Should You Play: Factorio 

meh factorios okay, i only played like 800 hours. not too addictive

> complains about excessive resourse needs for research > Still using one yellow belt to feed his research crafters There's your problem. It's not a grind, it's a bottleneck; you need to increase production. The factory must grow.

this game is fucking heroin.

The flamethrower is basically the newest forest destroyer. I used oil (the flamethrower ammo) to clear trees to make space for pumpjacks. What could be more environmentally unfriendly?

You don't need trains? My sweet boy, you are so wrong...

It's funny how the Devs addressed all these problems over the FOUR YEARS since this video was published. With bots, blueprints, and revamped science recipes, re-balanced trains (now far superior to belts,) and much expanded military have fixed basically all these problems. Factorio's problems were lack of polish and lack of content breadth, not lack of depth.

Two words: Automated drones. That stuff changes the game in a significant way

Holy shit this game took a dark turn fast. That alien part caught me completely off guard.

I think mods should've been brought up. Bobs mods and dytech add unheard of levels of additons and complexity, that are completely free to the player.

Interesting how basically all the flaws mentioned here we fixed by two simple fitures - bots and blueprints. You are not supposed to unlock big generator, you are supposed to build you own!

I've been avoiding Factorio. The min/max syndrome is strong in me. I almost fucked up my marriage playing mount and blade....

I've heard of it and it didn't sound interesting but I decided to watch the trailer. Half a minute into the trailer I paused it, instaled the game and played 7 hourd straight

6:50 The reason why trains are better than belts is because of throughput. The belts can carry 13.33, 26.67 and 40 items per second. Since mining drills can mine 0.525 ores per second (0.65 for stone), it doesn't take much to compress one belt. Since belts require 1.5, 11.5 and 31.5 iron respectively, it would be most efficient to use the slowest belts across long distances. Since it takes 25 miners to almost compress one slow belt, we are going to need a lot of them for large outposts that can fit around 200 miners. With 200 miners, you will need 8 lanes of belts just to transport the resources to your base. In this case, it will cost you 12 iron PER TILE to transport your resources (bear in mind that this is the most cost-efficient way to transport resources by belt) Now, let's see how trains work instead. 2 rails require 5.5 iron (and 1 stone). Since rails are 2x2 tiles, we need 1.375 iron and 0.25 stone per tile instead. Of course, we will need to factor in double rails and rail signals, so let's say that rails are 4 iron per tile (just to average things out). Even with all of this, it is still cheaper to use rails than to use 3 of the slowest belts (4.5 iron per tile). And you might argue that trains are complicated to set up, but if you're just transporting resources from an outpost to your base, it doesn't require any complex signaling. In fact, you might even run a single railroad to your outpost, which would only cost you 1.375 iron per tile.

Jumped from you Witness review to the Darkest Dungeon one, to this one, and I must say I really like your style. You now have a new subscriber. I mostly agree with your opinion on Factorio and the final suggestion you made would be a great addition to the game.

It sounds like you didn't use blueprints to build your factory, if you did it would make expanding very easy, you don't actually need some of the things you suggested, like factories with claws - you can just make a blueprint for it. By using them in late game it's pretty easy to automate even rocket production eithout the need to really afk to send a rocket. Increasing the scale of prosuction you actually start needing the trains as you have to get resourses from a very far away and enemies don't actually attack rails and power poles on themselves. This all leads to different late game designs in terms of both mining and production, which you seemed to miss unfortunately. Also the circuit networks definitely deserved mentioning. While you can play without them they allow a veery presize controll over some production lines.

Factorio is finally getting its 1.0 release this Friday. You should do that review. :)

0.15 just dropped; it's amazing and has some of the things you've asked for here. They added the Railworld world type which has very large and rich but infrequent resource deposits which motivates train usage, and biters do not expand to new bases. Infinite science expands the endgame and makes rockets part of upscaling instead of an arbitrary end goal, balancing makes dealing with aliens less tedious, new content like uranium, etc. etc..

One thing to note is that the 0.15.0 Experimental release removed the stark Magic Blue Science Potion cliff. It's now a smoother difficulty progression, from Red to Green to Military to Blue, then higher tiers still.

