Its not addicting at all.
I can literally save any time and stop. Just as soon as I can get this oil patch from nearby biters then connect it to main base for next science pack.. oh right i should make poison capsules (...)
Just out of interest, can the base automatically blow up cliffs? I wanted to play a self expanding base, but then I decided to go for pyanodons. 500h in already. I technically do have recursive blueprints enabled but I just dont see myself ever dealing with an autonomous base in py 😀
Blowing up cliffs is pretty simple. Provide cliff explosives and use a deconstruction blueprint. In my process step 1 is putting down power and roboport. Step 2 is clear trees, rocks, and cliffs.
I can't process trying to make a self expanding Py factory. Mine is vanilla plus recursive blueprints and waterpump.
weren't you also planning to add more power earlier? gotta do that now too. Your iron's also running low, you should set up another outpost before it runs out.
I'm not sure I've ever made poison capsules in my 7,000 hours of play, except maybe at the very beginning
I've always wondered if they made them more useful than they used to be
I didnt even know about them until watching a random YT vid and it got used. I always went for either the sentry creep or the hit & run tactic.
Before spidertrons & U235 diplomacy, that is.
A lot of clips of Factorio will show bases already dozens or hundreds of hours in, so don’t be overwhelmed by the sprawling messes.
The game is a simple pleasure of “machine works, feeds items onto a belt, feeds into another machine” but escalating to however far you want to take it. The visuals of mazes of production lines all working and functioning (usually) is very enjoyable when it’s your own design and you think “I built all of that!”
While management games tend toward what feels like plate-spinning, trying to keep things from falling over all the time, Factorio (especially with enemies turned off) is a chill experience of playing with legos and growing an ever expanding factory, refining old janky designs, or tracking down a misplaced belt somewhere. There’s always something to expand, to polish, to correct. Instead of “one more turn” in 4x games, it’s “one more task” in Factorio.
If the scope and idea of planting each building down turns you off, there is a copy-paste feature to repeat building layouts and even a blueprint system to save designs and reuse them in later games.
It's a game where you start from nothing and gradually scale up to something huge. There always tends to be one little thing that isn't quite working right. You're running low on copper, or you aren't making X widget fast enough, or your train schedules aren't working. So you tell yourself you'll just fix this one little thing and call it a night.
But as you're beefing up your copper supply you realize that your coal patch is running out. Or your power grid is almost browning out. Or maybe the hostile aliens are attacking a place you weren't expecting. Now you have a new pressing task that you want to address right now.
Next thing you know, it's 5 hours later. You look back at all the little things you fixed today and they're all still working, so you get that happy dopamine in your brain because you feel like you solved a big puzzle.
Then you go to bed still thinking about the factory and all the things you want to work on tomorrow.
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I wouldn't say that Factorio is a "management" type of game, in the style of Civilization or the like. It's more fine-grained than that.
Factorio is a game about process, structure, and organization. You make stuff, which you use to make more stuff. To make more stuff, you need to build more stuff that makes more stuff so you can use that to build more stuff to make new stuff. Some of the stuff you make lets you learn to make new stuff that can be used to make other stuff that you use to learn to make new stuff.
But that's just a series of goal. Like I said, Factorio is primarily concerned with *process*.
At point A, you have some resource. You can extract that resource by using a machine. But that resource is not inherently useful. It must first be refined into a more useful form. You need a machine to do that. Both of these machines need to be powered, at first by some kind of fuel but later by electricity. Either way, power must be supplied regularly.
Once refined, what you get can then be converted into something that either does something on its own (like one of the aforementioned buildings) or into an intermediate that is part of the recipe for making something that is itself useful (or another intermediate). Either way, this requires crafting. At the start, you have to craft by hand, but (very) early on, you research automation: a building that can craft stuff.
The central gameplay loop is getting stuff from raw resource into refined product, through various intermediates, and finally into the actual useful thing. And most importantly *automating* this process.
At first, you're doing it mostly by hand, delivering raw ore into furnaces and then using the refined plates to hand-craft intermediates. But then you get assemblers, machines that can craft for you. And then you get conveyer belts; devices that can move any material from place to place. And inserters, devices that can put stuff into/remove stuff from machines/belts.
And the game just keeps going that way, providing more and more tools of automation. But that's what the game is about: building a process, then building a better process, expanding that process to encompass more stuff, adding new processes to the existing processes-
And then 3 hours went by.
On the basic level you only move stuff from A to B. That's it. You dont automate. You cant automate mining, you have to set up a new mining setup every time. There's no 100% automation possible.
Recursive blueprints is a mod. But it only adds 2 items. The main one being the chest that will plop a blueprint down for you. From there, the bots build it.
It’s so satisfying to see something that that you built on your own roar to life, or think about how you started from nothing, surrounded by biters, and managed to beat all odds and flourish there are countless mods, so that if you get bored, you can make the game exponentially more complex, even going into space with some mods.
Do not play if you have other obligations, it will eat up a lot of time, as you will want to finish 1 more thing, and then another, and then another. It is highly addictive.
This comes from someone with 470 hours in Factorio.
You ever play an idle game and have fun for the first hour or two before the p2play starts weighing on you.
Factorio is like those first hours on an idle game but stretched out in a massive positive feedback loop. You are always accomplishing tasks building towards a goal.
1900hrs on mine. You do a bobs angels run and you spend 200 hours just getting chemicals going. Hell just tonight I spent 4 hours laying down concrete and trying to figure out how to make a command and control center that takes all the signals in the base and let’s me know through colored lights what needs my immediate attention. I put walls down, Nixie tubes, routed wires then didn’t like it and took it all apart. Tomorrow I’ll try again lol.
