Friday Facts #356 - Blueprint library for real

[Molay]

I'm curious what your son's mining/smelting looks like actually ^^

[Unknow0059]

I'm glad you took the high road and chose to keep the company and to maintain your values. It's heartwarming. The whole introduction section was.

The feature I'm most excited about is the map item-placing. I've been previously frustrated not being able to do that.

[rmusk]

Just read the FFF, I need to say, the changes are great!
The ones I like most are:
- nesting of books,
- descriptions (iirc it wasn't a thing before, correct me),
- and building from map - trains were never easier before!

[kemot]

Building from map is great when you try to place a blueprint that is too big to see it in whole on the screen. The base planning will now be much better.
And thanks for the personal insight. I am now motivated to build a PC for my 8 year old daughter and get her into Factorio.

[conn11]

FFF coming this close to Saturday facts is always indication for something big beeing announced.
This is exactly the thing needed, talking about the bp library. The possibility to quickly update blueprints without redoing the whole "documentation" is greatly appreciated (as are the numerous other improvements). Glad having those changes in before/ with the 1.0 and of course having you kovarex back!

[gGeorg]

Overcome mental block is the hardest struggle in life. Only those who passed could apreciate. Good luck for you and family.


Here is nice piece of UI:


Could you apply the descrition box for combinators ? So each placed combinator have option to add a description what is his role. It is years asked feature, mainly to prevent re-invent wheel feel, when come back to old/imported scheme. The blueprint of an combinator creation have to contain (potentinaly) descritiption for each combinator.

Thank you

[Usul]

The biggest issue I personally had with the blueprint library will finally be fixed!

In the panel showing all the blueprints, if I was scrolled mid-way down the list, it was hard for me to remember if a bp title corresponds to the bp above or below the title. Now there is a spacing that visually makes it clear, that the titles are *below* the corresponding bp.

Thanks!

[Zentrino]

Long time factorio player (thousands of hours over the years) and lurker here. I've never posted before but my heart sunk when I read you might close up shop or sell to a big game company. I'm happy that you bonded with your son and found your passion for working on the game again. Factorio is hands down the best game I've played.

[gGeorg]

At this point, I thought, that I would come back to work with full power, but I just couldn't. When I tried to work, I had this strong, almost physical feeling of disgust, that was impossible to overcome. It was clear to me at this point, this is the the typical burnout situation.

kovarex, as a fellow burned out developer: This isn't always entirely a motivation problem - you should see a doctor about this. It may take some time to figure out what exactly is going on but neurologists and/or psychiatrists may prescribe you some meds that'll help with this sort of stuff. See if you also have "brain fog" and/or various headaches, they're closely related and you can use these terms to describe the problem. Might also be a depression of some sort. Like, in any case, regardless of your motivation and ultimate purpose in life, you deserve to feel better.

I guess you are US citizen. Mediication is NOT helping, talk with specialist which focus is find the mental illness, actualy creates it. Look at huge amount of disorders and confused mass murdererees in the US, that is the result.It is not happening anywhere else. The real Man need NATURAL things like steak, forest, fishing, hunting, gardening and lots of boobs. Eventualy take care of offspring. These are the best treatment.

[el_penny]

Awesome FFF, kovarex, you take care of this brilliant mind of yours please
I just wanted to clarify that:

At this point, I thought, that I would come back to work with full power, but I just couldn't. When I tried to work, I had this strong, almost physical feeling of disgust, that was impossible to overcome. It was clear to me at this point, this is the the typical burnout situation.

kovarex, as a fellow burned out developer: This isn't always entirely a motivation problem - you should see a doctor about this. It may take some time to figure out what exactly is going on but neurologists and/or psychiatrists may prescribe you some meds that'll help with this sort of stuff. See if you also have "brain fog" and/or various headaches, they're closely related and you can use these terms to describe the problem. Might also be a depression of some sort. Like, in any case, regardless of your motivation and ultimate purpose in life, you deserve to feel better.

I guess you are US citizen. Mediication is NOT helping, talk with specialist which focus is find the mental illness, actualy creates it. Look at huge amount of disorders and confused mass murdererees in the US, that is the result.It is not happening anywhere else. The real Man need NATURAL things like steak, forest, fishing, hunting, gardening and lots of boobs. Eventualy take care of offspring. These are the best treatment.

Both parts are true. In most cases of psychic disorders, medication may be necessary to actually allow you to change oneself. What I mean, you battle depression mostly by living, interacting with people and objects and critically thinking of your thought process (so called therapy )

But if you cant get up from bed, you wont do all these things. That's where medication comes to do its job - it tries to establish baseline human brain chemistry, but the goal is not to take them for the rest of your life (most of the time, unfortunately there are people with mental disorders that force them to take medications for whole lives) but to take them so you can work at yourself.

