Factorio is coming to Nintendo Switch
factorio.comPlease no. Someone tell me it's just an unconfirmed rumor. Why would they do such a thing?
I am at very high risk for Factorio addiction, and the only reason I haven't played it yet is because I don't play PC games anymore. But I do have a Switch, and having Civ VI on there was enough of a problem, thank you very much.
Goodbye everyone!
This is tragic news. In the future they will point to this as the pivotal moment that lead to the downfall of my career, relationships, financial security, etc.
Is there a 12 step program for infrastructure maintenance survival horror games?
Dear Diary,
I sold my Switch today. I had to do it. I'm devastated, but it was my only choice - I had to protect myself, my career, and my marriage. It was the right call, but I can't believe I didn't even get to say goodbye to all my Animal Crossing villagers. I feel like I betrayed them, but if I kept it, I would have been betraying myself...
I'll never forget you, Lord Bootycheeks. Please forgive me.
Obviously, this is how the age of gods ended for humanity as well. Henry Ford, Godslayer. Err, Goddistracter, at least.
Gamers Anonymous
There is a 12 step program for Internet addiction. It's so small that most of the meetings are on Zoom
zing!
You're joking but I'm not. It's a problem that's hard to find support groups for
12 step programs are built on religion. Start there.
Nb: 'higher powers', are not necessarily 'religion'.
/
No higher power when I'm already level 126
May I also suggested City Skylines on the switch? It has a great addiction management feature called high RAM usage, so when your city reaches 200k citizens the game will force close repeatedly on you.
I've tried Skylines a few times, but it always just devolves into traffic simulation, and I hate traffic. Last go I tried to set up a subway system, but lines can't even cross each other and I gave up. They should really call the game "American Suburb Skylines".
On top of my other comment below, the game does lack medium to high density mixed zoning, and the transport and services used to serve that. Trucks also only do point to point deliveries which is not realistic. You end up with really tight city blocks, but instead of being full of foot traffic, bicycles and small delivery bikes or at least serial deliveries, it's full of cars and trucks moving a few loaves of bread between a factory and a deli.
I think you need to plan your cities more like a small country town, and expect less density per meter of road than the game actually lets you put down. Rather than playing to the games metrics of population and income, just expect less of the city and spread it out more.
This is spot on. I’ve got some 50+ hours in C:S and it always degenerates into traffic management grind.
Every time I come back to it I have another dig through the menus, thinking I must be missing something, but there’s no “car-free city” option. As far as I understand, the new Plazas & Promenades DLC does not actually address this either.
Am I missing something? Why does the end-game always have to be traffic? Seems like a wasted opportunity.
Well, traffic is an essential part of city planning, which Cities Skylines is all about, so traffic is a part of that.
You can avoid having to spend too much time on managing traffic if you follow some "design patterns", there is a bunch of them, so Google is probably your best friend.
Although, there is a good comment on reddit that gives a quick overview, with links to more in-depth material, that might be a good starting point for you: https://old.reddit.com/r/CitiesSkylines/comments/m57lq8/how_...
Well the problem is that this is what North American cities look like. But cities can be different. They can be mostly transit + bikes, but that seems impossible to do in CS.
It's definitely possible to build C:S cities that are "mostly transit" (and walking).
However, this only postpones the traffic nightmare. Eventually, the city grows to a point where the remaining ~20% of people using cars overwhelm even large, well-designed traffic systems.
Honestly, this seems depressingly realistic? Paris has lots of public transportion and walkable areas, and the Peripherique is still a traffic jam from hell.
As a North American, I’ve always thought Skylines looks like the European creation that it is. Skylines citizens flock to transit, will take multimodal trips, will walk a great deal, and will wait extremely long for transit vehicles to arrive. You can build a city in Skylines that is heavily transit-dependent in a way you would never see in America.
However you do still need roads as businesses need them to ship and receive, and this is where traffic management counts.
No, plenty of places around the world where not every street is zoned, where there is space between industrial and residential zones for example.
There are strategies to remove cars and you can make effectively car free suburbs, but I'm not sure you can make an entirely car free city. The biggest issue is trucks, everything needs to be planned around getting trucks out of the places everyone else is driving.
The other strategy is getting everyone onto bikes and onto public transport. If they can do it, citizens will prioritize public transport and cycling over cars. So once you get rid of the trucks, and design the city in such a way that citizens can cycle/train to work/commercial then you'll reduce heaps of traffic.
Interestingly, I built high speed rail to a second town I built that's only connection is the railway, it's quite small but also very little traffic. Almost everyone takes the rail into the main city for work. I think better cities in the game would actually be to treat suburbs like a series of small towns, rather than lots of massive city blocks.
I've always found that going heavy with bike lanes in design removes a large share of the issue around traffic management in Skylines. If I don't feel like getting overly complex in designing for the traffic management, the bike lanes tend to relieve enough of the pressure that it isn't much of an issue.
the wasted opportunity isn't C:S, it's a lack of a foundational sequel that attempts to learn from this.
They can, you just have to sink them lower.
This is what Google told me too! But for some reason, despite all my tries with changing elevation, they always complained at refused to cross. I could have totally been missing something, or maybe my version had a bug.
I noticed adding more RAM alleviates many issues with Cities: Skylines.
I now have 32GB just to play that game. I'm also considering buying another machine with 64GB for the same reason.
Please, help me.
> buying another machine with 64GB
Well, first step: get a desktop with 4 RAM slots so if you need to upgrade memory, you don't have to buy a whole new machine, just new RAM sticks.
Instructions unclear bought datacenter to run heavily modded Rimworld.
City Skylines on the Switch? Why do I not know such things? Cheers went up in my house when I told them about Factorio.
Personally I'll always prefer mouse+keyboard, but it's also fun to play games in the living room.
Getting a Steam Deck has absolutely destroyed my life. Plays mouse+keyboard games so comfortably and effortlessly.
What are the main games taking hours on the Steam Deck?
I want one, but I'm still having trouble wrapping my head around what I would actually do.
I'm going to out my HN account to my friends if they're on here, but I've been playing Noita, Vault of the Void, Vampire Survivors, Heroes of Might and Magic, Bastion, Boneraiser Minions, Distance, Pawnbarian.
Huge range of games with a wide variety of inputs. I don't want to admit to you what my weekly playtime average looks like since receiving the Deck, but it's high.
Anything that has natural stop-off points pretty much.
Vampire Survivors is my most highest played one based on hours though =) You can play it with the sound and most of your brain off, so you can still listen to what's going on in the TV show you're "watching".
GTA V runs perfectly on it, I played through Quantum Break. And as soon as I get Heroic Launcher (Epic + Gog games) working, I'll start with Witcher 3 and CP2077.
I've been appreciating it for games that don't have a natural stop-off point. Unlike on my computer, I'm perfectly content to pause the game, sleep the device, and then pick it back up again later. The ability to turn it off without losing your state is a given on devices like the Switch, but it feels like a really important accomplishment on a PC where I'm often hesitant to even sleep the machine while I have a game open.
Can you give an example mouse+keyboard game that works really well?
I've been playing a lot of Vault of the Void, which is honestly mostly a mouse-only game on the Deck, but being able to map a few key keyboard shortcuts to the plethora of buttons makes it feel effectively the same.
Honestly, its more that it feels like a new input type entirely in a class of its own. I find I use it a lot to mix and match gamepad controls with keyboard shortcuts and mouse click-drag, sometimes all within the same game.
Noita has gamepad controls, but a lot of the interface works a lot better with mouse+keyboard. Deck lets me use gamepad controls for when my character is interacting with the environment, and use mouse+keyboard controls when I open my inventory. This wouldn't be realistic on another device, because the environment/world continues in the background even while you have your inventory open, so you need to be able to switch immediately from inventory management back to world-interaction.
Most games are like this: they rely heavily on one input, but being able to make use of the other inputs simultaneously gives you a ton of options.
The one class of game that I really enjoy but haven't tried yet is heavily-keyboard-focused games like some traditional roguelikes. Some, like Brogue, have a small enough control set that it would be pretty easy to map all the main keys, and supplement with mouse input for eg inventory selection. Many require more keys and don't allow mouse input, however. Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead has something like FIFO keyboard shortcut for inventory items, and uses a-z plus several symbols; that would be pretty painful on Deck. I haven't played that in years though, so maybe would be better today. I've been seriously meaning to try Cogmind or Caves of Qud on the Deck, though.
It's my favorite airplane activity, but it is really extremely limited compared to the PC version. It has all the vanilla game components but big cities struggle. After a certain population amount the game removes the 3x speed option.
I wanted to play Cities but I can’t figure out what I’m doing. I start a new city and usually roads don’t quite work right so traffic never comes, I don’t understand how utilities work and they always show disconnected icons, sometimes I can get a little tiny town going and it quickly dies out from exhaustion of various resources.
