Satisfactory is tight.
Yeah I’m doing a playthrough on that right now. Only got as far as coal power but I’m really enjoying it.
Fuckin love Satisfactory
I distinctly remember seeing sprites about 10 years ago, where the enemies were eco protesters. The biters were protesters with signs, the spitters were protesters with Molotov cocktails, the nests were tent encampments.
I think I did not imagine that and it seems to me that the enemies’ mechanics make a lot more sense if they were people protesting.
Does anyone know what I’m talking about? Was this in the early builds or was that a mod?
P.S: the goal of Factorio is clearly to build a large enough factory to cripple your hardware, then apply the gained skills in a real factory to be able to buy new hardware, then get fired due to your addiction, freeing up time to build further
Seems like the very first, very outdated trailer from 2013 contains some of that - though in the trailer itself it seems more like bio-zombies than eco protesters. The game could only be pre-ordered at this point, though the video’s description suggests there was already a demo available. I don’t know if the game’s lore at this point was already “you play as an engineer that has crash-landed on an alien planet” – if it wasn’t, it wouldn’t surprise me that the decision to make that be the lore ended up convincing the dev team to abandon humanoid enemies.
In any case, starting from the following year’s (2014) trailer the fauna is already in the form of biters, spawners, and worms.
tagging @causepix@lemmy.ml in case they’re interested in this tidbit of history.
The game has long eschewed “good” and “bad”; thematically I’d say it’s more of a “water & oil” situation where you, the crash-landed engineer, don’t really have a way to both get off the planet and not pollute – you are of a fundamentally incompatible nature compared to the bugs. I imagine it could be possible to do a play-through that deliberately avoids automation and attempts to launch a rocket with the minimum of pollution emitted, though that’s more of a self-imposed challenge to try out when you already “master” the game (it will be long and dull, for the most part). As this analysis puts it, “Factorio is a game about building factories, and only uses environmental devastation as a minor background mechanic.” Another analysis comes to more-or-less the same conclusion.
It’s worth noting that, as of the Space Age DLC that released almost exactly 1 year ago, things get pushed even further away from morality. On the one hand, the dlc introduces a way to replant trees, including automatically, finally allowing players to get to a point where no blurb of pollution ever extends into the rest of the world/map. On the other hand, to complete the dlc you will need to farm the fauna by literally capturing the spawners and harvesting biter eggs from it. It’s a very fun automation and logistics challenge (harvested eggs hatch into aggresive biters if not used in a recipe quick enough, and nutrients for the spawners must be produced off-world and imported via rockets else the spawner reverts back to a “wild” state). Things are even less clearly moralized by the end of the dlc, where you obtain the capability to craft new spawners and plop them down wherever you want. This means you can add to the native fauna, not just take from it. In a sense, you get more agency in how your relationship to the native fauna ends up. The road to that agency, however, remains that of the base game. Neither planting trees nor creating new spawners is available without launching a rocket off-world (in fact, it takes many many rockets to get to this point). As the first analysis I linked so succinctly puts it, “[i]t is manifest destiny that a rocket be launched, so exploitation of the environment is unavoidable and the efforts of the bug race stand in the way of fate.” Cynically speaking, the DLC basically just lets you green-wash your dominion of the planet/solar system, after-the-fact.
just one detail though. you pretty much enslave the biters in a way that looks very gruesome. well technically you imprison and enslave the nests, but those are alive.
Oh yeah, the graphics really insist that they are captured spawners, not converted, raised, or otherwise “friendly” spawners.
I’ve never played the game. Been meaning to for a while but so far have really only heard third-hand accounts of it. From the very little I know though that seems like a real possibility and honestly I prefer that interpretation.
@Jayjader@jlai.lu 's explanation gave me the impression it was nature’s way of fighting back against unsustainable practices. Like it lets you play as a bad guy and see the consequences of doing so, rather than pitting you against some diagetic evil and painting everything you do in a morally justified light.
I might have to eat crow on this one though, like I said I don’t even have entry level knowledge here.
this is hilarious in a dark way
i feel attacked by it. lol
Automation games are usually my jam, but I bounced off Factorio pretty quickly. The automation part I got really into. I wanted to keep things as efficient as possible, but then I kept being interrupted by fauna attacks and I kinda hated the disruption. It didn’t help that various defense systems like turrets and the like needed their own supply chain for ammo, so I had to drop everything, start working on that, monsters started attacking my base on another location, rinse, repeat. You get the idea.
I am aware you can turn off the attacking fauna, but that feels like turning off an integral part of the game, so I dunno.
