Factorio!

[Clay]

@Daagar

Are they really interested in the factory building part? Both Factorio and Satisfactory are fairly advanced when it comes to that portion. Not saying they can’t handle it, just curious if they’d be more interested in a Valheim-like experience over a factory builder if exploration is their goal.

So, we’re home schooling them this year. I’m sure they would like Valheim, and maybe I should look at that as an alternative. However, from time to time, I’ll give them a game to play that is a bit more intellectual in some regard. For instance, they were both assigned to play Portal (in parallel) a few weeks ago, so they spent a lot of time talking through the puzzles to figure out how to proceed. I was thinking Factorio would be a good game in that regard, but Satisfactory is similar and might appeal to them more because of the environment.

With Portal, I gave them a goal and told them they’d get a surprise when they finished. Without any context, I told them that they had to finish the game and tell me if the cake was real. It was fun to watch them trust GladOS at first, only then to realize they were being manipulated, etc.

I’d like to be able to give them a goal with one of these games. Maybe “build the space elevator” or something with Satisfactory.

[Daagar]

Very good! Just don’t make them rush oil in Factorio and they should be okay :) I know they are interested in exploration, but consider Infinifactory for a good logistic puzzle game.

[fox.ferro]

The milestone system in Satisfactory certainly provides discrete goals that would certainly suit what you’re trying to do: Milestones - Official Satisfactory Wiki

(NB Tier 3 onwards is tied also to space elevator progression)

Reaching the end state in either Factorio or Satisfactory is a big ask, though. Portal’s a (very) short game, and not particularly complex, in comparison. But setting a tier milestone as a goal is reasonably achievable IMO.

[HRose]

I have another outstanding mod suggestion: Nullius.
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/nullius

This is completely standalone and incompatible with most other content-based mods (the few compatible are listed on the page). It has some bob mods and Angel dependencies but only used for graphics.

It’s probably as close to a perfect mod: right from the first minute it offers a completely different experience from standard Factorio. It cuts the slow, samey introduction and lets you play right from the beginning with fluids and gases. There are no biters, so there’s no time constraint. You just play doing whatever you want without any pressure.

The concept of the game is that you are actually terraforming an alien planet, so, later in the game, you will populate it with breathable air and living creatures.

You start, there’s no coal, there’s no wood. The usual loop, where you mine some coal, drop some miners for iron and copper… is gone. You also have zero recipes, zero craftables. You don’t even need the ores all that much.

So what happens when you cannot craft anything? Well, you can gather some resources from the destroyed spaceship. These include a number of buildings that happen much later in the research tree. That means the game gives you a finite number of semi-advanced buildings that you use for this first phase of the game.

You got no coal, but you get a bunch of solar panels. So you have already enough to set up an electricity network, first thing in the game. With some miners and a lab sitting in the inventory, you already have enough to start researching, and the unlocks come very fast. But within just a few minutes you need already a blue potion thing to research, and this is created by mixing water and air. You got five air filters, and that’s all you have for a while, since you won’t craft them until later in the tech tree. But you join air and sea water through some pipes and a dedicated building… and you have this blue potion.

The strength of this mod is that it does away with the early pattern that most of the other mods follow, and is interesting from the first minute. Letting you rediscover everything as if it’s all new. The difficulty is higher than vanilla, but not excessively so. I’ve read contrasting opinions. It has less “things” and fluids than a full angels-bob, but it has a lot more intermediaries and lots of chemical mixes. So, in general, it has less things overall but a lot more ways to connect them, more options, many different alternate uses for the same items that will become important at some later stages. It’s a lot more “sandboxy”, giving you plenty of toys to play with from the first minute and letting you be more creative. Supposedly, it also has a much more interesting endgame, playing with the life you create and other things, so it doesn’t just ramp up the complexity for longer chains.

It’s extremely well put together and it seems to focus on the best parts of the game. And it probably hits the best ratio of complexity and fun puzzles to solve, without being excessive.

[SadleyBradley]

That sounds fascinating and worth checking out. I’ve been disappointed that most of the popular Factorio mods are just different flavors of “make it more complicated.” It’s good there’s at least something out there that actually aims to make it a different game.

