Factorio Forums

Hi

My son saw me play Factorio and wanted to try. I installed the game and let him play with the tutorial. I just want to relate one experience, you may be have a different one.

Overall, he needed quite extra help during the first hour. He didn't understand how to properly use the belts and inserters, he didn't recognize what to do (generally speaking, he has some difficulty with directives). As I played the tutorial myself, I feel he would be quickly overrun when biters attack (I'll add more feedback when he comes to that part). He found the game interesting, but hard and complex.

In the end, I don't feel the need to change the tutorial, because, his age may not be the target player.

As long time player, we don't always realize that Factorio has a quite steep learning curve. There are a lot of things to grasp. I like that , but we may forget it's can be hard to get in for new players, especially young ones.

Have some kid Factorio experience too ?

My son was also 11 when I got the game. He watched me and wanted to play himself. So I bought him a steam key and we did multiplayer together. That was much more helpful than the tutorial which wasn't so great a few years ago.

• He fully understands the concepts of Factorio except for the combinator logic (he does basic things like "enable pump if light-oil in tank is > xx", which doesn't need combinators).

• Setting up ideal ratios is considered too much work. He sets something up and is happy if there is as much output as he desires. Typically that's not the case and he extends it. This lead to:

• He's driving me crazy with his spaghetti. It's so bad that he never made it to the rocket on a single player map.

We then started a Seablock pack map. That was a little bit too much for the now 14 year old.

@Bauer I think Seablock/Angel's+Bob's mod is little bit too much I would say it multiplies Factorio complexity by factor of 10. As for the spaghetti issue, try incorporate some planning tool to his gameplay. https://mods.factorio.com/mod/helmod is absolutely heaven sent, though it takes some time to learn to work with it (but youtube tutorials can help with that). Or there are many web based calculators, as https://kirkmcdonald.github.io. But I personally prefer Helmod, because it's ingame and you don't have to switch windows and it also works with modded content (as Angel's and Bob's mods). Honorable mention is also https://mods.factorio.com/mod/MaxRateCalculator which can show you how many inserters a building needs for max. efficiency.

These should help with planning, wish you both many hours of fun with Factorio!

You guys have some smart kids. Im 40 and it took me a good bit to get decent. Especially combinators. Even with some digital electronics education, they can be quite difficult to grasp at first. But all of this is why i love the game