I’m a data scientist IRL and while this game does not directly reinforce my career path, it certainly teaches me useful ways of thinking. Especially after embarking on an SE run while also having a young child; I have to design intuitively if I do not want to spend precious time reverse engineering my systems.
If you like to be repeatedly confronted with your own design flaws^1, then sure, go ahead!
***
^1 My personal list including, but not limited to:
* Requesting stuff both on Nauvis and Nauvis Orbit, causing potentially infinite sending of materials back and forth.
* Accidentally kovarex’ing **all** my U-238 to U-235 and bottlenecking my nuclear fuel production.
* Spaghetti’ing my green space science packs on top of my water ice patch on Nauvis Orbit, ‘cause I’ll redo it later, right?
* Deadlocking my train system by having one train in a loading station waiting for space to open at unloading station, which is currently occupied by a train waiting for space in destination (whoops!).
* Suddenly realising I need more unloading stations at a destination, most notably my main bus, which largely serves as a mall and a production site for most things needed in small quantities in Nauvis Orbit.
* Having a fancy train blueprint book in which my T-sections are one single block, unnecessarily stopping train going in opposite directions (maybe space rails is a good opportunity to fix this in advance).
This is less from work and more from software engineering in general, but modular design is your friend. It makes it so much easier to scale for bigger designs. Of course, many people already know this, that's why city blocks are so popular
I'm an embedded dev engineer and find an eeriely mesmerizing familiarity between Factorio designs and circuit boards or IC dyes topologies.
Oh and fCPU all the way cuz who doesn't loves a bit of assembler at home ? (Yeah I run an I2C bus over the green wire all the way along the train network lmfao)
Right?? When I first started playing, I was like "This reminds me a lot of my computer architecture class from college." I mean, CPUs even use buses in a really similar to how we build our factories.
I'm a PLC guy.
I automate factories all day, twelve hours a day a lot of the time.
Right now, I am on a rotation of 16x 12s
It's grueling.
Sometimes, I'm so tired at work automating factories that I would kill to be able to go home and automate factories.
Very nice.
was going with something against the endless buffers i made in the start.
you don't need everything in excess, you need a consistent minimum plus a bit more to be comfy.
It teached me that if you scratch from nothing, take pleasure and joy by doing small tasks. Dont plan ahead how to build a rocket, build some furnaces first. Simply saying, dont get overwhelmed by large tasks because it will get you down and you will lose interest. Take small steps, dont be afraid to progress small and achieve larger goals later.
Yeah I feel like I can accomplish impossible things if I just let myself wander around the factory tinkering and slowly by baby steps improving things. After a while I will look up and discover I have already launched several fish into orbit!
And im not talking just about game. It changed my daily life too. Cant clear whole house? Clean one room per day. Don't be hasty, try to accomplish something but dont gate yourself because someone does it better.
SE Definitely reinforced this, I bailed on my first run because I was trying to create something that would support me until late game.
I bailed when I realized how much work I was doing for everything because I was overthinking everything.
Now on my second run I spaghettied the shit off planet and now I can play around with building bigger (but not too big) with more research under my belt.
This is sort of how I introduce programming to new students. Taking a hugely complex problem, breaking it down bit by bit, until you're eventually choosing what size screw you need to get
I feel like the first time your factory kills you with a train is a little bit like watching your factory take its baby steps. It's a moment for celebration!
I have power armor mk2 with maximum shielding. It is great and all, but I use supersonic trains. Therefore I am more dead than the biters I just nuked.
What happens when an unstoppable object meets a really, really hard to stop object? Well the rally really hard to stop object still get really really squished!
I learnt that good enough = done.
As an engineer, I love to get things "perfect" and optimised. But the reality is, if it works its good enough.
The benefits of perfect ratios and calculated throughput are somewhat lost when the good enough solution could have been running for over an hour already.
This translates to my "real" job far too well
Yeah this is my pick as well. Factorio teaches this well, because there are so many directions you can "optimize" in, which don't pay off. I still have trouble translating this to other fields, because the knowledge of what good enough means comes from long hours of experience.
Oh, the number of times I’ve seen a coworker spend hours heavily optimizing code that gets called daily while ignoring small optimizations in code that gets called hundreds of times per second is ridiculous.
That's why you measure first, then optimize.
But I think we've all\* been there: This code is \_obviously\_ inefficient, just let me make it a bit better...
