The Factorio Mindset

I&#x27;m literally playing Factorio right now, with my kid. Got into it over Christmas based on HN talking about it all the time. Good game to multi because I don&#x27;t have to pay attention all the time.<p>It really reminds me of software in many ways. You fiddle with tiny little things like balancing a belt, and then move on to building belt balancers. You then move up the abstractions to where you&#x27;re not really placing inserters all the time. Maybe you make some blueprints and you&#x27;re placing a whole set of nuke power plants in one go, or looking at trains.<p>The kid loves it, but you can (luckily) tell the difference between what he makes and what I make. That engineer keep-stuff-organized thing takes a bit of time to hone, but he&#x27;s getting there. He also understands how to find root causes now, based on looking at where there&#x27;s a blockage in production and tracking back along the chain.<p>One thing that&#x27;s interesting is that the game is a bit, you know, dark. I mean we&#x27;ve built hell and the kid doesn&#x27;t mind. Literally paved paradise with concrete. The air is black with robots, 100k of them at the moment. There&#x27;s furnaces all over the place. We got rid of the steam power generation but there are huge areas of nukes all over. The natives are getting atomic bombs thrown at them constantly, it takes a while to even get to the nearest spawner. Or water that isn&#x27;t green.<p>And yet he doesn&#x27;t ask about how we destroyed all the cliffs and filled in the lakes, and chopped the trees.<p>&quot;How should we make it bigger, dad?&quot;

My problem with games like Factorio (and more recently Oxygen no Included), is that after I get addicted and get up past 100 hours of gameplay I start to question what the hell I&#x27;m doing with my life. Up until that point it&#x27;s great fun designing, building, and optimizing, but then a switch in my head flips. I start to become anxious about the fact that I was excited about getting better at skills in a virtual world. Usually around this time I start watching videos of more advanced builds, and then become increasingly depressed about the idea of sinking 1000+ hours into a game, when I could just be building something in the real world, or out riding my bike. This is usually the time I put the game down and never play it again.<p>I think the problem for me is that these games give me the illusion of learning, building, and accomplishing things, which my little engineer brain loves. But once I come out of the haze of addiction, I realize it&#x27;s nothing more than an illusion, and I just stomach going on.

I have over 5000 hours in Factorio. I am part of a group where several of us are over 5000 hours. Some of us have Autism. Some of us have ADHD. Some of us have both. The majority of us are in the tech industry.<p>The companies we work at have been made to understand that the factory must grow.

&gt; I used to be of the opinion that the computer game Factorio was a colossal waste of talent, burning many billions of dollars of GDP every year.... But since trying it out a bit more I’m starting to suspect that Factorio is the rare computer game to actually increase GDP.<p>Hell of an opener that just makes me immediately dislike this guys entire worldview.<p>Kinda also backed up by the fact that he doesn&#x27;t mention the very unsubtle commentary of you basically strip mining an alien planet clean mutating the wild life into a homicidal frenzy in desperate attempt to stop you from killing their home with pollution.

My friend has 600+ hours played of Factorio.<p>He just beat the game for the first time. I bought it, we played multiplayer. And I taught him the mantra &quot;great is the enemy of good enough&quot;. Our run took 14 hours.<p>I also know many people like this at work, and wish they could have the Factorio experience.<p>If you refactor at the first sign of trouble, you remain blind to totally new to problems just around the corner.

Going to give a shoutout to<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;anuke.itch.io&#x2F;mindustry" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;anuke.itch.io&#x2F;mindustry</a><p>and<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;songsofsyx.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;songsofsyx.com&#x2F;</a><p>In particular, mindustry can actually run scripts within the game to automate a lot of things. If you like factorio you&#x27;re going to like these 2 games.

I often encounter this issue when it comes to programming-like games. I’m wondering if I should adjust my thinking here.<p>1) Hmm, this game is a lot like programming. A lot like it.<p>2) Maybe I should just program? That is real work &amp; I can get done more work done, be more productive.<p>3) [stopped game, started programming]

&gt; I used to be of the opinion that the computer game Factorio was a colossal waste of talent, burning many billions of dollars of GDP every year.<p>I dunno if the author is joking or not, but I heard this argument over and over. Am I in the minority to think that it&#x27;s totally insane that everything should revolve around raising the GDP?<p>I feel smart people working at Facebook or Google working hard at finding new ways to serve more ads to more people is the huge waste of talent.