Should you play factorio? YES YES You SHOULD

I feel like this needs a new video once the game releases. There is quite a lot more to point out and comming. Blueprints, robots, beacons, flamethrower, nuclear power and mods are all already ingame, boosting the endgame experience and extending the gameplay length. this video does not talk about any of these features. maybe because the player might think they are only side features which can be tapped into as optional content, and that belt factories is the main way to build your factory. This conclusion is easy to get into because you learn for dozen of hours how to build and protect your factory with belts. You maybe dont expect that to change later in the game. Espacially when starting to try to incorporate beacons into your belt builds you are usually forced to redesign many of your designs. You technically can redo your entire base for increased productivity and efficiency. Same with roboports, logistic networks and logistic robots. They open up a complelty different playsstyle with does not require the use of belts all together. Furthermore, the ability to use blueprints + personal construction robots to help you to place large amount of entities at a faster pace was also not mentioned. the endgame you present in the video is far from the accual endgame, even thought the endgame IS still flawed (just for different reasons). the video sadly barely touched all of the accual endgame gamemechanics. And on the use of trains: Once ressource fields run out, you have to venture further out (espacially if you the set the ore richness to low). it is easy to underestimated the possible sizes of lategame factories. people build crazy factories with so much material throughput that they just have to use trains, otherwise they wouldnt be able to archieve such throughput. espacially if the final value you measure your factory with is "how many rockets can i launch each minute consistently". of course you dont need trains if your factory is still small or medium sized. Furthermore, trains are less update-heavy than belts. Eventually the game will run slower. Hardcore players want to create gigantic factories to the point where they start to min-max their computer performance based on how the game has been coded. edit: 8:39 The power armor provides personal roboports which allow you to let construction robots place entities for you. You can create blueprints and plop them down whereever you want and the robots will do the job. No need to place every single building or belt in the endgame anymore. 9:21 There is a building FOR the upgrade cards: The beacon. It does provide new ways to design your builds, which is mostly interesting if you like to play your games efficiently. If feel like this review was made with the mindset "This is early access, therefore it must be a simple game still being slowly developed" "If the factory works why bother changing it, i just want to finish the goal: launching a rocket" The game has great depth when you start looking at the mechanics of single entities, but i feel like this has been dismissed or might no be possible to be explored in just 100 hours. Thats why people are able to spend thousands of hours in the game and still enjoy it greatly!

One of the flaws you mentioned (to paraphrase): "the endgame is about doing tedious things instead of solving problems, since the amount of research required is astronomical and you're better off leaving the game running as opposed to expanding your factory to make it research faster" - and you said that it isn't worth the trouble, but you never said why! Now, I understand that constant expansion has diminishing returns, but that doesn't mean there isn't always something to do. Things could always be faster. You always have something bottlenecking your factory, so that other things aren't working at their full capacity. It's a constant balancing act, and I think that's what you failed to appreciate during the late-game. You restate how the end-game feels like a grind to "stretch out the game in its unfinished state" due to massive resource requirements, yet you give the impression that your factory lacked scale since you claimed that trains didn't serve a purpose that transport belts couldn't satisfy. I will make a point that you should Google some discussions about trains vs belts, because trains do serve a purpose. Simply put, I think the flaws you observed about Factorio's endgame are a result of a lack of scale and micromanagement to improve your factory's efficiency, speed and overall complexity. I understand that you don't find launching the rocket a satisfying conclusion to the game - that's a fair assessment on the rocket itself - but I think the enjoyment on launching the rocket isn't the destination, but the journey you've taken to get there. As you know, it's a humongous task to launch a rocket, so finally being able to do it is a reward in and of itself. This is my opinion though, I respect your opinion that the rocket launching procedure feels anticlimactic.

Blueprints would allow most of the automation you wanted, and personal roboports on your power armor make clearing the forests super easy. Even back then. With the new additions that are in the game, flamethrowers and setting an entire forest on fire makes it super easy (albeit it will make greenpeace show up). Also most of your complaints are addressed by mods, but I never feel that is a real solution. Plus you can get a rocket super fast, I did it sub8 hours and speed runners manage less than 2 hours. However I do agree the end game is weak, and the general thrust of your argument is correct.

"Factorio should be feature complete by the end of this year." *posted in February 2016* Thank the Emperor that Kovarex and others are still running strong.

