About seven years ago I visited friends. They were playing some game and told me that I may like it. I asked some questions, looked at their play etc.
Few days later I spent 70 PLN and bought Factorio.
3500+ hours later
Beginning
The idea of Factorio is simple: you crash land on some planet and do everything needed to send rocket to the space. Mine resources, turn ore into plates into electronic components into assembly machines. And use those machines to build more of everything.
And walk around to look for more resources.
And fight local fauna as they do not like you or your effect on their planet. Pollution made by your factory speeds up their evolution so you need to develop stronger weapons etc.
Addiction
It is easy to get addicted to the game. You start game ‘for an hour’ in the afternoon and ‘one hour later’ you see sunrise through the window. And your legs remind you that you were sitting in front of computer for 12+ hours straight.
Been there, done that. Then learnt how to make pauses and how to put some limits.
Achievements
Like many games today Factorio has set of achievements. Most of them you get during normal play. Some require special preparations.
I remember doing “Getting on track like a pro” one. It requires building a locomotive within the first 90 minutes of the game. Done on second attempt cause I did not noticed that locomotive needs to be put on the rail and I went out of time on first attempt.
The one I liked the most was “Lazy bastard” where you can manually craft no more than 111 items. This requires counting each move at the beginning of the game as there are only 10 items reserve. Great way to learn how to make factory produce things.
Took me over six years to get all achievements.
Rocket ones
To win the game you need to send rocket to space. And there are three achievements for it:
- “No time for chitchat” if you finish within 15 hours
- “There is no spoon” if finished within 8 hours
- “So long and thanks for all the fish” if you send fish into space
And there is funny one — you can send yourself into space and game handles it properly. The way is to put vehicle (car, tank, locomotive) into a rocket and then ‘take a seat’ in vehicle. You get the usual animation of starting rocket but from different perspective ;D
Space Age DLC
In October 2024 Factorio team released 2.0 version of the game. And “Space Age” DLC.
I decided to play 2.0 first to see what changed first. And there were many changes! And new achievements :D
Took me some time but once I finished I bought “Space Age” DLC and started playing again. Without rush or pressure to get complex factory.
After 260 hours I finished but did not had a feeling that I won anything. In normal game you build a factory to send satellite to the space. In DLC you have to make a useless ship and send it “where no man has been before”.
But that does not give anything. Going to the “shattered planet” gives 12th science pack but it is needed only to speed up research.
Mods
But basic game is just a piece of game. The most important piece of course but there are so many mods for Factorio…
Some are simple ‘quality of life’ ones, some are ‘why this is not in game’ (like Rate Calculator).
And there are complex ones like ‘Krastorio 2’, ‘Space Exploration’ or ‘Warptorio’ which change game, add lot of buildings, technologies, change winning requirements etc.
You can enable countless mods to make your game completely different. Easier, harder, more complex etc.
Multiplayer
One of things I like is multiplayer. I had own server where I played countless hours with friends. We did ‘Krastorio 2’, we did huge megabase.
We rebuilt half of megabase after visit of biters — it was ‘rebuild or start from scratch’ moment and we decided that starting from scratch is boring. Turned out that rebuild took only few hours once we got all reactors running so electricity was not a problem.
Community
One of great things around Factorio is community. Modders, youtubers, speedrunners (I learnt many tricks watching speedruns), people on forums etc.
I remember how one day Factorio was misbehaving on my system. Everything else was working fine, problem was only visible when I played the game. Reported a bug, got contacted by someone from development team and we joined multiplayer game. Some minutes later I got “Please check stability of your system. Run memtest or something”. And few hours later memtest86 shown some issue with memory config.
Final words
Money spent on Factorio was the best spend cash when it comes to my game related expenses.
And there are still four achievements to get :P