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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   2617 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for December 6, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I'm starting to think factorio space age suffers from the same gamey mechanics problems that make modded Minecraft unappealing for me.
Everything goes quadratic, everything before a particular weird meta becomes instantly obsolete the second you hit an arbitrary point on a tech beeline.

Like the correct way to make Legendary Concrete is a rube Goldberg system of turning stone into basic furnaces and recycling them back into stone with quality modules and filtering. Then taking all the non-legendary concrete, painting stripes on it, then erasing the stripes in an infinite loop to farm a 1% drop rate of the highest tier concrete. It's a game mechanic totally disconnected from both reality and the internal rules established at the start of the game.

The same sort of thing turned me off Minecraft too. You get invited to a group server and play for a bit, and then someone goes:

"you're mining?? in Minecraft?! You utter fool! You complete moron! The correct meta is to use your first quadlebonic extractor to make a fairy farm, then grind the faries into ruby dust to be catalyzed with magic tomes from Beecraft (obviously automated with the bibliotek autocasting lectern), producing infinite materials on demand from Greg's Quantum Replicator! Didn't you read the pinned reddit link on the modpack discord?!

I don't know, it just ends up seeming so arbitrary that there's no real joy in thinking your way through it, like one of the old point and click adventure games with the nonsense puzzles.

Maybe I'm just a stick in the mud, but this is the reason I always preferred the vanilla experience in games. It's like all the mods are just cheat mode but with an extra long and frustrating to type console command. And space age feels like a mod.

Yay! Factorio Friday thread again!

Love the game, and love the expansion even more.

A few secrets to enjoying the game and avoiding optimizing away the fun:

  1. Try to avoid deleting old stuff that worked. Let it stay there as an example of how far you've come. You'll also have a minimum output even if your latest build breaks for some reason.
  2. Avoid saving complicated blueprints, and absolutely avoid using other people's blueprints. Copy and paste is fine in the moment.
  3. Embrace the restrictions, treat them as harder limits than they actually are. For example avoid logistics drones on aquilo. Keep belts moving and other things moving on space platforms.
  4. Build in the moment. Let the needs of the factory dictate your build. Let spaghetti happen. Only you will understand your spaghetti. Embrace the simple challenge of weaving belts in and out of the existing factory.
  5. Build to last. Paradoxical with the last point, I know. Don't allow a breakdown in one part of your factory to clogg up the rest of it. This is important on Gleba. As long as inputs are available and output are needed each part of the factory should work. Make it a habit and you won't need to delete stuff.
  6. Switch it up. Go kill some enemies sometimes. Go build mining outposts. Go build factories planetside. Go build space platforms. This will help avoid the relentless optimization that will otherwise take hold. You don't need an insane ammo output factory, just a small one that will cover you and fill up a chest that you can occasionally empty out for cathartic bug killing.

Build in the moment. Let the needs of the factory dictate your build. Let spaghetti happen. Only you will understand your spaghetti. Embrace the simple challenge of weaving belts in and out of the existing factory.

Maybe you'll have more 'fun' but the headaches involved mean you will want to keep spaces for transit.

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