The restrictions on rail placement keep train layouts sane. There has to be a demarcation point between your rail and belt network. Now I can just fly in a train over top of my factory and drop materials everywhere. Now I can overlay two distinct rail networks in the same space.
I already have 1800 hours in Factorio. What more do the devs want from me?! My body can't take any more abuse!
I don't think I've ever been as excited about a game update as this new Factorio. I can't wait to make unholy train abominations floating atop my normal belt abominations
I managed to play the demo for something like 30 minutes, and then uninstall it. Precisely because I want to have a life. I know I would love this game too much.
It is the fastest I've ever gone with a game from "I love it so much, I can't stop playing it" to "I dream about it all night, and I have to stop, I feel like my brain is not getting rest at night".
This happens to me with every game eventually but with Factorio it happened so fast, I had to stop.
I'm still bummed out about that, and I want to give it another chance, but I can't be dreaming about it. I'll die.
I think the short slope is for QOL. Satisfactory has much gentle slope, and player end up build giant spiral structure to go up to where the game say it is way too high.
It's a game, it's fun, I really don't care deeply beyond the craic of taking a position.
Changing the graphics to show a rack and pinion on the ramps (and short sections before and after the ramps) would be a knowing nod in the right direction that I'd endorse, sure.
IRL, however, we're not going to see a rack and pinion lift a 250 wagon x 100 tonne load 2.5 kilometre long iron ore train up a short one story high incline (throw in the engine and the wagon weight that's ~ 30,000 metric tonne).
> IRL, however, we're not going to see a rack and pinion lift a 250 wagon x 100 tonne load 2.5 kilometre long iron ore train up a short one story high incline (throw in the engine and the wagon weight that's ~ 30,000 metric tonne).
A 2.5km iron ore train? What are you talking about? A 2-8 train in Factorio is 10 wagon-lengths, and each wagon is 7 tiles = 7 meters, so a large iron train is only 70m long.
IRL - In Real Life (outside of Factorio) those are the mean statistics on the trains I've worked with.
You can see video if you look for Pilbara ore trains.
In game - short ramps lifting 30 feet are cute and look like fun in a tile based game. In real physics the inclines are much more gradual, especially for loded ore cars.
I'm aware that Australia and the US have extremely lengthy, heavy trains (the EU mostly deals in short trains, though). But I was pointing out that the visual scale of Factorio is already pretty out of whack, especially for what ought to be the largest entities (the rocket silo is also comically small if you math it out), so objecting to the absurdity of the vertical incline feels like it's closing the trainshed after the locomotive has left.
If we're seriously comparing game V. reality it's more than just the incline, light transit rail runs in the air (with a considerable amount of strengthened understory) heavy resource ore trains (long or short) just don't (aside from cannot be avoided rivers and chasms).
Although I do recognise the awesomeness of early victorian wide valley crossing bridges (which didn't come cheap, then or now) and the jaw dropping bridging a valley with a canal (water ain't light .. but at least it doesn't vibrate).
Steam keeps counting "time played" while your PC is in Sleep mode with a game still open. Factorio is quite small, resource-wise, so keeping it open in the background is convenient.
Not saying this is the only possible explanation for 7000 hours. It's just something I noticed when my "time played" was way higher than what is plausible.
I'm a little scared to play Satisfactory. The only thing keeping my Factorio addiction in check is that I get bored after a few days. A new game just as bad might ruin me
Uh oh. You know that feeling when I bigger competitor announces they are implementing your special sauce? That's me now.
We made a vertical train factory automation game. Railgrade. And we had to solve many or the exact same complexities. I remember the exact moment we too built the track builder to route off A*.
We release October 13th so maybe we'll survive by being faster?
Hey, have had your game wishlisted for a while, and as a programmer/Factorio player/"guy who grew up with a pappy that had an awesome model train setup and took me all over to model train meccas", I just want you to know that I think you're filling a niche and expanding the genre in a very meaningful way!
Honestly, I want to say it was your twitter ads that caught me? I'm pretty entrenched in the indie scene on twitter, so it was either an ad or just a post that got in front of me.
