TL;DR
Add an "Achievement mode" which restricts certain gameplay aspects in order to make sure achievements reflect the current player's actions.What?
Add a selection during map gen to "Enable Achievements" which would do something like the following:* no external blueprints - start without global blueprint book and no imports allowed
* default settings only (or at least restrict what can be changed while keeping achievements - predefined modes only?)
* no map previews / hidden map seed
* single save only - like eu4 does. No save scumming
* No mods except dev-approved non-game changing mods (this is more or less done with steam achievements already)
Tangential suggestion to add some interesting additional achievements due to the existence of achievement mode:
* add a win the game without dying achievement - obvious sub-achievements to escape nauvis without dying / etc.
* add achievement for earning all achievements in a single playthrough
Why?
This originally came up in response to a question of "how would you improve factorio for those who find it too easy." After some thought, I wanted to bring the suggestion over here for consideration to actually happen. I have long found some things with achievements baffling - prime example the ability to earn them with an external blueprint. IMHO, achievements should reflect work and ... well, achievement by the player themselves. So I would like to propose the addition of a way to make achievements more meaningful to the playerI 100% don't think the base game should be changed for casual players. I think it's balanced very well, and the devs have done a bang-up job, as usual. But I do think that restricting achievements to those earned by the player themselves without importing a base / etc. would make them mean more / be more impactful. My two best experiences with factorio are my 100% achievement run - which I failed the first time by 10 minutes, and running with seablock (Yeah, I like a challenge!). But overcoming that was an even better experience than the ability to load an hour old save and just tweak a couple things.
Anyways, interested what the community thinks about the idea. I didn't see it in any searches for achievements, so sorry if this overlaps an old suggestion. I at least couldn't find it when I looked.