The factory must grow.
There are three video games that belong to a special category. They are games that I must heavily regulate and restrict to longer holidays because once I start playing, suddenly it’s 5 in the morning and then equally suddenly two weeks have gone past and I forgot to eat.
Factorio is one of those games. The other two are Stardew Valley and Balatro. They are way too addictive. I still sometimes play and enjoy them but I only do it when I’m very certain that it’s a worthy tradeoff putting life on pause for a long weekend or a week.
That’s how good and interesting game Factorio is.
Factorio is a 2020 factory simulator by Wube Software that drops you into a desolate foreign planet with a burner miner and a stone furnace and tells you: good luck, try to build a rocket to get out of the planet.
Everything else is up to you.
You start simple: you mine some iron and copper ore, and some coal and stone. Then you smelt those into iron and copper plates and use them to build more miners and more furnaces. Little by little, you research technologies that open up new opportunities: electricity, automation, weapons, trains and eventually, a space rocket.
The entire game is one continuous session. There are no built-in breaks in the game which makes it so difficult to stop playing. There’s kind of day/night cycle where it gets darker every now and then but that doesn’t really have a gameplay function.
On surface, this game looks like a fun survival automation game but under the hood, it’s a highly sophisticated system of mathematics, distributions, ratios and even programmable parts.
What it does brilliantly well is that it starts really smooth and simple. You can only do a couple of things. Then it teaches you the next thing and the next thing. As a player, you are always at the driver’s seat of the pace though. You research science to move forward and choose which new features you want to unlock next.
On the other side, it goes almost infinitely deep. You can optimise the hell out of everything if you want to. If you read Factorio related forums or search in Youtube (but do that after you’ve played a bunch because the joy of discovery and learning through playing is way more fun than copying someone else’s systems), you’ll see such incredible things people have built in this game.
/r/factorio subreddit is full of threads where people ask “am I too dumb for this game?” and that’s definitely something I feel often too. It’s a humbling game. But it’s kind in how it humbles you. It gives you all the keys and lets you experiment and learn and figure stuff out as you wish and doesn’t punish you from making mistakes or being imperfect.
There’s a fun cycle of building, learning, rebuilding, learning more, rebuilding and at every step ending up with something inefficient or some spaghetti as we call a messed up system that’s built with ad-hoc additions to solve a problem at hand rather than designing a base from top down (which is fun too).
And then you research robots.
Everything that was somewhat linear until now goes exponential. Suddenly you can build so much more so much faster and you’re challenged in yet another new way while still sticking to the same underlying mechanics.
There’s always something to do, something to improve, something to learn. Some people have put thousands of hours into the game and still enjoy it. That’s quite a good bang for buck.