I&#x27;m consciously avoiding Factorio because I know what it would do to me. It already took one of our team members.<p>As for automation: I&#x27;m surprised that scaling is presented as the main - or actually only - reason for automating. I for one don&#x27;t automate for speed, I automate for <i>correctness</i>.<p>The other day we discovered that some of the tens-of-megabytes JSONs we&#x27;re reading on a regular basis have an error: single-element arrays were replaced by that element, so e.g. `[1]` would become just `1`. That was okay for the parser on the receiving end, but not for the recently introduced more efficient serializing module.<p>I could just go over those files and search all such occurrences by comparing them to the reference type definition - would take less than an hour provided I didn&#x27;t make any mistakes. But I&#x27;m only human, so I opted for something else, namely: drawing from the pile of rich manure that is the npm repository and finding modules for:<p>1. Generating JSON schemas from TypeScript type definitions.<p>2. Validating JSON files against JSON schemas.<p>Armed with these tools I modified the files until the validator confirmed full correctness. Took longer than expected, but now not only can I guarantee that these files are error free, but any future ones as well.

I think game like Factorio shows that level of automation is kind of quantized.<p>First there is no automation, then one resource is automated but others are not, then several are automatized, but combining them is not. There are gaps where building the next thing doesn&#x27;t make sense even if it makes sense when you have little bit more resources.<p>I think this is true in business as well. It&#x27;s hard to tell when you have crossed the threshold where building the next level makes sense.<p>You tend to use a lot of time and money to build the next level of automation and only then you can measure if it was worth it or not.

Shopify allowing Factorio to be expensed is really interesting.<p>Someone higher up must really like it?

In theory, finding the ‘Factorio’ aspect of production just-enough management in other games is easy; Big Pharma is a lovely example of this. But instead, I want to talk about Stardew Valley, and the psychological effects of scaling up production.<p>There is a very popular player mod for Stardew that allows automation of all “click to perform” actions normally operated by the player: Harvest fruit from a tree, Brew honey into mead, Cook wood into coal, Age mead in cask, and so on. Essentially, it introduces the conveyor systems of any production game — Verb Noun With Machine — and uses footpaths as the invisible conveyer belts. It is possible, with careful pathing, to build a farm that is automated from harvest to sale, and generates an endless supply of any product with minimum downtime.<p>I found that when I applied this approach to Stardew, it was really fun making it work, and once I had it all working, there just wasn’t anything left to enjoy. Not because the game doesn’t have a near-infinite list of things you can produce (especially with mods), but because it turns out that the joy I derived from Stardew is about doing things myself. And so my intricately-pathed full scale production farm sits unopened.<p>I point this out because in tech we often forget that capacity and automation can, in some cases, be inversely proportional to enjoyment. I could apply a photo editing ML algorithm to my photo library and no doubt it would be nice, but I enjoy the act of taking a photo and fiddling with it, even if I send exponentially fewer photos to my friends. One of them has a complex multi-device “ingestion pipeline” and it treats them well for their purposes, and I’ve built one before, and it turns out I just don’t enjoy digital photography at that scale.<p>I love playing games <i>like</i> Factorio (though I haven’t gotten much into it yet) for their own sake, and I don’t deny that it’s possible to enjoy the art of scaling and automating these things, and that others feel differently. But my experience with Stardew pipelines was a really useful lessons in learning what I enjoy and when I enjoy it, and when that means I shouldn’t scale it up any further.

Factorio is my favourite game of all time by a country mile. The thing that is so amazing to me is when you first play it and suddenly you realise that what you thought was the goal of the game (to launch the rocket) is literally completely irrelevant and the goal has at some point just become &quot;to play more factorio&quot;.<p>The factory doesn&#x27;t have to grow to feed the rocket. The factory must grow because it must grow. And you&#x27;re there to make it grow.<p>Then pretty soon you&#x27;ve launched hundreds of rockets and you&#x27;re still thinking &quot;if I can just get my trains working a bit better, remove <i>this</i> bottleneck then I can expand over <i>there</i>...&quot;

Gah, this happened to me literally yesterday, where I started a new Factorio map and had to close it after like an hour because I knew a) how much time I&#x27;d be able to sink into the game and b) how similar it was to my day job, which means I could just do my day job and feel 90% of the satisfaction while also earning money doing it.<p>Rarely does an article online hit me as directly as this one does, good work.

