And people wonder why I still play Factorio, Parkitect, ATS, or RCT. People suck and being able to ignore them is great.
I’ve been playing Planet Crafter waaay too much. Check it out if you like Factorio, Satisfactory, etc. It’s fun and super addictive. At least to me.
Dyson Sphere Program
I’ve played DSP, it’s a great game too. I’ll probably jump back to that when I burn out on Planet Crafter. The thing I don’t like about it and Satisfactory is conveyor belt management. The constant battle to rewire the spaghetti.
DSP recently got localized small distribution drones, you can convert any storage box into a tiny logistics station now. It’s pretty sweet, really reduces the spaghetti early on in recent playthroughs
bruh factorio is literally in active development and has a huge active community, who would even think twice seeing someone playing it.
I absolutely love rollercoaster Tycoon. There really isn’t a game like it.
Have you tried Planet Coaster? Might be up your alley.
Here I am playing games from the 90s and 00s. Crazy that Quake III and Unreal Tournament are still active.
I often use UT, Q3 and CS 1.6 as examples of how long a game can stay active when players are given tools to setup their own servers, as opposed to companies handling multiplayer themselves (and often killing it off in a few years).
When they’re good, they’re good. Good gameplay beats good graphics every day
You might like Oxygen Not Included as well
Single player is the best.
yes but i do miss co-op gaming.
Couch co-op, split-screen, hotseat; Kingdom Two Crowns is nice. So is Darksiders Genesis, For The King, Moon Hunters, Trine, etc.
Always on the lookout for other good co-op couch games, especially with a good story, but I feel that they are few and far between. :(
Brothers, It takes two and A way out.
A way out I really liked.
For me its the Borderlands series & portal 2.
It takes two is absolutely amazing in every aspect.
Deep Rock Galactic.
Rock and Stone, Miner!
Powerwash Simulator.
A few games that are great single player can also be played with friends such as Terraria, Stardew Valley, Factorio and Minecraft.
10 year old games on a 4k OLED with maxed out settings is the best. Especially if it’s a game you can run above 60 fps.
100% Online gaming is pretty toxic and I love being able to play at my own pace.
Only exception to this for me was stardew with my wife.
Toxicity is one thing for sure but I don’t like how the commercialization of MP has shaped it.
Indie games have a very different feel in their online gameplay compared to “commercial” games.
Even way back, HL1 online and those online experiences felt so different because it was designed to be about the group experience rather than level up and get a skin, buy a weapon, our skill tree is massive. Sure technology was holding it back but I wish I could see what it would’ve been without the massive push for $$$.
Oh, yeah. I just ignore that stuff. But it’s really annoying. I can’t even think of the last time I played a game online.
Oh, I got fallout 76 on sale super cheap and uninstalled it after 20-30 minutes.
I only want to play single player games. I’m not a super big gamer, but I just want campaigns. I recently got a PS5 and I’ve been struggling to find newer games that have a great single player campaign. RDR2 is my style, it’s my favorite game. The gameplay itself is a little problematic, but it’s gorgeous and the story just gets me where I live. And that’s what I want.
I only play single player games, but couldn’t care less about achievements. It is all about exploration, story, game mechanics and modding for me.
People treat achievements as if they are a status symbol. I mean sure, if you don’t know what else to do in a game, they can give you some goal, but IMO the game itself should encourage you to reach the goal, not some external badge. The experience doing the task should be the reward in of itself.
Achievement unlocked! You’ve completed the tutorial!
What’s even funnier is “14.39% of players have gotten this far before uninstalling the game and forgetting about it forever”
Achievement unlocked! You opened the game!
I feel like even that would have only like a 60% achievement rate.
depends on the game, achievement hunting can be a lot of fun in a game u already love its just more stuff to do and more reasons to play, sure if all the achievements in a game are things like getting all of a collectible or beating certain story missions/quests they are pretty boring but in pdx map simulators for example many of the are interesting run ideas or they indicate where the hand crafted content is at. And despite how much i love the game i dont think i would have played as much of Tyranny as i did if i hadnt decide to get all the achievements.
Sure there are some interesting achievment, like the Stanley parable ones. For instance: ‘Go outside: Don’t play the game for 5 years’ (https://thestanleyparable.fandom.com/wiki/Achievements)
last played oct 15 2017 damn i guess its been more than 5 years
Only silly people flaunt achievements. I use them as a meta-gaming guideline, which in a good game leads to interesting and fun challenges. In an RPG, it’s like a check box for getting every ultimate weapon, fighting every boss, etc.
Can also give me something to do in a game I’ve played but loved. Retroachevements for instance encouraged me replay SaGa (aka Final Fantasy Legend) with only one character in the team. Wasn’t too hard, but definitely a second playthrough thing.
Well, the issue with that is that achievements are global over all playthroughs, so it doesn’t really work as a checklist.
True, if and when I ever get around to replaying things that could be a problem (although the industry has seen to remaking everything I cared about, sometimes poorly, but that’s another problem).
Another shout-out to the nerds running retroachevements though because they thought it that; they have an encore mode that let’s you redo achievements. Although honestly you could just make a second account, that stuff is for emulated content anyway and it’s not like it’s DRMed, haha.
