[scubbo]

The comment that really made it click for me is that there are two diametrically opposed responses for engineers playing Factorio:

* "This game is scratching the same itches as my day job, but with more dopamine and less bureaucracy - how can I play this all the time?" * "This game requires me to expend the same brain-effort as my work/side-projects, but I don't even get anything tangible out of it? Why would I ever 'play' this?"

Neither of them are wrong - and I suspect that the same person might even have different reactions at different points in their life.

[imiric]

I'm square in the second group. Factorio is fun for a while, but after somewhere around mid-game you realize that it's much more frustrating and less enjoyable than actual programming.

I can't easily "refactor" parts of my factory without fearing it will break some pipeline that depends on the changes. I wish there was a way to "write" "tests" or do mass changes safely. Blueprints and robots help automate things, but it's not that flexible.

I wish I could use a "debugger" and step through the execution and play with changes to see how it affects the factory.

And then I finally get to the conclusion that this would all be easier from a text editor using proper programming tools, and more enjoyable to work on a real project that could have tangible benefits (and then never finish that either...).

[vbezhenar]

Most of my games ending when I realized that I have to rebuild half of my base because of some thing and I don't want to spend so much time with inactive base. And my internal perfectionist can't live forever with quickly-hacked sub-par solutions.

Robots at least make it somewhat bearable.

[scubbo]

I absolutely understand where you're coming from. The closest thing I found to "tests" was that you could hook up alarm klaxons to belts/containers that would alert you when a certain resource was below a given level - but that's very much a in-production canary of "tell me when things are going wrong", not a mid-development "tell me how this change will end up looking".