What is Reddit's opinion of
Factorio?
From 3.5 billion Reddit comments
100 reviews of this app found across Reddit:
That's compilatron! It was the tutorial companion in old version of the game. See relevant FFF.
P.S. It's recommended to update to 1.1, many QoL and other changes from the old version you are using.
Papers, Please.
VVVVVV
Super Hexagon
Broken Age
Bleed
The Bridge
FEZ (sometimes poorly optimized, developer is a huge cock)
Gold source games (CS 1.6 CSCZ Half-life and the other few half-life games)
Electronic Super Joy and its sequel
Killing Floor
Age Of Empires II: HD Edition (fully recommended, as it's really fun with friends)
Max Payne 1 & 2
Oddworld Abes Exoddus/Odyssee (bit blocky controls)
Postal 2 (for the maniac)
Most of the older quake games (Quake 3 arena lost its multiplayer because of gamespy though)
Doom 1 and 2 (can be ran on an ATM)
Risk of Rain (towards the end it gets choppy, but the game can get pretty difficult)
The older Sonic releases
Super Meat Boy/ Binding of Isaac: Rebirth (both hit or miss)
Teleglitch
Dustforce
Thomas was alone.
One other honorable mention that is NOT on steam yet would be Factorio
A few extras: FTL
Atom Zombie Smasher
Dungeons Of Dredmor
Fallout 1, 2, Tactics (some pcs for 3)
Frozen Synapse
One Way Heroics
Plants Vs. Zombies
Shovel Knight
Terraria
Starbound
Most of the older Star Wars games
The Dig
Audiosurf 1 and 2 ( the second one maybe more difficult to run)
Shadowrun returns
Dungeon defenders
Elder Scrolls 1 2 and 3
Hotline Miami
Spelunky F2P
Older versions of Garry's Mod (13/14 kinda slower, and crappy UI choices)
Battleblock Theatre
Castle Crashers
Speedrunners
Psychonauts
Another thing: Classic Nintendo and Sony console Emulators are always fun to use. If you've got nothing but a low end PC then you can always find a ton of old games for free on that. On top of that if you want to go REALLY old the Internet Archive has an excellent place for that. The Internet Arcade.
Yeah this was going to be the endgame after launching a rocket or something. It's probably not going to be a thing though.
You can probably read more about it in this friday facts.
https://www.factorio.com/terms-of-service.
- You download, install and use Factorio at your own risk. We are not liable for any damage that might be caused to you by downloading, installing and using our software.
- Especially we are not responsible if you stay awake all night long playing Factorio and can't go to school / work in the morning :)
Is it your fault you didn't read their TOS. They warned you.
>> There is a demo available if you are unsure about the game.
Sidebar →
You'll know for sure if you want to buy the game after finishing the demo - but beware that you may look up and realize 5 hours have passed :P
Additional info:
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DR01YdFtWFI
Demo: https://www.factorio.com/demo
Works on Windows, Mac and Linux. Still in very active development, but much more polished and stable yet than most AAA titles will ever get.
Edit: bot->but. Too many Logi bros for me in the recent past it seems.
Neither of those can be parallelized. I don't know much about Cities Skylines, but the factorio devs have talked very extensively on the forums and on FFFs about how it would be difficult, if not impossible to parallelize, with few gains. It really isn't as simple as it seems, it's not just game.multitheaded = true.
Here's a couple links if your interested:
https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-151 - An FFF from back before version 0.14. The last section is on multithreading. They've been grappling with these issues for a very long time.
https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-215 - Another FFF, where kovarex finds that the multithreaded code actually performs slower because it causes more cache misses. Short of completely changing the way that memory allocation works in C, multithreading simply won't help as much as you think it will.
https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=39893 - This is a post on the forum from a developer who primarily works in functional programming languages and and familiar with multithreading. The devs discuss the issue at length, again.
There are many, many more places where they present even more issues, in various placed on the r/factorio subreddit. However, I hope you understand why it's not a trivial problem by any means.
Factorio doesn't iterate through each item every tick; it's *much* more efficient than that. It only tracks the space of the leading item in the ideal case. If there's no space in front of the lead item, nothing moves, hence the behavior seen here. Any fix for this has to at be around as performant as the current algorithm.
Edit: One possible solution would be to randomly offset/scale the "web-like structure" (assuming that is the current implementation) relative to (0,0) so that it doesn't always ruin a natural starting lake in all directions evenly.
My main request for map generation is to have water that can range between 0.16's extremely stringy patterns and 0.12's incredible oceans.
It's a tough problem because of the need to reach resources, but having a chance to be on the edge of a giant lake at the start is very satisfying. Meanwhile, 0.16's noodle land-bridges are often frustrating mazes, trolling you by connecting (or not) by the smallest of margins when you least expect.
I know there's large-scale variation and things change a lot as you travel away from the starting area (including some massive lakes indeed), but it would be nice to see more large-lake coastal starts. You get free defense from biters, but on the other hand it restricts expansion directions. Tradeoffs inspire creativity. :)
FYI it will never go on sale according to the devs
Yes, but also no.
It would require a rectangular object in order to fill a square. However, the tiles are square.
