What if it was Chinese

(Amazing Cultivation Simulator)

I have thousands of hours in DF...and I really wish it wasn't a buggy mess.

Marksdwarves not taking arrows? Follow this easy 20 step guide of obtuse mechanics that circumvent what's probably several bugs?

You fixed them taking ammo? Great, good job! Are they using the training room you set up verifiably correctly? No? Well sucks.

There are so many instances of this. Exploding trees killing woodcutters if trees grow into one another. Items left perpetually on the floor that can never be moved again. Military squads never returning from expeditions, forever blocking their noble spots and sometimes making it impossible to refill any positions...endless problems.

A lot of it can be fixed with DFhack but not all of it can. I am happy they are doing fresh content for the game, but I also wish they would take, like, two years to fix all the known bugs that have been in the game for several years. And while the steam version has a better interface then what was there before, it's hardly perfect. It's mostly just a bit more user friendly while being obtuse in new and inventive ways.

Why am I writing all this? Honestly I don't know. I just...the game is uniquely frustrating, but so cool when it does miraculously work.

There's a free demo 😉

(the first hit is free)

i mean...not anymore!

space age added tons of content after the rocket launch!

in space age the goal is to travel to the edge of the solar system ;)

That’s an additional paid for expansion, something they originally said they would never do.

It also STILL has an end goal.

I’ve launched a rocket with Angels mods and orhers… I’ve done my fair share haha.

The goal is to cripple your computers UPS at that point, or whatever the term is.

I'm also curious about how game value depreciates.

Games tend to go on sale to sell more copies later in their lifespan, attracting customers that weren't going to pay the original price for it.

It sounds like you're saying that the game can't be played for as long if you buy it later, which doesn't really make sense to me.

I might be a biased, as I'm one of those people with a few thousand hours into Factorio, and several hundred into other factory games.

The game came out in 2020. It’s now a 5 year old 2D indie game listed at $35

... which is still receiving updates well into 2025: wiki.factorio.com/Version_hist… Probably, in part, because they never put the game on sale and so each and every purchase of the game by players contributes equally to the studio's capacity to continue supporting the game.

Version history/2.0.0 - Factorio Wiki

^{Official Factorio Wiki}

Enjoys modding games more than playing, dislikes Factorio.

Have you tried modding Factorio? It’s a pit of fun

I've never played the game. Been meaning to for a while but so far have really only heard third-hand accounts of it. From the very little I know though that seems like a real possibility and honestly I prefer that interpretation.

@Jayjader@jlai.lu 's explanation gave me the impression it was nature's way of fighting back against unsustainable practices. Like it lets you play as a bad guy and see the consequences of doing so, rather than pitting you against some diagetic evil and painting everything you do in a morally justified light.

I might have to eat crow on this one though, like I said I don't even have entry level knowledge here.

Seems like the very first, very outdated trailer from 2013 contains some of that - though in the trailer itself it seems more like bio-zombies than eco protesters. The game could only be pre-ordered at this point, though the video's description suggests there was already a demo available. I don't know if the game's lore at this point was already "you play as an engineer that has crash-landed on an alien planet" -- if it wasn't, it wouldn't surprise me that the decision to make that be the lore ended up convincing the dev team to abandon humanoid enemies.

In any case, starting from the following year's (2014) trailer the fauna is already in the form of biters, spawners, and worms.

tagging @causepix@lemmy.ml in case they're interested in this tidbit of history.

The game has long eschewed "good" and "bad"; thematically I'd say it's more of a "water & oil" situation where you, the crash-landed engineer, don't really have a way to both get off the planet and not pollute -- you are of a fundamentally incompatible nature compared to the bugs. I imagine it could be possible to do a play-through that deliberately avoids automation and attempts to launch a rocket with the minimum of pollution emitted, though that's more of a self-imposed challenge to try out when you already "master" the game (it will be long and dull, for the most part). As this analysis puts it, "Factorio is a game about building factories, and only uses environmental devastation as a minor background mechanic." Another analysis comes to more-or-less the same conclusion.

It's worth noting that, as of the Space Age DLC that released almost exactly 1 year ago, things get pushed even further away from morality. On the one hand, the dlc introduces a way to replant trees, including automatically, finally allowing players to get to a point where no blurb of pollution ever extends into the rest of the world/map. On the other hand, to complete the dlc you will need to farm the fauna by literally capturing the spawners and harvesting biter eggs from it. It's a very fun automation and logistics challenge (harvested eggs hatch into aggresive biters if not used in a recipe quick enough, and nutrients for the spawners must be produced off-world and imported via rockets else the spawner reverts back to a "wild" state). Things are even less clearly moralized by the end of the dlc, where you obtain the capability to craft new spawners and plop them down wherever you want. This means you can add to the native fauna, not just take from it. In a sense, you get more agency in how your relationship to the native fauna ends up. The road to that agency, however, remains that of the base game. Neither planting trees nor creating new spawners is available without launching a rocket off-world (in fact, it takes many many rockets to get to this point). As the first analysis I linked so succinctly puts it, "[i]t is manifest destiny that a rocket be launched, so exploitation of the environment is unavoidable and the efforts of the bug race stand in the way of fate." Cynically speaking, the DLC basically just lets you green-wash your dominion of the planet/solar system, after-the-fact.

