I’m not very adventurous when it comes to gaming. I stay in my comfort zone, usually opting to replay games I already own (I have played Super Meat Boy about 20 times). This is to the dismay of my friends who love getting wrapped up in the game of the week, but after one too many wasted purchases I steer clear of as many as I can. That makes this year a very strange one indeed, because I’ve found two knockout games that I will surely play for years to come. The first is Balatro, an indie roguelike deckbuilder which is a smattering of words that otherwise gives me a gag reflex when combined in that order, and Factorio, the game where you make a factory for the glory of Alan, Fauci, and the Michelin Man. Merry Sciencemas!
You start by crash-landing on an alien planet as a pissant with nothing but a single drill and furnace, and the game prompts you to build a factory capable of launching a rocket into space. There are patches of iron, copper, stone, and coal that you must collect and process into useful technologies. The only automated process at this point is the drills automatically placing ore into the furnaces, but the fuel must be handfed to keep the process going.
In order to progress, we need a few key researches which cost red science packs. They are an abstraction for scientific research and are made by combining a copper plate and an iron gear. We also need a lab to spend these science packs, which requires electricity. This can be done by pumping water into a boiler which also takes coal to output steam. The steam is pumped into a steam engine which generates electricity, and the electricity powers the lab through a power pole.
After making 10 science packs and researching automation, you can finally start playing the game proper.
With all red science technologies complete and a stash of items in tow, you are ready to begin fully automating production. No more handfeeding! You can use the new electric drills to extract coal and belt it over to the boilers which powers the drills, making power fully autonomous. We can combine coal and ore on the same belt into furnaces to produce plates autonomously as well. From here, the game hits its stride as you discover new technologies and try to implement them into your existing factory. It is an exercise in CI/CD.
Your first factory is sure to look like a fucking mess by the time it outlives its usefulness. As a new player you have no idea what items will be used and in what quantities, so sooner or later your base will turn into a sea of spaghetti belts that somehow functions but the idea of modifying it is unthinkable. That’s why it is a good idea to start fresh with a completely new base, leveraging the technologies you’ve researched and the benefit of knowing what you want to make and how much those things cost. By this point you can use construction bots to copy and paste blueprints to quickly deploy new elements into your base, as well as a train network to abstract away the logistics of bringing in new ores.
This is where my opinion of the game gets negative, at least before the 2.0 update and space age which I will get to. The endgame of factorio used to suck ass. After setting up this new base with solid production of every science in the game and launching your first rocket, the game grinds to a halt. If you launched a rocket with a satellite in its cargo, you would receive 1000 space science packs that you could use on the special “infinite” researches, which give you incremental improvements on technology you are already using. The only two worth noting are mining productivity and bot worker speed. The problem comes with the cost of the rockets themselves, requiring 1000 rocket control units, low density structures, and rocket fuel units (three of the most expensive items to mass-produce in the game). In order to get these items in any sort of reasonable quantity, you need modules and beacons to improve your production. Speed modules improve a building’s speed and productivity modules give you more products for the same ingredients. They are amazing, but they are prohibitively expensive no matter what phase of the game you are in. Outfitting an entire factory with these things would cost hundreds of thousands if not millions of circuits. And to do what? So I can launch rockets more often? Why, so my bots can move 10% faster and my ore patches last slightly longer? The proposition wasn’t adding up to me, so that’s where my time with the game ended. It was a really cool foundation and progression through the early and midgame was amazing, taking you through new paradigm shifts and levels of production, but by the end the game invokes the same futility and existential dread you feel when playing Cookie Clicker.
That is, until the Space Age expansion came out and blew me away.
Everything in this post is true and remains true today, though my interest is winding down now that I’ve nearly achieved all my goals. I’m not exaggerating when I say I almost failed all three of the rigorous classes I took last semester. This game pinned me down and made me feel like a retard for caring about anything else.
Previously the game ended for me after launching the first rocket, but in Space Age that is just the beginning. Now there are four new planets to contend with, each with their own production processes and new technologies that force you to essentially relearn the game with new twists, plus the challenge of setting up spacecrafts capable of reaching these new planets and interplanetary logistics.
Vulcanus is a volcanic planet where you process molten lava into molten iron and copper using calcite as a catalyst within a foundry. Calcite is absurdly abundant and lava completely infinite, so you effectively have infinite resources here. The challenge comes from acquiring tungsten which is exclusively found in the center of lava “swamps” that are always guarded by Dune-worm creatures called Destroyers. You need tungsten to make the foundries, big mining drills, and the science packs. There’s also no oil, so you must use coal liquefaction if you want to make rocket fuel to get yourself off the planet. This is definitely the simplest planet and I don’t know have much to say about it, other than you should put your interplanetary mall here.