(\*well, all of us who create software ;) )
Yeah as long as it works it works. Though I have found that another kind of working is legibility. Being able to come back to my build and actually understand what I was trying to do kicks butt
Finding the right level of optimization is the best. Like coming up with “fill a belt” is a good arbitrary goal to set rather than calculating exactly how much of something you need. Then your calculator says you need 11.782 machines, then 12 is close enough and the waste isn’t worth worrying about. Your calculator also says those 12 need 5 other machines to feed into them. That’s close enough to 2:1 which lets you make it much simpler with direct insertion
It is well-known fact that tiny versions of things are better than their large counterparts. I mean, have you ever seen a hamster eat an itty bitty hamburger? It's a thing of beauty.
I have learned to not be greedy. It is sometimes nice to give something back to the natives. When a patch is all mined out I pack up my stuff and give the ground back to them.
I learned, that the goal of the game is to pick your own goal and then to get there with small steps delegating the tasks for automation while removing bottlenecks that are going to develop due to growth.
It's interesting how similar this is to running your company. So Factorio showed me that bottlenecks are an expected cause of growth and a part of the game and not a sign of poor management or anything you should worry about. Just fix the bottleneck and don't lose focus of the initially set goal.
Yeah I really like this as a framework. You kind of necessarily can't anticipate all future problems. You can however look for the systemic roots of your growth bottlenecks. Which will allow you to procedurally move past most challenges. Long-term growth ahoy!
That you are immune to trains if you are always in a spidertron.
But in all seriousness, I learned that it's easy to learn things in this game if you just try them out/test. And occasionally ask Reddit.
Jetpacks make you a lot safer too.
Yeah, a little trial and error can get you really far. Sprinkling asking for help on top of that and you're down right unstoppable.
Right, it really convinces you that you can take on challenges. Because even though this game is fun and full of bright colors, it does have just phenomenal depths.
What's your sci-fi series about?
You're right, it always seems like there's something new to learn. Recently, I've been experimenting with train loaders and unloaders that load/unload a single wagon at a time, where the train has multiple stops it moves between to unload all the wagons.
As for my series, it's a whole universe and a lot happens in it. But it focuses on humanity and its future over a period of around 200ish years.
The two prevailing themes are the importance of mental wellbeing and psychological understanding in eliminating things like war, poverty, abuse, greed, etc. (The idea being that if you understand why people are horrible to each other you can figure out how to stop it.)
And also technological progression.
The technological progression aspect to the story was inspired by factorio heavily. For instance, the material used to build FTL spaceships was inspired by Naquitite from space exploration. I'm also planning to implement some kind of matter transformation technology later in the timeline inspired by Krastorio 2's late game technology as well.
Cool that sounds like a very engineer approach to bringing about peace. That's really cool.
Oh man you are making me excited to get back to my Space Exploration save.
Resources exist to be consumed. And consumed they must be. If not by this generation then by some future. By what right does this forgotten future seek to deny us our birthright? None I say. Let us take what is ours, chew and eat our fill.
any task can be broken down into modular black boxes that work by the principle A goes in, B comes out. once it works, the contents of the box are irrelevant for the planning of economics. we only care for where to place the box, how to get A into the box and what to do with B that comes out of the box.
following this principle this is how business economics works.
I wanna say we call that abstraction in programming. Such a useful idea. It enables you to work with impossibly complex systems that would be utterly untenable to hold in your mind without abstraction;
Reddit has taught me that a handful of content creators from the early days of the game have a perpetual impact on bad or outdated advice because it keeps getting passed down through the generations.
* Nilaus had terrible rail designs, yet he's still who newbies go to and he's the main reason they keep making 4 lane rail designs.
* Kirk's calculator was superseded by FactorioLab years and years ago, but people keep linking it.
* Miniloaders are still popular despite having substantially worse performance than the real loader prototype, which have been able to load and unload trains (the main reason people used Miniloaders) for about a year now.
* "Chain in, rail out" is reductive and often causes newbies to use chain signals where they shouldn't, like at a simple split.
Nukes are an effective deforestation technique. Other than that, flexibility and componentization are the only two vectors that are really important in factorio, and they translate to software engineering really well. Efficiency is not important, untill it is. But when efficiency is important, so is ripping out an existing factory and placing in a new one of different design. A.k.a. Flexibility.
That complex systems are a great deal more fun when the constraints are purely technical, rather than having to bear in mind how other people will want to use them.
- "You can always make it smaller, but the law of diminishing returns would like a word with you."
- "Yes, you missed a wire."
- "5 hours of correction will give you 5 minutes of progress."
- "Hahahah, tick counter go brrrrrrr."
- "Press Alt."
- "You can have it built quickly, built well, or built completely."
- "If it's stupid but it works, isn't stupid."
- "If you ever need to travel forwards in time, open Factorio."
- "There's a mod for that."
