An interesting little game where you basically make factories of various levels of complexity
It starts a bit minecraft where you just harvest stuff yourself and make smelters refine stuff but then it shifts to a game of making supply chains automated mining machine harvesting the ore and coal for fuel conveyer belts feeding taking that to your smelters little robot arms that shift stuff into them and then take out finished product chains of automated assembly machines that make up the various required parts. It's a fairly compelling construction and management game.
There is a demo on the site and you can buy the alpha for not much
Comments
Cool game. I'm trying to do that factory stuff with Minecraft at the moment. :)
Factorio just went to full release 1.0 a few weeks back after a lengthy early access period so I've been playing it again and did get to "the end" or goal of the game for the first time. You launch a rocket which is the end goal you can just keep playing and improving and increasing your factory though at this point you've run through most of the tech tree with the rest of the upgrades just slight improvements to weapon damage speed and things like artillery range
I got further into the newer bits and bobs like nuclear power which I'd not really touched before running most of my factory off two 240MW reactors
I also got some of the nuclear enhanced weapons including the nuclear missiles which are kinda dangerous to leave equiped as I managed to destroy a large section of my factory by accidentally pressing space and nuking a small area. Luckilly I'd gotten to full automation at this point and my factory just rebuilt itself from stores using the logistics bot network.
Another new addition was the spiderbot a laser and rocket launching mobile robotic spider you can drive or remote control very fun to run around blasting things with it's many many rocket launchers.
I'm terrible at organizing my factory I set out with good intention but before long it's a mess of spagetti and weird jury rigged constructors pulling stuff out of inappropriate places and routing stuff back and forth in the gaps. I never allow enough room for expansion
Still a very fun game and nothing comes close to it in terms of levels or automation and systems in a factory game worth checking out if you like this sort of thing and have been waiting for it to leave early access
I have indeed been waiting for the end of early access. What puts me off is the graphics. Brown/green just isn't very interesting to look at. Call me a graphics ho but it just looks ugly. If it ever goes on sale, I'll probably grab it for some SNG shinanigans.
You're a graphics Ho!
I get what you mean and some of that I think is intentional it's a very complex visual environment and everything needs to read clearly for you to understand what is happening so the high contrast between the elements makes it possible to look at even the most complex factories and understand in a glance what is going on or if there are problems.
With the above (which admittedly is not a great example as it doesn't have much going on) I can see just by looking what is on all the belts where I'm lacking supply of any component how the resources are being distributed what factory types and inserters and belts are connected. If I had the overlay turned on (which I do most of the time) I could see what each is producing and what is in all the storage chests and pipes or being ferried about by the logistics bots. I can see the power is all connected and if I hovered over where the areas of influence are I can see where I've got automated construction in progress and what had been completed where elements are outside the power or logistics or construction areas. I can see where resources are roughly how much of any given thing there is and obstacles like cliffs trees or alien bitters.
In more complex factories being able to read all that at a glance is essential so the simple backgrounds and high contrast and deliberate use of colour coding make that work. The sprites have improved over the years with some more pleasing designs but the overall design language has remained the same it's very effective for communicating what is happening with the high levels of complexity you end up with.