Satisfactory is like a 3D version of Factorio, which lets you build huge multi-layer mega factories up into the sky. But it's not as deep and sophisticated as Factorio, and doesn't have drones or blueprints. (That would be a lot more difficult to accomplish in free-form 3D, than with Factorio's 2D tile grid.) It's kind of like the giant simple Legos for younger kids, as opposed to Factorio that's more like Lego Technic.
Satisfactory is well worth playing if you yearn for a 3D version of Factorio, but I still keep going back to Factorio, which is more like "Dwarf Fortress" in its depth and sophistication. Satisfactory's world is breathtakingly beautiful, lovingly hand-crafted by artists instead of procedurally generated, which makes it all the more satisfying to despoil and ruin with huge mega-factories belching out smoke and radiation.
This guy's videos stress testing and abusing Satisfactory are awesome:
I Produced so Much Nuclear Waste the World Is Ruined Forever - Satisfactory
I feel like if you want a 3D favtorio then going back to the mother: modded minecraft, is the best option. I have put multiple thousands of hours into industry games over the past ten years (few hours in the past two years though). Gregtech was what got me started and in some ways is still the best. GT6 is complete and a standalone game (Mechanatia I think) is currently being worked on. Factorio definitely wins on ability to automate and scale up, but it is very wide and not very deep. That is to say, there is no exponential growth power or resource requirements by moving up 5+ tech tiers. Combining many tiers with powerful automation would be a very fun combo. Modded factorio is probably the best place to look for this. For now, afaik, the biggest factorio mods are focused on going even wider.
I haven't played minecraft in a while, but I really enjoyed Industrial Craft, and haven't heard of Gregtech.
I looked into it a while ago, and noticed that IC hasn't been kept up to date with the latest minecraft versions, maybe it's a dying community. Would you say GT is a spiritual successor?
Maybe it's time to fire up the servers this weekend :)
GT was an add-on to IC2 and its development ran alongside IC2 during IC2’s hayday. There have been six official GT versions, but the latest one is on 1.7.10.
GT5 had an expansion to it made (GT5U) that was so great that it inspired the creation of GT New Horizons (GTNH).
GTNH is the currently the most active GT community, but it goes a little off the grind deep end imo. There has been a large amount of effort to balance every recipe in a huge number of mods and it’s great fun if you’ve already played through GT a few times.
GT Community Edition (GTCE) is a fan recreation of GT5 in contemporary versions of MC. The last I saw, the maintainer had bad vision and was not receptive to feedback. It is not worthy of the GT name.
Honestly I used to hate Gregtech when it was in modpacks I used to play with my friends for making things grindy, but playing Factorio gave me appreciation for what GT was trying to do. More large scale automation, but at the time we were too used to magic box mods that let you upgrade to faster magic boxes to realise.
My feeling is the modding scene as a whole and the people in it were much less mature in those days. See also fights between mod authors breaking people's worlds for unsupported combinations or attempts to block use in specific modpacks etc. And the ubiquitious overly modular mod so they could put each component behind its own adfly link.
I love Minecraft, and have played waaaay many hours of that too. But I'm not up to date on the latest mods, so thanks for the recommendations!
Both Minecraft and Factorio use grids, which make automated building with blueprints a lot easier.
But I can't imagine a good way for Satisfactory to support reusable blueprints in an unconstrained 3D world, the way Factorio does in a gridded 2D world (or the way Minecraft could in a cubic 3D world), where a big part of Satisfactory is building around the landscape, natural artifacts, and threading tangled conveyor belts around your other machines and belts and architecture.
When you're working with a 2D grid, it's easy to make reusable blueprints that you can systematically stamp out and plug together. (It's a lot like GPU programming, parallelizing tasks by spreading out the data to multiple processors, processing it in efficient units, making tradeoffs about bandwidth and buffering and transports, and merging it all back together again).
But there is so much variation in Satisfactory's 3D world and degrees of freedom in construction, that everything you build is unique and not nearly as modular and replicable as Factorio's blueprints.