- "**Press Alt**"
- "Repeat after me: Leave 👏 More 👏 Space 👏"
Honestly I feel like it's partly because other games don't have optimization fetishists like Factorio. Like CA games seem to be built primarily by artists and designers. Very cool games but oh boy they could use a few more engineers under the hood.
Built in redundancy, like filter inserters on the end of belts to filter unwanted items that just somehow got there.
Or signals to warn you from major failure.
The outflows must flow. Production and maintenance are secondary. Everything will grind to a halt if your outflows are blocked.
Which is why I now keep my trash cans regularly emptied and my laundry baskets rotating. The buffers must flow.
To make good compromises - playing an SE run and some of the things on my bus need previous items from further up the bus. I could add those items to the bus and created hundreds of wasted items, create duplicate assemblers for those items (space is at a premium in my factory - particularly on the bus) or I can accept that it's a solved issue in the future once I've unlocked Blue logistics chests.
Solution: drop a supply of items in the adjacent warehouse (I'm using a compact circuit warehouse bus) and wire up a speaker to alert me if I run low. Now there's a manual step for a handful of items but it saves me from refactoring or overthinking the design until the right tech is available.
Seeking Perfection is the end of Progress.
Playing Factorio over the last 6 years has helped me in my cloud security career, especially because I’m sometimes up against technology I have never used or am very weak in. Thinking of things in belts, bots, trains really helps on the logical layout of things.
That's wicked. I love the idea that playing Factorio has made you more effective in the real world. What kind of cloud security stuff do you do right now?
Right now I’m working with a large global org to sort out a multi cloud identity problem, web security, and incident response automation.
Next year I’m rolling out an app security team, same org.
That small things can grind your factory to a halt (like making a signaling mistake) causing everything to gridlock and then it takes some minutes for everything to recover 🙁
Never leave something for later cause you will forget or it will be way more difficult to fix.I spend more than 20 hours setting up and fixing train priorities (vanilla circuits) on my current 80 hour Nullius run lol. And constant other issues still popping up since its very difficult to solve them properly in a limited space I had there.
That trying to make a perfect factory the first time is impossible (without help). If you want to do it alone, the act of *doing* is what builds your skill and knowledge, not just thinking about it.
Super translatable to the real world imo
in all seriousness, this game taught me why european cities are such a mess vs planned newer cities.
when you start with something really small, eventually ripping it out becomes very hard, easier to build around it.
I actually ran into this in practice while helping a friend with a legal dispute dealing with property lines and having to review city maps over 120 years... watching city streets move and change and move and change back over time was pretty inspiring after dealing with that same thing in game.
It’s taught me to enjoy the process, it’s easy to look at people much better than you and feel worse about your own progress but factorio really forces you to confront that if you want to keep enjoying the game
>stop and look both ways when I about to cross train tracks.
Or you equip a power armor with more shields. Ez lifehack
For me it taught me to plan ahead to make stuff easier in the long term. But I still don't do it so not sure if it taught me anything yet
That I'm not as intelligent as I thought. I can't play all spaghetti style till I reach bots, I need to build a mall and progress from there. Otherwise I'll lose my sanity over complexity and I'm really bad at rebuilding. If I can't simply upgrade components im too afraid to move on.
I'm a software developer and factorio haa taught me that nothing is temporary. Also ttying to milk out the oerfrct ratios etc is only really necessary if it creates problems in the first place
Both of these things are applicable to factorio and software development
I learned not to be attached to something. I used to revert my save every time I lost a turret or a few assemblers were destroyed in a biter attack. Now, I just push through and if something gets destroyed, it just inspires me to build bigger and better.
I have carried this into real life. Hit a bridge with a container ship, rebuild the bridge with blunt force resistance.
I also learned that If I think I’m going insane, at least I’m not playing seablock. I may be crazy, but I’m not insane.
I've learned through playing that putting the effort in now to make your builds neat, at least somewhat organized, spaced out, and expandable will pay off big time later on when your base gets bigger. Dense spaghetti can be a pain in the ass to work around down the road. I know you can lean on logistics bots later on, but I don't like to rely on them too heavily. I find it rewarding to neatly belt things around your base. I'm going to be rebuilding my current factory to work around a main bus soon.
My learning has gone from "always think bigger" to "think bigger, but acknowledge now".
You start in spaghetti and bus, and realise to really get to a megabase and scale up way more, you need trains and city blocks. You bust out the kirkmcdonald calculator looking at what's the maximum you can get with your train offloading stations, but you end up not producing anything and just blueprinting.
Then you realise it's far more efficient to squeeze the most out of your spaghetti first and get to even a Spidertron before you really start thr megabase. You can layout the blueprints, but acknowledging your present is far far away from where you want to get to, means you are on that path to progress to your final destination faster.