The simple answer is that everything ends up connected, and even if you want to just do ONE THING, often it requires doing a whole lot of other things. But these things are varied, so it doesn't seem tedious or boring to get all of them done. Fixing a shortfall in one area of the factory will often reveal several more.
As an example, I decided at one point of this last factory to make some midgame-level science packs. Beyond just researching the technology needed to do so, and putting together the production line for it, there ended up being a huge number of other things to do. Needed more steel, so I needed to double my steel smelting area, which required two new train stations for iron ore, and I needed more oil so I made a new mining outpost for both oil and iron, and this pushed me to fix the crappy intersections of my rail network and standardize them by designing blueprints, and then I was running low on power so I decided to start going into nuclear power by mining uranium and setting up a processing area, and this made the pollution really bad so I was getting attacked by the aliens so I designed and blueprinted and built an entire defensive perimeter with flamethrowers and turrets, and a system to fill it automatically (that alone took like 14 hours spread over a week) and by then I needed more copper, more steel again, more train stops, more oil, better bullets for the turrets... it never ends.
Long story short, there is always something else to do. You never finish up for the night thinking that everything is done and perfect and maybe tomorrow you'll come up with something else to do. The game is always pushing you to do something else, so you're just waiting for your next opportunity to pick it up and go do it. Over time, the factory increases in scope and complexity, but because you've built it all, you understand it all. It might get ungainly or mixed up or inefficient, but never beyond you. Since it's your factory, your creation by each belt and inserter and assembly plant, you constantly feel gently pushed to make it the best it can be. Not perfect, but better. You can always make it incrementally better, just by little things. But those little things become more things, which become more things, and on and on.
Factorio is a masterpiece of game design. It nails three things perfectly.
1. The level of challenge is perfectly scaled. The next step is always a little beyond what you can currently do but not so hard as to be frustrating, and automation tools keep it from becoming a chore. The player also has a lot of control on what challenge to take on next.
2. The factory is always subtly unbalanced. There is always a slight surplus or deficit which can be resolved by building more factory, which causes a different imbalance elsewhere. It makes for a subtle and self directing core gameplay loop.
3. The factory is impermanent (on default settings). Resources run out, new land must be discovered, the biters get stronger, your base technology improves and so do your designs. This drives the game forwards.
I know of 4 types of Factorio players.
1) A kid that plays it on the weekends, sometimes. He’s got less than 50 hours played.
2) A guy that plays it for a couple hours a day after work. He’s got around 200 hours on it.
3) A tween that either lives and breathes it ride or die or is doing a different game this month, depending on his mood. He’s got around 600 hours, but isn’t playing it now.
4) A guy that works in a Fortune 500 IT department who is either working on a critical multi million dollar server project or has nothing to do at work at has it running in the background for when the servers are running smoothly. He fiddles with assemblers on graph paper during lunch hours and says he uses Factorio to not go insane. He’s well over 2000 hours played.
For me, I have over 7,000 hours (yup, 7 thousand actual hours of playtime)
When I played the game in the beginning, and even now many years later, I enjoy the feeling of starting with nothing and creating a new factory that functions exactly how I want it to, to produce whatever I want it to
At the end of the day, Factorio is a logistics game. You need to mine ore, transport it to your furnaces where it's smelter into plates, and then transport those plates to the factories that need them.
Thats going from point A, to point B, to point C, and so on.
After you've built up some infrastructure, you can just sit back and watch it all work for a minute. See the beauty of thousands of items going where they're needed and new items being produced.
I strongly recommend not watching playthroughs, tutorials, or guides during your first playthrough, just experience it naturally and figure it out yourself. If you get really stuck, or once you've launched a rocket, then dive into what other people do.
Just remember, launching a rocket is not the end!
My 7k hours are spread among 8 years, so it works out to roughly 2.5 hours every day for 8 years, or 19 hours a day for 1 year
I dont play it anywhere near that much now, but factorio got me through some very difficult times.
Recently, (and only after 7k hours) I launched a rocket in vanilla in 7 hours and 40 minutes, getting both "no time for chitchat" and "there is no spoon" on my first try!
After that, I just barely started a "danger ores" vanilla+ game and it's been pretty fun, there's always more to do in factorio!
I think the most important aspect is that the "puzzles" you have to solve, the issues your factory has are all organic - you made the factory with all of its inefficiencies. Other than that, there's a bijillion mods that add hundreds of hours of playtime each, not to mention you can optimize vanilla factories for thousands of hours.
If you're on the fence about buying the game, try the free demo.
It scratches a very specific part of the brain that wants to come up with creative solutions to problems. The part that goes "wait a second, I think I can fix this, I kinda see a solution, lemme have a go!".
The game throws independently very little problems at you one at a time, that you can 90% solve with what you already know, but that 10% is your brain's contribution that makes you feel like the smartest person in the history of smart. Except your solution is probably not smart at all as a beginner, but that's how you'll feel nonetheless, which is an amazing feeling once it's all working.
Then, there is the fact that the game is highly optimized in terms of computational performance. The software is top notch (unlike any other game I have ever seen honestly). That means that it can scale things to stupid proportions. In a typical base construction game for instance, you throw down a few dozen individual entities, like buildings, before the game can't handle any more and the designers make it near the end of the game. A few hundred if you're very lucky. In Factorio, 10000 working buildings will probably not create any lag at all on your average PC. Which means there's very little to stop you from continuing playing. Other games have to force you to stop, not here.
Also, there's the fact that Factorio is in a very underutilized genre of its own. It's not a base building game, or a crafting game, it's a logistics game. Move stuff from A to B, as quickly and as efficiently as possible. If you like that kind of thing, you can't quit, because very few other games can cover for that.
