What a great riff on the classic
Dwarf Fortress represent my personal brand of Autism best
Rock and stone!
The factory must grow.
Automation games are usually my jam, but I bounced off Factorio pretty quickly. The automation part I got really into. I wanted to keep things as efficient as possible, but then I kept being interrupted by fauna attacks and I kinda hated the disruption. It didn’t help that various defense systems like turrets and the like needed their own supply chain for ammo, so I had to drop everything, start working on that, monsters started attacking my base on another location, rinse, repeat. You get the idea.
I am aware you can turn off the attacking fauna, but that feels like turning off an integral part of the game, so I dunno.
My brother is currently way, WAY into it, though, so I might give it another shake in the future.
In a very real sense, the game is only intended to be played in the manner that makes it actually fun for you.
The fauna is an integral part of the game only in the sense that the pollution produced by your machines makes them angry and makes them evolve, and a lot of work has gone into balancing the pollution/evolution rates to provide a sort of tension and pressure that adapts to how fast you are progressing. If you care a lot about experiencing things “as the devs intended them” then I understand not wanting to cut off an entire system and set of mechanics. In that sense, dealing with the attacking fauna without completely stalling or falling apart is one of the first hurdles you are “meant” to struggle with.
There are intermediates between keeping the attacking fauna and removing them: you can disable their expansion, you can make them only attack when damaged, and you can tweak the numbers that determine how your factory’s pollution affects them. You can also change the amount of “safe space” the game forces the map to give you around where you spawn - this alone can be the difference between the early game being anxiety-inducing or quite relaxed. These can only be done at map generation (unless you don’t mind using console commands to change things on an existing save/map).
Without changing any map settings, it’s not immediately obvious how many options you have to address the problem in-game, but here are some pointers if you ever do give it another try:
- trees will absorb pollution, preventing it from reaching biter nests. They can absorb a decent amount but will eventually die and stop absorbing. Starting in a forest can be a bit more cramped than in a desert but at least you don’t have to fend off as many attacks early on.
- avoid overproducing just to fill up buffers - you probably don’t need to have 2k green circuits sitting in a chest as soon as you can make them. avoid emitting all of that pollution until you actively need those items.
- try to set up defences before they are needed. You can build a new production line first to know what space it requires, but set up walls and turrets before you turn it on. This should help prevent you being interrupted by attacks on undefended machines.
- researching damage upgrades gives you more damage output per unit of pollution produced, helping keep the balance in your favor
- only a nest that is exposed to pollution will send attack parties. You can toggle displaying pollution in the world map (now called “Remote View”) and proactively clear out nests before the pollution his them. You’re essentially choosing between proactive defensive efforts vs reactive efforts.
- reloading a previous save to change your approach without restarting an entire game is totally legit and nothing to be ashamed of.
At the end of what I would call the early game, you unlock even more options.
- efficiency modules reduce the pollution a machine emits. They also reduce the amount of electricity the machine consumes, which will indirectly lower your pollution by making you burn less coal
- solar power is a great way to lower the amount your factory is polluting once your panels and accumulators are already made. Making enough to power your whole base, however, takes a lot of steel and other ressources, whose refinement emits pollution. So don’t expect solar power to automatically fix your fauna problems - it’ll take a little bit of thought
- laser turrets do away with the need to produce ammo and get it to the front lines, though the spikes in power consumption they cause keeps them from being a total, immediate fix. Similar to solar power, you’ll need to plan a bit.
- flamethrower turrets are much easier to supply than gun turrets, and can be waaaaaaaay cheaper depending on how much crude oil you have available to you
Finally, you could also first play the game through once without the fauna to get familiarized, and then do a second run with them activated. in my experience, it’s a lot more fun to deal with them once you know your way around the other mechanics.
I did not expect to get such an in-depth response, holy shit. Thank you! Saving your comment for when I get around to giving Factorio another whirl.
You’re welcome!
I’m just glad the length of my response didn’t intimidate you. Factorio is really one of my favorite games of all time, top personal contender for “if you were stuck on a desert island and could only bring 1 video game with you”, so it’s easy to ramble far too long about.
We all want you to enjoy factorio maaaan. This game is magic.
Yup, I seem to have severly underestimated the enthusiasm people have for this game.
Usually I load machine gun turrets manually. And use them mainly to clear nests early in the game. Later, when I get my hands on oil, I build perimeter with walls, flame and laser turrets. Connect pipes with oil and connect electricity. That do the trick.
You can tune the biters and make them spawn less, tech up slower etc.
IIRC you can also use the Rail world mode and turn the settings as if they are Normal mode since any cleared space will not respawn biters.
You can also turn up the resource richness and size so you have to expand less and then every now and then clear out an area. I used to be a bit turned off by the biters but now I’ve leaned into it and have have blueprints for making laser perimeter which kinda automates a lot of the biter handling.
Maybe you just need a mindset shift where the biters are another automation challenge instead of it being an intrusion. I really hope you get to enjoy this game, I can’t anymore since I have a baby now but I hope you can. I’ll for sure start again as soon as time allows.
Also, aim for 100% roboport coverage so you can automatically rebuild everything that gets destroyed. Then you can clear out something, paste a perimeter wall and continue on with factory stuff.
I never played factorio but it probably makes the satisfying efficiency feeling even more satisfying when there are beings trying to destroy it and getting destroted themselves no?