Me, watching this video in 2020 hearing "The developers estimate that the game should be feature-complete by the end of the year." Video was released 4 years ago. Only took three years more... :) I love the game throughout the whole time.

I've put 500+ hours into this game (pre-steam obviously) and it's amazing. Obviously some people won't like it, and yes, the end game is flawed, but compared to most AAA titles I have purchased this is vastly superior.

I wasn't too sold on this guy's "armchain developer"-ing, until he proposed making the Player revealed at the end to actually be a Von Neumann machine. That's fucking brilliant!

No mention of robots and blueprints, things which I liked the most about the game

Followed your advice. Now I am addicted. thanks!

I have to admit that while the review part of the game was nice, the after review part sounded at least a little bit whiny. Yes, Factorio could use a better endgame, but when you think about it, the devs are really just trying to add features right now as well as polish. Just think about how many years Minecraft took before it had any meaningful semblance of an endgame. At least Factorio has a goal to work towards right now (launching a rocket into space) whereas other games have not done that. Also, I think you're the only person I've heard complaining about the polish that the dev team is putting in. The fact that they care so much about their game, and by extension their playerbase, is really important. Polishing what they have is making the game look nicer and function more efficiently, and I think it's great that they're doing this as they go along rather than getting all the way up to a pre-release and doing it all at once. It's very neat and tidy and goes a long way to make Factorio a better game. Finally, one more little detail that did bug me is how you talked about trains. Trains are MUCH more efficient than belts for transporting resources over long distances. To have a belt even come close to how efficient trains are, they would need to move resources many times faster than they already do and have a higher throughput. This would mean having 12 or 16 belts (or more depending on how big your trains would be) bringing your resources in, and depending on how far away the mining or production site is, that could become prohibitively expensive very fast. Trains may seem expensive but the truth of the matter is that they are very good at what they do, and are much easier to defend than a main bus.

When do we get an updated video on Factorio?

The old Rocket Silos look so cool. Also if your wondering, They've adressed so many of this issues posed. This game Is AMAZING now

what hooked me was the fact that when i started it i wasn't planning ahead so everything seemed inefficient, but after checking the tech tree i saw, "smart inserters", this could fix my problem, but then i ran into issues with items being everywhere so i needed an easy way to get stuff around, so again i looked into the tech tree and found "logistic bots", so i spent all of my time gunning for those bots and the logistic techs behind them, always thinking "just one more tech and the system will be perfect and i will have everything" but it wasn't perfect, i needed to more but i was running out of space with everything so close and intertwined, so i looked again at the tech tree and found a tech i missed on the way to logistic bots, "construction bots" which could deconstruct and construct from a blueprint. After rebuilding my factory i realized that my setups weren't optimal, the ratios weren't right, so that where i decided that i needed to restart and make a factory that is right and planned out from the beginning with the right ratios. I did better the second time, but there were always better setups, always more optimal ways to do it. 1000 hours later i think i need to restart from the beginning again, my train network is using loops and loops are shit.

This review was for a version of the game a while ago, since then there's a bigger scope to the end game with there being a use to launching multiple rockets. That being said the endgame, whilst being MORE interesting is not interesting enough. I usually start again with a different challenge or harder settings rather than continue past 150 hours of one map. I'm just up to 1000 hours on my Steam copy and I've definitely done more than that before too... I said this to a friend who played the game (about 100 hours before stopping) and I think it's worth saying to you. If the end game felt like a grind because you were taking a long time to finish it... why weren't you expanding your base to make it quicker? You know, literally the thing you spend the entire game doing. Building a factory, then building more factory. Then refining the design, adding modules etc...

Aliens that attack you for industrialising their planet?.. Is there a mod to turn them into mindworms?

If you do not play on peaceful I would definitely recommend starting in an area with large forests and chopping down as little as possible. This will delay the alien attacks as trees are by fare the best at absorbing pollution.

Was this review made before they added logistics? I didn't see you using any robots.

You said tanks are better to take down enemy bases than Lazer Turrets? have you tried making a simple blueprint with turrets surrounding a light pole and having your robot building them for you? It is the most OP thing ever

And it's version 1.0 now.

if you play long enough and in lower quantity settings for ores you will definitely need trains

Started playing it today and I could see myself putting 100 hours into it. The controls are super intuitive and it runs very well. The gameplay is just plain satisfying.