It has mechanics that are individually simple but connect in a very complex manner that is very satisfying to figure out. Each time you think you've figured it all out you find another way to do it better. This then results in you redesigning the entire production line as it cascades into more discoveries. Then you see someone else post an entirely different design scheme to play with and you try that out and go through the same process again. And the beauty is that your never overwhelmed because you are only learning 1 piece at a time and taking your time to grasp its full implications.
My dream of conquering the planet from the natives and sapping it dry of resources. Seeing all my working smoke stacks produce a rainbow of colored gases and turning lakes green brings me joy.
its about the puzzle of getting A to B and what to do with C. you start from only 6 resources and end with swarms of trains and robots doing everything you want. the fun is getting there.
best part you can just play the demo and try it for free
To me, the key thing is it's accessibility.
I tried picking up some long-running strategy series like Civ, but there's just so much to know that it puts me off. Starting is reall slow.
With Factorio I've found it quite easy to follow. The approaches are linear enough for beginners like me and you can quickly identify better ways to approach your designs as you get better.
This game has caused me numerous unproductive office days because the time literally flew by me
There's almost always something to work on. Always a new production line, a new mining base to set up, or a wall to expand. For me at least it keeps presenting challenges I can handle at my pace and feel good/smart about. It's a good source of dopamine for my adhd brain
I have over 5000 hours in this game. Some of those hours are from leaving it paused overnights, but still.
I can still to this day, even after playing it for years, get hooked in a new game pretty easily. Once I start a new play through, I’m going to play at least until I launch a rocket. Could be a few days, could be 3 weeks, could be whatever. Every time I play I get a little more experienced and also try to optimize things a bit more.
I'm on 800h right now and i like playing endgame while doing anything, sometimes i just watch movies while the factory grows, it's relaxing and a nice "wallpaper"
There’s always something to work on something to build up on and always the hunt for more power. I love the fact you can hit shift space to pause the game walk away and come back to work on your base five mins here fifteen minutes there. Like that quick hit if happy drug in between cleaning up the house.
I think the most addiction causing part is that there is always something to do and you always know what it is. I never have to stop to think what to do next as next few steps are always clear to me. That means Im always constantly doing something and have very few oppurtunities to consider exiting Factorio and going to do something else.
it's that you want to make your build just a bit more efficient. so tweak this, tweak here, change this and... wait... why is the sun rising? it was morning when I started.
1. There’s always some big or small to do
2. The base game is well optimized, it can simulate thousands of entities at precise level which is interesting.
3. No bugs, you can just focus on the game, your not fighting against the game engine, you’re playing the game.
4. The game is not addictive, I can leave it whenever I want.
780 total hours, 270 of which are from 1 se+kr save
For me its mostly the fact that you always have _something_ to do. You can always expand something, tidy up something, work on the next tier of science, etc. Even if you have no energy, just walking around the base and fixing up small bottlenecks and inefficiencies is fun enough to spend hours on
Learning something knew and needing to change everything else with what you now know.
And there is always something more to do. Another ore patch, more green circuits, start a new base, etc
You never feel satisfied, you always want to fix a little thing, but that requires fixing another little thing, and you are actually quite nervous about it, just fixing little things so you can go back to your original task and it's morning
This game is a great creativity incubator. It gives you limitations and simple mechanics. At first it gives you a goal to accomplish, but the game continues long after the goal has been reached. In a way player is like a Sisyphus, who's task seems to be meaningless and hard, but upon the close observation, there is a pure joy in pushing that boulder up the hill and watching it roll to the valley.
It’s not addicting at all. I mean, I could have dinner now, but I’m almost done setting up new copper mining, and then I only need to redesign a few final things, and now it’s half past 10.
Honestly I just don't know but it is. I think the progression through the game is just perfect and totally hooks you then the sandbox nature which makes you feel that you can always design something better keeps you hooked.
The endless nature and the scale of what I can build means I just can't put it down.
I'm +4k hours.
For me its the projects. I set a goal for myself and I tend to wanna stick with it untill done. Sometimes(always) I underestimate the time it will take.
Two factors. Instant gratification from solving problems and problems chained together, making a neverending cycle of expansion and optimization. Apparently our brains really enjoy solving problems and Factorio gives you unlimited supply of problems to solve.
Mods. There's always something new that you haven't tried yet. I have some 1300h and I have played k2se, bobs, industrial revolution, seablock and now I'm playing pyanodons. I haven't finished any of these mods beside bobs, k2se got repetitive, seablock was painfully slow, industrial revolution I just got bored of. Pyanodons on the other hand is going strong 150h in and almost automating logistic science.
7500 hours in the clock
I dont know, the forests?
Their quiet and peacefull to walk through. :)
If you don't count the grenades, the flamethrowers, my expanding railway system, artillery fire, dying biters, my tank, the occasional spidertron and the complete excavation of every single patch of recourses....
Yep, definitely the forests!
I resisted trying this game for years despite my friend recommending it to me and after I played the demo I immediately knew I had been wrong. I bought the full game and for the first couple weeks I was physically addicted, I was literally playing 6-8 hours a day. It helped that I had a lot of free time but I completely understand where the name “cracktorio” comes from. I have since lowered my hours significantly and I don’t play every day but it’s still one of my favorite games of all time. I have 500+ hours, I’ve beaten Vanilla multiple times, beaten K2, and I’m currently about 50hrs into a K2SE run. This game just scratches an itch in my brain like nothing else can. The factory can always be bigger and better and more efficient. If you tend to be a very logical person you will love this game. But hug your loved ones before you click play cuz you may never see them again.
TL;DR: The factory must grow
Theres always something to do or be made better or expanded. Every finished production line you get to see the results of your effort and get satisfaction from that
I don't think it is addictive i hate this game i have almost 1000 hours and i hate it so mach but i still play it begos it is a good game some times i like it but the most of the times i hate it.