That makes sense. I've been running a bunch of ads, and honestly I think they are a powerful technique for indies. We don't need to convince press, journalist, or a publisher. We can let our game speak for itself directly in front of players.
It helps that game ads are a lot nicer to look at, so our cost per click is lower than the typical business or crypto centric ad on twitter.
Just wishlisted! This was always my favorite part of Cities Skylines, and from there several other train games. But the tracks don't seem to be their main focus (vs economy and logistics), so I'm really excited about this. October's right around the corner!
A request, please: Would you please consider adding Geforce Now support so those of us on Macs and underpowered PCs can play it too? That tends to work better than the Rosettaing of Intel binaries. https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/cloudgaming
Oh that link is helpful! I've had a few other players ask for Geforce Now but I always thought the question of support or not was Nvidia's. With that form I can try and sign us up right away.
We already support cloud saves so enabling Geforce Now is for sure something I want to do.
Awesome, thank you! Yeah, the process for adding games is a bit opaque. I wish they'd let it be opt-out instead of opt-in, or at least provide a way for players to request it directly through Steam.
Those are neat ideas, but I don't want to lien on references to other games when marketing our own game. I want to play up the strength and what makes our game unique & special.
Plus as an indie the biggest hurdle is "getting a chance to say something" not "what to say". As players give attention to what is popular, and any attention small devs like us get need to be focused on why our game should exist at all.
maybe a different way to frame it is that your inspiration idols are releasing brilliant new work, and your tribute to them manages to be relevant ;-)
I'm not such a crazy fanboy as that sentence should make me seem, but factorio has definitely made the management/building genre much more interesting for me, and while i never have a patience for a megafactory, i do enjoy the other games inspired by factorio, and will likely try yours
Thanks eh. Certainly Factorio was a major inspiration, along with Railroad Tycoon and Transport Tycoon. Personally I wanted to concrate the fun I experienced when building new factories in Factorio. The clean slate and excitement of getting everything working together. Hence our mission structured campaign. We tried to make each mission challenge the player to build slightly different that the last time. Sort of like if Factorio had more ways to "start" than just coal, copper plates, and iron.
Well lol, we're not actually unlimited. Over the campaign players unlock new tech which caps out at 10 levels high. With each track requiring 2 levels of clearance. So the max layering is 5 tracks deep. Until mods...
It helps that our game is 3d so you can rotate the camera to see things below at different angles. With Factorio being 2d they'd have a horrible visibility problem going even 3 layers up.
Oh there's < 5% chance (lower honestly) that they'll add more than two layers. Pipes and belts have two layers (underground in their case). I think there's a graph theory theorem that you technically only need unconflicting crossings (~two layers) to be able to draw any valid network (that doesn't mean it'll be pretty but it'll be possible, i.e. it can embed designs that the previous system would simply be unable to represent). Anyway, at this point having exactly two layers is a factorio theme.
I think you can rest easy if you're worried that factorio might implement more than 2 layers. I like the sound of a mission-oriented problem solving core loop. Maybe allow players to create and share their own missions, that could add an engaging social element. Good luck!
Thanks! As it happens Mod support, an in-game map editor, plus Steam workshop support is our next planned update after release.
True, weaving up and down can get you far but you still need to mix tracks. I think a big difference is Factorio's trains use basically infinite-frieght-cars-of-holding and thus achieve freight high density. In our game each freight car holds 1 freight. Thus players build a ton more trains and network efficiency is more about capacity than simply connecting two points.
It's funny how divisive the graphics for Factorio tend to be. As someone who was a kid in that "golden age" of mid/late 90s isometric sprite based PC games, not only does the game have a nostalgic charm to it, but there's something about the the expressivity that the mostly-2D gamespace creates that makes it far more visually interesting than most AAA 3D games. A dense factory (and especially some of the animated gifs in the blog post) always feels alive in a way most game worlds never manage to touch.
