. I also live in an apartment, so facotrio/building games are my outlet. Minimal impact on the environment, I get my design and building fix, and I can always stand up and walk away without much clean up.
Do your work feels like you have infinite resources which you need to extract, connect and spend on building a fully automated planet-size megafactory all by yourself while fighting local roaches and acid-spitting bugs? What kind of work it is?
Ironically the game goal is to leave that place :D
> Whenever I play it, I get the distinct feeling that I could instead do the same thing but productively instead
This is me, but extended to all games. I stopped playing games because I feel like I can always do something more productive with my time instead. If I really want to check out, I watch some TV instead. But games (especially modern ones) take too much work without any real reward.
I love Factorio, because in real life it's difficult to fully automate things so abstractly. It's so wonderfully simple to think that oh this thing goes here, is combined with this and this... profit.
You then walk away from the game, inspired to apply such process-thinking to your actual work and life, and realize that it's actually rare to be able to do.
To me it just feels very repetitive. I don't feel clever building out factories, I just feel more like a drone doing iterative manual labor. As an engineer I just couldn't get into it.
I get the same feeling with increasingly many games as I get older.
It started with games that are basically engineering work. But now it's anything with resource management or long-term strategic thinking (basically whenever I think "hmm, I need to note down my thoughts so I can pick up my strategy where I left of next time I play").
There's a whole slew of great programming puzzle games where I get the same feel. One day while playing tis1000 I was like I should just learn fpga programming. Except for human resource machine that one stuck with me I guess because my daughter was playing as well.
But same with pico 8, I just want a real ide, debugger, unit tests. If I'm not getting those better be getting paid
On the other hand, what bother me about factorio is its deterministic nature. Perhaps it would be more fun with more random elements like equipment failures etc.
It does feel like work, but that's okay! Some mechanics are mundane than others, e.g. compare clearing enemy bases to designing rail blueprints, but the game does everything to make it efficient and ejoyable: high performance, keyboard shortcuts, immense amount of quality of life features - all you get when devs love playing the game themselves.
And, even Factorio being my favorite game, I still need to take a long breaks from it because building a factory is a lot of mental effort.
Not just you, I had the same experience with Factorio. Other building games like Minecraft I could play for days, but Factorio stresses me out. I want to chill and make cool stuff, optimizing a factory while fending off aliens wasn’t relaxing.
Exactly how I feel with redstone contraptions in Minecraft. Already have OSS projects to my name, and my way to "play" is to refactor them endlessly. In a game I'm looking for a different type of fun for once.
Not the same, but Slay the Spire could be described as a "programmatic game". I play it when I just need to burn some spare cycles (especially if programming is inaccessible to me at the moment, like when I only have my phone)
I think there is a quite big player intersection between Factorio and Slay the Spire, despite being completely different genres. And I agree that StS is a nice way to relax from programming.
I wasn’t into video games for a long time for the exact reasons as you aren’t into Factorio. The ones I was interested in always felt too much like a job.
Minecraft with a kid was my gateway drug and I got into Factorio really quickly after. It’s actually a really special game. There are elements of it that are practice for real world scenarios, but it is very relaxing, stress free and commitment free. It’s a great game to sit down with for an hour after work to decompress and become normal again.
It’s also an incredibly fun game to share with a group of people on one device. That’s something I haven’t experienced since the 1990s, but it’s really enjoyable to get together with a group and build together. It’s an excellent cooperative game and is a great way to really get to know people. It’s even more fun when you play it with people from a range of professions - one of my favourite Factorio groups is a bartender, a cook, a lawyer and a software developer. We think differently but when it all comes together, it’s really neat.
I understand that it’s not for everyone and I’ll be honest with you, I don’t have nearly the reflexes for FPS so we’re likely quite different in terms of the games we like. But I find it very relaxing and very enjoyable. It reminds me a lot of QBasic on an old Tandy - it’s that same thrill of tinkering because tinkering is fun.
I feel you, I used to play many single player games as well like Ratchet and Clank, Jak and Daxter, or Sly Cooper, over games that wanted me to expend significant brain power. They are still incredible games that don't have the same effect as Factorio does, they feel wholly different in their goals.
Splitting from the experiences of others, I think the mentality somewhat comes down to your preference in what you seek to do in videogames and how you engage with them. In these types of sandbox building games, career developers naturally get somewhat of a "cheat" to becoming proficient quickly in that the mode of expressing logical sentiments will only ever be a few abstractions away from what you would do normally at your work, so you feel less constrained to building understanding of a system and can instead use the system as a way to output your ideas in a way faster than others might. In this sense, it's somewhat of a power fantasy that if you vs the average person were to play this game that you would most likely be able to clearly express your ideas and goals and be able to act on them, which makes it fun to go off the rails to show off "some crazy thing" you've made as a slight nod to your perceived skill being able to make these things.
Consequently, that's why I'm so disinterested in learning these games. The discussion about them shifts into a thin one layer abstraction for other people to try to brag about their accomplishments and what they self injected as their experience instead of the game itself. This doesn't affect the gameplay, but it affects my perception of the game as a shallow vehicle for attention seekers more than it promotes the ideas of fun gameplay.
That said, sometimes the style of gameplay resonates with a style of development you might have been interested in understanding more and can use it as a way to get motivation or inspiration for ideas. Automating pipelines, physics simulations, etc. I think it's always worth a shot on games that have notable recognition of quality to see if it jives with what you enjoy, but it's been the exception more than the rule in my case.
I feel the same way sometimes, it definitely closer to the same loop of plan execute refactor then many games. I do find my self getting wrapped up into then backing off because it does feel like work.
But I like the fact that I can see it working in realtime, its just pretty, this machine I built that I can zoom into and see the smallest detail actually working.
Wish software was more like that, a good debugger can get closer to that but way more clunky and poor performing than Factorio.
You're right. The intoxication of graphics and visual design in games can't be underestimated. It's more than a paint job or window dressing. It slots into the whole itch-scratching appeal and addiction.
I agree debugging tools could make more use of visualisation. I remember the excellent HTML 3d view in Firefox, removed from version 47. For some reason we can't have nice things:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqHV625EU3E
Not sure if there's a way to get it back. I heard it's available in Edge, but I don't use that browser.
This is why Satisfactory works for me, but factorio doesn't: even though it's supposedly also a factory buildering, it's really much more of a world exploration game that happens to have factory building, but you don't have to build "a perfect factory" to get anything done, or unlock things that let you explore better. I can just throw down some buildings and link them up haphazardly and that strategy kind of works all the way up to near-enough-to-the-end to keep the game a fun running/driving/flying with occasional bouts of production line management, rather than feeling like I'm just doing work that a computer could do way better.
Funnily enough, I actually used to play America's Army 3, a game which explicitly was funded by the DoD. It was pretty fun, not gonna lie, much more tactical than many other shooters during that time.
I remember speaking to several of the people who worked on America's Army back around 2007, when Counter-Strike was all the rage. I think this was at the GDC.
The people I spoke with were from the Army. And they found CS-style games agonizing to watch. So many people running around with no plan, so much friendly fire, so many unrealistic tactics. You could practically see them shudder.
They also had some people who worked in logistics. I remember one of them saying, "If the United States decides to invade a country, the software we wrote could calculate how much toilet paper we'd need."
Operation Flashpoint (early version of ARMA) did that for me. You sneak around for an hour, then get shot in the face and it's all over. Imagine that, but for your life ... fuck war.
Haha. Yeah, I’m working on logic puzzles all day for work. The games I play to relax are either shoot-everything games or, like, MarioKart. I need to chill and not think.
Same, I get to a certain stage in the game (usually the first big factory 'refactor') and find myself thinking that the exact same effort I'm applying to the game could be applied to any number of work-related things that would be just as fun and much more beneficial.
This makes no sense to me. Doing productive things means 40 to 100 hour commitments with the possibility of your work being worthless at the end, because you didn't have enough time for that 40th or 100th hour, because you need to do a lot of upfront work, because you need specific hardware, because someone else did it better, because the maintainer rejected your pull request, because what you want to do actually takes 1000 hours.
Now that is what I call tedious!
Meanwhile open ended pvp multiplayer games can drain hundreds of hours with no feeling of accomplishment. Those are the games that make me feel I should be doing something more productive.
You have a very limited view on what being productive is. I have a home lab, I'd rather spend an hour or two improving it and learning things along the way rather than playing factorio.
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.
To me, it starts to feel like work when I have to rebuild large parts of my factory because I didn't leave enough space to expand. This process feels exactly like having to refactor a bad codebase (where you feel the urge to just start from scratch).
If you plan your build properly, you can avoid this, but it takes a few runs to learn the best strategies.
Factorio makes me realize that I don’t really like solving problems for the sake of solving problems (or optimization, for that matter). I like solving them for a tangible reason or because I I’m making someone’s life better.
Problem solving and optimizing in Factorio is different than a grind in some game like Diablo. That sort of grind uses a completely different part of your brain (movement and in-the-moment decision making), and I find that I need that kind of change after a week of real-life problem solving.
I imagine people who gravitate to Factorio are probably better problem solvers and optimizers than me because that’s what they truly enjoy for its own sake.
I think the new expansion helps a lot with the rebuild issue, since you're expected to have have many different bases on different planets instead of just one big base.
I’ve always been a little miffed with the comparison to programming. I love Factorio because it’s the only survival-craft game I’ve played that doesn’t devolve into an inventory management game. The game scales with your gameplay.
> The grind is no different to me than playing Diablo.
On the surface, I guess. But Diablo is a game about dungeon crawling and Factorio is a game where you make the dungeon. You aren't looking for good loot rolls to make your character better in Factorio, you're trying to reassemble the pieces of a poorly-designed infrastructure network to make it efficient enough for your goals.
Really there are so many types of programming that Factorio's proximity to your day-to-day work will vary on the field. If you are a frontend web designer, then Factorio will probably feel pretty fresh and novel to you. If you're an SRE/SWE that rips apart musty codebases to see what's salvageable, Factorio's loop of refreshing and optimizing can feel eerily similar in some respects.
I like that it’s similar to work and that is probably why it is my favorite game. Sometimes I don’t have the intensity needed to attack a hard problem at work so I chill out and work on my factory instead. Once I notice that I’m becoming too ambitious in the game I can tell that my intensity has returned and will switch back to work. If I don’t have the energy for factorio then clearly I won’t have the energy for work so there is no point in forcing it. It’s like a halfway point between relaxation and work where I can hang out for a while before committing to either.
Maybe it depends on the work, but for me, writing code, there's always loads of low intensity work to be done. Minor refactors, improving code clarity, writing docs, replying to technical emails etc. For me, the energy level at which I'd enjoy a game like Factorio (which I did briefly try) is exactly the energy level at which I'm most productive doing this kind of work.
I work in applied research so it’s prototypical, fiendishly difficult, and always pushing the limits of my ability. I do mix in light duty work to try to help me get back into the flow and build up a head of steam but I don’t have enough of that kind of work. For me time spent in factorio reflects sub optimal organization usually due to not feeling 100%. It’s currently the best adjunct I’ve used to help manage my energy levels so I don’t begrudge the time spend in it. As I’ve gotten better at managing energy levels I do spend less time gaming. At ~100hrs per year and decreasing I think it’s unlikely that I’ll ever make a major dent in space age but I’m ok with that. I really only bought the new DLC as a thank you to the game devs.
I'm terrified of Factorio. I've deliberatly avoided playing it because I know, if I do, I'll lose an entire month. Kudos to the creators on their brilliant game, it's like heroin for a particular type of brain.
I was really looking forward to the expansion that came out on Monday. I chose not to play the main game anymore for the last several months. But then life threw some curve balls and I can't bring myself to buy it, knowing it would pull me away from the stuff I need to do. Hopefully soon...
Factorio isn’t like work as much as it tickles the same spots on my brain that my favorite parts of work do as well. After putting in 2K+ hours to the game I have the follow suggestions/advice for new/experienced players:
* Play your first game without mods (or very limited QoL mods)
* Don’t use blueprints from others online (at least in your first play through), you can watch videos if you are truly stuck but copy/pasting what others have done can ruin the fun
* Don’t always try to min/max. If that’s what you like then more power to you but I often guess at things or over-provision because it lets me keep playing and not get bogged down
* Before you look for blueprints online use something like Helmod or Factory Planner, blueprints can really ruin the game for me at least. The one exception is belt balancers, those are fine to copy. You can share your own blueprints between games but taking blueprints from online feels too much like cheating. Study them and reproduce them if you need to but I promise it will be more satisfying to do it yourself rather than just plopping down what someone else did.
* Don’t try to build the best or “final” version of something at first. As in, build what you need now and re-evaluate later when it’s not enough. I’ve ruined the “fun” before because I was too hung up on making a production line too complicated/large/etc too early. Don’t make your first smelting operation at a scale you’d use in late game, you’ll build a new smelting setup later and that’s fine.
* Go into the game blind, don’t research “the best way to do X”, your first (few) play throughs will be more fun if explore and learn on your own.
With the understanding that you can regularly leave Factorio running overnight or even all week to build up resources, how many hours have other hard core Factorio players logged?
My Factorio play time is up to 6,573.2 hours at this point.
I love Factorio for the same reasons I love SimCity. 6,573.2 hours seems like a lot of time, but I've probably logged even more hours playing SimCity since 1989. (But much of that was actual productive time porting it to various platforms, testing, debugging, and optimizing the actual source code and user interface, etc.)
I read about a half hour every day. That means I probably clocked some 6 thousand hours in my lifetime. Imagine all the time I could’ve invested in playing the rat race more, in those wasted 3 years of books :(
Instead of binging a game over an entire weekend and burning yourself out.. slow down, just play for an hour a week. Treat it like a weekly TV episode of a currently airing show. I follow a couple television series weekly and don't fret myself for wasted time because I only spend 2 hours a week watching them.
Life is all about experiences. I am sad for those who go through life without experiencing video games in moderation. They provide one of a kind interactive experiences that you won't find anywhere else in life.
Some games really reward spending more time with them, and getting into the "flow". I think playing Factorio for an hour and then stopping would just feel frustrating - like cooking up a delicious meal, eating a spoonful, and running out the door.
Same. In my case I have real world problems that need my attention and I struggle to justify playing games while those problems loom. Only exception is playing games with my kid, but that is time boxed.
I still play games but I lost my ability to “lost myself in time” while playing games, what you’re describing does not happen to me anymore. And I dearly miss it.
I've started and re-started Factorio several times, and always enjoy it... up the point where an automated train network is necessary. Here, I always run into problems, and no amount of researching or fettling of the setup seems to guarantee that my trains work. Sometimes they do... often, I have to drive them manually.
Anyway, if you like Factorio, you might also enjoy Mindustry: simmilar-ish, less constructional depth, more tower-defence and fighting.
My train network ran about as good as any multi-threaded code I can write. Perfectly smooth and then a massive deadlock because my mutex locks (rail signals) have a bug.
The train logistics system in 2.0 has been vastly improved. I was just able to make a “set and forget” train automation system. All I need to do is add more stations and, when necessary, more trains. Before this updated you needed mods for this.
> Tobias Lütke, co-founder and CEO of the ecommerce platform Shopify, lets his staff expense their copies of Factorio. “It’s just bound to be good for Shopify if people play Factorio for a little while,” he told the Invest Like The Best podcast. “Because part of Shopify is building warehouses and fulfilling products for our customers. We are building global supply chains, and Factorio makes a game out of that kind of thinking.”