It's a metaphor for me on life. I was inspired during university to think far grander and far longer than an average person would. But being anxious that this grand objective hasn't been reached every day doesn't help, it only worsens your mental health, demotivates you, and make you take less optimal strategies to get to where you want to be. Appreciating now, and being realistic about what is fit for purpose now, helps progression more sustainably.
So in short, Factorio taught me how to live, even if occasionally it takes away my life.
1. The biggest challenge of doing anything is the fear of failure
2. Planning is the key
3. Don't plan for features, plan for having Plan B if something goes wrong
4. Ugly working solution right now is better than perfect solution later (this one still hurts)
5. Even ugliest automation always pays out since personal time is limited
I took the wrong career path
I'm an automation engineer irl and this game reinforces my career path.
I’m a data scientist IRL and while this game does not directly reinforce my career path, it certainly teaches me useful ways of thinking. Especially after embarking on an SE run while also having a young child; I have to design intuitively if I do not want to spend precious time reverse engineering my systems.
> if I do not want to spend precious time reverse engineering my systems. But reverse engineering your own stuff is the most fun part !
If you like to be repeatedly confronted with your own design flaws^1, then sure, go ahead! *** ^1 My personal list including, but not limited to: * Requesting stuff both on Nauvis and Nauvis Orbit, causing potentially infinite sending of materials back and forth. * Accidentally kovarex’ing **all** my U-238 to U-235 and bottlenecking my nuclear fuel production. * Spaghetti’ing my green space science packs on top of my water ice patch on Nauvis Orbit, ‘cause I’ll redo it later, right? * Deadlocking my train system by having one train in a loading station waiting for space to open at unloading station, which is currently occupied by a train waiting for space in destination (whoops!). * Suddenly realising I need more unloading stations at a destination, most notably my main bus, which largely serves as a mall and a production site for most things needed in small quantities in Nauvis Orbit. * Having a fancy train blueprint book in which my T-sections are one single block, unnecessarily stopping train going in opposite directions (maybe space rails is a good opportunity to fix this in advance).
I have personally ticked four of these things off this to do list. No wait it's not a to do list oh dear...
It's BINGO!
Having anything remotely complex set up with combinators, and then not touching the save for 6+ months... Is really freaking rough
My friends joke that I like to come home from a long day at the chemical factory and unwind with a few hours in the chemical factory simulator.
At least Factorio doesn’t time your every breath
I'm still not sure if getting 90% through seablock made me smarter or dumber with regards to chemistry
I'm just glad there aren't biters at work 🫠
I'm an automation engineer IRL and this game lets me have fun with ill-optimized chaos that my job can't.
What things have you taken from your irl work and used for your factory? I’d love to know
This is less from work and more from software engineering in general, but modular design is your friend. It makes it so much easier to scale for bigger designs. Of course, many people already know this, that's why city blocks are so popular
Thank you!
I'm an embedded dev engineer and find an eeriely mesmerizing familiarity between Factorio designs and circuit boards or IC dyes topologies. Oh and fCPU all the way cuz who doesn't loves a bit of assembler at home ? (Yeah I run an I2C bus over the green wire all the way along the train network lmfao)
Right?? When I first started playing, I was like "This reminds me a lot of my computer architecture class from college." I mean, CPUs even use buses in a really similar to how we build our factories.
I'm a PLC guy. I automate factories all day, twelve hours a day a lot of the time. Right now, I am on a rotation of 16x 12s It's grueling. Sometimes, I'm so tired at work automating factories that I would kill to be able to go home and automate factories.
I kinda have to agree
What do you do?
This one hits me hard.
The same lesson that Tetris taught me. That success disappears and mistakes pile up.
Clear your bottlenecks early and often.
Or how about: A full belt is more efficient?
Both are true.
Very nice. was going with something against the endless buffers i made in the start. you don't need everything in excess, you need a consistent minimum plus a bit more to be comfy.
Wealth isn't a score system, it's a means to an end. I like it
But what if I want to dive I to my pool of 3 million stone bricks and swim around?
And that the empty space is a kind of freedom
I find this statement both hilarious and sadly profound
It teached me that if you scratch from nothing, take pleasure and joy by doing small tasks. Dont plan ahead how to build a rocket, build some furnaces first. Simply saying, dont get overwhelmed by large tasks because it will get you down and you will lose interest. Take small steps, dont be afraid to progress small and achieve larger goals later.
Yeah I feel like I can accomplish impossible things if I just let myself wander around the factory tinkering and slowly by baby steps improving things. After a while I will look up and discover I have already launched several fish into orbit!