There used to be an effort made with how you play a game to get achievements. The Orange box was a great example of this. The ‘Little Rocket Man’ and ‘The One Free bullet’ achievements both made you play the game in a different way. Sadly now it’s mostly just ‘play the game’ ‘collect all the things’.
I love any game with a handcrafted map and some exploration. Even Satisfactory, a factory building game, does an excellent job at that. Procedural generation has its uses but lacks soul I guess.
It never went away.
Was gonna say, nobody took shit, lol
Yeah, single player games are nowhere near dead. If they ever did go the way of the dodo, I would probably stop playing altogether, because for the most part I just don’t like multiplayer games.
“$3,000 setup to play a game from 2010.”
I have an RTX 4070 that I’ve been using to play Half Life. I’ve owned my copy for a while, but have never played it.
Drives my wife crazy lol
You can play it at “accurately model the thermal vibration of molecules” framerates.
Gimme dat visible Brownian Motion!
Isn’t there an RTX Version?
There’s a fan made mod for the original, but HL2 has official RTX support I believe
I know that Nvidia released a Portal mod, so the Source Engine is already done. No idea how much effort is needed between games.
I upgraded to a 3070 from a 1080 just to play grim Dawn. Good games are good games
$5 Black Mesa brother. It looks phenomenal now.
If he never played the original I think it’s good he starts with it. Black Mess is great, but the original Half Life has a certain historical value (and is still a great game).
New Black Mesa is Half Life…
You are saying the third party remake in another engine from 2020 is the same as the original from 1998?
Black Mesa is literally just better looking Half-Life approved by Valve. I can really only say the same thing so many times before you understand that what I’m saying is what it is lol.
And you’re saying there’s no difference between playing Black Mesa today vs playing Half life today, and therefore he might as well start out with Black Mesa? Or what is the meaning of your reply?
Hard disagree. Games like Half life have a huge historical value for their impact. Playing the original is worth it. Especially if one takes the medium itself seriously. You wouldn’t say an original movie and a 22 years younger remake are “the same”, right? I think you’re playing dumb with me.
Love the Wikipedia link btw. I’ve played Black Mesa in its early access phase already and then later on again when they released Xen.
No, I just think you’re kinda dumb now looking for a pedantic fight on Lemmy of all places trying to argue that Half-Life and Black Mesa aren’t the same story and essential game lol.
Sometimes I even set the difficulty to Easy to really chill.
Wait, you play games to have fun and not as a duty? What about “pride and accomplishment”? ;)
The moment I embraced easy mode was when Assassin’s Creed Odyssey was like: “Is the gameplay we designed for our single player game too tedious? Then buy some legendary items with IRL money or maybe our XP cheat!”
I hate that games started designing around microtransactions. Like who thought “hey let’s take the worst parts of MMOs and put them into single player”. I loved AC origins and was so looking forward to odyssey and then I just bounced off it within a few hours because so much of it just felt like doing chores.
Everyone who looked at how much money WoW was pulling in without having to churn out game after game and figured out why
Extra bonus: Odyssey was supposed to feature a female lead, rather than the choice, but a misogynistic Ubisoft exec vetoed it, which I can only assume was reason for the absolutely garbage dialog.
The suits did. You know, so the line goes up. Because we’re all gonna die otherwise or something.
And replay games I already know by heart. I can start a new game or… play Starfox 64 again. “Do a barrel roll”.
StarFox 64 is so perfect in that arcade-game way, where you can technically finish it in a sitting but it’s so cool to figure out different paths and stuff. :D
“Okay guys, let’s ROCK N’ ROLL!”
In case you haven’t seen it, this video might make you very happy.
I had not seen it, that was pretty cool.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=GXLmDRwxAUU
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
if game difficulty gets to the point the tedium takes the joy out of it, nothing wrong with easy mode.
A lot of times I start out with Normal difficulty, and a game eventually escalates its difficulty past what I am capable of delivering. At which point I find that the only way to change the difficulty is to start over, so I uninstall it.
Sometimes I’ll get the trainer so I can chill and feel like a badass. I could “Git gud” or better yet ill take infinite ammo and no reload and relaxingly kill everything
I’m glad I’m not the only one! Though if I play something for a second time I do tend to up the difficulty a bit.
Or play factorio… Look at the time, ah it hasn’t changed, then an hour later notices the date incremented. Oh
Or Civilization, where one more turn becomes five hours where you’ve barely moved.
Gods I was strong then.
That’s when you find yourself asking the important question, “What day is it?”
Don’t care about achievements play games till like 70% then drop them. If it stops being fun I’m done, finishing a game is never a requirement don’t have time for that
I got to like 98% in RDR2 before I realized the gambling ones were going to be a giant pain in the ass. At that point I was in too deep to give up. I watched all 3 Robocop movies in one sitting and still didn’t complete the last blackjack one. Eventually got it but that was a frustrating experience.
The truly infuriating part is there’s likely lots of people out there that got them on the first try or by accident
Yea I was like looking for a solution online because I was like “there’s no way you’re just supposed to brute force this” and came across so many people that were like “no there’s no trick but I got in like 30 minutes”
Yeah, play the story and sidequests but don’t do any of the collectibles that are often necessary for 100%.
Yeah unless the story is good I’m rarely going to stick around for the last bit, which is usually just padding. Actually, good difficulty levels / other accessibility options have been a nice development.
