RSO sort of accounts for this pretty well. it has a different world generation formula
Also, 0.17 is out for those that aren’t paying attention.
And the only thing the developer of the game can say to that is “Damn.”
I’m liking 0.17. I usually play modded, but I unlocked a bunch of achievements unmodded this time around. The UI improvements are very helpful; I probably will skip some of the UI mods I’ve used before going forward. The cut/copy/paste/undo support are a surprisingly intuitive improvement to the game. The graphics are looking pretty good, too.
Also, one of the other devs, Klonan, has been putting up some nice extra mods to tweak the game. Next up for me is controllable units like a RTS in Factorio:
Nice, I was actually waiting for 0.17 to start a fresh game.
I’m not going to pretend to understand the appeal, but my son made himself a computer in Factorio, clearly university isn’t keeping him busy enough.
https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/b46ta1/16bit_risc_processor_with_512_byte_rom_and_128/
Impressive. If my son ends up making simulated processors in games while at university (while not flunking out) then I would be patting myself on the back enough to leave a bruise.
I started playing Factorio again lately and the quality of life improvements has been amazing. It’s one of those rare games that I keep coming back to.
I saw that on my morning Reddit read-through earlier today. Very nifty. Also surprisingly well documented, a rarity for “I built a CPU in X” projects.
Congrats on all of your son’s new job offers. There was one right in the thread!
That computer is amazing. What kind of things can it do? Basic math operations, or more?
That is mighty damn impressive. Back in the day around his age, I was happy to get Hello World to display.
I’m afraid I can’t answer that. I’m just a helpless ChemE, so when he goes on about word lengths, instruction sets and addresses and what have you I quickly glaze over. My very, very basic understanding is that it is a fully functional calculator, he has written a compiler that takes psuedo-assembly that he writes and generates a factorio blueprint that he then copies over the memory (?) on the left hand side and magic happens and output happens. Or something like that.
It’s not a computer, but the growth of my rail system has been gratifying.
I’m enjoying rail-building to the point that I might try to skip the logistics network altogether for the achievement, and just rail-ship plates and circuits around for the no-logistics achievement. (Thanks to the patch of 4.6 million uranium ore to the bottom right, I’m already on track for the no-solar achievement.)
Here is what he says about his computer.
“It is a full Turing-complete computer. So in theory, it could execute every possible program - its just limited by the low memory + speed”
I don’t know what that means either :(
It means it can compute anything that is computable. A couple of good books about it are Turing’s Vision, and the Annotated Turing.
Kudos to your son on the project. Probably a nice way to reinforce what he has been learning in school.
Have the tutorials been kept up to date with whatever changes have been made?
Not only have they been kept up to date, but they’ve been completely redesigned for a better New Player Experience. Though I don’t think it’s going to be completely released until 1.0, they did release a bunch of NPE campaign stuff in 0.17:
https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-241
https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-257
https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-262 (This one tells you about their new Clippy / Navi)
https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-283
Do you recommend new (well I did tinker a little bit a while ago) players wait until 1.0?
Personally, I’m waiting until 1.0 until I play again :)
Given how recent the 0.17 release is, if you were to jump in right now you might hit a bunch of bugs that would sour you experience. (The last three FFF have been about all the bugs and crashes they’ve fixed after the 0.17 release, including some bugs in the new tutorial). If you wait a month it’ll be a lot more stable.
…yet if you wait 6 months 0.18 or even 1.0 might be out… maybe. I have no idea on the release date there.
Conclusion: Depending on how risk averse you are, either start playing TODAY, or wait a month for 0.17 to be a bit more stable! By that point you’ll be hooked and either a) still be playing when 1.0 is released or b) want to resume playing when 1.0 is released ;)
I guess I’m not in a huge rush and can wait - I’ve been waiting this long! I rather maximize my chance I’ll stick with it instead of writing it off. I thought Production Line was going to fill a building / logistics itch for a while but it was a bust for me.
Congrats, though I personally don’t understand the appeal at all. If you want to build something, contribute to open source software. If you want to play a game, play a game. At least that’s how my brain works.