Same here. Love the game so much, but I end up taking a big break and coming back and not knowing how to play, so I just start new. Rinse repeat. Seems there’s a year to build and launch a rocket before this expansion drops, so maybe I should fire it up again and give it another try.
The 3rd science pack is probably the hardest leap forward. But purple/yellow science are difficult too (just not “as hard” as blue IMO).
The 3rd science pack requires mastery of oil refining. The 4th and 5th (purple/yellow) science packs are “just” about scaling up to exceptionally large bases, which is easier IMO than trying to figure out oil (though still somewhat difficult, and the scaling is of two grossly different stuffs. Purple science requires a ton of stone-and-steel, while yellow science requires a ton of copper).
Once you recognize that purple and yellow need way more space than you originally expected, its actually really easy. Just build “bigger” than you ever had before, but otherwise the basics are the exact same as red/green science. Don’t build a “few” assembly machines, you need to be thinking of at least 50+ assembly machines for the entire purple / yellow chains, and possibly need ~2 or ~3 belts of raw iron ore (for purple) or ~2-to-3 belts of raw copper ore (for yellow). Meaning you need maybe 200+ furnaces (I’m not joking). But… “big designs” are just big, they’re not actually difficult to think about.
3rd / Blue science is difficult because its the only time you ever have to master fluids in Factorio. Fluid trains, fluid wagons, fluid containers, etc. etc. You pretty much have two designs: you either bottle everything up into steel drums so that you can “stick with belts”, or you learn to properly use pumps+pipes+trains (fluid wagons) to move things around. In both cases, its complex but its the only way you get past blue-science.
I can’t recall but I know it was somewhere around when you started messing with oil. Honestly the problem was space for sure. You build this massive complex factory but then you have to start making adjustments to try and fit new parts in and it just got so complex that in order to proceed I was gonna have to gut entire sections and restart, just lost interest.
Still an amazing game and I loved every minute of it. I did the same thing with rimworld. I have dozens of hours and I’ve never once launched the rocket lol.
You build this massive complex factory but then you have to start making adjustments to try and fit new parts in and it just got so complex that in order to proceed I was gonna have to gut entire sections and restart, just lost interest.
Ah. You haven’t learned the most important rule of Factorio.
Don’t “erase” your old factory. Its far more efficient to instead “abandon” it. Space is infinite in Factorio.
“But the biters will attack and destroy the factory” ?? Well, guess what? You don’t care. Automated cleanup. Just abandon it and move somewhere else.
And when you “abandon” a factory, its not a big deal to “undo” your decision, walk back, fix the few broken parts to grab the 400 belts you need for the new factory, and then “re-abandon” the factory. Deciding which parts are abandoned / not-abandoned is a state of flux. You can always reuse / repair the old factory as you spin up your new one. Just do whatever is easiest.
Bonus points: try to abandon your factory after the research of Construction Bots. At this point, you can CTRL-C your good designs into blueprints, and then CTRL-V the “good parts” of your factory over to the new base with very little effort.
But really, the answer is rarely to abandon your working factory. Instead, you use belts to pipe out every useful element of those factories (ie: iron, copper, circuits, gears, steel), and then expand your factory to a new location.
as expected this will be an “easier” version of space exploration, but that’s not a bad thing, specially for people like me that couldn’t finish space exploration, pretty cool to see that Earendel is on the team as well.
Agreed, definitely excited to see what the revised tech tree does to the initial stage of a playthrough as well. This seems like a great way to make the game feel fresh and change up a player’s approach.
Factorio’s FFF blog posts have always been amazing.
From deep dives into development, their automated testing systems, terrain generation, and hyper-fixation (in a good way) on optimisation and QoL, through to more meme-ish and lighthearted things.
Im sure there is a great story of an indie developer making the best/funnest production optimisation games out there, all in the FFF blog.
Im so glad they are writing them again, even tho im not playing it at the moment
Wube is the kind of game dev company that would invent a new algorithm (like the fast inverse square root in quake) and not tell anyone until some insane player realised that their in-game circuit network ARM CPU simulation ran 20% faster than it theoretically should. Then they would publish a Friday facts about it once and move on.
You say that like they haven’t already done that. The sheer amount of optimizations they’ve put into factorio are insane, I’d almost guarantee they’ve invented some new data system that’s never been seen before and haven’t told us.
I feel at this point, those colours and names are essentially a cultural baseline - in the context of game item quality, to differ from them is rarer than to use them
But then there is the (hopefully) good news! From now on, we are stopping the embargo on the expansion content, and we will be publishing Friday Facts every week about all the different aspects of the expansion until release!
Goddamnit, so we have to listen to you gush about the expansion for a whole YEAR, without being able to play it?! How is that good news?
factorio.com
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