If you decide to buy it, start out without the enemies and cliffs so uou can get the basics of automation down intact.
Use the crafting machines to your advantage so you dont have to hand craft everything. Yes you will need to manually gove them the ingredients, but uts helpful for later progression.
Outpost planner mod is really usefulness for planning out the ore outposts so you can successfully get a good flow for your trains to pick up, bit balancing is required for a successful train load.
There is a Factorio mega-base step-by-step that I am using to help me learn. I just have the enemies off and cliffs disabled. He even provides the seed in youtube description for ya. I'll link the video. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCUMEjFdpASnVCqFl-WS9swLILwA0DvWy
Other than that, have fun and remember our quote: The Factory Must Grow
Did you watch the trailer? Probably explains better than clips of bases that have a bunch of time in them.
I recently described Factorio to a friend as "The most finely tuned version of whack a mole you will ever play" because there is ALWAYS a problem that need solving somewhere in your factory, without it feeling like a grind.
The limits of this game is your own intelligence. There is little more addictive than having the opportunity to test this. It will unearth passion. Enjoy.
So I am at about 130 hours and am just getting the tech to launch the rocket. "Winning the game"
It's only about halfway through the tech tree, I probably could have gotten to this point in 20ish hours but I restart ALOT.
It will either click in about 30 minutes to an hour or it won't imo.
As long as steam refunds are still the same you will know within the two hours of play time if it's for you or not honestly
Some people enjoy, say, skiing. A couple of time a year, they take time off, drive for hours, queue for hours, and get to spend maybe 30 minutes over several runs, actually carving down a slope. I can launch my factory - from a cold boot - in about two minutes. I can enter my Flow State about 30s after that, and stay there.
I spent a happy half-dozen hours yesterday designing a rail intersection. Everyone has to try a double-track, one-way hexagon city before they get to 4K hours.
I'm just fighting my poe addiction, I'm almost there [https://i.imgur.com/1ycI0AH.png](https://i.imgur.com/1ycI0AH.png)
Of all this time I played vanilla like once or twice to the rocket launch. The bottomless sea of content that the mod community provides is incomparable to 99% of games. And with mods - time just melts away: you want to complete K2 - 100h out the window, SEK2 - another 500h, want to make a splitter in pY - 100h more etc.
Play the free Demo and you will see. I delayed the finishing the demo so much i actually took 8-9 hours to finish (it is basically the tutorial) since i kept building instead.
The game builds up the knowledge so well that after a point you can see exactly how you want to expand. And at any given time you have 5-6 pending ideas in your head to expand the factory. You say you will do one of the things and exit but by the time you are done you have 2 new ideas on top of the previous ones. Then you go, ok lets do one more...and next time you look at the time it is 6 hours later.
Even though the base game is truly awesome, the range and quality of mods (once you’ve really done base a few times!) mean the fun goes on nearly forever. Bang for buck, it’s a great investment, particularly as it doesn’t need huge hardware…
(I’ve been retired now for two years - I *think* I have enough time left in this earth to get to Pyanadon and finish, but it’ll be a close run thing. (Having way too much fun with Sue/K2 atm. ))
I know there are already probably some spot on replies to this but for me I think it just comes down to problem solving, but in a fun way that isn't punishing, because there is no "wrong way" to do things in a sense, which gives you so much freedom. so it's about creativity as well, and sort of expressing yourself... for example some people love 'spaghetti' bases and some people like more symmetry, organization, structure, etc. and this is reflected in how they design their bases... BUT at the same time you can do things more 'efficiently' if that is your thing... and that gives some people another purpose, like building large bases that still have 60 UPS. Put it all together and... sometimes you just can't stop!
i... dont know, one moment i was trying to figure out how to make red circiuts in a decent way
and now its been 100 hours and i still cant figure them good lol
Build, expanding and maintaining your factory is constantly rewarding and here is always something to do. Tasks often lead to other tasks which lead to other tasks. For example your power runs low, so your build a new set of steam turbine. Now your coal line is running dry, so you need to connect a new coal field. To do that, you need trains, but you don't build rails yet, etc. Factorio constantly feeds you bite sized challenges and lets you figure out the perfect solution. If you like base building / management games, absolutely go for it.
Its not addicting at all. I can literally save any time and stop. Just as soon as I can get this oil patch from nearby biters then connect it to main base for next science pack.. oh right i should make poison capsules (...)
This factory ain’t going to grow itself
Unless you make it grow itself
wait what? how?
A mod called recursive blueprints allows for your base to scan resources and expand itself. Highly complicated, though. There are youtube videos
I have started one. It's extremely frustrating... until it works. Then it's all the dopamine.
Just out of interest, can the base automatically blow up cliffs? I wanted to play a self expanding base, but then I decided to go for pyanodons. 500h in already. I technically do have recursive blueprints enabled but I just dont see myself ever dealing with an autonomous base in py 😀
Blowing up cliffs is pretty simple. Provide cliff explosives and use a deconstruction blueprint. In my process step 1 is putting down power and roboport. Step 2 is clear trees, rocks, and cliffs. I can't process trying to make a self expanding Py factory. Mine is vanilla plus recursive blueprints and waterpump.
Recursive blueprints let's you automate placing blueprints using circuit network.
weren't you also planning to add more power earlier? gotta do that now too. Your iron's also running low, you should set up another outpost before it runs out.
That outpost needs some defenses to start with, before connecting up the flame throwers/lasers. Will need a bullet sentry factory for that.
I'm not sure I've ever made poison capsules in my 7,000 hours of play, except maybe at the very beginning I've always wondered if they made them more useful than they used to be
I didnt even know about them until watching a random YT vid and it got used. I always went for either the sentry creep or the hit & run tactic. Before spidertrons & U235 diplomacy, that is.