[thischarmingman]

That does sound pretty cool. I’ve not tried any mods yet, base game is plenty daunting in itself. There’s one where you start on a raft or island that sounds cool as well

[Daagar]

It is a different style, but it is also “make it more complicated”: https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/nx7zba/nullius_endgame_world_250_hours/

[HRose]

@Daagar

It is a different style, but it is also “make it more complicated”: Reddit - Dive into anything

Yeah, but it should be the fun part of complex, because it’s more interconnected and more than one way to build something. Without biters there’s no real pressure.

@thischarmingman

There’s one where you start on a raft or island that sounds cool as well

Sea block? Sea block is just angel-bob but where I think you get minerals and ores from processing water. The real difference is that in the normal game you can build anywhere you want, but then have to deal with the transportation. In Sea block you expand your base area through landfill, but you have to produce that as well, so you are constantly spatially confined and so have to build things in the most compacted way.

I haven’t tried it but it seems more gimmicky and I don’t think it plays all that differently.

[Daagar]

@HRose

Yeah, but it should be the fun part of complex, because it’s more interconnected and more than one way to build something. Without biters there’s no real pressure.

Absolutely. It really looks like an interesting mod and seems to be gaining interest.

[HRose]

This is very off topic… But not so much. I’m putting it here for the people who might be looking here… for a suggestion.

I don’t know what’s happening this year, but I’m finding the best games of my entire life, and they seem to appear out of nothing even if they’ve always been there. Earlier this year I discovered Factorio with mods, this summer I got into Rimworld (I, and this forum, we’ve been fans of Dwarf Fortress from the beginning, discussing it here before it was known to the world, I even gave Tarn Adams my webserver for client mirrors when it got popular).

Now everything’s happening this week. Three days ago I discovered Tarkov singleplayer with mods. The following day I discovered a wonderful game that is a DF-like, Rimworld-like, Songs of Syx. This one written in java but running at 20% CPU on my 13+ years old pc. With 70 villagers… for a game with a population cap of 15k. I played it for 18 hours. In the same day. It’s an extremely relaxing Dwarf Fortress that does everything right (DF is a mess of a game that is a masterpiece, but does everything wrong from game design perspective, this one is the opposite, it’s very simple but it’s designed with brilliance). I suppose the game wants you to accelerate some activities, since it allows to speed up the time. But I never hit that button. It’s zen like experience I kept sometime running on its own, just me watching or doing some other stuff while it kept running in the background. It has a beautiful music that never stopped. After 18 hours it’s now seared into my brain and now it continues even when the game is closed.

I’ve read the developer plans to expand it for the next few… YEARS. This now joins the group of games that have a permanent place on the disk. The forever games.

And, speaking about forever games written in Java, I found something that melted my brain. I don’t even know why I completely missed this and how it’s even possible that it exists: Minecraft.

Well, of course I knew Minecraft already, and in fact, speaking of this forum, we didn’t just discover DF when it wasn’t know (and contributed to make it popular), but Minecraft too. Actually I think I also a played a very earlier tech demo where there was nothing to do.

But what I found out yesterday wasn’t just Minecraft, but Minecraft… with mods. But not just mods. GregTech. But not just GregTech, mod packs with hundreds of mods, built as total overhauls (what’s known as “Feed the Beast”). But not just modpacks. GTNH.

So I love these humongous projects that humble human life itself. Same as I was looking for the most complex Factorio mod offering gameplay in the thousands hours. Here comes “GTNH”. There’s a “version” of GTNH that is much simplified and streamlined. A guy on reddit completed this other version, here is what he said:

… And here’s GTNH:

Now, this is of course a meme of an hardcore mod and its “length”, but you have to believe me, it’s incredible. This is not just artificial extension of playtime, nor it’s one of those insanity mods that are unplayable, messy and broken.

This is… well thought and well designed. Even more surprising for this kind of mods, it has the BEST TUTORIAL I’ve ever seen. Hardcore mods are for hardcore players. Try playing Stalker Anomaly (or Tarkov) or Jagged Alliance 2 with 1.13 and Aimnas, and see how it goes if you don’t already know those games extremely well.

