Briefly mentioned in this and rendered: space exploration is an incredible factorio mod and the deepest game I've ever played.
In Factorio you launch a rocket and win. Space exploration takes that and continues. You end up developing a base across multiple worlds in the solar system. After developing the solar system from the different unique resources on each planet you expand to interstellar space and then other solar systems. The game has a 'quarter of the way through' victory screen but there's another victory screen as you explore a mystery that spans the known universe and takes a reasonable amount of math knowledge figure out.
It's 100s of hours of gameplay and really well done. They modified the game so that you can fly spaceships between planets with a star and solar system maps and it all works really well.
Just make sure to turn the biters way down. The mod requires a level of patience and the intensity of combat runs counter to that (in fact the mod itself has a popup telling you to turn biters down on start).
Yeah, but I'd only pick up Space Exploration if you've played through the base game a few times and just want more. What I've found is that it rebalances the game so the 'base' takes less parts (i.e. for modules), but it goes harder on complexity. Like, the number of factories / production lines you have to build for the next stage just goes up and up.
I think I got to a point - probably nearly 100 hours in - where I finally had two lines of products coming from other planets to do the next tier of science.
Another tip that I'd add is that you should increase the science cost, I found it easy to run out of things to research while it still took hours to expand things for the next tier, which in practice meant your factory just stops doing anything because it doesn't need to do anything.
> Another tip that I'd add is that you should increase the science cost, I found it easy to run out of things to research while it still took hours to expand things for the next tier, which in practice meant your factory just stops doing anything because it doesn't need to do anything.
That's not a wrong way to play, but the intent of the default balancing is that you make those expansions smaller and faster. If a new resources has 5 steps to make, you can slap down 2-5 buildings per step with absolutely minimal planning/routing and feed it into a launcher. There's no need to spend hours on an expansion until your science production needs that much. And an orbital base can go very far with one assembler per recipe.
Agreed. The difficulty creep that was demanded by vocal experienced players has made Factorio much harder for newcomers to get into.
Factorio is a brilliant Zen garden and an absolutely terrible real time strategy game. Since the beta there's been more and more biter types and a gradual ramp up in how frantic you have to be to keep up. It's tremendously off-putting and completely opposite to what makes Factorio what it is.
Hopefully the developers realize this at some point and knock it off. Make a 'frantic mode' toggle for the experienced players but don't make it the default. I can handle needed a turret or two at key points but I can't handle needing to race the tech tree to keep up. I don't get why they made the defaults so hostile to new players. I'm not even that new to Factorio but it's still waaaay too frantic with default settings.
I actually liked having the biters on my first couple of playthroughs of the game. It added a sense of urgency and a feeling that this was a dangerous alien world.
After that I started playing mods that in and of themselves increased the difficulty of the game, and having the biters on top of that was just way too much.
Also, in a vanilla game, once you're more or less invulnerable to the biters they become just an extra annoyance, and I'd rather just focus on building.
On the other hand, without the sense of urgency that biters give the game can become kind of boring...
I agree. It adds pacing, as you can't simply dive down one branch of the technology tree. You're forced to always be developing your offense and defense, pushing you down branches you would have ignored otherwise.
I second this. Played with a friend some 150hrs and eventually started a new game with more mods and crazier biter levels ultimately increasing complexity and build formulas.
It was so nerve wracking I felt like progress was so much slower due to all the fighting. After maybe 50 hrs in we realized the krastorio mod want being called correctly, so when we fixed that we learned all the new complex recipes were obsolete and all our defense were useless due to the restructuring of ammo types
So I guess my point is. Bitters have a time and place and I'm over them.
I've never felt the desire to turn off biters. I'm in it for the building, not the fighting, but taking out biter camps combines well with exploration, and it's often a nice change of pace between all the thinking about logistics.
I'm currently playing with the Krastorio 2 mod, where the ridiculous range of the anti-material rifle makes killing biter camps a bit too trivial.