I wonder if they'll pay for their employees' copies of Wilmot's Warehouse, too.
I can certainly say I'm an example of someone who hasn't bought it because it hasn't been on sale, but 50 dollars for a good game is entirely reasonable anyway and I admit I will probably still buy it one day.
It's funny I came across this thread. Just yesterday I was looking at buying it, but it's 50 AUD. I went to add it to my wishlist to wait for a sale, but it was already there. I realised it must have been on there for a long time.
I was wondering if I somehow missed it going on sale, or it never had.
Yeah, it stings. I did buy 2 copies on launch day for myself and my son (8) though. We have spent a lot of time on Factorio together though and I prefer it much more than Minecraft (although we have probably clocked up many many more hours on that).
Lots of comments on this thread in the vein of “I dislike this game because it’s not productive”. My honestly question is… why? Why is “being productive” this goal that has to consume your entire life?
I feel like it and Satisfactory redirects the part of me that creates and looks for novel ways of doing things from something that yields useful byproducts that actually change the world in tiny ways into something that yields nothing but more of itself. And it never really ends. I don't mind useless stuff, I play games, but something about Factorio and Satisfactory both draws me in and makes me feel so empty. I think because it scratches the itch that IRL I have built my career on, but points it towards something useless.
This is a really good analysis. I love both of those games but I felt exactly the same way as you. For me they are REALLY addictive, Minecraft is too. In a way that isn’t the same as some console games I play - where it’s easier to step away…
People look at me funny when I say this, but it's true.
I work in performance - a space where we're thinking about threading, parallelism and the like a lot - and I often say "I want to hire who play with trains". What I mean is "I want people who play Factorio", because the concepts and problems are very very similar. But fewer people know Factorio, so I say trains instead.
I think I know why it's enjoyable even though it's so close to work, too. It's the _feedback_. Factorio shows you visually where you screwed up, and what's moving slowly. In actual work the time and frustration is usually in finding it.
To me it feels like it subverts the desire to build something, in the same way that e.g. porn subverts the desire for sex. You feel like you're making something, but at the end of the day you didn't actually make anything.
For me RTS games are like a drug. I can easily get lost in them and play for 10-15 hours straight due to how my brain is wired. That doesn’t mean I never play them, but I treat it with the same respect as a drug, and use them in moderation.
I’m a pilot and lost interest completely in flight sims when I bought my airplane (And I had a maxed out setup, multiple monitors, VR, controls, etc.) The simulator doesn’t capture the real-ness as ironic as that is, of the sounds, smells, vibrations, emotions and so on. In fact during my flight training my experience with simulators imparted a few low-level bad habits I had to work through when it came to operating the controls.
The analog controls in real life are heavier, more raw, somewhat imprecise, and you can feel them knocked around by the wind for example. Night and day difference. It honestly makes the most state of the art simulator feel like you’re operating a NES.
> In fact during my flight training my experience with simulators imparted a few low-level bad habits I had to work through when it came to operating the controls.
When I first started flying my instructor specifically recommended against flight sims for that very reason.
Now that I have my PPL I only use them to practice approaches for new airports that I’ve never visited before and to familiarize myself with the cockpit layout for planes I haven’t flown before. It helps build some minor muscle memory so I can focus on the harder parts of flying.
It’s not in any way similar to coding, though - it’s a puzzle-solving game. It’s not made to simulate any engineering discipline, nor user to train engineers (like flight sims are)
Yes, factorio is not coding, though it follows some principle of programming, such as input-process-output, workflow, load balancers, modular design, etc. Many players say that the factories often resembles PCB.
but that's the extend of it, you don't have to do heavier programming practice like algorithm, complex state management, input parsing and validation (unless sushi), or anything involving combinators until finishing the 1.0 version.
Factorio is not a puzzle game. You can get puzzle like gameplay if, for example, you are on a map with heavily restricted space, or are trying to micro-optimize something. But that is analogouse to code-golf or microoptimizations in programming, which are fairly puzzle like.
For typical gameplay, the only puzzles you run into are the ones you build yourself into. The name of game is to design your factory in a modular and extensible way so that you do not build yourself into a puzzle.
"not in any way similar to coding" is a very strong statement
many people feel it feels similar to coding, in the way you have to slowly refactor designs + work involves a recursive breakdown of tasks + tracing/debugging of issues
People say the same thing about Sudoku. Or any video game (historically claimed as a hobby that creates coders, just because many coders liked computers at an early age, I suspect)
And I think that's mostly due to the lack of constraints in most programming jobs. I don't have to think about throughput or optimizing op codes or almost anything else because our machines have absurd amounts of compute and more memory than most hard drives I've had in my life, the networks are broad and fast, and there's a commercial solution for most of the hard problems.
Maybe I'd think differently if I worked on microcontrollers, but my brief foray into Arduinos and Raspberry Pies didn't feel that much different. I mean, I was using Python on the Arduino. I felt more constrained by the pins than anything else - another problem with several well explored solutions.
I can think of a bunch of similarities just off the top of my head: throughput management is probably the most critical skill in factorio, and obviously comes up all over software engineering. Managing production belt chains is not unlike managing your program's call stack. Ensuring the right resource reaches a production facility is like managing input types.
If you subscribe to Peter Singer's views on consequentialism, we all have a moral duty to spend our life maximizing the number of people we save from dying or from immense suffering. Hard to do that if you're not being productive; though I'll be the first to admit nobody does or can live with perfect adherence to that principle
That’s a crazy ascetic view of life. Also completely unrelated to almost anyone on this forum, since it’s unlikely most here are doing any work that saves anyone’s life
Because it feels like you are building something but you are not. The problem solving in factorio is just tedious like doing manual calculations and you spend a lot of time doing this. It satisfies the problem solving itch for people who haven't faced any challenging problems in their work. Once you start solving these problems in real life factorio just seems pointless. Dont get me wrong i like paying pointless games that require very little to zero thinking (Muscle memory based) that I find satisfying. Factorio is just tedious.
Well, because being more productive makes more money, of course. Even if I only capture a small portion of the overall value of it.
Scratch that - I'm using "money" as a proxy for "value". Let's talk value directly. All things being equal, if I can enjoy Activity A totally in isolation, and Activity B equally much, but B leaves something behind which other people can use and get their own value out of, then B is clearly a better or more noble use of my time. Being productive just makes you a better person on net.
Now... I do not choose the "max productivity" strat with each and every second of my being, far from it. I'll probably buy and play Factorio sometime in the next few months, and it will be Steam game #3 added to my library after FTL and Slay the Spire. But I'm not going to sit here and pretend it is somehow better for the world outside of myself to play Factorio rather than e.g. improve the FOSS software I maintain that helps people learn Finnish. Let alone something like contribute to the Linux kernel. This is a philosophical non-question to me.
When I play games, I never play competitive or intense games, I see it as a therapeutic activity.
I play relaxing single player games like Stardew Valley or Tiny Glade. Cultivate some crops, feed my chicken, pat my cat. No real end goal other than to just relax. I urge anyone to try, especially in co-op with with a friend or partner. It really is therapeutic.
I’d love to do that, but I have a different kind of syndrome where I can’t motivate myself to play something unless I’m playing with other people. Being an adult, I don’t have anyone who can just jump on a game with me on a regular schedule.
I’ve wanted to play Valheim for ages. I even bought the Factorio DLC on launch day and barely played it because nobody wanted to play.
Maybe because it sometimes feels like work. So if it's kinda like work, why not do something that is also not productive but would either not feel as though it's work or if it's like work, that you can actually enjoy.
For some the latter is facotrio. I tried it myself, didn't get past the demo. I think if I'm doing something not productive in terms of not using my time towards something that actively makes me money, I would feel better doing something like learning another programming language, do some quick projects to automate parts of my life, try to write myself a game or a piece of toy software that challenges me and is also fun to implement.
Being productive doesn’t consume my entire life but if i’m going to do two things that feel the same I may as well do the one that has other substantial benefits to myself and others. I spend enough time developing that side of myself at work. My free time should go to making myself more well rounded.
I faced my mortality and went the other way. I’ve already achieved more from an extremely difficult background than I ever could have imagined and it turns out when faced with my mortality, that was enough for me.
Everyone has different ways of unwinding and finding meaning, and productivity doesn’t need to be the sole measure of time well spent, at least for me anymore.
If you don't somehow make something useful, or built a thing people actually use, then what was the point of it all? To have fun and then be forgotten?
Though, with AI looming to take this last shred of human dignity too, maybe having a bit of fun along the way isn't such a bad idea.
I'm not sure if there's any economic system that could survive long term without people being productive. Just because the farm is collectivized doesn't mean you aren't working from the crack of dawn to sunset
Being productive doesn’t require you to be productive non-stop. It’s not good for you and will likely make you far less productive in the long run
Trivia on farming: Medieval peasants worked far less than modern employees (at most 150 days a year). It was obviously harder physical work than sitting in an office all day, but they had plenty of downtime
I think it's just getting older. Some play is rehearsal for real life. Now I can run a real company, make real money and become a real millionaire instead of a pretend one (or at least try to).
Plus I'm going to die unlike when I was an immortal teenager, so I want to retire ASAP.
If I'm going to game it'll be an FPS or similar when I'm too brain dead to play when-will-i-be-a-millionaire.
(Unfortunately one would have to scroll back through 3 years' worth of other things to run across it, but it's on my list to fix that and it's squirreled away there for the future)
I get a real kick out of playing builder games with my son. We played Jurassic park evolution a lot, I would direct contracts and what to build and then we’d discuss and he would build it. Heh it was like being team lead without the pressure and anxiety.
Every time I start playing Factorio it's always a matter of time before I'm trying to figure out how to solve factories with VHDL and how to interface Magic VLSI with the game's blueprints. From there it's another day or so before I'm reviewing EE graduate programs and working out how much math I would need to grind.
I had this experience with Eve Online back in the day. The optimization limit horseshoes back into the real world.
Case in point: just reading this thread started me learning about discrete event simulation. Damn you Factorio.
Is there a better graphics version of factorio? And no I don't mean Satisfactory or Dyson Sphere Program though those are good games in their own rights, I mean something with the same level of depth and camera as factorio.
I guess it depends on what you mean by "better graphics"? They're upgraded their graphics several times over the years. I'm playing on a 4K monitor and they're using most of those pixels. I can see a small amount of interpolation at full zoom at 4K.
If you zoom in, the graphics are high-res 2D sprites, rendered from 3D models. And the level of detail can be ridiculous. From this week's Factorio 2.0 update (and Space Age add-on), here's an example of the zoomed-in detail: https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-396 See the foundry animations? Those videos are actually slightly more blurred than the in-game version. And the sound effects are synced to specific animation frames.
So the world of Factorio is oftentimes brown and grim and covered in grime, but that's a conscious artistic choice. (Not all of the new planets are brown. Gleba is green and irridescent and frankly creepy.) Similarly, Factorio's 2D nature has allowed the developers to focus on gameplay and quality-of-life more than many newer games in the genre. If you want to build big, intricate factories with complex train networks, for example, Factorio really shines.
If anyone would like a game with 3D graphics, or a different graphics style, try:
- Satisfactory: The 3D world is gorgeous, and Satisfactory shines at "walk around inside your factory and tinker with it." Gameplay-wise, it has only recently gained blueprinting tools that allow working at a medium level of abstraction.
- Shapez 2.0: This is pretty and colorful and full of great little puzzles. It occupies a different part of the game-design space and is just a joy to play.
(Dyson Sphere Project and Captain of Industry also have great gameplay, but I don't know if their graphics are likely to grab people who find Factorio graphically underwhelming.)
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.
Speaking for myself, I love Factorio and can't stand Satisfactory. Even on peaceful mode Factorio has you solving real problems, whereas Satisfactory feels like playing Minecraft on creative mode.
Satisfactory's main issue is that it lets you build in three dimensions without doing any physics to check if that build is mechanically plausible. It's of course not reasonable to expect them to do that physics. But it means that sophisticated logistics/organization problems in Factorio almost always have the same solution in Satisfactory: build more, but upwards. There's no reason to think long-term in Satisfactory unless you have a specific aesthetic vision for a base. Of course, a giant factory-skyscraper with tons of conveyor belts sticking out looks really cool! And Satisfactory being easier makes it more of a chill sandbox game than a tense strategy game like Factorio, so I get why aesthetics-minded people like it. Different strokes.
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 travel process up.
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.
The trees move in the wind when you zoom in. Factorio takes sprite graphics to the next level! I felt the same as you, I've always wanted a brighter reskin of Factorio but I've realized it's way tooooo much work for anyone to do for free...
I haven’t found one, and really as you get later in the game the retro graphics are a blessing. I play on my work Mac (most powerful thing in the house) and I end up having to bail early because I just can’t have a megabase over a certain size, everything grinds to a halt.
I love Factorio but the graphics look a bit like 1996 SVGA 256-color sprites (edit: by which I mean, I feel like there is noticeable dithering). I haven't played the new "Factorio in space" bits, maybe it gets out of the browns-and-beige color palette a bit more?
Because your phrased your question like people that complain about the level of detail. Yes, factorio is ugly (although some trees are beautiful). And yes, that's a design decision.
There are some mods that reskin it. Personally, I don't think any of them are beautiful.
2. I view it as a defense mechanism against the onslaught of modern gaming that’s locked in a race to the lowest common denominator (i.e. “Stay away! This game isn’t for you!” ;) )
For Factorio 2.0, there's a lot of graphics that have gotten higher resolution upgrades. Earendel has blogged about working on this. (The Space Exploration mod author, who also works for Wube).
Terrain looks better, trees look better, too, I think it's a pretty big change.
Nandgame and nand2tetris both take you on a journey from discreet transistors to a computer, in the form of a game. There's also Zachatronics games' TIS-100, and Shenzhen I/O.
I'll offer some unsolicited rankings here for these:
Level of fun/addictiveness: Factorio<<<----, Shenzhen I/O, TIS-100, Nandgame, nand2tetris
Best story: Tossup for Shenzhen I/O and TIS-100, Factorio, nand2tetris, nandgame
Best order if you've never coded and want to get tricked into becoming an engineer: Factorio (but hard limit yourself here to no more than 2000 hours), then TIS-100, then Shenzhen I/O, then the Nands. I think Nand2tetris is more accessible as a learning tool.
Upshot - I highly recommend this list. :) Space Age (the Factorio DLC) has me wanting to do nand2tetris in Factorio now. Resisting..
The thing I like about games is a clear objective that once achieved you have "finished".
The thing I don't like about software is that no software is (or will ever be?) finished.
Factorio provides the illusion of achievement which produces happy chemicals in my brain. I will happily forego any other work when getting my fix from factorio. So I stopped playing it and returned to interesting side projects. I confess I have purchased the recently released Space Age expansion, and my productivity is in the toilet again. I’ll probably be done with it by thanksgiving.
The Civ series does the same thing for me. I've also moved on from games, although I think from time to time they may be useful for stimulating creativity.
I was looking at this game this morning, it sounds fantastic fun podcasts I've listened to, but at 50 Australian dollars it'd be the most I've ever paid for a game on Steam. Someone convince me it's worth it?
> For me, the difference between work and fun is about the process.
> If I have to do it in an inefficient way, or the way I’m told to, it feels like work.
> When I have the freedom to do it my way, it feels like fun.