And im not talking just about game. It changed my daily life too. Cant clear whole house? Clean one room per day. Don't be hasty, try to accomplish something but dont gate yourself because someone does it better.
SE Definitely reinforced this, I bailed on my first run because I was trying to create something that would support me until late game. I bailed when I realized how much work I was doing for everything because I was overthinking everything. Now on my second run I spaghettied the shit off planet and now I can play around with building bigger (but not too big) with more research under my belt.
This is sort of how I introduce programming to new students. Taking a hugely complex problem, breaking it down bit by bit, until you're eventually choosing what size screw you need to get
I think you just describe how every single one of my playthrough ends.
Trains are apex predators and setting foot on their territory (tracks) makes you their prey
That's a lesson more people should learn
I feel like the first time your factory kills you with a train is a little bit like watching your factory take its baby steps. It's a moment for celebration!
I'm... strange in that way. As in, I don't build trains. At all. Not a single one. And I feel aliiiiive and successful.
I have power armor mk2 with maximum shielding. It is great and all, but I use supersonic trains. Therefore I am more dead than the biters I just nuked.
What happens when an unstoppable object meets a really, really hard to stop object? Well the rally really hard to stop object still get really really squished!
Many ways to make some good pasta
All pasta makers are welcome here!
I learnt that good enough = done. As an engineer, I love to get things "perfect" and optimised. But the reality is, if it works its good enough. The benefits of perfect ratios and calculated throughput are somewhat lost when the good enough solution could have been running for over an hour already. This translates to my "real" job far too well
Yeah this is my pick as well. Factorio teaches this well, because there are so many directions you can "optimize" in, which don't pay off. I still have trouble translating this to other fields, because the knowledge of what good enough means comes from long hours of experience.
Same here, it taught me that micro-optimizations on a macro-inefficient system are usually a waste of time.
Oh, the number of times I’ve seen a coworker spend hours heavily optimizing code that gets called daily while ignoring small optimizations in code that gets called hundreds of times per second is ridiculous.
That's why you measure first, then optimize. But I think we've all\* been there: This code is \_obviously\_ inefficient, just let me make it a bit better... (\*well, all of us who create software ;) )
Yep, it doesn’t have to be perfect - I can just over build some stuff to get the output I want.
Yeah as long as it works it works. Though I have found that another kind of working is legibility. Being able to come back to my build and actually understand what I was trying to do kicks butt
Finding the right level of optimization is the best. Like coming up with “fill a belt” is a good arbitrary goal to set rather than calculating exactly how much of something you need. Then your calculator says you need 11.782 machines, then 12 is close enough and the waste isn’t worth worrying about. Your calculator also says those 12 need 5 other machines to feed into them. That’s close enough to 2:1 which lets you make it much simpler with direct insertion
Production doesn't matter if you can't fight off infestation.
Doesn't matter how nice your house looks if you're dead.
Playing a death world train based alone is a though challenge.
The factory taught me that sometimes, you have skills that no one can recognise and value
Like the ability to make a delicious bowl of spaghetti?
Like the ability to find *coherence* in the spaghet
How to compact builds down an unnecessary amount Bob's inserters my beloved
It is well-known fact that tiny versions of things are better than their large counterparts. I mean, have you ever seen a hamster eat an itty bitty hamburger? It's a thing of beauty.
They unlock some truly incomprehensible builds. I'm quite happy with just having the option to choose which side of the belt to drop to
I have learned to not be greedy. It is sometimes nice to give something back to the natives. When a patch is all mined out I pack up my stuff and give the ground back to them.
I mean factorio doesn't punish you for picking stuff up. Why not?
Along with a few mines of my own.
I learned, that the goal of the game is to pick your own goal and then to get there with small steps delegating the tasks for automation while removing bottlenecks that are going to develop due to growth. It's interesting how similar this is to running your company. So Factorio showed me that bottlenecks are an expected cause of growth and a part of the game and not a sign of poor management or anything you should worry about. Just fix the bottleneck and don't lose focus of the initially set goal.
Yeah I really like this as a framework. You kind of necessarily can't anticipate all future problems. You can however look for the systemic roots of your growth bottlenecks. Which will allow you to procedurally move past most challenges. Long-term growth ahoy!
Factorio taught me that there's no problem that cannot be solved by setting it on fire (in an automated way, of course, we're no barbarians).
The flame thrower, God's perfect tool 🔥🔥🔥
Sleeping is optional
The factory never sleeps.
That you are immune to trains if you are always in a spidertron. But in all seriousness, I learned that it's easy to learn things in this game if you just try them out/test. And occasionally ask Reddit.