So telling, that only medication can help you overcome depression or other not-so-severe psychic disorders (dont want to lessen the struggle, its just depression is quite common and in most cases can be handled in finite amount of time, unlike e.g. schizophrenia) is not true, but telling, that you can heal all naturally also is not true. For most people, intensive medication is needed to jump-start brain and allow it to not focus on depressive thoughts and then therapy is in order to allow you to rethink how you approach the world and develop healthy ways of overcoming obstacles in life. Typically, medication doses are made smaller while you continue therapy, eventually going to 0.

So, to reiterate, all people are different and some can lift themselves up from depression without meds or without therapy or without both. Most people will need both and, what could be seen in Kovarex entry on FFF, longer you remain depressed, harder it is to break free.

If anyone struggles with mental health, please, try to see professional who will discuss possible options for situation. Also, my GF recently started to use AI-enhanced app designed to help you monitor your mental health, I think its called Wysa. For her it helps remembering how many days turn out to be good maybe try it out.

Mental disorders, sometimes even mild ones, can take years to fix and its really hard work, stay strong everyone!

[TaxiService]

[...] I was proud of what I was doing, yay

I'm glad you feel better <3

[Cgeta]

Ooh yeah
I'm pretty new to coding and stuff and I noticed that whenever I start something simple, I end up making it way too complicated eventually, where I have to spend weeks on something big, rather than maybe do a small thing every day
I guess the lack of "finishing" things is what is so demotivating. So, doing some smaller tasks once in a while is quite nice.
But it's not easy to keep things small and simple

[ssilk]

Kovarex, I really can understand how this time was and how it felt. I really like your decision to not sell wube and what it stands for and it was the same kind of thoughts, that made me thinking 7 years ago to put all of my free time energy into this project.

And I really understand it, because I mean it had reasons why I wasn’t active in 2018/2019 in this forum...

I need to explain a bit more around it. I heard lately a podcast from a psychologist and he talked about statistics. He said 1/5 of all people will have such things as burnout or much worse depression and such kind. 1/5! And as you find out, you get lazy. Up to a point where everything is a problem.

For me the first time I was forced to see that I have a problem was, when I came to work and I wasn’t able to tell in the daily standup what I had been doing yesterday. Yesterday was dark, and trying to remember it made me nervous (because I couldn’t!) and I sweet so strong, that I need to change clothes after the standup. Of course my team saw that, but I wasn’t able to communicate what the problem was, because I didn’t understand what was going wrong with me. I ignored the signs long before and to me it looked so, that suddenly something changed. I somehow got through the days, but it was a struggle. At that time I stoped Factorio forum activity, because 0.17 came out and I found that I couldn’t read hundreds of posts every day.

Then at my work a new project began and I came into a new team, and here I found colleagues who where able to explain me what they saw and every time I made the same error they pointed it out in a nice way. I begun to write some kind of diary, what was good today, such things. And so I figured out that my problem was sleep. Every day I made errors or strange behavior or I tried to fix a simple bug but need a whole day for that, it correlated with too less sleep. (In the end it was not only sleep, but much more things, but at that time it was the most important).

So it looks easy to change that, just go to bed earlier, but it really wasn’t. Because then I wake up in the middle of the night and couldn’t sleep in again. But I made this to my target: get enough sleep. So I begun to make more sports.

It helped, as my body now felt similarly exhausted as my brain.

I felt better, but I still had problems, so tried and improved many, many more things. Some things worked, some didn’t. The long story short: fixing here a little, there a little things of my life helped not to get too lazy again. Suddenly things got easier, suddenly I saw again the sense of the project I was working on. And the life I was living in. I have so much fun now, working with my colleagues and when I come home (from sports) I do not sit me again in front of a computer but I read a book. I talk to my wife and the cats. Maybe I play a bit (Factorio of course, but in the last times I feel that I want to play other new games which I see as a good sign), but not longer than an hour or two. Sounds boring, but I can see in my diary, that it works for me.

So I would end here normally, writing that I wrote this for those who have similar problems and so on.

But I come back to the beginning: 1/5 of the people will have similar problems. So the chance, that you - the reader of this text - will read this and already had or will have or currently have such problems is about 1/5. This thought really freaked me.