Yeah, that resonates with me. I didn't pursue a software development career because of this. Decided to do something else and enjoy programming on my own terms. It's been alright but I still wonder what might have been.
https://archive.is/2sRrE
The article mentions one of the main appeals of factorio is you get to think like a programmer without bosses/overhead from actual work but it’s always been hard to get into games for that reason because I could just work on a side project with the same result. I really don’t understand the appeal.
I remember when Guitar Hero came out I didn't understand why anybody would play that instead of just buying a guitar. The point is the videogame itself is designed to be fun and remove plenty of other elements from the real life equivalent that focuses more on enjoyment and less on grinding it out. If you're thinking about "what have I accomplished?" instead of "I'm having so much fun!" then it might not be for you.
The other aspect is there are plenty of people that like to think like programmers, but have no experience programming and the barrier to entry for a videogame is substantially lower than even figuring out a "hello world!" program for someone who wouldn't even know how to pick a programming language.
Your comparison hits home for me. I have been playing guitar on-and-off for over a decade (OK, maybe more like trying to play guitar) and I still really enjoy Guitar Hero.
It's instant gratification: I don't have as much fun practicing at .75x speed with a metronome to learn the hard part of a piece. Instead a video game tells me how great I am at "guitar" by being able to push buttons and strum on the beat, not to mention that I hear the sounds of my favorite songs come out when I do it.
For a similar reason, I like Rocksmith (guitar hero but with a real guitar), but the gratification is not quite so instant. They gamify the practicing part but I still need to do it, otherwise the part I'm playing actually sounds bad. And sight-reading is so much harder when there are more than 5 buttons.
I can't stand Guitar Hero because it's nothing like playing a real guitar and I'm therefore no good at it. At least the Rock Band drums vaguely approximate playing a cheap e-kit and the vocal part has proper pitch detection... unfortunately a real guitar is hard to replicate with cheap plastic hardware. There's also the fact that memorizing a real song is easier than memorizing colored buttons because you can build a mental model of the song around your knowledge of music theory.
On the topic of complex games a la Factorio: I've been playing a lot of Age of Empires II with my friends lately and have come to enjoy it. I previously shied away from RTSes because I was terrified of the meta but I've gotten decent enough to consistently beat the CPU on Moderate. I have no shot of ever commanding an army of trebuchets and knights in real life so doing it on my ThinkPad via Proton is the next best thing :-D
Omg aoe2 is so addictive! Some things you might enjoy:
- YouTuber “spirit of the law”
- watching some build order guides. Fast feudal and fast castle build orders are super useful
- watching commentated games of the Viper
Ha, I was watching a SOTL video earlier today to learn how to better plan my military build. I was a Fast Castle -> Boom adherent until a week or two ago because I kept getting got by the CPU rushing me during Feudal without having my defenses built... these days I basically do Dark Age the same every time then adjust my strategy based on the map, enemy civs, etc.
As someone that plays music professionally and who enjoyed Rock Band, I think that the issue is a lot of folks find satisfaction in matering skills and checking off boxes that other folks design for them.
Designing a satisfying skill progression takes a lot of work. I know what I will have to do if I, say, take up mandolin again seriously, and it's daunting- and worse, maybe it won't even lead to a satisfying or useful end... I will still do that at some point. I had the same feeling about cello or pedal steel guitar, and they all turned out okay.
At the same time I totally understand why following simple tutorials, running a preset course, climbing an established route, riding already-cleared bike trails, or playing a video game with few possible outcomes can be satisfying.
I agree: a well-designed educational course can feel like a video game in some ways, in that you're learning at a high, consistent rate.
Being someone who grew up on these games, I often think of the steep trade offs I made in childhood playing them.
If I’d spent all the time playing Guitar Hero playing an actual guitar instead, I’d be a real guitar hero.
I could also be a pro skater.
On the other hand, video games enable a wide breadth of intellectual experiences.
Being a simulated guitar hero and simulated pro skater is more enriching than the likely baseline of having zero experience with either.
And, video games can help in discovering real world passions — the number of guitarists who found their inspirational spark through Guitar Hero is likely significant. Same for Factorio or Minecraft -> programming.
If I could have got a steady hand with tweezers, I could easily have been a surgeon. Real patients probably don’t have noses that light up, which reduces distractions too!
My malpractice insurance payments would be through the roof. I'm pretty sure I managed to lose leg bones inside the patient.
Maybe you would have tortured yourself and still wouldn't be any good.
But we’re talking about professional programmers here, not amateurs role playing.
So? There are a lot of not fun aspects of programming; Factorio is what it's like if it was all just the fun parts.
The problem with side projects is that they do not have a well defined goal. Or they do, in which case something like Factorio won't have any appeal because you can just work on something more meaningful instead. Factorio is for people who want to keep programming but are too frustrated or cynical about the real world to do it there. If the real world was better, they would do it there. If the real world could be fixed with programming, they would do it there. Many have tried, only to discover that what they thought were technical problems are really people problems.
Games usually have kinks worked out - if you build project you might end up chasing one liner for a week.
From game I get instant gratification as if I play by the game guide/rules I can have something satisfying built in one evening.
There are plenty of technical problems that are in fact technical problems.
e.g: making bluetooth 10% more energy efficient in the next few revisions
In fact there are probably infinitely many.
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? People saying "whoa, hey, great work but let's talk about this. I see here you've made assumption X about implementation area Y and that actually conflicts with the direction that we had in mind for the upcoming release, so let's talk more. To start, we'd like to see if we can explore option Z, thoughts?"
That ain't fun. It's rewarding but it ain't fun. Not like sitting down and messing with Legos in your own house is fun, or building a silly factory in Factorio is fun.
> 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!
I know a person who 2x'ed BTLE transfer speeds by herself by coming up with a new protocol to talk to iPhones w/o the need for one of Apple's security chips.
Sufficient brainpower can do amazing things.
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 reader to come along.
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.
This isn’t a feasible pathway outside of a lifetime commitment, because it takes several decades to build up enough credibility to reliably advance proposals in such committee work. (Or be very lucky )
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.
Perhaps you should be concerned if your productivity is so low when you don't have an AI crutch doing the work for you.
Trust me when I play minecraft, the moment I realize I don't have inventory sorting installed I quit the game.
Are there any popular games with copilot like AI suggestions being part of the core gameplay?
Also, are there video games with ML-powered opponents or NPCs that'll act more like humans instead of the old-fashioned decision tree AIs? Seems about time. I know there are research projects that tried this for things like Starcraft 2.
Also saw Facebook's experimental Diplomacy AI. Wish that were usable the time we lost a player.
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.
I can't tell if you're being serious or not here lol
where is our hacker news copilot when we need it?
Lol. My parser failed at this step, so I had to look it up:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence
I'm looking over the sentences in the comment you replied to and I can't figure out where you would have gotten lost, can you quote the partial sentence that confused you?
It starts out as a typical programmer rant these days about AI assistants and LLM fine tuning and then goes on to complain how sadly, they don't work for this game yet. So he's forced to play it manually. How old fashioned.
I find that pretty amusing.
Oh well if you thought someone was going to say they dislike LLMs failures so they want fewer LLMs, and instead they say they dislike LLM failures so they want LLMs to be trained more, that's not a garden path. You don't have to back up and re-process the previous words. And in particular a garden path sentence does it grammatically. You suddenly realize you were getting parts of speech wrong.
Note that the original sentence also gave me pause.
It's perhaps too long, overflows the parser stack.
Thanks for the feedback if you are talking about me ;). I frequently get suggested to put more punctuation...
Yeah. It was parsable, but took a second reading.
By original do you mean Xeronate's sentence? I agree but that's not the comment that was talking about LLMs.
Mindusry scratches the same itch, but in perhaps a slightly more appealing way for me at least. Rather than the entire game being dedicated to creating one massive monolith dedicated to the one goal of rocket building or whatever, there are many different levels each where you’re just playing classic tower defense and using the layout of the map to your advantage to extract resources and kill bad guys. It’s casual and FOSS.
the expansion adds some of these aspects.
> there are many different levels each
the expansion adds separate planets and multiple space-platforms. So it moves away from the monolith and towards multiple smaller factories. (In the end-game you probably and up with a massive monolith again, but until then you will have multiple medium-sized factories).
> ... classic tower defense and using the layout of the map to your advantage to extract resources and kill bad guys
Each new area add some unique defense-need, e.g. in space you have to shoot at incoming asteroids, and on the lava-planet, you have to build temporary mining-outposts, that get eaten by worms after a couple of minutes. (The other planes probably add something like that too, but I haven't played so far yet)
I think Factorio, Mindustry and Satisfactory is a "choose one" trio for any gamer to like. They share similar goals (factory building), but approaches are quite different.
Not sure what "choose one" means here. I liked Factorio and Satisfactory, but didn't like Mindustry.
I meant that out of this 3 games you'll find one you like when looking for factory building games.
hopefully not a spoiler given the name, but the space mod that was released on Monday opens new planets to explore, after you manage to build the rocket to space on the first level, so it's no longer an "entire game being dedicated to creating one massive monolith dedicated to the one goal of rocket building"
I do get the appeal of games, it is one of my long-time passions, but indeed that's the issue with games like Factorio specifically, they feel too much like work, so might as well do work.
This, long ago a roomate got into Factorio and after figuring out the basics ended up admitting that it felt way too much like work. This has been my reason to stay out of Factorio even though plenty of people have recommended it to me. I did a short collaborative run of Mindustry and I feel I don't need to play Factorio, plus, Counter-Strike chugs all my playing time, to me it's a bit like cocaine made a game and except for griding aim, it scratches all the right spots in my (smooth?) brain.
It's the trucking game for truckers in my mind, only a madman would play it after work.
> It's the trucking game for truckers
Exactly yes, I wouldn't say it's only for engineers, it is perfect for smart people who chose a different path in life and need to feed this part of their brain with a fun simplified simulation of what it's like to be an engineer.
Of course, engineers would love this game, but we already engage in this type of activity all day much more intensely precisely because we love it, we already know how to do more interesting and valuable things with the same effort.
Similarly, I really lost the appetite for hard decision-making strategy games when I founded my startup. I was already having to take plenty of hard decisions, thank you very much, the real thing is much more interesting and more than enough.
Are you working at Black Mesa research? Or maybe space communist office? Do you work on interplanetary industrial stuff?
Yes. Don’t you? Why not?
I feel the same about another pretty chill game, Dave the Diver. It has a great feedback loop, at the beginning
Once I get successful in it, I'm like "but I should be making money in the real world, not this world" as I do have side projects. the game does turn into a slog, if you approach it that way
Dave the Diver just turns into a slog is all. It's fantastic at the start when everything is novel, and all the systems hold promise. But the systems themselves turn out to not have good gameplay loops, so right around the underwater village it starts to kinda suck, which ironically is right around when all the systems are mature enough that to play well you have a giant list of "todo" items across a variety of systems, many of which you may find boring, but are obliged to interact with anyway, sort of like real life.
The advantage a game like factorio has over DtD is that you can kind of abandon huge sections and "start fresh" while still collecting rent from the work you did earlier to fund your new excursions. I guess DtD does this to a degree, but there's a lot less freedom of intellectual movement.
This is why I like Against the Storm. It is a novel (if familiar) challenge every time, and every time you "beat the odds" the game forces you to move on to the next harder challenge, "you beat this puzzle, you need a harder on."
just looked up Against the Storm, looks like the board game Agricola, where the goal is to build and farm and survive the winter. I always found Agricola ironic, in that is masquarades as a PvP game, where your survival outcome is then compared to the other players, but its very stressful as there are not enough resources on the board for your family.
so thats what made it too much like real life for me, because you're like struggling but then pretending like you are flexing (look at the size of my house! my farm!), but really everyone barely made it at all
maybe Against the Storm as a single player journey makes more sense
I've played both, I absolutely love both, but they don't have that much to do with each other.
Against the Storm is all about setting up complex production chains, not necessarily linking them explicitly like in Factorio, but more about balancing resource availability and assigning workers. It's a lot like other resource-focused city builders like Anno, but it is very well designed to impose a constant pressure on the player, always on a rush to meet goals before the whole thing crumbles, constantly putting out fires in the system (sometimes literal fires).
The name is perfect, in that you build this complex machine, and it is constantly stress-tested by periodic hazards. It's an awesome rush to "hold-fast", scramble to desperately fix things, constantly on the edge, hoping that the storm will end soon because the whole thing is about to crumble, while rushing to fulfil the objectives so you can get out of there before it gets too bad.
Frospunk evokes this feeling really well too. I suppose Factorio is kinda similar with the alien attacks. Come to think of it, the pressure to feed the family and the final scramble for points in Agricola are not so dissimilar either.
> Once I get successful in it, I'm like "but I should be making money in the real world, not this world" as I do have side projects. the game does turn into a slog, if you approach it that way
Life is a slog if approached that way. Spending your time chasing more money instead of enjoying life is the quickest way to have a miserable existence.
Spending your (now short) life hungry and homeless on the streets is not enjoyable either.
That's... a weird dichotomy to draw. Seems like you're determined to keep yourself miserable.
I'm not miserable. I quite enjoy having money. It allows me to spend time with my family doing the things I enjoy.
I find the game motivational after a very profitable shift, in game.
But I wasn’t looking for devil’s advocate or solutions, us guys need to affirm each other’s experiences more often.
I also do enjoy very profitable sessions in life, the pursuit of money itself is fulfilling for me as it already is a massive multiplayer game pvp. Additionally, I would usually prefer to be doing entertainment options exclusive to the level of profits that have been manifested. But I love the existence that allows me to play video games with no consequence.
The stakes (there are none except ones you set for yourself)
The timeline (quick returns, but a long scale of challenges you can build up to. Lots of side projects out there with 0 users.)
You can play with friends
You can also pay 1/4 attention until you need to design something complex in the game. I find it fun, I can turn my brain off for a bit but then re/engage for the fun complex stuff.
I stopped playing as much myself because I wanted to either work on professional development (side projects, learning more) or actually make things with my hands (woodworking, chair making, fixing an old truck) that were real breaks from software engineering, and easier to share with my kids.
I feel guilty every time I turn on Factorio and basically no longer play it because I know I could have just as much enjoyment building something for the real world.
I've yet to find something I can do in the real world that's as enjoyable, accessible, affordable, and easy to pick up and put down as Factorio, or similar games (that scratch a "builder" itch). What sort of things do you have in mind?
* edited for clarity, typos
Well the reason I enjoy Factorio in the first place is because I love automating things, not necessarily the building part. There's an endless amount of things I can automate in my life or for others, and the effort I put into building those automatons, whether is personal or professional, continues to provide value after I'm finished. I have 1k hours in Factorio, while those hours did provide value to me, that value is pretty finite. That's my logic at least, I just feel guilty playing it looking at it through that lense. I got like 50 private repositories that aren't finished, or are interesting and fun that could provide just as much satisfaction and possibly continue to provide value in my life even after I'm finished with them. Right now I'm working on a little project to buzz myself into the front door of my building via an app on my phone that triggers the buzzer in my apartment that is a weird analog system that's 60 + years old (but funnily enough is called Auth Master). Not complicated or intense, but fun and interesting and will provide a standard of living improvement for me for years to come (assuming I don't move) after I finish!
For me it's me PhD thesis. It's a drug, and there's always something to do either on the code or writing or reading. I'm even a bit disappointed by Space Age.