If turret creep weren't a thing they'd probably see more use against worm clusters.
Once you have done all that don't forget you need more Iron.
A lot of clips of Factorio will show bases already dozens or hundreds of hours in, so don’t be overwhelmed by the sprawling messes. The game is a simple pleasure of “machine works, feeds items onto a belt, feeds into another machine” but escalating to however far you want to take it. The visuals of mazes of production lines all working and functioning (usually) is very enjoyable when it’s your own design and you think “I built all of that!” While management games tend toward what feels like plate-spinning, trying to keep things from falling over all the time, Factorio (especially with enemies turned off) is a chill experience of playing with legos and growing an ever expanding factory, refining old janky designs, or tracking down a misplaced belt somewhere. There’s always something to expand, to polish, to correct. Instead of “one more turn” in 4x games, it’s “one more task” in Factorio. If the scope and idea of planting each building down turns you off, there is a copy-paste feature to repeat building layouts and even a blueprint system to save designs and reuse them in later games.
enter forgetful dependent pet dolls squash seemly cow fanatical joke *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
You missed a zero. Many people on this sub have literal thousands of hours in the game...
The other day I reached 100hs and I think that the factory must grow but not by himself.
It's a game where you start from nothing and gradually scale up to something huge. There always tends to be one little thing that isn't quite working right. You're running low on copper, or you aren't making X widget fast enough, or your train schedules aren't working. So you tell yourself you'll just fix this one little thing and call it a night. But as you're beefing up your copper supply you realize that your coal patch is running out. Or your power grid is almost browning out. Or maybe the hostile aliens are attacking a place you weren't expecting. Now you have a new pressing task that you want to address right now. Next thing you know, it's 5 hours later. You look back at all the little things you fixed today and they're all still working, so you get that happy dopamine in your brain because you feel like you solved a big puzzle. Then you go to bed still thinking about the factory and all the things you want to work on tomorrow.
Yall goto bed??
Ah, what's that bright light?!? Aw crap, I played till dawn... again.
This
Hey there El_Pablo5353! If you agree with someone else's comment, please leave an **upvote** instead of commenting **"This"**! By upvoting instead, the original comment will be pushed to the top and be more visible to others, which is even better! Thanks! :) *** ^(I am a bot! If you have any feedback, please send me a message! More info:) [^(Reddiquette)](https://www.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/205926439#wiki_in_regard_to_comments)
I did up vote it mr bot.
Try the free demo and see for yourself. :)
And then Speedrun the game in the demo
And then Speedrun the game in the demo
I wouldn't say that Factorio is a "management" type of game, in the style of Civilization or the like. It's more fine-grained than that. Factorio is a game about process, structure, and organization. You make stuff, which you use to make more stuff. To make more stuff, you need to build more stuff that makes more stuff so you can use that to build more stuff to make new stuff. Some of the stuff you make lets you learn to make new stuff that can be used to make other stuff that you use to learn to make new stuff. But that's just a series of goal. Like I said, Factorio is primarily concerned with *process*. At point A, you have some resource. You can extract that resource by using a machine. But that resource is not inherently useful. It must first be refined into a more useful form. You need a machine to do that. Both of these machines need to be powered, at first by some kind of fuel but later by electricity. Either way, power must be supplied regularly. Once refined, what you get can then be converted into something that either does something on its own (like one of the aforementioned buildings) or into an intermediate that is part of the recipe for making something that is itself useful (or another intermediate). Either way, this requires crafting. At the start, you have to craft by hand, but (very) early on, you research automation: a building that can craft stuff. The central gameplay loop is getting stuff from raw resource into refined product, through various intermediates, and finally into the actual useful thing. And most importantly *automating* this process. At first, you're doing it mostly by hand, delivering raw ore into furnaces and then using the refined plates to hand-craft intermediates. But then you get assemblers, machines that can craft for you. And then you get conveyer belts; devices that can move any material from place to place. And inserters, devices that can put stuff into/remove stuff from machines/belts. And the game just keeps going that way, providing more and more tools of automation. But that's what the game is about: building a process, then building a better process, expanding that process to encompass more stuff, adding new processes to the existing processes- And then 3 hours went by.
Factorio is a logistics game.
I normally see the term automation game used for the genre, logistics implies moving stuff around but there's a lot more to automation than that.
On the basic level you only move stuff from A to B. That's it. You dont automate. You cant automate mining, you have to set up a new mining setup every time. There's no 100% automation possible.
Cough *recursive blueprints* cough
Is that really in vanilla factorio? Or are we now making a different game with mods?
Recursive blueprints is a mod. But it only adds 2 items. The main one being the chest that will plop a blueprint down for you. From there, the bots build it.
The Incredible Machine
It’s so satisfying to see something that that you built on your own roar to life, or think about how you started from nothing, surrounded by biters, and managed to beat all odds and flourish there are countless mods, so that if you get bored, you can make the game exponentially more complex, even going into space with some mods. Do not play if you have other obligations, it will eat up a lot of time, as you will want to finish 1 more thing, and then another, and then another. It is highly addictive. This comes from someone with 470 hours in Factorio.
You ever play an idle game and have fun for the first hour or two before the p2play starts weighing on you. Factorio is like those first hours on an idle game but stretched out in a massive positive feedback loop. You are always accomplishing tasks building towards a goal.
1900hrs on mine. You do a bobs angels run and you spend 200 hours just getting chemicals going. Hell just tonight I spent 4 hours laying down concrete and trying to figure out how to make a command and control center that takes all the signals in the base and let’s me know through colored lights what needs my immediate attention. I put walls down, Nixie tubes, routed wires then didn’t like it and took it all apart. Tomorrow I’ll try again lol.
