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from the you-are-stuck-at-home-you-may-as-well-enjoy-it dept.
After 8.5 years and countless delays for "refinement" Factorio has finally released today.
Factorio is a very successful indie game. (A few months back, it hit 2 million sales.) It is a base builder. The premise is that your spaceship crash lands on an alien planet, you are left with next to nothing and from there you build a gigantic factory so that you can build a new spaceship and get off the planet. You start off gathering basic materials and researching the basics until you rise to the level of advanced materials and spaceship construction. Your factory will continue to grow as you advance and as it grows it will create pollution. The pollution will cause the local alien life to stir and eventually attack your base; so you will need to set up defenses while advancing.
It is very addictive. Probably the most addictive thing for me is that often you need to do multiple things, and must prioritize. As your base grows, you will need to expand your power production, at the same time you need to explore and find a source of oil so that you can unlock the next level of research, at the same time, aliens are attacking the other side of the base and need to be killed... then you need to rebuild... add defenses... clear alien hives that are too close... add more ammo production... add even more power... expand your resource harvesting before the current iron patch is completely mined... and so on. and so on...
I personally have played Factorio for 1500 hours over the last 4 years... Over that time it has gone through some major changes such as the addition of Nuclear Power, Massive Network games (over 100 people have played coop in a single game,) high definition graphic overhaul, and regular performance tuning. While the 1.0 release is here, the devs have promised continued bug fixes and already annouced that 1.1 will be coming.
Factorio supports Linux, Mac, and that microsoft os.
Related Links:
Factorio Home Page
Factorio Steam Page (though you can buy directly from their home page to give the devs a few cents more.)
Submitter's Steam Review (shameless self-promotion that provides no actual value.)
(Score: 5, Interesting) by stretch611 on Saturday August 15 2020, @09:01AM (2 children)
I have spent quite a few hours playing Oxygen Not Included. (I admit that I was a fan up until the last minute changes that Klei made right before release.) ONI was actually announced, developed, and released all in less time than Factorio spent just in early access.
They both appeal to a similar set of people... They are both base builders and the goal (in theory) is to launch a rocket ship. I say in theory because many people just have fun regardless of whether or not they build a ship or not. While factorio essentially states that you reached your goal after launching the rocket, like ONI, there are research projects that can't even begin until after the first rocket is launched. Factorio does not have all the (in some cases) exacting science of ONI, (like matter and heat conservation,) but, Factorio's research tree is much more complex.
In ONI, your colony can die due to heat or a lack of food, or oxygen. In Factorio, there really is not a truly deadly incident. The aliens can kill you, you can walk in front of your own train and die, or you can even blow yourself up by firing a nuke and not being out the blast radius... But you just respawn with no penalty past losing the gear on hand. The aliens can destroy your factory/base, but once it is destroyed, the pollution will die down and you can rebuild after they calm down with no pollution to attract them. Quite a big difference here. (There is actually a steam achievement for getting killed by a train... they can move quite fast in late game and you will have them delivering ores/goods everywhere.)
They are both games with 2D maps as a world. However, ONI has a side view like an ant farm and is quite limited in both size and resources. Factorio has a 2D top down map (with a slight isolionear angle given the faux appearance of 3d.) In factorio, the map size is infinite in all directions. Resources are also unlimited... If you run out of something just go exploring and you will find another ore patch. It really is an infinite map... but your computer's memory is not infinite enough to store it all. (Your RAM is a theoretical limit, I have not heard of people exploring so much of the map that the game ran out of memory.)
In ONI, you try to support enough dupes to do all the work that you want to get done. Of course with each Dupe, that is more Oxygen that needs to be created, more food, and more heat that has to be dissipated. In Factorio, the object is more to automate everything with machines so that you do not have to do a thing except grow and upgrade the base... but even that can be automated.
Despite the differences, they are both base builders and people try to take it to the max. I remember some people in ONI would try to get colonies that were thousands of days old. In factorio, people tend to make huge mega-bases trying to produce x amount of science research per minute, or launch x number of rockets per minute. For many people of both games, it isn't over until after you bring it to the extremes.
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 3, Interesting) by looorg on Saturday August 15 2020, @12:19PM (1 child)
ONI is deceptively complex after a while. Getting rid of the gases and the heat turns into a massive problem. In some way you are your own worst problem -- as you want to build more, since it's in essence a builder game, but building more creates more problems that have to be dealt with which in turn causes almost as many, or more, new problems as it solves. Bases tend to eventually end in my opinion in heat problems or that the base becomes so big and sprawling that eventually you just never get anything done but there is just maintenance and eventually you run out of stuff. One would think it would be hard to die but considering the clones (or whatever they are again) are to stupid to live it happens, like building themselves into places they can't get out of and then eventually just die there.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Sunday August 16 2020, @04:12AM
Mods. There's a mod that makes the dupes smarter. A mod that adds radiators that dump heat out into the void. Etc.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek