9 Lessons I Learned from Over 100 Hours of Playing (and Beating) Factorio
The premise of the Factorio is that you land on an alien planet with minimal tools and access to only four minerals initially (iron, coal, copper, and stone). You have to build a series of manufacturing production lines while investing towards innovating and keeping the alien lifeforms from attacking your facilities so that you can ultimately build a spaceship and take off.
The more efficiently you build, the faster you win the game. It took me ~77 hours to win the game. This isn’t counting the 26 hours I spent on previous games figuring out the basic systems.
I have a special place in my heart for Factorio.
I played (and beat) this game over the holiday period during the winter of 2020. I was in the middle of a seven-month stint in a one-bedroom with my life partner.
We were in Seattle during this time (December 22nd - January 3rd), and it was dark and cold. Factorio saw me through.
I was having Queens Gambit-level game-strategy visualizations before falling asleep. I had “gamer hands”—your fingers that feel ice cold. And it was an excellent time to be consumed entirely in a virtual world.
What did I learn in my 100s of hours?
Modularization—When building supply chains for resources, it’s best to dedicate a supply line to the production of just one resource and ensure the inputs being sent to that factory are only the ones you need. This sounds obvious when you write it out, but it’s hard to do when you have many competing priorities.
Not all automation is equal - The game is predicated on your ability to build automated production systems, but some are better than others. The more you can optimize for efficiency, the more leverage you will get on your time. Again, it's obvious when you write it out, but it becomes more accurate when you are punished immediately (and harshly) for your mistakes.
The trade-off between building systems and crisis management - Most of the game is spent trying to build supply chains and manufacturing systems, but what do you do when an alien invader is destroying one of the previous systems you’ve built? Do you rush over to save it? Do you let it go and know you can rebuild but can’t leave the rest of your system hanging? It’s a tough one.
Don’t be afraid to restart. Sometimes, you have to tear down what you built to rebuild better, stronger, and more efficiently. This is an important part of success in the game.
Using equations to define relationships of proportion, sequence, and priority - Everything is governed by equations and ratios that you can easily find and calculate if you so desire. There are many and the key ones are electricity consumption, pollution creation, output rates, and inputs needed. An under-rated one I ignored at my peril is the evolution of attack from invaders and the scale of defenses needed to keep them at bay.
Balancing learning strategy vs. tactics. Many times in the game, I thought to myself, ‘There must be a better way.’ People before me have cracked the code to solve this problem or optimize the design. Searching for those answers or examples takes digging to get to the most helpful level of simplicity. I used Twitch in earnest for the first time.
On becoming a gamer:
Learn the time-saving tactics: Hot Keys. I could have used them more effectively earlier to go faster. Part of the problem is that I’m on a Mac, and I have struggled with the lack of right-clicking (at least not an obvious way of right-clicking). For perhaps the first time, this made me wish I had a PC.
The tech specs of your computer become a need, not a want. Immediately, I became in tune with my computer's technical operations, which were now being tested to the limit and impacting my gameplay.
The desire for optimal comfort. After a few days, I lusted for a second bedroom and a Scorpion chair to maximize my setup. Or something like that.
Time well-spent.
I recommend you give the game a shot. I found a state of flow. You will be intellectually challenged. You will learn to think like an engineer. And we could all use a little more of that.