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Factorio - Strike the earth! (with automated mining drills)
harvest
By birthright,a stupendous badass.Registered User regular
By birthright,a stupendous badass.Registered User regular
Here's the trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yDZM0diiYc
Here's the demo download page:
http://www.factorio.com/demo/stable
Factorio is a management-transportation-crafting-survival-strategy-sci-fi game. It's in what seems to be very late alpha. I have only played the demo to completion (about 2 hours of gameplay, which is like an extended tutorial) and totally love it.
If you've played Transport Tycoon, Dwarf Fortress, Starbound, Minecraft, or any of the Anno games, this title has things similar to all of those.
You are a spaceman whose ship has crashed on an alien planet. You're there to build some kind of planetary defenses for colonists that are en route, and even though your ship crashed that job still needs to be done. You start out, like you do, by gathering iron, coal, and wood by hand, but within a few minutes you are building coal-fired automatic mining drills, conveyor belts, and robotic arms to move materials around. Soon you'll set up boilers to run steam engines which provide electricity for your growing automated facilities. Include research, vehicles, and combat with alien life the bigger your operation gets. The indigenous life doesn't like your pollution and will try to bust up your machines to stop it! At first you're defending yourself with a pistol, but soon you can set up automated gun turrets.
I haven't dug in to the main game yet, I wanted to post this post first. Everyone download the demo!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yDZM0diiYcHere's the demo download page:
http://www.factorio.com/demo/stable
Factorio is a management-transportation-crafting-survival-strategy-sci-fi game. It's in what seems to be very late alpha. I have only played the demo to completion (about 2 hours of gameplay, which is like an extended tutorial) and totally love it.
If you've played Transport Tycoon, Dwarf Fortress, Starbound, Minecraft, or any of the Anno games, this title has things similar to all of those.
You are a spaceman whose ship has crashed on an alien planet. You're there to build some kind of planetary defenses for colonists that are en route, and even though your ship crashed that job still needs to be done. You start out, like you do, by gathering iron, coal, and wood by hand, but within a few minutes you are building coal-fired automatic mining drills, conveyor belts, and robotic arms to move materials around. Soon you'll set up boilers to run steam engines which provide electricity for your growing automated facilities. Include research, vehicles, and combat with alien life the bigger your operation gets. The indigenous life doesn't like your pollution and will try to bust up your machines to stop it! At first you're defending yourself with a pistol, but soon you can set up automated gun turrets.
I haven't dug in to the main game yet, I wanted to post this post first. Everyone download the demo!
+1
Posts
In the full game you can run the campaign which continues where the demo left off. I went to sandbox mode, but something tells me that playing the campaign would have explained some mechanics better. It took me a good while of experimenting to figure out how oil processing works (it is actually pretty easy).
In sandbox mode the game is about as hard or easy as you want to make it. I toned down the biters for my first run so I could figure out how stuff works. But you can also turn them up.
I need to get a lot better at feeding resources to my machinery using automation.
I am having a ton of fun with it though. On the second campaign mission you have to get the trains running, and that was fun to do, and then fun to ride them. A train car can carry 960 units of ore, so pretty soon I had a stash of like 12k ore at the mine station and nearly that much at the factory end. Blue inserters can only work so fast to unload that shit into chests.
When building train tracks, the train stop goes on the right-hand side of the track. If you don't put it there, the train goes 'no path' forever and won't move.
The bottleneck for greens doesn't even seem to be the components themselves, the factory that makes them is god awful slow as well. Probably gonna stick a couple speed modules in along with a productivity module till I unlock automation 3 (hopefully that can get the time down some).
So here's the biggest selling point to me about this game: a crafting game that doesn't give two shits about trying to waste your time on the boring stone/iron/silver/etc pickaxe system or manually mining individual bits of stuff. Yeah, you have to do some manual mining to get the basics materials, but once you've got a self-sustaining setup, it's actually self-sustaining. The fun is in maximizing productivity and getting great automated setups, not micromanaging or wacking away at rocks with your latest-and-greatest pickaxe.
By the third stage of the demo, I had a little base running off of steam power where the coal mining automatically refuelled boilers, all my resources were being collected and refined into plates automatically, and even auto-loaded gun turrets; basically, my whole factory was on autopilot while my four radar dishes scanned for wreckage. And this was a teensy factory, with only a couple steam plants and handful of ore collectors.
Basically, I'm hooked. Paid for and downloaded.
If it is, then fuck you guys for finding this and ruining my life.
(Please do not gift. My game bank is already full.)
I just took the plunge and picked it up.
[edit]
Maybe, maybe I can hold out until this hits Steam.
(Please do not gift. My game bank is already full.)
See, when I built that and got it running efficiently so the labs were stocked 100% of the time, I was proud of myself. Now I'm looking at it and going "I COULD TEAR IT DOWN AND REBUILD IT AND GAIN 43% MORE EFFICIENCY."
