Day: January 14, 2021

Rags-to-riches survival games are a dime a dozen these days, but Factorio’s wild ambition and open-ended format takes the potential for complexity up several notches. It starts you off as a spaceship crash survivor with only a pickaxe with which to explore its randomly generated 2D planets, but stick with it long enough and you can build all the way up to fighting aliens with tanks and creating manufacturing megastructures in seconds with a personal robot swarm. While it gets a little slow in certain places and its ultra-complex logistics chains can be overwhelming, the rewarding depth that can be extracted from its whirring conveyor belts and steam-belching power plants are worth the trouble.

The most important thing to understand about Factorio is that it’s one of those games you probably won’t figure out how to play optimally through trial and error alone. My first couple of experimental factories ended up being such a mess that I decided it was better to simply abandon them and start over rather than trying to salvage the tangle of assembly lines and mining drills I had created before I understood some key tricks and common pitfalls. You’re best off doing your homework and