I own a copy of Factorio, yet I never play it. Whenever I think about playing Factorio, I think what I really want to do is emulate biology, not industrial machinery. I want a game that lets me alter genomes slightly and try out several branches to see which ones are better for the world I&#x27;m trying to create. I want to fast forward through time so that evolution can run its course, then if I don&#x27;t like the outcome, I want to be able to go back and try something else. I also want to be able to share evolutionary steps as code (in text form, not graphical!) with a community. The steps should be expressed in a functional language. Effectively, I want my quasi-biological world to take on a life of its own and I want to be able to run reversible experiments on both my worlds and other people&#x27;s worlds.<p>That&#x27;s probably too much to ask. :-)

If you want to add more of the human dynamic to resource management and refactoring, I suggest FrostPunk. While Factorio feels more like managing and scaling code, FrostPunk feels like running a startup. It&#x27;s rewarding, but very stressful.<p>0. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;store.steampowered.com&#x2F;app&#x2F;323190&#x2F;Frostpunk&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;store.steampowered.com&#x2F;app&#x2F;323190&#x2F;Frostpunk&#x2F;</a>

&quot;Step 3<p>Rip up large fractions of the setup and lay them out again with more straight lines and sensibility&quot;<p>Newb.<p>You don&#x27;t rip the first spaghetti base up and rebuild, that&#x27;s a waste of time.<p>The first base only exists to get you to the point where you can build a main belt line and then make everything nice and straight and coherent.<p>The old base just sits abandoned, until the new belt line eventually encroachs, and then you just unceremoniously raze it.

I just don&#x27;t get this. I feel like people back port their learning experiences to games that have a similar enough structure. A nice observation, but you can&#x27;t go in the reverse direction by playing Factorio to learn something tangible. Factorio doesn&#x27;t have the same failure granularity as the real world and so the usefulness of the analogy&#x2F;mindset just doesn&#x27;t do it for me.<p>Plus my skill can be replaced by roughly how well I can memorize other peoples&#x27; factory patterns.<p>Don&#x27;t get me wrong though, it&#x27;s a great game, and probably had the same impact for its genre as Doom had for FPS games.

Recently discovered Satisfactory. It&#x27;s roughly GTA2 vs GTA3 when compared to Factorio (2d top down vs 3d open world). I&#x27;d love to hear peoples thoughts on the two games and what one does well vs the other. What people get out of either.

From the footnote: &gt; In CS terms, expanding a poorly-specced and unmaintainable Factorio base is O(log(n)) while expanding a perfectly specced one is O(n), but the coefficient on the first is massively higher.<p>Shouldn&#x27;t this be the other way around? Speccing out requires higher upfront effort, meaning a higher coefficient, but ultimately results in better long term results in overall required effort, for an O(log(n)) graph.

Factorio is an SRE game if there ever was one. It comes with graphs and dashboards. You can create audible alerts. The QPS (errr, biters) <i>will</i> come and the factory better be ready. Success failure is a thing.

Dyson Sphere Program is a similar type of game, with prettier graphics.

I love Factorio!<p>If you&#x27;ve completed enough of the base game, I can recommend Seablock (which includes AngelBob) and Space Exploration as two mods that make the game dramatically larger. I played some of Pyanodon (which is also sometimes mentioned as a big mod) but I found it kind of gratuitously complex.

I feel compelled to repost a comment of mine from the simutrans thread:<p>—<p>So, this is totally pop-evolutionary-psychology, but I think the relevant predisposition is towards hoarding. For 100,000 generations, humans (and our ancestors before then) have had to gather and store food and other supplies to see them through the winter (or other hard times). We are wired to do this because we would have died out if we didn’t.<p>Building games let you build up your hoard of stuff (whether trains, rails, buildings, tiberium silos, green circuits, …) in a tight feedback loop that repeatedly triggers the “this is my stuff, now I am safe” dopamine response.<p>This also explains collecting hobbies, and goes some way towards explaining the desire for wealth acquisition in general.

I famously only play video games that increase GDP.

One of my top gaming moments ever was launching the rocket in under 6 hours. I launched it at 5:59:40. Then I realized the &quot;There is no spoon&quot; achievement was for 7 hours (and it&#x27;s now 8 hours after 1.0 launch).<p>Love this game.

