Since @Mikey asked, I’ll share my impressions of this heck of a game.
Factorio is essentially a game about creating automated factories. The game starts with you stranded in the middle of an infinite, procedurally generated world and your objective is to survive long enough to launch a rocket into space with a satellite, ostensibly so you can get rescued. You do that by exploiting and consuming the planet’s resources in order to build everything you need for the satellite.
Factorio is currently in Early Access but it’s really stable and completely winnable. Not sure when is the date for the true release, but I don’t think it’s too far off.
Anyway, the game starts reminiscent of survival games. You build your tools and craft things by hand, chop down trees and mine ores manually. It soon becomes obvious that for the scale of your enterprise, doing things this way is inefficient and impractical, so you start automating stuff. You build conveyor belts to transport materials, set up a water pump and some boilers connected to a generator, feed coal to the boilers and you soon have electric power. With this you can power electric drills which in turn make mining more efficient, and subsequently smetling those ores into useable metal plates, which in turn are used as materials to build all sorts of machines.
The whole process starts by bootstrapping in this way. When you have a decent production going, you can start building labs to research new technologies. Labs run on some sort of science juice you also need to produce. More advanced technologies need more juice, and also more advanced kinds of juice that are harder to produce. The challenge is to build an automated system that can keep science going and your tech advancing towards the space rocket.
While you do this, you also have to defend against attacks from the local fauna. In the planet live these zerg-like creatures, and they get pissed off if you pollute their skies with the smoke from your coal smelters and boilers, so you have to build perimeter defenses with turrets, cement walls and so on to protect your precious factories. Of course, as your factory grows, you’ll need to automate delivery of ammo to the turrets and keep producing a steady amount of war machinery in addition to your other productive factories.
I don’t have a lot of experience with this whole aspect of the game because I’ve always played in peaceful mode. In peaceful mode, the biters (that’s how the cratures are called) don’t attack you unless you attack first. It used to be that for the more advanced technologies, you needed a material that could only be obtained by killing them, but since version 0.15 they’ve revamped the late-game science progression so now you can play till the “ending” (launching the rocket) and beyond completely peacefully.
(you can also eventually switch to clean energies like solar power)
0.15 also introduced more new options to transport fluids (you can put all sorts of liquids in barrels now and there’s a fuild wagon for trains) and also introduced nuclear energy, which is super poweful and probably meant for massive factories working at full capacity.
Did I mention that the game for the most part operates on a conservation of mass principle, so you’ll HAVE to deal with nuclear waste producls like spent fuel cells and non-enriched uranium isotopes. Also with empty barrels if you use those for transportation.
The game is a notorious time devourer. There’s always some aspect of your factory to optimize, some new thing to try, so if you like this sort of thing Factorio wil eat your days up. Be careful.
The main progression is through the science tech tree. Progression is linear at first, and there are some milestones you must hit. For example, everything dealing with manipulation of liquids, you can’t do “by hand” so you’ll need to create buildings that can process that for you. Refineries, tankers etc are necessary to produce sulfur and plastics, which are intermediate components of more advanced circuit boards and batteries, for example.
After a while, the tech tree explodes into several branches that are technically completely optional, but incredibly rich on their own. You can build networks of trains to transport ores and materials from distant veins to your processing plants, with train stops, signal systems (so your trains don’t collide with each other in intersections) refuelling and unloading stations…
You can build smart devices with circuit logic, wiring up machines and programming combinators in different circuit networks so you can, e.g. regulate production of specialized items you don’t need as many of (so they don’t cannibalize your resources)
You can set up a wireless network of logistic drones that will fly materials to you and to your other factories, as well as automatically build blueprinted structures…
The game is huge. You can get lost for dozens of hours. I haven’t even covered a lot of what the game has to offer, so ama.
Also, worth noting that the game itselt is not so good at explaining what you have to do or how things work optimally, so you’ll have to seek external information. But wikis and youtube videos are plentiful and serve as good learning material. Make sure the video you are watching applies to your version (the jump from 0.14 -> 0.15 changed a lot of minor details for energy rations and the like)
Oh, and it has mod support. It doesn’t intergrate with Steam, so you have to make an account at the factorio website, but the process is painless enough. I haven’t played around a lot with mods but there is one I recommend. The Long Reach mod allows you to manipulate any building or item as long as you can see it in the map, instead of having to maneuver your avatar within reaching distance. It’s technically cheating (it allows you to e.g. reload turrets while away from danger) but it’s a great quality of life improvement if you just want to build stuff with minimal fuss.