Lets you turn down the volume on the gameplay so you can finish for the story.
Friends don’t let friends play League of Legends
That’s why I play DotA 😎
(Yes, this is a cry for help)
10/10 setup. Only disappointment is that the PC is running Windows, and not GNU+Linux.
How do you know he doesn’t have a dual boot
He’d have told you.
hes also calm instead of RAGING because windows has YET AGAIN overwritten his linux bootloader.
He didn’t spend half of the meme writing about the hours spent on forums trying to get each game to work.
Lol
Well it’s an AI generated picture
I want to play my character, not just play towards whatever the optimal setup is
I strive to ultimately be able to tank enemies and kill them with weak weapons like forks.
If you want to be the Cutlery Colossus then you can
Please recommend me your favourite story games. This is me and I’m in need of a good ‘book.’ :)
Edit: I’m going to tell you all to play Night in the Woods. Now, it is set in my home region and felt like a game made for me, but I think it has messages anyone could relate to.
Disco Elysium
The only run I haven’t done is the fascist run because I cannot be a dick to Kim.
‘Outer wilds’ don’t look it up. The most fun is play ing it for the first time. It doesn’t hold your hand though.
I’ve read that comment a lot and it makes me feel like there’s something big that I might spoil if I ever Google about it. But like I’m a couple dozen hours in at this point… After how many hours of playtime would you say the “don’t look it up” advice expires?
I think there are guides that gently point you in the right direction, without too many spoilers.
I definitely got stuck on a few things.
YouTube started recommending Outer Wilds videos, intermixed with my Minecraft: Create mod videos and I was very confused what mod it was
Seconding this, and its a great game but only if you do like games where there is a story line, but its up to you to find it.
Thirding lol
Fourthing, my absolute favourite game.
Spiritfarer, To the Moon, Gris (no words in this one but still a good story imo), anything SuperGiant has ever made with my favorite being Transistor.
Definitely anything SuperGiant. Bastion, Hades, and Transistor are some of the only games I’ve actually finished, and the sound tracks are incredible.
Best response
Sea of Stars.
I’m listening to the soundtrack right now and it’s awesome. The story is decent and the graphics and design are top notch. It was so captivating that I pretty much didn’t play anything else while I was working through the game.
I have to say is this is clearly the closest gaming has come to a sequel to Chrono trigger
I absolutely adored a low budget game called Firewatch. It’s first person and your only contact with another human is through a radio. You’re running away from your life and work for a summer in a fire watch tower in a national park.
The story is nice and the characters are interesting and flawed and relatable.
Buy it on sale and have a fun evening or two with it.
Bastion will make you feel like you’re reading a book. It’s one of my all-time favorites, by the developers now best known for Hades.
“Proper story’s s’posed to start at the beginning…”
“Kid just rages for awhile.”
That game is still fantastic.
Mostly in alphabetical order going down my steam list:
Great stories great games: Tales of Symphonia and Vesperia, The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky trilogy, Metal Gear Solid, 2, and 3, Subnautica, Secret of Mana, Legend of Mana, Chrono Trigger, Hollow Knight, Spec Ops: The Line, A Hat in Time, Hades, Doom, Deus Ex, Eternal Sonata, F.E.A.R., FF6, FF13-2, Nier Replicant & Automata, Sleeping Dogs, Undertale, Valkyria Chronicles (admittedly haven’t beaten it though).
Mindless fun simple stories: Ys (almost any of them), My Time at Portia or Sandrock, Resident Evil games, Rune Factory 4 and 5, Harvest Moon 64 and Friends of Mineral Town, Stray, Amnesia, Armored Core 6, Have a Nice Death, I am Setsuna, Life is Strange, Neon White, Cyberpunk 2077.
If you had to twist my arm I’d give you these variations of top recommendations.
Best typical JRPG: Tales of Symphonia
Best Metroidvania: Hollow Knight
Best where choices matter: Undertale
Best fps: Spec Ops: The Line
Best comfy story: My Time at Portia
Best environmental storytelling: Subnautica
Best simple stories in stories: A Hat in Time
Best story with a bajillion endings and things to keep playing for: Nier Automata (play Replicant too!)
Have you tried Triangle Strategy?
Negative. I’ll take a look, thanks.
Tales of Vesperia. I like the combat system most, but the story’s pretty good, and there’s a lot of optional content.
Oh sweet nobody’s mentioned it yet! One of my personal favorite “book-feeling games” is an FPS series.
Linear, tightly focused, and feels like a novel because it’s based on one:
Metro: 2033 and Metro: Last Light. (Haven’t played Exodus yet)
You play a young fella named Artyom. Living in formerly-Russia’s metro tunnels with other survivors after a nuclear apocalypse devastates the surface.
Your settlement comes under threat from seemingly psychic creatures called “the Dark Ones”, and you’re sent on a quest to go get help.
Across the way is a bit of a “coming of age” adventure. You run across really interesting and well-acted characters, sneak past hostile factions, contend with scary (and diversely behaviored) mutants, and risk dangerous excursions on the surface. This is a dark world where gasmask filters are precious and bullets are literally currency, but somehow it’s still beautiful and fascinating.
(That intro guitar melody will stay with me forever.)
