Back on the Factorio
A few weeks ago a bunch of my friends got back into Factorio. I saw them popping up on Steam regularly, but I knew I'd had my fill of it.
Having my fill
I played a ton in 2023, getting comfortable with lategame bases and trains in time for the expansion. I had a 300spm base, but hadn't dipped into beacons yet and was barely using modules except to balance things, so was definitely not fully into "postgame" territory.
I took a break of a couple months before the Space Age DLC, and when I started on it I found it very comfortable - the basegame experience was broadly smoothed out, a lot of rough edges fixed, and the building rockets was made a lot less obnoxious now that it had become the "End of the Early Game."
But I found transitioning to space very difficult. I lost a lot of progress stranding myself, and didn't fancy starting from scratch.
I redesigned my ship several times, eventually settling on a functional-if-slow design that could fly back and forth between Nauvis and Vulcanus shipping supplies and science around without my intervention.
Vulcanus was cool, but it's definitely a shallower experience than Nauvis - Space Age is designed to deepen Factorio, not add a whole new Factorio on top of it. After about 10 hours on Vulcanus and getting 60spm sorted, I was kind of happy to stop playing. The other planets would probably be harder, and I wasn't in the mood.
That was in January, and the mood hadn't hit me again, so I was happy to call Factorio a thing of the past.
But everyone else had got back into it. Maybe I could spend a couple hours getting reacquainted with my base. Fix it up a bit. So, 8 days ago I booted it up again...
Yeah it kinda hooked me again
It's honestly wild how hard it was to get to grips with the new planet mechanics having only spent a few hours with it previously compared to the hundreds on Nauvis.
I still don't genuinely know how my spaceship works, and if it breaks I have to stare at it for... several minutes to recognise where it's gone wrong.
I got myself back into space embarrassingly fast, figuring the work on Vulcanus was basically done, and jetted off back to Nauvis to try to remember what the hell I'd been doing there.
It was trains.
Worse than the spaceship, I swear.
I kind of hate this design tbh. I took it from a "how to set up rail networks" guide that I honestly skimmed more than read, I just took the blueprints and ran. While it's nice to just slap down rails and have the signals work, I find the spacing super awkward - for smaller processes, it just feels silly to have a whole 2x2 square, but anything smaller loses too much space to the rail overhead.
This is just a general problem with using someone else's solutions though - they solve their problems, not necessarily yours.
So yeah I hooked up the space sciences and got on with it.
I won't go much in on the other planets - Fulgora is extremely cool, Gleba is a massive headache and I hate it (affectionate).
At this point I have about 10 hours on each extra planet and I've started revisiting them to get them exporting more than just science. I think this is a really cool part of the DLC that will maintain my attention for a while - I actually misunderstood the rules and thought that when it said the special buildings could only be "constructed" on their planet, that meant "placed" - but nah you can ship them all back to Nauvis if you want to boost productivity.
My next steps are getting space platforms sending down useful bits to the planets (especially Gleba) with the advanced asteroid processing, building a new model of spaceship, and fully rebuilding my absolute dogshit Gleba and Fulgora bases.
The base must grow to meet the needs of the growing base
Overall I like Space Age a lot so far. I like it back when I got bored of it too.
It's not easy to tack this much onto a game like Factorio and ask for money, when there are so many excellent freely available mods out there. Those mods have the benefit of a much lower expectation of quality and user-friendliness. Arguably, designing a Factorio mod to make people feel like total shit is a great way to go viral.
I don't know if I'll stick with Space Age long enough to finish it this time, but I still think I won't be leaving it in a bad mood when I do stop playing.