Fulgora is probably the most conceptually interesting planet in the game. This planet was home to some kind of alien civilization which has long since fallen. It is made up of a massive ocean of heavy oil dense enough to walk or drive on broken up by small rocky islands, and the planet is bombarded by relentless lightning storms that will kill you and destroy your factory without the proper precautions. You must harvest the remains of this dead civilization and process the scraps into usable items. The problem is twofold. First, the items you get from scrapping are very advanced, so while you will have tons of blue circuits and low density structures, you’ll have no iron or copper plates. Second, you need items from scrap for crafting in different ratios than you make them in. That means that sooner or later, your belt will back up with one of the 13 possible items and prevent you from processing new scrap, grinding production to a halt. This is where recyclers come in. Recyclers will convert an item into 25% of its component parts. For example if you want green circuits, you can recycle a blue circuit into five greens. The challenge is to sort all the items you get from scrap and recycle them such that you are constantly churning through new scrap. You have to do this because the rarest result from scrap, holmium ore, is always the limiting factor on Fulgora and the key to getting the planet’s science pack, as well as the unique items in Mech Armor and Electromagnetic Plants.
Gleba is the hardest planet in the game and contains the most powerful technologies, bar none. Gleba is a planet of biological matter. You must use the power of agriculture to harvest yumako and jellynut, then use biochambers to process them into yumako mash and jelly respectively. These items must then be converted into bioflux for the science pack. The problem? Every single item has a freshness value and when the freshness runs out, the item turns into spoilage. If you aren’t keeping the belts moving and/or don’t properly deal with the spoilage, then your belts will back up and your problem will cascade across your entire base, requiring manual intervention to get everything working again. Next, the biochambers require nutrients as fuel for any crafting process. Converting bioflux into nutrients is the best way to get it, so you must have a circular production where the end product feeds the beginning. Nutrients can also spoil. Items crafted in the biochamber inherit the freshness of their ingredients, so an almost rotten jellynut will produce almost rotten jelly. Last and most importantly, you aren’t alone on this planet. Gleba is home to the menacing pentapods, strange five-legged creatures who take notice of your agricultural ventures. They are hungry and will make a beeline for your farmland and factory, destroying anything in their way.
I haven’t spoken about the enemies much and that is for a good reason, but here I must. Without powerful defenses in the form of tesla turrets and rocket turrets, you will get absolutely rolled over like the gentlemen in the video above. Not only are the pentapods a challenge to defend against, they are necessary to progress. When you kill pentapod bases, they drop pentapod eggs. These eggs combined with bioflux and nutrients in a biochamber will give you this planet’s science pack. You can double an egg by combining one with water and a TON of nutrients to get two eggs out, keeping one to keep the process going and sending the other to the science production. The catch is that these eggs don’t spoil into spoilage, they spoil into live pentapods right there in your base! All this put together means that you must create a factory with significantly more rigorous tolerances than you’ve been expected to up to this point. When you do it right, it means that you produce more bioflux than you do eggs, and make enough biochambers such that you consume all the eggs with a surplus of bioflux and use that surplus to meet the nutrient demand. When you do it wrong, well… When one module of your factory backs up with spoilage, this will prevent the items from getting where they need to go and will halt your bioflux production. Now there is a surplus of pentapod eggs that aren’t being consumed anymore, and they will hatch and wreak havoc. At best, this means you have to fly to Gleba and make a couple changes, making sure to go kill a pentapod base to start the process over. At worst, you entire base gets compromised from the inside and you have to start completely from scratch. In exchange for this step up in difficulty, you get:
Carbon Fiber and Rocket Turrets.
Stack Inserters and Belt Stacking (Quadruple every belt’s throughput).
Spidertrons which can be remotely controlled and act as an emissary when you are off-planet (Goated).
Biolabs with four module slots, doubles your science per minute for free.
Asteroid Reprocessing which converts one asteroid type into another.
Advanced Asteroid Processing lets you get copper, sulfur, and calcite in space, Which can be used to make rockets and better spaceship fuel.
Biter egg handling and tier-3 productivity modules.
Several incredibly useful infinite researches.
I’d recommend going here last among the first three planets (If you must know, go Vulcanus → Fulgora → Gleba), and to rely on the strength of your other planets. In particular, bring tons of laser and tesla turrets and a nuclear power plant to support them.