THE FACTORY MUST GROW

Factorio announced there first expansion today space age the game has evolved so much since this video

The idea of making a clone to research upon sounds amazing. It would also tie in with the making of the rocket, as its purpose is to deliver the clone to a new planet.

oh trust me my first factory looked like the spaghetti monster in the trailer... and no when the research starts to get too long, you expand, at least I do

Like you I discovered this game before it was put on steam, and I fell in love with it. I'm glad to see someone take the same level of love for a complicated game like factorio. Thank you

the best way to describe this game in my opinion is the Feed the beast minevaraft mod packs you start off with small scale automated systems that make you cobblestone, stone, lava, and sand, and build your way upto automatically growing and cutting down trees, sivving for diamonds, etc etc

I've seen gameplay of this before but you were able to sum the game up in a way that makes me desperately want to try it. good job!

I took the complexity a whole other step. I worked out the optimal ratios for crafting science packs (necessary to research new things) all by myself by paying attention to the crafting times to create the intermediate resources while wasting as little time as possible. This led me to discover that one gear factory is sufficient to supply 5 Science Pack 1 factories, for example. And for the record: 13 refineries (supplied by 13 pump jacks and 1 crude oil storage tank for runover) supply 5 sulfur factories with petroleum (a storage tank for leftover petroleum) which supply 2 sulfuric acid factories which supply 25 battery factories (ya really), but basic oil processing also supplies light and heavy oil, which allows 14 solid fuel factories for heavy oil (and 2 storage tanks, one for heavy oil and another for a factory that processes left over heavy oil into lubricant which needs its own storage tank) and 23 solid fuel factories for light oil and one last storage tank for leftover light oil. That’s the optimal setup that crafts every drop of crude oil as fast as possible, according to the crafting timing. This is on top of a base setup that doesn’t use conveyor belts for much, because conveyor belts don’t get resources from point A to point B as fast as keeping everything compact/piped together and abusing inserters and chests, and feeding the chests with material manually. Why do this? So that when you unlock robotics later on, robots can do the manual transfer of goods for you, so you don’t over complicate your base with conveyor lines and don’t have to worry about early factories in a conveyor line hoovering up the conveyor belt resources and leaving the further factories bare. Conveyor belts are only useful when crafting time-intensive products like Science Pack 2, because the initial factories take so long to process the goods that later factories can be supplied without any supply disruption (by the way, 2 inserter factories and 2 transport belt factories can supply 48 Science Pack 2 factories. Ya, really.) I could have looked up those ratios myself (maybe I’m off somewhere, and inserters introduce a small error in processing as it takes a 1/2 second or split second to move materials, which is faster than a belt but slower than the “assumed” instant timings for the ratios I worked out). However, sitting down, working out the math, then building it and seeing the end result is unbelievably satisfying. It feeds into the addictive nature of the game; it’s not just that you automate X so you can craft new materials that allow you to automate Y, it’s that there’s an underlying mathematical logic to the whole thing that can be studied and exploited to the player’s benefit. That is what makes Factorio so unbelievably fun for so many people, and why it takes so long: you’re doing what engineers all over the world do every day: figure out the math to make X product using Y materials. Real-world engineers need a preliminary step, though: figure out Z requirements and B environmental conditions that Y materials must have and can survive in, in order to satisfy C problem the engineer is attempting to solve. It’s awesome that Factorio taps into a part of this process, and it makes me wish that the environment affected materials as well: iron rusts, copper tarnishes, petroleum evaporates, uranium radiates, etc., and that rain and winds could cause damage to structures over time, and that different environments have different structural considerations (crafting solid foundations specific to swamps/sandy areas, constantly repairing stone and asphalt paths in snowy areas because of frost heave in the ground, designing pipes with flexible supports that can withstand earthquakes (Wouldn’t that be terrifying if it existed in Factorio?), on and on and on. The focus the game has on its “Make X and Y to build Z” aspects is a great foundation, but to become legendary it must expand its environment and factor in real-world physics to drive aspects like decay and environmental damage. This would sell Factorio’s world as more of a “living ecosystem” than simply a manufactured game world to play around in, which would greatly improve the game experience. Make of my thoughts whatever you will.

Finally released! Would love to see a follow up video for this game.

