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One of the things that makes Factorio so great is how solid it is, not just in its programming but also in its game balance. (At least pre-Space Age; I can't speak to its Space Age balance from my own experience, though I'd be surprised if it was badly unbalanced).

To give just one point of evidence in support of the idea that Factorio is a well-balanced game, there is a guy who goes by "The Spiffing Brit", whose Youtube channel is all about breaking games by finding an exploit, or a bit of unbalanced interaction between two different game mechanics, and abusing that exploit or unbalanced interaction to the maximum extent possible. Armies with a million archers in Heroes of Might and Magic, that sort of thing.

When he did a video on Factorio, I wondered what exploit he had found in the game. Then I watched it. It was about how quickly you could win the game if you got 50 people to play multiplayer with you. That's it. No exploit, no broken game mechanics, just a game mechanic working as intended (yes, any job can get done faster if you can divide it between 50 people who can work on it more or less in parallel). I'm pretty sure that if there had been an exploit to be found, he would have shown it off in his video.

That doesn't prove there are NO software bugs in Factorio. But it's pretty good evidence that any remaining bugs are quite hard to run across.

There's another guy who I love watching (@MichaelHendriksLIVE) that exploits the heck out of biter mechanics. But it's generally in the context of difficult modded playthroughs.
Space Age is superbly balanced because it’s dynamic, offering multiple paths.

You can mega Nauvis with molten foundries, but that requires importing Calcite.

You can mega Gleba for just-in-time and resource generating blades, but how do you handle stone?

Vulcanus offers limitless resources- yet other planets may actually offer more.

Fulgora offers much if you learn modular design.

How do you handle quality? Dedicated factories, or integrated with production? How much footprint reduction do you want, and how much input efficiency via production modules. But that requires circling back to Nauvis…

Here's one of their many impressive software dev stories: making transport belt update multithreaded https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-364#:~:text=Multithreaded...
I play on an 8 year old MacBook Pro and with 10k logistics bots it still has smooth graphics and zaro boogs. It reminds me of how good blizzard was in the 90s.
That video was hilarious, with fifty people running around destroying alien nests with pickaxes.
Their continued all-star Linux support is worthy of applause.
For a time I thought steam on Linux had begun to add .desktop files for games. Nah, just Factorio. Wube really is the GOAT.
It also plays flawlessly on M* Macs
The only simulation game which keeps my laptop fans quiet, incredible.
I haven't checked, but have they done anything about my personal balancing gripe: trains vs conveyors?

Now that they have faster conveyors and stacking, they've become quite viable for moving large quantities long distances. Which is fine, but it feels like the right way to do that should be trains. My thought is that quality wagons should be able to hold a lot more and quality trains should move a lot faster, and/or fast fusion trains.

Yes. Quality boosts storage for wagons and speed for trains. Also unloading is more compact due to inserter belt side selection.

I did a 1m eSPM base though, and I don’t think the totality of all of that would bring me back to trains. Belts are extremely reliable, and I have never managed to make trains so.

The right way to do that is trains. A fully compressed, stacked belt is 960/s, but a train can easily hit that throughput as well (and even exceed it). And they are much easier to set up across long distances than belts are.
I’ve wanted the ability to hang pipe or wire along elevated rail.
DONT PLAY THIS GAME - It’s called Cracktorio for a reason. I’ve lost years to this game :)
I prefer 'Satisfactory' it's a very very chill factory builder. And less annoying in that it's fully 3d, meaning that its always possible to fit one more belt through somewhere wihout having to refactor large parts of your factory.
I was at risk, but weirdly I can never get automated trains to work, and this blocked my progress.

And then I discovered Mindustry. Which is crack-squared, for me at least.

Lmao. Yea I played it once and lost a day. I knew I had to uninstall ASAP else my life as I knew it would never be the same. Never touched it since.
I'm especially stoked about space-to-space logistics. One of my first projects will be an in-orbit space platform factory, so that making a new space ship won't take a bazillion rocket launches just for the platforms.
It's already faster even without that because it now uses mixed content rockets to build ships and platforms. But space-to-space logistics do mean that you can make rocket launches less bursty and continually ship stuff into space to then use it.
And the addition of mixed-use rockets! That is going to make it a lot cheaper to easily kick up initial platforms.
I'm on the fence about quality now. I really, really dislike the recycler and asteroid processing spamming as the endgame. But is it going to too hard to bother now? Will having to deal with the rare exceptions of actually having a quality item pop out be worth all the extra logic?
I don't think it'll be too hard; you can build infinite legendary iron from just a dozen or so foundries on Vulcanus. Legendary coal and stone are not much harder, and from legendary coal you get legendary plastic and then legendary steel and copper via the LDS shuffle. It's not quite as broken as the asteroid casinos and feels much more factorio-y IMO.