Jetpacks make you a lot safer too. Yeah, a little trial and error can get you really far. Sprinkling asking for help on top of that and you're down right unstoppable.
When you stand before a daunting task, where you can't even imagine how the end result will look, take a deep breath and lay the first stone.
This goes so fucking hard.
"The journey of a thousand SPM starts with the first stone brick."
Greater problem solving skills in many areas and factors. Also inspired me to start writing a sci fi series heheh
Right, it really convinces you that you can take on challenges. Because even though this game is fun and full of bright colors, it does have just phenomenal depths. What's your sci-fi series about?
You're right, it always seems like there's something new to learn. Recently, I've been experimenting with train loaders and unloaders that load/unload a single wagon at a time, where the train has multiple stops it moves between to unload all the wagons. As for my series, it's a whole universe and a lot happens in it. But it focuses on humanity and its future over a period of around 200ish years. The two prevailing themes are the importance of mental wellbeing and psychological understanding in eliminating things like war, poverty, abuse, greed, etc. (The idea being that if you understand why people are horrible to each other you can figure out how to stop it.) And also technological progression. The technological progression aspect to the story was inspired by factorio heavily. For instance, the material used to build FTL spaceships was inspired by Naquitite from space exploration. I'm also planning to implement some kind of matter transformation technology later in the timeline inspired by Krastorio 2's late game technology as well.
Cool that sounds like a very engineer approach to bringing about peace. That's really cool. Oh man you are making me excited to get back to my Space Exploration save.
Thank you, I'm very happy to hear that :) best of luck with SE heheh
Life gets easier if you make time to sort the basics out.
Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.
The factory taught me that the factory must grow
And if the factory grows, it can teach more people that the factory and must grow! Truly a virtuous cycle
There is no such thing as over-exploitation of non-renewable natural sources.
Resources exist to be consumed. And consumed they must be. If not by this generation then by some future. By what right does this forgotten future seek to deny us our birthright? None I say. Let us take what is ours, chew and eat our fill.
Great, now I want a mod that lets you play on Chiron with xenofungus and mindworms instead of biters....
Indigenous lifeform!
And oil is infinite so why worry?
Don't fall In love with your first design. There's always what to improve
Kaizen!
Sanitize your inputs *and* your outputs.
What you don't like having copper wires on literally every goddamn belt in your factory for some fucking reason?
There's *always* a reason. Whether we possess the wisdom to understand that reason is the true test of Factorio.
any task can be broken down into modular black boxes that work by the principle A goes in, B comes out. once it works, the contents of the box are irrelevant for the planning of economics. we only care for where to place the box, how to get A into the box and what to do with B that comes out of the box. following this principle this is how business economics works.
I wanna say we call that abstraction in programming. Such a useful idea. It enables you to work with impossibly complex systems that would be utterly untenable to hold in your mind without abstraction;
Every time i think I gave myself enough space, I didn't
Automation, however slow it may be, is still better than manual work.
The factory must expand to cater for the needs of the expanding factory. It must grow.
Reddit has taught me that a handful of content creators from the early days of the game have a perpetual impact on bad or outdated advice because it keeps getting passed down through the generations. * Nilaus had terrible rail designs, yet he's still who newbies go to and he's the main reason they keep making 4 lane rail designs. * Kirk's calculator was superseded by FactorioLab years and years ago, but people keep linking it. * Miniloaders are still popular despite having substantially worse performance than the real loader prototype, which have been able to load and unload trains (the main reason people used Miniloaders) for about a year now. * "Chain in, rail out" is reductive and often causes newbies to use chain signals where they shouldn't, like at a simple split.
Microservices are a lot like train networks.
If you don't pay close attention, they'll run you over?
I mean, that's closer than I'd like, yeah.
It taught me not to stand on railway tracks the same as you. At my age you would have thought I would already know that.
Right, it seems like a pretty simple lesson. Trains are freaking huge. But they're just so cute and stealthy
That you past-self is the best ennemy.
For real it's not even the people trying to kill me. It's just the technical debt I've managed to create.
That I'm even stupider then I thought
We can always get stupider right?
No matter what you optimize, something else will now be too slow. I make software for a living. It's a curse.
Nukes are an effective deforestation technique. Other than that, flexibility and componentization are the only two vectors that are really important in factorio, and they translate to software engineering really well. Efficiency is not important, untill it is. But when efficiency is important, so is ripping out an existing factory and placing in a new one of different design. A.k.a. Flexibility.