There's a reason why it's called Cracktorio by us who play it. I have like 300 hours in this, it's fucking addictive.

It's released!

Factorio is an interactive finite state machine simulator.

That last idea about making a clone and going to a new plant is so cool, it would retroactively turn you into one of those self-replicating drones and would bring up some cool questions about your origins

You may think its excessiv towards the endgame, but the compulsion to the need to grow the factory and perfect it just feels so... goooood.

The factory must grow

The flamethrower story: so onetime I was angry at trees because they took forever to clear, I fired my flamethrower into them and they caught on fire. All of my walls were destroyed because the fire killed them. Remember, trim the trees away from your wall before you burn them!

This is a great analysis of the game at the time. It would be great to see an updated analysis including the influence of mods.

One thinh you completly ignored are all of the great mods the game has, which adress some of the issues with the game you mentioned. RSO spreads resources out, so trains become mandatory, bob's mods adds new versions of everything in the game, and there are so many other great mods, it's hard to even know them all.

Hey, I don't know if you'll see this comment, but Factorio is about to release its 1.0 version soon (factorio.com/blog/post/fff-349) . They've updated a lot of graphics, refined the GUI, and made a LOT of improvements over the last few years. I can wholeheartedly recommend giving it a second look if you have the time!

I almost spit my meal on my monitor as you said "The developers estimate that factorio should be feature-complete by the end of the year" xD

the game as really changed a lot since this video. though it's still changing somewhat, i hope when it has it's first 1.0 release you're gonna get back and redo the review and talk about what changed for the btter, for the worst, and how the game now is

I fucking watched this exact video like, a year ago, and I was like "wow this guy sure knows his shit, too bad he has too little views", and completely forgot about it since I got hooked on Factorio, and couldn't remember the name of this vid to subscribe. Then I watched your No Man's Sky vid a week ago, subscribed, and "REFOUND" this vid. Genuinely happy that your vids and channel are getting the recognition they deserve, you almost always capture the gist of a videogame in your reviews -too bad about your wrong opinions on Dragon's Dogma though- Keep it up!

Your view of the endgame is a bit off, I think. The materials needed to produce rockets and sattelites are expensive, sure....but at that point in the game it should be a drop in the bucket of your production. You're offloading your resource problem onto the game itself. Also: Trains can haul more items at faster paces over medium-long distances, so while they may not be necessary, they are extremely valuable if you plan on building big.

I decided to give the game a try. Next thing I know, the police is at the door, since a week ago somebody reported me as missing. Fortunately, I can continue playing on the laptop while the doctors are busy trying to separate my body from the chair.

I have thousands of hours into the game now. Still has 100% replayability. No game is ever the same.

I started watching this and Factorio opened itself in the background. The factory must grow. The factory must grow. The factory must grow.

I now have almost 600 hours in Factorio and never thought of buildings or endings like you mentioned and tough the video is already pretty old its great

Hi. So Factorio just had 1.0 realase and came out of beta. Will you do new video some time in the future?

this is one of those games that makes you fee like you are being productive. i love it

My friend and me decided to get the game. We built a huge factory like the one in the trailer.

Factorio 1.0 released You better do that examination.

What if they made it so that the trains had weaponry and the rails either couldn't be attacked or weren't targeted as often as factories by mobs? I would think that late-game expansion would be encouraged, since you could set up little mining operations all over the world, and (fairly) safely transport goods back to the main factories where they get processed. The challenge would be making sure that those miniature mining bases are adequately defended, as well as making sure the weapons on the train are up to scratch. Definitely interested in the game though. Would you mind posting a video when it gets off early access, so we get the news?

You can output from drills directly into furnaces. Coal drills can also power each other (and I see you discovered this later.. and later again also the first one). I believe that factorio would be better with something to explore - random ruins, other factions, rare resources (the current worldgen is exceedingly dull). Originally, the developers were firmly against this but they seem to have come around a bit so let's see.

This video made me consider playing Factorio, which I might now! Especially after the Total Annihilation comparison (one of my favorite games)

About the rails: yes they are a bit more complicated to set up, but you they are much more fun when you like complexity (and I think many of factorios players like complexity) and you really need them later. They take far less resources and far less space.