Thus, if you look very carefully, if you make a grid of chests, they're quite close together horizontally, but there's a pretty big gap between them vertically.
Welcome to /r/Factorio!
Factorio is a video game about making a factory. Your end goal is to shoot a rocket into fucking space. (edit: Well, one rocket is the "goal", but nothing says you can't shoot 10 or 10.000)
The game is available on Windows, Mac and even Linux! /r/linuxmasterrace
If you are at all curious about the game, then fear not! There is a free demo available on Steam and on their website!
This sounds like you should make an inquiry via https://www.factorio.com/support/contact or more specifically the official forums. The people there are very helpful and the devs / mods are very attentive. I wish you best of luck in this endeavor. If you have to modify the game assets yourself to enjoy this game maybe the devs have a heart and are willing to cooperate with you on a new colorblind mode.
No it's fucking terrible, it'll only last you, what, 2000 hours ? Ridiculous.
Totally not worth it. /s
More seriously -> https://www.factorio.com/download-demo. Try it yourself, if you like what you see, go buy :D
No. Diesel-punk is the style of Factorio, and bright colors are not part of that color scheme. The whole point of the style is that everything is clobbered together with what the engineer has on hand, it’s not produced in a sterile laboratory. In addition, in a recent FFF, it’s implied that the engineer’s home planet and machines are more clean and colorful, but when you crash land on a deserted planet, you make do with what you have.
According to the devs, the real end game that is still in the works is the rockets allow you to construct a space platform. Then you can build a factory in space, collect materials from asteroids, and possibly even go to other planets. There is also supposed to be intelligent aliens in the game that also have technology. This is all mentioned in a couple of the devs posts on the website. All very indev but also really interesting.
Edit: source: https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-111
The devs release a blog post each Friday where they talk about some of the things they are working on. You can find them all here: https://www.factorio.com/blog/
This one in particular briefly talks about that they hope to accomplish for the 1.0 update: https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-189
The devs have a whole series of automated tests that check a whole bunch of mechanics so they can easily tell when something breaks. They talked about it in FFF#62.
This angers me a bit, probably because I have been spoiled by the devs of Stellaris and Factorio, the devs for both games every single week release updates about what they are working on. The next update for Stellaris is probably months away and already the community has a really good idea exactly what is happening because the Paradox devs have shown us.
From what I have seen over the past couple years is that ED's development is a much more closed off process. For all the community knows what you said could be exactly what has happened. The only times we really hear what the devs are up to is about 3 weeks prior and 2 weeks post update release, at big events and during fuckups like this (and when they have to god-mode community goals or nerf gold rush missions). They give big season long projections of what they are planning then we never hear from them again. FDev release features like CQC or SRVs then largely abandon development of those features for months to years on end while fiddling with game assets adding some bread crumbs for a story and some grindy upgrades for our ships, it took them something like 12-18 months for them to add and change features in Engineers enough to make it less of an RNG grind fest with a slot machine at the end.
I really enjoyed the time I played ED exploring, but the snails pace of development and complete lack of meaningful communications from their dev team with the community is seriously frustrating.
Factorio comes to mind. It's a game that's fundamentally about logistics. It forces you to be creative and solve difficult problems. The best part is that literally all of the problems are the ones you create for yourself.
The official statement:
> The good deals that are not so good. > > One of the problems we had in the past months were the credit card frauds, so let me explain how exactly it works. > > - Someone obtains credit card numbers somehow. > - He buys Factorio keys (among other things) with these cards on our site > - Then these keys are transferred somehow to these "good deal" sites where they can be bought for cheaper price. > - Eventually, the card owner finds out and cancels all the transactions, we get a notice about every faulty transaction > - Not only we don't get the money paid, but we have to pay extra $20 fee per every transaction that was cancelled. > - As reaction to this, we have to deactivate all keys bought this way, which results in steam key deactivations as well. > - So in the end, we are 20$ short and we lost time dealing with it and the buyer doesn't have the game he paid for. > > Although it is a giant inconvenience for all parties involved, it is not currently a large financial burden for us, I don't want to guild trip anyone, just to get the message out. The conclusion is, that we strongly advice to buy Factorio, or any other game just from reliable sources. In our case, it is factorio.com, steam, gog, and humble store currently. Pirating the game hurts us less than using these sites.
> dev is not going to last long
I mean, he's listed on their site as Technology Director and a founding member of the company, so I don't expect him to face any repercussions.
Some details of the coloring algorithm are mentioned in https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-201
Basically the game picks the lowest numbered color that isn't already touching the current block. If the color number index goes above 5 or 6 it just starts over. No need for global computation and results are good in normal situations.
It's FFF #201. They use a greedy algorithm, not a normal one for graph coloring. It can fail, but it's better at using fewer colors in real situations, and it's incremental.
Fun fact: There is warning about addiction to the game in the TOS the first time you run it. Unfortunately it's to late to go back at this point. :P
>Especially we are not responsible if you stay awake all night long playing Factorio and can't go to school / work in the morning :)
>
>via: https://www.factorio.com/terms-of-service
​
Not quite what you asked, but I think it's also worth mentioning that the "Humble Widget" is a good choice for selling on your own website. I recommend reading the full article linked below, CC fraud is often a big problem for small games companies distributing their own keys.
