Just bought the game; What were Your first impressions?

[GreenTeaKinase]

My first impression? All I can remember are my thoughts from each time I started over. I had started over five times within the first week of playing the game. Each time was preceded by a thought of "Holy Hell! This is a great idea! But I don't feel like rebuilding everything..."

[esygrim]

I wish i had known what factorio was when it released.

The game just completly passed my radar and i had no clue how much i needed factorio.

Factorio is not only a game about automation or factories, but a game about mindfulness, becoming clear about what you want and structure your actions in a correct order, to achieve your desired goal.
Factorio gives me a situation in which i can always fail and always have the ability to fix it and make things work how i want them to - the most empowering game i have played to date in almost 3 decades gaming.

Factorio gave me my curiosity for logic back and motivates me to refine the basic mental faculties, that society seduces to neglect.
From the bottom of my heart i wish you well and i thank you, Wube.
May your good work be blessed and rewarded always.

[doryjoge]

I was happy because I had been waiting for the day I'll purchase it and start playing.

[alicestevens]

i love the game! Yesterday couldn't stop playing for the whole evening and half of the night.

[HelenaMaria]

My first impression is that I need to rebind the controls to something more like Minecraft. I keep right clicking to go into the machine GUIs....

I also have the same issue. I thought i was alone.

[Gnin1988]

I was really excited about this game. I had been waiting for it since I saw that it was coming out. So, I got my copy yesterday and started playing right away. I have to say, I am not disappointed at all! This game is just what I expected from it. It's fun, addicting, and has some great features

[xZippy]

I played the game for 5 minutes and already knew that this game would be in my top 5 favoritest games of all time.

[ExistentialHorror]

I've already posted some of my positive impressions in the "thank you" thread, so here is the rest.

At first I played tutotrial, which is really good.
Then I played a freeplay game, died, and decided to start from scratch as I didn't like how my base was built, and wanted to use my new knowledge.
In my second game I've launched my first rocket in 50 hours, and a lot of fun stuff wasn't researched or tried. Makes me wonder what the expensive research and products are for.

The "victory" screen is boring. I don't care about how many bitters I've killed, killing them is boring and a routine. I would prefer to see some production statistics and a rewarding victory screen or cinematics.

It would be great if character's death would be unrecoverable. It would make the game much more interesting but instead we have autosave and even respawn (although with no items, so I wonder who would actually respawn when playing single).

I am very impressed that this game runs smoothly on my laptop with 8GB RAM and integrated video card in i5-1230U. Great job! There were glitches only when I had to close some apps which consume a lot of RAM.

The multiplayer was lagging, so I didn't play it.

I continued playing after the rocket launch to discover on what I've missed out. But still no idea why I would do it after first rocket launch. It would be nice to have some goal that actually requires me to research and build all the expensive stuff.

The idea behind natural inhabitants who dislike your pollution and destruction of their natural habitat is awesome. I would replace bitters with people so that the moral dilemma would become even more pressuring. Why did the hero decide to exploit and leave the planet at the cost of inhabitants and ecosystem? Why wouldn't he just die and save a lot of lives that he would otherwise ruin? Is he worth it? What makes him worth it?

It would be nice to have a meaningful and advanced enemy, just like you, in the game.

I didn't understand the meaning of gray and green boxes, so didn't use them. I think the red box can be replaced with the yellow box and a logistics filter.

I've played for 105 hours so far.
I had to look up how a lot of things work on the internet, which I don't mind.
I didn't use circuit network at all as it wasn't required, and I didn't understand it, but now I see how it could be helpful.

There were some other details which I also didn't understand, but didn't bother to look up on the internet. But still, if comparing with Heroes of MIght and Magic, Factorio is still much more self-explanatory in the unnecessary details.

I thought it would be great if everything can be automated so much so that I don't need to do anything at all. I didn't achieve it, but I didn't try hard.
Architecting can't be automated, but I think that it should be automated too. It would be awesome if everything is so automated so that you only observe and intervene only if you decide it necessary.
The production chart is very handy, I used it often to check up on production problems instead of running everywhere and checking what is missing or not working; because I wanted to exclude myself from the manual labor. But why aren't fluids there?