IMO the bugs add some needed entropy. If you’re not paying attention your bases will eventually be demolished. Makes me more thoughtful about my planning and design rather than just plopping some half assed shit down.
they're also the entity that gives "bite" (pun intended) to the pollution mechanic, which complicates lots of tradeoffs in the game. with biters/pollution, trees are both an inconvenience and a helpful pollution buffer. it's not trivial to decide whether to build your starter base in the open desert or nested between forests. additionally, the tradeoffs between solar vs steam and the effect modules are shallower when you ignore pollution.
I understand some people just aren't really into the tower defense side of factorio. that's okay, and it's a good thing that the settings can be adjusted to suit a wide range of playstyles. but if that's you, I'd recommend at least trying a low pollution / efficiency-focused playthrough. the game gives you a lot of tools to manage pollution, and the biter threat can be pretty minimal if you use them. imo this preserves the balance better than just turning off biters.
I rarely defend. Factorio is a great example of a good offense being the best defense. Just take out any biter camp that comes close to the edge of your pollution cloud, and you never really have to bother with defense.
> the game gives you a lot of tools to manage pollution
The popular Krastorio 2 mod adds even more: wind turbines from the start, more efficient ways to produce energy between steam and nuclear, and it even has air purifiers that reduce pollution. That's almost cheating. On top of that, taking out biter camps is a lot easier with the anti-material rifle.
There's a lot of important details in this : when, how and where biters expand, how much less killing settlers rather than nests increases evolution, &c.
Good point. I often play train worlds and the normal settings there is to not have biters expand at all. I often change that to having them expand slowly, but much more slowly than they normally do. Having new biter camps pop up in your cloud will require some defense of course.
My understanding is that the purpose of biters is to prevent you from building too big too fast and also as a resource sink to get rid of excess iron. There is a FFF they wrote about it and Katherine of Sky has a great video about why you should bet biters IIRC because she was against them when they got buffed as well but changed her tune. I can't seem to find either though.
I'm not sure I agree. I gave up on my first sandbox game of Factorio mid-way through, because I realized that biters were a pushover against my new tank... (not realizing that biter settings or mods existed)
Many of my fun memories of Factorio do involve biters though, both defending against them, and attacking them by building power lines and quickly building and then un-building laser towers near their bases (and later just by having super strong armor and a shotgun).
But I guess a toned down offense on your base, while still allowing the same kind of attack, would work just as well.
Also, the biters are somewhat boring at end of game, it's just the whole world map full of the exact same evolved bases everywhere.
I don't recall thinking the biters were at all frantic on default settings. They shape your play, but they don't really push things hard in my experience. I get why people play with them off (though I reckon a lot more it's because people wind up finding them boring after the first few runs), but I don't think it's obvious that it's something that should be the default for new players.
Is that actually how it ends up going? Unless your base is extremely small, then going slower means less pollution reaches the biters and they evolve slower.
If you won't have 20 drills going after several hours, "play the tutorial" is probably the best advice.
"Don't start in the middle of a treeless wasteland" is also important advice.
> "Don't start in the middle of a treeless wasteland" is also important advice.
Don't people just take whatever starting position the game gives you? Sometimes the starting position simply is a treeless wasteland. As far as I understand, moving to start far away from your starting position is a bad idea, because there's more biters there and the resources you need are much further apart.
Mineral patches are farther apart, but much richer. The starting patches will have a few thousand units, ones that require a train ride to get to will have millions of tens of millions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqJ3Vx6tdbc
One build style has you rushing to decent weapons, then walking far from spawn to set up your main base, so you don't have to bother with trains to get up to rockets. (The patches are randomly placed and don't have exclusion zones, so it's not impossible to see a 10M iron, copper, coal and oil all next to each other.)
I will note that getting to the rocket launch stage only requires 3-5 patches outside the starting area and you can very easily reach that with belts. Trains are for going big or simply because you like them.
The random map generation is not the ideal experience for new players. Most of them are fine, but sometimes you get accidental hard mode from no trees or cut-off starting resources or oil being super far away. And the solution is hitting the new seed button.