I think this is something everyone should be aware of!
> On our side, the cost is very large, each chargeback costs roughly $20 in fines, effectively a negative sale, and we were seeing upwards of 10% chargebacks on our website transactions.
> We switched from processing payments through braintree and paypal, and instead implemented the incredible Humble widget. It has built in fraud prevention, which completely stopped all the chargebacks we were seeing. I highly recommend the Humble widget for anybody looking to process payments on their own website.
Full article, scroll to "The Grey Market"
We use forward declaration when possible, only include things that we actually use (as best as humanly possible), use precompiled headers, and a unity build.
We use FastBuild to manage the unity build process on Windows and the fact it builds as a unity in combination with how we do templates means extern template is virtually useless to us and gave zero improvements when I tested it on some heavily-used template classes we have.
Specifically; most of our heavily-used templates are explicitly instantiated in the cpp because they have some non-header-usable functions (typically saving/loading). That alone is basically what extern template does and so we already benefited from it before it was even a thing.
However, with all that said; the single biggest gain we ever got around compilation was the day we removed Boost from our codebase
There's a demo if you're on the fence.
The developers have explicitly said they won't be doing any sales - $20 is a fair price, take it or leave it. It's a blink-and-lose-50-hours-of-your-life game, so I can't disagree with their position.
Factorio offers a free demo on their website that would've given him the same amount of a taste as he got from playing a pirated version.
https://www.factorio.com/download-demo
Arguing that this isn't how the market works, when the market has an extremely comparable option, is inaccurate.
Factorio, build a factory and defend it from aliens. It's like all those Minecraft mods that introduce automation but top-down and with a much deeper technology tree and with the end goal of launching a rocket into orbit. It's currently in an independent form of early access but could release tomorrow and be considered finished, it's definitely doing things properly a la KSP and Prison Architect.
If you like planning, organising, and optimising you'll love this game and sink days into it. Plus, I'm pretty sure it has one of my favourite game trailers.
Factorio didn't do any regional pricing or discounts and still had keys sold on G2A at massively marked down prices.
They also had a bunch of charge backs that hit them and forced the devs to use Humble Widget to stop credit card chargebacks.
There is no guessing here. There's no "possibly". G2A was distributing stolen keys.
Here's their full blogpost on it.
There are a lot of issues with them.
They fraudulent resold keys hurts self-publishing games, mentioned by Factorio devs here: https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-171
So the key can be revoked any time. And aside from that, it can be simply invalid, it can be region locked, etc.
To "combat" this G2A signs you up for their "protection" program where you can get another key if there is something wrong with it, but for an extra fee thats quite hard to avoid or get out from. So thats really scummy.
r/GameDeals does not allow it for these and other reasons, elaborated here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/GameDeals/comments/2yhlw4/key_resellers_and_what_they_mean_for_you/
So G2A pumps a lot of money into advertising to counter their bad press. And people are vain or just trying to stay afloat, thats why they are willing to take the "blood" money for advertising.
It has been asked before, like r/Games/comments/2fvjgq/what_is_up_with_g2acom_and_why_is_it_being/
They had an AMA, people pressed some of these questions against them: r/IAmA/comments/5rg9mo/we_work_for_g2acom_global_digital_marketplace/
Or just google, for example TotalBiscuit was really againts them.
Well, I hope you actually asked in good faith and not just trolling while hoping someone uses that referral/discount code to make some beer money.
This is (for me) a hugely anticipated improvement. Normally, when a train station opens, all the available trains rush to it. Only once a train reaches it and disables the station again (e.g. by removing enough ore from the chests), do the others get to repath. This is especially an issue if there is no other station open, as they will then go back, empty, to the unloading station. This causes a lot of useless back-and-forth of trains.
See also FFF #361: https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-361
Fortunately upgrade planner is getting integrated into the next Factorio release.
The factory always needs more iron. And green circuits. And space.
Oil is definitely the biggest roadblock, I think mostly because it's the first time you have a recipe that produces multiple outputs, and it's not immediately clear that assemblers, including oil refineries, stop if there isn't room for all of the outputs.
My 2 cents:
>According to a statistic, only 11% of factorio players have ever launched a rocket
According to a Steam stat. That only counts players who bought the game there and only played vanilla. I bought the game on GOG and launched a rocket in a modded save, for instance.
>I guess a lot of people don't play factorio that much because they find they don't like that
What? How did you come up with that conclusion? The average play time for this game is 85 hours.
Regarding the question, I only did it because I wanted to get it out of the way of me building a layout that I liked for the factory.
It's not an "anymore" thing. It never has been on sale.
The reason:
>We state it on our steam page, but people are still asking about it so I want to state it officially. We don't plan any Factorio sale. I'm aware, that the sale can make a lot of money in a short period of time, but I believe that it is not worth it in the long run, and since we are not in financial pressure we can afford to think in the long run. We don't like sales for the same reason we don't like the 9.99 prices. We want to be honest with our customers. When it costs 20, we don't want to make it feel like 10 and something. The same is with the sale, as you are basically saying, that someone who doesn't want to waste his time by searching for sales or special offers has to pay more.