Like any good hero, Artyom finds himself in one bad situation after another, and along the way if you pick up on the hints, may even come to understand the world around him and the role he plays in it.
There’s a morality system that’s more subtle than “be boyscout or be a villain”, and “ranger difficulty” is an amazing way to play because it makes gunfights feel tense and realistic.
You can only take a few hits in this mode, but unlike in most games, so can your enemies! It makes things feel much less “bullet spongey.”
Everyone begged for an “open world” experience and we got Exodus which is supposed to be awesome, but something will always stay close to me about this post apocalypse story that takes you on a focused, well paced, and at times emotional ride to save a transformed world.
And that’s just the first title mostly.
You won’t be running between towns for hours or making rubber bands and glue into machineguns. You’ll still feel like you’re surviving, but know exactly where you’re supposed to be going.
They go for super cheap on GoG and Steam all the time. Well worth the experience. :)
Nier automata, nier replicant, Yakuza like a dragon, FF7R, Baldurs Gate 3, Divinity Original Sin 2, Control, star wars fallen order/survivor
Story first games: Tacoma, What Remains of Edith Finch, Life Is Strange, Botany Manor(more puzzle than story), Open Roads, Lake, Deliver Us The Moon, Firewatch, Kona, Day of the Tentacle (The remaster is incredible)
For more standard shoot or action games with good writing/story I love the remedy games, Alan Wake, Quantum Break, Control.
I was never a huge fan of Telltale style story games that much, but I really enjoyed the Back to the Future one that came out years back. Not sure if that’s still available anywhere though.
The Blackwell series, West of Loathing, Talos Principle II, To The Moon series.
Seconding the Blackwell series, with a caveat. The earlier games can be a little rough around the edges, resulting in a few Guide Dang It! moments. Walkthroughs are your friends.
Star Wars Fallen Order has a great story and really fun gameplay.
I recently got “Yakuza Like a Dragon” from my Humble Choice bundle and it’s so good it’s made me want to check the rest of the series.
It’s maybe my fav series in gaming. Kiryu is so much better than ichiban
I picked up “Yakuza 0” on sale not too long ago, and I’m enjoying it so much that I picked up the rest of the remastered series while it was on sale. Based on how long I’m spending mucking around in the first one, It may take me the rest of my life to get through them all. I don’t know how “Like a Dragon” compares to the earlier games, but I really enjoy the narrative, combat, sub-stories, and mini-games in “0”.
As an aside, I really enjoy a well-done pool mini-game. I probably spent more time playing pool in the various space stations in “Rebel Galaxy Outlaw” than doing anything else. Likewise, Kiryu spends a lot of time in the pool hall, as well as hanging around the batting cages, and fine-tuning his pocket racers.
Yakuza 0 was absolutely fantastic, kiwami 1 was ok and kiwami 2 was also good
Pillars of Eternity. I’ve owned the game for 8 years but finally sat down recently to learn how to play a classic CRPG. I haven’t been this engrossed in a game since Mass Effect 2 or Skyrim.
Witcher 3. The story is insanely good, just remember: your decisions matter (but don’t look anything up).
Some people say it’s hard to get into it and to be fair it is a bit complicated first but you don’t have to use all mechanics, and it’s well worth getting into it.
It just got an official mod creator (yes, that game from… 2015? (graphics from 2022 since there was a huge graphics update) still got a new update in 2024) and the community still is strong so it’ll get even better over the next years.
In Stars and Time is especially appropriate for Pride Month!
Disco Elysium is phenomenal as well.
“To the moon”, it will take you 4h to finish and the story is awesome, it’s worth playing in a single playthrough. I wish I could forget and play it again.
I have played “The Invincibles” recently. It’s a beautiful walking sim.
Favorite point and click adventure: Sam and Max. They recently remastered the first season. Funny/silly game.
The Sea Will Claim Everything
https://store.steampowered.com/app/337720/The_Sea_Will_Claim_Everything/
Martha is Dead. A tragic and frightening story. Heed to the warnings they give at the start, tho. My wife literally got sick from playing it. No other game or movie has touched me that deep.
Don’t know that they’ll all be ported to PC but the Supermassive standalones (Until Dawn, The Quarry) and Dark Pictures Anthology are great, if you like horror movies. I prefer to watch my wife play them. They’re literally like interactive/choose your own adventure films.
Just looking through my HLTB at things I’ve done recently:
The Ace Attorney series Sucker for Love Coffee Talk Haven (good for co-op)
If you want a bit more gameplay, but still chill:
Paradise Killer Braid Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons
More gameplay focused:
Control Portal Wargroove Cat Quest Knack (I know it’s a meme, but the games are actually pretty fun)
Steins;Gate. It starts slow, but once it picks up it’s amazing and puts all that slow build up to good use. Not sure if it technically counts though. Visual novels are a weird middle ground that aren’t really book or game, but there are some really good ones. Definitely the way to go if you’re in more of a reading mood but want some art and music to go with it.
Disco Elysium. Its an RPG, but most skills have an application both in the world but also in conversations (of which there are a lot, and very well written). Its got a very bitter-sweet vibe to it.
You got a lot of great recommendations already, but I want to add one more indie game: Lost Words Beyond the Page. Gameplay is simple and it’s not very long, but the writing is excellent.