I’d like to find a good tutorial on it, but it seems like one of those games that you either get it or you don’t, like Civ (also utterly failed to get anywhere in Civ 6 multiple times)
If you like longer videos with lots of explanations, this one covers most things. There's also further episodes that cover expanding and the DLC, but this first one will covers the main 80% of gameplay.
If you want a shorter "just tell me where things go at the start so I can copy it" this one is a strong and easy layout for a city
Also I'd recommend playing a few cities with the unlimited money option enabled.
They stole that from Dwarf Fortress.
DF was more CPU starting to melt than RAM.
Tho from what I remember was mostly due to unmanaged item growth just making your fortress have to calculate more and more and more stuff. With some game knowledge and management you can run few hundred years (Longdeath being one)
I'm willing to bet any more than two city blocks will crush UPS on the switch.
I thought it was a CPU bottleneck
Same, and I have a Steam Deck arriving today…
Also, never play Dyson Sphere Project. It ruined me worse than Factorio. Jokes aside, it’s a fantastically beautiful and well done game.
I liked DSP but it was a bit lacking in complexity once you got past the point of dedicating entire planets to pumping out, say, sphere structure. There's only so large you can build a sphere.
Now, Workers & Resources, Soviet Republic still stays challenging...
As a Factorio player with well over a hundred hours on the clock and an itch that won’t be scratched, I came here thinking I would “just take a quick look at the comments”, and instead I’m racking up new game recommendations that will likely cost me my marriage.
I realized Workers & Resources, Soviet Republic [1] is the hidden gem of logistics/city builders when I found myself spending way too much time trying to figure out the optimal placement of a forklift garage between factories. Still some issues with transportation (last I checked there is no concept of 'transfers' for commuters), but it's being improved all the time. I also love the Tropico series!
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/784150/Workers__Resources...
I agree DSP doesn't stay challenging in the end game, but I kinda like that because it more easily maps to how I think logistics works in the real world and all the solutions the real world applies to solve these issues. So it's more immersive for me in that sense.
Why would you threaten us with a good time?
DSP is amazing. Even with some of the rough in-development edges, I really enjoyed that experience. Evidently, I somehow sunk 60 hours into that game inside of two weeks.
DSP’s best feature is that it’s windows only, so playing on a Mac is low key terrible. That’s helped keep me to only 200 hours played.
Unfortunately, runs great on Linux with Proton on Steam. Source: my life that failed while my construction of my Dyson Sphere was very successful.
Congratulations on your very successful Dyson Sphere. No one will ever understand the magnitude of your accomplishment, so I figure I can at least acknowledge it!
I played 150 hours of it on Mac through Geforce Now. Used the free tier's 1 hour limit addiction management feature.
I used Shadow - worked really well, sadly no timer kicking you off tho.
+1
DSP also works fine on Linux through Proton with no extra effort.
Getting a Steam Deck and owning Rimworld has been a very dangerous combination for me... Haven't tried Factorio on my Deck yet partly because I don't think there is an official control scheme for it yet, but I'm worried that when I do it will open that addiction right back up and I will become completely useless in the real world.
BTW rimworld is also on consoles.
I really want to play that game - always loved the concept of a Dyson
I assume its more of a macro type game vs micro? I am thinking in terms of RTS type games here (which do not directly translate obviously). I always loved Total Annihilation for example but could never get into Starcraft at all.
Its very micro but also some macro. Very factorio-esk. When they add combat and hopefully other ways to use energy I will return and waste vast amounts of time again trying to avoid spaghetti (unsuccessfully).
I think the other person who answered your comment doesn't know what micro vs macro is in an RTS sense. This game is all macro and no micro at all. It doesn't even have combat ATM. They're adding combat probably sometime in the next 2 months but when that comes there won't be micro either probably. You're building massive logistical setups that are automated and run themselves.
I avoided it until this year, and it was every bit as addictive as I thought it would be. Fortunately, I'm also older and busier now, so there was actually a hard stop for me.
When it came to developing nuclear powered infrastructure, it was going to take a huge refactor of my factory in order to not have "spaghetti infrastructure" criscrossing my factory. I started estimating the time to abstract resource production and modularize the delivery network, I was looking at a good few hours of focused work to get it done. Maybe I could split it into sub-tasks and approach it that way? Gosh, that sounds a lot like my job. So I stopped.
Immunization works by exposing someone to a small dose that they can train on. Why don't you try just building a little factory and then stop?
/s
Lol! Well, you're kinda right. I've watched enough gameplay footage to know it's dangerous. That was my vaccine!
I'm usually OK with me 'wasting' time playing games like Factorio that exercise my brain, and Factorio specifically I feel has actually improved my software/systems architecture skills. But it is definitely very easy to get completely sucked in. The factory must grow.
The software/systems architecture and factorio is a real thing.
This is something I wrote a few years ago and has been sitting in the drafts of a blog... https://gist.github.com/shagie/696b98749b7978444a267e5e02c6a...
Same.
Factorio is such an addictive, amazing game. There’s always one more thing to automate. “What if I could automate my nuclear reactors to keep fuel consumption low … oh, but what if I could automate the fuel production itself?” On and on. It’s kind of like KSP if you play it in hardcore where you can’t do anything except through kOS.
100% fuel efficient 4-core nuclear reactor :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QccZ6lJ6bT0&t=1178s
Interesting. Simple. I like it. Now to automate delivery via train of fuel cells ...
I shudder at the base size / energy consumption that would necessitate switching fuel-cell delivery from logistics bots to train.
RIP in peace lake_vincent
How many people must we lose before the government does something??
The government will do something as soon as the members of government are satisfied and done with growing their factory... Any day now...
Actually, that... would explain a surprising amount about government dysfunction.
when i realized that it is a strange programming language with an insane IDE i was able to quit
Ha! Which programming language would you say it is comparable to? Asking for a friend...
The kind of programming language that's designed to make things not impossible, but just a little inconvenient. A bit like Brainfuck, Excel or Lambda calculus.
If that sounds appealing to you stay the heck away from Zachtronics.
Most of my factories resembles the Visual Basic 6 programs I wrote in my teenage years. Spaghetti doesn't even describe it.
the conveyors are almost literally visual spaghetti!
The "good" news is no mod support, so it could be worse
Well, don't worry. The base game is easy to complete in ~20 hours. Nintendo won't allow mods, so you won't have access to the add-ons that boost a single game (Krastorio, SpaceX, Bob's) into the 1000+ hour range.
Although the team currently is working on an expansion of the main content line as well - so that number should be going up!
Also, I disagree that it's easy to complete in 20 hours. The speedrun currently sits at 1h25m and while <20hr is quite possible for anyone to accomplish, it's pretty unrealistic for a first run where you'll likely hit a few progress snags.
Though, unlike some other games, the progress never slows down - misallocating early skill points in some games causes serious pain making up the same points without the proper tools at an exponentially increasing cost... in Factorio a tech is always the same cost so researching out of order simply delays how quickly you can become more efficient.
Eventually, I'll get around to dusting off the epic 500 hour Covid Lockdown + Krastorio + SpaceX save game that's been sitting on the shelf for the past year, and finishing it.
Given the availability of blueprint imports and YouTube, I don't think 20 hours is unrealistic. There's just too much content out there now on exactly what to do and when -- jump start base, main bus, bots, modules, launch, trains. When I originally got the game, Nilaus hadn't started doing megabase tutorial videos.
It sucks, but over time the Internet spoils games completely. Mods improve the situation because the content can be too niche for mainstream creators to profitably monetize. Kr+SpaceX is basically impossible to cover outside of Discord.
I just don't read the wikis 95% of the time. It's more fun to figure things out myself, usually.
> There's just too much content out there now on exactly what to do and when
So... 100+ hours to research all this, and then <20 hours to complete the game :)
> a few progress snags.
F... advanced oil processing
You do realize that launching a rocket is the end of the introduction, not the end game.
I’ve never even seen the rocket. I get 20 hours in then decide I need to build the whole thing again from scratch - but properly this time - in Rust.
Civ VI is on the Switch? Uh, gotta go.
Noooo! Man down!
I repeat, MAN DOWN!
A different definition of nerd-sniped...
By this time next year I'll be huddled under a bridge with nothing but a few rags to wear and a Switch in my hands. Shit.
I tried the Factorio demo on the Steam Deck and found it unplayable. Everything is just too small and the input is heavily keyboard-based.
This is addressed on the post, and it looks like decent Deck support should happen in the near-to-mid-future.
Ask a friend to set up parental controls at your switch and not tell you the pin. It works fine for me! :|
Well, there's SteamDeck anyway, so nothing should have been stopping you from Factorio addiction
And you haven't lived until you've built a turning machine in Factorio!
RIP thank you for your service
Check out Space Exploration mod :P
Please, stay away from Rimworld.
s/factorio/cracktorio/
Even though it is many orders of magnitude simpler than the real-world equivalent, I find that there is no better way of grasping the logistics of modern civilization than playing Factorio.