Not sure about resources being further apart, and agree about new players. However it's well known that your starting area can have an immense impact on the game difficulty.
There are games where there needs to be some investment, something at stake, for the game to be fun. Playing such a game on easy makes it less fun and eliminates the satisfaction of overcoming challenges. I wondered if this might be the case with factorio, so in my second year of playing it, I launched a deathworld map. Nope, it was just tedious as I thought it would be. Launched the rocket and never played with biters again.
The obvious missing piece is biter-clearance automation. The game is about increasing levels of automation. The next level after we get laser turrets and we get flying bots should be reaper drones with lasers that automatically patrol and eliminate biters within a large range. Also, I've put several thousand rockets into space (4K SPM baby), but I can't fire a nuclear weapon more than 54 meters?
Train artillery requires a base. Artillery agros biters, so they navigate to the location of the train. If the train is still there, it gets destroyed. If the train isn't there, the tracks get destroyed. And in any case, the train isn't automated: it doesn't drive out to where they are and kill them. The train artillery just makes more sense than stationary artillery: it has the same range, and it is the most effective way to transport artillery shells. Think about that for a minute: the most effective way to transport artillery shells to stationary artillery is to send it in a train artillery wagon. Why the fuck would you build stationary artillery! LOL!
Spidertrons are also not automated. They don't patrol. They don't run away when they are out of ammo, come back and reload.
Love the MIRV: like the too-short-range nukes on the spidertron, they are a great way to bomb yourself back to the stone-age. The video nicely shows how it's first missile on automatic mode blows up his own base. Brilliant.
I mostly play for the engineering side of it, so in all my bases over the years, I always always play on "peaceful" mode. It makes part of the tech tree useless (no need for better guns if there's nothing to shoot) but I find I enjoy the game much more that way.
I've found the other planets to be the real PITA that got old quick. Biter asteroids in particular.
I love Space Exploration, but when you hit late game man it starts to get tedious fast. I've gotten to naquium and the higher end space sciences, but I get bored with the logistics of keeping it all running and have quit both times I've reached this point.
Try Companion Drones (don't have a link to hand) - gives you a pair of very capable personal drones that can attack/defend as well as filling in blueprints.
I’m playing Space Exploration right now and it is epic. But beware, a professional YouTuber Dosh Doshington who seems to be one of the best Factorio players in the world (in my opinion) took 300 hours to complete SE with some help.
I think SE is amazing but it’s an incredible time sink. I’ve gotten 3500+ hours in Factorio, I think I have a problem.
Anyway, seeing Factorio in 3D was amazing though, really cool
Yes that's why I think you should turn biters waaaay down or off for SE. It's a game that can take a few years to play through if you have a full time job+other things. Still a worthy distraction, just understand you'll be playing for years.
another modpack that should be mentioned here is pyanodons [0]. similar to space exploration it also extends the game significantly after the rocket launch, but it also adds additional content before (in fact, the rocket launch itself becomes rather unimportant and is an at first optional blue science tech)
pyanodons adds very realistic ore processing chains, petrochemical processes (the main developer, pyanodon, is a chemical engineer by trade), energy generation mechanisms, electronics overhauls, and also farming components including both plants and animals.
overall, a full py run will easily take 1500+ hours. it's probably not particularly enjoyable for most vanilla players, but if you liked mods such as space exploration or nullius, you might find some enjoyment in py
What, you'd rather spend that time working "for the man"? ;)
To be honest, I used to be much more critical about how people spent time - particularly how I spent time ... Then I learned to stop worrying and love the reality: there is no 'purpose' (which is, itself, open to as many interpretations as you're able to and comfortable entertain[ing])...
pyanodons really does seem like grind for the sake of grind. It's great if you're basically a utility monster for factorio's core gameplay and want as much of it as possible without any regard for repetition, or you really get a lot out of the satisfaction of achieving ridiculous goals, but most people are not likely to find it very fun, even if they liked seablock or SE.
pY is very much not repetition of vanilla, not only it pushes Factorio to its limits in terms of features and of course PC load (if not in the same way than the new SpaceX), part of the fun is to have MANY alternative ways to produce most of the things, then decide which one you want to use.