I almost never buy multiplayer-focused games anymore. Of course not all gamers are shitty, but enough are to matter. Having left those games behind I can see how they were taking more joy from my life than they added. If friends want to do private co-op that’s cool, but it’s also rarer now that we’re all older.
As far as sales go, I love playing a year or two behind new releases. Patched games at a discount ftw and timing doesn’t matter in single-player games.
To me, multiplayer video games should be about having fun with friends. Couch co-op, LAN parties, online multiplayer work for different genres and depending where your friends are. I don’t care if they’re older games, newer games, as long as it’s fun and interesting.
Yeah I don’t really care to play with strangers and none of my friends have ever asked to play so I also stick to single player games when I do play.
Don’t forget that you’re also allowed to ask them to play, if you should feel like it
i have like 370 hours of factorio, and i’ve only really played it over the period of about. 4-5 months, though i’ve owned it for a year or two now.
Factorio is just one of those games. For anybody that likes open world sandbox games and technical stuff, you already own factorio, yell at me in the replies.
Have to agree. I’ve played through a couple of times myself and a couple times with friends. Always fun. If you’ve never touched mods on it I recommend taking a look. Will further diversify your playing time.
absolutely. Personally i’ve just been enjoying varying my playstyles over time. It’s added enough variety for me so far. I will presumably also enjoy building and design different base metas over time as well, though i have only done a few things so far, so i have hundreds if not thousands of hours to go before i start to get interesting things.
Ah the early times of factorio, learning everything for the first time. Those are long ago, 1700h+ now. The addiction is real.
yeah, it’s like that. Took me about a 100 hours to get fully acquainted. I’ve had several different play-styles through my various saves, all trying different things, and seeing how they go. I’m sure it’ll continue for quite some time.
Especially when the expansion with 2.0 drops.
Such a good game. Especially if you get a multiplayer game of people with different logistical strengths.
absolutely, especially if you play with the various multiplayer scenarios.
I’m a big fps/3d spaces person. I gravitated to satisfactory. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the same thing but 3D.
Love satisfactory. It is super addictive to me though, especially with mods. It just provides multiple angles to play from.
Sometimes I wanna build a factory, sometimes I wanna play homemaker, sometimes I just wanna organize shit/ make it more efficient.
I’m currently enjoying Foundry right now. It is a nice blend of a few different games.
Foundry is on my radar. I might wait for satisfactory to hit 1.0, play that for a few months, then switch over to foundry.
It looks good though. IIRC it’s early access and what I’ve seen of it, I kinda want to give it a bit to get closer to complete before I jump in.
i don’t own satisfactory, though it does seem interesting, i feel like factorio is the precursor to satisfactory in a way.
It’s more primal to the human urge to industrialize.
That’s a fair assessment IMO. They’re all related games.
I personally haven’t played factorio, but I know enough about it to prefer satisfactory.
A few friends of mine are getting into Palworld and getting away from satisfactory. IDK, it seems a bit too different to me.
I personally haven’t played factorio, but I know enough about it to prefer satisfactory.
any reason specifically you prefer satisfactory?
I think i’d have to look into satisfactory more, but factorio is more explicitly focused on the gameplay loop, and meta elements of the game itself. Having really good balance, great game design, and super functional gameplay styles.
Whereas satisfactory seems to focus more on the game itself, less than the gameplay styles. I.E. the game creates the gameplay style, the player will follow, as opposed to in factorio, it’s explicitly designed around having certain styles of gameplay, which make it very easy to adopt and utilize.
Not to say that you can’t with satisfactory, it just seems like it would be a lot more work. Like in factorio i have a set of rail blueprints that are perfect. Space optimally, designed optimally, and work optimally, they’re designed so that i can just plonk them down and do as little work as possible and have them functional. I’m not sure satisfactory has that level of gameplay.
Satisfactory has added blueprints. They’ve been part of the game for a while. You can design, build and disassemble blueprints wholesale. They’re not super large, which is part of the challenge. For something like a rail line, the placement of blueprints won’t connect the rail line together even if you put a rail from end to end; so those blueprints usually are all the infrastructure surrounding a rail line, and the rail line is run down the infra after the blueprint is built.
There’s plenty of quirks with it, as I’m sure there are in factorio, and there’s no “perfect way” to do anything. A core mechanic in satisfactory is alternate recipes. I’ll give you an example. Screws are an early item that’s usually a pain point for new players early game. To get them, you have to mine iron, smelt it into iron ingots, then construct rods from those ingots, and finally, convert the rods into screws. It’s a pretty involved recipe for the early game. Most other recipes are more simple, concrete is raw limestone, constructed to concrete directly, it’s a two machine setup to get it rolling. Rods are another, and plates are similar to rods (both three machine setups, miner, smelter, constructor). Screws require at least four.
There’s a popular alternative recipe called cast screws, which creates screws from iron ingots directly. Not only that, but you get more screws per ingot than the vanilla recipe.
To take that example further, there’s an alternate for ingots, which is a “pure” ingot, which uses a mid-game machine, the refinery, to combine raw iron and water, and produce iron ingots, which has a higher yield than simply smelting the raw material.
So you can do the og recipes, and build a field of miners, smelters, and constructors (to make rods, then screws), so that you get enough screws in sufficient quantities, or, with a little legwork and some alternative recipes, you can use the pure iron ingot alternate, and cast screw alternate, and get a lot more with a lot fewer machines, and fewer iron nodes (less raw iron).