On the other hand, Satisfactory's 3D building tools are fantastic (and it would be frustrating and impossible to play if they weren't so good): they make it really easy to connect up machine inputs and outputs with conveyor belts and pipes, and route them around like spaghetti code.
Here's something I posted earlier, quoting Dave Ackley on why he didn't transform his Moveable Feast Machine from 2D to 3D, who said: "I need to actually preserve one dimension to build the thing and fix it. Imagine if you had a three-dimensional computer, how you can actually fix something in the middle of it? It's going to be a bit of a challenge. So fundamentally, I'm just keeping the third dimension in my back pocket, to do other engineering."
DonHopkins 4 months ago | parent | favorite | on: Wolfram Rule 30 Prizes
Very beautiful and artistically rendered! Those would make great fireworks and weapons in Minecraft! From a different engineering perspective, Dave Ackley had some interesting things to say about the difficulties of going from 2D to 3D, which I quoted in an earlier discussion about visual programming:
David Ackley, who developed the two-dimensional CA-like "Moveable Feast Machine" architecture for "Robust First Computing", touched on moving from 2D to 3D in his retirement talk:
"Well 3D is the number one question. And my answer is, depending on what mood I'm in, we need to crawl before we fly."
"Or I say, I need to actually preserve one dimension to build the thing and fix it. Imagine if you had a three-dimensional computer, how you can actually fix something in the middle of it? It's going to be a bit of a challenge."
"So fundamentally, I'm just keeping the third dimension in my back pocket, to do other engineering. I think it would be relatively easy to imaging taking a 2D model like this, and having a finite number of layers of it, sort of a 2.1D model, where there would be a little local communication up and down, and then it was indefinitely scalable in two dimensions."
"And I think that might in fact be quite powerful. Beyond that you think about things like what about wrap-around torus connectivity rooowaaah, non-euclidian dwooraaah, aaah uuh, they say you can do that if you want, but you have to respect indefinite scalability. Our world is 3D, and you can make little tricks to make toruses embedded in a thing, but it has other consequences."
Here's more stuff about the Moveable Feast Machine:
I more or less beat (I escaped but haven't gone back to do stuff in the "Real world") Compact Claustrophobia recently and one of the things that ends up teaching you is a 3D composability that wouldn't really apply to the real world.
Compact Machines are pocket dimensions of fixed internal size (the first one you get is 3x3x3, the last you'll build is 13x13x13) that all exist as a single 1x1x1 cube on the outside. From inside you can reach any of the six sides of that cube with a "tunnel".
So if you've got, say, a simple basic Minecraft furnace with fuel flowing in the left, and stuff input to the top, output from the bottom, you can replace that with a 5x5x5 Compact Machine, with three tunnels inside, and any amount of complexity that fits. Maybe inside the 5x5x5 machine you turn fuel into electricity, you run four electric furnaces, and you parallelise the processing. Externally though it behaves just like the furnace... except both faster and more efficient.
The limited space in Claustrophobia (before you escape) means you feel compelled to actually solve problems in place this way, whereas normally you'd be tempted to just be lazy and add a few extra pipes here, an extra hopper there and soon it's a vast sprawling mess. When 13x13x13 seems impossibly large you cut that sort of nonsense right out.
Buildcraft’s builder can stamp complicated structures, but if you want to use it in factories then every stamp will need some hands on work. Ticking tile entities have fragile metadata that don’t like getting placed by non-players. There may be workarounds, but then you need to implement a blueprint system that can handle arbitrary ticking tile entity metadata. It might not even be a good idea to do this even if you can. Anyway, assuming these are solvable problems and someone has solved them, then you could have a factorio-like experience.
The thing is, factorio came out swinging with better automation than any minecraft mod. It is much easier to place things together and have them run free. Logistics bots are an absolute game changer in industry games. The bar has been raised.