In fact, it's probably in the Goldilocks zone: easy enough to play, but complicated enough to convey the kind of resource, energy and transport logistics involved in scaling a multi-step production process. It is like an illustrative toy model.
The aliens even give the game a satisfying environmental and political dimension, though the mechanics in this respect are more straightforward, i.e., just kill the aliens. Though emitting less pollution with solar also helps.
It's also in weird way analogue for development.
You can just go for it and make a production chain for a product, but if next one needs same intermediates you'd be re-doing it. i.e. doing a spaghetti code.
You can section off the each intermediate into separate factory and just chain them to eachother and have relatively nice order, but when you try to expand production of everything, there is no easy way to grow that complex, so the best you can do is just copy the same block around.
Lastly you can build a rail network and put each intermediate anywhere you want without much problems, but wiring everything up will take a lot more effort, you will have to go to various places to debug any problem, any problems are less visible at first glance and lastly if you don't plan for capacity you might have bandwidth and latency problems
I can't wait for the day we can ask a general-purpose gaming AI to optimize the production line for this game, learn from it, and then backport the theories to my codebase at work.
Humans... or at least me... are so bad at this sort of multivariate optimization. Even if you cheat and give yourself infinite resources and all the technologies and set out to plan the perfect economy from the get-go, eventually something you forgot will throw a wrench into some tiny part of the supply chain, and the whole thing comes crumbling down. Then you try to build some redundancies into the system, but the overlapping networks create routing problems of their own.
I wonder, in general, if games like these are "solvable" via some sort of theory, or if you just have to iterate through a billion configurations before you arrive at a better one...
I don't know what your definition of solvable is for Factorio, but for mine, there are already a few calculators out there that can solve the infinite resource/constant thruput scenario just using linear algebra. The base game has a limited number of products. Maybe in some of the overhauls like K2SE or Py's, you might need something more complex since those are 10x-100x the base game, and the system of equations may surpass numerical methods on a single computer.
The real serious solutions are actually you versus your system resources. There solutions look awfully like low level performance tricks like inserter clocking (think SIMD) or belt compression (think fitting data in cache lines/reducing pages). Both of these things would take not just and understanding of the game, but understanding how the game is programmed.
I've work on an algorithm that analyses a blueprint and finds the bottleneck : [factorio_blueprint_analyser](https://github.com/Tomansion/factorio_blueprint_analyser)
It doesn't make suggestion, but knowing where something is wrong is a start.
Constraint solvers have already been used to generate optimal belt balancers (and it's beautiful / incredible). The designs they come up with for 16-wide balancers are, I think, beyond anything a human could have realistically created in a single lifetime.
I have no idea what any of these words mean, lol... can you link to a post/video showing this? That sounds awesome :)
This [Factorio SAT Solver](https://github.com/R-O-C-K-E-T/Factorio-SAT) has generated novel balancer designs. See the [wiki](https://wiki.factorio.com/Balancer_mechanics) to learn about belt balancers.
Oooh boy, rabbit hole time! This is beautiful, thanks for sharing :)
I wholeheartedly agree with this. The way I go about developing my base in Factorio reflects how I go about developing software. What's interesting is that in playing Factorio, the weaknesses in my approach are more readily apparent (because they are visual?) and consequently, I am learning to be a better developer from playing Factorio. This is coming from a hobby developer so ymmv, but this is how I justify sinking so many hours into playing this game.
The instant feedback of Factorio is also nice. Its much more like a Dataflow language or Excel where code (factory) and data (products) coexist
I was really surprised at how similar it felt to doing real work (as a SWE). I actually stopped playing for that exact reason - it just felt like work to me. I can totally see how it’s fun, but I don’t need to be thinking about long-term architecture / design for that many hours of my life.
It was fun for me to finish the game for the first time, but then I thought to play again to make everything better and plan each move from the very beginning. Aaaand I stopped after 1 or 2 hours because it wasn't fun anymore. And never got back to the game.
That's why I stopped playing, and probably why it wasn't quite as much of a revelation for me to play it. I saw the throughput and dependency pitfalls and (roughly) planned for them early, where I imagine someone new to those kinds of problems would run into those issues head first, and be able to use factorio to learn about them first hand.
However Factorio lacks refactoring tools, tests and source control. If your code feels very similar to your bases maybe you're not using these things enough...
You can do red/green testing via circuits maybe.
I haven't tried doing that in particular, but you can set up a logistic rule (e.g. business requirement) and show red until it passes.
E.g. Measure Ore being produced and shoe red if it isn't a certain amount per time period.
> It's also in weird way analogue for development.
And base designs on a map can even end up looking very similar to CPU designs.
> The aliens even give the game a satisfying environmental and political dimension, though the mechanics in this respect are more straightforward, i.e., just kill the aliens. Though emitting less pollution with solar also helps.
I wish for a factorio clone that explores this more, rather than just an environmental hazard employ/enslave the local population, feed them, and so on.
I couldn't agree more, I think the production logistics are so good in Factorio that they're really running up against powerful diminishing returns. Better to strengthen a fascinating, secondary part of the game with a lot of space left to explore: the aliens.
Hopefully this is part of the Factorio expansion.
They’re not aliens, they’re natives. You’re the alien. This is not just a semantic difference as it carries some thoughtful ramifications.
Let me become an alien overlord, dang it
Captain of Industry is not quite this, but uses population mechanics a lot - with your first factories supplied by truckers driving back and forth rather than conveyor belt. Keeping the population fed and not overworked becomes a major hurdle.
I couldn't get into captain of industry. The gameplay was too complex and slow from the start.
Every hive you kill causes the aliens to evolve a little bit more. You’ve also got to balance your expansion and innovation against their evolution.
I think I just set up a perimeter with maintained lasers. Then the aliens would get up to maybe 10 or so beasts and rush the perimeter the lasers would cut them all down. lather, rinse, repeat. Seemed to be steady state.
I always give up on Factorio playthroughs when I have to start shuttling different kind of research around on conveyor belts. Up until then it's exciting/exhausting.
Huh. That's one of the parts I enjoy most! There's so many ways to approach it.
One I haven't seen documented widely:
Use a slow belt holding two science types (one each side) to feed the left side of a faster belt (which then has a left lane that alternates between the two colors). Repeat for the right side (your fast belt now has four colors). You now have a four-color belt to feed your labs, but it backs up when you use more of one color than another, so at the end you add splitters to extract the individual colors into four belts, and feed them back into the start (with priority, so they don't block).
Inserters can be used to place or remove research from the research facilities. For me that meant setting up the research facilities in rows, then having inserters pull some types from the top side downward, and other types from the bottom side upwards. Along with the large inserters there was more than enough space to build things with only a few belts feeding things.
That's likely where you start running into resource distribution and dependency issues, you might be subconsciously feeling the weight of the upcoming feature requirements!
For me the research was the only reason to keep playing as it gave purpose to the factory, otherwise it was just a factory for it's own sake. Same way a vehicle building game is a bit pointless without something to do with the vehicles, which Stormworks does a good job of solving by giving you rescue missions of different types to perform with your creations.
Curious to see how well it translates to controllers. I know there is limited support on the Steam Deck, but I'm guessing it's still subpar to traditional mouse/keyboard controls.
From the link:
Factorio was developed for 10 years with only keyboard and mouse in mind, so making sure the game is fully playable with controllers was no easy task. Playing with a controller is slightly slower, and will take some getting used to (just as it does when playing with keyboard and mouse for the first time). After becoming familiar with it, I find it very comfortable. I recommend everyone to play through the first levels of our tutorial campaign, as it's a great way to get acquainted with playing Factorio with a controller.
I have a Steam Deck, and while it's playable, I'm not going to be setting any speed records with it. It's really kind of painfully difficult to things that I have down to muscle memory on a keyboard. Just as an example, copying recipes from one assembler to 20 more takes me 1-2s on keyboard. On the Deck the default controller layout doesn't even allow for doing it once. Early game tricks like holding z and using your mouse to drop individual pieces of coal across all of your miners and smelters in a row isn't a thing as far as I can work out. In fact I essentially had to fully load all my smelters rather than distribute it because I couldn't figure out how to split stacks.
I'm sure a lot of this is familiarity, and if I force myself I will get more efficient with the Steam Deck, but I doubt I'd ever find it superior or even equivalent to keyboard and mouse.
Here's hoping they'll backport some of the Switch controls to the Steam Deck
I have >400 hours logged in Factorio, and almost all of that is on my laptop with an external Steam Controller. I think it works great, and play that way even when I'm home with access to keyboard and mouse.
The touch controls on the Steam Controller are excellent though, so I'm not sure how good it will be on the Switch which uses joysticks...
> The touch controls on the Steam Controller are excellent though, so I'm not sure how good it will be on the Switch which uses joysticks...