Good luck :)
I play Cities Skylines for that reason I have to debug the traffic but mostly have fun building the city the way I want. Like once I feel like building a lot of tram lines, other time building train lines.
I also build side projects - but from the game I get instant gratification as I can build decent city with goal I have in one evening whereas side project to have anything I can say is pleasing takes much more time than one evening.
Games don't have annoying blockers like trying to use some new library, cities I build also did not work first times I was playing because I was noob - but even libraries frameworks I use on daily basis always have some kinks I have to figure out so it takes multiple evening anyway.
That’s funny! I play because I don’t code in my job so this scratches my itch with instant feedback. Now if only I was good at coding…i probably should do a side project
I think it's more a rite of passage.¹
You don't have to make it your job.
In a similar way I think more people should change a flat tire or change the oil in their car. I think it will make them more aware, but they don't have to become a mechanic.
[1] A rite of passage is a ceremony or ritual of the passage which occurs when an individual leaves one group to enter another. It involves a significant change of status in society.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rite_of_passage
Because you don't always have a fun side project and Factorio is designed to keep providing them for hours and hours.
>Factorio is designed to keep providing them for hours and hours
It's called replayability, the crucial selling point of every successful game.
Yes, and?
There's an in-between experience with the likes of the Natural Number Game or Project Euler -- it feels like there should be so much more of that kind of thing to substitute for so much of legacy education. Most "learning games" afaik are too "schooley".
I haven't played Factorio so far; for those who haven't programmed, do you think you're learning something new and somewhat transferable?
Zacktronics games might fit this bill
Games are much easier than real work and provide more consistent dopamine hits with their graphics, sound effects and feeling of progression. Factorio while fun is a long way from real work.
Factorio is more fun than any side project. While it hits a similar area of the brain as programming does (the problem solving zone), it's definitely not the same.
That is debatable. I get more satisfaction from working on a side project that I know matters in the real life, outside of the gaming scene, and it is fun working on it myself, and the same thing applies here: no bosses, deadlines, etc.
Sometimes you just want to expend energy in a direction that doesn't have consequences. I hold the opposite opinion from you in that people ought to be able to turn off the "any non-productive minute of my life is wasted" mindset.
You're on big space rock, dude.
You could just as easily say, why work on a side project when you could play Factorio instead with the same result?
What makes a side project better than Factorio?
I feel I contribute to society more by working on a side project of mine than if I play video games.
Most "side projects" have no users, other than maybe their creator, and therefore provide zero value to society. Furthermore, there's no intrinsic value in "contributing to society" — a term that is completely arbitrary, anyway. If the idea that you can improve society with your projects provides you joy, more power to you, but that's all it should boil down to: doing what you enjoy the most.
I do not know about "most", maybe.
I agree that "contributing to society" has no intrinsic value. It is my own.
I feel like I waste my time when I play video games, but this is recent. I used to play a lot till age 24 or something. This feeling stops me from playing, but even if I do end up playing, I feel guilty afterwards that my time went to something that ultimately "does not matter". That said, playing something for fun is entertainment, it should matter, but I still get those feelings nevertheless. I hope this makes sense. I am not trying to argue that "fun" does not matter, I suppose I am just not so fun anymore. :P
It depends though, if I play a video game with my girlfriend it is alright.
I don't either. I tried getting into it (and recently Satisfactory) and I find it boring.
I 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 this.
The games I play instead are wholly unrelated to my work life, such as FPS or RPG ones, where there is a clear distinction between what I can do and what I want to do.
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 the design do something else.
> 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.
This makes me sad.
You don’t need to make software for mass appeal.
Git is weird and bizarre (especially when initially released), but it’s used and well loved.
> 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 means, e.g., you need to remember to load the grocery list before leaving the house that has the server in it and better hope your phone doesn't decide for you that the page needs to be unloaded on the way!
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?
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
Email in the drafts folder on my phone
open apple notes and type in my grocery list and go blissfully about my day
That works great and is exactly what I did... when I was alone
I’d use tailscale or WireGuard for remote access, for starters.
That's... the situation as described in the post which the comment above you was responding to?
> The only downside is that internet connectivity being down means, e.g., you need to remember to load the grocery list before leaving the house that has the server in it
Wireguard or Tailscale Inc. are not magically going to resolve that situation. Does Tailscale even work locally if your internet is down or does it require their cloud for NAT punching regardless of whether you're on the server's LAN? For starters
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.
I won't go so far as to say I'm disgusted by what others do, but I am increasingly resenting having to use my phone for myriad tasks that shouldn't require a phone in the first place. Like unlocking my apartment door. It's obviously so that someone can get a recurring cut where they would have once provided a one-time semi-permanent solution (like a key, or a notepad).
I mean, maybe some of this will be blunted over time as open source slowly eats away at these utilities, but until then I view my phone like a grenade, or a drug, or a slot machine, or a money-eater.
My apartment recently moved over to “smart locks” and I immediately noped out (app is slow), choosing to memorize the codes instead. This was clearly an afterthought since about 40% of the time touches are missed when using the keypads.
Why anyone wanted to unlock their door with their phone instead of tapping a fob, I’m not sure, but the only interesting feature (temp access for friends) doesn’t seem worth it.
"Why anyone wanted to unlock their door with their phone instead of tapping a fob, "
I would want to do it with my phone because then I only have to have one thing to carry around with me. I haven't carried a key ring in years. I don't even carry a wallet these days. It's really quite useful. Way fewer trips back to fetch the keys/wallet, etc.
> I would want to do it with my phone because then I only have to have one thing to carry around with me.
I would prefer this to be a keyring over a phone for aforementioned reasons. Secondly, the app is buggy and often just fails to work. Third, it takes a good deal of time to take out the phone and fumble around with the software.
All in all, it's a pretty miserable experience.
Maybe, but if you really don’t want to carry stuff around then it’s optimal to just type the code in (…which is why it makes zero sense that the keypads suck. except that they were being cheap.)
Then what I'm carrying around is a bunch of codes in my head which is its own form of baggage, or I re-use the codes and that comes with the same risks as reusing passwords has. Using the phone for everything has risks too, but I think not much differently than a password manager does, and most phones I've used have a reasonable device recovery process (not that I've had to use them or have expertise in that area...).
Carrying a single thing (which has a bunch of other uses than just access control) doesn't feel like a burden to me.
That said, I don't disagree at all that the typical keypad for access control on everything pretty much sucks. My front door has like 4 buttons only and does the telephone keyboard thing of using the same button for multiple 'numbers' in your code. Time to jump on amazon to look for a decent front door lock that works with my phone :)
> It's obviously so that someone can get a recurring cut
As the person who started this discussion about needing software for household things, let me be clear that this is not the sort of situation I'm talking about! The things I use, I either made or maintain myself because it's my hobby. Nobody needs to use them who doesn't want to and there is no cut. I think the conversation diverges here as this is not the same situation! Probably anyone would agree that being forced to use something or other is very different from being able to use something or other.
In the part of the world where I currently live there are cafes/restaurants that have a menu ONLY in the form a QR code that leads to some shitty slow and laggy webpage with the actual menu. I can't express how much I hate this.
Why do I even need a smartphone the go to a restaurant and eat something? Why would anyone effectively refusing service to people who don't have smartphones or do not want to use them? If I need their service and have money to pay for it why would they put additional obstacles in my way? What's their motivation for scaring of a potential customer using totally arbitrary criteria that has nothing to do with the service they provide?
Oh, I hate it so much.
This. And then getting shouted at or (less than politely) talked down to for wanting to talk to the staff for how they deal allergies. Only to finally load the menu, show them the information isn’t there, and promptly walk out.
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
"suboptimal" => optimal
I'm getting the distinct impression that handwriting human language may be beyond the basic capabilities of the Modern Human.
Seems to be memory and basic cognitive difficulties such as "sorting" whatever that means when actually buying the stuff in the store. I've been buying stuff in stores constantly for 50 years and I'm very fast, without aid.
But boy howdy these devices sound like just the tool for people with actual cognitive difficulties; we should make definitely sure that they have them. Might be a problem though on the data entry side.
edit: improve accuracy
Progressive app using local storage?
Can you not just screenshot the page on your phone as a backup before you leave?
Yeah, as a last resort that is a good suggestion. On a proper computer you could even use "save page as" and have it run the javascript so you can use all of the functionality (e.g., checking items off, or temporarily hiding when you're planning to get them in the next store) except that the syncing will fail until you get back home, which would be okay then.
It's a rare situation though, otherwise it would have been worth it to make a proper app that caches all data locally rather than a webpage
> You don’t need to make software for mass appeal.
Some people, like myself, enjoy writing code but need a purpose to write code. If I don’t have a reason, or problem to solve, I can’t just sit down and start coding.
Try graphics programming.
Endless fun to be had trying to recreate shaders and having cool ideas for different vfx.
Honestly, that fits into the same boat for me. I like fixing problems for people and I’m not particularly creative in the classical sense. So messing with visual effects for the sake of it doesn’t really do it for me. Weirdly, if someone needed it for something, I’d probably pull a 60 hour shift to figure it all out ;-P
Just kind of sounds like recreational programming isn’t your thing.
That’s okay too :)
Consider yourself lucky. I enjoy programming in itself greatly, but I don't find myself motivated by producing anything useful.
I mean, what is “useful” in the sense of “paying the bills” is quite different from “useful” in the sense of social utility - and what you _perceive_ as social utility is a whole other thing on top of that, that’s only _hopefully_ somewhat aligned with the actual thing.
Working on something that feels like it’s only useful as a way to extract money is incredibly unrewarding in my experience, to the point of increasing my feeling of burnout.
Useful does not mean mass appeal. The software I got paid the most to write is used by a handful of people on a manufacturing site and 99.9999999999% of the public will never see it.
It solved a problem they had and I’m proud of it but yea it’s incredibly niche and useful to a very select few people.
I don’t disagree and, to be honest, that kind of work is something I really enjoy.
I’m mostly, personally, talking about building toy apps or hacking my microwave to play Doom. Not throwing shade at those who do, it’s just not what motivates me.
> You don’t need to make software for mass appeal.
In Factorio, the things you make don't need to have *any* appeal. It's just fun.
If you have more fun making random wonky software, that's great for you and I'm happy for you. But I personally find Factorio to be more fun than software when I'm trying to enjoy my days off. (at least, some of the time. Sometimes I have fun making software too but only if I have that 'itch'. With Factorio, it's fun even if I don't have an itch)
>This makes me sad.
I gotta say, I think I agree.
Maybe it's just rose-tinted-glasses, but I remember a time when software was split between "IBM-Corpo" culture, and zany SV/MIT/Caltech culture where people threw things at the wall and proceeded when stuff stuck.
It kind of saddens me that it feels like it's now only IBM-Corpo, and everyone feels the need to be ever-productive and adhere to strict rules and schema.
tl;dr : I remember when the fun Factorio game was qbasic.exe and no one blinked about it. We all had fun.
(p.s. I love factorio now too)
> It kind of saddens me that it feels like it's now only IBM-Corpo
I think about this whenever I see a new open source library hosted on its own domain with a polished and slick promo material. I really don't mean to throw shade at designers for making nice designs, but it just feels weird and corporate-y to me that the polish is a priority.
There are, of course, open source projects that serve as a hook for selling SaaS products, which is corporate by nature and thus doesn't trigger the same feeling in me.
the permaculture of: patches in emails; binaries on usenet; releases / of sources on maybe less savoury personal web sites
otoh lack of basically centralized source control / git / hub / lab etc would also be missed dearly
depending on context: corporate polish can be fine; especially if software "is infra"; let truly (?) fun inconsequential software be messy and / or fun if sparks joy
apropos permaculture: i enjoyed TIS-100 but never got interested by factorio (maybe its art?) but anyways i'd personally find it more interesting to see more declarative / triggered simulation / play out in ever interesting ways
so maybe biologic systems over industry in space?
maybe there exist such games already? they do in my mind at least; i should look into current simulation frameworks maybe and read up on ecology
TIS-100 was more of a puzzle game than a sandbox factory building game like factorio.
TIS has a much tighter game loop with hard success metrics for each challenge.
I wouldn’t really compare the two.
TIS-100 was one example of the general context of "programming in games" or "games as programming" which I've actually played and enjoyed. I get that Factorio has a different game loop and broader sandbox than TIS-100, so I can see where you're coming from. Factorio, on the outset however, hasn't quite gripped me. Again, it might be this particular one's art and overall setup, but TBH I also think that outside of constrained puzzling as you say, I'm much more inclined to work on all those little side projects desperately waiting for attention...
In some ways, this reminds me of Guitar Hero and its set of games. As great as those are for getting into music, once you're already into it, it can feel like time that could have been better spent on deliberate practice or at least some good old jamming for fun. I do love games, as long as they don't take up too much time and have an ending. In an earlier life I've already burned plenty of midnight oil on similarly "open ended" play (4X and other strategy or construction games are the worst traps for me). I'd rather finish BG3 at some point - at least that one has a definitive end to the player's story and is a bit more of a change of scenery from what I do for a living (building and optimizing systems).
Then again... maybe I'll finally try Satisfactory which I own through Humble Choice IIRC; or maybe I should avoid doing that at all costs for the reasons above... ;)
TL;DR IT'S A TRAP
Not long after his immersion in LIFE, Gosper himself got a glimpse of the limits of the tight circle the hackers had drawn. It happened in the man-made daylight of the 1972 Apollo 17 moon shot. He was a passenger on a special cruise to the Caribbean, a “science cruise” timed for the launch, and the boat was loaded with sci-fi writers, futurists, scientists of varying stripes, cultural commentators, and, according to Gosper, “an unbelievable quantity of just completely empty-headed cruise-niks.”
Gosper was there as part of Marvin Minsky’s party. He got to engage in discussion with the likes of Norman Mailer, Katherine Anne Porter, Isaac Asimov, and Carl Sagan, who impressed Gosper with his Ping-Pong playing. For real competition, Gosper snuck in some forbidden matches with the Indonesian crewmen, who were by far the best players on the boat.
Apollo 17 was to be the first manned space shot initiated at night, and the cruise boat was sitting three miles off Cape Kennedy for an advantageous view of the launch. Gosper had heard all the arguments against going to the trouble of seeing a liftoff—why not watch it on television, since you’ll be miles away from the actual launching pad? But when he saw the damn thing actually lift off, he appreciated the distance. The night had been set ablaze, and the energy peak got to his very insides. The shirt slapped on his chest, the change in his pocket jingled, and the PA system speakers broke from their brackets on the viewing stand and dangled by their power cords. The rocket, which of course never could have held to so true a course without computers, leapt into the sky, hell-bent for the cosmos like some flaming avenger, a Spacewar nightmare; the cruise-niks were stunned into trances by the power and glory of the sight. The Indonesian crewmen went berserk. Gosper later recalled them running around in a panic and throwing their Ping-Pong equipment overboard, “like some kind of sacrifice.”
The sight affected Gosper profoundly. Before that night, Gosper had disdained NASA’s human-wave approach toward things. He had been adamant in defending the AI lab’s more individualistic form of hacker elegance in programming, and in computing style in general. But now he saw how the real world, when it got its mind made up, could have an astounding effect. NASA had not applied the Hacker Ethic, yet it had done something the lab, for all its pioneering, never could have done. Gosper realized that the ninth-floor hackers were in some sense deluding themselves, working on machines of relatively little power compared to the computers of the future—yet still trying to do it all, change the world right there in the lab. And since the state of computing had not yet developed machines with the power to change the world at large—certainly nothing to make your chest rumble as did the NASA operation—all that the hackers wound up doing was making Tools to Make Tools. It was embarrassing.