My brother is currently way, WAY into it, though, so I might give it another shake in the future.
In a very real sense, the game is only intended to be played in the manner that makes it actually fun for you.
The fauna is an integral part of the game only in the sense that the pollution produced by your machines makes them angry and makes them evolve, and a lot of work has gone into balancing the pollution/evolution rates to provide a sort of tension and pressure that adapts to how fast you are progressing. If you care a lot about experiencing things “as the devs intended them” then I understand not wanting to cut off an entire system and set of mechanics. In that sense, dealing with the attacking fauna without completely stalling or falling apart is one of the first hurdles you are “meant” to struggle with.
There are intermediates between keeping the attacking fauna and removing them: you can disable their expansion, you can make them only attack when damaged, and you can tweak the numbers that determine how your factory’s pollution affects them. You can also change the amount of “safe space” the game forces the map to give you around where you spawn - this alone can be the difference between the early game being anxiety-inducing or quite relaxed. These can only be done at map generation (unless you don’t mind using console commands to change things on an existing save/map).
Without changing any map settings, it’s not immediately obvious how many options you have to address the problem in-game, but here are some pointers if you ever do give it another try:
- trees will absorb pollution, preventing it from reaching biter nests. They can absorb a decent amount but will eventually die and stop absorbing. Starting in a forest can be a bit more cramped than in a desert but at least you don’t have to fend off as many attacks early on.
- avoid overproducing just to fill up buffers - you probably don’t need to have 2k green circuits sitting in a chest as soon as you can make them. avoid emitting all of that pollution until you actively need those items.
- try to set up defences before they are needed. You can build a new production line first to know what space it requires, but set up walls and turrets before you turn it on. This should help prevent you being interrupted by attacks on undefended machines.
- researching damage upgrades gives you more damage output per unit of pollution produced, helping keep the balance in your favor
- only a nest that is exposed to pollution will send attack parties. You can toggle displaying pollution in the world map (now called “Remote View”) and proactively clear out nests before the pollution his them. You’re essentially choosing between proactive defensive efforts vs reactive efforts.
- reloading a previous save to change your approach without restarting an entire game is totally legit and nothing to be ashamed of.
At the end of what I would call the early game, you unlock even more options.
- efficiency modules reduce the pollution a machine emits. They also reduce the amount of electricity the machine consumes, which will indirectly lower your pollution by making you burn less coal
- solar power is a great way to lower the amount your factory is polluting once your panels and accumulators are already made. Making enough to power your whole base, however, takes a lot of steel and other ressources, whose refinement emits pollution. So don’t expect solar power to automatically fix your fauna problems - it’ll take a little bit of thought
- laser turrets do away with the need to produce ammo and get it to the front lines, though the spikes in power consumption they cause keeps them from being a total, immediate fix. Similar to solar power, you’ll need to plan a bit.
- flamethrower turrets are much easier to supply than gun turrets, and can be waaaaaaaay cheaper depending on how much crude oil you have available to you
Finally, you could also first play the game through once without the fauna to get familiarized, and then do a second run with them activated. in my experience, it’s a lot more fun to deal with them once you know your way around the other mechanics.
I did not expect to get such an in-depth response, holy shit. Thank you! Saving your comment for when I get around to giving Factorio another whirl.
You’re welcome!
I’m just glad the length of my response didn’t intimidate you. Factorio is really one of my favorite games of all time, top personal contender for “if you were stuck on a desert island and could only bring 1 video game with you”, so it’s easy to ramble far too long about.
I always turn the enemies off. I just want to automate. But the tech tree existing for weapons and being useless really bugged me so I got really in to Dyson Sphere program. But enemies have been added there too.
The combat system in DSP is not as disruptive as the one in factorio, and it isn’t as “integral” to the game as the one in factorio either. Once you get rid of the darkfog bases in your planet they will mostly leave you alone unless you’re unlucky; if that minimal interaction sounds annoying, turning them off entirely has little consequence.
Turn these biters of or set them to peaceful mode. I bought the game in beta and disliked the biters, like you i just wanted to build in my own pace. Some years ago i heard about the option of peacefull mode and got hooked so hard to this game.
I never played factorio but it probably makes the satisfying efficiency feeling even more satisfying when there are beings trying to destroy it and getting destroted themselves no?
I dunno. I feel like diverting resources to defense systems, necessary as they are, makes the factory less efficient than anything, but that’s just me.
You guys should try mindustry. It’s a factory/mining/tower defense games. I think it’s hard as balls to get right.