Hehe, feature complete by the end of the year 2016... good one past Joseph Anderson, good one.

if you are debating on getting the game, GET IT. IT IS THE BEST $20 I HAVE EVER SPENT!!! PLEASE GET IT NOW!!!!!

Trains are extremely useful if you can use them correctly. I find them most useful to carry my self over large distances, and they're typically better then belts for large factories as you can separate each system, that way in case one gets attacked(At this time I'm assuming it's very late game and pollution is super heavy) the whole factory doesn't get destroyed.

Why is no one talking bout the amazing graphics and spritework. This is real vintage late 90s DOS pixel art polished to a mirror-shine. You literally cannot find a fault in it. It's incredible.

I recently bought factorio and just finished the game. I don't agree with you on the end-game issues. I didn't feel the game was a grind. I had no problems launching the rocket within less than an hour from when I placed the building, without knowing what resources I would be needing to launch the rocket. I already had quite a lot of resources incoming. I have constantly increased my flow of resources, constantly removing bottle-nacks and constantly expanding. I had 4 blue belts of iron, and 2 with copper, and they were flowing freely and nearly fully saturated, not backing up. Maybe your review is outdated, since I've been playing 0.15 and it looks quite different. Robots & blueprints make expanding on-demand resource production & building huge rail networks quite manageable. Regarding trains... sure, you can place down a belt, but keep in mind that belts aren't cheap compared to rails. I started of with belts, but I went to trains when all resources nearby were depleted and I had to cover huge distances for resources. I launched my rocket at 50 hours. Not very close to the 15-hours achievement... :P

I think the long range artillery and logistic/construction blocks were a great addition

I personally adore Factorio, I first played it a year ago and barely did shit all, a few weeks ago, my life changed. I looked at "Factorio" and didn't remember, so I gave it another try, this time in peaceful mode and other different settings. I have never stopped playing since then, no other Steam game has pulled me in just like that. Despite me being 13, I adore this game to its nuclear core, it's fundamentally amazing mechanics, its odiously awesome gameplay. And most of all: it's addicting. 10/10 Recommended.

Well about that Space platforms.... here we are, Factorio: Space Age soon to be released, finally!!

Some great suggestions. I do think having more biomes with unique resources would be the way to expand it. Right now there is very little reason to use trains and is more about just giant supply lines. I haven't played the game much in the past year, but I do hope they polish up the end game instead of having it be super grindy like it was.

I think nukes added the best response to the previous biter issues.

The game has changed quite a bit since this video has come out. His main complaint the lacking end game has mainly been fixed by adding even more challenging things this game also has a extensive and in built modding scene that can change the game I highly recommend it as it is still getting updated. Granted it is still in early access but the game has more then enough features to outclass many triple A titles factorio is one of the smartest purchases I have ever made I highly recommend

Hit me hard with that Galifianakis gif... It was exactly what I was doing. Reminds me of the the fun I used to have with the Tekkit mods. Can't play yet tho, just got addicted to Diablo 3 so gonna have to wait 200 hours to get bored of that first.

I absolutely hate that you don't have more views and subs, keep up the good work man.

In my opinion you should do another review of this game, explaining the beauty and complexity of the logistic system and maybe even the circuit network system... And what about Rimworld? You mentioned Dwarf Fortress...

All they need to fix is the end game. The Nuclear Reactor and Rockets where a nice addition but you still sit aroung for houres to get your first rocket.

You should come back to it. I've watched a few of your videos, and I'd love to do some co-op with you on this some day.

I highly recommend the new update, even if you don't make a video about it. What they have done is pretty interesting.

I was on the fence for this one. I'm huge on discounts and for anyone else looking to buy it on sale, it won't be for a long time. This review was my tipping point. I've got a good 19 hours now :)

Dude,you make a 10 minutes video and it feels like an hour... IN A GOOD WAY. Your commentary is just so brilliant,your reviews are well done,explain the game well and aren't anything like most reviews which are generally just whining for no reason or praising a game for no reason.

what do you think about robots? didn't see any in your video.

*watching while playing*

No wonder personal lasers feel better. I'd forgotten they used to be 2x3 in size.

Thanks for this awesome review! This is exactly what I wanted to know!

Starting in an area with lots of Trees won't be a problem if you use the Agent Orange mod.

and yet, they are going into space next year.