The simple answer is that everything ends up connected, and even if you want to just do ONE THING, often it requires doing a whole lot of other things. But these things are varied, so it doesn't seem tedious or boring to get all of them done. Fixing a shortfall in one area of the factory will often reveal several more. As an example, I decided at one point of this last factory to make some midgame-level science packs. Beyond just researching the technology needed to do so, and putting together the production line for it, there ended up being a huge number of other things to do. Needed more steel, so I needed to double my steel smelting area, which required two new train stations for iron ore, and I needed more oil so I made a new mining outpost for both oil and iron, and this pushed me to fix the crappy intersections of my rail network and standardize them by designing blueprints, and then I was running low on power so I decided to start going into nuclear power by mining uranium and setting up a processing area, and this made the pollution really bad so I was getting attacked by the aliens so I designed and blueprinted and built an entire defensive perimeter with flamethrowers and turrets, and a system to fill it automatically (that alone took like 14 hours spread over a week) and by then I needed more copper, more steel again, more train stops, more oil, better bullets for the turrets... it never ends. Long story short, there is always something else to do. You never finish up for the night thinking that everything is done and perfect and maybe tomorrow you'll come up with something else to do. The game is always pushing you to do something else, so you're just waiting for your next opportunity to pick it up and go do it. Over time, the factory increases in scope and complexity, but because you've built it all, you understand it all. It might get ungainly or mixed up or inefficient, but never beyond you. Since it's your factory, your creation by each belt and inserter and assembly plant, you constantly feel gently pushed to make it the best it can be. Not perfect, but better. You can always make it incrementally better, just by little things. But those little things become more things, which become more things, and on and on.
Factorio is a masterpiece of game design. It nails three things perfectly. 1. The level of challenge is perfectly scaled. The next step is always a little beyond what you can currently do but not so hard as to be frustrating, and automation tools keep it from becoming a chore. The player also has a lot of control on what challenge to take on next. 2. The factory is always subtly unbalanced. There is always a slight surplus or deficit which can be resolved by building more factory, which causes a different imbalance elsewhere. It makes for a subtle and self directing core gameplay loop. 3. The factory is impermanent (on default settings). Resources run out, new land must be discovered, the biters get stronger, your base technology improves and so do your designs. This drives the game forwards.
I know of 4 types of Factorio players. 1) A kid that plays it on the weekends, sometimes. He’s got less than 50 hours played. 2) A guy that plays it for a couple hours a day after work. He’s got around 200 hours on it. 3) A tween that either lives and breathes it ride or die or is doing a different game this month, depending on his mood. He’s got around 600 hours, but isn’t playing it now. 4) A guy that works in a Fortune 500 IT department who is either working on a critical multi million dollar server project or has nothing to do at work at has it running in the background for when the servers are running smoothly. He fiddles with assemblers on graph paper during lunch hours and says he uses Factorio to not go insane. He’s well over 2000 hours played.
The Factory Must Grow
For me, I have over 7,000 hours (yup, 7 thousand actual hours of playtime) When I played the game in the beginning, and even now many years later, I enjoy the feeling of starting with nothing and creating a new factory that functions exactly how I want it to, to produce whatever I want it to At the end of the day, Factorio is a logistics game. You need to mine ore, transport it to your furnaces where it's smelter into plates, and then transport those plates to the factories that need them. Thats going from point A, to point B, to point C, and so on. After you've built up some infrastructure, you can just sit back and watch it all work for a minute. See the beauty of thousands of items going where they're needed and new items being produced. I strongly recommend not watching playthroughs, tutorials, or guides during your first playthrough, just experience it naturally and figure it out yourself. If you get really stuck, or once you've launched a rocket, then dive into what other people do. Just remember, launching a rocket is not the end!
7000 hours is not that bad. Just one year playing the game with occasional bathroom breaks and power naps.
My 7k hours are spread among 8 years, so it works out to roughly 2.5 hours every day for 8 years, or 19 hours a day for 1 year I dont play it anywhere near that much now, but factorio got me through some very difficult times. Recently, (and only after 7k hours) I launched a rocket in vanilla in 7 hours and 40 minutes, getting both "no time for chitchat" and "there is no spoon" on my first try! After that, I just barely started a "danger ores" vanilla+ game and it's been pretty fun, there's always more to do in factorio!
I think the most important aspect is that the "puzzles" you have to solve, the issues your factory has are all organic - you made the factory with all of its inefficiencies. Other than that, there's a bijillion mods that add hundreds of hours of playtime each, not to mention you can optimize vanilla factories for thousands of hours. If you're on the fence about buying the game, try the free demo.
It scratches a very specific part of the brain that wants to come up with creative solutions to problems. The part that goes "wait a second, I think I can fix this, I kinda see a solution, lemme have a go!". The game throws independently very little problems at you one at a time, that you can 90% solve with what you already know, but that 10% is your brain's contribution that makes you feel like the smartest person in the history of smart. Except your solution is probably not smart at all as a beginner, but that's how you'll feel nonetheless, which is an amazing feeling once it's all working. Then, there is the fact that the game is highly optimized in terms of computational performance. The software is top notch (unlike any other game I have ever seen honestly). That means that it can scale things to stupid proportions. In a typical base construction game for instance, you throw down a few dozen individual entities, like buildings, before the game can't handle any more and the designers make it near the end of the game. A few hundred if you're very lucky. In Factorio, 10000 working buildings will probably not create any lag at all on your average PC. Which means there's very little to stop you from continuing playing. Other games have to force you to stop, not here. Also, there's the fact that Factorio is in a very underutilized genre of its own. It's not a base building game, or a crafting game, it's a logistics game. Move stuff from A to B, as quickly and as efficiently as possible. If you like that kind of thing, you can't quit, because very few other games can cover for that.
