From manual ore mining and smelting to fully automated space exploration, the way player agency interacts with Factorio's robust systems creates an understanding of progress as a force of nature. As the game locks the player in cycles upon cycles of expansion and recoil - as automation breeds pollution that breeds bitters that require military advances that require automation - progress emerges less out of a player's desire to try new things and more out of sheer economic necessity. The factory, a being whose will is defined by the game's ravenous and wonderful economy, slowly unravels throughout a playthrough, supplying the demands needed to keep the player constantly on the edge of their seat, as well as playing all the way through the night if they're not careful.

Seeing my pollution clouds grow as I slowly drain the entire planet of its resources makes me feel a deep dread. I took a flight a couple days after I had first finished researching logistic bots. The past weeks had been hotter than I remembered them being last year, and the last months much hotter than I remembered them being when I was a kid. I looked through the window as the plane took to the sky and I saw roads and houses and factories expanding far beyond the horizon. I think Factorio is incredibly good.

A great mechanical and thought provoking game. This game is the eptiome of what builder games should be. It knows what it wants and it serves it to you in a way that is digestable. However complex this game may seem, there is always going to be something that will lead you in the right direction. It does tike quite a lot of time, but it's not the type of game that requires a jobless grind in order to have fun. You can always go at your own pace in the freeroam, and other modes. Or take a relaxing crack at building a full system in the cheat mode. Overall a great game, not my favorite but definetly the best builder game I've ever played.

As far as factory games go this one is a best in genre. I've seen people playing it more than I have played it myself so when I finally sat down it was surprising how much the game expects you to figure out yourself without any guidance.

There is a certain fun to creating lines, optimising and organising the belts to connect things together as it exponentially grows, but I found the biter bugs to make the experience less fun as this constant eroding force that requires you to juggle the combat side of the game and makes building more tedious.

I think I lack the right type of autism to really sink my teeth into this one, or maybe it's knowing where the game ends up that I can see myself not really wanting to get invested. It's a creative idea taken to a high level, but maybe if gameplay was more puzzle focused with clear objectives I'd be more into it personally.

I should love this game.

It's one of the few things most people in my life agree on. That Factorio, the autism-feeding factory simulator, should appeal to me, the autist who loves factory games. I've been told this by like 40 separate people, myself and also my stepdad.

But, no. I've tried to give it a fair crack for like three years now, and it's just not landing.

The core is good. It's a factory game. You dig up coal/iron/copper (It's always coal, iron and copper...) to build machines that do things for you so you can do more things and get more resources to make more machines that do more things until eventually you've done the same amount of planning and logistics work that goes into a CIA's disruption of a small country's economy.

The issues arrive when it comes to anything outside the basic core.

For starters, there's the map generation. Factorio's early game is horrifically slow even on a 'good' start, to the point where there's a not-insignificant number of mods to skip it. On a 'bad' start, it's horrific.

A 'good' start in Factorio is one where your immediate needs (water, stone, wood, iron, coal, copper and oil) are arranged in such a way that you can slap a factory in the middle and effortlessly plug the resources into its veins. Even with this boon, there's still an absurd amount of mostly eventless walking and waiting around for conveyor belts to craft so you can get things plugged in.

A bad start, then, is one lacking this cohesion, and my god does the map generator love to shit them out. My recent run stalled because my factory needed more coal than my overrun deposits could extract, and the nearest deposit was on the other side of the available map.

I get that the point is that, at some point, you'll have access to bots and trains that make long distance logistics trivial, but it feels terrible to get there becauseeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee...

The research system is just awful. My god. My goodness gracious. On paper I don't entirely hate it, it's a good way to keep older resources in circulation without having to bog you down with junk recipes.

Except in practice, the science system is a bunch of junk recipes and the amount of automation/logistics needed to fully automate research scales up so harshly compared to every other part of the game. Ore extraction, power acquisition and distribution, ammo manufacturing, factory defense... These all scale up linearly, I have no issues with them.
Science, it feels, scales up exponentially. You need so much, to the point where regardless of progress my runs just utterly stall because I end up fixating on JUST science. It's so vital to progression that putting it off even until later just feels utterly non-negotiable. Much like how Cities: Skylines is more of a traffic sim than a city builder, this game feels like more of a server maintenance simulator than anything.