I love programming and I hate games like Factorio where you&#x27;re (to a degree) doing the same thing with logical thinking and optimization etc.pp. (I like games and I like puzzles, but this feels like work to me, in a language I hate, with an IDE I hate and with no undo).<p>At least this article doesn&#x27;t tell me I will love this and I should play it, unlike all the others. So thumbs up for the article :P

Please please try Satisfactory. It&#x27;s a beautiful, 3D equivalent. Holds a coveted Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam.

I think that a Factorio style interface for datacenter layout would be great. Saastorio.<p>Layout your process and point it at your cloud service(s). Monitoring built in.

To anyone bored with vanilla Factorio, I&#x27;d strongly recommend trying out some of its hundreds of mods.<p>As much as I love vanilla Factorio, mods make it 10x better for me, and solve all sorts of little complaints and annoyances in the vanilla game.<p>If there&#x27;s something in the vanilla game you don&#x27;t like or want to improve, odds are there&#x27;s already a mod that fixes it for you.

I got addicted to Dyson Sphere Program... already clocked in 100s of hours, pretty much embarrassed to admit how much I play the game.<p>Restarted it few times to apply what I learned. It is still early in the game, they keep adding things but that thing is really amazing and provided fun to me that I didn&#x27;t feel in the game for a long time.

&gt; I used to be of the opinion that the computer game Factorio was a colossal waste of talent, burning many billions of dollars of GDP every year.<p>Oh no, the GDP!<p>I appreciate most of the rest of the article, but the premise that it&#x27;s value is tied to it&#x27;s ability to influence one economic metric is a very flawed lens to view the world through.

I really like builder games (Anno series) but haven&#x27;t picked up factorio due to concerns of time sink.<p>Instead tinkering more with self-hosting stuff lately. I find it scratches the same itch - building &#x2F; optimisation &#x2F; problem solving vibe but has a slightly more tangible enduring value (something useful + learning)

Anyone else really want to get into Factorio, but an hour into it realised it just felt like work and quit?

Personally I feel like Factorio reveals a principle I also see at my day job. Automation is exhausting. ;-)

I think a missing factor here that hasn&#x27;t really been brought up is Teambuilding. Factorio lends itself to multiplayer very well, and a team working together to solve problems that are not dissimilar to the coding projects they have at work can be easily worth $20.

I love Factorio. One of my top 10 best games ever. I am currently playing Satisfactory as well. It is equally good and share a lot of things with Factorio but also has a nice exploratory feel to it.

This person sounds absolutely insane going on about GDP lost to people enjoying themselves. That said Factorio is much more psychopathic than GTA has ever been

So, what about Dwarf Fortress? (Would anyone recommend Factorio over Dwarf Fortress?)

&quot;How Much Are Games Like Factorio And EVE Online Sapping Away The Intellectual Potential Of Humanity?&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;slatestarcodex&#x2F;comments&#x2F;ml00ac&#x2F;how_much_are_games_like_factorio_and_eve_online&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;slatestarcodex&#x2F;comments&#x2F;ml00ac&#x2F;how_...</a><p>&gt;I often wonder if these specific types of games are redirecting a nontrivial amount of human intellectual output into a deadend. They&#x27;re explicitly geared to lure in the kind of obsessive tinkerer types who&#x27;ve historically driven scientific and engineering progress. Only now, there&#x27;s little to no payoff for the rest of humanity if they spend thousands of hours consumed by one of these games. What&#x27;s Newton&#x27;s modern equivalent doing right now? Probably perfecting a build order in Stellaris.

&gt; (it should probably be renamed &quot;Refactorio&quot;)<p>great observation :)

Satisfactory is a less frustrating version of Factorio.

Every once in a while on the HN front page you get some article about a programming analogy or an entrepreneurship analogy.<p>&quot;Here&#x27;s why the game factorio is like programming or here&#x27;s why it&#x27;s like life. yada yada yada&quot;<p>Yeah, AND this guy takes the next step and turns the analogy into a &quot;mindset.&quot;<p>Great. Revolutionary. First off.. analogy is amazing. Second... turning that analogy into a way of life blows my mind. Is your mind blown too? This guy is a genius.<p>The next step, (and I&#x27;ve seen plenty of this on HN), is to turn that analogy into a full blown &quot;theory&quot; of some sort... complete with diagrams.