I'm a former engineer. Toolmaker to be precise. I just could not get into this game no matter how long I tried.
I love making stuff as a hobby, and reading all the good reviews this game had it seemed like a great way to kill a few spare hours. But I just couldn't gell with the game.It just seemed like I was back at work but now not getting paid for my time.
I feel the exact same way. It's interesting that you mention Rimworld - I dived into Rimworld when I first got it and came to appreciate the way little things add up in that game and make the simulation more interesting (be it positive or negative). The complicated UI is slowly unraveled and becomes intuitive as you learn the game because there are simple feedback mechanisms for actions that affect your colonists.
Everyone tells me I'd love factorio. Every time I load up the intro tutorial I have the intention of finally diving in and just.... nothing. I can't get into it. I don't feel an incentive to learn the building and crafting UI's. It just feels like work. I'm not even sure why I'm building the things I'm building, or what the aim of the game is.
Maybe rimworld sucks me in because I can immediately empathize with the plight of the survivor, whereas factorio seems to be all about building efficient machines for the sake of building efficient machines.
Yes, Rimworld is easier to get into for many. "Survive" is a way more obvious and natural goal.
But once I got more and more into the details, Rimworld was the one frustrating me. I probably just despise this kind of "Storyteller" aka Event choosen by Wealth & RNG. This ruined the fun for me and is probably the reason I played Factorio easily 10 times as long as Rimworld.
The closest Factory has to that is the pollution mechanic, but that doesn't feel nearly as contrived.
Not sure it would be fun for me with something like a peaceful-mode.
Combat is a useful "problem" to solve/prepare for. But having understood those are just randomly selected, totally interchangeable events (that btw, actually change after reloading a save) made them feel arbitrary to me.
Added to this, the difficulty of those events is fully determined by some arbitrary "value" of all the stuff in your settlement combined together. Build a big wall around the settlement? Value just went up. But not if those were natural mountains. Thus to beat the game, you want an effective defense while keeping that arbitrary value low. And this just kind of killed the immersion for me.
Thing is, I also don't see a good way to avoid such value driven systems when designing a survival-game that is supposed to keep being challenging. There is little risk of "game over" in Factorio or Oxygen Not Included once you got past the initial challenge and it becomes more of a SimCity than survival. Civ becomes a chore. Games like Don't Starve have a high skill floor and the restarts made me loose interest just about when I had learned enough to get through winter. "Go to harder area"-games just incentivize not taking risks. Time-based difficulty is an OK compromise at best...
Factorio is a sandbox game where you are free to set your own goals.
As a new player, my goal was to explore everything the game had to offer, and that meant researching all the technologies in the game and learning how to use them effectively.
A secondary goal is to make efficient use of space, which is limited by biters, base layout, and resource layout.
Another goal is to automate as much as possible instead of hand-crafting.
Yet another goal you might have is to defend your base against the biters to go after them pre-emptively. If you enjoy the combat in the game there are a wealth of ways to get more of it or increase the difficulty. On the other hand, if you don't like combat you can dial it down or even get rid of it entirely.
Mods increase your options exponentially, and give you much more new stuff to explore and use.
Like any sandbox, what you do with everything you're given is up to you. The limits are: your interest, your skill, and your imagination.
But doing so hardly ever gave me a feeling of closure (excluding the 8h achievement speed-run) I got after finishing some story-based game and the "you won"-screen has a "keep playing" button for a reason... I expect most player use it.
If the core game loop doesn't bring you satisfaction and you don't find motivation in setting your own goals, then this game just isn't the right one for you.
That was the original goal, at least over a year ago. They have since extended the tech tree requiring you to launch lots and lots of rockets containing satellites in order to acquire Space Science packs.
I feel like I didn't get the same satisfaction out of factorio until I turned the difficulty up enough to feel like the bugs were a threat so I could lose. Admittedly I turned it up too high to get that feeling and had to restart with a bit less difficulty. Then I had a reason to build walls/turrets/etc because I couldn't maintain safety without them and planning for mining expansions.
I highly recommend the Rampant mod. It makes the biters smarter (they'll seek out the weaknesses in your base defense), let them use pheromone trails and conduct pre-emptive raids on your base, and makes them tougher in general.
Depending on what you have to fight them with, the default settings of Rampant might be too difficult, in which case the mod has lots of options that'll let you dial that difficulty down. Also, you can get various other mods (like improved weapons, far reach, or tweaked evolution rates) to make fighting them easier.