I stumbled upon Factorio only after the graphics and gameplay of Dyson Sphere Project hooked me! Both are fantastic games with similar mechanics but different challenges; DSP has modern quality of life conveniences (like cleaner/simpler use of pickers from conveyer belts), but Factorio has a ton of depth and great mods.
I don't mind the look of Factorio, personally, but being able to rotate stuff around and see different angles of the factory was very helpful for routing in DSP. Then of course you can take it to a first person view too, like Satisfactory, but then I spent too much time trying to move myself (the player) through my maze of conveyer belts.
I think a lot of it is that 2D gives you a lot more opportunities to dial in the precise "things are visually distinct" vs "visual clutter" trade-off that you want, and optimize practically every pixel. 3D has to deal with every possible angle instead of like 1-4, you just can't make it perfect all the time like you can 2D.
They are? Are you referring to anything from the post or the comments here? I’ve never really seen any complaints about the graphics that weren’t from people who effectively only play AAA games. I certainly wouldn’t call that divisive though.
For what it's worth, I'm one of those people that you're looking for. Out of the 11 games I completed this year so far, the only AAA title I played is Tears of the Kingdom (and, if that counts as AAA, Satisfactory). Everything else is indies.
I got into Satisfactory really hard this year (450+ hours played) after seeing a friend play it. I previously tried Factorio based on a similar personal recommendation and a general sense of "I ought to like this", but put it down after 2 hours thinking mostly just "meh". In hindsight, I really do think it is the graphics.
I'm now somewhat "over" Satisfactory (at least until they add more stuff in the next updates) and thinking about how to explore the factory builder genre more. Factorio is still in my library, yet I feel no desire to go back to it, mostly based on visual appeal. If I want to see something that's just 90% grey and brown, I can just go see any DC or Marvel movie from the last decade, thank you very much. In fact, looking at the games I recently played, one of the connecting facets seems to be a vibrant color palette (Hollow Knight, Ori 1+2, Webbed, Bug Fables, A Short Hike, Fez, Chicory, to name a few).
Same reason why I don't plan on playing any of the From Software games, even though 250 hours of Hollow Knight confirms that I'm a glutton for punishment and thus in the main demographic for Dark Souls and friends. But if I'm going to die 100 times in one sitting, at least I want something pretty to look at as I do so.
Personally I like Factorio's graphics and I definitely know it's inspired by those old graphics but, having grown up after those were mainstream, I've always thought that the originals were too muddled by the low resolution and generally dark palettes
I basically spend zero time on games in general, downloaded the demo and spent 10h in 3 days on it.
I'm resisting buying the full game because I know exactly how it'd end.
Fitting, given industrialcraft and buildcraft and probably gregtech 2 were inspirations for Factorio. In a lot of ways, Factorio helped me appreciate what old Gregtech was trying to do, but the formula stuck in factorio because it omitted the manual mining aspect. Gregtech was always a bit tedious to encourage you to automate, but it was too slow starting that portion off as it had to give a nod to the base game of minecraft. Factorio basically cuts that out except for the very first 3 minutes of a new playthrough.
I've played a number of modpacks for Minecraft and some are way too primitive (anything involving primitive tech or whatever it is), and at some point you really do have to stop manually mining (which GTNH has well, eventually reaching void miners, where the real problem is power not minerals).
Factorio is more of a throughput optimizer as it really doesn't have that much in the way of tech, and nothing really becomes outdated beyond a few early game items.
Mindustry has a certain elegance to it and also the multiplayer aspect is really cool. Griefing can cause a lot of issues though unless they solved that since I played a few years ago - a single misplaced ore will clog a line and its easy for someone to silently sabotage.
Factorio completely hacks and breaks the brain's reward system of anyone interested in problem solving. It's a never ending, deep, wide, and task oriented rabbit hole where you can create very personal solutions that are very rewarding.
And the scale is massive, from simple obvious problems at the start, to huge, factory wide ones that emerge from the solutions you implemented before, that require carefully planing and phased execution to avoid breaking things.
And then you discover the circuit network, and the complexity of the solution space available to you suddenly becomes exponential.
