I want to play factorio but I lack a goal

[fderty]

guys I need your help.
I think that game has amazing mechanics so I want to play it.
However I'm not interested in its intended objective (launching a satellite to what end ???)
Neither am I interested in slaughtering aliens, having all the techs, owning a big factory for the purpose of owning a big factory. etc...
what do ?

[jodokus31]

launching a rocket or killing biters are by far not the only goals, which you can imagine
- Did you play at all? Did you play the tutorial missions?
- If you don't like biters, switch them off.
- You can hunt achievements. f.e. lazy bastard, get on track like a pro, etc.
- Build a nice train network
- Look into speedrunning
- Look into mods (f.e. seablock....)

The possibilities are crazy much

[Serenity]

Launching a rocket is not necessarily the end goal. Usually people set themselves goals like doing X science per minute. And you can pick some building paradigms like a pure belt base, bots, or using lots of trains

But ultimately it's the same as with any sandbox game. You have to find some motivation to go on and accept more nebulous goals instead of clear missions

[coppercoil]

How about X000 SPM factory? It's not about owning a factory, it's about building. Old approaches do not work in a x10 scale

[fderty]

Launching a rocket is not necessarily the end goal. Usually people set themselves goals like doing X science per minute. And you can pick some building paradigms like a pure belt base, bots, or using lots of trains

But ultimately it's the same as with any sandbox game. You have to find some motivation to go on and accept more nebulous goals instead of clear missions

maybe I could pretend God ordered me to build a factory and expand it forever.

How about X000 SPM factory? It's not about owning a factory, it's about building. Old approaches do not work in a x10 scale

that does not answer the problem. working is not an end, working is a mean to an end

launching a rocket or killing biters are by far not the only goals, which you can imagine
- Did you play at all? Did you play the tutorial missions?

yes I've gone as far as researching everything with the red and green science pack

- If you don't like biters, switch them off.
- You can hunt achievements. f.e. lazy bastard, get on track like a pro, etc.
- Build a nice train network
- Look into speedrunning
- Look into mods (f.e. seablock....)

The possibilities are crazy much

not interested in that except for mods maybe. Is there a mod that gives you a true purpose ?

[Rjskeet]

The philosophy of this question goes far beyond the scope of this forum. I play the game to challenge myself and for the love of trains, your mileage may vary.
Maybe try different styles of play? Role-playing may help. Put yourself in the mindset that your a solo colonist whos striping the planet of its resources. Or your a crashed engineer who's slowly going mad and are naming bots or keeping biters as pets.
I challenge you to make a base that produces and uses 50gw of energy continuously.

[TheRangerLOL]

what do ?

Yes.

Or your a crashed engineer who's slowly going mad and are naming bots or keeping biters as pets.

There is nothing wrong with wanting a biter as a pet. At any rate, you missed the point of his last post. I swear it's like people don't read on this forum sometimes. Oh wait, that's just an internet thing.

[fderty]

what do ?

Yes.

Thanks

The philosophy of this question goes far beyond the scope of this forum. I play the game to challenge myself and for the love of trains, your mileage may vary.
Maybe try different styles of play? Role-playing may help. Put yourself in the mindset that your a solo colonist whos striping the planet of its resources. Or your a crashed engineer who's slowly going mad and are naming bots or keeping biters as pets.

I'll try that.

I challenge you to make a base that produces and uses 50gw of energy continuously.

I'm not interested.

[5thHorseman]

not interested in that except for mods maybe. Is there a mod that gives you a true purpose ?

Probably not anything that will satisfy your specific crave. Factorio at its heart is a sandbox game and in sandbox games there is no actual purpose outside enjoying the process. Most of these games give you a MacGuffin-type "reason" why you're doing what you're doing. Factorio you want a rocket. For reasons. KSP you want to get the tech and money to put that space station around that moon for that contract. For reasons. Minecraft you want to get to The End. For reasons.

All of these though are just windmills for the player to tilt at. The REAL reason to play these games is because you enjoy them.

If you don't enjoy the game, you should put it down for a while and play something else. Your brain will let you know when it's ready to enjoy Factorio again.

[Aru]

You have to want to play the game badly enough to come up with a way to play it yourself, nobody can tell you how to play. I mostly just make blueprints with creative mode, then see how useful they are in an actual game, then go back to designing.

[ssilk]

I found it useful to have a Factorio pause. The need to build something came by itself.
I heard also trying multiplayer might be useful.

