[Macha]

Fitting, given industrialcraft and buildcraft and probably gregtech 2 were inspirations for Factorio. In a lot of ways, Factorio helped me appreciate what old Gregtech was trying to do, but the formula stuck in factorio because it omitted the manual mining aspect. Gregtech was always a bit tedious to encourage you to automate, but it was too slow starting that portion off as it had to give a nod to the base game of minecraft. Factorio basically cuts that out except for the very first 3 minutes of a new playthrough.

[bombcar]

I've played a number of modpacks for Minecraft and some are way too primitive (anything involving primitive tech or whatever it is), and at some point you really do have to stop manually mining (which GTNH has well, eventually reaching void miners, where the real problem is power not minerals).

Factorio is more of a throughput optimizer as it really doesn't have that much in the way of tech, and nothing really becomes outdated beyond a few early game items.