Factorio — In a World of Efficient Machinations
Factorio kept popping up on my list of recommendations in the last couple months. I saw they had a demo, and I didn’t have much work to worry about, so I gave it a download. I got frustrated with the demo, probably three different times. Uninstalled it, tried to move on. I’m not really the biggest “management and automation” player in the world, so some of the systems felt strange to me. But every time I uninstalled it, I kept thinking about Factorio. So I reinstalled it, made some progress on the demo, got frustrated at some new point, uninstalled it, rinse, repeat. I kept thinking about it, kept considering alternatives to my design, kept seeing different layouts and ideas and concepts click in my head. After twelve hours in the tutorial, things were snapping into place. All of those reviews that only said “the factory must grow” started to make sense. The multi-hundred hours of playtime started to make sense. Factorio started to make sense.
I have unintentionally put off writing this review for nearly a month. I know a review should be based on maybe a couple days’ gaming, a good impression to see how well it holds a player’s attention, other standout points, but every time I had a handle on Factorio, it would change and it would feel like a completely different game. So, forty-five hours into my own playtime (fifty-seven if you count the tutorial), I implore you to try Factorio, even just the demo. You’ll know if you want the full experience by the end.
To start Factorio before completing the five-part tutorial is tantamount to shooting yourself in the game-foot; even with the patient hand of the tutorial guiding me to my scaled goals, I also recognize that, without it, I wouldn’t understand half of the mechanics of the game going in. The tutorial follows your engineer, post-crash landing on an alien planet, as they build out a series of small operations to get a foothold on the new planet. Step-by-step, players are guided through small-scale operations: hand-mining, automated mining, power distribution, scientific automation, and rail-based automation. It should be said that the tutorial, while giving you the tools and guidance needed to accomplish the goals, still lets you run loose in the slice of world. You tackle the goal how you want to, with the tools you have, regardless of the tutorial’s guidance. Factorio gives you a lot of freedom in the learning stages. It never tries to overwhelm you, even though it may feel like that sometimes. It wants you to come back, it wants you to improve, it wants you to grow. To that end, don’t be a fool like me and think you don’t need the tips and tricks provided in-game, as well. Swallow your pride and take it all in stride!
Complicated as it can be, Factorio does everything it can to be visually clear in what is going on. Distinct arrows on conveyer belts, clear arrows of where mechanical arms are picking up from and depositing items at, connection points for pipes and pumps, everything is made as understandable at a glance as possible. As your factory grows out, there’s even a nifty button (Left Alt) that shows what everything is holding or constructing, so you can have an even better idea of what’s going on in your automated paradise. Factorio is a lot like Portal in these ways: it tries to be clear with you every step of the way, while always teaching you new ways to improve your craft. When given a chance, it excels.
Factorio’s main mode, Freeplay, starts you back at square one with (hopefully) everything you learned from the Tutorial: crash-landed, all alone, nothing but the engineering suit on your back and a pickaxe, the goal to get back home via spaceship. In order to progress, players fulfill different research requirements, which requires long-term automation. In their progress, they unlock different methods of growth: faster conveyer belts, different mechanical grabby-arms, offensive and defensive capabilities, and modes of transportation, to scratch the surface. Just as in the tutorial, the gameplay is staggered, following your capabilities before expanding out into more options. If you haven’t expanded your scope out to efficiently research a certain requirement for research, it will take longer, encouraging you to build out or restructure your factory to meet demand. If you cannot defend your factory against the planet’s insectoid natives (they don’t like pollution), they will rip your factory apart until it is pollution-neutral. If you’ve built too much that your power grid can’t keep up, productivity will suffer until you fill in the power vacuum. Factorio’s counterweights to your attempts at expansion do more than just keep you humble, they show you your weak points and simply ask that you address them. Unless you go traipsing into a hostile insectoid nest (10/10, would recommend for true humbling experience), it’s unlikely that you will die, you’ll just have to rebuild better than before.
For all the complicated math going on behind the scenes, Factorio controls surprisingly well. The basic actions are tied to clicking and dragging, while menus and item manipulation (in-menu and in-world) are tied to keys right next to the movement keys. Even if it takes a while to get used to, the controls are surprisingly compact for such a complicated-looking game. Now, granted, some of the mechanical and programming controls might not make sense for everyone, but the keyboard and mouse control the world very well.
A pleasant surprise was how much the Factorio community thrives on the use of its Wiki collection, expanding on concepts one might not get in the main game. It’s all a collection of tools, advice, tutorials designed to even further immerse players in the mechanics and potential of the game. Again, as in the main tutorial, there is no singular way to play and win Factorio. Factorio is a collection of tools you manipulate to your liking to accomplish your goal, and the community encourages that the whole way. The mod community is expansive, as well, if you find yourself mastering the base game or want to expand on it. A note: as much as people speak highly of Angel’s and Bob’s mods in particular, all of my experience is solely from the standard base game.
Building out a factory from nothing is satisfying in its own mechanical way, but luckily for everyone, the soundtrack (composed by Daniel James Taylor) helps to wrap players up in the world. It is a minimal soundtrack, ranging from ambient music to dread-inducing forebodes, hymns of your automation against a fear of what lies just beyond your defenses. Its main draw is how easy it is to overlook when you’re playing: it blends into the background so seamlessly, no matter what is going on in your surroundings, that it feels organic, like the soundtrack itself is part of the world. But in those moments where you stop and survey your surroundings, whether admiring your factory up to this point, or wondering how best to navigate between some insect nests, those moments of pause are when the soundtrack hits hardest. That’s when you start to hear it more in the background. That’s when you truly appreciate it.
One can’t speak of the music in the game without mentioning the sound design (by Ian Macbeth, Valerii Kuznietsov, and Daniel James Taylor). Every whir, grind, and chug of your living factory, the skittering and cries of the insects whose home you’ve invaded, even the zip of your vehicles as you explore the landscape beyond, every decibel of Factorio’s world is accounted for and gives a special life to the world you seek to industrialize. It gives weight to your creations, your actions, and everything around you, making this world feel alive in all stages of your creation-process.
A thousand moving pieces come together to create something like Factorio, whether it’s moving pieces of your own placement, the adaptation of the world around you to your actions, or your surrounding’s sound design cocooning you in this world of automation. It is a beautiful game if you give it time to connect with you and let it teach you its ways. Soon, you, too, can start seeing conveyer belts and factory layouts when you lay down to sleep. The factory must grow, yes, but so, too, must you. Let Factorio teach you.
See you planetside, engineer.