I've found myself spending too much time trying to find something in my inventory in the end-game.

Again, thanks to all who made Factorio possible. This game is so inspirational on so many levels!

[Gorb]

I picked up the demo on Steam due to Factorio's support of Linux. 20 Hours into the demo, I felt like I'd already gotten my money's worth. It's rare that I like a demo enough that I want to buy the game just to support the developers. Other games that I have felt that with are Doom, Quake, and Starcraft (spawn). It speaks very highly of Factorio that the demo plays so well.

4 games and 140 hours later, I still haven't launched a rocket. I switched to pacifist mode after feeling pressured from biters when I didn't know what I was doing. It's allowed me to go down some rabbit holes like circuits, which I think would have been very frustrating to figure out if I was worried about time. I'd like to see the game provide a bit more information about rail signals, circuits, and nuclear power. All of those I've looked up outside of the game.

This game could benefit from a Civilization type menu that allows players to select buildings/items and get detailed information. Anything that could help players optimize their factory.

Overall I'm having a lot of fun. I think I'll try to do my first *real* play through on a rail world and probably look into game mods after, or do it again in marathon. I don't know why this game is so addicting.

[DickSturm]

I was sent a link here to the trailer by an acquaintance and after I read the demo I bought the game. Started my first game put my first lab and saw the whole techloky tree for the first time. It's really interesting.

[leopoldkabouter]

I bought the game about a month ago and find this way too addicting. I mostly like managing the spaghetti of belts while still making the factory look nice and orderly (currently using 96x48 rectangles to organise production). I disable enemies always. It took ten days or something to launch a rocket, working on the rest of the achievements now.
The game is very polished. My only minor annoyances are that the pistol/armour window in the bottom left cannot be hidden, and that a Quickbar row is only ten wide (when it could be 50 and still not take the complete bottom of the screen).

[SKaterle]

Hello Community,

new to the game and here are my first impressions.

A good friend of mine, a mechanical engineer by trade; specialist in ALPO, shared the game to me via steam. I have a background as electronical engineer but work in IT since ages in the field of POA.

The first hour was fun, till you reach the threshold of diversification, this is basically crying for the binary supply tree. This principle was developed roughly 60 years ago and should work well for the current stage of the game, or not.

The avail switches in the game are not binary switches, they are mechanical switches - they are either ON or do not exist. Yes, there is a work-a-round by supplying each positive switch with a negative counterpart to emulate the binary flip-flop behaviour, but this would be a lot of hassle and is prone to human error if you mess up the cabling or your negative switch generates a false positive; this is known behaviour in this kind of mechanical switching.

With only mechanical switches avail, let's deploy a mechanical ON/NULL tree instead, with some fiddling and experimenting with belt counts, addition behaviour and resource consumption counts, a mechanical dial tree was build and my belts happily ticket away. This is the same principle deployed 70 years ago and was used in the telephone switch networks and is proven to work just fine, in a limited demand situation.

Then I reached the stage of upgrading my red belts to blue belts and has they have a shared resource (cogs), the on demand needs and wants principle seems perfect for this challenge.

Dear provider, the current consumer is not avail to discuss your offers regarding his demands or in lemans terms, you can not connect your fabricators to your circuit network; bummer.

Some fiddling later (again) with fixed counts from inserts consuming and 'removers' to reset the counts, supplied by a mechanical dial network (I really want true binary switches), I had a NEEDS/WANTS belt, without the OnDemand component running. A principal developed and applied by Volks Wagen. roughly 50 years ago.

Happy that everting seems to run fine, a well defended resource provider was run over and taken out by the bugs; a real StarShip Troopers event; as only Heinlein would have envisioned it.

With my belts crumbling (as I should have expected, as I do not had the OnDemand component avail, VW insist for the principle to work); I had my epiphany: You can have any car, as long as it is painted black [Henry Ford].

