Find Your Inner Engineer with Factorio
Will You Build Your Own CPU from Factories?
There are several games where I’ve spent hundreds, perhaps even thousands of hours, but I’m hesitant to write about them.
They’re so complex and ingrained in my heart that I don’t want to risk messing up my words. One such game is Factorio. But let’s embark on this journey together, shall we?
Factorio was likely the first game of its genre I ever played. It’s simple at first glance: gather resources from your surroundings and turn them into something useful, even if just a little bit.
For example, you gather wood and iron ore. You think, “I can make usable iron from this.” So you gather some nearby stone, build a furnace, and use wood to smelt the iron. Easy, right?
The same process applies to copper. With iron and copper plates in hand, you can create additional tools and start building assembly machines to automate their production.
And then you find yourself in an endless cycle of building more things to build additional things, all to automate everything.
Yes, Factorio is that kind of game — a game where you construct huge factories from individual parts, connecting everything with transport belts and later with drones. The more you build, the more processing you require, necessitating tweaks to maximize efficiency.
You can imagine yourself as the sole technician in an enormous machine where everything needs to work together. If something fails on one side, you’ll soon find issues elsewhere.
The complexity of your creations can grow to enormous sizes. You can automate tasks to the point where you can even build your own computer, performing calculations, playing music, or even setting up further growth on its own.
Sure, such extremes are usually undertaken only by the most dedicated enthusiasts, devoting vast amounts of their time to the effort, but the possibility is there.
As a normal player like myself, you’ll slowly create your factory, searching for opportunities to improve and ensuring that your perfect home isn’t destroyed by local fauna, who dislike all the pollution your factory generates.
Right, you’re not building on a lifeless place or any virtual laboratory; you’re situated on a planet with its own inhabitants. Despite not being humanoid, they’re smarter and more dangerous than you might think at first glance.
So, in addition to the buildings that produce something, you’ll also need buildings that produce fast-flying lead, flames, or laser beams.
All of these could be enclosed by some, perhaps too fragile walls, and when this is ready, you can only pray that you built enough of it.
Bet that you didn’t, and all those creatures full of acid will sooner or later demolish at least something vital for your factory.
If you want a peaceful playthrough, you can disable these enemies, or if you’re up for a more challenging gameplay, you can boost their numbers, abilities, and so on.
And if you get tired of everything the game offers? There are thousands of greatly crafted mods that could add so much more to the game.
Be it new types of resources, new complicated recipes to craft even more intricate items, or total overhauls of the game providing vastly different experiences.
I think I’m starting to go in circles with my recommendations, but if you’ve ever played Captain Of Industry, Dyson Sphere Program, or Infinifactory, I can only recommend Factorio for you. For me, it’s like the older brother, or perhaps even the good old dad, of all these games.
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