This weekend I spent some time playing the demo part of the newly released game called Factorio. As the name suggests it is about building factories, and it reminded me of games like the original Railroad Tycoon, early Settlers and to a degree Simcity and the likes.
You start out be mining basic resources yourself, like stone, wood and iron ore. And then you can combine the stone into a furnace and use the wood as fuel to smelt the iron.
But instead of doing it manually, you can construct a automatic drill and connect it to your furnace, and fuel both. Or you could establish energy supply and conveyor belts and establish an automated factory.
Of course it quickly becomes complicated, because just like beforementioned games, inputs are never where they are needed and outputs also needs to be somewhere else. But it is also immensely satisfying when you manage to get a hugely complicated factory spinning.
The demo consists of the four “tutorials”, and I will put that in quotes, because while the firsts are pretty basic, there certainly is a steep learning curve for the latter – they are more like scenarios than tutorials, being quite big and somewhat open-ended. And they do not guide every step, but sets quite broad goals, so you will probably end up wanting to try out different strategies.
Some tips:
- In the latter tutorial there are lots of critters and they can be deadly in huge numbers. But they are fairly indifferent until you begin to pollute, so there is plenty of time to plan and to build up defences, before you ramp up production.
- I also tried to automate everything, but you only need so many engines, so it was actually viable to build an unconnected factory and feed it manually. You can also feed factories from crates, and move in materials in bulk manually. Having automated production is much cooler, though!
- You also might want to siphon off some intermediate materials for your own use, but be careful not to starve the automated production entirely. Sometimes the sinks are too effective; a workaround is all crates have a lower limit set that the automation will respect.
- I have found no penalty for pulling down constructions, so if something needs to be moved, go ahead and tinker.
- Remember the wiki (and it is searchable)
While the tutorials are large enough to be replayable, they do not allow the entire techtree – there is much more to the game. I will probably be exploring the tutorials again some times before deciding, but it looks like a very promising game.
I will recommend that you try it out too, but beware that it can be a time sink. There is always just one more tweak to do before saving and taking a pause …!
The game is available for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.