Be Excellent To Each Other

The inevitable has occurred.

I'm not convinced it's going to be any good.

changemymind.jpg

You appear to have forgotten to buy your hype train ticket. An unusual lapse.

At least we won’t get a toilet photo

FINE come watch then
https://mixer.com/DoctorGlyndwr

Not very fucking exciting tbh

It was gripping! And then I went to cook dinner.

So that Factorum, is it any good?

I don’t anything about this. I imagine from the subtitle it’s a factory game where you can things, animals, people maybe. Who knows.

cool contribution to the discourse, bro

Well yeah, that's great. Factorio meets No Man's Sky meets look at this crazy bullshit I'm doing with conveyor belts in the sky. And for an early access it's incredibly accomplished.

Our factory! We built a space elevator!

But is it good

I'm really impressed with how they've done the item placement. With trees and uneven floors and boulders and shit it could have been a pain in the arse to place structures, but it all just works really well, and connecting them together with conveyors is really easy and slick.

Is it better than Factorio?

Anyone else remember that toy factory game by Lucasarts?

Night Shift it was called.

It's definitely a different game. It's tougher than factorio, layouts are trickier in 3D and building stuff isn't so simple. But it's more rewarding too.

Dunno. Factorio is awesome because it's basically doodling factories on a canvas. This is basically a similar concept but adding height to everything is incredibly cool. Being able to walk around your factory is great. The buildings are fantastically animated.

It's better, in the same way Carrier Command is better than minesweeper.

But…is it good

I figured I covered that earlier with 'this is great'.

:’(

Not gonna happen

It's different enough to make that difficult to answer. It's the Forza Horizon to Factorio's iRacing. The similarities are shallower than you think.

Streaming Satisfactory for a bit https://www.twitch.tv/penllawen

Put your Twitch ID into your forum profile and Beex will tell folk automatically.

I watched it a little while bit my connection is slow, or Gaywood went offline. I get you are building factories, but what does your factory make? Also, I was not expecting the little video of Gayrod in the corner on a little camera

Gayrod!

Moar factory.

Dave is not wrong.

Will do when I get it working. It was dropping 50+% of frames for no good reason I could fathom. The streaming software has a hundred thousand settings to twiddle, just need to work out what the issue is.

It was stupidly broken. I turned it on and off a few times but didn’t manage to get it fixed.


To progress in the game, you need to make increasingly large numbers of increasingly complex things. Each new tier of components is exponentially more difficult to make as it needs more sub-things to make them. So your factory has to get bigger and bigger as you scale up just to keep a consistent rate of progress.

I R PROFESHIONAL STREAMZER NOW

Anyway: this game is great. Cras and I have put 7.5 hours into our multi player game, and I’ve done maybe 4-5 into my single player game. We’ve progressed theough tiers 0-4 (I think) with tiers 5-7 left. Each tier seems to take almost as long to do as the previous ones put together, so there plenty left. (Also there’s two further tiers coming next month or the month after, and probably more after that.) Plus it’s a factory game — there’s always something more to optimise.

I’m very impressed with the amount of content for such an early Early Access game. Bugs seem OK too. Seen some clipping errors and some lag when driving vehicles but it’s better than any recently launched Bethesda game.

Ah, a factory factory! It looks fun, in its buildy buildy way, though from what I could see, too grey (and I get that factories are mostly grey steel, but...)

I know somebody called Gayrod so that’s definitely autocorrected from my phone contacts.

The planet was pretty until we built grey steel and concrete edifices to industrialisation all over it, belching smoke and smog into the sky.

I did notice little light bugs and motes of glowing dust dancing around the grass, and I thought ‘ah, that’s pretty’ before I even noticed the big conveyor behind it.

You are the Once-ler and I claim my five pounds.

Ah, the factory makes thneeds. Now the game makes sense.

The factory must thneed.

Have you changed your mind yet?

No.

Well, I don't know what more to tell you.

Just wrote this elsewhere:

Wow, this is goooood. Picked it up on Friday, put about 15 hours into it over the weekend (across a single player and a multi-player map.) I am very impressed.

Comparisons to Factorio
It's interesting how not like Factorio it is, in a funny way. It's significantly simpler, at least in the parts we've played (we're through to steel, which I think is a bit over halfway through the current content.) But still plenty deep enough to drive you mad figuring out optimum production chains and ratios. It does some smart things to streamline the Factorio experience without losing the core essence. For example, instead of modules (with a complex production chain to make them), you get the ability to "overclock" buildings with a slider. The slider scales building production rate linearly, but scales power consumption exponentially. So there's an interesting iterative tweak process to find the optimum place somewhere in the middle. Also, you spend less time feeling like you are fighting the game, eg. inventory sizes are much more generous (obv unlocking inventory size upgrades in Factorio is A Thing and I get that.)

I've been telling people it's sort of like the Forza Horizon to Factorio's Project CARS. The latter is the brutal, no-holds-barred simulation. The former is the more approachable and gentler intro, but still with plenty of stuff there to get you hooked in. Satisfactory is also a bit more of a structured game and less of a sandbox, which might make it easier for some people to get into.

Also, aesthetics are a whole other thing when you can build in 3d and make buildings around your factory production chains and paint them different colours. On the other hand, the belt spaghetti you can make in 3d is truly incredible / horrifying.

The core gameplay loop is the same in both games, though. Anytime you look at your factory, you can probably immediately identify half a dozen things that could be improved: this assembler isn't running at full efficiency, there's not enough of a particular resource being mined, this part of the factory is just ugly and should be tidied up, the next tech tier unlock just needs 15 more of some widget to be made. The game's interface makes re-shuffling things around easy so any given improvement is probably only 5-10 minutes away from being done. Then it's on to the next improvement, and the next improvement, and the next, and oh it's dark outside now.

Early access stuff
Honestly it doesn't really feel like an early access game. I saw a few bugs but mostly clipping or floating object ones; no worse than any launch day Bethesda RPG. There are reports of connectivity issues with MP games which we haven't seen. Also, there's plenty of content here already, even for Factorio veterans like us who probably rattle through it a little faster than people new to factory games because the concepts aren't new to us. I'm often dubious about early access games but this one seems like a solid choice.

Last night, Cras and I went exploring. Found two hidden caches of unique upgrades. Then found a random outcropping of some mineral we hadn't seen before. Took it back to base, analysed it, and a new mini tech tree appeared... There's a fair bit going on in this game that doesn't immediately meet the eye.

Then I made a new mining area that involved such an ugly belt run (clipping straight through a walkway in total defiance of the laws of physics) Cras almost booted me from the instance in disgust. A rich, full evening of play!

I did see a weird bug. I found a few areas of the map that I just couldn't walk into. Every time I tried I would lag and warp backwards and make no forward progress. These zones seemed to be small, a few metres across, and didn't seem to affect Cras (who was hosting the instance). I could work around (by literally... walking around) but it was weird.

So, I see this is out on Steam now. Kinda tempted. Is it still holding your attention with its creative opportunities and scope for exploration, or did an overwhelming feeling of futility flood over you at some point?