There’s Infinity variant building methodologies, from building right on the ground, to large towers filled with many floors of machines to do the work. The layout can be chaotic and spaghetti, inefficient and a mess, to varying levels of perfect input to perfect output, building a variety of things continually.
You can focus on design, or efficiency, or simply the speed at which you can throw things together. The options are endless.
You can rush towards coal, fuel, or nuclear power, or flatten all of the biodiversity of the map into biofuel and run everything on plant and animal matter.
Personally, I focus on alternative recipes early on, as well as logistics (faster conveyor belts, etc), and power (mainly coal/fuel)… Collecting biomass generally sucks IMO, plus the nature in the game is quite lovely and I don’t like to destroy more than I have to.
With the verticality, you can have production floors of machines where the inputs and outputs go into the floor, out of sight, into logistics floors below, to be carted around between machines, and to storage crates, or whatever you need. If you run out of space, you can expand, or build more floors above your current build and expand that way.
Trying to solve logistical issues in three dimensions can be a challenge.
There’s caves to explore, a variety of wild animals of varying strengths and abilities in the game, even some that are radioactive, or spew toxic gas. There’s even flower looking plants that kind of stand up when you come nearby, and if you hang out near them, they emit toxic gases too… Or you can play on passive mode where the fauna generally ignore that you exist unless you attack them.
I could keep going, there’s a lot of interesting stuff in the game, including a lot of things we don’t have the story about (they’ve had placeholders in the game that won’t be explained until 1.0 gets released, hopefully later this year). I have over 970 hours in the game and I will be starting a brand new save once 1.0 is available. I’m certain I will be playing that for many more hours to come.
If you want to know anything specific, please ask. I can point you at beginner friendly YouTubers, or streamers that push the game to its absolute (and ridiculous) limits with mods, or anything in-between. I can also just discuss the mechanics or what we know of the story so far.
For me, satisfactory is an extension of the same concepts I enjoy and employ for my profession. I’m in IT, and getting everything working just right, then seeing everything working perfectly is the take away I like to get from doing a thing. Troubleshooting it when it’s not operating correctly, and ensuring everything stays running 24/7, is huge.
Satisfactory has added blueprints. They’ve been part of the game for a while. You can design, build and disassemble blueprints wholesale. They’re not super large, which is part of the challenge. For something like a rail line, the placement of blueprints won’t connect the rail line together even if you put a rail from end to end; so those blueprints usually are all the infrastructure surrounding a rail line, and the rail line is run down the infra after the blueprint is built.
yeah i know it has blueprints, i’m just saying it feels more like it’s been shoehorned in than it has designed to be integrated fully, as it has in factorio.
There’s plenty of quirks with it, as I’m sure there are in factorio, and there’s no “perfect way” to do anything.
there are definitely some quirks, but for all intents and purposes, anything you want to do with blueprints, can be done with blueprints. You can align them globally to the world chunk size, to make your blueprinting incredibly idiot proof, you can align it relative to the blueprints dimensions itself and change how that alignment is configured and setup, such that it will perfectly paste continuations in perpetuity, until you let go of the shift button. One thing about factorio that doesn’t exist outside of it is that the devs don’t settle for “good enough” they either do it right, or implement it so minimally that it can’t be wrong. A good example of this would be robots, they have an incredibly minimal implementation, though annoying, it’s forgivable because of how simple they are. Where as something like blueprints, basically anything you could ask for, is already inside of a blueprint. The one thing i want, is better blueprint navigation, because it doesn’t support forward and backward navigation quite perfectly, and that’s it.
There’s Infinity variant building methodologies
this is actually one of the things i appreciate about factorio, to my knowledge in the vanilla game, there are no alternative solutions or recipes. You make gears with two iron plates. There are different tiers of assemblers and modules, but those are the only things that change that. Everything is balanced to be self contained perfectly. It’s annoying sometimes, for example boilers burn solid fuel, but not liquid fuel, it’s not a huge deal because you can just make solid fuel, but it’s somewhat annoying because of pollution. Ideally burning solid fuel would be less polluting, though it isn’t in vanilla, i’m sure it could be modded in. But generally, the balance is really good, very well thought out, and explicitly designed around building and manufacturing things. Which makes for a really nice gameplay experience. I’m sure satisfactory is similar in that regard though. (a lot of factorio mods will introduce alternate recipes btw)
You can focus on design, or efficiency, or simply the speed at which you can throw things together.
same thing in factorio, like i mentioned with modules, you can just put three prod 3 modules into the rocket silo and make it 25% cheaper, or you can stack prod everywhere in your manufacturing line up, reducing your usage of raw material by at least 50% total.
You can rush towards coal, fuel, or nuclear power, or flatten all of the biodiversity of the map into biofuel and run everything on plant and animal matter.
this is actually one of the interesting things for me with factorio, there is a very explicit gameplay advancement. You could get to end game on coal power, sure. But the game really incentivizes you to at the very least, build solar power, if not nuclear power. Once you get to solar research, your power costs immediately start to increase significantly, building yellow and purple science basically double your raw material costs, while doubling the production of your factory. You need lots more power if you want that to go over well. You often go from about 50MW on blue science, to 500MW on a full 60spm base. It can be a little strict but the game is designed around it so well it’s not a huge concern of mine.