Avadii made a great guide about good ways to farm legendaries in 2.1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuwBnOsULkc

Washing ore is probably the easiest solution - research high levels of mining productivity, put quality modules in drills, filter off uncommon+, and loop them through recyclers until they are at the desired quality level.

It’s inefficient but has a very low cognitive load.

You can improve the efficiency a little by increasing the quality floor each level, eg rare iron ore, epic iron plate, legendary steel. But in my post endgame playthrough I was drowning in so much legendary ore with this method I didn’t bother.

Running upcycling loops for specific items and materials you focus on is the way to go. Upcycling blue chips is going to continue be overpowered, which nets you high quality of them and their components..

With that said, you can play without quality just fun and playing SE without quality is great too.

Upcycling is not that hard. The real problem imo is that legendary quality is such a late unlock, and lower than legendary feels kinda worthless for everything except maybe personal gear and power poles.
The crushers could be vastly improved by treating recipes as a filter.
Factorio is an amazing piece of work. I wish the devs would open source the codebase and artwork; its just such an amazing piece of engineering that I think the world deserves to own it. They could continue charging for players to play the game and charge some royalty for derivatives… The devs have said that they are tired of working on it, which is fine, but wish their solution would then be to release the code or organize institutions that would continue development outside of wube…

I feel like the game could be taken in many directions. True multiprocess support, parallel execution, multi-level buildings and so much more.

I'm already playing 2.1, and have been since it came out like 3? 4? days ago.

Seeya sometime next decade.

> Added fluid mixing warnings. If you attempt to connect two pipes with different fluids, a warning will be shown until the conflict is resolved.

Be still, my heart.

I would buy this game but $50 is a bit steep and it has effectively never gone on sale (at least not in the past 2 years).
Don't, unless you're ready to "waste" 200hrs. They call it cracktorio for a reason. And the devs have a "no sales" policy.
The game will never go on sale (stated by the devs)
This is a $35 USD game.
>Disallow quality modules to be applied to crushers with asteroid reprocessing recipes.

ruh roh.

I love this game but am kinda disappointed with the patch after almost two years of hype. I was hoping for a total overhaul of the quality mechanics, not just a random nerf here and there. And there is still the big problem that by the time you unlock late game cool tech like foundation, fusion, and legendary quality, you no longer have much use for them. And I am still convinced Gleba was a terrible idea even though I have conquered it twice now.
I don't think the developers promised more here, but the community might have overhyped itself as it is common. It's still a very solid .1 release, the improvements to space logistics and platform building are very nice. There's also a whole bunch of really nice circuit additions.

Gleba is different, but I think that is good in a game that is as long as Factorio. There's a bit of a bumpy difficulty curve here if you approach Gleba in certain ways. But it is very different mechanically than the base game or the other planets in a way that is interesting, at least to me.

It took me two or three iterations when I first landed on Gleba. But afterwards my factories there were more robust than on the other planets and almost never stalled or broke down. And solving that was quite satisfying.

I’ve heard the Gleba gripe in many places but I don’t understand what people are frustrated about. I really liked the challenge. Care to elaborate?
> And I am still convinced Gleba was a terrible idea even though I have conquered it twice now.

I hated Gleba at first. I have come to love it, and it might be my favorite part of space age. Embrace its organic nature, stop trying to centralize an focus on "flow"...

Nauvis is a monolith, then gleba is micro services...

Quality mechanic is just broken as gameplay and broken as worldbuilding. Ford doesn't make a Lincoln by recycling 4000 Ford SUVs until they get a Lincoln SUV by change. It is stupid and tedious. Now even more stupid and tedious with the asteroid fix. Fortunately there are mods to just make normal things have the same stats as legendary. Also spoilage isn't fun, and the workaround of converting eggs into Q3 modules and recycling them later back into living eggs just undermines any argument against refigeration or other preservation tech. But hey, mods!
I was so disappointed to unlock fusion the first time. The complexity seemed interesting at first but the power it produces just wasn't worth my time.
>Reduced centrifuge stack size to 10.

Well, that'll make Rocket Rush a bit more fun to play. It was taking forever to get up to 40 U235s.

[Edit] Nope.... it doesn't change the requirements from 40 U235, just makes it so a centrifuge will fit on a rocket. 8(

Am I the only one who likes rocket rush?

Why do you need nuclear for rockets?
Is there a good tldr somewhere? I love Factorio but not enough to read a changelog that exceeds 40k characters.
If you want the core loop of Factorio but with a fresh spin, I highly recommend Dyson Sphere Program. It's my personal fav of the factory genre for the pure scale of it. As a tip, there's full multiplayer support from the mod community that works great.