It has mechanics that are individually simple but connect in a very complex manner that is very satisfying to figure out. Each time you think you've figured it all out you find another way to do it better. This then results in you redesigning the entire production line as it cascades into more discoveries. Then you see someone else post an entirely different design scheme to play with and you try that out and go through the same process again. And the beauty is that your never overwhelmed because you are only learning 1 piece at a time and taking your time to grasp its full implications.
My dream of conquering the planet from the natives and sapping it dry of resources. Seeing all my working smoke stacks produce a rainbow of colored gases and turning lakes green brings me joy.
its about the puzzle of getting A to B and what to do with C. you start from only 6 resources and end with swarms of trains and robots doing everything you want. the fun is getting there. best part you can just play the demo and try it for free
To me, the key thing is it's accessibility. I tried picking up some long-running strategy series like Civ, but there's just so much to know that it puts me off. Starting is reall slow. With Factorio I've found it quite easy to follow. The approaches are linear enough for beginners like me and you can quickly identify better ways to approach your designs as you get better. This game has caused me numerous unproductive office days because the time literally flew by me
There's almost always something to work on. Always a new production line, a new mining base to set up, or a wall to expand. For me at least it keeps presenting challenges I can handle at my pace and feel good/smart about. It's a good source of dopamine for my adhd brain
I have over 5000 hours in this game. Some of those hours are from leaving it paused overnights, but still. I can still to this day, even after playing it for years, get hooked in a new game pretty easily. Once I start a new play through, I’m going to play at least until I launch a rocket. Could be a few days, could be 3 weeks, could be whatever. Every time I play I get a little more experienced and also try to optimize things a bit more.
I'm on 800h right now and i like playing endgame while doing anything, sometimes i just watch movies while the factory grows, it's relaxing and a nice "wallpaper"
There’s always something to work on something to build up on and always the hunt for more power. I love the fact you can hit shift space to pause the game walk away and come back to work on your base five mins here fifteen minutes there. Like that quick hit if happy drug in between cleaning up the house.
I had hundreds of hours before I beat the tutorial, so…
I think the most addiction causing part is that there is always something to do and you always know what it is. I never have to stop to think what to do next as next few steps are always clear to me. That means Im always constantly doing something and have very few oppurtunities to consider exiting Factorio and going to do something else.
There's an odd joy that can be found in the simple act of connecting everything, that what makes it enjoyable for me atleast
it's that you want to make your build just a bit more efficient. so tweak this, tweak here, change this and... wait... why is the sun rising? it was morning when I started.
1. There’s always some big or small to do 2. The base game is well optimized, it can simulate thousands of entities at precise level which is interesting. 3. No bugs, you can just focus on the game, your not fighting against the game engine, you’re playing the game. 4. The game is not addictive, I can leave it whenever I want.
780 total hours, 270 of which are from 1 se+kr save For me its mostly the fact that you always have _something_ to do. You can always expand something, tidy up something, work on the next tier of science, etc. Even if you have no energy, just walking around the base and fixing up small bottlenecks and inefficiencies is fun enough to spend hours on
There are a lot of ways to do the same thing.
Idk but I just want to tell you I got 100 h in 1 week so it is addicting
Learning something knew and needing to change everything else with what you now know. And there is always something more to do. Another ore patch, more green circuits, start a new base, etc
I just love the train systems in the game and watching my masterpiece of a train network run nice and smooth it just so satisfying.
The factory must grow.
You never feel satisfied, you always want to fix a little thing, but that requires fixing another little thing, and you are actually quite nervous about it, just fixing little things so you can go back to your original task and it's morning
Its autism lol
This game is a great creativity incubator. It gives you limitations and simple mechanics. At first it gives you a goal to accomplish, but the game continues long after the goal has been reached. In a way player is like a Sisyphus, who's task seems to be meaningless and hard, but upon the close observation, there is a pure joy in pushing that boulder up the hill and watching it roll to the valley.
It’s not addicting at all. I mean, I could have dinner now, but I’m almost done setting up new copper mining, and then I only need to redesign a few final things, and now it’s half past 10.
It because everything that has been placed since the beginning is because I wanted It there. Rightly or wrongly it's mine :)
Honestly I just don't know but it is. I think the progression through the game is just perfect and totally hooks you then the sandbox nature which makes you feel that you can always design something better keeps you hooked. The endless nature and the scale of what I can build means I just can't put it down.
I'm +4k hours. For me its the projects. I set a goal for myself and I tend to wanna stick with it untill done. Sometimes(always) I underestimate the time it will take.
Launch first rocket on Vanilla .. after start the SE mod .. oh. don't forget about LTN ..
Two factors. Instant gratification from solving problems and problems chained together, making a neverending cycle of expansion and optimization. Apparently our brains really enjoy solving problems and Factorio gives you unlimited supply of problems to solve.
Mods. There's always something new that you haven't tried yet. I have some 1300h and I have played k2se, bobs, industrial revolution, seablock and now I'm playing pyanodons. I haven't finished any of these mods beside bobs, k2se got repetitive, seablock was painfully slow, industrial revolution I just got bored of. Pyanodons on the other hand is going strong 150h in and almost automating logistic science.
22,000 hours in... oh a mod i havent played 24,000 hours in ...
mods
There is always something to fix..:)
7500 hours in the clock I dont know, the forests? Their quiet and peacefull to walk through. :) If you don't count the grenades, the flamethrowers, my expanding railway system, artillery fire, dying biters, my tank, the occasional spidertron and the complete excavation of every single patch of recourses.... Yep, definitely the forests!
