The Hamster, The Wheel, And Creativity

[sunnyskies]

Grab a cup of tea and kick your feet up.

I despise tutorials. It’s far and beyond my least favorite way to learn things. There’s nothing quite as uninspired as being tossed into a hamster wheel with only two ways out: obey or get off the wheel.

So, I loaded it up, saw “use ESDF to walk” acknowledged that it was still smart enough to detect my custom keys, and... I may have quit. I lost track of the number of times I saved and quit or just straight up quit.

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My finish time was only three hours. But it took the majority of a week to get through the first hour. I’d chip away a couple minutes a day and wonder why I was putting up with it. Soon enough, I’d be back to reading a book or revamping my current Minecraft project.

I mostly ignored the Compilatron in favor of turning over every single leaf in the area. I looted every broken remnant of spaceship, noted that the text warning of unmineable objects only popped once for most things with a gray square but were persistent for the loaders, was a good steward of the earth and made timber of dead trees, mined every rock I could reach, including a huge one on the north cliff face (all of its brethren are out of reach, so this was a pleasing discovery).

I remember standing on a little patch of grass that jutted into the eastern void, admiring the debris that spilled over into and being just a touch disappointed that my character wasn’t tumbling into alternate glitch reality.

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Eventually, I noted that Compy wanted me to do things I would have done anyways with a fresh world, and he wasn’t telling me exactly how to do it. So I went along. Mined exactly 3 iron because that was the number I needed to make a burner drill, tossed in some fuel, and was grievously betrayed 5 minutes later.

Compy decided to demonstrate iron mining. By gleefully running over my burner drill and furnace and replacing it with its own configuration. I mourned my scrap heap. Then attempted petty revenge. I was not successful. So, I saved and quit.

Yes. I saved. I did not time travel to rescue my belongings. No, no. I would remember this. The moment that the Compilatron showed its true colors. It was no longer a friendly nuisance. It was my mortal enemy. Even biters have the decency to chew on perfectly good machinery. (I suspect they graze on ores anyways, given the abundance of surface ores and general lack of other life.)

But the Compilatron…

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I loaded up the checkpoint auto save and surrounded him furnaces to verify and document evil behavior. I also surrounded him later, during normal play. Just to make sure. It doesn’t do to carry assumptions. Definitely Evil.

I eventually got through the first part of the intro. Not being able to handcraft gears took me for a momentary pause. Somewhen in the midst of things, I gave up on ever seeing electric inserters and decided to fully embrace the burner tech.

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It didn’t bother me one bit to pack up and leave behind everything that didn’t truly belong to me anyways.
The new area was a breath of life. Normal gameplay! I could build what I wanted. As it turns out, I had more fun rotating burner drills than I’d ever had before. It gave me a new perspective on this early part of the Factorio experience— a welcome and fun one.

And dang, those research costs. I hastily set up a lab.

Even though I knew trouble would come knocking, I was perhaps a little too enamoured with my newfound fondness for humble beginnings. Only after losing my first electric ore miners to biters did I start setting up turrets. On cliffs. Because natural defenses are good. I dumped my personal ammo into them and handcrafted another 5 mags.

I stupidly challenged a cluster of biters with naught but a pistol once. It didn't end well. I may have gotten into an eventual habit of just dumping any and all ammo I had on hand into turrets.

Nonetheless, it became abundantly clear that automating ammo needed to happen sometime roughly yesterday. Along with automating turrets and belts. So much to do!

And as tempting as it was to try doing it all with burner inserters (I’d never known how much fun they were or that they run on kinetic energy for the first two and a half scoops before stalling out ), I did want some electric ones to fill boxes and expand laboratories, lest I have burner inserters powering other burner inserters. Although, I already had burner drills powering my burner drills, so it really wouldn’t be all that much of a stretch. But nah.

The infrastructure grew.

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I automated walls as well, even though I’d decided to start barricading with furnaces because I kinda wanted to get overrun, and surely the biters could just waltz right on through. But hey, it’s all in the name of fun.

And that’s the highlight. I was having fun. It wasn’t a hamster wheel. I had an artificial objective. I had boundaries. But I could reach for that objective however I wanted within the boundaries. Purpose.

Because military research is important, I picked up a shooting speed instead of launching straight for logistics. In freeplay, I would've researched damage. Oh well. Eventually I got tired of running around refilling turrets and set up some refill automation. Some with burner inserters and boxes. Others with long belts from the iron field.

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Some of the cliff turrets got destroyed. I didn’t even bother defending the northwest gap. And feeling decidedly unsafe, I started on logistics. (Please pardon the fourth wall and note that this next picture was taken after the scenario finished, not during. The ginormous autotaken pictures don't reach all the way over here, so this is the set up. That mountain of carcasses definitely was not there at the time.)

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At least I had plenty of ammo. For one side. So while researching, I frantically started expanding my ammo, suddenly wasn’t making enough iron, easy fix for that, and began belting over to the east side. There was much running back and forth. And after I’d nabbed enough belts to accomplish everything I wanted and a bit more besides, my iron was still looking desperately thin, so I halted belt production.

There was a fair bit of running back and forth, many emptied turret alerts, and surprisingly little destruction.

The bar ticked over sixty percent and suddenly, I felt safe. Except that wouldn’t do at all! Standing around afk and waiting for the end is no fun. So I dropped down an entire new line of turrets in the east, set them to autofill. 90 percent came by. My easternmost cliff turrets were completely empty. I felt completely impenetrable, but figured I might as well rip up a wall and set those guys to auto load, too.

And I was done.

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I might have been a little disappointed. Where were the great hordes? Did the horde only mob those who horde? Why didn’t they path northeast? Was it because I used furnaces instead of proper walls? Are biters just dumb as rocks? (I suspect they are.)

I dunno. But it wasn’t so bad. Not boring. Not terrifying.

But it stretched me. v.16 had me making little turret nests. I’d never made an autoloader for turrets before. Much less one with burner inserters. Heck, I’d never walled off a base before.

And I might not be completely estranged by campaigns anymore.

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Thanks for reading. Have a lovely day

[abregado]

Thanks for the story! It was en enjoyable read.

I really tried to do something different with this tutorial. I hope it did not trigger you quite as much as other tutorials. It is nice to see you enjoyed the second area where the player can "show me what you know".

Actually the version before this one had Compilatron wait 1 minute even before appearing and saying PRESS WASD TO MOVE because I did not want that to be the first thing the player saw. Guess what happened during Focus testing? Players just waited until they were told to do something! *facepalm* I really dont like setting up the precedent that the player should be waiting for hoops to jump through, but there we have it.

Most of the issue with the final waves being too easy I think comes from your far western turret setup. The scenario does not detect things out there. Future versions will not be so kind

Thanks for your detailed feedback.

[Seraphendipity]

This. This is beautiful. Fantastic writing, much engaging very wow
Also, while compilatron may be evil, never lose sight of the TRUE enemy...

trees.