Factorio Future Plans

I love this team and their game and have ~1k hours in it. But I hope they soon choose to do a whole new game. Incremental improvements to their masterpiece is a suboptimal use of their talents. Just a few more bulbs in an already brilliant room. A fresh start would be a bigger risk but for a possibly bigger payoff for us.<p>I&#x27;d love to see their take on something like Universal Paperclips or Dyson Sphere. So many homages have been built to Factorio; they could return the favor.

These are fun &quot;metrics&quot;:<p>2.7 → 0.42 → 0.34 lines of code per one buyer<p>0 → 2.3 → 4.4 years of playtime per resolved bug report<p>0 → 4 → 8 months of Steam playtime per one commit<p>0 → 9.1 → 37 days of Steam play for each line of code

Factorio is my number one favourite game ever, and a large part of that is because of how open kovarex and the rest of the team has been during the whole development cycle, with the weekly development blogs etc. I&#x27;ve been a player for many years, and watching Factorio grow and get better over time has been very inspiring!

Part of me is happy about their decision to make an expansion because my friends and I can return to this amazing game in a year and enjoy a fresh experience.<p>But I would have liked to see what else this amazing team could have done. Like maybe a city building simulation game, optimized as well as Factorio? Would have been amazing for sure.

I think one of the best parts of this game are some of the unique multiplayer mods that exist. If development was to focus on creating some really fun and polished multiplayer mods that would attract 50+ people continuously to each game, I&#x27;d happily pay a monthly&#x2F;annual subscription. It&#x27;s a shame though that typical multiplayer numbers are fairly low in the order of 20-40 players in each of the top 2 games, then 10-20 games averaging 5 players, and hundreds of empty games. I wonder what it could be like with a multiplayer tower defence style game with 100+ players, or with 5-10 innovative and fun multiplayer game types all filled with enough players to make each game viable?<p>There are plenty of mods in this game that increase the number of resources, buildings, technologies, etc by a factor of 5 or more and I personally find this is far too complex and takes the fun out of the game and makes it too repetitive and clinical. Fragmenting the small-ish user community between &quot;base game&quot; and &quot;DLC game&quot; would possibly make the multiplayer experience non-existent due to low player numbers.

I&#x27;d really enjoy some kind of campaign expansion, a connected series of missions with specific goals and constraints. One of the tutorials, where you need to rebuild a half destroyed base (with satellite mining bases) aiming to produce a certain number of materials as the goal, is a nice example of what a campaign mission could be.<p>I suspect they&#x27;ll go off in a different direction, Factorio is more of a pure sandbox make your own fun kind of game but I think you could do some fun campaign stuff.

I have 2500+ hours in Factorio. I loved it. Love to read this.<p>My 6+ year old computer can&#x27;t handle the enormous factory complexes I like to build.<p>Now I have switched over to my next hard drug addiction:<p>-&gt; Mindustry. &lt;- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;anuke.itch.io&#x2F;mindustry" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;anuke.itch.io&#x2F;mindustry</a><p>Factorio + tower defence: it&#x27;s awesome and runs on a potato.

Just a helpful note for those that saw they want programmers:<p>You must be hire-able in EU, because they can&#x27;t afford to sponsor people.<p>Sadly this doesn&#x27;t include me :(

One thing that I would really like to see is a sort of hybrid between Factorio and a colony type game. Imagine that instead of crash landing by yourself, you crash land with an entire group of people that you have to protect and provide for while you bootstrap yourself up to getting everybody off planet. For those who don&#x27;t like biters, it can provide another means of making pollution matter. For those who do, it adds another interesting complication.<p>Along with that, I&#x27;d like to see more green energy. Wind power, for instance, could be an early game technology that competes with boilers. Naturally it would need to cost more and &#x2F; or produce less. Perhaps also geothermal power that must be generated at a particular location.<p>Of course, more could be done with water. Boats, offshore resources, aquatic biters? Depletion of water resources so you don&#x27;t have a one tile pond cooling 4 nuclear reactors? Or making the water less useful the more polluted it is.<p>So many possibilities.

