Just Got the Game – Is Upping the Difficulty

[sophiaalice]

My initial thought is I should change the controls to be closer to those in Minecraft. I keep mistakenly right-clicking to access the machine interfaces.
I thought a lot of Steam achievements are pointless. For example, in Civ V there's one for losing a game with every civilization—how is that an achievement? Factorio's achievements seem okay, not too many, but I hope they don't add too many in the expansion.

Have you guys tried the Milestones mod in Factorio? It tracks different objectives like your fastest time to achieve each science pack or defeat certain enemies. It's a neat way to challenge yourself to improve. What do you think?

[Stringweasel]

My initial thought is I should change the controls to be closer to those in Minecraft.

Personally I would keep the controls as-is. It's designed to work well with Factorio's playstyle.

I thought a lot of Steam achievements are pointless. For example, in Civ V there's one for losing a game with every civilization—how is that an achievement? Factorio's achievements seem okay, not too many, but I hope they don't add too many in the expansion.

Personally I think launching rockets and settings your own challenges is more fun

Have you guys tried the Milestones mod in Factorio? It tracks different objectives like your fastest time to achieve each science pack or defeat certain enemies. It's a neat way to challenge yourself to improve. What do you think?

Yeah, this is a really nice mod. I think most players use it to nicely track their progress and feel a sense of progression. Not typically to compare with a previous run, because typically a next run will contain different mods or a different playstyle, which would have different progressions.

[000]

My initial thought is I should change the controls to be closer to those in Minecraft. I keep mistakenly right-clicking to access the machine interfaces.

In contradiction to Stringweasel, I don't think there's any harm in doing this. I did the same thing when I first got factorio, and in fact in a lot of other construction-based games that reverse right and left-click as compared to minecraft. It feels perfectly natural, and if you're playing both games it will save you a lot of frustration.

I thought a lot of Steam achievements are pointless. For example, in Civ V there's one for losing a game with every civilization—how is that an achievement? Factorio's achievements seem okay, not too many, but I hope they don't add too many in the expansion.

Some games definitely bloat their achievements list for no apparent reason. I think factorio's is a perfect example of achievements done well. With the exception of a couple of joke achievements, they are all genuine achievements within the game itself. In fact, the achievements aren't just for steam: if you play without steam, they're still there, handled by the game's engine. Some mods add new achievements.

You can of course safely ignore them, but personally I found my first few games I was focused on doing them, and rather than being fetch-quests or silly tasks in which I had to stand in one place and kill a respawning chicken again and again or something, doing the achievements just felt like playing the game.

Some of them require a completely different playstyle than you might have developed by the time you come to attempt them.

Have you guys tried the Milestones mod in Factorio? It tracks different objectives like your fastest time to achieve each science pack or defeat certain enemies. It's a neat way to challenge yourself to improve. What do you think?

I have not, but I might look into it.

[ManaUser]

You can always switch the left and right-click functionality yourself in the Controls settings. If you've played minecraft a lot I can definitely see why you'd prefer that, but I think it's too late to change the defaults as it would be very confusing for current Factorio players.

[computeraddict]

My initial thought is I should change the controls to be closer to those in Minecraft.

It's not Minecraft, though, so it's fine. Destroying things is much more common than interacting with things in Minecraft (or at least it was back when Minecraft's defaults came into being, where "break" was in the game long before "place" or "interact" were). Factorio puts your most common actions on left click and your less common actions on right click. Especially once you get bots unlocked you will barely be using actions bound to right click at all.