Py is as hardcore as it gets, and a lot of even experienced players don't pick it up for that reason.
That being said, the Factorio crowd I rub shoulders with 1500 hours is not a lot. Heck, i myself am about 4-5k hours of gameplay and mine are rookie numbers :D
Factorio allows for an extremely wide ways to play it, multiplayer is it's own world entirely if you find a decent crew to play with (there are many communities around Factorio).
And then there's Clusterio that opens a whole new dimension of what's possible.
You spend a small amount of time each day meticulously crafting the factory/garden to unwind. The time it takes isn't a problem. The goal isn't to 'win'.
I've played Factorio (and Satisfactory, and DSP) and I understand that you can just do a bit here and a bit there but still. And I've spent 1,500 hours in some games (with a couple of hours a night, most - but not all - nights) too. Even so, it's intimidating to start such an endeavour.
The biggest issue with biters, IMO, is that their density continues to ramp beyond you capping out your ability to efficiently eliminate them.
In my (normal level biter) space exploration run, my buddy and i didn't run into any problems clearing out a large swath of space to build by rushing artillery and flamethrower turrents. The problem became the tedium of expanding our territory to keep the pollution cloud contained by manually firing artillery.
IMO, the problem should be solved by giving the player better tools for artillery automation. The auto-firing artillery is both too short range, and has a tendency to anger a bunch of nests at once. Instead, it should focus on eliminating one nest cluster at a time, and maybe allow for circuit-controlled timing of when to move into the next cluster.
With SE you don't need that much space on Nauvis. You should be targeting 10-30SPM in your first playthru; you will get bottlenecked on extraterrestrial resources as soon as you try to ramp up space science. There are people who beat the game off of a single core drill on Nauvis - what makes this mod take so long is designing all the solutions, rather than waiting for the science to trickle.
Artillery (as well as basically everything from the base game) should be considered early game tech: you will later unlock stuff that would make Palpatine salivate.
If anything, you very suddenly run out of things worth shooting at.
> [...] maybe allow for circuit-controlled timing of when to move into the next cluster.
You can achieve that in the vanilla game by blueprinting the artillery outpost (which would include all the necessary supporting defences, like walls/turrets/roboports/etc). Train rolls in, unloads gun+flamethrower ammo, once ammo buffers are ready set a signal to load ammo into artillery, which will start shooting. Set a timer, every time you load a shell reset it, once timer runs out + there are still shells left - you can set off an alarm that the outpost is done. Use a filtered deconstructor to pick the pieces up and move it all over.
I got pretty far into a Seablock run before eventually giving up (I think it was around the 4th or 5th science color). I ended up stopping because the factory design started getting tedious. I had all the requisite ingredients coming in on neat belts (city blocks / LTS delivered) and the lines were modeled in Factory Planner, but just assembling them for each science pack was a larger and larger amount of tedium: not any new challenge, just tons of belt weaving and inserter adjusting.
I'm willing to be told I'm just doing it wrong, but does vanilla + Space Exploration have a different sort of challenge curve, or would it end up being pretty similar to Seablock (which includes SpaceX, dunno if that's the same or different).
It has tedium in the science imho but it's low enough bandwidth that I solved that with logistic chests without ever falling behind on science.
The larger aspect is effectively restarting repeatedly on new worlds which have unique new resources until they too are shipping rockets of stuff into space. Each new world has different properties. Some have almost no solar, others no water, some have no bugs, but others have bugs dropping in from space anywhere on your base so it's not the same thing each time. I don't mind this aspect. It is a bit like playing Factorio on repeat but it has reasoning behind it. And each restart you get to bring a cargo rocket of stuff with you and the ability to build anything you've already researched.
My outpost worlds are often messy and do the bare minimum to send up rockets of stuff to space. But it works. I'm finding it fun but I'm only a couple of hundred hours in.