I like the game and think it's fun and interesting but the graphics are a big turnoff for me. I find it a lot harder to see what I'm looking at or if parts are lining up just due to the overall brown / ugly colors. If it had something much easier on the eyes I think I'd be more interested overall.
This is why I'm looking forward to Satisfactory coming to Steam within the next month or so. 3d Factorio with much better graphics.
Interesting. I used to play video games but now I mostly 3D print stuff and design robots for fun. I don’t think video games are a bad use of time generally, but I feel so good about doing actual engineering for fun that I’m always a little surprised with games that are supposed to be fun for engineer types. I kind of wonder why actually doing engineering for fun isn’t more popular?
Certain game types basically are puzzles that are similar to the kinds of puzzles one would encounter during engineering things.
Factorio is one of them, but other puzzle games such as topological ones (Spacechem, Opus Magnum, Infinifactory, Molek-syntez), programming (Shenzhen IO, TIS-500, Human Resource Machine, Silicon Zeroes) or logic ones (Baba is you) kind of scratch similar itches.
As for doing engineering for fun, some of us are stuck doing rather boring tasks at the office, and the idea of having a game that one can just put away seems less daunting than having a code/hardware project that could potentially sit uncompleted. Designing robots definitely is fun, although it requires a fair bit of working space and tools.
Well I guess the idea behind engineering at home for fun is that it doesn’t have to be boring tasks. And I tend to work on completely unnecessary things such that there’s no time pressure. That makes it a lot more fun and rewarding than working at the office. Like I recently designed a pair of headphones from scratch. They sound better than any of my other headphones which are all a bit cheap. It totally didn’t need to be done so I could put it away whenever. But it was lots of fun to dig in to. That feels more rewarding to me than a task where all of my progress is virtual. I should say I’m not trying to criticize others who play games, I’m just curious about it. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
That's pretty cool with regards to the headphones. Do you have a link to your project?
I agree that it's really enjoyable to build physical things. I have one 3D part that I've been meaning to print for a while, but without a 3D printer at home it's a bit trickier to get it done. I wish I had a home workshop, but Silicon Valley prices make that a rather expensive proposition. There's no more TechShop either. :-(
Weren't you afraid that you'll somehow botch the headphones and they'll play an excessively loud sound, which will permanently damage your hearing or give you tinnitus? Or can that risk be ruled out somehow?
I wasn’t worried about that. I tend to assume I’ll figure things out. And indeed the wiring for the headphones is “cut a 3.5mm cable, solder the leads to the purchased headphone speakers.” The only thing I brought to the table was design of the enclosure for the headphone driver, which can’t really create bad loud sounds.
I think there is just too many options how to build things in real life so it can be overwhelming. In video game, the selection of tools is intentionally limited so it isn't so daunting.
Perhaps there should be a wiki or something just about all the different skills a human can have. And each skill would have some description how to get started ("first couple levels") and links to other skills. The links would describe that if you enjoy skill A, here's why you might also enjoy learning related skill B for this and that reason. So you could choose in what direction you want to continue the learning.
Yes, the game is a tailored experience you can pick up and quickly become engaged in. I suppose engineering for fun takes more self direction. Your idea for a wiki sounds interesting, though there’s enthusiast communities on reddit and elsewhere that may already have answered “how to get started” questions. So in a way, the resource you mention exists as data on the internet. For much of what you want to learn, you’ll find out how to get started with some time at the search terminal.
Engineering as a job often requires a lot of grinding to get an outcome, even the “easy” engineering (?) disciplines like embedded software work in my experience.
Your “engineering for fun” is perhaps not what most engineers do day to day. And certainly our jobs and workplaces generally are not explicitly designed to be enjoyable with satisfying outcomes.
Well yes a lot of workplace engineering is drudgery. That’s why I love the freedom I have with projects at home. There’s usually no time pressure, and I can work on what I enjoy. I learn constantly and develop new skills. It’s super fun!
I had the impression of working while playing Space Chem, a really good puzzle game with awesome music. I think the developer made another game but haven't tried that yet. In the game you can compare your results with others and in most cases you have to decide between optimizing for simplicity or speed. Seriously, if I just had a sliver of the ambition I had while playing this game for other projects...
Well when I do engineering for fun I’m learning skills that directly apply to my jobs. So I gain experience with PCB design, CAD and 3D printing, or software. Perhaps Factorio flexes general cognitive skills like problem solving and algorithmic thinking, but it’s not going to help you get better at learning KiCAD for example.
Quite the understatement. Pretty much every engineer that I've introduced to the game has played for at least 40 hours.