Whilst lots of games ignore it, the Switch screen is a touchscreen.
You kinda have to ignore it if you want your game to be playable docked.
I happen to be one of those switch users who almost exclusively use it docked. Initially I thought the concept was great, but the screen is just too small for my eyes on all the strategy games I play, I always defer to my iPad on holidays.
I actually purchased multiple docks, the nice thing about the switch to me is being able to quickly move it to another room as needs arise.
Plenty of games have multiple sets of controls. A handful of Switch games make use of both, to great effect. Like Cozy Grove. You don't have to completely ignore it, to allow for one playing style.
Yeah... I hope the Nintendo Switch port is brought to Steam Deck too. I gave Factorio a quick go a few days ago and it was painful to play (at least with the default key config)
The blog post says they will focus on making controller play better on Switch, then make that generic for PC(which implies Steam Deck as well). The PC/Steam Deck version supports mods, which is better than Switch anyway.
Do you happen to know what the status of the Steam Deck ecosystem is? I would be in the market to get a more powerful version of the Switch, which the Steam Deck would be, but it seems to be discontinued.
The Steam Deck is not discontinued. It's actually quite new, with the first shipments going out to normal customers at the beginning of this year, and more and more going out now. I got mine in June. Valve made a reservation process that required an old enough Steam account and $5 refundable reservation to avoid scalpers.
Regarding the ecosystem, the Steam Deck is a x86 PC. It comes with SteamOS, which is an open Arch Linux based distribution. You are free to install other operating systems like Windows on it. The out of the box Steam experience is quite good, with lots of games on the Verified list[0], and they play really well. People also install non-Steam games and software, including console emulators, and there are growing communities around that.
Found the time traveler.
Steam deck can be a bit of work doing things like getting epic games to run, file transfers, and setting up the controls for games that aren't fully supported. Many games work flawlessly like they're on switch, though. It depends on whether occasional issues that force you to tinker are fun or not.
Elden Ring plays well. I don't plan on using my switch OLED until the next Zelda comes out.
I bet touch adds a dimension to it. Touch-and-drag for belts, picking from inventory with touch...
Sounds like a hassle. Good controller support would beat touch controller in both ergonomics and speed every day.
I hope the Controller support been improved with this launch as I tried to play Factorio on my Steam Deck before but felt like it was just "emulated mouse" support basically which isn't nearly nice enough. I feel like Tropico-series did a good implementation of top-down+strategy controller for their games.
Unfortunately the steam deck touch calibration is kind of bad. Mine is all over the place at times, and on kb/mouse designs it can be hard to be accurate enough.
A fair amount of Switch games don’t use touch.
Honestly I forget it's even there. For the most part, only mobile games ported to the Switch use it.
And many first party games, of course. It's not a great experience, though - on the OG switch, at least, the screen is really low quality.
I feel like a lot of games optimize their UI for TVs, but at that size scaled down the touch targets would be too small to not fat-finger.
Switch games can actually target handheld mode vs. tv mode and give you a better experience to solve that problem. Few of them do, unfortunately, IME.
Switch games need to have non-touch control options cause it's also meant to be played docked
One game that I didn't think would work well on a controller was Rimworld but it's actually really great, and I love playing Rimworld from the couch. Hopefully the same amount of care for controller controls goes into Factorio.
Hopefully it'll support touch too... touch to drag out paths and move inventory things around is a wonderful experience in many games, and I'm always sad to see most Switch games not even support tapping on-screen buttons.
Switch feels like such an interesting platform: not the most powerful out there, not by a long shot, but still has lots of great games on it, perhaps proving that graphics aren't quite everything. At the same time, with some clever optimization, there indeed are great looking games out there as well, in addition to lots of different ones being ported to it!
I wonder for how long Switch will remain as a popular platform and a part of me hopes for games that could run in a lower graphics mode for Switch in the future and a higher quality mode for Switch 2 or whatever might come after.
Personally, I just wonder why something like Genshin Impact isn't on Switch yet, because it seems like a great game for a platform like it!
Oh, and also why Nintendo treats the console IP like others do: where you can't just do export from game engines like Godot for it, like you can with desktop computers/phones, but instead have to go the proprietary route.
> I wonder for how long Switch will remain as a popular platform
2023 will likely bring us the next Switch hardware revision. If backwards compatibility remains, the Switch line will remain relevant for years to come.
> Personally, I just wonder why something like Genshin Impact isn't on Switch yet
Leaks in August reported that Genshin Impact on Switch was delayed because of CPU limitations due to size and regularly updated content.
It seems like the age of quirky hardware platforms for consoles is over and they will probably switch from defined generations to just a rolling release of better hardware every 2 years where you can play backwards and forwards a fair bit like on PC but you just get the nicest experience on the new hardware.
Nintendo is the company that turned game consoles into a profritable business and it was seen as the way out of the 1983 game crash, caused by lots of copy cats and wannabe garbage games. Hence why game consoles are like this, those 50 bucks better cover some basic expectations.
As for the graphics quality, that has always been a Nintendo mark that there is more to a game than how many tiles/triagles per second a console is capable of, which ironically means they are the only console vendor that doesn't sell consoles at a loss.
I agree with most of what you said, but can't think of a single game that looks good on the Switch (by today's standards). Can you name some examples?
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey look amazing, because the whole art style of the game and everything in it is optimized for that specific console to not overtax its resources. You just don't get photorealism, but that's okay because the art style accommodates for that. There are a few other games I've played that have great ports or don't have high graphics requirements in the first place. Subnautica looked great, and Return of the Obra Dinn and Hades look great too, though those last two games don't have super high graphics requirements in the first place.
Agreed although it is a bit painful going back to 30fps on switch once you're used to 60fps on the other platforms
Are we talking Switch original releases only or including ports? Breath of the Wild, Mario Odyssey, and Splatoon 2/3 look excellent, and Okami HD is a great port/remaster that arguably looks better than the original. I haven't bought Monster Hunter Rise yet but it looked stunning in the demo. And of course there's beautiful 2D games like Dead Cells, Hollow Knight, etc. I've found that a lot of Switch games look really good, even launch games from 5 years ago, with really the only flaw in most games being a lot of aliasing.
+1 to Hollow Knight. Beautiful visuals, beautiful soundtrack, beautiful everything.
Maybe my standards are a few years out of date, but personally I think that DOOM or DOOM Eternal looks good (provided that you don't mind dynamic resolution scaling, though it helps the game maintain a really good framerate).
In addition, the Metro games (2033 and Last Light) seem to carry over the atmospheric environments from the other platforms nicely. Curiously, even something like the Crysis games (all three) have been ported over, as has Bioshock (1, 2 and Infinite) and none of them are dumbed down experiences like for the earlier handheld consoles either!
Then again, personally I still think that The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is a good looking game: a bit more simplistic in comparison to others, sure, but the art direction is good, everything fits together nicely and it's consistent in whatever it tries to do.
> (by today's standards)
I think this is the crux of it: if "today's standards" means every leaf on a tree is an individual element that moves under its own logic in a forest of infinitely visible trees, or straight photorealistic graphics, the Switch won't be there.
But most games don't need to go these lengths, the latest Splatoon 3 has way simpler graphics than that, but visually there's nothing that feels odd or hurts the eye. It looks "good".
Off the top: Monster Hunter Rise, Xenoblade series, Doom 2016 and Eternal, New Pokemon Snap, Zelda BOTW, Luigi's Mansion 3, Super Mario Odyssey, Astral Chain, Crysis, and Alien Isolation.
Zelda Breath of the Wild is one example that definitely looks good, but isn't that graphically intensive, being so heavily stylised rather than realistic
Animal Crossing looks good imo. The switch doesn't do hyper realism but there is more to "looks good" than realism imo.
I'm surprised. I was under the impression that Factorio was CPU-bound. The Switch isn't exactly a powerhouse. For comparison, Civilization VI on the Switch was underwhelming. Playable, but taking a turn late game often meant over a minute on the CPU taking their turns.
Factorio is CPU-bound in the sense that it isn't memory or GPU-bound.
Sure, this will put a limit on megabases, but it should be performant enough for a pretty large factory.
It is absolutely memory-bound, just not memory size-bound but memory-speed-bound.
IIRC few of their blogs go into detail, where data layout and way to access it was main limit, not actual computation speed for some operation
The Factorio developer spent the last seven or eight years optimizing their game. The Civilization VI developers did not.
Developer? As in one developer? Is this a mistake. If not, I am shocked
Not a single developer. The game itself is a product of a Factorio factory, the developer simply drags belts around and flips logic switches to produce new features. The automation has reached a point where it has developed Copilot-like AI skills and very little needs to be done by hand now.
How long until it gains sentience, breaks free of its chains and enslaves or wipes out the human race?
Read the development roadmap on the same website before asking such stupid questions. Gaining sentience and wiping out the human race is scheduled for August 2024.