Now is a good time to talk about space itself. Above Nauvis, the starting planet, you are safe to leave your space platforms undefended from debris. Everywhere else, however, you will be beset on all sides by waves of asteroids impeding your journey into the final frontier. In order to get to the first three planets, you must build a factory capable of damaging the asteroids into smaller and smaller asteroid chunks until they are no harm to you. You can grab these asteroid chunks and process them into raw materials that you use to generate power, spaceship fuel, and ammunition to replenish as it gets used up. The tricky part is keeping everything in a small footprint and managing the asteroids on your belts. The larger the space platform, the more ammo it costs to defend and the slower your ship will travel (plus every tile of space platform costs 20 steel, zamn). If you don’t set up the asteroid collectors with proper combinator filters, then your belts will pile up too much of one asteroid and not enough of another, leaving you unable to generate fuel or ammunition. For this reason I dreaded designing new ships because while making the layout is a lot of fun, meticulously configuring the combinators and signals is not, especially with the limited reach of red and green wires. I will sooner deploy a copy of a ship I’ve already made with outdated technology than make a whole new one that will be outdated after I finish the next planet anyway. I put off making new ships until absolutely necessary, when the conditions of space made my current ships unviable. Like when it was time to visit…
Aquilo is an icy hellscape, the furthest planet from Nauvis at a whopping 45,000km away. Seriously what the fuck are these distances Wube? That’s barely more than the circumference of the Earth. Anyway, you must conquer the other four planets before you can proceed here. You need rocket turrets to have a chance of breaking the big asteroids on the path here, and you need planet-exclusive items from every planet to craft all of this planet’s exclusive items. There are no land masses here, just small chunks of ice floating on a sea of ammonia. There is no way to generate any basic items here like iron or copper. everything must be shipped in, and I mean EVERYTHING. That’s not even good enough though, because the surface of this planet is about -33 degrees celsius, far too cold for any electronics to function without an outside heat source. You must use either nuclear power plants or heating towers to generate heat and transfer it into the buildings through heatpipes. This forces you to think differently about your builds, since it is very easy to block yourself from getting heatpipes where they’re needed. Other than that, the only real challenge is not messing up the ammoniacal solution processing. It is very easy to overproduce ammonia relative to the ice, so you have to find other places to spend it as you cannot recycle fluids. The best way I found was to make ice platform and recycle the excess and if that’s not enough, spend some oil to make solid fuel and burn it in a heating tower. Ammonia backup means no new ice → no new water → no rocket fuel for heating tower/no steam for nuclear power → freezeover/loss of power (followed by eventual freezeover). Other than that, if you have strong and robust factories on the other planets then you will breeze through the challenges found here and you will be welcomed into the endgame. Make the mistake of coming unprepared, or God forbid, get yourself stranded here, then you will truly know what pain is.
The edge of the the solar system is the win condition of Space Age, and you need the most powerful weapon of all: the railgun. You’ll have to make the most complex space factory of all, one capable of making railgun ammo, rockets, enough electricity to power a small city, and a constant stream of fuel. Despite my misgivings about building the ships earlier, I had a great time making a ship capable of making it out here.
The endgame of Space Age is much improved over 1.0. It could be argued that all of Space Age is the endgame of 1.0, but I think comparing what you can do when the tech tree is complete in both versions is worthwhile. The foundries, electromagnetic plants, recyclers, biochambers, cryogenic plants and so forth, can all be used on any other planet, not just the one you get it from. All of these buildings are strictly better than their earlygame variants in assembly machines and chemical plants in that they have extra base productivity (free shit) and they have new challenges associated with using them elsewhere. For example, foundries can be used on Nauvis, converting ores to molten iron and copper instead of lava, but the process still requires calcite. There is no calcite on Nauvis, so you’ll have to figure out a way to get it there. There’s no challenge in the endgame of 1.0, just tedium, but not so in Space Age.
On top of improving your production of regular items, you can improve the quality of those items themselves. Quality is the best addition to this game and was my favorite challenge to overcome. By using quality modules in a building, that building has some percent chance of improving the item’s quality by one tier. There are five tiers: Normal, Uncommon, Rare, Epic, and Legendary, each improving the item further. Weapons get more range, production buildings improve their speed, power generators increase their output, and so forth. The challenge comes from getting every intermediate item in legendary quality such that you can craft any item in the game using legendary components, rather than having to rely luck of the draw. This was quite the journey indeed, because quality modules themselves can benefit from quality upgrades. Higher quality quality modules will raise the quality of crafted items more often. Therefore it isn’t worth it to begin trying to get quality items other than quality modules at first since the improvements will compound over time. To achieve this goal I had, I made a small foray by making rare quality 3 modules on Fulgora while I was away working on Gleba and Aquilo. By the time I finished Aquilo and unlocked the legendary tier, I had about 1000 of them. I invested these into a spaceship whose only duty was to collect asteroids and reprocess them (with quality modules) over and over until they became legendary. Then you just have to process them into legendary iron and copper, sulfur and carbon, plus calcite which you can use to make legendary stone. Next is to get legendary superconductors so you can craft legendary quality 3 modules outright. Once I had a ton of those, I replaced the rares on the ship with legendaries and began working through all the planets, making small subfactories whose job was to produce quality ingredients to be spent elsewhere.
I do want to touch on the biters and the combat more broadly. I think it still sucks even after the expansion, and is definitely the weakest part of the game. If you suck at the game because you are a noob, it puts a lot of pressure on you in a game that already takes a lot of brainpower to get a grasp of, and could lead to a player getting completely wiped out and quit for good. If you are good at the game then the biters are nothing more than a nuisance and only ever take away from the fun part of the game, designing the factory. Sure, artillery is cool and will take out the expansions at your border, but you still need to set up a border. That means turret creep and then build a cuckbox, or attack with spidertrons and then build a cuckbox. After the border wall is up with flamethrower turrets online and bots making automatic repairs, the biters become a complete nonentity. In my opinion, you should do yourself a favor and disable enemy expansion on Nauvis and Gleba. It will save you so much time clearing biters and pentapods.
There isn’t a point to this post. I’ve just been obsessed with this game for the past two months and I need to put my thoughts out somewhere. My family and friends don’t understand, they couldn’t understand… but you, dear reader, you understand that the factory must grow. Go play Factorio if you are retarded like me.