Factorio

I don’t often get to play video games, but I have put in 242 hours on Factorio. These are my favorite kind of games – resource management. And this one in particular focuses on one of my favorite things to think about – factories.

The game features a complex tech tree of products that need to be built, and you design the full vertically integrated factory that extracts basic resources, refines them, and builds increasingly complicated parts. You get to layout all the complicated conveyor belts and machines to move things from one place to another.

The most interesting things that end up complicating what you build tend to be around matching the production and consumption rates of various parts of the system – how many things fit on the conveyor belt, how fast can it deliver items, how reliable is the source material – does it need a buffer, what’s the ratio of particular production of sub-components required so you don’t have 1000’s of one thing, but none of another part.

The game also has an element of battle with the aliens who occassionally attack and destroy everything (this is probably the least fun part of the game)

There’s enough depth to the gameplay that I could definitely put 1000+ hours into it and still not be an expert in all the more advanced things like train management and control signals. And once you have explored the stock game, there’s a massive librarly of mods that can completely tweak everything.

This is a game that teaches some valuable thinking skills. Managing complex systems and how best to abstract and organize things. I definitely got my money out of this game. Lots of fun. Highly recommend.