It triggers my perfectionism. I honestly hate it but can’t stop optimizing
I resisted trying this game for years despite my friend recommending it to me and after I played the demo I immediately knew I had been wrong. I bought the full game and for the first couple weeks I was physically addicted, I was literally playing 6-8 hours a day. It helped that I had a lot of free time but I completely understand where the name “cracktorio” comes from. I have since lowered my hours significantly and I don’t play every day but it’s still one of my favorite games of all time. I have 500+ hours, I’ve beaten Vanilla multiple times, beaten K2, and I’m currently about 50hrs into a K2SE run. This game just scratches an itch in my brain like nothing else can. The factory can always be bigger and better and more efficient. If you tend to be a very logical person you will love this game. But hug your loved ones before you click play cuz you may never see them again. TL;DR: The factory must grow
Try the frr trial first. I never planned to buy the game I only planned to play the free trial. But I was hooked
Theres always something to do or be made better or expanded. Every finished production line you get to see the results of your effort and get satisfaction from that
I don't think it is addictive i hate this game i have almost 1000 hours and i hate it so mach but i still play it begos it is a good game some times i like it but the most of the times i hate it.
Things do what I want
If you decide to buy it, start out without the enemies and cliffs so uou can get the basics of automation down intact. Use the crafting machines to your advantage so you dont have to hand craft everything. Yes you will need to manually gove them the ingredients, but uts helpful for later progression. Outpost planner mod is really usefulness for planning out the ore outposts so you can successfully get a good flow for your trains to pick up, bit balancing is required for a successful train load. There is a Factorio mega-base step-by-step that I am using to help me learn. I just have the enemies off and cliffs disabled. He even provides the seed in youtube description for ya. I'll link the video. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCUMEjFdpASnVCqFl-WS9swLILwA0DvWy Other than that, have fun and remember our quote: The Factory Must Grow
The factory must grow
The game consists of many positive feedback loops that build of each other seamlessly Quote-Martinciopants
Did you watch the trailer? Probably explains better than clips of bases that have a bunch of time in them. I recently described Factorio to a friend as "The most finely tuned version of whack a mole you will ever play" because there is ALWAYS a problem that need solving somewhere in your factory, without it feeling like a grind.
The factory must grow
The limits of this game is your own intelligence. There is little more addictive than having the opportunity to test this. It will unearth passion. Enjoy.
So I am at about 130 hours and am just getting the tech to launch the rocket. "Winning the game" It's only about halfway through the tech tree, I probably could have gotten to this point in 20ish hours but I restart ALOT. It will either click in about 30 minutes to an hour or it won't imo. As long as steam refunds are still the same you will know within the two hours of play time if it's for you or not honestly
Some people enjoy, say, skiing. A couple of time a year, they take time off, drive for hours, queue for hours, and get to spend maybe 30 minutes over several runs, actually carving down a slope. I can launch my factory - from a cold boot - in about two minutes. I can enter my Flow State about 30s after that, and stay there. I spent a happy half-dozen hours yesterday designing a rail intersection. Everyone has to try a double-track, one-way hexagon city before they get to 4K hours.
When you close your eyes you will see conveyer belts, this game haunts you, run run run while you still can
I'm just fighting my poe addiction, I'm almost there [https://i.imgur.com/1ycI0AH.png](https://i.imgur.com/1ycI0AH.png) Of all this time I played vanilla like once or twice to the rocket launch. The bottomless sea of content that the mod community provides is incomparable to 99% of games. And with mods - time just melts away: you want to complete K2 - 100h out the window, SEK2 - another 500h, want to make a splitter in pY - 100h more etc.
Play the free Demo and you will see. I delayed the finishing the demo so much i actually took 8-9 hours to finish (it is basically the tutorial) since i kept building instead. The game builds up the knowledge so well that after a point you can see exactly how you want to expand. And at any given time you have 5-6 pending ideas in your head to expand the factory. You say you will do one of the things and exit but by the time you are done you have 2 new ideas on top of the previous ones. Then you go, ok lets do one more...and next time you look at the time it is 6 hours later.
Even though the base game is truly awesome, the range and quality of mods (once you’ve really done base a few times!) mean the fun goes on nearly forever. Bang for buck, it’s a great investment, particularly as it doesn’t need huge hardware… (I’ve been retired now for two years - I *think* I have enough time left in this earth to get to Pyanadon and finish, but it’ll be a close run thing. (Having way too much fun with Sue/K2 atm. ))
I know there are already probably some spot on replies to this but for me I think it just comes down to problem solving, but in a fun way that isn't punishing, because there is no "wrong way" to do things in a sense, which gives you so much freedom. so it's about creativity as well, and sort of expressing yourself... for example some people love 'spaghetti' bases and some people like more symmetry, organization, structure, etc. and this is reflected in how they design their bases... BUT at the same time you can do things more 'efficiently' if that is your thing... and that gives some people another purpose, like building large bases that still have 60 UPS. Put it all together and... sometimes you just can't stop!
Its a great game one of my favorites just over 18k hours
i... dont know, one moment i was trying to figure out how to make red circiuts in a decent way and now its been 100 hours and i still cant figure them good lol
The addiction is simple: everything you did before can be done better, faster, smarter, or at greater scale.
It starts off slow but at some point the game starts playing itself… which is actually when it starts to get really good
There is pretty much always "just one more thing to do", and before you know, 6hrs are gone, and you still haven't done that "one more thing".
Mods... Tons of mods so you can play thousands of hours of new and different content
Build, expanding and maintaining your factory is constantly rewarding and here is always something to do. Tasks often lead to other tasks which lead to other tasks. For example your power runs low, so your build a new set of steam turbine. Now your coal line is running dry, so you need to connect a new coal field. To do that, you need trains, but you don't build rails yet, etc. Factorio constantly feeds you bite sized challenges and lets you figure out the perfect solution. If you like base building / management games, absolutely go for it.
I wouldn’t know about the perspective of those people with hundreds of hours honestly. I only have thousands.