It's a lot like a STEM degree. It's fun recognizing problems, fixing them, optimizing your solutions, getting marketable skills, etc. However at a certain point the projects you're working on become more tedious than fun, especially when you start factoring in scale. Because you're spending so much time on something you find fundamentally draining, your interest in other hobbies decreases, you find doing actual life both too similar and too dissimilar from what the Factorio/STEM life is. And perhaps the biggest con, your social life takes a massive fucking hit--unless someone is also living the STEM/Factorio life, you're probably not gonna see them often.

Still though, in such a fundamentally unstable world, there's a definite appeal to being able to have a plan, follow through with that plan, and then see the fruits of that plan come to fruition. The industrial revolution happened for a reason right? We all need some rigidity, formality, and industriousness in the chaotic systems of our lives. I played the most Factorio when I was mentally rotting away at a bad coding job, physically isolated from my friends; in that period, the sandbox of problems and solutions was a perfect mental escape. Not to say that Factorio is only appealing when you're suffering from sadness (though this is very much a "breakup-game" if there was one), but that there's something distinct about the appeal that can really hit at certain points of life.

But IDK maybe I'm just projecting.

The first time I played this I had trouble remembering to eat, sleep, and go to the toilet. It's pure-bliss crack-cocaine energy of devise and optimise had me enthralled once I got in the swing of things. The drones were the coolest thing ever once I unlocked them. One day though, my base suffered from a power-failure due to an over-reliance on dwindling coal supplies as a fuel source in the mid-game, and my base was overrun with biters because I was using nothing but laser-turrets in my defenses.

Playing the game through from the beginning the second time wasn't quite the same, and hasn't been since. Developing new technologies was a lot of the enjoyment I got out of the game, and subsequent playthroughs feel quite repetitive. I can't really be bothered with mods in this particular game.

But I'm always open to coming back to it, and this game will always go down in history for me because of that first initial playthrough.

Also, the game just seems to be so nicely and efficiently made, I never witnessed any bugginess and I gotta respect that.

An excellent game that, in spite of what you may have been told by various online nerds and dorks, actually does allow you to not give a shit about optimising every facet of your dumb factory. I've played this game alone for hours on end, restarting at arbitrary points because I felt I wasn't being efficient enough – a sure-fire way to lose interest in a game. But right now I have a 20 hour long co-op game with two of my friends and our factory is a disgusting, entangled mess of railways and belts carrying god knows what and a fleet of drones that constantly scramble to repair the outer perimeter of our base, fending of a growing horde of critters. Our base is essentially an exercise in engineering nihilism that would have made me restart a thousand times over, had I been playing alone.

It's a great game when you remind yourself that you're not an engineer and you don't have to take a video game that seriously.

It was after spending 2 hours just messing around in the demo tutorial that I realize this game might be good.

If the premise of the games sounds like fun to you then this game is like crack.

I stopped playing simply for the fact if I knew came back to it it would be good week or two before picking up any other games