The game is not geared towards the modern principles (developed in the last 50 years) of workforce (inserters and fabricators) optimisation, it is based on the streamline production principle from 120 years ago; with the goal of exceed optimisation developed roughly 100 years ago; driven by WW1. In hindsight all the early indicators where obvious presented in the game by the availability of only mechanical switches and throughput optimisation based on fabrication ratios.

In summery, if you have a background in assembly production, flow optimization, or similar; forget everything you have been thought, as it will take a lot of effort and time to implement (modern principles) in the game and it will not work out for you, even if it looks just fine till you reach what is called the mid-stage of the game. In the end-stage of the game, the only things that counts, will be the stream line exceed production values your setup and can pump out, so forget about resource consumption or work force optimization. Keep in mind, this are principles developed 100 years ago; where HR didn't had much say, in how you treat your workers and unless someone unionizes the fabricators and inserters, exploit the heck out of em.

And what ever you do, do not forget to do your part!

Thoughts, comments or feedback, feel free to leave me a message.

[Koub]

[Koub] Merged into the "first impressions" thread

[Tertius]

Thoughts, comments or feedback, feel free to leave me a message.

Although Koub moved this to a somewhat post-only thread, I dare to reply and possibly start a discussion:

@SKaterle, please try to use Factorio terminology, if you comment on game features and game items. You talk about technical game aspects, however I'm unable to relate the things you mention to actual Factorio items and concepts, because you don't use Factorio terminology. It's even worse, you use your engineering terminology to address things, but some of this terminology was used in Factorio to address a different thing.

You say "switches", but I guess you mean splitters. The only switch in Factorio is a Power switch.

You say "binary supply tree". The only tree in Factorio is the technology tree, which is the hierarchical visualization of the technologies that can be researched.

The word "supply" is used by the community to describe the stuff that's provided to outposts to keep the outposts running (ammo and repair kits), as well as finished products used to build blueprints by the construction robots.

You say "cogs", but I guess you mean iron gear wheel. It's important to precisely use an ingame name if you mean an ingame item, because if you use some other name, it's not clear if you mean something abstract in general or exactly this one Factorio item.

You say "inserters", but I'm not sure if you really mean ingame inserters, because you didn't follow ingame terminology until now, so it's possible you mean something different here.

Perhaps you could do your post again with Factorio terminology, because this will enable the community (who are for the main part no electronical engineers) to understand and comment on your comment.

And, after all, keep in mind Factorio is a game that doesn't aim to mirror current industry concepts. I'ts a building game that has as much focus on logistics and transportation as it has on production. May be even more. It deals with all its tasks in a generic kind of way, not necessarily with the highly optimized way of modern industry. To keep everything simple and not too complex for every kind of player, it was made as it is.

[fiwon123]

This game is incredible.
I didn't expect so much, but my cousin recommended this game and when I bought...its very awesome.
I didn't play so much, but for what I could see, its very polished and incredible. The systems and the interaction called a lot my attention, because have so many objects in scene but without lag.

I know this game is 2D, but even so this is very impressive.

Good Game, its a masterpiece haha.

Kind Regards,

Felipe Inoue

[TheKillerChicken]

I bought this game out of curiousity, and do not regret it. This game is the only game I know that depends on DRAM and CPU cache latencies over the central processing unit. I also learned later on that this could use a trillion cpu cores and the benefits would only be marginal. I just wish GPU manufactures would optimise the raster renderer more. I have a 3dfx voodoo 2 2000, and it has 2d as well as 3d accelleration. Modern GPUs do not have 2d accelleration. Imagine if 3dfx was still alive? My RTX 2080ti is good , but to what I can see, the VRAM is the most beneficial part of the GPU. I usually run this game in OpenGL as I am using the studio drivers from nVidia and as such OpenGL and OpenCL are prioritised. I see people asking for a 3d factorio. I love the 2d magic of factorio, but that is because I like 2d over 3d games. Proof, I have a windows 98se machine to run all the dos and windows 9x games on it. This game my second favourite, first being Team Fortress 2. Yes, I played satisfactory, but it does not have the magic that this game has.

[Blitz4]

Just bought the game; What were Your first impressions?

@Version 0.11.17

How is this $20?
It supports multiplayer?