> I'm willing to be told I'm just doing it wrong, but does vanilla + Space Exploration have a different sort of challenge curve
Completely different. The SpaceX mod used as an endgame in Seablock has no relation to Space Exploration.
Space Exploration makes pervasive changes throughout the game, and adds the ability to launch yourself into space, build a space station, build colonies on other planets, and mine resources on other planets (and elsewhere) which aren't available on the starting planet. The research required for the first rocket launch is reduced, and there are multiple tracks of research unlocked once you get into space.
yes, space exploration (which is a different mod entirely), aims to introduce new automation challenges instead of simply extending the same kind of challenges as in the base game (though it also does a little of that: it'll probably take you a bit longer to launch a rocket than in vanilla and that's more or less the start of SE, but it's nowhere near as slow as seablock). It basically requires use of the circuit network, for example (though the required use is relatively simple, it benefits from more advanced usage).
You don't even have to alt tab out to use Excel, they've added to the game. Seems like it doesn't fit your criteria for games you'd like anymore so there's no reason to try! :P
No trig or calc, every formula is linear. There’s some very non-integer factors in there, but if you take “time” as an input you can do it all with algebra.
Honestly, I think the feeling of not wanting to have to bust out a spreadsheet to play a video game is entirely reasonable and shouldn't be downvoted. but this is HN in 2023, so he'll get downvoted, while, who does use a spreadsheet will get downvoted when I admit that the spreadsheet I use is from Microsoft. =)
You don't have to though. Base facrorio does not require any spreadsheets or math (other than production lines for efficiency, but that's kind of the nature of the game.)
It's a mod, and so not required and already something you decided to optionally add to your game.
After initially bouncing off of Factorio and then having a lot of fun with shapez, I tried Factorio again and got totally addicted for a while. Shapez is a perfect entry point and is different enough to be worthwhile for its own sake. I also just love the chill nature of Shapez, it's a lot less stressful than Factorio since there are no senemies and resources don't run out. I have high hopes for Shapez 2, which, from the dev logs, looks great and will hopefully have some extra QOL stuff to eliminate some of the original's minor annoyances.
I had such a fantastic time with DSP. Has some clunkiness which will hopefully be refined with time, but absolute blast in going from nothing to dominating a star. Count me as one of those people who see zero need for the game to incorporate the upcoming combat/enemy mechanic.
Yes! I was hoping someone mentioned this already. I had soo much fun with DSP, ended up needing to track all my shipments in a spreadsheet. I really hope the upcoming combat system works out so I have an excuse to play it again.
I agree Factorio does not look the greatest. It looks like a giant smear of muddy washed out colors. I've tried to watch some content on YT and its so hard to tell whats going on or to see anything as a newcomer.
As a game dev, factorio has always been a title that I would absolutely love to see the original source code for.
Also, for anyone who’s first question was “how is this legal”:
“When asked about the legality of this whole endeavour, they showed great understanding and allowed the project to be released, provided it won’t be used for commercial purposes.”
The Factorio team is pretty chill about stuff, generally, which is why they make the game so moddable in the first place. The only time I remember them having to take any legal action was to deal with someone reselling stolen keys or something. It's understood that anything cool the community does is good for Factorio.
> i would absolutely love to see the original source code for
As someone who's seen the source code, I'd say it's relatively good code, but nothing particularly amazing. C++ with multiple inheritance, game objects doing method calls to each other in multiple phases, and a good dose of "maybe not the best way to do this but it works and we're not changing it now" code. What keeps it all running as well as it does is a comprehensive set of automated tests, and Rseding getting on your case any time you make a PR with less-than-optimal code. The interesting bits are the algorithms, which are covered by the Friday Facts.
I'd be impressed if they managed to find any bugs, it's probably one of the least buggy games I've encountered (the speedruns for example contain no glitches at all).