Source: https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-140
It's basically about this: If you like the game you should be able to buy it right away without having the feeling of wasting money by not waiting for a sale.
Nope not in 4 years and the devs have said it never will.
That said jokes on them, game would easily be worth $30 or $40. The only big AAA games I've spent more time on than Factorio in the last 3 or 4 years has been Fallout 4.
It's modable, it's got multiplayer, it's got active development, it's got a proper demo on Steam which is rare these days.
The way I see it is that for $20 the game is always on sale.
I love this game so much, I'm extremely excited for multiplayer. But I imagine multiplayer will often be a clusterfuck. The things you build in the game are often extremely convoluted and communicating to another player what you are trying to do and then cooperating without getting in each others way will be difficult.
Edit: For anybody interested in this game, there is a demo. It doesn't let you do a whole lot, but it might give you an idea of if you might be interested in playing. https://www.factorio.com/demo/stable
edit 2: If you start playing, there are some handy tips and such in /r/factorio
It ended up being pushed back to 0.16, but it's really just optimizations to how they're tracked and updated. Nothing game play wise.
The devs did mentioned once about bring micro transactions into the game.
"In the beginning player gets a credit to produce let's say 1000 items. When he does that he can choose to buy another credit or simply continue playing by crafting items manually. One thing we want to avoid for sure is making the game annoying for people who decide not to pay."
https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-132
Luckily it was only for April fools.
I did a video review but if you aren't into watching a full review of the game here are my thoughts. Factorio imo is a game that perfectly balances challenge and accessibility in terms of management style gameplay by making the factory systems easy to understand at a glance but with enough depth that it will take you weeks to master. Factorio naturally paces itself with your level of play; teaching you everything you need to know through the campaign and allowing you to set the difficulty of the game extensively in sandbox mode. In terms of early access games, this one is up there with Kerbal Space Program as one of the best, and I highly recommend you at least check out the free demo if you aren’t sold on buying the full game.
The Four Colour Theorem just says that it is possible to do it, not that it's at all practical. Finding a four colour solution for the entire rail system, each time you move a rail or a signal, would be a massive waste of resources.
The game uses a much simpler algorithm. There are a list of 7 colours. For each new block, the game just picks the next lowest colour that isn't in use by any adjacent block. This is fast, doesn't involve non-adjacent blocks at all, and rarely uses even 5 colours.
In case you're interested, they posted their reasoning in this FFF:
> No Factorio sale
> We state it on our steam page, but people are still asking about it so I want to state it officially. We don't plan any Factorio sale. I'm aware, that the sale can make a lot of money in a short period of time, but I believe that it is not worth it in the long run, and since we are not in financial pressure we can afford to think in the long run. We don't like sales for the same reason we don't like the 9.99 prices. We want to be honest with our customers. When it costs 20, we don't want to make it feel like 10 and something. The same is with the sale, as you are basically saying, that someone who doesn't want to waste his time by searching for sales or special offers has to pay more.
I know the graphical fidelity of the 2 games cannot be compared, but Factorio is 100% the most optimised game I’ve ever come across. The dev writes whole blogs detailing the optimisations in the game, and they’re fascinating (e.g https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-209 )
All of the sprites in the game start out as 3d models (made in Blender iirc). They then render and down-sample the image to make the sprite and its animations.
To be fair, the Friday Facts Blog Posts tend to have all sorts of interesting insights into the development process. Then again, a full AMA once fully released might be fun.
https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-364
> When we were releasing the 1.0 FFF-360, we actually stated that there were "around 150 bugs on the forums and around 80 internal tasks to be solved". These were obviously minor issues, things hard to reproduce or very rare problems. In other words, it was quite reasonably stable, which normally goes without saying when it comes to Factorio stable versions. But it proved to be a mistake wording it this way, since some media picked up on it and presented it as a "fairly bugged release".
> So I'm pretty thrilled to finally get to the point, where we actually have 0 known issues and 0 active bug reports on the forums.
There's a whole post about how making the trains appear the same length in an isometric space is a challenge. Your view is not "top down" so the top of the screen is "further away" from the camera's perspective but the grid is actually still perfectly regular. This means that when the train is vertical vs horizontal it needs to stretch.
But yeah here you go https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-133
> 41.570 Uploading log file
That made me wonder so I searched the crash reports and:
> \src\entity\furnace.cpp (123): Furnace::canInsert
> \src\entity\inserter.cpp (633): Inserter::getPickupTarget
> \src\entity\inserter.cpp (886): Inserter::update
> \src\surface\chunk.cpp (575): Chunk::updateActiveEntities
> \src\surface\chunk.cpp (624): Chunk::updateEntities
> \src\surface\surface.cpp (1191): Surface::update
> \src\map\map.cpp (1302): Map::update
> \src\game.cpp (163): Game::update
> \src\scenario\scenario.cpp (865): Scenario::update
> \src\mainloop.cpp (1001): MainLoop::gameUpdateStep
> \src\mainloop.cpp (868): MainLoop::gameUpdateLoop
> \src\util\workerthread.cpp (36): WorkerThread::loop
> ...