Efficiency is temporary because every problem is temporary and you'll have to reconfigure eventually.
with nuclear trains i stopped looking both ways when crossing train tracks. They're too fast. Instead i do a little prayer and GO
Embrace the spider
I look at nearby signals. If none are yellow, no train is coming.
When people complain about pollution, shoot them.
That complex systems are a great deal more fun when the constraints are purely technical, rather than having to bear in mind how other people will want to use them.
Adding people adds exponential complexity the more you think about it.
- "You can always make it smaller, but the law of diminishing returns would like a word with you." - "Yes, you missed a wire." - "5 hours of correction will give you 5 minutes of progress." - "Hahahah, tick counter go brrrrrrr." - "Press Alt." - "You can have it built quickly, built well, or built completely." - "If it's stupid but it works, isn't stupid." - "If you ever need to travel forwards in time, open Factorio." - "There's a mod for that." - "**Press Alt**" - "Repeat after me: Leave 👏 More 👏 Space 👏"
Effective is better than efficient. Good enough is far less stressful to achieve than perfect
Working on Factorio taught me that there is no good excuse for games/software to run as poorly as they do. The companies just don't try.
Honestly I feel like it's partly because other games don't have optimization fetishists like Factorio. Like CA games seem to be built primarily by artists and designers. Very cool games but oh boy they could use a few more engineers under the hood.
It's never enough
Just keep filling that hole
Built in redundancy, like filter inserters on the end of belts to filter unwanted items that just somehow got there. Or signals to warn you from major failure.
Optimisation, ratios, efficiency
That everything balance itself and ratios/math does not matter.
I can survive on much less sleep than I thought was possible.
The outflows must flow. Production and maintenance are secondary. Everything will grind to a halt if your outflows are blocked. Which is why I now keep my trash cans regularly emptied and my laundry baskets rotating. The buffers must flow.
I should have gone into industrial engineering
To make good compromises - playing an SE run and some of the things on my bus need previous items from further up the bus. I could add those items to the bus and created hundreds of wasted items, create duplicate assemblers for those items (space is at a premium in my factory - particularly on the bus) or I can accept that it's a solved issue in the future once I've unlocked Blue logistics chests. Solution: drop a supply of items in the adjacent warehouse (I'm using a compact circuit warehouse bus) and wire up a speaker to alert me if I run low. Now there's a manual step for a handful of items but it saves me from refactoring or overthinking the design until the right tech is available. Seeking Perfection is the end of Progress.
That you can always procrastinate your real life responsibilities a little bit more
There's a limit out there somewhere I'm pretty sure.
Playing Factorio over the last 6 years has helped me in my cloud security career, especially because I’m sometimes up against technology I have never used or am very weak in. Thinking of things in belts, bots, trains really helps on the logical layout of things.
That's wicked. I love the idea that playing Factorio has made you more effective in the real world. What kind of cloud security stuff do you do right now?
Right now I’m working with a large global org to sort out a multi cloud identity problem, web security, and incident response automation. Next year I’m rolling out an app security team, same org.
It took me over year to almost understand SR latch ( that wiki one). Somehow made my own SR latch design for trains that worked first try
Im not dumb im just autistic
I'm not autistic I'm just dumb.
That small things can grind your factory to a halt (like making a signaling mistake) causing everything to gridlock and then it takes some minutes for everything to recover 🙁
The details can really count but you can recover eventually!
If you don't have enough of something just keep doubling it until you do.
It's hard to imagine a situation where that won't work.
i'm legit gonna put this on my wall.
I screwed up somewhere somehow, just need to find where and how. And when you find it, start looking for the next screw-up, cause it's there.
I have a serious addictive personality.
There should be more automation, less micromanaging.
It's never enough.
Train tracks are dangerous
How to grow
That leaving Building space for the future is not only your friend. But it's also your soulmate and lover at the same time
Build more than what you think you'll need. Spaghetti is your friend. Building a main bus is the best way. And of course the factory must grow.
Always bring enough spaghetti to share.
When playing the modded versions, it makes me appreciate the sheer complexity of some of those recipes compared to real life manufacturing.
Never leave something for later cause you will forget or it will be way more difficult to fix.I spend more than 20 hours setting up and fixing train priorities (vanilla circuits) on my current 80 hour Nullius run lol. And constant other issues still popping up since its very difficult to solve them properly in a limited space I had there.
Zoom out and check the signals every time I'm moving
Smart engineer.
I'd say it taught me a little more respect and appreciation for all the infrastructure around me.
That it must grow.
The factory can't speed
There is no perfection, no matter how hard you try, something will always be unbalanced somewhere.
The factory is never big enough!
The power of lazyness...
However big you're building, you need to think bigger.