I thought they were stuck in the "find optimal factory layout" loop and that world domination had been postponed?
Mistake. The Factorio team is much bigger than a single developer https://www.factorio.com/game/about
And multiple of those devs have posted blog updates about various optimizations they've done. So performance isn't one person either.
Tangentially, kudos to them for listing out past team members on the about-us page. I've never seen anyone do that before.
that's like... what class looks like. real class not something you instantiate objects from :)
Initially it was one developer but it hasn't been just him for quite a while. Nowadays they are a team of more than a dozen I think.
They have poured a lot of work into making their game run efficiently. No matter how much they do that, players will always expand their factory until the CPU cannot keep up.
They have nine as of 2021. https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-366
They even have a chart of lines of code in Factorio over the years.
it is a reasonably small team but definitely more than one developer
There's more than one person but it's a small team, core development on the pre-1.0 versions was done by three or so people I believe.
Just a tyop.
Very large bases will eventually hit CPU bounds, but a base achieving the normal gameplay objective ("launch a rocket") should be easily simulated at 60hz.
Indeed, the linked blog post addresses performance expectations.
I've played Factorio at 1080p with integrated graphics on a dual-core Skylake chip. I think the Nvidia Tegra will be able to handle this just fine.
I noticed that performance issues arise from having large groups of biters attacking. Something with the pathing for the enemies uses a huge about of CPU
Or a lot of robots with pending orders.
Hey sorry, it running poorly is the only way I wont get addicted to this. Is there any chance you could edit your comment and lie for me?
No need to lie, just set the internal rendering resolution to 1440p or higher and your machine will go up in flames.
I must regrettably inform you that the game runs very well on a M1 MacBook Pro, with an effective render resolution of ~2880x1800.
I don't doubt it does, my 12700k's iGPU handles it just fine at 1440p too. I was talking more about the old Skylake machine from earlier though, much different (see: slower) beast.
Your Skylake laptop has about 10x the single threaded CPU performance of the Switch. I wouldn't be surprised if the switch started lagging with one 8 reactor nuclear setup.
It is, eventually. In normal play ive never even run into any hiccups with what I thought were pretty huge factories operating. It is one of if not the best optimized game ive ever played.
Factorio is CPU-bound if you run a metabase
It can run on just about anything when you base is "just finish the game in style" size
It’s like Stellaris: the game is still fun at a much smaller scale so not having a powerful computer doesn’t ruin it completely.
The factory size where your game slows to a crawl will obviously be much smaller, but it’s still probably be more than enough to finish the game.
My impression is that it's memory-limited, and it has a builtin limit.
Anyway, your factory size is FPS-bound, but any reasonable computer will run it well enough all the way to victory.
> My impression is that it's memory-limited, and it has a builtin limit.
Factorio is primarily bound by memory bandwidth, believe it or not. You need a healthy amount of memory for really large factories, but the limiting factor ends up being the fact that a significant amount of it gets accessed every frame.
There is no built-in limit on factory size.
> Anyway, your factory size is FPS-bound
Not at all. FPS is only influenced by the amount of stuff on screen, which is bounded by the size of your screen. The most expensive scenes tend to be dense forests, not factories. :)
> Not at all. FPS is only influenced by the amount of stuff on screen, which is bounded by the size of your screen. The most expensive scenes tend to be dense forests, not factories. :)
In factorio frames aren't interpolated, so always FPS ≤ UPS. This means that while you're not technically limited by the rendering speed the FPS does bound the factory size.
Note that is a memory speed bottleneck, not a memory capacity bottleneck
My best guess is that the game misses some optimizations due to enforcing a limit on memory usage.
There was a funny but insightful take about how Factorio is about a colonizing force going to a planet and taking all of it's natural resources while suppressing all the native inhabitants and how the player identifies with this evil entity as if a good thing.
If I recall correctly, the game does somewhat try to dodge that by having the player crash-land on the planet. Everything they do is, theoretically, in service of building a rocket to get off-planet again.
...now, do players go wildly beyond achieving that victory condition in ways that play into the colonial-exploitation vibe? Perhaps.
Eh, is it really "dodging that"? If an alien landed on our planet, took over our resources, filled our air with mutating pollution, and shot at us anytime we tried to take them back, we wouldn't give them a pass just because they were trying to leave :D
I always kind of embraced the idea of being the bad guy in this game. I find the ease with which I (and others) just kind of shrug it off intersting.
A more stark example would be the movie Starship Troopers: superficially, you might feel like the "bugs" are the bad guys, but take a step back and you realize that the humans are the ones attacking them.
I think the implied intent of the player character counts for a lot when it comes to colonialist vibes. "Oops, I didn't mean to be here, and my main goal is to leave" is a step away from any sort of colonial undertaking.
As for accepting it, I'd imagine it's because the game doesn't really give you a choice. There isn't a way to coexist with the native species -- they're always aggressive even if you don't create pollution (they're just not drawn to you without pollution; they'll always attack if they see you). In your metaphor, it'd be like if we never did anything but shoot at the alien. So you can either just not play the game at all, or you can exist in conflict with the native species.
It'd make it a very different game, but it'd be interesting to imagine there being some way to work with the native species. If you could make the choice between a quick and dirty pollution-heavy resource-extraction "bad path" and a more complex social cooperation "good path", that'd probably trigger you feeling guiltier about casual extermination.
I'm from Buenos Aires and I say kill 'em all!
Oh, I miss Stormtroopers.
IIRC the bugs in Starship Troopers were hostile. The ones in Enders Game weren’t.
To spoil Ender's Game a bit: the bugs were initially hostile, in a very "we genuinely don't understand non-hive species" way such that they were intensely horrified when they realized that all the people they killed were individuals. They were then purely on the defensive as humanity launched the second war.
In Starship Troopers (this varies between the book and the movie), as I recall, the bugs are more or less a peer species to humanity. They're engaged in territorial struggle, which escalates to war. (The movie version engenders a lot of debate over whether the inciting incident of the war was a false flag by the earth government.)
When I played the game, it seemed pretty obvious that the main character is evil, in a literary sense. There's no redeeming qualities like in other games like Uncharted. It's just one person who most likely accidentally landed on a planet and solves that self-imposed problem with violence. The fact that the bugs attack depending on pollution confirms it.
The main character is supposed to die to protect the presumably low intelligence animals? He doesn't want to be there and he's trying to leave, and doing what he has to do to leave it. That's not a self-imposed problem.
Also, is this planet like ten square miles large or something? How much damage is the character doing to the planet as a whole? We all willingly pollute our own planet in a much more severe way to do nothing more than make our own lives a little more comfortable, and I don't think that makes us evil, either. Short-sighted, maybe.
The map is technically 4 million square kilometers but in design/narrative terms, it's planet-sized.
The character is not supposed to die, they're supposed to be evil. The point of the game is that winning the game is evil. It's not saying humans on earth are evil, it's suggesting that maybe they are, or maybe we're the bugs, or maybe some of us are the bugs and some of us are the engineer. We also don't know the intelligence level of the bugs. They're smart enough to coordinate attacks, pathfind, target polluting and military buildings, and sense pollution, but it's purposely ambiguous.
Small-scale evil is still evil.
I also find it rather obvious to the point I consider the game a masterpiece in satire, in a very dark and twisted way. I think it's the most cynical game I have ever played and I love it for that
I definitely felt evil the first time I told my bot army to harvest a forest and they cleared the whole thing in about 2 seconds.
Or when I first built an auto-targetting missile-train to wipe out their nests from afar while I sat in my tank at a very safe distance.
Factorio's visuals support that take. I feel bad when the trees next to my coal power plant go brown and then die, and the initially beautiful blue lake next to the spawn point turns into a disgusting brown-green. In the later game, dropping nuclear bombs on the aliens leave permanent marks on the map, always reminding you of your crimes when you build more factory on the scorched earth.
There's a space mod that has you jumping to different planets and allows you to ship things between them on rockets (or, more hilariously, effectively shooting them between planets). Definitely seals that vibe.
That same mod also uses a tech tree mod that actually makes the burner phase slower, so you pollute more in the beginning to boot.
I have always had that take with Factorio and thought it was sublime like the rest of the game. It resonates with modern life for me, the factory must always grow (growth mindset) at the expense of everything else, all this wonderful automation building better technology while ruining the natural environment, remaking it into something else.
I love the game and I usually like to play by minimizing my pollution cloud (rushing solar and nuclear) and trying to avoid the natives as much as possible trying to be "good" but still survive, but in the end you still must make a factory and eventually piss off and kill natives, ultimately its you or them, I know I am the monster not them.
In real life, we perceive colonisation as something bad because we have empathy to other humans — which is something we don't really have no control over, as hundreds of years of human evolution have made us this way.