Gosper’s revelation led him to believe that the hackers could change things—just make the computers bigger, more powerful, without skimping on expense. But the problem went even deeper than that. While the mastery of the hackers had indeed made computer programming a spiritual pursuit, a magical art, and while the culture of the lab was developed to the point of a technological Walden Pond, something was essentially lacking.
The world.
As much as the hackers tried to make their own world on the ninth floor, it could not be done. The movement of key people was inevitable. And the harsh realities of funding hit Tech Square in the seventies: ARPA, adhering to the strict new Mansfield Amendment passed by Congress, had to ask for specific justification for many computer projects. The unlimited funds for basic research were drying up; ARPA was pushing some pet projects like speech recognition (which would have directly increased the government’s ability to mass-monitor phone conversations abroad and at home). Minsky thought the policy was a “losing” one, and distanced the AI lab from it. But there was no longer enough money to hire anyone who showed exceptional talent for hacking. And slowly, as MIT itself became more ensconced in training students for conventional computer studies, the Institute’s attitude to computer studies shifted focus somewhat. The AI lab began to look for teachers as well as researchers, and the hackers were seldom interested in the bureaucratic hassles, social demands, and lack of hands-on machine time that came with teaching courses.
Levy, Steven. Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution - 25th Anniversary Edition
----
Factorio is hacking again. It's kludging it together to make it work. When you read things like https://wiki.factorio.com/Balancer_mechanics or the JK latch and the SR latch ( https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/92tdgm/jk_latch_s... and https://wiki.factorio.com/Tutorial:Circuit_network_cookbook#... ) and get into r/technicalfactorio/ it is reminiscent of HACKMEM ( https://archive.org/details/HAKMEM ) written by Beeler, Gosper, and Schroeppel.
Thundering towers blasting into space is a primal thrill... but what if the hackers can do all of that with some aluminum foil, duct tape, and other things found in every garage workshop?
Big and flashy bets are expensive, many small bets are a far, far better way to explore the design space, especially now that we can share all the results with almost no cost.
I think that culture still exists outside of official IT teams. It is just contained in python scripts, R coding, excel, PowerApps, shadow IT etc.
The hacker culture is still there but hacker social media (unless carefully curated) is flooded with optimized content to the point where the cool stuff is hard to find and you only see the grifter techs.
Nah, they're still there, you merely have to know where to look. Most hackers I know eschew social media appearances.
There’s loads of hacker spirit still alive in the homelab and home automation space just to give one example.
Having lots of fun tinkering with Proxmox, Wled, Shelly devices to manipulate electric rollers, and more. Couldn’t quite get Valetudo running on my robot vacuum (my model isn’t the easiest to hack) but the concept is so cool. Triggering automations With dirt cheap NFC tags or a cheap wireless numpad is so satisfying.
Building an *arr stack is another area where there’s tons of amazing creativity online and the hacker spirit still lives on.
Plenty of hackers with substantial social media presences but they live in pockets that don't cross over into mainline social media too much.
You don't even have to look per se. The YouTube aglo provides me a lot of interesting content that isn't especially high quality or production value. I do take an effort to ignore click bait as much as possible and click "don't recommend channel" for things like MKBHD and LTT, because those crowd out original content if you let them.
Social media popularity is pretty much an anti-signal nowadays. The more popular the closer to the average.
Eric S Raymond deserves credit for pioneering the grifter tech exploitation of hacker culture.
Bring back counterculture hackers
What do you mean, back! There's more than ever! We're overflowing with talented peeps hacking on cool things, writing nice blogs publishing zines, and so forth and on!
The formerly-counterculture conventions got so cult and big they grew a counter-counterculture of smaller places.
Outside the walls of the AI SaaS grind. There be life.
Haha, any recommendations?
See if your area has any local makerspaces/hackerspaces or regional conferences like BSides.
I won't sell any area near me unfortunately.
Next to none in south Florida outside of Miami :(
An app can be like a home cooked meal
https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/
Used? Certainly. Well loved? Oh boy do I disagree.
I think it's an extremely powerful tool, and it's worth knowing how to wield it well, but that power comes at the expense of user friendliness, especially for junior devs who don't have an intuition of git internals and how commands map to them.
> Git is weird and bizarre
The core of Git is incredibly simple and elegant (content addressable database). It's an amazing approach to how to represent the data that needs representing.
The UI is the challenging bit, and that's because Linus just slapped something on to demonstrate it, expecting that a proper UI would be built over the plumbing he'd created.
> The UI is the challenging bit, and that's because Linus just slapped something on to demonstrate it
Which makes it weird and bizarre. Especially in the context of this whole discussion. Not really sure what you’re trying to say.
Well loved? It runs on network effect mostly. hg is well loved but not well used.
Nods in Emacs.
I do not find git weird and bizarre at all. First time I hear such nonsense. Why do you feel that way?
> I do not find git weird and bizarre at all.
You probably haven’t used it enough, honestly.
Rebasing, reflogs, pickaxes, 3 way merges, merge directions, the fact that merge directions are reversed during rebases, are all weird things that are pretty specific to git.
At least as far as how they’re presented
> First time I hear such nonsense
You don’t seem to listen very closely. Linus himself recognized git’s perceived weirdness in a talk he gave about it years ago.
It’s amazing you haven’t heard negative criticism of Git, before! It’s widespread.
https://kagi.com/search?q=criticism+of+git
For all the peasants that don’t have a kagi subscription (like myself):
https://www.google.com/search?q=criticism+of+git
Or this (used share search feature in Kagi, which works for everyone)
https://kagi.com/search?q=criticism+of+git&r=us&sh=-Tk-oKViO...
I don't understand, I can make whatever software I want, for whatever purpose, and it can still be impactful, depending on the user. It feels way more impactful than anything I can make in Factorio or similar.
This behavior is known as "play". Many of us find it stimulating. If it doesn't work for you you have my sympathy.
I play, just not in the same terms as my work. For example, I shoot bad guys, but I also know people in the military who refuse to play FPS games.
A surprisingly number of airline pilots are flight simulator aficionados.
I was going to say this, VATSIM is full of real pilots.
There's a whole genre of such games.
- Modern Farming. Has really good working models of expensive farming equipment. There are videos of real farmers playing it.
- Lawnmower Simulator. Yes, really. Mow enough lawns, get a better mower.
- Power Wash Simulator. Not kidding.[1]
The first game in this category was probably the famous Desert Bus.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5G-2qTupCk
Then there's the PC Building Simulator
If you like Power Wash Simulator, you'll LOVE the relaxing meditative idle game Paint Drying Simulator, and the exquisite organic fractal patina of its sequel, Paint Peeling Simulator. ;)
Good for them, fortunately I'm not a trucker.
Life is way too short to be boring.
It’s boring to play CoD instead of Factorio?
I read that as "to play CAD" and was like "nah, Fusion's fun too". :D
No, it’s boring to use cheap personal attacks (like I responded to) instead of actually engaging. If I wanted to read that, I could find it in YouTube comments.
"Good for them, fortunately I'm not a trucker."
How is that a personal attack?
Fortunate for the truckers..
I've found myself in playtime with Claude 3.5 lately; it scratches both itches very satisfyingly.
You and I both, and I actually have something to show up after!
What do you do with it?
> I can make whatever software I want, for whatever purpose
Such freedom is extremely rare when you get paid for writing or maintaining software.
It depends on whether you make software for a living or for OSS. One does not preclude the other, even if one is rarer. Given my situation, as I had initially stated, I am part of the latter. Even still, were I the former, I still don't get why one would work "for free" basically, especially in terms of a game versus real life.
Even oss has users to satisfy.
If you’re building oss with no users, or just for yourself, you’re functionally doing something more like art than coding in terms of how you prioritize and execute.
You’re not playing Factorio for a living, are you? Supposedly we’re talking about your free time.
Here's to hoping things like Patreon and GitHub Sponsors make it more common. These platforms could truly change the way things are done in the software world. Given enough sponsors, I could quit my job and focus on free software every day.
Not everything is about impact.
Perhaps not, but my fun can in part be traced to impact.
Are the FPS games you play also about impact? You seem to have set yourself a different bar for 'fun' for this title (or genre?) alone.
Of course not. I think you misunderstand, if a game is too similar to real life, I am unsure why I should play it, whereas if it is fairly different, such as an FPS, it becomes much more fun for me. My question is primarily on the former, of why people seem to play a game that basically is like work but has no benefit for them. If it's fun for them, then that's fine, but my question more, why is it fun for them in the first place? That's really what I want to figure out.
Sometimes it's fun to do things when there's no real world consequence attached to failure and experimentation even if the mechanics are similar to something we do for work.
I sometimes do project euler puzzles for fun. I'm a CS professor - this starts to feel kinda close to my job. But it's relaxing and there's no pressure and no one is affected when I screw up; I just get to keep kicking at it, or put it down. The freedom makes a big difference.
The "solving an interesting problem" part of my job is the part I love. It's the other stuff I need a break from sometimes. :)
I think I can answer this to some extend. I kinda feel like you do, that playing factorio is time that I could more productively spend on side projects (especially considering how much time it costs), but I don’t kill bugs in side projects, don’t build train lines, don’t build spaceships. I play factorio because the dopamine hit when something comes together is nearly the same, but the actions I take are different enough to stay fun.
Also, I just think it’s good to not look at something that’s too much like work once in a while. Even if factorio is closer than many other things.
Did someone really downvote my opinion? That’s just, like, pretty demotivating.
It's fun to solve problems. How do I optimize this sub-factory? - That's the same fun as "how do I optimize this function" but instead of a green light from my test runner one gets a colorful display of a working factory with a visible result. The fact that I reduced memory usage of that function by 10% I don't see in that way. And probably both both are equal in benefit to humanity's progress (zero)
> 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.
Sue you do. And you’re not obliged to keep it in some workable form just because they use it, they can use something else.
>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.
More counter-examples: LaTeX, vim, Regex, Blender, SAP, most Unix CLIs...
I feel the same way, I was building something in a game 10 years ago and I thought to myself, “I’m putting all this effort into this game and at the end I won’t really have anything to show for it and this feels like the same energy I use when programming, let me program instead”.
This thought changed me from someone who plays games to someone who makes games.
The only real game I find entertaining and fun these days is Rocket League, everything else feels slow and boring or I could be using this energy for something else.
Not sure if it’s a blessing or a curse.
> I’m putting all this effort into this game and at the end I won’t really have anything to show for it
You will have something to show for it: Joy.
If your only interest is to invest effort into producing something that provides some kind of physical value, then of course work will be more interesting than games.
Development has fun parts and it has tedious parts. The tedious parts are what usually makes for a good product. Factorio removes that part; because it is not about producing a product, it's about having fun.
> Not sure if it’s a blessing or a curse.
That's up to you, but for me it'd be a curse, not being able to do thing just for fun anymore, because of always feeling a pressure to be productive.
> Development has fun parts and it has tedious parts. The tedious parts are what usually makes for a good product. Factorio removes that part; because it is not about producing a product, it's about having fun.
Factorio also has tons of tedious parts. It really isn't all that different in that regard in my experience.
There are many games these days that are designed to have a certain element of tediousness (grind) in them, because this gives you the sense of being productive without actually producing anything.
> That's up to you, but for me it'd be a curse, not being able to do thing just for fun anymore, because of always feeling a pressure to be productive.
I don't think they mean to say they always feel a pressure to be productive. If it costs you exactly the same amount of energy and you get the same amount of joy from it, then why would you not choose an activity that produces something of enduring value?
> Factorio also has tons of tedious parts. It really isn't all that different in that regard in my experience.
I would say that the only boring part is before you get bots. Then your role shifts from builder to designer. All the tools given to you (ctrl+c/x, up/downgrade planners, rail autocomplete, ...) just make building effortles, and most of your time is spent in design, analyzing and debugging your factory, while the changes are done for you as you work.
You're discounting the joy you get from actually solving a problem for yourself and other people which can provide serious long term satisfaction and monetary rewards.
For diversion, I try disconnecting from screens and doing something healthy that involves the use of my physical body. I find walking, hiking, swimming and running very enjoyable. I'm also a big fan of tennis, racquetball and table tennis. I still play video games occasionally when there's not an option to engage with the physical world for diversion but I really prefer chess to most modern video games.
> You're discounting the joy you get from actually solving a problem for yourself and other people which can provide serious long term satisfaction and monetary rewards.
Key word: can.
You can also waste your time and end up with something no one will use. In fact, that's the likely outcome — there are many repos on Github with 0 stars, after all. Factorio is designed to reward you for your efforts. The real world has no such guarantees.
Programming can still beat most games in terms of joy. I just miss that burst of satisfaction from completing something in programming because it’s never really done just good enough for production.
Factorio and other open ended optimization games scratch the same itch as programming without any payoff. Speed running feels different because execution is so important optimal changes over time, and you get a finite endpoint.
You're discounting what's actually being said here, and said by many people.
I don't play Factorio for the same basic reason as so many others in this thread: it's too much like programming, and I want to use that energy actually programming. Something I enjoy very much, something which has paid every expense I've had for the last fifteen years, and something which directly produces value for other people.
I also pick up a little handheld most evenings and play games on it. Lately, Puzzle Bobble and Galaxian. Scratches a different itch.
The dichotomy between 'play Factorio' and 'program computer' does not reduce to the dichotomy between 'have fun' and 'joylessly pursue productive endeavors'. Clearly for some people Factorio doesn't produce the former dichotomy in the first place, and more power to 'em. For others it does, and the conclusion that this means we don't like fun is simply invalid.
Happened to me too. I was creating circuits and logic in Little Big Planet 2 when the realization hit. I then built and released a Android platformer.
My LBP2 levels had 50ish hearts. My Android Game got 15k downloads
If this is coming from the feeling that you’re not useful in the meantime - pretty curse that has positive effect on your pro life as a benefit. Makes me miserable though.
In the meantime I always could choose between similar joys based on future professional benefits like programming vs gaming. Factorio is like programming so for me I play it whenever I can with my friends (aka almost never), but otherwise I am programming
Nobody ever bikesheds me or makes me break flow to attend a Fun Team Event in Factorio :)
I feel exactly the same. I don't think the problems you solve in factorio are that complex, they are just tedious. It feels like calculations that a calculator can do. It is utterly boring to me personally, I can simply write a program or come up with a formula once I know what I need to make to calculate how much of everything I need. I also like to play simpler games which stimulates more of a lower part of my brain (motor control shit that feels good) no need to think too much in these game since I do a lot of that in my real life job. I have mostly been working on research problems where you can't generally write these rules for how to solve a particular subproblem and that feels like actual problem solving I just don't get when people say they love the problem solving aspect of the game. I mean if you think solving simple mathematical optimization problems that already have a solution "problem solving" then good for you. The average game time is too long and it is just not worth my time.
I’m inclined to agree.
I also don’t get people who look up YouTube videos on how to do things in Factorio.
What’s the fun part left to do if you just use someone else’s factory or belt design?
