
1 Factorio involves a lot of this (it should probably be renamed "Refactorio").
#Factorio price code
The traditional programming term for solving this kind of problem is “refactoring,” when you take a big messy blob of code that has evolved over time, write down what it is actually supposed to do, and rewrite something that does exactly that. I would use personal screenshots, but I will probably not play it long enough to get a non-embarrassing "after" pic. Both of these images are sourced from the Factorio forums. Go to 1, but making the next round of errors subtler, meaning that the complications are correspondingly hard to fix.Ī messy base, affectionately known as “spaghetti” An organized, modular, nice-to-look-at base that (if you’ve played regularly) is pretty easy to understand.Rip up large fractions of the setup and lay them out again with more straight lines and sensibility.As you scale, see the consequences compound and necessitate increasingly hacky solutions.
#Factorio price series
Make a series of design decisions that have some internal logic at the time, but with accruing mistakes.Over time, playing the game reveals the metagame: early factories end up poorly laid-out, with redundancies, complex hacky ways of moving products around, and dead ends from which it's impossible to scale.
#Factorio price manual
You can meditate in order to be in the moment you play Factorio in order to habituate yourself to never leaving a manual process un-automated. But it's also meditative in the sense that meditation is partly a way to cultivate a particular mindset, and Factorio does that, too. one more thing to move on conveyor belts) and new challenges (squirting fluids through pipes, and combining their outputs with solid products to create new items). This may sound boring, but how many human-hours per year are spent matching colored gems? Some games get described as meditative, and that's true of Factorio in two senses: first, there's a theme-and-variation aspect to it, where each new product built is some combination of known problems (e.g. In Factorio, players gather resources and craft items, and then automate this process-so a player might start by manually mining coal and iron, then smelt the iron and use it to build a mining drill, the hook up some conveyor belts so the miner automatically sends the iron to a smelter, then hook up conveyor belts to that and uses them to pass these materials on to a factory that mass-produces more conveyor belts, mining drills, and so on. If anything, my view was that Amazon should be reimbursing Shopify employees for playing.īut since trying it out a bit more I’m starting to suspect that Factorio is the rare computer game to actually increase GDP. It seemed downright pathological that Shopify lets employees expense it.

I used to be of the opinion that the computer game Factorio was a colossal waste of talent, burning many billions of dollars of GDP every year.