Ecocritical Analysis of Factorio - The Gemsbok

This article examines the relationship between the player-character and their environment in the automation/management simulator Factorio.

^{Daniel Podgorski (The Gemsbok)}

In a very real sense, the game is only intended to be played in the manner that makes it actually fun for you.

The fauna is an integral part of the game only in the sense that the pollution produced by your machines makes them angry and makes them evolve, and a lot of work has gone into balancing the pollution/evolution rates to provide a sort of tension and pressure that adapts to how fast you are progressing. If you care a lot about experiencing things "as the devs intended them" then I understand not wanting to cut off an entire system and set of mechanics. In that sense, dealing with the attacking fauna without completely stalling or falling apart is one of the first hurdles you are "meant" to struggle with.

There are intermediates between keeping the attacking fauna and removing them: you can disable their expansion, you can make them only attack when damaged, and you can tweak the numbers that determine how your factory's pollution affects them. You can also change the amount of "safe space" the game forces the map to give you around where you spawn - this alone can be the difference between the early game being anxiety-inducing or quite relaxed. These can only be done at map generation (unless you don't mind using console commands to change things on an existing save/map).

Without changing any map settings, it's not immediately obvious how many options you have to address the problem in-game, but here are some pointers if you ever do give it another try:

• trees will absorb pollution, preventing it from reaching biter nests. They can absorb a decent amount but will eventually die and stop absorbing. Starting in a forest can be a bit more cramped than in a desert but at least you don't have to fend off as many attacks early on.
• avoid overproducing just to fill up buffers - you probably don't need to have 2k green circuits sitting in a chest as soon as you can make them. avoid emitting all of that pollution until you actively need those items.
• try to set up defences before they are needed. You can build a new production line first to know what space it requires, but set up walls and turrets before you turn it on. This should help prevent you being interrupted by attacks on undefended machines.
• researching damage upgrades gives you more damage output per unit of pollution produced, helping keep the balance in your favor
• only a nest that is exposed to pollution will send attack parties. You can toggle displaying pollution in the world map (now called "Remote View") and proactively clear out nests before the pollution his them. You're essentially choosing between proactive defensive efforts vs reactive efforts.
• reloading a previous save to change your approach without restarting an entire game is totally legit and nothing to be ashamed of.

At the end of what I would call the early game, you unlock even more options.

• efficiency modules reduce the pollution a machine emits. They also reduce the amount of electricity the machine consumes, which will indirectly lower your pollution by making you burn less coal
• solar power is a great way to lower the amount your factory is polluting once your panels and accumulators are already made. Making enough to power your whole base, however, takes a lot of steel and other ressources, whose refinement emits pollution. So don't expect solar power to automatically fix your fauna problems - it'll take a little bit of thought
• laser turrets do away with the need to produce ammo and get it to the front lines, though the spikes in power consumption they cause keeps them from being a total, immediate fix. Similar to solar power, you'll need to plan a bit.
• flamethrower turrets are much easier to supply than gun turrets, and can be waaaaaaaay cheaper depending on how much crude oil you have available to you

Finally, you could also first play the game through once without the fauna to get familiarized, and then do a second run with them activated. in my experience, it's a lot more fun to deal with them once you know your way around the other mechanics.

You can tune the biters and make them spawn less, tech up slower etc.

IIRC you can also use the Rail world mode and turn the settings as if they are Normal mode since any cleared space will not respawn biters.

You can also turn up the resource richness and size so you have to expand less and then every now and then clear out an area. I used to be a bit turned off by the biters but now I've leaned into it and have have blueprints for making laser perimeter which kinda automates a lot of the biter handling.

Maybe you just need a mindset shift where the biters are another automation challenge instead of it being an intrusion. I really hope you get to enjoy this game, I can't anymore since I have a baby now but I hope you can. I'll for sure start again as soon as time allows.

Also, aim for 100% roboport coverage so you can automatically rebuild everything that gets destroyed. Then you can clear out something, paste a perimeter wall and continue on with factory stuff.

What other automation games are you into?

The latest one I tried out was Oddsparks which I think is fantastic but I bounced off it because the rail system is a bit underpowered compared to what I'm used to in Factorio and Satsfactory.

It solves most of the Jank like non dividable Produktion times and such, so yes, its great

But I hate the maps.

I finally did the last satisfactory delivery last week and have started making themeed train stations and ficsonium power plants.

The only game that feels like a job that I'd actually love to do lol.

The downside is that if a device you aren't online with modifies it, and doesn't reconnect to the internet or even LAN that the other client is on, other clients will be out of date and potentially cause file syncing/overwriting issues.

But SyncThing is a good tool for this.