This one is insanity, but it’s also perfectly accessible. Because you spawn with a book. And this book has ONE THOUSAND THREE HUNDRED tutorial quests. It takes your hand gently and explains everything STEP BY STEP, through the WHOLE GAME. It gives simple quests with objectives and rewards, telling you exactly what to do and how from the first moment in the game. It even gives you coins that you can then spend on a page to obtain some other rewards.

It’s tiered. It has 200+ mods, but organized so they are far more than stuff bundled together. They are built into one experience so that they all depend on each other, and they are made tiered so that there’s a linear progression through the whole game. Those are the 4000 hours, because it’s not just one messy sandbox, but it has this linear life quest with linear goals… It just happens to be so huge that it borders on the eternal.

I don’t know how this thing can exist, and why I never heard about it. Because, again, this is fun and incredibly accessible (a few caveats, you have to pull out from the inside a mod titled HardcoreDarkness that makes night too pitch black and it’s a bit overkill).

From the first second in the game everything’s different, because you cannot even make an axe out of wood, and even the crafting table is built in a completely different way. It’s not a huge mod that extends the game, it’s a total overhaul that gives you a COMPLETELY different gameplay right as you step into the game. Actually, the assumptions, the knowledge you have about the game, will work against you, because you will try to do stuff that does not work, and doesn’t need to be done at that moment (for example, I wanted to dig and so I kept trying making torches… but that’s not the right way).

But that’s why it’s brilliant. Here you don’t go and “play Minecraft” as you expect. You instead open the book tutorial, and learn.

Trust the tutorial.

An hardcore, humongous game. With an hand-holding brilliant tutorial. This must be a miracle.

(and I’m off, working on some weird performance kinks that I need to solve…)

P.S.
I still have no idea how to install this. There are some launchers they use, Technic, MC. I’ve just done everything manually, getting the curse 1.7.10 client (because this runs on the older 1.7.10, as all of the GregTech based mods), and then the mod from here: Index of /Dev-Pack/Pack/Client/
And since I’m nuts I got that dev pack test client. For the “stable” version go up a few directories…

…This takes more than 5 minutes even to load. But then it’s AMAZING.

And it’s basically Factorio in Minecraft, but with A LOT MORE.

P.P.S.
I also wanted to add that if I had found out Minecraft when I was young… Then it would have easily become my dream game. But I never got into it, because it’s… Minecraft. It’s not intuitive to play without reading guides, and the bigger problem is that it’s a kind of aimless sandbox. So playing on my own I always reached the point where the immediate “survival” pressures like finding basic equipment (iron → build some armor) and food were solved… and it was game over because I lacked an immediate, interesting goal to pursue (and I’m not the type of player that spends hours decorating, unless there’s something else that sustains the activity).

This mod fixed this. Because, again, of the wonderful tutorial. Now I got stuff to do, and it’s the game that tells me what and how. And it’s still the same sandbox, so I can go at my pace, and can do what I want, if I want. It’s perfection made into a game.

[SadleyBradley]

I’ve been wanting to make a post about Minecraft mods for a while, since I’ve been diving in to quite a few of them lately. But this isn’t really the thread for it, so I’ll just add I’ve really enjoyed Engineer’s Life 2 (for a tech-focused pack that also adds farming, new enemies, and a more complex food system) and Valhelsia 3 (for a bit-of-everything pack that has some tech, some magic, and lots of exploration and adventuring). Neither I think are quite as crazy as Gregtech, but they offer a lot to do and are mostly well-documented with quests in the same way.

[HRose]

By the way, this isn’t GregTech. This is a modpack, based on GregTech.

Now… GregTech is on version 6, standalone. It’s now its own thing.

GregTech 6 was basically a brand new start, it simplifies and streamlines a few things, add something else. I’ve read people that GT6 isn’t as good as GT5, because there’s less chemistry, and it’s more focused on industry instead.

So, for some players the “true” hardcore “microcrafting” GregTech is GT5.

Then… GT5 was usually smashed into these huge modpacks, built so they added GT5 together other massive mods, to create these humongous games. And there are the “Feed the Beast” packs. The one “simplified” version I mentioned in the post is “Interactions”, the one that takes ~700 hours to complete.