I think a lot about this in the context of video game minmaxers/netdeckers who just copy a researched, optimal behaviour. It's completely alien to me but some people really get a kick out of just being an implementer, following rote instructions exactly to the letter.
yes once you watch those videos it takes away the problem solving element as well.
Ratios are one thing. To find a good tileable design, which is also UPS efficient, especially with beacons can get quite challenging
It can be but my point is when you face those types of challenges in you work and solve them you realize how much better and satisfying those challenges are in real life compared to Factorio which takes away the fun part of playing it.
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 things, what the layout you will have to put in place, how fast things will have to move. You painfully build that. It works. You feel good. Then you realise it will just be more of the same ad infinity with the first time you do train design and liquids the sole inkling of novelty. It’s all fairly simple conceptually so it gets tedious and boring quite fast (at least to me). I think part of the issue is also that I tend to play it wrong by calculating and planning - literally work for which the in game tooling is not optimal - while I think I would have more fun just winging it and fixing things as they happen.
What I mean is I think it’s not a game for everyone but I can see why it’s catnip for its intended audience.
If that’s how you want to play it, there are mods such as factory planner which will support that playstyle.
Meanwhile, yeah, at least half my time is spent working around earlier mistakes. A main bus always works, but spaghetti is what makes the game fun.
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 includes some ingame recipe-planner mods, so it's easier to plan-then-build.
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.
I submit that if "but I could be doing something productive instead" is a common thought when you are trying to have fun, that is the problem and not Factorio. It's perfectly ok to just have fun and not build something meaningful.
I can have fun without needing to build anything meaningful at all though, but when the barriers get to close, that's when I start having an issue, in my experience. That's why I play games that don't replicate work in a sense.
Your implication that the definition of fun excludes meaningfulness is equally problematic.
I don't think they're saying that per-se, I think they're saying: it's perfectly ok to both "have fun" AND "not build something meaningful" at the same time. I don't think you need to read in that having fun necessarily excludes doing something meaningful.
While we're on the topic of assuming intent: that invented word "problematic" - problematic to whom? Something being a problem is almost always a subjective stance, not a universal truth as that word implies.
problematic to the maintenance of a good-faith social contract
What is this contract?
I find it hard to believe that faux dumbfounded naivete jives with the terms of the social contract.
Just like any other video games, I like these type of management games because it's "work" without real-life consequences.
I can play the min-max game without any unknowns that comes from real life management. Or I can destroy everything and mess everything up too.
It's my escapism.
That’s why I prefer Satisfactory : it’s the same principle but it also allows you to build gigantic great and beautiful things. For me it’s the perfect mix between Factorio (for building factories) and Minecraft (for allowing you to create your environment) and, contrary to those two, it’s also aesthetically beautiful. In fact building production lines is not even what I prefer, what I prefer is organizing them in chaotically beautiful buildings.
(Don’t think I want to start a debate, I loved the 3 games and played them a lot, it’s just that Satisfactory won my heart… even the name is great).
Same here. Played both, both are extremely satisfying to play, but Satisfactory is just..... pretty. It's nice to take a break from building the factory to just explore the world too.
Concur on all points honestly. I will also add that Factorio's setting is pretty bleak, and the game is a bit too addictive to me. It's also harder to just botch things which, because I am trying to have fun and not work, is pretty laborious. In satisfactory if I messed up some spacing of belts or machines or whatever, I can just clip it, go up and over, just generally make a visual mess that works.
Not entirely sure why Factorio is more addictive. Shorter action loops, but often queing and waiting for things to happen might jiggle the brain in a more addictive way. It's not a positive feeling situation either, more like you get trapped having to do more stuff over and over again.
Agreed. Factorio is a fantastic game and it ran so Satisfactory can fly. With every update (and with release) Satisfactory keeps upping the complexity. I would be extremely happy if Factorios development helped push Satisfactory in this way and led to more maps (planets!)
I've never tried Factorio, but I found Satisfactory very boring after a few hours. It was initially fun to do some exploring and make some initial manufacturing lines. However, when I realised that to scale up the manufacturing, then I would have to place all these components by hand hundreds of times, it just felt like boring make-work, and I never turned it on again. Maybe I would have continued if there was some way of automating the building, such as some sort of 2D viewer.
Looks like you tried the game a long time ago. There is totally a way to automate building with the Blueprint Designer which basically allows you save blueprints of full buildings (or building parts or whatever you want) and to build them in one click.
You might want to try Dyson sphere program next ( ◔ ‿ ◔ )
IMHO, Factorio is aesthetically beautiful.
In a stylistic way, yes. Not in the « what a beautiful multi floor truck station I built there, oh and btw, take this stair then on the mezzanine, take the door at the left to access the commands of the station. » way.
It’s just different games. Factorio is excellent as building production lines while Satisfactory is excellent as making feel you « in » your creations with 3D, a lot of architectural options, a really immersive sound design (quitting your noisy machine room to a corridor and hearing the sound go down when the door closes).
It’s different. But there is one important common thing with Factorio though : they are both made with a lot of love and with a lot of attention to every detail. In fact, both games could be an exemple of design and ergonomics for even professional softwares.
I feel the same. Factorio was fun for a small bit but it really just felt like a job, same with Stardew Valley, Animal Crossing, etc.
After beating prepatch PCR, I switched back to Call of Duty for a bit.
Same with me. When I was younger I was able to just enjoy myself without mixing irl thoughts. Unfortunately these days as an adult if I'm stuck in a game or have to chip at it in some tedious fashion, a part of my brain goes "you can spend this time learning something new or productive irl".
I think my attitude changed the games I play also. I used to play MMO when I was younger but FPS games give me that dopamine rush without any commitments.
Sadly it's only when I'm sick do I feel I'm able to just cozy up without these "you can be doing something else" thoughts and truly enjoy games for what they are, tedious or not.
It's important to have time for yourself. You might want to think about scheduling some, if it feels like you can only really relax when you're sick.
> I never got into these types of programmatic games for precisely this reason but I'd like to understand other perspectives on this.
Everything you describe requires interaction with people. Those are too often toxic, incompetent, overly demanding and keep changin schedules and priorities. At least in single player games you get to drop all that crap.
Some of my most overengineered code was written after a Factorio session… maybe it’s better treated as an outlet for some urges to which you shouldn’t acquiesce :)
My day job is mostly CRUD or calling APIs. I trained my brain for many years to do more than that and Factorio satisfies that urge.
This. But for me it was moving into management instead of production. I don't really get to CAD/design in my day job, focusing on one of two projects with my mind for weeks on end. Instead I manage others and troubleshoot problems that arise that become impediments for my team. I also live in an apartment, so facotrio/building games are my outlet. Minimal impact on the environment, I get my design and building fix, and I can always stand up and walk away without much clean up.
Do your work feels like you have infinite resources which you need to extract, connect and spend on building a fully automated planet-size megafactory all by yourself while fighting local roaches and acid-spitting bugs? What kind of work it is?
Ironically the game goal is to leave that place :D
> Whenever I play it, I get the distinct feeling that I could instead do the same thing but productively instead
This is me, but extended to all games. I stopped playing games because I feel like I can always do something more productive with my time instead. If I really want to check out, I watch some TV instead. But games (especially modern ones) take too much work without any real reward.
I love Factorio, because in real life it's difficult to fully automate things so abstractly. It's so wonderfully simple to think that oh this thing goes here, is combined with this and this... profit.
You then walk away from the game, inspired to apply such process-thinking to your actual work and life, and realize that it's actually rare to be able to do.
To me it just feels very repetitive. I don't feel clever building out factories, I just feel more like a drone doing iterative manual labor. As an engineer I just couldn't get into it.
I get the same feeling with increasingly many games as I get older.
It started with games that are basically engineering work. But now it's anything with resource management or long-term strategic thinking (basically whenever I think "hmm, I need to note down my thoughts so I can pick up my strategy where I left of next time I play").
I feel the same about when I play HoI4-- really winning a two-front war on ironman and building webapps have a lot of similarities.
There's a whole slew of great programming puzzle games where I get the same feel. One day while playing tis1000 I was like I should just learn fpga programming. Except for human resource machine that one stuck with me I guess because my daughter was playing as well.
But same with pico 8, I just want a real ide, debugger, unit tests. If I'm not getting those better be getting paid
On the other hand, what bother me about factorio is its deterministic nature. Perhaps it would be more fun with more random elements like equipment failures etc.
It does feel like work, but that's okay! Some mechanics are mundane than others, e.g. compare clearing enemy bases to designing rail blueprints, but the game does everything to make it efficient and ejoyable: high performance, keyboard shortcuts, immense amount of quality of life features - all you get when devs love playing the game themselves.
And, even Factorio being my favorite game, I still need to take a long breaks from it because building a factory is a lot of mental effort.
Not just you, I had the same experience with Factorio. Other building games like Minecraft I could play for days, but Factorio stresses me out. I want to chill and make cool stuff, optimizing a factory while fending off aliens wasn’t relaxing.
Exactly how I feel with redstone contraptions in Minecraft. Already have OSS projects to my name, and my way to "play" is to refactor them endlessly. In a game I'm looking for a different type of fun for once.
Not the same, but Slay the Spire could be described as a "programmatic game". I play it when I just need to burn some spare cycles (especially if programming is inaccessible to me at the moment, like when I only have my phone)
I think there is a quite big player intersection between Factorio and Slay the Spire, despite being completely different genres. And I agree that StS is a nice way to relax from programming.
I felt same way after playing bunch of American Truck Simulator. Why I’m doing this? I can just go and drive real car instead!
I wasn’t into video games for a long time for the exact reasons as you aren’t into Factorio. The ones I was interested in always felt too much like a job.
Minecraft with a kid was my gateway drug and I got into Factorio really quickly after. It’s actually a really special game. There are elements of it that are practice for real world scenarios, but it is very relaxing, stress free and commitment free. It’s a great game to sit down with for an hour after work to decompress and become normal again.
It’s also an incredibly fun game to share with a group of people on one device. That’s something I haven’t experienced since the 1990s, but it’s really enjoyable to get together with a group and build together. It’s an excellent cooperative game and is a great way to really get to know people. It’s even more fun when you play it with people from a range of professions - one of my favourite Factorio groups is a bartender, a cook, a lawyer and a software developer. We think differently but when it all comes together, it’s really neat.
I understand that it’s not for everyone and I’ll be honest with you, I don’t have nearly the reflexes for FPS so we’re likely quite different in terms of the games we like. But I find it very relaxing and very enjoyable. It reminds me a lot of QBasic on an old Tandy - it’s that same thrill of tinkering because tinkering is fun.
I feel you, I used to play many single player games as well like Ratchet and Clank, Jak and Daxter, or Sly Cooper, over games that wanted me to expend significant brain power. They are still incredible games that don't have the same effect as Factorio does, they feel wholly different in their goals.
That sums up how I feel about it. I can see the appeal, but for that kind of mental effort I rather just keep coding.
Splitting from the experiences of others, I think the mentality somewhat comes down to your preference in what you seek to do in videogames and how you engage with them. In these types of sandbox building games, career developers naturally get somewhat of a "cheat" to becoming proficient quickly in that the mode of expressing logical sentiments will only ever be a few abstractions away from what you would do normally at your work, so you feel less constrained to building understanding of a system and can instead use the system as a way to output your ideas in a way faster than others might. In this sense, it's somewhat of a power fantasy that if you vs the average person were to play this game that you would most likely be able to clearly express your ideas and goals and be able to act on them, which makes it fun to go off the rails to show off "some crazy thing" you've made as a slight nod to your perceived skill being able to make these things.
Consequently, that's why I'm so disinterested in learning these games. The discussion about them shifts into a thin one layer abstraction for other people to try to brag about their accomplishments and what they self injected as their experience instead of the game itself. This doesn't affect the gameplay, but it affects my perception of the game as a shallow vehicle for attention seekers more than it promotes the ideas of fun gameplay.
That said, sometimes the style of gameplay resonates with a style of development you might have been interested in understanding more and can use it as a way to get motivation or inspiration for ideas. Automating pipelines, physics simulations, etc. I think it's always worth a shot on games that have notable recognition of quality to see if it jives with what you enjoy, but it's been the exception more than the rule in my case.
I feel the same way sometimes, it definitely closer to the same loop of plan execute refactor then many games. I do find my self getting wrapped up into then backing off because it does feel like work.
But I like the fact that I can see it working in realtime, its just pretty, this machine I built that I can zoom into and see the smallest detail actually working.
Wish software was more like that, a good debugger can get closer to that but way more clunky and poor performing than Factorio.
You're right. The intoxication of graphics and visual design in games can't be underestimated. It's more than a paint job or window dressing. It slots into the whole itch-scratching appeal and addiction.
I agree debugging tools could make more use of visualisation. I remember the excellent HTML 3d view in Firefox, removed from version 47. For some reason we can't have nice things: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqHV625EU3E
Not sure if there's a way to get it back. I heard it's available in Edge, but I don't use that browser.
This is why Satisfactory works for me, but factorio doesn't: even though it's supposedly also a factory buildering, it's really much more of a world exploration game that happens to have factory building, but you don't have to build "a perfect factory" to get anything done, or unlock things that let you explore better. I can just throw down some buildings and link them up haphazardly and that strategy kind of works all the way up to near-enough-to-the-end to keep the game a fun running/driving/flying with occasional bouts of production line management, rather than feeling like I'm just doing work that a computer could do way better.
For me it's because it looks pretty. The light and sounds of factorio are so much fun. Trains going zoom, research centers going zip etc.
I wish real programming tools were this much fun.
reminds of me of this quote from the Tao of programming:
https://farosaves.com/375baf1e-cc1c-4f02-8a7c-35eaba25d94d
Fps: the US military thanks you for training for infantry in your spare time.
Funnily enough, I actually used to play America's Army 3, a game which explicitly was funded by the DoD. It was pretty fun, not gonna lie, much more tactical than many other shooters during that time.
I remember speaking to several of the people who worked on America's Army back around 2007, when Counter-Strike was all the rage. I think this was at the GDC.
The people I spoke with were from the Army. And they found CS-style games agonizing to watch. So many people running around with no plan, so much friendly fire, so many unrealistic tactics. You could practically see them shudder.
They also had some people who worked in logistics. I remember one of them saying, "If the United States decides to invade a country, the software we wrote could calculate how much toilet paper we'd need."
Of course it is agonizing, CS doesn’t try to replicate real world scenario. In real life if you die - you die, you don’t get to respawn with $800.
You sure?
I haven't tried it myself, but heard that this is indeed the case.
It also convinced me to never join the army, because I was a bullet magnet haha.
Operation Flashpoint (early version of ARMA) did that for me. You sneak around for an hour, then get shot in the face and it's all over. Imagine that, but for your life ... fuck war.
Haha, I would never dream of actually getting shot at, lol.
But by your own measure, you're not killing actual people, so why waste your time?
Do you finally get it now?
My work is not killing actual people, so your analogy is flawed.
Gonna enlist and be the first man to rocket jump
Finally my 14 years of TF2 will pay off. Do they have sticky bombs too?
Or Quake 3!
Practicing point and click skills probably won't to help much with your firearm accuracy. Or cardio.
Haha. Yeah, I’m working on logic puzzles all day for work. The games I play to relax are either shoot-everything games or, like, MarioKart. I need to chill and not think.
That's the feeling I get when I see day traders on Eve Online.
Same, I get to a certain stage in the game (usually the first big factory 'refactor') and find myself thinking that the exact same effort I'm applying to the game could be applied to any number of work-related things that would be just as fun and much more beneficial.