I wish I liked games like factorio.
I love base building stuff (rimworld is my current obsession, tho I almost like making my heavily modded game function properly more than actually playing it) but automation is just too many moving parts, and too much planing and I can’t bring myself to do any of it right.
If not for that it would probably be entirely my jam. I get downright jealous when I see some of the amazing stuff people do.
I’m the opposite. Love automation (literally a programmer by trade lol), hate hate hate base building.
Enjoys modding games more than playing, dislikes Factorio.
Have you tried modding Factorio? It’s a pit of fun
Haha, that’s a fair point.
I’d have to actually like the game and have been sucked into it to want to spend days and days finding mods that sound like good additions, or address frustrations with vanilla mechanics, and then bash my head against the wall trying to figure out the error logs and why the map didn’t spawn anything this time (I don’t have a tech background, I learn tech on the fly to do specific things, so troubleshooting is a big challenge). Like I have over a thousand rimworld mods I individually, manually, downloaded (I don’t use steam but I found a site that rips mods from steam). I’m currently running about 650 of them, but I had over 100 hours in before I even looked at mods, and it started with running out of storage and having to dedicate half my map to storage space, because I HOARD STUFF and 3 stacks per tile with vanilla shelves is just not enough space. You never know when you’ll need 167 elephant tusks. Oh they are vendor trash that can be used as a shitty improvised weapon and that’s it? Well I found that out after about a month.
I just know factorio would hit my frustration buttons quicker than my obsession buttons because I can’t even bring myself to do the fairly simple automation in rimworld because it’s too finicky and I have to learn stuff and figure out where to lay pipes and shit, so I’d struggle to hit the “let’s find mods to make this game even more overwhelming” stage.
But now I’m even more jealous, if there’s a vibrant modding community and all…
The game is still actively developed, with the primary focus on bug-fixing. The price is one-time, and there is no intent to sell another expansion, as the game is pretty much at its technical limits as to what you can add to the game with the current expansion.
Also it has a ridiculously good mod repo and management system built into the game.
Dwarf Fortress represent my personal brand of Autism best
I have thousands of hours in DF…and I really wish it wasn’t a buggy mess.
Marksdwarves not taking arrows? Follow this easy 20 step guide of obtuse mechanics that circumvent what’s probably several bugs?
You fixed them taking ammo? Great, good job! Are they using the training room you set up verifiably correctly? No? Well sucks.
There are so many instances of this. Exploding trees killing woodcutters if trees grow into one another. Items left perpetually on the floor that can never be moved again. Military squads never returning from expeditions, forever blocking their noble spots and sometimes making it impossible to refill any positions…endless problems.
A lot of it can be fixed with DFhack but not all of it can. I am happy they are doing fresh content for the game, but I also wish they would take, like, two years to fix all the known bugs that have been in the game for several years. And while the steam version has a better interface then what was there before, it’s hardly perfect. It’s mostly just a bit more user friendly while being obtuse in new and inventive ways.
Why am I writing all this? Honestly I don’t know. I just…the game is uniquely frustrating, but so cool when it does miraculously work.
Rock and stone!
A friend recommended it to me years ago, and I thought I’d try. On my second fort, I thought I was going ok, we got attacked but my unarmed and untrained dwarves fought off the attacker and I was rebuilding. I told my friend and he asked if it was goblins. No, it was a Titan. I thought it was normal, but I haven’t seen one since in the thousands of hours I’ve played.
Was the Titan a Forgotten Beast? I saw one of those at least once per fort. Once it was a completely helpless squirrel made of ears that got caught in a trap without my noticing, once it was a colossal brass spider that casually strolled through my fortress, sticking all my surviving dwarves onto walls and ceilings with a web cannon. I had to wait for those dwarves to die of dehydration, since the fort isn’t considered lost while they’re still alive, but they couldn’t free themselves to eat or drink.
…ere the titans get hungry.
What if it was Chinese
(Amazing Cultivation Simulator)
I only know of this game because has SsethTzeentach reviewed it in the past, but it seems quite funky indeed.
If you enjoy Dwarf Fortress it’s very similar, but instead of military dwarves just… training passively, the whole game is centered on progressing them little by little through a wide array of different mechanics that each have a lot of nuances. It’s even more of an ‘autism game’ because it has a lot of minmaxing and analysis/decision making. The only part of it that is ironically a bit unfriendly to my brain is how FOMO inducing the minmaxing mechanics are, because you always feel like you can make the numbers on your guys go even higher.
The factory must grow.