[Ringkeeper]

I found it useful to have a Factorio pause. The need to build something came by itself.
I heard also trying multiplayer might be useful.

jep ... after Multiplayer with wife, reaching 5k+ science per minute we stopped, as frames went down to 30... didn't play last half year. I started now alone again, 100h into the map and not a single rocket launched. I prepare everything for 5k science and want to turn it on at once.
Lets see how bad that works out

[coppercoil]

How about X000 SPM factory? It's not about owning a factory, it's about building. Old approaches do not work in a x10 scale

that does not answer the problem. working is not an end, working is a mean to an end

More detailed answer is: building x10 SPM factory is not easy at all. Do you like to solve building issues? BP copy/paste will not work for it . You will need to discover completely new, more effective approaches. Do you like improving factories? That is the question.

[lupinehorror]

another vote for multiplayer for keeping things interesting from me. played the tutorials solo but i bore myself when playing alone. the shared goal of multiplayer (assuming that's how one is playing) keeps me coming back to it.

[azesmbog]

Some unattainable goals in a vanilla game with biters enabled and constant respawn
1. Open ALL map and destroy all biters and spitters.
2. Build a railroad of 2 million cells. In vanilla. Per month
3. Drive around the entire map along the perimeter. For a minute, this is 9 million cells and I think 100-500 million destroyed biters )
4. Play 10,000 hours of the game. In fact, it's not difficult )))))))
5. Build a compact 100 GW power plant. In vanilla, but not in islands, it's easy. Two 50 GW each - not counting. 50 is easy too.
6. continue ???
7. Win the world death marathon - launch 1 rocket, for example, in 50 hours ?? Or is it possible?))))) And for 10?

[Koub]

The idea of a sandbox game is either to play just for the pleasure of playing, or to play for achieving a goal you've set to yourself.
If neither interests you, then you're not the target audience for sandbox games.

[fderty]

thanks everyone. I think I'll stick to the roleplay idea.

[TheRangerLOL]

Kinda what koub said honestly, just do your own thing. Set your own goals, you don't need to care about what anyone else tells you to do. That's why i never play for achievements. Honestly, it's usually bad to check up on forums when you first start playing a game if you don't have any problems while playing. Too m uch meta gaming. Meta gaming is generally a very bad thing. Too many people who think they know what they're doing when all they're really doing is just doing what someone else thinks that they know what they're doing said is good.

[starlinvf]

Kinda what koub said honestly, just do your own thing. Set your own goals, you don't need to care about what anyone else tells you to do. That's why i never play for achievements. Honestly, it's usually bad to check up on forums when you first start playing a game if you don't have any problems while playing. Too m uch meta gaming. Meta gaming is generally a very bad thing. Too many people who think they know what they're doing when all they're really doing is just doing what someone else thinks that they know what they're doing said is good.

its kind of become a hallmark of a modern gamer to basically have no initiative of their own...... which is why theres so much dissonance generated by their desire for "Purpose"/"Meaningful gameplay"/"Progression"/"Fun". An inability to define what these things are, is partly why they get so wrapped up in the long list of things they think "aren't". And an inability to find their own way leads to the problem of quickly losing attention. This isn't limited to games either...... pretty much all of social media, consumable media, and digital entertainment is further conditioning this (either on purpose, or as a side effect of trying to keep pace others doing it on purpose).

In his case, I'd very highly recommend trying to force a mental reset. Stay away from anything that routinely "Dings" you with a highly explicit feedback loop.... which is gonna effectively exclude almost any major title made after 2010, and to a lesser extent Consoles as a platform (because achievements). Disabling Steam overlay is the only option for that platform.

The super hard part is finding games that avoid these mental traps, because is become the standard of game design in order to facilitate all kinds of routine building behaviors. The absolute hardest part is resisting the urge to go back to a Ding-game, since its basically a dopamine addiction. If you're the learn-ed type, look up game design essays from Mark Brown (Game Maker's Toolkit), Adam Millard (The Architect of Games), and related circles. Its not directly useful as a player.... but it does help you understand "why" a game does certain things, and help you recognize how its manipulating you.