This makes no sense to me. Doing productive things means 40 to 100 hour commitments with the possibility of your work being worthless at the end, because you didn't have enough time for that 40th or 100th hour, because you need to do a lot of upfront work, because you need specific hardware, because someone else did it better, because the maintainer rejected your pull request, because what you want to do actually takes 1000 hours.
Now that is what I call tedious!
Meanwhile open ended pvp multiplayer games can drain hundreds of hours with no feeling of accomplishment. Those are the games that make me feel I should be doing something more productive.
You have a very limited view on what being productive is. I have a home lab, I'd rather spend an hour or two improving it and learning things along the way rather than playing factorio.
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.
To me, it starts to feel like work when I have to rebuild large parts of my factory because I didn't leave enough space to expand. This process feels exactly like having to refactor a bad codebase (where you feel the urge to just start from scratch).
If you plan your build properly, you can avoid this, but it takes a few runs to learn the best strategies.
Factorio makes me realize that I don’t really like solving problems for the sake of solving problems (or optimization, for that matter). I like solving them for a tangible reason or because I I’m making someone’s life better.
Problem solving and optimizing in Factorio is different than a grind in some game like Diablo. That sort of grind uses a completely different part of your brain (movement and in-the-moment decision making), and I find that I need that kind of change after a week of real-life problem solving.
I imagine people who gravitate to Factorio are probably better problem solvers and optimizers than me because that’s what they truly enjoy for its own sake.
I think the new expansion helps a lot with the rebuild issue, since you're expected to have have many different bases on different planets instead of just one big base.
You actually don't have to rebuild anything in Factorio. That's your personal decision.
I mean, theoretically...
I’ve always been a little miffed with the comparison to programming. I love Factorio because it’s the only survival-craft game I’ve played that doesn’t devolve into an inventory management game. The game scales with your gameplay.
Diablo felt like work the time I played it
> The grind is no different to me than playing Diablo.
On the surface, I guess. But Diablo is a game about dungeon crawling and Factorio is a game where you make the dungeon. You aren't looking for good loot rolls to make your character better in Factorio, you're trying to reassemble the pieces of a poorly-designed infrastructure network to make it efficient enough for your goals.
Really there are so many types of programming that Factorio's proximity to your day-to-day work will vary on the field. If you are a frontend web designer, then Factorio will probably feel pretty fresh and novel to you. If you're an SRE/SWE that rips apart musty codebases to see what's salvageable, Factorio's loop of refreshing and optimizing can feel eerily similar in some respects.
I like that it’s similar to work and that is probably why it is my favorite game. Sometimes I don’t have the intensity needed to attack a hard problem at work so I chill out and work on my factory instead. Once I notice that I’m becoming too ambitious in the game I can tell that my intensity has returned and will switch back to work. If I don’t have the energy for factorio then clearly I won’t have the energy for work so there is no point in forcing it. It’s like a halfway point between relaxation and work where I can hang out for a while before committing to either.
Maybe it depends on the work, but for me, writing code, there's always loads of low intensity work to be done. Minor refactors, improving code clarity, writing docs, replying to technical emails etc. For me, the energy level at which I'd enjoy a game like Factorio (which I did briefly try) is exactly the energy level at which I'm most productive doing this kind of work.
I work in applied research so it’s prototypical, fiendishly difficult, and always pushing the limits of my ability. I do mix in light duty work to try to help me get back into the flow and build up a head of steam but I don’t have enough of that kind of work. For me time spent in factorio reflects sub optimal organization usually due to not feeling 100%. It’s currently the best adjunct I’ve used to help manage my energy levels so I don’t begrudge the time spend in it. As I’ve gotten better at managing energy levels I do spend less time gaming. At ~100hrs per year and decreasing I think it’s unlikely that I’ll ever make a major dent in space age but I’m ok with that. I really only bought the new DLC as a thank you to the game devs.
I'm terrified of Factorio. I've deliberatly avoided playing it because I know, if I do, I'll lose an entire month. Kudos to the creators on their brilliant game, it's like heroin for a particular type of brain.
I was really looking forward to the expansion that came out on Monday. I chose not to play the main game anymore for the last several months. But then life threw some curve balls and I can't bring myself to buy it, knowing it would pull me away from the stuff I need to do. Hopefully soon...
Yeah I have that feeling about Path of Exile 2. I also know I won’t be able to resist.
Factorio isn’t like work as much as it tickles the same spots on my brain that my favorite parts of work do as well. After putting in 2K+ hours to the game I have the follow suggestions/advice for new/experienced players:
* Play your first game without mods (or very limited QoL mods)
* Don’t use blueprints from others online (at least in your first play through), you can watch videos if you are truly stuck but copy/pasting what others have done can ruin the fun
* Don’t always try to min/max. If that’s what you like then more power to you but I often guess at things or over-provision because it lets me keep playing and not get bogged down
* Before you look for blueprints online use something like Helmod or Factory Planner, blueprints can really ruin the game for me at least. The one exception is belt balancers, those are fine to copy. You can share your own blueprints between games but taking blueprints from online feels too much like cheating. Study them and reproduce them if you need to but I promise it will be more satisfying to do it yourself rather than just plopping down what someone else did.
* Don’t try to build the best or “final” version of something at first. As in, build what you need now and re-evaluate later when it’s not enough. I’ve ruined the “fun” before because I was too hung up on making a production line too complicated/large/etc too early. Don’t make your first smelting operation at a scale you’d use in late game, you’ll build a new smelting setup later and that’s fine.
* Go into the game blind, don’t research “the best way to do X”, your first (few) play throughs will be more fun if explore and learn on your own.
BTW "Factorio: Space Age" was release a few days ago. Personally, I'm going to spend whole Sunday playing it :)
I've started a new Space Age game, too!
With the understanding that you can regularly leave Factorio running overnight or even all week to build up resources, how many hours have other hard core Factorio players logged?
My Factorio play time is up to 6,573.2 hours at this point.
I love Factorio for the same reasons I love SimCity. 6,573.2 hours seems like a lot of time, but I've probably logged even more hours playing SimCity since 1989. (But much of that was actual productive time porting it to various platforms, testing, debugging, and optimizing the actual source code and user interface, etc.)
https://github.com/SimHacker/MicropolisCore
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fVl4dGwUrA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8snnqQSI0GE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsxoZXaYJSk
> My Factorio play time is up to 6,573.2 hours at this point.
I habitually translate "X thousands of hours" into "full time employment years".
You've been playing Factorio as the equivalent of a full time job, for 3 years and 3 months.
[Edit: Many of those hours were probably background farming, so not a direct comparison.]
I read about a half hour every day. That means I probably clocked some 6 thousand hours in my lifetime. Imagine all the time I could’ve invested in playing the rat race more, in those wasted 3 years of books :(
I am absolutely not suggesting that "full-time employment years" are better allocated to work/job/employment.
Just modeling what we (US, 40hrs/wk and 50wks/yr) consider a "full-time" commitment to any task/activity.
I don't play computer games anymore.
Factorio was the last game I played. I lost a weekend and ended up with a raging headache.
Before that an MMORPG did the same
A year before that it was Civilization IV, exactly the same, lost an entire weekend then never played it again.
I don't think I am suited to games. Or maybe I just need more free time
Instead of binging a game over an entire weekend and burning yourself out.. slow down, just play for an hour a week. Treat it like a weekly TV episode of a currently airing show. I follow a couple television series weekly and don't fret myself for wasted time because I only spend 2 hours a week watching them.
Life is all about experiences. I am sad for those who go through life without experiencing video games in moderation. They provide one of a kind interactive experiences that you won't find anywhere else in life.
> slow down, just play for an hour a week.
Some games really reward spending more time with them, and getting into the "flow". I think playing Factorio for an hour and then stopping would just feel frustrating - like cooking up a delicious meal, eating a spoonful, and running out the door.
Same. In my case I have real world problems that need my attention and I struggle to justify playing games while those problems loom. Only exception is playing games with my kid, but that is time boxed.
The time I put into Nintendo Switch with my kid in the last year is the most I've gamed since very early 2000s
I still play games but I lost my ability to “lost myself in time” while playing games, what you’re describing does not happen to me anymore. And I dearly miss it.
"lost a weekend" - it's called having fun. You loose a week if you work for someone else.
If you like Factorio give Shapez 2 a try. I lost a week to it recently. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2162800/shapez_2/
I've started and re-started Factorio several times, and always enjoy it... up the point where an automated train network is necessary. Here, I always run into problems, and no amount of researching or fettling of the setup seems to guarantee that my trains work. Sometimes they do... often, I have to drive them manually.
Anyway, if you like Factorio, you might also enjoy Mindustry: simmilar-ish, less constructional depth, more tower-defence and fighting.
My train network ran about as good as any multi-threaded code I can write. Perfectly smooth and then a massive deadlock because my mutex locks (rail signals) have a bug.
The train logistics system in 2.0 has been vastly improved. I was just able to make a “set and forget” train automation system. All I need to do is add more stations and, when necessary, more trains. Before this updated you needed mods for this.
Or Dyson sphere program
Satisfactory is also good.
> Tobias Lütke, co-founder and CEO of the ecommerce platform Shopify, lets his staff expense their copies of Factorio. “It’s just bound to be good for Shopify if people play Factorio for a little while,” he told the Invest Like The Best podcast. “Because part of Shopify is building warehouses and fulfilling products for our customers. We are building global supply chains, and Factorio makes a game out of that kind of thinking.”
I wonder if they'll pay for their employees' copies of Wilmot's Warehouse, too.
http://wilmotswarehouse.com
If you've been consistently redeeming free games from Epic you might already have it. It was free on 2020-08-06[1].
[1] https://josephmate.github.io/EpicFreeGamesList/
For anyone similarly confused by the "it," the Aug 6 one was Wilmot's and not Factorio (which, AFAIK, has not been a participant in any giveaway)
Factorio doesn't go on sale. The author's reasoning being it's disrespectful to those who paid full price for it.
Edit: official forum link stating thus: https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?p=159626#p159626
I'm sorry, you're right, I misread https://isthereanydeal.com/game/factorio/info/ without checking https://isthereanydeal.com/game/factorio/history/ which shows it was cheaper but only goes up over time
No worries. It's an interesting moral stand for the author to take, so it's one of those random facts that just sticks out of my brain.
I can certainly say I'm an example of someone who hasn't bought it because it hasn't been on sale, but 50 dollars for a good game is entirely reasonable anyway and I admit I will probably still buy it one day.
It's funny I came across this thread. Just yesterday I was looking at buying it, but it's 50 AUD. I went to add it to my wishlist to wait for a sale, but it was already there. I realised it must have been on there for a long time.
I was wondering if I somehow missed it going on sale, or it never had.
Glad I know it isn't likely to any time soon.
Yeah, it stings. I did buy 2 copies on launch day for myself and my son (8) though. We have spent a lot of time on Factorio together though and I prefer it much more than Minecraft (although we have probably clocked up many many more hours on that).
It's interesting, this isn't the first time Shopify's CEO Tobias has looked to videogames to find skills he wants in employees.
He's a longtime Starcraft fan for example, and offered an ex Starcraft pro a job on the strength of that alone.
There is a reddit thread where he participated in that had some interesting perspectives that I think may be of interest to this forum: https://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/dl3o2p/billionai...
Heh, I would think that Amazon would allow expensing Wilmot's Warehouse since that feels more in their wheelhouse than Shopify
---
wowzers, "hate" is not a strong enough word for how I feel about that raging piece of junk. Holy hell, I'll never get that 15 minutes of my life back
Lots of comments on this thread in the vein of “I dislike this game because it’s not productive”. My honestly question is… why? Why is “being productive” this goal that has to consume your entire life?
I feel like it and Satisfactory redirects the part of me that creates and looks for novel ways of doing things from something that yields useful byproducts that actually change the world in tiny ways into something that yields nothing but more of itself. And it never really ends. I don't mind useless stuff, I play games, but something about Factorio and Satisfactory both draws me in and makes me feel so empty. I think because it scratches the itch that IRL I have built my career on, but points it towards something useless.
This is a really good analysis. I love both of those games but I felt exactly the same way as you. For me they are REALLY addictive, Minecraft is too. In a way that isn’t the same as some console games I play - where it’s easier to step away…
It's a digital model train set.
At least it doesn't take up the whole basement like the sets previous generations played with.
People look at me funny when I say this, but it's true.
I work in performance - a space where we're thinking about threading, parallelism and the like a lot - and I often say "I want to hire who play with trains". What I mean is "I want people who play Factorio", because the concepts and problems are very very similar. But fewer people know Factorio, so I say trains instead.
I think I know why it's enjoyable even though it's so close to work, too. It's the _feedback_. Factorio shows you visually where you screwed up, and what's moving slowly. In actual work the time and frustration is usually in finding it.
To me it feels like it subverts the desire to build something, in the same way that e.g. porn subverts the desire for sex. You feel like you're making something, but at the end of the day you didn't actually make anything.
For me RTS games are like a drug. I can easily get lost in them and play for 10-15 hours straight due to how my brain is wired. That doesn’t mean I never play them, but I treat it with the same respect as a drug, and use them in moderation.
I think because - or to speak for myself, the reason I've never bought/played it, despite being interested - it's similar and yet not productive.
Versus say Call of Duty or whatever that you might lose yourself in, which is also not productive, but bears no resemblance to work.
Pilot communities probably say similar things about flight sims (or flight components of games) that aren't good enough to be useful practice?
I’m a pilot and lost interest completely in flight sims when I bought my airplane (And I had a maxed out setup, multiple monitors, VR, controls, etc.) The simulator doesn’t capture the real-ness as ironic as that is, of the sounds, smells, vibrations, emotions and so on. In fact during my flight training my experience with simulators imparted a few low-level bad habits I had to work through when it came to operating the controls.
The analog controls in real life are heavier, more raw, somewhat imprecise, and you can feel them knocked around by the wind for example. Night and day difference. It honestly makes the most state of the art simulator feel like you’re operating a NES.
> In fact during my flight training my experience with simulators imparted a few low-level bad habits I had to work through when it came to operating the controls.
When I first started flying my instructor specifically recommended against flight sims for that very reason.
Now that I have my PPL I only use them to practice approaches for new airports that I’ve never visited before and to familiarize myself with the cockpit layout for planes I haven’t flown before. It helps build some minor muscle memory so I can focus on the harder parts of flying.
It’s not in any way similar to coding, though - it’s a puzzle-solving game. It’s not made to simulate any engineering discipline, nor user to train engineers (like flight sims are)
Yes, factorio is not coding, though it follows some principle of programming, such as input-process-output, workflow, load balancers, modular design, etc. Many players say that the factories often resembles PCB.
but that's the extend of it, you don't have to do heavier programming practice like algorithm, complex state management, input parsing and validation (unless sushi), or anything involving combinators until finishing the 1.0 version.
Factorio is not a puzzle game. You can get puzzle like gameplay if, for example, you are on a map with heavily restricted space, or are trying to micro-optimize something. But that is analogouse to code-golf or microoptimizations in programming, which are fairly puzzle like.
For typical gameplay, the only puzzles you run into are the ones you build yourself into. The name of game is to design your factory in a modular and extensible way so that you do not build yourself into a puzzle.