Gameplay wise: Great, I'm looking forward to it. I think they've come to just the right level of flexibility to not make people just automatically make everything elevated without having to just make it tediously expensive.
Graphics wise, I think it's mostly working, but, and it feels bad to say this with the 9 months they've apparently spent on it, I think some of the sprites are not clearly elevated enough? Like the X crossing in the second has my brain really want to see it as ground level rails, and similiarly there's a second about two thirds across and one third down on the final image which doesn't read as elevated to me.
I think in the X at least they've had to make some balance between visual noise and how supported it looks, since the support rails terminate early rather than joining each other at angles, so I'm sure it's not easy to do.
I also agree that there's something off in the graphics department. Although looking across all the images, it's only in the diamond crossing that the illusion is horribly broken. The railings are mostly doing a good job of differentiating between the height levels, but if a junction is complex enough that the railings disappear for a significant portion of it, the differentiation is lost.
OTOH, the diamond junction is an incredibly zoomed-in shot, so maybe we're overestimating from one picture the size of the portion without railings.
I need to give Factorio another go. I loved the alpha, as others do. Than the release arrived and I gave up playing having to scout the map just to find an ore field.
That is the premise to playing, but it's why I found minecraft a bore. Same with any survival game.
You can make a game with custom settings and increase both the frequency and size/depth of ore fields, which makes that a lot less frustrating. There's still plenty to build even if you deemphasize the exploration portion (which wasn't my favorite either).
Maxing richness in world gen is all-but-infinite; but regardless infinite ore just moves the throughput bottleneck much earlier as you no longer have the incentive to distribute your ore supply.
Its been a while since I last played but there was very little minecraft style ore searching and that was on a railworld setup, which has fewer but richer ore patches. Part of that may have been the radars I put down whenever I placed defensive turrets, not only do they scan the map for you but they give you mapsight (when you zoom in enough it stops being a symbolic representation and starts being game graphics). Its very helpful for telling if a biter attack is serious or referencing a layout on the other side of your factory that you want to repeat, and I think its nicer that the map scanning occurs almost as a side effect of that immediate tangible benefit.
You can also muck with the world generation and make patches much richer and much more frequent. And I don't mean that like 'you can turn the difficulty down', its really more like increasing or decreasing emphasis on an aspect of the game to suit your preferences.
I have felt what you express about minecraft so I wanted to chip in my 2c, because it would be a shame if you missed out on factorio due to weird mapgen or the like.
Same, but for a different reason: I tend to get a bit frustrated knowing there is an 'optimal' way to build certain layouts, and the min-max part of my brain takes over and I spend more time looking up those layouts than actually enjoying figuring it out for myself.
Consider giving Satisfactory a try, if you have a PC good enough to support its 3D graphics. In Satisfactory, all ore deposits are infinite. It generally has much less survival elements, using mobs only as a way to gate higher-tier ore deposits and rare items from the early game. Once you have built a factory somewhere, you will not get attacked by hostiles there.
The energy cost to run more than a few is prohibitive though. I prefer to research cars and then go driving, but that’s a very different sort of gameplay (eg twitchy rapid steering to avoid collisions at speed)
Radars do consume a lot of energy at the beginning of a game, but even just one placed early and running continuously will find the ore needed to produce exponentially more power.
After that, I no longer think about radar power consumption. I just place them willy-nilly wherever they'll be useful. They're even spaced throughout my factory's interior just so I can see it working on the map from anywhere.
As a kid I was realy into model trains. But the reality was/is that it is way too expensive for my budget. What is the most close digital alternative to model railway enjoyment? Most of the games I have seen don't seem to capture it.
Oh. Oh no.
No, I'm not ready for this.
The restrictions on rail placement keep train layouts sane. There has to be a demarcation point between your rail and belt network. Now I can just fly in a train over top of my factory and drop materials everywhere. Now I can overlay two distinct rail networks in the same space.
I already have 1800 hours in Factorio. What more do the devs want from me?! My body can't take any more abuse!
I don't think I've ever been as excited about a game update as this new Factorio. I can't wait to make unholy train abominations floating atop my normal belt abominations