> Stack trace logging done
> 34.109 Error CrashHandler.cpp:174: Map tick at moment of crash: 1911239
> ...
> 41.570 Uploading log file
> 41.597 Error CrashHandler.cpp:225: Heap validation: success.
> 41.598 Creating crash dump.
> 41.721 CrashDump success
Fun stuff.
> multithreading the sound load with the sprite load seems like low hanging fruit, and in my case would save ~2s of loading time.
Indeed. This is for 0.16, of course.
> # Game startup time - Sounds > With the loading of graphics and mod data no longer being the slowest parts the next thing that started taking the majority time was loading sounds. I realized, after my work on improving map loading, that there wasn't any reason I couldn't just load sounds in parallel with the graphics. It was a 20 minute 'fix' and now by the time graphics are finished loading, sounds have long finished meaning it can proceed straight to the main menu.
> -Rseding91
Nice to see an annoncement on what appears to be Steam Forums (?), but this has been told way back on Xmas:
Friday Facts post #118 (25.12.2015):
>We have been pushing the stem release forward for a pretty long time, but we finally have a definitive release date of Factorio on steam. The date is 25. February, exactly 2 months from now.
Was about to get all pissy cuz thinking this was a repost of stuff from this https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-132
Take the upvote for proving me wrong!
They actually use a much simpler algorithm they explained in FFF #201. TLDR 4-coloring is always possible but can be hard, 6-coloring is easy but the algorithm wasn't suitable for changing rails in real time. So they tried something simple and imperfect.
I don't have a link but the devs said themselves at some point that they are unsure where they will go after 1.0. They mentioned both maybe adding content to Factorio or maybe trying their hand at a new game.
edit: actually FFF #151 has a promising tidbit at the very end for after 1.0
The devs have said they will never provide a discount nor put it in any bundle: https://www.factorio.com/faq
However, if you have a Humble Monthly subscription, you can buy it from the Humble Store and get the 10% discount.
The Factorio devs recently released a blogpost :
https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-366
This blogpost talks primarily about the coding advice of Uncle Bob. His coding advice is considered by some to be good, by others to be outdated. This controversy isn't about the coding advice though. Uncle Bob (or Robert C. Martin) had been involved in some controversy (This seeems like a link with some background info, I haven't followed this issue so far.) https://www.reddit.com/r/internetdrama/comments/8me34n/a_compilation_of_robert_c_martin_drama_some/
So, one of the people on the factoria subreddit pointed this out and suggested that the Factorio Devs might want to put in a disclaimer or something.
This then provoked the factorio dev into a rant about cancel culture, which ended here.
I remember the switch to the new train gfx. I think they're a vast improvement. Seeing this old trailer reminds me of just how far the game has come graphically.
The funny thing is I like the new one for the same reasons you mentioned you like the old one. The old one is too clean and based too much on rl train engines. The new one seems more thrown together and haphazard like the rest of the tech in Factorio. :)
Check out the high res side view render from when they were introduced: https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-141
To add to this there is also a "cost" that is often overlooked, and that is the way threads can "pollute" the cache on the CPU. Something the Factorio devs seems to be well aware of, as seen in Friday Facts #215.
More good games journalism; thanks to the authors and B2G.
The low number for Factorio seems like it should be off by at least one order of magnitude, if not two. I'm sure Wube Software have some very talented programmers, but I wonder if there's some technical factor causing this to be misreported somehow?
I'd hate for a game developers to be getting bad information about their real audience and addressable audience. Note that I have always told game developers that they can safely project/budget 1% of sales on Linux. They can also take measures to increase that fraction, but that's a subject for a different thread.
Hm, I can try.
normal behavior:
- all items are side loaded to the left lane of the red belt.
- first splitter sorts items alternating to the left/right belt (as always)
- side loading orders the items on belt in such a way that items alternate between left lane and right lane.
- second (magic) splitter alternates between top/bottom belt (as always), but because of the ordering the top belt has items exclusively on the top lane and the bottom belt has items exclusively on the bottom lane.
- third splitter does nothing because top lane is blocked on the bottom belt.
overflow behavior:
everything gets messed up and the third splitter routes items to overflow belt.
This principle was featured a long time ago in Friday Facts #122 (bottom of page).
> Instead of placing single blocks, it would be nice if I could place a line of them, or draw out a line on the ground and have the conveyors automatically get placed.
Hold the left mouse button and run. With conveyors and rails, it will drop a new conveyor belt with each square of movement. In the mid and late game, you can now use blueprints with a "personal roboport" in power armour to construct more intricate layouts.
The rail-laying mechanic is changing with the next major version of the game (0.13), which should be available on Steam as an experimental/beta update; see a recent Friday Facts for more details there.
For power poles, hold shift+LMB and run; it will drop a new power pole at the edge of "connection" range with the last-dropped power pole.
> Also, how do I know how much power I'm generating and how do I know how much I need in total?
Click on an electric pole that is connected to the power network. That will show a graph of power consumption/production with time.