There are mods that add blueprints to Satisfactory. Kind of wonky but definitely works. I'm sure official blueprints will work fine. My gut feeling is that we will see it in Update 4 since it's the most requested feature.
Best game ever btw and this comes from a seasoned Factorio player.
I remember a comment from you a few months ago regarding factorio and you pointed out that it was "just" an implementation of a specific variation of a cellular automata ruleset.
I enjoyed the comment but when I went back to find it in your history I discovered that you are a prolific commenter and that I was unable to find it.
Do you remember it and if so can you link to it or expand more on which cellular automata rule set it is?
Factorio (and also games like SimCity) are not actually pure CA rules, but they combine cellular automata techniques together with many other techniques like system dynamics, etc.
Will Wright gave a great explanation of how simulation games combine different techniques together in three intersection dimensions: Topologies (agents, networks, and layers), dynamics (propagation, growth, grouping, order, allocation, mapping, specialization, and nesting), and paradigms (cybernetics, system dynamics, cellular automata, chaos theory, adaptive systems, network theory).
>Lessons in Game Design, lecture by Will Wright, Computer History Museum, November 20, 2003.
Maybe the comment I posted about Factorio and CA was this, in the discussion of John von Neumann's 29 state cellular automata rule -- It is a pure CA, and a historically interesting one that he actually designed on paper and wrote about in a book. I compared it to Factorio, in the way Factorio uses conveyor belts in four different directions to direct the flow of items, and JVN29 uses arrows in four different directions to direct the flow of signals. But you can put a lot of different kinds of things on Factorio conveyor belts, but only ones and zeros on JVN29 arrows, since it was designed to be minimal and mathematically rigorous like a Turing Machine, not practical and convenient to program and fun to play like Factorio.
>Factorio players will recognize these tapes of construction instructions as 2D "blueprints" that construction drones use to build patterns of factories and conveyor belts, etc. In Factorio, after your drones have build a blueprint in the unpowered, unsupplied state, you can connect it to the power grid, hook up pipes to deliver fluids, and run conveyor belts in and out of it to deliver resources and products, and it will immediately starts doing its thing. Playing Factorio is uncannily like von Neumann 29 state cellular automata programming, not by coincidence. So it's a great way to get your head around cellular automata programming, gpu programming, parallel programming, queuing systems, and data flow programming in general!
>Factorio Tutorial #20 - Bots, part 1 - Construction robots
>Factorio just doesn't have the ability to construct cells by spilling items off the end of conveyor belts, or destroy cells with conveyor belts, either. But maybe there's an extension for that! And John von Neumann's 29 state cellular automata doesn't have swarms of construction drones that build and tear down blueprints in parallel like Factorio does, so there are some differences. But the basic idea of grids of cells with conveyor belts carrying items between factories is the same.
>The Real Time Crossing (Buckley, p. 457, The real-time crossing organ) is like a road intersection that splits the two crossing lanes, then uses traffic lights to give cars in each pair of lanes alternating turns to cross, and then merges the lanes back together (since each intersection works at 50% throughput, you need to split, use two of them, and merge -- Factorio and Satisfactory players will get what I mean, in terms of conveyor belts, splitters and mergers, and conveyor belt throughput).
Also I asked Alan Kay about Factorio and other games here, and he replied:
>DonHopkins on May 31, 2016 | parent | favorite | on: Alan Kay's reading list
>I've heard you say that Rocky's Boots was one of your favorite computer games. Please, off the top of your head, what's your top-n list of inspiring games that you think people learning to program should play?
>I've been playing Factorio [1] [2], which I think would resonate with your love of Rocky's Boots, cellular automata, queuing theory, visual programming, system dynamics and distributed control systems. It's in the spirit of John von Neumann's 29 state cellular automata [3] and universal constructor. [4]
>I think I'm so out of context wrt video games here and now that I can't come up with a worthwhile reply. I liked Rocky's Boots because of the brilliant combination of the content and the idea behind the game play -- and they were well matched up. I liked the idea of its successor "Robot Odyssey" a lot, but advised the TLC folks to use something like Logo for the robot language rather than the Rocky's circuit diagrams (which were now not well matched up to the needs). As you know I really tried to get the Maxis people to make "Sim City" a rule based system that children could program in so they could both understand the generators and to change them (no luck there).