This video pretty much hits home on the dissonant sensation I mentioned earlier, and almost perfectly slots into the OP's dilemma.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ypOUn6rThM




(and side plug...... Kruggsmash plays Dwarf Fortress. Its a video series thats really good for helping develop altered perception; which is really useful for understanding the mind set of a sandbox environment. Not explicitly in how he plays.... but in the presentation, and how it helps you view and understand the play space. )
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDX5hmt ... VYh8t11lYl




Its hard to suggest what games the OP could consider.... because I have no idea what kind of games they like. But I would suggest outright avoiding anything with RPG-lite leveling systems, stat based skill trees, or gear with visible numbers. Older, linear single player shooters would be good candidates. Things with Metroidvania type power structures (function based, rather then incremental power increases), classic RTS games, extremely narrative focused games, or a point/click adventure throwback title. Or Games with exploration elements or survival elements if you want to keep in the sandbox zone. These are notably better since it can leverage your ADD into something productive, and stimulates a lot of problem solving in your brain. I would also be a bit leery of games with comprehensive questing systems..... anything with a dotted line should be low on that list. The trouble, though, is that quest systems aren't necessarily bad.. its that far too many lead you around with awareness bubble of only 10 meters... and THATS the kind of situation you want to avoid. Ideally ones that give you a goal, but don't act as a walk through (excluding story driven ones); one that let you figure out your own solution.

After about 3 months of this, your brain relaxes a bit, and you start becoming acutely aware when a game is trying to egg you on without using organic game play reasons for it. You SHOULD also lose interest in certain types of games... and thats arguably a good thing for your mental health.


I lay all this out, because Factorio is kind of this weird animal. As far as Sandbox and Survival games go, its design is the high water mark for TechTree and Organic Progression as a game system. The mechanics are simple, but they're consistent across ALL scales game play. And "progression" that actually properly builds on top of previous efforts, rather then trivializing them out of existence. But the genius is that, at its core, your focus is only on a small area of the factory at any given time..... and your mind isn't aware of how big the factory actually is, until you have to walk back through it to figure out where some shortage is happening. Everything about it makes intuitive sense... until you hit the brick wall of the "end game dilemma". This is where most modern games tend to start spiraling out of control. When players "beat" a game.... and still expect it to continue on like it has been, but to infinity. An endless need for new quests, new stuff, new tricks.... and are only willing to put it down once it pisses them off for some arbitrary reason. Sandbox games don't even attempt at an illusion of offering this, which is why a lot of gamers don't understand it.

ugh.... now I'm just kind of rattling on. Without even needing to get into programming yourself, theres so much interesting intersections and things to be learned by studying game design and game history. Technical disciplines, Philosophy, History, Literature, Mythology, Psychology, Sociology, Logistics, Mathematics, Physics, Art, all lending contributions as either ideas, influence or processes to how many really good games are made. Being an arm chair developer has been the thing thats kept me enjoying games, despite how terrible the last decade has been overall in terms of treatment of gamers. I still talk about 2015/2016 like its the Dark ages.

[Squelch]

How do I decide when I'm satisfied?

- From the video

That question just about sums up the frustration I have with the path some parts of the games industry have taken. It's the instant gratification vs creativity for its own sake dichotomy, and seems to have polarised the gaming community between "on rails" offerings with prescribed near instant rewards, and the freeform/sandbox where the player themselves drive their own narrative and goals.

Factorio is just one of many sandbox games that gives us the latitude to solve problems in whatever way we choose. There are some broad overarching goals and achievements, but none that are mandatory, nor with rewards beyond that of personal satisfaction.

There is no right way to play. Sure there are some formulas offered by the community on how they like to play the game, but the only, and best reward in my humble opinion, is to play it your way and set your own goals and narrative.

New "personal" goals can be realised in several ways.

• Experiment with the map generation settings. New challenges present themselves, and therefore new solutions are created as a result.
• Multiplayer - Co-operative play can open up so many new ideas. PvP brings unexpected methods of combat beyond the predictability of the AI.
• Finding creative assemblies of buildings. Make them more compact, faster, efficient, modular - save them as blueprints, use and constantly improve.
• Consider creating your own scenario/narrative. Write it down, or even attempt to create it as a game scenario to share with others.

The list could go on forever, but I see that you have settled on creating your own personal goals, and have also posted another thread regarding a defensive structure. I would suggest testing out just how effective that is when faced with large swarms, and I would bet real monies that you'll be changing the design once you find its weaknesses. One true fact about Factorio is - Nothing ever goes to plan, even when it looks watertight on paper.

Good luck, and enjoy the experience.