Power usage intentionally varies within a factory, so a power setup that works under ordinary circumstances might struggle if a resource bottleneck is alleviated and more assemblers than normal activate.
You can also find production statistics for your factory with the 'P' key, unless that has been rebound to another key in the game options.
https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-184
While it's not on the old version page, there's a download link to 0.1 on this blog post to it. It's free for everyone.
I think the new quickbar is one of the best changes yet. It makes much more sense for it to be a shortcut menu that holds pointers to objects in your inventory rather than a a secondary inventory/shortcut menu hybrid; it makes inventory management less of a hassle, and it gives the player 10 sets of shortcut bars instead of 2 so we can have a bar for most any situation - yellow/red/blue belts, fluid works, outposting, railway building, combat, etc. I did a quick search and found the FFF that talks about it, going over some of the reasons for the changes: https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-278
Really the only major difference is that the quickbar isn't actually an inventory, rather it holds shortcuts to those items which are all contained in the main inventory. Personally, I don't even use more than a few quickbars; for example, I don't even have pipes on a quickbar; I just use "Q" to pipette-select objects since there's usually one nearby, and if not I don't find it much of a hassle to open the inventory and grab something, then clearing the cursor with "Q" when done placing.
It's not like Wube hasn't thought about that. They did.
> At this moment, there is no danger of the reactor meltdown, there is just maximum temperature of the reactor and the rest is wasted. We might add some risk into the reactors, but we might as well leave it as it is.
Obviously, Wube has decided against the danger of a meltdown. I guess it's because of balancing issues: Why deal with meltdowns when you can just place another solar field? That would be just another disadvantage.
Eine andere Quelle ist Kreditkartenbetrug.
Factorio hatte da zu kämpfen als sie zum Steam Release Keys bei Kauf direkt über deren Seite rausgegeben haben. Kurze Zusammenfassung in deren Devblog.
Key Reseller mögen ja günstig sein, aber Hui Bub, können die vor allem Indie-Entwickler so richtig ficken.
Per the name they are every friday... https://www.factorio.com/blog/
.15 was marked stable, so now is a few months where they work on making .16 internally before making it available as .16 experimental. It will have a couple new features and potentially be the 1.00 release candidate.
Once upon a time, there was going to be a whole section where you launch a rocket and then build a factory in space. That was abandoned in favor of infinite research but it did sound fun.
I believe the plans for the (Spidertron) [https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-120] are up in the air at this point but I think it's one of the last great hopes we have for a new feature before release.
This is in response to the recent devblog, where the devs revealed they deduplicate blueprints based on CRCs. Well, it turns out making CRC collisions is pretty easy.
If you'd like to try it yourself, here's the blueprint strings:
> 0eNqdlltugzAQRfcy36ZihkcStlJVFUncyBIxyDZVUcTea0CR0oQ09vBj8fC5d/BlzAX2TS87o7SD6gLq0GoL1fsFrDrpupmuuaGTUIFy8gwCdH2ezr5q6xLbNco5aWAUoPRR/kCFowib60ytbdcal+xl424INH4IkNopp+RiZT4ZPnV/3nutCp+YENC11s9q9aTsSQkJGPyAb4XHH5WRh+UuTSbvqPSX2nsz5mRaPy4GH+jpAs/u0OJac9u7rp8Ke5DKmFIUL5XHSiX4oiyln0gV/67vUyEaV1hlHItWPecr4A0LTK/jsw0N5bXskEzugpOeLdQ0hIpp5AcURsW4V7tkOn29ZEisYKUBljOO5QTXEos5L/4YYLPg9QtGu8CS2S8oul3ghlcVMqrastYGA7K54/ST1ZZHKQcVEB/CuNa0slv6DXnewaubnwUB39LY+YEyz6nMcn/sxvEXzMLHPQ==
Blueprint B:
> 0eNqdldGKgzAQRf9lniMkaWqrv7KURdthCWiUJF0qkn/fWF922QF1fJEYPd7cucPM0HZPHL11EeoZ7H1wAeqPGYL9ck23PIvTiFCDjdiDANf0ywpfo8cQiugbF8bBx6LFLkISYN0DX1CrdBOALtpocSW+F9One/Yt+vzCFkvAOIT8+eAWFRlZaAFTvqn8l4f1eF/3yiT+wTUbrv/CDQE/HYZLUrgm2Oa4cLXblTNXuN5ml2zhetuVy2E4bQpVzSuXvUN3xY2hSgRNSS5OkjjFjAMtTnMDsKMrFLfl6IOzm0xu94E6M/O0I6qqZLJpGy7cOGkSd2XWiKZV3BqROC2ZzmVanmPv2Vf/GpUCvtGHNQTG6PJk8lWl9ANC8HuF
Edit: Note, this might change in future factorio versions, I don't know how sensitive their map representation is to version changes. Easy enough to redo at that point though unless they use a real hash.