Also for making me want to take the place I've spent the last three hours putting together, pull it apart, and redirect all the manufacturing products to centralized collection areas.
cold, emotionless, completely automated robots made me laugh
skynet has won, folks
not gonna get me.
nope nope nope
Oh its not on steam? Good I'm safe.
I wonder if it would make sense to have SpaceChem style leaderboards. You know, maps with a certain goal and then stats on how much time and components you used compared to others.
(Please do not gift. My game bank is already full.)
...holy shit. I am already scribbling designs on some paper for the next level.
Currently playing: GW2 and TSW
God damn it.
I'm a sucker for games like this where you can just sperg over efficiency and what not, and end up obsessing over them (because I'm not as smart as a lot of people playing stuff such as SpaceChem and Kerbal Space Program with their crazy solutions and rocket designs respectively).
Now if you'll excuse me I'll be over here wondering why it's suddenly 12 hours later while I watch my automated production line.
Steam profile - Twitch - YouTube
Switch: SM-6352-8553-6516
Towns?
FFRK: 9rRG
Yes
Also I was pretty proud of myself when I built up an efficient mineral burning system.
(Please do not gift. My game bank is already full.)
a) Stop with the hostiles and the day/night cycle. The tutorial is meant to teach the mechanics, and it's fucking annoying having to deal with that shit while I'm trying to figure out what the hell the tutorial is trying to tell me (badly).
b) Stop with the prebuilt tutorial stages. If I'm meant to learnt, it doesn't help if you've gotten half the shit placed already. I just started map 3 and I'm faced with a lot of stuff I don't recognize. Why wasn't I allowed to place those? why wasn't I told what they are/do?
c) For the love of god, on/off switches for everything.
I can tell I'm going to like the building side of things, but not the tower defense bits.
Currently playing: GW2 and TSW
I said screw the tutorial and just dived into the game proper after finishing the very first tutorial area.
While it still has the day night cycle, you'll be glad to hear the enemies aren't a problem unless you settle right next to a hive or if you have a lot of pollution. Like, there was a hive about 2.5 screens away from the edge of my base, and they left me 100% alone until I had my boilers running, and then it was only like 1 little scout every 2-3 game days.
And then you can just throw up a few automated turrets.
Apparently the 'F' button is your friend.
(Please do not gift. My game bank is already full.)
Eh, after playing for a bit, I really feel like this would just add an excessive and pointless level of micromanaging. Resources are massive, so there isn't actually much point to having to switch a bunch of sequences on and off manually; using conveyor belts to buffer resources lets you build long production sequences that automatically stop drawing resources when the conveyor backs up, which is WAY more useful than a switch to stop a sequence.
For instance, at this point I have something like a dozen constructors and furnaces with a zillion arms running in a production chain which takes in coal, iron ore, and copper ore to produce copper sheets, iron plates, gears, wire, circuits, conveyor pieces, inserters, red science stuff in triplicate, and green science stuff in duplicate, with the red and green science automatically dumped into four labs for hassle-free research. The whole sequence is self-fueling, including the half-dozen steam engines powering my base, and I have a couple of dump points for excess iron plate and copper sheets so I can grab them for crafting elsewhere.
Trying to manage that all with manual switches would be a total nightmare, as opposed to the conveyor buffer setup restricting its own use to strictly what is needed. Just let stuff run, because draining resources at any significant rate is actually really tough unless you decide to just build massive extraction points.
Oh, and two pieces of advice for everybody in general. The first is that inserters won't actually endlessly dump items into every structure. For instance, furnaces will keep taking in ore until you have a full stack of refined product inside the furnace, but they will only take a handful of coal and refill it as it runs out. Inserters will also only automatically put a certain amount of ammo in turrets, and will also only put a couple of each science type in a lab at a time. What this means is that you don't have to worry about an automated sequence turning all of your resources into bullets or red science or something like that, since the stuff you'll be dumping refined products into are generally limited specifically to prevent that from happening.
The second thing is that building multiple labs is totally worth it. 4 labs means research is done in a quarter of the time, and once you have an automated sequence figured out for getting science goo made and transferred to the labs, research basically takes care of itself except for choosing the actual research items.
So much regret.
FFRK: 9rRG
So much
I agree about wanting off switches. I don't ever need hundreds, or even a full stack, of engines or defense drones. It would be simpler for me to let those assemblers run and then switch them off when I don't need it anymore. You could rotate an inserter to get a similar effect but that doesn't stop power draw or pollution.
What do you mean..too much?
This is the point where I realize I still have a kindergarten-level understanding of the game.
...ok then. If anyone wants me, I'll be in the corner playing with some sticks and mud.
Currently playing: GW2 and TSW