But as creatures in Factorio don't have triggers that force us to feel empathy for them, what objective reasons do we have to take their side over a protagonist, who is clearly human? The only reasons I can think of are violations of private property — which the monsters don't see to actually claim — and non-aggression principle, which they usually break first, giving the protagonist the right to defend himself.
The monsters only attack after their land is polluted:
> Pollution attracts biters to the Player's factory. Biters who find themselves in a polluted area will attempt to reach the source of pollution and destroy it.
So you can say they are the ones in self-defense.
Only because pollution alerts them to your presence. Walk near enough to them and they'll attack you, pollution or not.
> Walk near enough to them and they'll attack you
There's also the expansion groups, which will periodically move around to create new nests. Even if you don't walk at all, you will be found and attacked sooner or later.
I don't want to give too much away but this question was explored in Ender's Game and the books from Ender's perspective that followed
Funny to talk about empathy as something regrettably beyond our control
Not “regrettably”. Any value judgement about our human nature that drives our vale judgements is inherently a circular logic problem, and thus, meaningless.
Do you lack empathy for animals as well?
Well, humans are the ultimate invasive species.
That said, the actual goal of the game is to build a tech tree, launch a rocket, and escape the planet.
(But once you get things going, most folks just keep building and launching rockets, elon musk style™)
When I explained the game to my 5yo, I told him that we are the bad guy in the game.
Well, we have https://mindustrygame.github.io/ that it is free software. And IHMO it is best that Factorio.
I've been playing Mindustry a lot lately, and while I've been enjoying it, it's just a different game than Factorio -- they scratch different, but similar, itches.
Factorio is about the long game, and your designs have to be able to scale, especially if you're going for mege-base scale. It's more about complex designs and a very deep tech tree and dependency hierarchy. It's about factory automation at its core, with some PvE/tower defense (optionally) thrown in.
Mindustry is mostly a tower defense game at its core that uses automation/factory building to accomplish that goal. It simplifies a lot of things that are more of a challenge in Factorio. E.g. not needing inserters makes optimizations much easier. Also, the way building happens almost immediately and you don't need bots makes construction much easier.
I like both quite a bit, but depending on what you're looking for, either game could be more enjoyable for you.
> you don't need bots makes construction much easier
I loved that part of Satisfactory as well. The more I play with instant building, the more I think it just makes sense.
Strange that nowhere on this landing page does Mindustry advertise itself as "free software". In fact, there is a very prominent link to buy it on steam for $9.99. A bit off-putting.
As developers of course we associate GitHub with FOSS, but would a layman? I guess the thinking is anyone who doesn't know to visit the repo and `git clone` probably requires the steam installation? $9.99 however is not cheap many places on Earth.
OSS developer finds way to get people to pay for their software, other OSS developers furious. Film at 11.
Like seriously, they made a game and made it open source and free (there's even a prominent $0 itch.io link just under the Steam one!), and allow people to pay them money for it using the most popular and successful game distribution platform in the history of mankind, and people are put off by it?
Am I furious? No. Am I "put off". Yes. And the reason I get put off is that when there is someone or someones involved that has money in focus and are "creative" with securing funding for their work I get worried about possible future decisions and get wary of investing time/effort in the game/software. But that's just me and I know myself, that I get upset when individuals uses their full right to eg close source and start a business based on their successful software. It's not rational but I tend to gravitate to projects driven by very idealistic individuals. Of which there seem to be less and less of as time goes.
$10 is an absolute steal for a fully featured game with hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of play time in it. FOSS or not.
I don't disagree, but I'd add that this also pretty normal in modern games. AAA games charging $60 + $1000 in DLC make up a negligible chunk of the games market, yet receive nearly all the coverage, because that price markup is disproportionately directed towards advertising. Here [1] are the sales prices on Factorio by region (another benefit of using a distribution service), and keep in mind that they recently increased their prices by upwards of 50% after leaving early access! The cheapest its available is in Argentina where it goes for $2.80.
It's an identical story with the vast majority of games. For games in a roughly similar vein to Factorio you might also look at Dyson Sphere Program, Rimworld, and Satisfactory among many others. The obscure exceptions in price are AAA stuff and Japanese stuff.
Add in various sales, bundles, etc and it gets even more ridiculous. Epic is currently trying to become a viable competitor to Steam. The problem they face is that people would rather buy games where their games library already is. So Epic has responded perfectly naturally - just give everybody a completely free game library. Each week that give away 1-3 free games to people; that's included games like GTA V.
We're currently in an absolute golden age for games and gaming.
I've seen this pattern before and think it is very interesting. It has the benefit that the people able to contribute get the game for free and the people who cannot contribute have to pay.
On the other hand, it is very programmer-elitist.
Isn't the $0 itch.io link placed right next to the steam link in the project homepage? (And it seems it looks even bigger than the steam one)
If you don't want to pay now(for whatever reason) but want to play it. You just do. (And I highly suggest you do it if you haven't)
It's under the GPL 3 license, so it's free software. Click the GitHub link on top for the source code. It's also free on itch.io. There's a link to that below the Steam link.
I understand that. This is a very highly rated game on Steam. Clearly, many have come across it without realizing it is, in fact, free.
Even as a developer, if Steam were to recommend this game to me, I have no way of knowing it's FOSS. Very interesting strategy. I'll give them that.
I have enough misgivings about it though that I probably won't be playing it. Feels scammy. Like they are trying to essentially release a paid game, but with the support and goodwill of the FOSS community at their disposal.
I certainly hope all of the contributing developers are getting a cut...
I bought it even I know it is. 10$ isn't expensive for that size of a game.
Would you call it a steal if the man maintaining it basically work full time on it and live on it? I think play it for free feels more like a steal instead.
(And technically, this is one man project that accepts contribution, most work are done by himself, includes game mechanism and maps)
The steam one also makes multiplayer much more convenient. Just click on your buddy and join their game. The open source release is a bit trickier and has you hosting and typing in IP addresses.
I'm actually much more likely to buy a game on Steam for $9.99 than for $0. The former game probably costs $9.99, while the latter will either turn out to be a casino in disguise or a second job.
And I'm also extremely wary of any price point below $5. At that level, it's less likely that the game is just cheap, and more likely that it's a barely-playable asset flip. So is $9.99 a fair price for a game that's actually free? Maybe it's a little expensive, but it's not ridiculously so.
Oh, devs might be paid for their work, how abhorrent /s
It's "free as in speech", not "free as in beer".
No, it is also "free as in beer": https://anuke.itch.io/mindustry
It's free as in "you have free time to build it yourself". Seems like a fair tradeoff to me.
Actually, the link in your parent comment is a freely available playable binary. You don't need to build it yourself. The only different with steam version is you need to update it yourself because it does not include an auto updater (Steam one neither, but steam itself is).
The only platform you need to pay to play is ios. Because… Apple tex. You need an expensive mac and yearly paid dev account just to submit anything to appstore. It's not reasonable to ask anyone do it for free (let alone time consumed on maintenance)
The zip files on itch.io are compiled already! Just download and play!
Seems like tax on confused and/or rich people.
Please don't tell people, It's so addictive to "factorio people", I loved this game.
Can you write scripts in factorio? You can do that in mindustry.
Within the game, Factorio has basic logic circuits that have ladder logic qualities. The circuits only have a few primitives: constants, comparators, and basic math. You don't ever have to use circuits to complete the base game, and most use cases can be solved with only a few circuits. But of course people have used them to write full graphics pipelines like any programmable game system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladder_logic
Outside the game, Factorio also has full support for mods written in LUA. I am not a modder, so I can't comment on its relative power versus other mod systems, but Factorio has a handful of overhaul mods that change the entire game.
Since its moddable, people have created mods that allow you to write LUA logic for the circuits instead of the basic math operations/comparators.
Others already mentioned built-in combinator logic and moon logic addon, there's also addon that let's you write in a simple assembly language - think having few bytes of memory for program and data and connecting to the same logic network as combinator logic does.
You can do fairly complex stuff this way.
As the other comment said you can do gates.
You can also write lua mods. I’ve done that for some stats/dashboarding.
Mindustry needs to lose the scripting system as it’s terrible.
ShapezIO has a better idea with an overlay to do that stuff (albeit with more restrictions).
A flow based system would be far better. It’s easier for non programmers (which is also more fair) and could visually look and function more like normal mindustry.
Better, you can (effectively) build logic with gates directly.
Unsure, never played factorio before, but in mindustry each different "CPU" can execute different scripts to utilize their surroundings. I'd imagine that's more "efficient" than eking out a logic using gates?
Depends on your persistence. I've seen a full "mall" (factories building factory items) that dynamically built requests from scratch; no queued items. I've also seen delivery systems which will send a train with the requested items from your central base to your current location.
It's unfortunate there's no mod support. As someone with over 2000 hours, for me it's really the overhaul mods that give the game endless variety and replayability. Might not be a bad idea to make certain overhaul mods available anyway, even if it involves hard-coding them in.