And lastly, the combat just sucks. I love the idea of having something to react to - and continually mourn its absence in Satisfactory - but the bugs just don't feel good. Sure, it's nice to make ammo factories to burn them down, but this entire third of the game just feels like it peaks obscenely fast. Even with various worldgen tweaks to make them more frustrating, it only takes a couple hours for them to downgrade to a nuisance and further fall.

Overall, it's just not clicking and I don't think it ever will. All the depth in the world isn't worth the frustrating bits, and while I'm thankful to Factorio for spawning the automation genre I also vastly prefer its imitators for not even bothering with the worst bits.

Here's hoping Foundry is good.

I'm about 25 hours in and already this is one of my favorite games ever. If you want a game where strategy is the most important part of the game, look no further.

In order to do things efficiently, there is an optimal solution, but doing what is optimal is not necessary to enjoy yourself. The solution you create can be unique to you and your base.

I love how the positioning of your assemblers, trains, turrets, inserters, conveyor belts etc. are so important. How much clarity there is visually, making it very easy to understand what is going wrong. How the pollution you create pisses off the wildlife. The creator(s) made it really easy not to sympathize with the environment, so don't take the lessons of this game to heart lol. Trees are always in your way, the creatures are ugly as fuck, and polluting the world is extremely fun.

Despite the theme of the game, the artstyle I think is phenomenal. Rimworld, Dwarf Fortress, and many other 2D Strategy games like Planescape Torment, Roller Coaster Tycoon, or Starcraft have nothing on this. Especially when you factor in mods like Space Exploration and Alien Biomes. Obviously there are better 2D artstyles but for games that focus on 2D isometric worlds with sort of level builder assets, this one takes the cake for me.

The 50 hour minimum playtime may seem daunting, but every second I play this game I feel like I'm making giant progress. When I compare that to other resource dependent games like Minecraft and Terraria, you can get shit done so fucking fast in this game.

The only hiccup of factorio is also a strength. It is complicated, there is a learning curve for each and every mechanic. It's a lot like Terraria but with less of an emphasis on combat and more of an emphasis on automation. Yeah you can automate things in Terraria like enemy farms for example, but it's not really necessary unless you are looking for a rare item. It is 100% necessary to automate and think about scalability in Factorio.

I hate Terraria rare items. RNG is gross, ewe yucky no. As far as I can tell, this game is largely about your skill. Yes there are luck elements like getting a good world seed and apparently there is a quality feature for things being produced, but those are minor luck factors. You don't need luck if you know what you're doing. Luck in my mind is bullshit to prolong the playtime of a game.

If you know what you're doing, you can also play with other people and teach them how to play which is amazing because there's a lot to teach.

The other thing that really sets this game over the edge is in comparison to Terraria, each mechanic is distinct from one another and I can't really say Terraria is like that. Terraria kind of sticks to a formula that makes it monotonous or tiring. That is not the case here.

Every challenge I have faced is completely do-able and fair vanilla, no mods. There has very clearly been a lot of effort put into Quality of Life features. And then turns out mods are built into the game even though you don't need them, based and red pilled.

It is no wonder this is a game loved by engineers. Engineering is oftentimes convoluted and confusing, and once you get a grasp on one part of the picture, 10 more confusing logistics arise. In real life there is always more work to be done and always something you should understand when you don't. Unlike real engineering, this game ends and it is possible for you to have a complete grasp on every facet of this game. To me, that is what makes it appealing. It feels just as complicated as real engineering without being an infinite chasm.

EDIT:
I do NOT endorse playing this game with overhaul mods before you complete the base game. Terrible idea, don't do it. I have 225 hours in the game now, and I haven't completed the base game after starting a space exploration and then krastorio 2 play through on my own. This game already has enough complexity in the base game to make you satisfied. All the overhaul mods do is add unnecessary playtime, all I really learned from doing the overhaul mods is how to make sushi belts. https://youtu.be/dCqpkF3xx0U?si=uFTK29OaU21tfIpm

The problem with making this game too complicated is your builds need to be bulletproof. No bad building practices can exist when you start the overhaul mods. Otherwise you'll be doing some dumb shit that takes forever.

The worst thing you can do playing this game is make too much of a resource just to play it safe for the future, or ponder over the smallest efficiency at low volume, then realize that you didn't need to do any of that for the late game and regretting how you spent your time.