Factorio is available for purchase via their website and via Steam for all operating systems, and has been downloaded over a millions of times. The developers are part of a small company in the Czech Republic who focus primarily on this game.
#FACTORIO LEARNING FACTORY UPDATE#
Even though it’s been out for several years Factorio is still in a beta phase, but given it’s maturity and update cycle it’s super stable. You can also develop cleaner, less polluting technologies to irritate them less.Īn additional challenge is that the game keeps changing. Or you can barrel out in a tank or use artillery to destroy them as they encroach on your operations. You can take a purely defensive approach, building walls and gun turrets to protect your base as well as armor and shields to protect yourself. Sadly there is no negotiating with them (they’re not sentient), so some of your attention and resources must be spent on weapons. Once they become irritated enough they attack and chew up your factory, and you along with it. There are some large, scary-looking insect creatures living there that don’t like all the pollution that’s coming from your factory, and they don’t particularly like you. Main Factorio screen showing portion of a factory and map layoutĪt some point you face a new problem: you are not alone on this planet. The clock is always ticking as the game is played in real time (it’s not turn-based). As your factory expands you have to grapple with the logistical hurdles of moving products created at disparate ends of the plant together in order to create new products, forcing you to either plan ahead or reconfigure your layout as time passes (or build some drones to fly the materials around). You can develop solar and nuclear power as cleaner electricity alternatives, drill and refine oil to create fuels and plastics, build cars to explore the landscape, and construct railroads to transport more distant materials to your base. You construct pumps, boilers, and steam engines powered by coal or wood to generate electricity to power the entire factory, and in order to keep developing higher-order goods you combine certain materials to produce “science” little colorful beakers of liquid that you move on belts to laboratories to keep research humming.Īs the game and your research progresses you develop technology that allows you to better explore the world and access additional resources, as you’ll eventually deplete the original deposits near the factory. You transport everything using conveyor belts and inserters, which grab materials from belts and insert them into the smelters, assemblers, and other structures. The game becomes a logistical puzzle, where you mine ores from various deposits and move them to be smelted, and then move the refined materials to different assembly plants to create higher-order products. Ultimately you’ll construct assembly plants that take the necessary materials and build the products for you, and the outputs can be used as inputs for other products. Initially you can take these materials and manually craft them to make products: iron plates become iron gear wheels, copper plates become copper wire, which in turn can be crafted to create higher order parts like electronic circuits and finished machine products. Smelting the ore converts it into refined material: stone to bricks, iron ore to iron plates, and copper ore to copper plates. Once you’ve smelted some metal you can construct a drill to mine the materials and insert them into the smelter automatically. You use your ax to mine some stone to build the furnace, some iron for smelting, and some coal for fuel. With an ax and a few scavenged plates from the ship, you begin by building a stone furnace for smelting metals. Scattered across the planet are concentrations of resources: water, trees (for wood), stone, iron ore, copper ore, oil, coal, and uranium. Using the scrap metal of your ship, a few simple tools, and the abundant resources on the planet, your goal is to build a rocket to launch a satellite into space to alert the crew of a successive spaceship of your presence. The premise is you are the sole survivor of a team of scientists and engineers who have crash landed on an unexplored world.
#FACTORIO LEARNING FACTORY SIMULATOR#
More recently, I started playing a top-down, world-exploration, operations management, logistical simulator game called Factorio. I’ve always enjoyed top-down simulation games I still have my original copy of SimCity from 1989, in the box with the diskettes. It’s been a difficult transition, so I thought I’d write a more lighthearted post this month about imaginary geographic worlds (as luck would have it, the Geo NYC Meetup group is discussing fictional mapping next week). The first draft is finished and I sent my book off for review earlier this month, and I’ve been back to work full-time for two months now.
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