>If I were to look around today, I'd look for something where the underlying content was really "good" for children -- I doubt that cellular automata would be in my top 10 -- and then would also have good to great game play.
Mining and crafting is a fine primary loop. It inspires zen much more than factorio. The more advanced tech mods require automation. I have never needed to set up a bang-bang controller for my fuel burner or spreadsheet out perfectly matched rates to avoid overflow/underflow issues in Factorio. In some ways modded minecraft demands more automation engineering, and I find that fun.
Advancing in minecraft tech trees grants more powerful mining tools so you can clear entire veins in minutes, or set up quarries that mine everything to bedrock (with the sorting and processing system being a fun challenge).
Factorio certainly cuts the chuff and opens up the ability to physically scale up to an absurd size. The controls work is less needed, but the geometric layout is more critical. Since minecraft bases are expected to be small, advancements in tech must be in faster, small machines.
I actually don’t like the hand crafted nature of the map because it severely limits replayability. Sure it’s damn pretty but once you explore once and learn the interesting/valuable spots, the sense of awe and wonder that comes from exploration just vanishes.
I'd sure hate to work on a product with that guy working in QA! Oh the bug reports he would generate! The Satisfactory developers must have a dartboard with his face on it.
I find it kind of weird that programmers seem to like this game. I tried playing it for a bit and all I could think of was how much more efficient things would be if I could just write code instead of running around on a map to achieve the same thing.
The whole game seemed like a forced distillation of programming into a form that can be consumed by the masses.
Do you like games at all? Almost any game would be “more efficient” if you could just write code to declare yourself the victor. Games - for that matter, pretty much any leisure pursuit whatsoever - are not about efficiency.
I think it's the difference between what feels like work and what feels like an emotional resonance. Or I guess, whether you end up enjoying the process, or the outcome.
For example Doom Eternal is basically, IMO, one of the best games ever made, because it's one of the only games where the combat loop gets a physiological response from me. I can't play it at all if I'm in the wrong headspace, but it's amazing when I'm in the right one.
Factorio really has to hit the same sort of "zing!" feel. Programming-wise for me, it's the feeling of unbridled power at just tearing things apart to refactor. Because that's a hell of a different feel to the day job.
Oh I do play a bunch of games. I have no problem enjoying strategy games like Civ, EU4 or base builders like RimWorld. Factorio is just too much like programming for me to find joy in it.
For example with Zachtronics games (very programming-puzzle-esque games), I doubt I could play it for long. It would be similar to messing about with an Esolang, but more structured. While I enjoy using Esolangs, I can only ever do it in short bursts, and I imagine the same would hold if I started playing a Zachtronics game.
For Factorio, it is just barely different enough from regular programming (due to various parts, such as the grid based nature of reality, etc) that if I am in the right mood I could play it quite easily for several hours. Yet, if I am in the wrong mood/state-of-mind, then I will constantly compare it to what I am coding and likely stop playing after an hour.
I will say that Factorio is far more distilled in it's problem solving nature than you'll usually get with programming, which can make it scratch that itch of solving something. While I still enjoy Factorio after playing it for some hours, I'm more likely to code now than I am to play it. Still quite enjoyable and worth the money and possibly the time, though.
I played it on a 2012 MBP; only started lagging at the very end right before I managed to launch a rocket (which broke my addiction to it, thankfully).
Some of my favourite youtube videos on it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xF--1XdcOeM [Self expanding factory, recursive blue prints]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feHq2Ken43M [Factorio Rocket ballet, for reference it took me 30 hours to launch a single rocket]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KoV_Zk2IRs [Factorio base tour, this base looks like a CPU die when zoomed out]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjtXHsv5E6M [Another Factorio base tour]