For those:
- avoid being stressed. You are not able to see how stressed you are!! Feeling stressed and being stressed doesn’t correlate! But for me I found that it is a clear sign of being stressed, when I feel the urge to eat sweets and fast-food and such things. Others smoke or take other drugs... very different for everyone.
- but the opposite isn’t being lazy to avoid any stress. The opposite is doing things that do kind of stress. But “positive“ stress. Like moderate sports. Reading a book. Drinking one glass of beer/wine. Go to concerts. Eat healthy food. Hear music you love in a dark room. Thousands of things you can try out. Do things you really like, and not those that you think you like. Be honest to yourself - easier said as it is.
- being aware of that takes some time! You need to find out if you are currently stressed (again feeling stressed is not always a clear sign). I lost this natural feeling and need to relearn it. You need to find out what’s good for you and what’s not. Use a diary, write in what you did and how you feel. And check from time for the correlations between what you do and how you feel/how things are going afterwards. And how that correlates with the signs of stress. Ask others if they feel that you are stressed and how that correlates with your feelings.
- you cannot change your behavior just because you now (seem) to know what causes your problems. You need to feel the inner urge to do it. That takes time. A lot of time. Give yourself this time.
- This is not a recipe which works for everyone. I cannot explain the years of frustration where I was searching. In doubt get professional help - talk with a doctor, they normally know which kind of help is needed

[Monara]

Just here to say thank you and one minor bit of feedback on the blueprint library (this isn't specific to the update): I always found the definition of "my blueprints" and "game blueprints" confusing. Is "my blueprints" all of my blueprints across different saves, or does "my" refer to the character playing the current map only? Does "game blueprints" refer to game(factorio)-wide, or to the current game(session/map)? It can be interpreted both ways, so I think these descriptions could be better I didn't think too much about this but maybe something like map vs universal. Not sure how it works in multi-player so that may not make sense either.

[qq271206247]

Thanks for your hardworking on the blueprint system! I really love those new features, dev-team really got a lot of great ideals. And for kovarex, thank you for sharing your story with us, and thank you for your hardworking on the blueprint, I love it.

[T-A-R]

Always surprising us with something big. Much appriciation for sharing these struggles, and writing them down in an inspiring way. We should also be thankful for the team that you have selected, which could be trusted to keep the company running all the meantime. Great to see you back, just in time for the release party, to celebrate Factorio!

[nafira]

I'm truly happy you managed to get over it ! It's pretty hard for any normal human being, even harder when people depends on you (I think the team was worried too even if you don't mention it).

I personally had in that order :
* epileptic seizure : broke jaw in 3 / 1year rehab
* chronicle insomnia : 10h of sleep every 72 hours max
* burnout
* more insomnia
* another burnout (just finishing jaw rehab)
* still insomnia

I managed to get out for a year or so, before covid came and ruined everything. I was stuck at home working all day long (longer than previously) and fell back into my old habits.
Take care of you, your kid and your wife (husband? idk), and grab what you can to keep you in order. I let down my guard in march and paid it hard.
For those who face burnout and then having chronicle insomnia, it's a barbaric name called psycho-physiological insomnia.
Basically, your mind is stuck in a stress of fear of insomnia due to the shock of the burnout, and this stress generate insomnia, which generate stress, etc.

You have to break it (pretty easy) and keep it on track (very very hard) forever. You can't use medicine, drug, alcohol or any sleep drug. It only help you break the cycle at the beginning but they worsen the symptoms in reality.
Anyway, it's always a good news to hear about someone recovering from a burnout without being stuck in a self-protecting cycle which is often the case (remember your aunt or uncle afraid of everything in the world and trying to cure her(im)self from every diseases).


Back on Factorio, you did an amazing job on BP library. It looks fantastic.
I hope you will add an extra feature to have a shared library across games It would be awesome !!

[Lubricus]

I se forward to the BP library update.
I recognize what you wrote in my self. It's more lack of motivation and than depression/burnout I don't really know the difference.
At work I do some menial gluing and cutting stuff that's need being done, as breaks from coding and more creative work. For me it helps to always have something meaningful and simple to do when I am not up to do more demanding/creative work.
That is a problem now when I have to work from home... So it may sound silly but it could be good if you help out packaging T-shirts and stuff like that.

[SkerrittT]

Well done mate.
Sharing your motivational difficulties is brave and good of you. One can take heart hearing of your experiences and that you have worked thru it. I am pleased for you.
Thank you for the great game that you and the team have created. It has given me many hours (thousands according to Steam) of enjoyment and, in my retirement, helps to keep my brain going.
The work on the blueprint features is icing on the cake - a terrific improvement which will enhance the game experience I am sure.

[kbramman]

In a way I'm less interested in the second half of the the blog, but the first half really struck home.
After a couple of years of manic working, just this past few weeks I've had a chance to take a small step back and spend it with my daughter (who is of a similar age), and whilst she's not so hot on a pc (which I am so ashamed of!!!), building some lego monstrosities with her has been a great way of de-stressing and connecting again.

So happy you've had the chance to step back, spend time with family and get back into the development of Factorio. Hopefully though this time has shown that burn out is a real concern to you and your colleagues!