"not in any way similar to coding" is a very strong statement
many people feel it feels similar to coding, in the way you have to slowly refactor designs + work involves a recursive breakdown of tasks + tracing/debugging of issues
Many people are quoted in the article claiming it is in fact useful for training/educating software engineers.
People say the same thing about Sudoku. Or any video game (historically claimed as a hobby that creates coders, just because many coders liked computers at an early age, I suspect)
Liking video games sometimes leads to modding video games, and modding video games is a gateway drug for "real" programming.
You don't find coding similar to solving puzzles in any way?
IMO coding is to solving puzzle the same way as any other discipline (from people management to architecture) is to solving puzzles
Not really.
And I think that's mostly due to the lack of constraints in most programming jobs. I don't have to think about throughput or optimizing op codes or almost anything else because our machines have absurd amounts of compute and more memory than most hard drives I've had in my life, the networks are broad and fast, and there's a commercial solution for most of the hard problems.
Maybe I'd think differently if I worked on microcontrollers, but my brief foray into Arduinos and Raspberry Pies didn't feel that much different. I mean, I was using Python on the Arduino. I felt more constrained by the pins than anything else - another problem with several well explored solutions.
Not at all.
I’ve hated puzzle games all my life. Most likely because they’re artificial.
What about Zachtronics games like TIS-100 and Shenzhen/IO and Exapunks that are literally about coding (albeit in a simplified assembly language).
I can think of a bunch of similarities just off the top of my head: throughput management is probably the most critical skill in factorio, and obviously comes up all over software engineering. Managing production belt chains is not unlike managing your program's call stack. Ensuring the right resource reaches a production facility is like managing input types.
If you subscribe to Peter Singer's views on consequentialism, we all have a moral duty to spend our life maximizing the number of people we save from dying or from immense suffering. Hard to do that if you're not being productive; though I'll be the first to admit nobody does or can live with perfect adherence to that principle
That’s a crazy ascetic view of life. Also completely unrelated to almost anyone on this forum, since it’s unlikely most here are doing any work that saves anyone’s life
Theoretically, I guess telling HN people they should be out saving lives could save lives.
To his credit, Peter Singer actually is a crazy ascetic.
Taleb would be proud.
I mean, you work to make money, and you can donate that money to all kinds of charities that do save lives.
Just as a productive person sleeps, so too do productive people take leisure. Someone who never sleeps is not maximizing the number saved from dying.
Most people are brainwashed by the rat race. They don't realize that all the productivity is worthless.
Because it feels like you are building something but you are not. The problem solving in factorio is just tedious like doing manual calculations and you spend a lot of time doing this. It satisfies the problem solving itch for people who haven't faced any challenging problems in their work. Once you start solving these problems in real life factorio just seems pointless. Dont get me wrong i like paying pointless games that require very little to zero thinking (Muscle memory based) that I find satisfying. Factorio is just tedious.
Well, because being more productive makes more money, of course. Even if I only capture a small portion of the overall value of it.
Scratch that - I'm using "money" as a proxy for "value". Let's talk value directly. All things being equal, if I can enjoy Activity A totally in isolation, and Activity B equally much, but B leaves something behind which other people can use and get their own value out of, then B is clearly a better or more noble use of my time. Being productive just makes you a better person on net.
Now... I do not choose the "max productivity" strat with each and every second of my being, far from it. I'll probably buy and play Factorio sometime in the next few months, and it will be Steam game #3 added to my library after FTL and Slay the Spire. But I'm not going to sit here and pretend it is somehow better for the world outside of myself to play Factorio rather than e.g. improve the FOSS software I maintain that helps people learn Finnish. Let alone something like contribute to the Linux kernel. This is a philosophical non-question to me.
I think it's perfectionism and impostor syndrome.
When I play games, I never play competitive or intense games, I see it as a therapeutic activity.
I play relaxing single player games like Stardew Valley or Tiny Glade. Cultivate some crops, feed my chicken, pat my cat. No real end goal other than to just relax. I urge anyone to try, especially in co-op with with a friend or partner. It really is therapeutic.
I’d love to do that, but I have a different kind of syndrome where I can’t motivate myself to play something unless I’m playing with other people. Being an adult, I don’t have anyone who can just jump on a game with me on a regular schedule.
I’ve wanted to play Valheim for ages. I even bought the Factorio DLC on launch day and barely played it because nobody wanted to play.
Maybe because it sometimes feels like work. So if it's kinda like work, why not do something that is also not productive but would either not feel as though it's work or if it's like work, that you can actually enjoy.
For some the latter is facotrio. I tried it myself, didn't get past the demo. I think if I'm doing something not productive in terms of not using my time towards something that actively makes me money, I would feel better doing something like learning another programming language, do some quick projects to automate parts of my life, try to write myself a game or a piece of toy software that challenges me and is also fun to implement.
I think I'd rather do those than play facotrio.
Being productive doesn’t consume my entire life but if i’m going to do two things that feel the same I may as well do the one that has other substantial benefits to myself and others. I spend enough time developing that side of myself at work. My free time should go to making myself more well rounded.
The KPIs of these people's own lives have failed to grow quarter-over-quarter https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYvhC_RdIwQ
Because I am high in trait orderliness, conscientiousness and industriousness.
That’s why startups appeal to me, because they appeal to my nature. It’s in my nature to desire being productive.
So asking “why must you always be productive” on a site full of startup enthusiasts … well, you’re going to get a lot of the same answers
Because this is HN and everyone wants to LARP as their projection of a typical HN denizen. Sometimes this place brings out the LinkedIn in people.
Oh yes, without getting too political, that's just what capitalism is about.
Ironically, Factorio is all about productivity. Mine more resources, produce more items, expand more land and build more factory.
I faced my mortality and went the other way. I’ve already achieved more from an extremely difficult background than I ever could have imagined and it turns out when faced with my mortality, that was enough for me.
Everyone has different ways of unwinding and finding meaning, and productivity doesn’t need to be the sole measure of time well spent, at least for me anymore.
Because we'll all be dead soon and I want to have achieved something great with the short time I was given on this planet.
If you don't somehow make something useful, or built a thing people actually use, then what was the point of it all? To have fun and then be forgotten?
Though, with AI looming to take this last shred of human dignity too, maybe having a bit of fun along the way isn't such a bad idea.
Internalized capitalism
I'm not sure if there's any economic system that could survive long term without people being productive. Just because the farm is collectivized doesn't mean you aren't working from the crack of dawn to sunset
Being productive doesn’t require you to be productive non-stop. It’s not good for you and will likely make you far less productive in the long run
Trivia on farming: Medieval peasants worked far less than modern employees (at most 150 days a year). It was obviously harder physical work than sitting in an office all day, but they had plenty of downtime
Medieval peasants also had life expectancy of 30 years, what’s your point?
That is not true. You are passing on an ill informed myth.
How’s that in any way related to the topic?
I think it's just getting older. Some play is rehearsal for real life. Now I can run a real company, make real money and become a real millionaire instead of a pretend one (or at least try to).
Plus I'm going to die unlike when I was an immortal teenager, so I want to retire ASAP.
If I'm going to game it'll be an FPS or similar when I'm too brain dead to play when-will-i-be-a-millionaire.
The primary source is
https://www.ft.com/content/b9e419c6-acf1-420b-8ae6-908feb52c... ("How ‘Factorio’ seduced Silicon Valley — and me")
(Cool fourth-wall breaking moment seeing an HN'er featured in the FT!)
(We moved this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41954555)
Three HNers (at least!)
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=xal
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=patio11
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=kentonv
And the author of the article contacted me because of this old HN comment:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26593117
(Also, I am typing this while alt-tabbed out of Factorio...)
Highlighted. Thanks!
https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights
(Unfortunately one would have to scroll back through 3 years' worth of other things to run across it, but it's on my list to fix that and it's squirreled away there for the future)
I get a real kick out of playing builder games with my son. We played Jurassic park evolution a lot, I would direct contracts and what to build and then we’d discuss and he would build it. Heh it was like being team lead without the pressure and anxiety.
Every time I start playing Factorio it's always a matter of time before I'm trying to figure out how to solve factories with VHDL and how to interface Magic VLSI with the game's blueprints. From there it's another day or so before I'm reviewing EE graduate programs and working out how much math I would need to grind.
I had this experience with Eve Online back in the day. The optimization limit horseshoes back into the real world.
Case in point: just reading this thread started me learning about discrete event simulation. Damn you Factorio.
Is there a better graphics version of factorio? And no I don't mean Satisfactory or Dyson Sphere Program though those are good games in their own rights, I mean something with the same level of depth and camera as factorio.
I guess it depends on what you mean by "better graphics"? They're upgraded their graphics several times over the years. I'm playing on a 4K monitor and they're using most of those pixels. I can see a small amount of interpolation at full zoom at 4K.
If you zoom in, the graphics are high-res 2D sprites, rendered from 3D models. And the level of detail can be ridiculous. From this week's Factorio 2.0 update (and Space Age add-on), here's an example of the zoomed-in detail: https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-396 See the foundry animations? Those videos are actually slightly more blurred than the in-game version. And the sound effects are synced to specific animation frames.
So the world of Factorio is oftentimes brown and grim and covered in grime, but that's a conscious artistic choice. (Not all of the new planets are brown. Gleba is green and irridescent and frankly creepy.) Similarly, Factorio's 2D nature has allowed the developers to focus on gameplay and quality-of-life more than many newer games in the genre. If you want to build big, intricate factories with complex train networks, for example, Factorio really shines.
If anyone would like a game with 3D graphics, or a different graphics style, try:
- Satisfactory: The 3D world is gorgeous, and Satisfactory shines at "walk around inside your factory and tinker with it." Gameplay-wise, it has only recently gained blueprinting tools that allow working at a medium level of abstraction.
- Shapez 2.0: This is pretty and colorful and full of great little puzzles. It occupies a different part of the game-design space and is just a joy to play.
(Dyson Sphere Project and Captain of Industry also have great gameplay, but I don't know if their graphics are likely to grab people who find Factorio graphically underwhelming.)
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.
Speaking for myself, I love Factorio and can't stand Satisfactory. Even on peaceful mode Factorio has you solving real problems, whereas Satisfactory feels like playing Minecraft on creative mode.
Satisfactory's main issue is that it lets you build in three dimensions without doing any physics to check if that build is mechanically plausible. It's of course not reasonable to expect them to do that physics. But it means that sophisticated logistics/organization problems in Factorio almost always have the same solution in Satisfactory: build more, but upwards. There's no reason to think long-term in Satisfactory unless you have a specific aesthetic vision for a base. Of course, a giant factory-skyscraper with tons of conveyor belts sticking out looks really cool! And Satisfactory being easier makes it more of a chill sandbox game than a tense strategy game like Factorio, so I get why aesthetics-minded people like it. Different strokes.
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 travel process up.
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.
Shapez 2 is just stellar. I mean, Shapez 1 was good, but 2 is just awesome (IMHO, of course)
The trees move in the wind when you zoom in. Factorio takes sprite graphics to the next level! I felt the same as you, I've always wanted a brighter reskin of Factorio but I've realized it's way tooooo much work for anyone to do for free...
I haven’t found one, and really as you get later in the game the retro graphics are a blessing. I play on my work Mac (most powerful thing in the house) and I end up having to bail early because I just can’t have a megabase over a certain size, everything grinds to a halt.
Better in what sense?
I love Factorio but the graphics look a bit like 1996 SVGA 256-color sprites (edit: by which I mean, I feel like there is noticeable dithering). I haven't played the new "Factorio in space" bits, maybe it gets out of the browns-and-beige color palette a bit more?
You don't like the design aesthetic?
Because your phrased your question like people that complain about the level of detail. Yes, factorio is ugly (although some trees are beautiful). And yes, that's a design decision.
There are some mods that reskin it. Personally, I don't think any of them are beautiful.
I love the art for two reasons:
1. It’s simple, charming, and nostalgic.
2. I view it as a defense mechanism against the onslaught of modern gaming that’s locked in a race to the lowest common denominator (i.e. “Stay away! This game isn’t for you!” ;) )
For Factorio 2.0, there's a lot of graphics that have gotten higher resolution upgrades. Earendel has blogged about working on this. (The Space Exploration mod author, who also works for Wube).
Terrain looks better, trees look better, too, I think it's a pretty big change.
> by which I mean, I feel like there is noticeable dithering
Any chance you have the game set to use 16-bit color?
i also hated the graphics, but once you play it for a bit the graphics melt away and you can see the beauty in the details they have
Mindustry
Is there a similar game that lets you place logic gates and do computing?
Bonus points if it's open source.
Mindustry. It is open source and allows your to build logic gates.
Works on mobile, desktop, Linux, etc.
And according to this article [0] (from the mindustry article on Wikipedia), it was a hit on prison-issued android tablets until they banned it.
[0]: https://prisonjournalismproject.org/2024/03/31/popular-video...
A game called Turing Complete. Not open source, though AFAIK
Nandgame and nand2tetris both take you on a journey from discreet transistors to a computer, in the form of a game. There's also Zachatronics games' TIS-100, and Shenzhen I/O.
I'll offer some unsolicited rankings here for these:
Level of fun/addictiveness: Factorio<<<----, Shenzhen I/O, TIS-100, Nandgame, nand2tetris
Best story: Tossup for Shenzhen I/O and TIS-100, Factorio, nand2tetris, nandgame
Best order if you've never coded and want to get tricked into becoming an engineer: Factorio (but hard limit yourself here to no more than 2000 hours), then TIS-100, then Shenzhen I/O, then the Nands. I think Nand2tetris is more accessible as a learning tool.
Upshot - I highly recommend this list. :) Space Age (the Factorio DLC) has me wanting to do nand2tetris in Factorio now. Resisting..
nand2tetris is a book/course not a game lol I loved it though
Pretty different to Factorio, but Human Resource Machine is somewhat relevant and very enjoyable
Personally prefer Dyson sphere but to each their own
Games that require significant time investments have a tragic quality to them.
The thing I like about games is a clear objective that once achieved you have "finished". The thing I don't like about software is that no software is (or will ever be?) finished.
Factorio provides the illusion of achievement which produces happy chemicals in my brain. I will happily forego any other work when getting my fix from factorio. So I stopped playing it and returned to interesting side projects. I confess I have purchased the recently released Space Age expansion, and my productivity is in the toilet again. I’ll probably be done with it by thanksgiving.
The Civ series does the same thing for me. I've also moved on from games, although I think from time to time they may be useful for stimulating creativity.
It’s just gamified programming. I lost interest quickly.
You could replace this whole article with https://xkcd.com/356/
Also, if you like Factorio Youtube videos, I'm a big fan of https://www.youtube.com/@DoshDoshington
I was looking at this game this morning, it sounds fantastic fun podcasts I've listened to, but at 50 Australian dollars it'd be the most I've ever paid for a game on Steam. Someone convince me it's worth it?
They have a free demo that is fairly extensive. It should give you a good feel for whether the game is worth it to you.
Don't play the demo if you have a deadline coming. I repeat.
Easily the single best bang for your buck game I have ever played.
I’d still say that at AUD$100
> For me, the difference between work and fun is about the process.
> If I have to do it in an inefficient way, or the way I’m told to, it feels like work.
> When I have the freedom to do it my way, it feels like fun.
Yeah, that resonates with me. I didn't pursue a software development career because of this. Decided to do something else and enjoy programming on my own terms. It's been alright but I still wonder what might have been.
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