Factorio Forums

TL;DR

Add local multiplayer/coop to the Switch.

What?

In addition to the normal "single player" and "multiplayer" options in the start menu, add a "local multiplayer" option. Selecting this option allows 2-4 players to play Factorio on the same Switch device when it is docked by using multiple controllers. The (tv) screen would be split into multiple parts for each player - like in Mario Kart for example. Kind of like running 4 clients locally, but the game state is shared (instead of just the actions being uploaded and the game state being calculated by each client).

Why?

This lets more people play Factorio, since they don't all need to buy a copy.

Why not?

It will be a lot of work to change the engine to support multiple players I think. Currently multiplayer can do calculations in "latency", and this would have to be avoided.


I had a dream where I was going to play Factorio with my brother on the Switch via local multiplayer, but when I woke up I realised this wasn't possible, which saddened me a bit.

Apologies if this has been proposed before, I couldn't find it by searching.

Funny how it can be hard to talk about these things due to disagreements about what the words « local multiplayer » mean : LAN and/or same PC ?

Like how there's sometimes confusion between games supporting shared/split screen and «coop». (See also : «hotseat».)

(You don't have to play MP Factorio coop.)

Last but not least : You can already kind of do it on PC.