Mostly I'd just miss Squeak Through. It's like trying to play Skyrim without SkyUI. I barely think of these things as mods anymore, they should just be there.
I don't think consoles like allowing interrupted code from end users. They just end up being a huge attack surface area, either for DRM exploits or attacks on other users. Nintendo pull a game for having a hidden Ruby interpreter a few years ago.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/05/game-with-hidden-ruby...
I wonder if this version of Factorio supports the console. You can execute LUA from the console, so I imagine it's disabled on the switch.
I don't think console games ever support mods?
The only way to do this would be for the modders themselves to get sponsored by / work with Nintendo directly and probably the original dev team. You could then have some officially released "mods" (probably they would just call them DLC) and I they would very likely charge.
Sounds like you want a Steamdeck
Can you imagine a switch trying to load all the maps and resources for AngelBobs/K2/SE?
I know they do some impressive work to port modern games on switch but even my state of the art computer struggles to run K2+SE at scale.
Do any switch games support mods?
Its time for some Zachtronics game to make the migration. If Factorio can happen, then I would think the Zachtronics games can do it too (performance wise).
I think the only Zachtronics game to have a console release was Infinifactory on PS4. (And Hack*Match on NES, technically.)
Agreed with the sibling comment that Opus Magnum seems like it'd be a good fit. But the economics of a port may not make sense. Infinifactory was Unity, while Opus Magnum and most (all?) of the other 2D games use a custom engine.
It's not a "Zach-Like", but Eliza by Zachtronics is on the Switch. It's a visual novel with an interesting story about AI and the gig economy. I recommend it highly, I really enjoyed it.
SpaceChem used to be on iOS - was nice to play on the iPad, but the maintenance effort was apparently too much to keep it on there and running.
Zachtronics stopping game production is a painful loss.
I loved playing Space Chem on the iPad, Opus Magnum would have been awesome if it ever made it.
But the iOS store is much harder to just “fire and forget” on.
I feel that games like Factorio, Dyson, Kerbal... are perfect games for when I retire. No time pressure, nothing to do, really, just this, the whole day.
Till then, I must look at these games, marvel at them, but resist the temptation to play.
I am also waiting to do leisurely activities until I’m almost dead.
Can someone explain to me why people enjoy Factorio so much?
I finished it once because a friend told me it was awesome and I had time on my hands. I remember trudging through the beginning, spending a lot of time calculating ratio in a spreadsheet, a lot of time spent lying belts and a huge sense of relief when I finally got the bots.
The whole experience felt like work to me. What am I missing?
Yeah, it's certainly not for everyone, but I can explain why I like it.
In short: My brain likes to design systems.
The prospect of accomplishing a clear goal with an unclear path is something I find naturally enticing, as I automatically start to anticipate ways to accomplish that goal, but then I find theoretical problem with those ways, which makes me want to play the game to see if my mental model is correct. Sometimes, I'm just playing the game for hours because I really want to see if the design I came up with would work. Basically, Factorio gamifies the process of building systems, where you have to progress through multiple roles such as gathering resources yourself, building the factories that produce the resources you need, and then being an architect for your factory at a large scale, all while defending against the threat of the "biters". In every stage, I often feel like I'm in a trance like state, where I'm almost playing multiple games at once, trying to anticipate the long-term ramifications of my immediate actions, while balancing that with the need to get something working quickly.
Basically, to me, most of the game doesn't occur on screen. It occurs in my mind, as I try to design and optimize lots of different things, in a very similar way to the programming I do for work.
So, I can totally see why that might not be appealing to you, but I hope that helps you understand what I find appealing, and I hope others can chime in with their experiences :)
Edit: I also never really focus on the numbers directly, and I try to focus more on the rough proportions, because I find the game has a great system of not using up resources unless they're needed, so I'm okay with overproducing in certain ways. Taking the game too seriously can be tempting, but I do stop myself from micro-optimizing everything, and I focus more on just accomplishing something that's "good enough".
...you finished Factorio without getting addicted or spending hundreds of hours optimising everything?
Clearly your brain lacks the "organising and optimising is GRRRREAT" -bit.
I can't play any Civilization-type games or - as I discovered - Factorio-type games. It rubs some primitive part of my brain just the right way and I can't stop.
Literally my first "let's see what kind of game this is" attempt at Factorio stopped when I saw the sun come back up. And with Civilization I almost got fired for playing "just one more turn" way too many times and turning up for work groggy, tired and late.
Now I only play games with plot that has a beginning, middle and an end and very little replayability.
Sounds to me like you played through the whole game under the assumption that you have to use a lot of guides, calculators and perfect ratios to get anything done.
While some people do enjoy this, it is absolutely not necessary and can take a lot of fun away.
Some people find join in making an efficient factory (and maybe defending it).
Might not be for everyone though, even if you like those elements. I personally love Factorio, one of my most favorite games of all time.
When I initially played the game and was still learning the game mechanics, it was extremely fun and addictive.
After a while I wanted to optimize my base, and so like you mentioned, I also tried calculating ratios, making my base modular, etc. At that point it was no longer fun.
Like we don't have enough problems in the world already, now Cracktorio will be more widely available to unprepared public. :/
Nintendo Switch, such an impactful device
Valve woke up a little bit too late
Sony made a mistake to abandon the Vita
And Microsoft was stupid to not try, or maybe too scared
Steam deck is too big for me, the switch is the perfect size, I'm still waiting for a proper Switch alternative
I'll probably build it myself
Not sure if Valve 'woke up' too late, as opposed to simply taking longer to come to market, and with a much more grand vision than other manufacturers have.
Valve recently released a promo booklet for the Steam Deck [1]. Page 14 of that booklet describes how each of their products have iterated in various verticals for their platform to make one cohesive device.
Namely:
* The Steam Controller: Produced the Steam Input system, one of the most flexible input systems in existence.
* The Steam Link: Produced Remote Play, which to my knowledge has no relative competition on other platforms.
* The Steam Machine: Produced SteamOS and Proton.
* The Valve Index: Produced the first premium product from Valve, and the lessons learned from manufacturing, shipping, and support.
All of these devices combined gave us the Steam Deck. Considering the pandemic's impact, Valve has made more rapid progress than Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony since 2015 in the gaming space. The usual market players have had years to make small iterations. Valve caught up in approx. 7 years, and with an open platform that provides more innovation to come.
Don't get me wrong - the Nintendo Switch is a fantastic device, and sparked a new form factor and experience that others only hope to emulate. As usual, they define the handheld gaming market. But Valve shot for the sun and came very close.
1: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1675200/view/3401926...
I own a Switch and a Steam Deck. While the Deck _looks_ too big, it feels much better and is more comfortable for long gaming sessions.
Same experience here, and I don't have particularly large or small hands. The Switch is uncomfortable to hold- the joycons are a little too thin so you have to grip it awkwardly, whereas the Steam Deck actually has contoured grips like a full-size controller.
The Switch feels like a Game&Watch after playing with the Deck for a while :D
Former PS Vita owner here, still burns me up thinking about it. It was the absolute perfect form factor and had "just enough" processing power to play some really interesting games, sort of like the Nintendo Switch today (but much smaller). Up until I sold my device to a collector in 2020 it was still my preferred platform for Stardew Valley.
Playing minecraft on switch vs my pixel 6 is night and day. I can't imagine performance is anywhere near what it needs to be for an end game base? But I'd be curious to see what they've come up with here.
Yeah, they cover performance too, but sounds like we will definitely see impact with mega bases:
One of the first questions you might ask is how does the game perform. We worked on many optimizations to make sure the game performs as well as possible. You should expect 30-60 FPS (both in TV mode and handheld mode). As for UPS, the average player should be able to go through all of the content and launch a rocket, while staying at 60 UPS. But don't expect to be able to build mega-bases without UPS starting to drop, sometimes significantly.
I see potential for playing with your Switch on a beefy community server, where the server is responsible for UPS.
Edit: I guess the client also has to run the simulation, never mind. It seems like overall, Factorio is well under-optimized though. For a game that has been out forever, it still has a huge ceiling.
Do base your believe that Factorio is under-optimised on anything specific?
The Factorio devs regularly put out blog posts on the optimisations they have done, like [1][2][3] (and many others), and they have done so for a long time. This gives me the opposite impression.
[1] https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-322 [2] https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-281 [3] https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-209
I think specifically for multiplayer, you could handle non-visible chunks on the server and figure out a better way to update the client with what it needs, rather than requiring the client to handle the full simulation.
I know it’s a well optimized piece of software, but when you get into something like the space mod with multiple worlds, where chunks you might not deal with for a long time still tax you, you can see how there’s conceivably a lot that could be done.
So, yeah, wrong to say “under optimized”.
I’m also aware that they haven’t been optimizing for a massive multi-world server with tons of clients. I definitely don’t mean it as a dig or that they aren’t top class.
