Be prepared for a wall of text because this game is just awesome and literally changed my life someway.
About the game:
Guys, if it were for me you just won the internet. Even if this game is still an alpha version it offers so much and guarantees fun for countless hours. I bought Factorio on August the 16th 2016 and already played like 40 or 50 hours. I’m employed and a family father btw so this is quite some time I guess. Don’t worry, nothing is neglected
For me your game combines all the good stuff which other – related – genres offer considering it is still an alpha. Most other games can’t do this as a final though.
1. You are free. You can build what you want, where you want and how you want plus the world is unlimited so there aren’t any limits to your factories/bases size.
2. The possibility of customization and automatization and the way it is built into the game. Belts over- and underground. Belts are two-sided (yes I really love this fact because it gives you more flexibility) Same goes for pipes. Separators for belts. Inserters, even with filters. Trains, robots. DAFUQ? There are so many ways to achieve your goals and you are free to choose which one you want to take. (Btw I would love to have a separator which switches sides. Like: left side: ↑↓ :right side or the possibility to build corners with the underground belt entrances :]
3. You can build complex logic circuits which is just hilarious. It’s not just a game though in my opinion. You can actually train your brain (rhyme!). The fact with the circuits and the belts actually remind me of programming somehow. You can either build everything in an absolutely structured way with a lot of space and clear, separated paths for everything or you can crunch everything and try to use every single cell to somehow save space no matter the cost like a quick and dirty programmer “less lines = win, who cares about readability?“ Hybrids are possible to ofc.
4. You have enemy you can fight which even evolve and you cannot just fight them, u can fight them with a freaking TANK or a POWERARMOR which is modular and can be upgraded with lots of nice stuff.
5. Science! I like the idea it is implemented. I just think the level 4 sciencepacks are a bit “to easy” to craft. I love the way how you have to build the pre-mats and stuff, figuring how to combine the belts, separators and inserters just to get the right “material-mix” on the desired belt to put them together in an automatic builder.
6. Modsupport. I didn’t use mods yet (don’t know if I will ever do, almost never did in other games) but I like the fact that the devs give us the freedom to build own stuff to implement into the game.
7. You can play it with friends. Do I have to say more about this point? Only downside for me is: If u host a game yourself it takes ages to load a saved game depending on the savegame’s size. Somehow my upload is always limited to like 20kb/s -_- Don’t know if it is limited by the game itself but I found no catch in my network configuration (any clues? I’m network planner/engineer but maybe there is one little thing I missed).
8. You get all this for a lousy amount 20€.
It might sound like ingratiation because I just listed the stuff I like but to be honest: I haven’t encountered any bugs yet or at least I didn’t know it is one (I only played stable so far btw) plus it’s an alpha version for mere 20€ so… I don’t have any serious things to complain about (except the separators and underground belts I mentioned above
). Well ok, the car controlls are really nasty to be honest.Well now the part about how it changed my life or at least helped me somehow. I just want to write this down to say thank you just if you wonder.
The last 7 months have been really hard for me. I had some severe psychical problems because of a constant and massive stress overdose (over years). Even my body was freaking out and doing shit which worried me even more and so the journey was constantly heading downwards. Yes you could say I was at the edge (or even crossed it already) of a depression. All my thoughts were about “am I sick? Will I die soon? What about my girlfriend? What about my son if I’m gone? I don’t want to die! I want to see my son growing, marry my girlfriend” and so on. I forgot to laugh, cried pretty much.
Sure my little family helped me but even this stressed me because I thought that I’m a burden for them. It was a chicken-and-egg situation also because before this all happened I was known as “this ‘as tough as nails’ son of a bitch” who helped others but did not need any help himself. So I got disillusioned which stressed me too.
I hope it doesn’t sound like my friends and especially my family weren’t able to help me. Without them I wouldn’t be any more if I look back. Just to get this straight.
Enough of the serious/heartbreaking “bla bla”. Your game helped me too feel better. My thoughts aren’t about dying and sickness anymore. Well ok that’s not 100% true, sometimes those thoughts are there but they are pretty rare now (fingers crossed that it stays that way!). My thoughts are more about having fun in life again, enjoying the time with my family and friends or even: “how can I optimize this process in Factorio and what shall I do to make it ‘future-proof’” – “will I be able to build this and that in my today’s session or shall I focus on expanding resource-wise?”. Hell even my job performance got better again. I hope you guys get what I’m trying to say. Factorio is part of a complex construct which helped me to get distracted from all the shit in my head and helped to make space for the good stuff.
Thank you, devs.
PS: Someone might laugh about this text. If you do, be my guest.
PPS: If I remember correctly the devs (or most of them) are Czechs right? I’ll drink a bottle (or two) of nice and cold Staropramen to you in my session tonight.