I dunno. I feel like diverting resources to defense systems, necessary as they are, makes the factory less efficient than anything, but that’s just me.
You could always play with mods. One of them adds pollution scrubbers, which you can surround your base with to make sure biters are never prompted to attack in the first place. I have several hundred hours in one save that has a metaphoric wall of filters that has yet to be attacked outside of a few instances when I was expanding.
Out of curiosity and just for the novelty of doing it, I found another mod that made a combinator device which would output the current pollution for the chunk that it was contained within. Using that, I set up a whole system to turn on the exact number of scrubbers I needed to prevent any pollution from leaving my base. Never actually implemented it because it was wildly impractical, but it was a fun project just to see if I could do it.
I always turn the enemies off. I just want to automate. But the tech tree existing for weapons and being useless really bugged me so I got really in to Dyson Sphere program. But enemies have been added there too.
Something about autism
You guys should try mindustry. It’s a factory/mining/tower defense games. I think it’s hard as balls to get right.
Satisfactory is tight.
It solves most of the Jank like non dividable Produktion times and such, so yes, its great
But I hate the maps.
Yeah I’m doing a playthrough on that right now. Only got as far as coal power but I’m really enjoying it.
The game has an end and a reason to stop playing though.
The point of the game is to launch a rocket, you can continue past that if you want.
The game is still actively developed, with the primary focus on bug-fixing. The price is one-time, and there is no intent to sell another expansion, as the game is pretty much at its technical limits as to what you can add to the game with the current expansion.
Also it has a ridiculously good mod repo and management system built into the game.
I’m too scared to try it. Maybe when I retire.
Dyson Sphere Program is closer in gameplay than Satisfactory, for a 3-D variety
I wish I liked games like factorio.
I love base building stuff (rimworld is my current obsession, tho I almost like making my heavily modded game function properly more than actually playing it) but automation is just too many moving parts, and too much planing and I can’t bring myself to do any of it right.
If not for that it would probably be entirely my jam. I get downright jealous when I see some of the amazing stuff people do.
That’s the beauty of it. You hate stuff but you can automate it away. You have a shortage but with more automation you can scale up 2x or 4x. You have logistic issues but you can use bots and when bots don’t cover it you can use rails.
I’m the opposite. Love automation (literally a programmer by trade lol), hate hate hate base building.
The main Factorio dev is pretty publicly a shithead.
Perhaps even worse: Factorio has never gone on sale. They are very strongly against the idea of sales. Which like… Fine, but game value depreciates so you should at least drop the price over time. Not the case- in fact they INCREASED the price from $30 to $35 in 2023. The game came out in 2020. It’s now a 5 year old 2D indie game listed at $35. Can I afford that? Yes. Am I going to buy it? No.
I’m also curious about how game value depreciates.
Games tend to go on sale to sell more copies later in their lifespan, attracting customers that weren’t going to pay the original price for it.
It sounds like you’re saying that the game can’t be played for as long if you buy it later, which doesn’t really make sense to me.
I might be a biased, as I’m one of those people with a few thousand hours into Factorio, and several hundred into other factory games.
I interpret their comment slightly differently; Factorio as a game is less valuable today then, say, 4 years ago.
I still disagree with that interpretation, as the game has continued to receive updates and bugfixes, steadily increasing it’s value (or at least counteracting the depreciation). Not to mention the additional value provided by community mods has only increased over the years.
The game is also one-of-a-kind. Until a “factorio 2” equivalent comes out that is just straight-up better in every way, it’s hard to see how the value would depreciate. Heck, the Space Age DLC is basically “Factorio 2” without splitting the playerbase across 2 separate games.
The game came out in 2020. It’s now a 5 year old 2D indie game listed at $35
… which is still receiving updates well into 2025: https://wiki.factorio.com/Version_history/2.0.0. Probably, in part, because they never put the game on sale and so each and every purchase of the game by players contributes equally to the studio’s capacity to continue supporting the game.
What do you mean that the dev is publicly a shithead? Genuinely curious because I’ve mostly only seen positive information about them
A couple of different controversies. He has posts on Reddit (that have since been deleted, but you can find them archived) talking about how student-teacher sexual relationships can often be consensual.
The more famous controversy is this one. Which is hard to summarize other than him being a general asshole to fans, and while he didn’t really say anything too terrible he uses a lot of red-flag language talking about “cancel culture” and “sjw’s” which, in my experience, is only used unirlnically by shitty people.
I’ve seen an online comment somewhere referring to this interview of him (it’s in Czech, but has English captions). I don’t have much interest in watching the full interview myself (though I probably should just to check what I’m talking about). According to this comment I had seen, he explains in this interview that he had that knee-jerk reaction to the pushback to recommending Bob Martin’s “Clean Code” book in the public factorio devlog in part because of the political climate he grew up in (Czechoslovakia near the end of the Soviet Union, and then following it’s dissolution) which was full of spurious accusations based on tangential links.
Myself, I distinctly remember reading the devblog post when it came out and thinking “oh boy, it’s a shame he only learned about Clean Code today and clearly is unaware of Bob Martin’s reputation on matters outside of strict software development”. His comments in the reddit thread really just made things worse. I’m still hesitant to unequivocally label him as bad as many others, but simultaneously I don’t hold much hope that he’ll ever come out and publicly denounce his former comments.
This really raises a lot of questions about Factorio’s story and worldbuilding 😔