As someone who doesn&#x27;t code all day any longer, factorio really tickles that part of my brain.<p>Every problem that needs to be overcome, every obstacle in the path, every idiotic decision I curse is something I did previously just to get things working. Then I run out of space. Or I need to pipe water in. Or a factory is outputting to the left when outputting to the right would be a better decision .... hmm ... do I move 200 componenets or just ... slap a train station in? Or 1,000 belts? ARGH! I&#x27;ve done it again!

They should make a straight-up visual Lua programming interface within Factorio. Lua&#x2F;JSON objects on conveyor belts, buildings and factories with mathematical, logical, and procedural functions. Open up a building and read and reprogram its Lua scripts! And libraries of buildings for different kinds of programming tasks, including programming drones, web services, image and signal processing (audio and video frames along the conveyor belts), scripting Factorio&#x27;s simulator and user interface, orchestrating scenarios and simulations, and programming Factorio extensions themselves!<p>Robot Odyssey re-imagined in Factorio!<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Robot_Odyssey" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Robot_Odyssey</a>

I know a lot of people who enjoy this game, and I am trying to get into it at the moment. I played a couple of hours earlier this week, and this is my review:<p>The premise of the game is excellent. You have crashlanded on a remote planet and have to start from nothing, acquire resources, build tools, build machines, automate the acquisition of resources, etc., until you have developed enough technology that you can build a spaceship and flee the planet. Wow.<p>There are 2 things I don&#x27;t like.<p>Firstly, I don&#x27;t like the &quot;biters&quot; that come and destroy your base. I don&#x27;t really think this adds to the game in any way. It feels like it was added to the game to make it appeal to the &quot;gamer&quot; demographic rather than the &quot;programmer&quot; demographic. If I&#x27;m working away on one corner of my base trying to solve automation problems, I don&#x27;t want to have to run away and piss about shooting some pointless biters who are trying to destroy my stuff. I know the answer is &quot;that&#x27;s an automation problem too! build turrets!&quot;. But I just want to calmly play the game at my own pace, I don&#x27;t want to have to be attending to urgent biter problems.<p>I stopped playing the other day after biters destroyed a load of my stuff and I no longer felt invested in the game. That&#x27;s not fun for me. I want to play the game, but I don&#x27;t want my stuff getting destroyed if I do a subpar job of defending it.<p>Secondly, (and this is partly related to the biters, but not completely), I find the game surprisingly stressful. I think this comes from the interplay between short-term and long-term problems. I don&#x27;t know exactly what game mechanic causes it, but I think I would find it much more enjoyable if I could calmly work on problems without having to run around topping up coal and otherwise putting out non-automatable fires. Perhaps it&#x27;s just the visuals of loads of materials stacking up on conveyor belts and going to the wrong places, and the kind of visceral feeling that the problem is getting worse for every second that it&#x27;s not solved. I don&#x27;t know. I don&#x27;t find that relaxing.<p>I will have another go though. I love the concept, and I haven&#x27;t actually got to the end of the tutorial yet. I understand that when you start the proper game you can ask for &quot;peaceful&quot; mode which turns off biters, which sounds ideal for me.

OT: Anyone here played &quot;Dyson Sphere Program&quot;?<p>Is it good? How does it compare to Factorio?

Multiplanitary Factories would be awesome. And a way to build a Dyson Sphere ;)

Very happy with their plans. I got more than my moneys worth out of factorio and I&#x27;m happy to buy DLCs (if they&#x27;re not a scam of course, which given their track record I doubt they will be).<p>But DLCs fragment the community and thats bad. So I think a big expansion DLC is indeed the best course.

&gt; 38 870 years of combined playtime played on Steam<p>Wow, that&#x27;s some real impact, seems crazy to me.

My feeling about this (and a lot of the similar games: opus magnum, spacechem, etc), is mixed.<p>I like the idea of them, but I don&#x27;t actually enjoy <i>playing</i> them. They feel so much like programming that I generally just go and actually work on programming projects. That way I get the same problem solving challenge, and the end result is something I can actually use.<p>Why would I want to spend time solving made up problems when I can solve real problems in my hobby projects?<p>These days, the games I find myself enjoying are games with a interesting story, or that are mechanically fun to play (e.g. twin stick shooters and similar).