Factorio has had straight up performance patches in it's long long life. They have multiple times committed months of dev time to just improve fps by 1-2% that doesn't even show to the average user but is a great deal for the end game enthusiast. These updates pile up on each other making the game run absolutely great. Also their patch note explanation is top notch: https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-366
it's a tongue in cheek reference to the "no sale" policy as highlighted here https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-140
people are just jealous of the 50 lucky backers that got it for 7$ during the initial campaign
meanwhile I'm sitting here watching these peasants like https://i.imgur.com/tzy9M6s.png
In summary, belts are chunked into belt segments, which are segments of belt that are interrupted by a splitter or inserter. Using underground belts doesn't change the number of belt segments, so it doesn't change affect UPS. This FFF goes into many of the technical details of the main optimization: https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-176 (in a later FFF, they explain that it is only merged into 0.16), though several other optimizations, discussed in other FFF's also help.
You know... this might be a good candidate for "Cleanup of mechanics".
Do dedicated fluid inputs add anything to the game? What if the chemical plant and refinery simply didn't care as long as they got one pipe of each fluid they need?
https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-255
>When you build a blueprint of something, pressing Ctrl+Z cancels all the ghost entities, and if some of them were constructed already, they are marked for deconstruction.
>When you deconstruct something, pressing Ctrl+Z cancels the deconstruction, and for entities that have been removed already, it places a ghosts so they will be rebuilt again
Iirc there was an update that gave connected, non-branched belts, a singluar computation. This is a simplification, you can see the FFF below. Belts are probably one of the most efficient things in the game.
https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-176
They considered giving pipes similar treatment as it helps immensely. However, I cannot find evidence of them implementation of merging as the algorithm is fairly good so long as you are only doing oil. Nuke requires so many changes in fluids and such it's just too intensive for UPS efficiency.
https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-274
Bots are all individual entities. Much higher ups drain.
https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-215
Let me quote where their problems are:
"The problem with this is, that it requires big changes in the code as not only the entities itself but all their dynamically allocated data would have to be always allocated depending on the entity position. " And then we have:
https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-204
Read the whole chapter named "Prefetching (Technical) Zulan" where it is clearly explained that Factorio is latency, not bandwidth limited. I think fff 203 or one or two earlier talks about the optimizations they actually do there now.
Edit:
https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-203
actually talks how they got more performance prefetching. If this would be a bandwidth limit, prefetc h would change nothing. Also bandwidth - if Factorio would b bandwidth limited, my machiens would fly around a high end Intel. I use Threadripper for my work/game. Intel has way lesss bandwidth than that - but is faster. Latency vs. bandwidth.
Indeed they are. GUI and UIX are covered in FFF191. Here's a quick snip of the relevant pieces you referred too.
> As a bonus, this goes well with another idea: building ghost buildings without having the required item. When you click a shortcut for something you don't have any items of, you grab a ghost of that item in your cursor. Placing the ghost item places a ghost of the building.
> Another use case is making future plans by placing items you are not crafting or you haven't researched yet. Simply make a shortcut for any item you want and you can now easily build ghosts of that building.
Factorio is a magnificent base building game, where the focus is on engineering processing systems. There is a free demo here, or the full version is US$20 here: http://store.steampowered.com/app/427520/
The game is very much worth the price tag if you enjoy base building and engineering.
if you want to try out the factory building genre give the free factorio demo a try. in my opinion Satisfactory is still working out the Early Access kinks while factorio is a complete and well built game.
The easiest way is to grab the standalone zip version of 0.18.47 from https://www.factorio.com/download/archive and copy your save to it, load and resave your game, then copy it back to your normal install.
If you're using steam you CAN tell steam to downgrade your install to an old version with the Betas tab in the game properties, but that has issues with a) deleting your blueprints and achievements because it can't read the newer format, and b) not loading because it can't read the new config parameters. Using the standalone avoids those issues.
There are some recipe changes you'll need to deal with, but nothing too major. I have a megabase that was from 0.15 that's running fine in 1.1 without too much work - I think the purple science recipe changes were the most annoying to fix. Terrain generation is gonna look weird- there'll be a clear break from what was generated in the old version and the new version. In my game, I hadn't noticed anything major though, just abrupt grass/desert transitions.
They have a development blog where they often talk about technical implementation details and their development processes. This particular video was part of Friday Facts #288.
Funny enough, I happened to be on the Factorio team page yesterday, check out the profile pic for Lubomír Grund. Definitely knocked me down a peg or two seeing that before posting this ;)
also factorio will never go on sale, they're very solid on that.
https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-140
> No Factorio sale
> We state it on our steam page, but people are still asking about it so I want to state it officially. We don't plan any Factorio sale. I'm aware, that the sale can make a lot of money in a short period of time, but I believe that it is not worth it in the long run, and since we are not in financial pressure we can afford to think in the long run. We don't like sales for the same reason we don't like the 9.99 prices. We want to be honest with our customers. When it costs 20, we don't want to make it feel like 10 and something. The same is with the sale, as you are basically saying, that someone who doesn't want to waste his time by searching for sales or special offers has to pay more.
There's many ways to play. A bus seems popular because it's easy to describe. Bus with 4-4-2-1 or whatever for whatever item types is a simple description, super organized, and easy to wrap your head around.
Another big benefit of a bus is that it's easily understandable, readable and adaptable as a rule, meaning that you can easily organize a multiplayer game where you do have the shared bus that everyone understands, and feeds into the sub-factories that not everybody needs to understand.