With the verticality, you can have production floors of machines where the inputs and outputs go into the floor, out of sight, into logistics floors below, to be carted around between machines, and to storage crates, or whatever you need. If you run out of space, you can expand, or build more floors above your current build and expand that way.
this is probably the most interesting thing to me about satisfactory, the fact that you can just immediately stuff things into an additional dimension is huge. Factorio kind of has this with a few mods, like warehousing, though it’s different. Though in factorio everything is just 2D, which makes for a rather aesthetic building style, as well as pretty clearly demonstrating where everything is, as well as where bottlenecks and problems are, which i find rather nice.
If you want to know anything specific, please ask. I can point you at beginner friendly YouTubers, or streamers that push the game to its absolute (and ridiculous) limits with mods, or anything in-between. I can also just discuss the mechanics or what we know of the story so far.
personally i’m not a huge lore fan, i like to follow along with it as i play, if i ever do though. As for questions, one thing i’m kind of curious about, though i’ve never looked into is building logistics. Do materials just magically materialize out of thin air from your base/root storage? Or do you have to do a bunch of handling logistics to cart materials and buildings from one place to another as you build stuff like you do in factorio. That’s probably my biggest gripe with factorio, though it does have robots, i find them lacking in aspects.
For me, satisfactory is an extension of the same concepts I enjoy and employ for my profession. I’m in IT, and getting everything working just right, then seeing everything working perfectly is the take away I like to get from doing a thing. Troubleshooting it when it’s not operating correctly, and ensuring everything stays running 24/7, is huge.
it’s similar for me, although i find factorio is sterilized a bit more, as far as my general taste goes. It’s more interesting for me on a macro level, than on a specifics level, for me i really enjoy experimenting with different play style metas in factorio, i’ve gone from belt based mega base, to bot based belted megabase, to train logistic based megabase, to presumably in the future, a proper belted mega base, and a proper bot based megabase. As well as all of the various overhaul mods and play style changes you can make to make it more interesting to play.
Factorio is lot less about the individual build, although you can still hyper optimize those, and i do that from time to time, and more about figuring out how to fit them together effectively. Anybody can build an oil setup, it’s integrating it properly into all of your other stuff that makes it hard.
So, to address your question, raw materials only come from nodes, which require miners. Obviously miners require power, but produce raw materials (output via a belt) indefinitely. The rate of extraction depends on the quality/purity of the node (poor/normal/pure) and the level of the miner. Miners can be placed anywhere there is a node. So building smaller modular factories is definitely possible and one of many legitimate strategies.
I think that answers the question, let me know if I misunderstood. I’m not 100% familiar with all the factorio mechanics so I’m not totally sure if I fully understood the question.
Between locations, you can move materials by truck, train, or drone. You can run trucks across the ground or build roads.
When it comes to generation, coal plants can burn just about anything solid, from raw coal to more complex materials derived from by-products of oil production. Fuel generators take any liquid fuel, from regular fuel, turbo fuel, and even liquid biofuel. Additionally there’s a bunch of different ways to arrive at each type of fuel, for solids, you can use refineries to refine coal or petroleum waste into compacted coal or similar, and with liquid fuel, there’s blenders and refineries, recipes for turbo blend fuel, heavy fuel, even turbo heavy fuel, diluted fuel, and packaged fuel too (used for jetpacks and vehicles). It gets… Complicated.
With satisfactory, you can build small and just wait, or build big and use a lot of power, and things get finished much faster.
With progression, there’s two main sections, milestones and phases. Each phase unlocks more tiers of milestones, and each milestone unlocks more buildables which will allow you to complete future milestones and phases. You can complete them in whatever order you want, but some of the progression requires that certain milestones get completed before progress can be made. In that way, there’s some linearity with the progression.
The first person perspective of the game and the three dimensional design is what draws me towards satisfactory more than factorio. I’d happily give you a personal tour of one of the multiplayer servers I play on and host. No pressure, I just thought I’d offer in case you wanted to ask questions and get shown around the game by someone.
It just seems like you would enjoy the game. If you ultimately decide to play, that’s fine, if not, no worries.
I like factorio but the game never even asks the question of whether destroying an entire planets ecosystem just so you, one person, can get home is ethical or right.
I don’t know, it is a small thing, I totally get why people get addicted to factorio’s gameplay loop not disputing how amazing that is it is just the basic premise of the game makes me uncomfortable in it’s disinterest in the planet you are on being anything but a resource to conquered and consumed or in thinking about how you are actually the villain in this situation from the planet’s perspective.
I always felt like the fact that you get attacked by local fauna when you cause pollution was a comment on that. As in the planet recognises that you are not doing a good thing.
ironically, it seems almost as if the planet itself was designed to counter your existence. The biters literally feed on your pollution and evolve multiple magnitudes of strength, multiple times over.
I like factorio but the game never even asks the question of whether destroying an entire planets ecosystem just so you, one person, can get home is ethical or right.
yeah, but the game isn’t about social commentary, it’s about logistics, factory building, and to some degree, tower defense. You don’t like biters? You can just disable them, you don’t actually need to play with them. You can just roleplay as if you’re living on mars.