I am a big fan of Stellaris model - sizeable DLCs.<p>This supports development of the game and introduces new exciting staff for me as a player gradually at a fast enough pace (~every 6 months).

One thing I think would be a good addition to the existing gameplay would be adding RNG elements for more probabilistic &#x2F; emergent behaviour like equipment failures and ageing, natural disasters, statistical variance in the performance of individual units of same types, manufacturing defects, etc.<p>Also other things that reduce gami-ness; Gaminess kills immersion in my view.

Personally I think the factorio format would work great for developing biochemical systems into cells and then multicellular organisms. It’s all about the automation, and would teach biochemistry concepts simultaneously. That would be a good spinoff that I would play.

A good alternative if you’d rather Factorio was 3D is Satisfactory.

One thing I always love to do whenever this site is linked is click on the &quot;back to top&quot; rocket button at the bottom. Such an amazing little easter egg.

The game is ridiculously popular and has a fan base that has means. Release paid DLCs, or even an entirely new game but keep monetizing. Free updates forever seems silly.

Is this game multiplayer?

Playing Factorio requires starting out by performing a few tasks by hand, then thinking about how to incrementally automate factories with trains, drones, combinator circuits, and blueprints, with high level modular repeatable patterns. And estimating where the break-even point is between completing a few tasks by hand, and spending the time to automate more common tasks.<p>That evokes an article that Richard Potter wrote about &quot;Just-in-Time Programming&quot; in Alan Cypher&#x27;s classic book (which is now online for free), &quot;Watch What I Do: Programming by Demonstration&quot;, about when &quot;the user attempts to write a program for a task that is already in progress&quot;:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;acypher.com&#x2F;wwid" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;acypher.com&#x2F;wwid</a><p>Watch What I Do: Programming by Demonstration. Edited by Allen Cypher. Co-edited by Daniel C. Halbert, David Kurlander, Henry Lieberman, David Maulsby, Brad A. Myers, and Alan Turransky. 1993. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;acypher.com&#x2F;wwid&#x2F;Chapters&#x2F;27JITP.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;acypher.com&#x2F;wwid&#x2F;Chapters&#x2F;27JITP.html</a><p>Chapter 27: Just-in-Time Programming. Richard Potter.<p>Introduction<p>Many of the other chapters have presented advancements in programming by demonstration (PBD) by presenting PBD systems and their innovations. In other words, these chapters have presented solutions. This chapter takes another tack by discussing PBD in the context of a problem. The problem is to create a new type of programming system that overcomes the obstacles users encounter when they attempt to use present-day programming systems for just-in-time programming. This chapter defines just-in-time programming and identifies five of these obstacles: inaccessible data and operators, the effort of entering the algorithm, limited computational generality, effort of invoking the algorithm, and risk. Just-in-time programming motivates PBD research because PBD can potentially overcome several of these obstacles.<p>Just-in-time programming is the implementing of algorithms during task-time, the time when the user is actually trying to accomplish the task. It can be characterized by a situation with the following components:<p>- a computer user who could be either a novice user or an experienced programmer,<p>- a task that the user is manually accomplishing and completion of which is the user&#x27;s primary goal,<p>- a repetitive subtask[1] of the task that could potentially be automated, thereby making it easier for the user to complete the task,<p>- an algorithm that will accomplish the subtask and that the user envisioned while working on the task,<p>- and an attempt by the user to implement the algorithm for the purpose of more effectively completing the task.<p>In short, the goal of just-in-time programming is to allow users to profit from their task-time algorithmic insights by programming. Instead of automating with software that was carefully designed and implemented much earlier, the user recognizes an algorithm and then creates the software to take advantage of it just before it is needed, hence implementing it just in time.<p>[...]

Because it&#x27;s marketed as a &#x27;big expansion pack&#x27; and not a &#x27;dlc&#x27; they can price it at 20€ instead of 10€. Smart.