“ Fixed a crash when downgrading ghost of assembling machine when target machine cannot craft recipe due to missing pipes. ”
“ Fixed a crash when removing modded pipe-to-ground that connects to a shifted pipe-to-ground. ”
“ Fixed that solar panels on multiple surfaces would all produce electricity based on a daytime of one of the surfaces when they were part of a single electric network with a script created wire between surfaces “
“ Fixed a crash when moving blueprint book to blueprint library when there is also another book that will get under the cursor and tooltips are showing “
“ Fixed a crash related to teleporting spider vehicles with burner energy sources between surfaces. “
And so on. There was a blog post a while back that claimed they had fixed over 8,800 reported bugs and after more than four years of development they had reached 0 outstanding bugs.
Particularly notable is that many of the bugs they're fixing can only be triggered by mods. (This is the case for at least half of the ones in your example -- "modded pipe-to-ground" is obviously mod-only, and neither "solar panels on multiple surfaces" nor "spider vehicles with burner energy sources" are features present in the base game.)
Naively, I had the inverse question after reading that, how would this be illegal? Why must this be a labor of love? Use of Factorio IP seems limited to visual inspiration and file format parsing, and its clearly transformative (in the legal sense of the word)
Sometimes I think we're far too obsessed with legal. The developer is good to the community, the community is good to the developer. This seems like a much more productive relationship than arguing over what is legal.
In this instance, it would be more than "look and feel" and more "would a person assume this project is done by the original Factorio developers" — are they misleading the audience. They copied much of the UI from the Factorio site for instance — so if they wanted you could make the argument the intent is to mislead.
I think you’re confusing trademark and copyright. Trademark is about confusing the public. Copyright is about derivative works. It seems pretty clear to me that this is a derivative work, due to its direct copying of Factorio sprites.
The website UI is by the Alt-F4 team, not the FUE5 team, it's like seeing this discussion and then complaining that FUE5 'copied' Factorio's colour scheme, thinking they are also behind hackernews, lol.
> When you don’t know how to code, you just put these nodes together, and if it doesn’t work you just keep adding more and more and become increasingly confused. Suspiciously similar to this factory game I’ve been playing recently.
I loved that bit too. Especially because when you do know how to code, you still do the same exact thing but some things are probably less verbose. Still lots of spaghetti involved occasionally.
I installed Factorio 4 times, and uninstalled it three times.
The slow pace at the start, and the somewhat lifeless 2D isometric graphics simply didn't do it for me.
But the blog posts were fascinating, and people kept raving about it, so on that 4th install I decided to soldier on and actually get somewhere.
I now rate it as one of the greatest games ever made. It is insanely technically impressive, able to run megabases with trains and belts and robots and inserters and all the rest of it at 60 FPS. It doesn't crash. It's incredibly fun and very addictive. Amazing mods, amazing community.
I can't wait for the expansion. I'll just assume from the start it will be as polished as Factorio is.
I apologize in advance for introducing the risk of ruining your life.. but I highly recommend checking out Captain of Industry.
It has a faster start, real world processes, terraforming and I believe is better than Factorio in every way. I consider Factorio a genre defining game and while Satisfactory and DSP comes close to surpassing it their 3d nature makes the game's puzzles easier to solve. Captain of Industry makes the puzzles just as difficult as Factorio despite having more dimensions. CoI has a lot more resources you need to manage as well.
What will be very interesting, as stated in the article, is to see what the factorio creatives in the community figure out what to hack together based on this...
I expect some sort of UE5 factorio-esque battle system...
Imagine a game where you run a factory, and you haveto maintain it - while a bunch of PvP FPS shooter are running through your factory battleing it out and keep dmaging your supply lines and you have to fix them - you can choose to join the factory maintenance team, or be a PvP player laying waste to your enemies and fucking up the factory supply lines for the other teams at the same time.
Thats interesting, but I don't think the social dynamics of such a game would work. The situation is unstable, where either the builders can't keep up and quickly lose their factory (and probably quit) or the PvPers get surpressed and/or just ignore the factory.
This is kinda what happened in modded PvP Minecraft servers.
But there are already some team based "production line PvP" games like Mindustry and Foxhole.