I feel like if anything factorio does a great job of explaining why the human urge to industrialize exists, and makes you experience all of the negatives of it. If we’re taking it like a social commentary sort of thing. Ultimately it’s nothing worse than human history has done at any given point of time. By a large margin.
By the way, you might want to check out nullius, it’s the inverse of the gameplay loop. The planet is barren, and you are analogous to god, you need to create everything in order for the “normal” gameplay loop to begin.
It’s also kind of interesting to consider the impacts of the biters themselves, they aren’t really a life form, they’re more akin to a bacteria, just on a macro, insect scale. They literally only do something productive for themselves once you get in their way. Their entire evolutionary lifeform is predicated on you being a negative influence on their environment. They consume your pollution, and use it to grow and become stronger. However, left to their own devices they seem to spread across the entire planet, almost like a cancer, just without the consumption of life that is typical, because biters seem to be magic?
that’s my two cents on it, i suppose.
Thank you for the thoughtful response
It’s also kind of interesting to consider the impacts of the biters themselves, they aren’t really a life form, they’re more akin to a bacteria, just on a macro, insect scale. They literally only do something productive for themselves once you get in their way. Their entire evolutionary lifeform is predicated on you being a negative influence on their environment. They consume your pollution, and use it to grow and become stronger. However, left to their own devices they seem to spread across the entire planet, almost like a cancer, just without the consumption of life that is typical, because biters seem to be magic?
I mean I would accept magic, but anything less of an explanation of the biters behavior seems like a problematically reductive view of life.
Even the behavior of bacteria is complex and more nuanced than a cancerous process.
I get that it is a game, but I think these things do matter, especially for computer minded people who want to understand everything as a computer programs and recklessly ignore the reality of the environment around them. Media like this severs the salience of the surrounding landscape to people, and contextualizes it simply as a resource to exploit.
Idk, I mean factorio is amazing, I totally get why people love it, and I know the focus of the game isn’t on this but still…
I mean I would accept magic, but anything less of an explanation of the biters behavior seems like a problematically reductive view of life.
magic is definitely an option, but we’re talking about an entire field of science here. How are we supposed to define something without reductive reasoning? The only other real possibility would be religious in nature.
All we know, or more specifically, all i know about the biters is that they’re a seemingly persistent, constant across any given world. They don’t seem to be feeding on anything. They don’t even consume the player when killed. They seem to be explicitly aggressive against the player, for who knows what reason. They seem to benefit explicitly, and massively from pollution, and they also seem to direct targeted attacks towards the source of that pollution, all of which in an evolutionary sense would take billions of years. So presumably, there must be more than one person on this planet, and this must be a very regular cycle. Or perhaps it’s a sort of multiverse deal where this simply loops forever?
Even the behavior of bacteria is complex and more nuanced than a cancerous process.
yeah, i mostly just meant it in comparison to like tigers, or something. We hate ants, wasps, and insects in general, we seem to have little problem killing them on the regular, however when it comes to things like tigers, we seem less receptive to it. It’s certainly an interesting choice to base the biters on an insectoid type species.
I get that it is a game, but I think these things do matter, especially for computer minded people who want to understand everything as a computer programs and recklessly ignore the reality of the environment around them. Media like this severs the salience of the surrounding landscape to people, and contextualizes it simply as a resource to exploit.
It’s definitely interesting, but i feel like exploitation of resources is probably the only good setting for this game. We can look at something like shapez for instance, similar to factorio, but it’s a sterile environment, where you produce shapes. Suddenly that seems even more dystopian by nature. Are you just a dude shipped to a massive sterile warehouse and told to create various different shapes as a method of commoditization? Who knows.
At least with resource exploitation, there’s a very clear driving path, there’s an entirely independent motivation (not being on that planet, because lore wise, you crashed there, and aren’t supposed to be there, and how else are you supposed to leave without exploiting resources? Sure you could wait for someone else, but they also exploited resources, and them arriving isn’t a guarantee, so you might as well keep busy and do it yourself.) Though to be clear, i haven’t played shapez, so maybe there is some kind of weird lore behind it, i’m assuming there isn’t.
Idk, I mean factorio is amazing, I totally get why people love it, and I know the focus of the game isn’t on this but still…
I always like to think of it from the perspective of something like a lion. Killing animals for sustenance. At the end of the day, we all must cause some level of destruction to progress. In this case we cause very little destruction once we do leave, because inevitably the base will cripple, run out of power, and the biters will overrun it, destroying everything in it’s place, claiming it as theirs again, and expanding back over it. Just at an extremely high level of evolution now instead.
There is an eventual yin to every yang.
Don’t worry, it’s fiction. It’s not real. No actual planets were harmed in the making of this game.
Oh thanks! I didn’t even realize factorio wasn’t real!
facepalm silly me
Well ackshually… One was.
I’ve hit 700 tonight and still have another 200 in my current playthrough
Good choice to fast-forward your time perception
it truly is weird, how you can sit down and simply, play the game for 8 hours straight.
That might have been the opioids i was on at the time more than anything (dental work) but regardless, i got a lot of work done.
I like the Shapez too
i have shapez kicking around somewhere, seems interesting, havent played it though.
Satisfactory isn’t bad either, but factorio wins in my book.