GT New Horizons (GTNH) is the most humongous of all the modpacks. So GregTech 5 is only one… out of 255 other mods, big (huge) and small. And not only, because this is an extension of an extension of GT5, called CT5U, then maintained by the community, itself extended by another named GT++… plus all the other stuff.

So even if GT5 is the old, abandoned version, it actually isn’t because it lives on… in other forms.

These things take a life of their own.

(other absurd stuff I read about is Psi, a magic mod that creates spells as if they are coded in a mix of icon based grid and assembler, or NuclearCraft… where you build a “realistic” nuclear reactor.)

[HRose]

There’s something I can ask you.

How is this client/server thing working? Because I of course only want to play locally in single player, but I looked up Valhelsia 3 and it comes with client and server. But the client is just 33Mb. So I suppose it needs the server to run locally?

Because I was looking at GTNH and I only used the client. And if I load the server I think it uses up the 6-8Gb of memory just for it, so I probably end up with client+server taking up to 16Gb.

I’m not sure what’s the standard way of doing things (without multiplayer).

[SadleyBradley]

I don’t know the complete answer because frankly, I always just use a launcher to install and handle all of that. When you download a mod or a modpack through, say, Curseforge, it basically creates a new installation of Minecraft with a new profile and installs all your mods to it. So each mod is kept entirely separate from the others and there’s no weird cross-pollination, and you can launch the game with whatever mod or modpack right from that client.

But I think you’ve got the right idea. You should just need the client install. The server install would be what you put on a multiplayer server.

[Daagar]

@HRose

Songs of Syx

This looks amazing! Thanks for pointing it out.

GTHN sounds interesting as well, except for the whole Minecraft part. I personally prefer the overhead/isometric 2D games like DF/Rimworld/etc., so Songs is so much more attractive. Same reason I just can’t do Satisfactory.

EDIT: Has a demo even!

[HRose]

@Daagar

I personally prefer the overhead/isometric 2D games like DF/Rimworld/etc., so Songs is so much more attractive.

And it’s not just that. Songs of Syx is Dwarf Fortress 1.0.

There was a huge, conceptual difference between first and second gen Dwarf Fortress, and while the game gained a lot of variety and richness, it also lost some magic it will never get back…

Back with DF1 the fun thing was sharing your fortress. There were no “z-levels” so everything was on the same screen. You could build these humongous fortresses and they all fit into one giant map/screen. The coolest thing is that every player ended up with a different construction style, so it was fun to see what other people built.

Songs of Syx is again DF1 style. No z-levels, and it has a UI button that does just that, take a single screen of the whole map.

(Another great feature has been a pet peeve of mine since day 1 in DF. I like more to keep small communities than exponential growth (and also why I’m more fond of Rimworld, that also lets you compartmentalize groups and areas, and even maintain multiple colonies in different parts of the map). In DF you either cap the population, or you cheese the mechanic by killing immigrants. In Songs of Syx you just press a button when immigrants are available, whenever you want.)

Of course people are going quite crazy.

…This is instead mine.

(to notice the L shaped wall slightly on the left, between two buildings, that was built as an attempt to block the noise made by the carpenter above that would invade the dormitory right under it…)

[ooomalley]

@HRose

There was a huge, conceptual difference between first and second gen Dwarf Fortress, and while the game gained a lot of variety and richness, it also lost some magic it will never get back…

Agreed. I love me some DF (though it’s been a couple years since I gave it a go) and while I absolutely see and respect the vision that the Adams’ have for their game, and I 100% see how adding the third dimension is part of that, I think there’s a complexity cliff that comes with, uh, literal cliffs, and there’s really no going back.

[Daagar]

Adding z-levels makes sense from a logical progression perspective and it does add some interesting gameplay, but I agree that I really like the ‘flat’ nature of Factorio/RimWorld/etc. The beta update that just came out for Songs today is pretty huge too. Looks like great stuff.

[Matt_W]

@HRose

I still have no idea how to install this.

It was pretty easy to install using CurseForge, but then the very first page of the quest book says there are problems with Curse installations.

[LokeUtgaard]

I installed it with the Technic launcher without any problems. Thanks for the tip.