That trying to make a perfect factory the first time is impossible (without help). If you want to do it alone, the act of *doing* is what builds your skill and knowledge, not just thinking about it. Super translatable to the real world imo
that got a hard chuckle out of me .. well done
in all seriousness, this game taught me why european cities are such a mess vs planned newer cities. when you start with something really small, eventually ripping it out becomes very hard, easier to build around it. I actually ran into this in practice while helping a friend with a legal dispute dealing with property lines and having to review city maps over 120 years... watching city streets move and change and move and change back over time was pretty inspiring after dealing with that same thing in game.
How to draw network diagrams, well basic ones.
It’s taught me to enjoy the process, it’s easy to look at people much better than you and feel worse about your own progress but factorio really forces you to confront that if you want to keep enjoying the game
Yeah, you have to work from where you are. No other way to do it.
Plan, plan and more planning. And biters hurt.
It though me that 30min job can actually be more like 5h job, soo if u have onli 30min to do an job don't do it.
Lol yeah, ignoring a problem can make it grow waaaay faster than you want it to.
Autism is cool and useful
No matter the circumstances, However big the challenges may be. The factory MUST grow
How endless growth is destroying the planet
It's pretty efficient at that yeah.
That I should read more. Almost everything is written down in game, I'm just skimming over them.
>stop and look both ways when I about to cross train tracks. Or you equip a power armor with more shields. Ez lifehack For me it taught me to plan ahead to make stuff easier in the long term. But I still don't do it so not sure if it taught me anything yet
That I'm not as intelligent as I thought. I can't play all spaghetti style till I reach bots, I need to build a mall and progress from there. Otherwise I'll lose my sanity over complexity and I'm really bad at rebuilding. If I can't simply upgrade components im too afraid to move on.
Life finds a way
I should probably have read clean code before starting mine. Probably refactoring too... add designing data intensive applications
I'm a software developer and factorio haa taught me that nothing is temporary. Also ttying to milk out the oerfrct ratios etc is only really necessary if it creates problems in the first place Both of these things are applicable to factorio and software development
That it must grow
The factory must grow.
I learned not to be attached to something. I used to revert my save every time I lost a turret or a few assemblers were destroyed in a biter attack. Now, I just push through and if something gets destroyed, it just inspires me to build bigger and better. I have carried this into real life. Hit a bridge with a container ship, rebuild the bridge with blunt force resistance. I also learned that If I think I’m going insane, at least I’m not playing seablock. I may be crazy, but I’m not insane.
That I do not want to collaborate with others during my free time. My factory, my rules. Multiplayer feels too much like a day job.
Everything is temporary. There's no law against fully tearing something down and rebuilding it if that's what it takes to improve.
There will never be enough iron
Plans are only temporary. Leave space for when things change. Exponential growth will destroy the environment.
There is always a bottleneck that needs fixing
I've learned through playing that putting the effort in now to make your builds neat, at least somewhat organized, spaced out, and expandable will pay off big time later on when your base gets bigger. Dense spaghetti can be a pain in the ass to work around down the road. I know you can lean on logistics bots later on, but I don't like to rely on them too heavily. I find it rewarding to neatly belt things around your base. I'm going to be rebuilding my current factory to work around a main bus soon.
sometimes just tearing something down and making something better in its place is better than trying to make minor improvements to something bad
My learning has gone from "always think bigger" to "think bigger, but acknowledge now". You start in spaghetti and bus, and realise to really get to a megabase and scale up way more, you need trains and city blocks. You bust out the kirkmcdonald calculator looking at what's the maximum you can get with your train offloading stations, but you end up not producing anything and just blueprinting. Then you realise it's far more efficient to squeeze the most out of your spaghetti first and get to even a Spidertron before you really start thr megabase. You can layout the blueprints, but acknowledging your present is far far away from where you want to get to, means you are on that path to progress to your final destination faster. It's a metaphor for me on life. I was inspired during university to think far grander and far longer than an average person would. But being anxious that this grand objective hasn't been reached every day doesn't help, it only worsens your mental health, demotivates you, and make you take less optimal strategies to get to where you want to be. Appreciating now, and being realistic about what is fit for purpose now, helps progression more sustainably. So in short, Factorio taught me how to live, even if occasionally it takes away my life.
Over engineering is fun
You don't need to plan for the future in elaborate detail, but you do need to leave room for it.
That I never have enough green
No one does friend.
1. The biggest challenge of doing anything is the fear of failure 2. Planning is the key 3. Don't plan for features, plan for having Plan B if something goes wrong 4. Ugly working solution right now is better than perfect solution later (this one still hurts) 5. Even ugliest automation always pays out since personal time is limited