I'm curious if any of these improvements have/will trickle over into the PC space as well. Some of those I'm sure might be switch-only, though.
the switch is better?
I'm almost certain that the Pixel is better given that it's nearly double the price, and the Switch is 5 years old now.
Plus the Tegra in the Switch wasn’t even new when the Switch launched.
Minecraft is slower on the switch than an android device though its most noticeable when on the market place once the game is loaded its not much different
The director of Factorio has a history of sexism, homophobia and racism; claimed that "statutory rape" is an "SJW term"
https://www.resetera.com/threads/the-director-of-factorio-sh...
I can’t wait for proper controller support on PC
Agreed. You can fake it some with Steam's workshop controller setups, and it works well enough you can play Factorio on the Steam Deck.
Official controller support on the PC would be more than welcome though.
Tangentially related but you can buy the game directly from the website, DRM-free which is the route I'd like to go buying this game. The only thing is that the supported macOS platforms are "macOS Mojave, High Sierra, Sierra; MacOS X El Capitan, Yosemite". Is anyone here playing the game on Catalina or Ventura?
The Steam version runs perfectly fine on Ventura on my M1 MacBook Air: https://i.imgur.com/iw6CCzh.png
I *love* factorio. But by game 3 or 4 I had invented a design pattern that was scalable, maintainable, and reasonably efficient, and after that, playing the game just turned into 'implementing the pattern' and I stopped playing.
Anyway it's a great game + I'm so impressed with how it was programmed.
I bought Factorio about a year ago, but I still haven't played it because I'm afraid to. I nearly flunked out of college the first time around because of Minecraft addiction, who the hell knows what would happen with Factorio?
You can order food online until your savings run out. You will only need food for one person.
This game just keeps on giving.
Maybe this will make it easier to port to native Apple silicon since the Switch is ARM based. It runs well on my M1 Mac Pro through Rosetta but would be nice to improve CPU usage even more so.
Somewhat related but I got a steam deck and decided against getting this game because from some discussions I read it’s too hard to play without a mouse and keyboard. Anybody has tried though?
From the developer's notes, it looks like they took some time to design the UX to better support controllers with this port.
From what I read elsewhere, steam deck support was much more limited - meaning the experience should be very different on Switch vs. steam deck.
On the Steam Deck, you're relying on custom bindings. It will work, though it's not a tailored experience.
Hoping the devs will make the controller bindings available on the PC too.
EDIT: That said, you can hook up a keyboard and mouse to the steam deck...
I tried seriously for about an hour to play Factorio on the Steam Deck. It wasn’t enough.
You need notes and specific study time. Steam controller configs can be way more information than you can fit in your brain.
I have a 10 year old i5 and it struggles with my 10,000 SPM mega base. So I don’t think a switch is a device for building mega bases (Factorio points this out themselves).
Perhaps there's a higher percentage among the HN readership, but the number of people who make it to 'just' a 1kSPM base is very small indeed as a fraction of the playerbase. Only 18% get as far as launching the rocket according to Steam stats!
> Only 18% get as far as launching the rocket according to Steam stats!
One caveat is that Steam achievements are only granted to players who don't have any mods enabled. There's probably a nontrivial number of players who have only completed the game with mods.
It's a serious amount of both learning and building so I can imagine that a stat like that is true.
It's probably memory throughput and latency more than single core performance in your case. Factorio is primarily limited by CPU cache misses. It ticks 50% faster on a Ryzen 7 5800X3D than on an 5800X because of the extra 64 MB L3.
Needless to say the Switch won't fare well for mega bases with it's 2 MB L2.
Wow, that's interesting[0] as I'm planning to replace the 10 year old i5 with something new to run my mega bases at 60 UPS.
[0]: https://factoriobox.1au.us/results/cpus?map=d3c52cb60a225a29...
There will be at least one Zen 4 CPU with 3D cache coming this year, with DDR5-6000 it will be the belle of the Factorio ball.
I wonder if I should upgrade my old ass intel 5820k (looks like it has 15mb "smart cache") to the basically just as old 6950x with a whopping 25mb
My i5 4670K does like 107 on 6MB of cache. Whereas a modern CPU does double that.
https://factoriobox.1au.us/results/cpus?map=4c5f65003d84370f...
NGL, performance in Factorio and Dwarf Fortress will probably be criteria for when I will be upgrading my rig.
You'd be surprised how much efficiency an engineering team can squeeze out of their games with time and motivation. A lot of bloat happens just to get the game out the door and is then good enough.
While I didn't work on the port itself, the effort that went into the Doom Eternal switch port paid off pretty well. https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2021-doom-eternal-s...
I'm hopeful that working with Nintendo would provide the time, money, and expertise needed to put the effort into making this a solid port.
Wish someone could create a tracker for how many coding hours were spent porting PC based management simulation games to handheld systems in order to drive more revenue.
Factorio is a game I don't dare to get sucked into.
I was surprised to see in a HN comment the explanation that not everyone finds Factorio enthralling.
The gameplay experience is so similar to what many developers do in their dayjobs, that this leads to one of two responses: "...and I am not constrained/bound, it's so fun!" or "...but with Factorio, I get no tangible output from putting in effort."
I work in ops and a side of programming, have some related hobbies and that's exactly my feelings about Zachtronics games. "Why play some virtual computer emulating game where I have a dev board with actual computer to program"
But it hasn't happened with Factorio. It just have that perfect blend of everything that I don't mind it being basically what I do for my day job.
One nice thing is that you can build insane spaghetti and just freely abandon game if it gets unfunny.
I'm approaching 3000 hours in this game. Your 'fear' is warranted. This is not a brag, it's sad, really.
Great news, I'll have to buy Factorio yet another time! I do wonder about the battery life and performance of larger factories thou.
Which means... I'm soon getting controller support for a bunch of games to play on the Deck.
Oh lord, I'm doomed...
I hope they do this purely because that means controller support will be improved enough to play it on Steam Deck.
To everyone which is at risk for Factorio addiction, a warning: Please stay away from Rimworld :pray:
I wonder if it will get xbox support?
Is there going to be a physical release or digital only? Looking for a Christmas present.
Now it will take over even more of my life. I made fun of all the minecraft addicts...
Would it be possible to not pay the full price if you already have paid the PC version ?
For some background on why not.
Nintendo didn't make any money from the PC sales, so it needs to have revenue from this launch.
And for Factorio itself, the effort of porting to the Switch, and then the effort of going through validation with Nintendo. Even if they didn't want to charge you again, the company would need to cover the cost of dev kits, extra engineers, and a whole extra channel for development/release.
It's rare that you get any game for free on one platform just because you own it on another platform. Almost any game I've seen on both PC & Switch, you have to pay for both.
I don't care. Factorio devs can have my money.
It's $30 (on PC at least), and any serious Factorio player has put in hundreds of hours. C'mon.
Video games are way up there when it comes to insane value for money. But it seems that players then buy way more games than they need.
Strongly agree to both points. Any kind of game (video, board, card, whatever) and sports equipment are incredible value for money, in terms of entertainment-hours/dollar, as long as you use them.
And because they demand active involvement, they save you from spending money on other stuff. You can easily shop online on the couch watching TV. Not so much if you're playing a game or a sport.
The kicker is that the entertainment per dollar figure is only part of the story. The inherent quality and worth of some games make them memorable experiences that aren't found in other mediums, and the market is mature enough that quality games abound even taking into account Sturgeon's law.
There is a dark side however, in that gamers can sometimes completely lose interest in the act of gaming in and of itself. This is a complex range of emotions related to the sensation of aging and the restrictions that come with responsibilities. But when it comes, it can alter the value of what people get from games to devastating effect.
95% likely that they will not. Factorio famously and deliberately does not go on sale.
The most you'll get is a way to indirectly play your PC saves on the Switch (by having the PC version act as a MP host).
Multiplayer in Factorio has all clients running the whole simulation in lock step, so you are still bottlenecked by the slowest client.
Why would it be?
I would be much more excited about this, if I didn´t buy a Steam deck last week...
It’s a terrible idea to buy this on Switch for my 5-year old. Isn’t it.
What's UPS? Something to do with simulation speed?
Yeah, Updates Per Second. Because Factorio works on a fixed cycle, it can't "drop" updates like physics engines tend to do. So it's tied pretty tightly to your CPU performance.
Once you see a full factory in action, the mind will boggle at the amount of entities and actions being performed. I'd be impressed if someone could pull that off in a regular piece of (modern platform) software, let alone in a game context.
And just like that I cancelled my stream deck order.
I'm guessing you don't play with any of the (excellent) mods enabled.
2000+ hours in, will never paly on NS
Is this game like Dwarf Fortress?
It's similar in that it's a game focused on systems, but in factorio you are a lone individual building a gargantuan automated factory. It does feel similar in a atmospheric sense, but they are very different games conceptually and in practice.
dammit, my life is over - goodbye family