Dyson Sphere Program is closer in gameplay than Satisfactory, for a 3-D variety
The game has an end and a reason to stop playing though.
The point of the game is to launch a rocket, you can continue past that if you want.
i mean…not anymore!
space age added tons of content after the rocket launch!
in space age the goal is to travel to the edge of the solar system ;)
That’s an additional paid for expansion, something they originally said they would never do.
It also STILL has an end goal.
The actual end goal is how much science per min can you pump out to flex on other autists. If you think the game ends when you launch a rocket, or when you get to the edge of the solar system, you are certifiably not autistic enough.
I’ve launched a rocket with Angels mods and orhers… I’ve done my fair share haha.
The goal is to cripple your computers UPS at that point, or whatever the term is.
I’m too scared to try it. Maybe when I retire.
There’s a free demo 😉
(the first hit is free)
Paradox games do this too
What’s a paradox game? I assume that’s some sort of studio?
Yeah, Paradox Interactive makes a lot of games, mainly Grand Strategy Games that attempt to simulate (alt) history. Crusader Kings is medieval, Hearts of Iron is WW2, etc. It’s a bit like Civilization on steroids with a daunting learning curve.
The main Factorio dev is pretty publicly a shithead.
Perhaps even worse: Factorio has never gone on sale. They are very strongly against the idea of sales. Which like… Fine, but game value depreciates so you should at least drop the price over time. Not the case- in fact they INCREASED the price from $30 to $35 in 2023. The game came out in 2020. It’s now a 5 year old 2D indie game listed at $35. Can I afford that? Yes. Am I going to buy it? No.
The game came out in 2020. It’s now a 5 year old 2D indie game listed at $35
… which is still receiving updates well into 2025: https://wiki.factorio.com/Version_history/2.0.0. Probably, in part, because they never put the game on sale and so each and every purchase of the game by players contributes equally to the studio’s capacity to continue supporting the game.
I’m also curious about how game value depreciates.
Games tend to go on sale to sell more copies later in their lifespan, attracting customers that weren’t going to pay the original price for it.
It sounds like you’re saying that the game can’t be played for as long if you buy it later, which doesn’t really make sense to me.
I might be a biased, as I’m one of those people with a few thousand hours into Factorio, and several hundred into other factory games.
I interpret their comment slightly differently; Factorio as a game is less valuable today then, say, 4 years ago.
I still disagree with that interpretation, as the game has continued to receive updates and bugfixes, steadily increasing it’s value (or at least counteracting the depreciation). Not to mention the additional value provided by community mods has only increased over the years.
The game is also one-of-a-kind. Until a “factorio 2” equivalent comes out that is just straight-up better in every way, it’s hard to see how the value would depreciate. Heck, the Space Age DLC is basically “Factorio 2” without splitting the playerbase across 2 separate games.
What do you mean that the dev is publicly a shithead? Genuinely curious because I’ve mostly only seen positive information about them
A couple of different controversies. He has posts on Reddit (that have since been deleted, but you can find them archived) talking about how student-teacher sexual relationships can often be consensual.
The more famous controversy is this one. Which is hard to summarize other than him being a general asshole to fans, and while he didn’t really say anything too terrible he uses a lot of red-flag language talking about “cancel culture” and “sjw’s” which, in my experience, is only used unirlnically by shitty people.
I’ve seen an online comment somewhere referring to this interview of him (it’s in Czech, but has English captions). I don’t have much interest in watching the full interview myself (though I probably should just to check what I’m talking about). According to this comment I had seen, he explains in this interview that he had that knee-jerk reaction to the pushback to recommending Bob Martin’s “Clean Code” book in the public factorio devlog in part because of the political climate he grew up in (Czechoslovakia near the end of the Soviet Union, and then following it’s dissolution) which was full of spurious accusations based on tangential links.
Myself, I distinctly remember reading the devblog post when it came out and thinking “oh boy, it’s a shame he only learned about Clean Code today and clearly is unaware of Bob Martin’s reputation on matters outside of strict software development”. His comments in the reddit thread really just made things worse. I’m still hesitant to unequivocally label him as bad as many others, but simultaneously I don’t hold much hope that he’ll ever come out and publicly denounce his former comments.
This really raises a lot of questions about Factorio’s story and worldbuilding 😔
Sounds like a relatively normal dude. It’s foolish to care about “red-flag language”, especially if you’re also saying “he didn’t really say anything to terrible.”
I suppose when you look at the world through rose-colored glasses, all the red flags just look like flags.
who cares?
