[agentwiggles]

Preamble: I mean this as a compliment to the game, so I hope I don't come off too negative.

Factorio is so analogous to coding that I just couldn't get into it. I laid out a neat little factory and then requirements changed and I realized that I needed to basically abandon what I had and build something new. My factory was not really "open to refactoring". Something about that feeling felt so similar to what I have to do at work all day that I closed the game and haven't gone back to it since.

I got really into a technical Minecraft mod back in my college days (Better Than Wolves). For some reason I never really had the same problem with that, in fact I really enjoyed crawling around in tunnels and changing things around. Something about the 3d-ness of Minecraft made it feel more like tinkering maybe.

Idk, this post has become a ramble - but suffice it to say that Factorio felt _too much_ like programming for me to truly enjoy it. Maybe that says something about the kind of developer _I_ am ;)

[drewmate]

There is an inherent tension in Factorio (and software engineering!) between trying to get everything right up front and just building anything that works and fixing it later. I've found a balance that is fun for me in the low-stakes video game world.

Every Factorio player I know has an enormous laundry list of things they wish they'd done better after their first game. That urge never completely goes away, and if that feeling is more distressing than energizing to you, then perhaps Factorio is not the game for you.

Still, the process of analyzing a system in a factory and redesigning it to be more efficient is massively satisfying. New challenges arise at every stage of a factory's growth, and before long, your 'starter base' is just a small part of your whole operation, and the shortcomings there just don't matter in the whole scheme of things.

[clows]

I've played a few hundred hours of factorio, so by no means a _lot_ but I've launched quite a few rockets and "finished" the game a few times.

Depending on how long you played you might have missed out on the part that's the most fun (for me at least) - the later/end game.

Once you have bots the game changes a lot and you stop building stuff yourself and let bots build stuff for you. Once you have a few hundred bots (and resources) you can build/destroy/rebuild/scale up huge parts of the factory.

The starting factory is usually abandoned but a megabase can be a beast of it's own with constantly tweaking bottlenecks - which can be quite a lot of fun (or it is for me at least)

[kortex]

That is an oft-echoed sentiment. I've experienced it a little bit myself, but the main reason I've fallen out of it (after a few fiercely addicted bouts) was it felt like I was exacerbating some RSI, especially with my mousing hand.

But yeah once you start thinking about on-demand rail delivery using signals as RPC...it's pretty work-like. :D The async nature of the inventory system means long-range signal transmission handling ends up feeling exactly like bit-banging on a microcontroller, which is sufficiently out of my current work scope that it's fun and interesting. Oh no, this makes me want to attempt the Ben Eater computer in factorio...

[Arrath]

This, for me, certainly drove home how much I hate refactoring things. If I need to reconfigure my factory for some reason, beyond throwing in a little spaghetti and in-filling some gaps to add another few bits of production, I'll just waltz off into the distance a ways and start anew, piping in resources from the old factory as needed.

And then I run into bottlenecks arising from the utilization of the old factory and the process repeats itself.

[scrollaway]

I find your comment super interesting. I myself deeply enjoy refactoring as an activity in software, and I share that affinity towards it both in Factorio and Minecraft, where I'll deeply enjoy tearing down massive chunks of my base to reconstruct them slightly or completely differently.