I modeled a few of the Factorio machines back when I was 3d-printing them to use as desk ornaments - they took me around six hours each, so I could definitely imagine getting through all of them in a few months. Of course, my task was certainly easier since models destined for 3d printing don't need proper UV mapping or texturing.
> The remodelling process was a lot of fun, but next time we should really ask for the original Factorio models to preserve what’s left of our sanity.
Some tools are a lot better-- Substance 3D for texturing, for example, especially if you can get their auto UVing to make something acceptable-- but fundamentally most straight-up 3D modelling tools are roughly what they were a while ago. The screenshot of their model seems to have tight topology, too, so I'll bet it was pretty labor intensive.
Full disclosure didn't even read the article. But if you wanted to know what programming as a game would look like, play Factorio. Refactoring, decoupling, debugging, it's all there. I played it intensely for 3 weeks then had to force myself to put it down. It's a one of a kind game.
Why is the video 25fps? To make it more "cinematic"? It isn't even 24fps cinematic. In either case, they both look awful in your typical 60hz container because 60 isn't divisible by 24 or 25.
Just make it 30 or 60fps. It looks awful like this.
Most people over the age of 30 or so can’t see the difference. We didn’t grow up with high frame rates and our brains didn’t train on them. It’s entirely possible they have no idea this is a thing.
I’ve seen some videos where different people try out gaming trials on different Hz’s and it seems like older gamers don’t get nearly as much performance improvement from high frame rates that younger players do. They’re also much less likely to be able to tell which is which in a blind trial.
I never mentioned high frame rates. I mentioned uneven frame times, because you can't properly show 24 or 25fps on a 60hz display. The vast majority of videos on YouTube are 30fps so they don't have this problem.
60Hz video looks super weird to me. Looks like it's running in like 2x FF, but everything syncs up with 1x audio. Watching The Hobbit when it came out was a horrible experience.
It's not a problem with games, though. Even if 60 fps was quite rare to achieve for 3D games 20+ years ago. I was usually happy if I could get stable 20-30 fps.
Factorio is already quite CPU heavy so I don't want to imagine how it would behave in 3D. The factory size might be much smaller for this to be possible.
I don't really see the point of this, really, except a misunderstanding about game design, UX and programming in general. This thing might be possible with huge sacrifices, though, but I'm not very interested in making something in 3D "just because". I love 3D games, but a lot of games just don't translate properly to 3D.
Factorio is popular because its hardcore players make immense factories that usually reaches the limit of any CPU/GPU.
That's a bit why I dislike most of the gaming industry, because there are way too many people who aims for high quality 3D graphics without ever understanding software or hardware, and it shows, and it's a big step back for the industry as a whole, but GPU vendors are always happy for those people to push for high end graphics, but not people who like good gameplay.
... your comment doesn't particularly suggest that you have understood what this is about, while complaining that its authors don't understand things. For one thing, this is not the game and doesn't attempt to be.
factorio isn't CPU or GPU bound though. memory bandwidth is typically the bottleneck, at least according to the developers.
I'm glad the developers have prioritized game mechanics and sim optimization over graphics, and I think the game looks good enough for what it is. but I wouldn't mind if they improved them either. they could do a lot before it meaningfully impacted UPS for megafactories.
I mean, Satisfactory and Dyson Sphere Program run well.
Also, hypothetically, I don't think a 3D client would impact the simulation since Factorio (AFAIK) runs as a client + server. The 2D simulation would be unchanged.
In Factorio you launch a rocket and win. Space exploration takes that and continues. You end up developing a base across multiple worlds in the solar system. After developing the solar system from the different unique resources on each planet you expand to interstellar space and then other solar systems. The game has a 'quarter of the way through' victory screen but there's another victory screen as you explore a mystery that spans the known universe and takes a reasonable amount of math knowledge figure out.
It's 100s of hours of gameplay and really well done. They modified the game so that you can fly spaceships between planets with a star and solar system maps and it all works really well.
Just make sure to turn the biters way down. The mod requires a level of patience and the intensity of combat runs counter to that (in fact the mod itself has a popup telling you to turn biters down on start).