But it does almost entirely remove a lot of magic in the game, and it's probably not "efficient" either. You have to build a lot of "pointlessly long" belts especially early on, use a lot of space that you need to defend, ... and instead if you get good at building without this organization, I believe you could be much faster.
As a shameless off-topic personal input, I enjoy to cause belt hell to myself. ( https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-236 ) If it's infernally tough to connect A to B in my base, then that's exactly the Factorio that I want to play. It's not for everybody and not for every "mode" of playing the game, and that's fine. :)
> not once needed to know about O(n), etc, traversing trees, race conditions, etc.
Look at Factorio weekly dev blogs for instance. You will see a lot of math and CS being used to optimize this game a bit more. For example.
> increase the text size
It's not part of the official graphics menu, but the font sizes are also configurable somewhere in the bowels of the scripts. If you purchase the game and the basic UI Scaling is insufficient, then this may also be a possibility.
Before you purchase the game, please do give the Factorio demo a chance.
What are you trying to show with that link? For me, it shows a consistent price across all platforms with zero sales...
The game has never been on a discount-sale. The price increase has been explained by the devs happening when the game exited Early Access.
Hmm, I wonder who was that created the Brood War API, which launched the whole StarCraft AI competition scene?
It's more complicated than just making the game use more than 1 core at a time. These links have a lot more information and discussions on it from the devs.
https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/5xa5m1/multithreading/
One reason is there was good reason not to trust 3rd party sellers:
https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-171 (The section labeled "Grey Market")
People would buy keys and then issue a chargeback and then turn around and sell those keys on 3rd party platforms. When the chargeback finally went through the keys would be revoked.
So yeah, there is a good reason to stick to only the official sellers.
I never really liked factorio interface (to be fair it has improved a lot since its early days), but I also knew it was a WIP all along.
Now, I see these mockups and screenshots (look at the GUI Update Part II as well) and they are amazing. I love the style, it fits so good with the overall theme.
Factorio dev team never cease to amaze me. Great job, hats off!
> I don't know much of the other two
Factorio is currently the second highest rated game on Steam. There's a Free demo available both on Steam and on their website
Do try it. A game doesn't get 98% positive ratings by accident
The blogposts that the Factorio team does should be a staple of game developmet:
https://www.factorio.com/blog/
They haven't missed a weekly blog post on what they're working for years (or ever to be more exact).
And, if anyone wants to try the game before you buy it, they offer a free demo of the game that you might enjoy!
But really, the developers are awesome, they're constantly going far and beyond what they have to do.
From the website:
Technologies used
- C++
- Boost libraries
- Allegro Game programming library
- Agui
- Lua
- Python (web development, scripting)
- and more ...
If anyone missed it..
they're hiring!
paste from bottom of the post:
We need people
It is more than obvious, that we should get more people now. We can afford it, there is practically infinite amount of improvements or additions we could work on, and we feel there isn't enough of us. So if you know a good C++ programmer or 3D artist, please send him/her our way, specifically to https://www.factorio.com/jobs
Posted this earlier in /r/games but seems relevant here too: I did a video review but if you aren't into watching a full review of the game here are my thoughts. Factorio imo is a game that perfectly balances challenge and accessibility in terms of management style gameplay by making the factory systems easy to understand at a glance but with enough depth that it will take you weeks to master. Factorio naturally paces itself with your level of play; teaching you everything you need to know through the campaign and allowing you to set the difficulty of the game extensively in sandbox mode. In terms of early access games, this one is up there with Kerbal Space Program as one of the best, and I highly recommend you at least check out the free demo if you aren’t sold on buying the full game.
You want a save to be the state of the entire world at one particular moment; otherwise items could be duplicated or erased if the state of a chest was saved the moment before an inserter pulled something out for example.
You could do the save itself in a separate thread, but you would have to, at the very least, make a copy of the entire world state at that moment in memory, so that that save thread would have one consistant moment in the game to look over and save all the data from.
This might seem like a good idea, but while it would be slightly faster on high-end computers (the world would still have to be paused, briefly, during the 'copy' process) it could be much slower on computers that don't have a lot of spare RAM.
Factorio is written primarily in C++, and uses Lua for Scripting/Modding^citation
That number seems low to me, if the goal is all non-infinite science and launching a rocket. Before the 0.17 research redesign, Twinsen calculated out that it would take 3.5 million copper and 5.2 million iron to complete all non-infinite research. Obviously those numbers are no longer valid but I would be surprised if it's changed by that much.
I think they mentioned in some Friday Facts they would like to finish it till the end of the year, but in the article is something else... so maybe the estimate have changed.
This summer is highly unlikely already, 0.17 is not even out yet and I think they still have a lot of work to do, when it's released then few months of fixes so maybe the next summer is not so stretched.
//EDIT from Friday Facts #223 - Reflections on 2017
> We've said it before, that the game will be finished and released during this year and we mean it this time. There is even the joke in the office that the game is always to be released 'next summer', which never comes. But this time we really really mean it, we want to finish the game in 2018.
Maybe this changed I don't know...