#by factorio and modded minecraft and now satisfactory

[neona]

feel like I'm having a sort of delayed reaction to Satisfactory and Factorio doing really well with their updates since my perspective has mostly been that well duh they're gonna do well they're really good games

but now it's hitting me that they're becoming prominent enough to possibly have some cultural effect on the games industry

will be interesting to see if we see more automationy stuff seep into other genres, it's already happening a tiny bit

heck it'd be funny if we live to see a mainstream AAA automation game - probably not that likely, but I'm sure we can expect to see it in one as a side system, assuming we haven't already

it feels like a little automation is a straightforward addition to the basic base building you'll see bolted onto random games sometimes (and extremely basic automation is already a common element in these systems anyway)

[archiethinking]

I don't think Factorio is good.

That must come as a shock to the many fans that this game has. I know how much effort went into polishing it, how much thought was spent trying to perfect it. But I simply don't like it.

The issue I have with it, and that I also have with other games such Satisfactory or DSP, is that it gets stale. So stale. I cannot finish these games, I often don't even make it out of the mid-game.

I'm not sure why people like these games to be honest. Building belts and machines can only interest me for so long. After the 200th furnace I am spent mentally. It requires so much manual mental labor to sit there and do the same thing over-and-over again that my brain melts. It simply refuses. I get headaches and I stop: and I usually never pick it back up again.

It is in fact quite sad how neither satisfactory nor DSP seem able to effectively innovate upon the foundation of factorio in any meaningful way. Yes the third dimension is fun, but it does not fix it. It simply delays the inevitable.

In satisfactory I was genuinely saddened by the lack of anything new. I'd say that the beginning game of manually fueling Bio-reactors is even worse than factorio's mis-paced mess of a beginning, because its simply even more repetitive labor. But not even DSP is safe from this. The idea of having to walk and fly slower until you can develop tech that allows you to magically walk a meter per second quicker is tedious. In addition to the issues factorio poses, It is what kills these games for me.

So why has nobody fixed it? I think its very much a solvable issue. The features that are tedious are right there, out in the open. Simply salivating to be improved upon. Yet I think I've only found one project to have actually attempted to fix it.

That game is Minecraft. Now, hold on. Not just Minecraft. As fun as it is, its definitely no factory management game. But what makes it that is a mod for it called 'Create'. Despite the uninspired name this mod does what these other three games could not. It engages the player with innovative, actual third dimensional gameplay, unlike whatever garbage the other games have done, and does so while smoothly integrating minecraft within it. Nothing about it is repetitive in my mind. Every thing has a different way of being done, and different blocks required to do it.

I have spent 100+ hours on each of my two bases, having created factories that created everything for me and did so speedily. If you like the inherent puzzle-ness of factorio, and you want a fresh take on automation, please play this mod.

To give you a sneak-peek of what this mod does, I tell you only this: It adds rails with trains, it adds moving contraptions that can engage with the world, and it has many integrations with other mods.

It'd be an understatement to say that it keeps you engaged. It keeps you hooked, chained to the factory until your game runs out of frames.

It is a genuine 10/10.

https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/mc-mods/create

[wirewitchviolet]

Dear Game Developers, I don’t want to be a rapacious colonizing blight on the world.

I like a pretty wide variety of games, but one general thing I’ve always been particularly keen on is the sort of game where I start off just kinda naked in the wilderness with nothing and have to build up a bunch of infrastructure to accomplish something. So you know, RTSes, Civ clones, survival games, sandbox-y Minecraft stuff, Dwarf Fortress and similar things, but these all have this really annoying habit of making my character the biggest existential threat to the entire world, and I would really like them to stop doing that all the time.

So, just to open up with an example of how to do this sort of thing in a way I like, Subnautica is one of my favorite games. I recently streamed the whole thing, so, links to that if you’d like: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4

Subnautica actively confronts my issue head on, and handles it right. I’m not slaughtering everything I see, I’m not strip mining the whole planet, I’m not leveling forests. I’m here by way of horrible tragic accident, and by the end of the game I’ve done my best to clean up the mess from that and address some other global issues to the point where I can confidently say my presence over the course of the game has made for a net positive impact on the environment in which it’s set. Plus it’s a great game in a bunch of other ways.

I’m also pretty happy with Factorio, oddly enough. In Factorio I AM strip mining the whole world, slaughtering absolutely all of the local wildlife, and any forests I’m not clear-cutting I’m choking out with industrial emissions that leave nothing but dry withered skeletons where there were once beautiful stretches of foliage. The thing of it is, between actually tracking my environmental impact as a mechanic and having such downer visuals, it at least feels like the developers and I are sharing a really dark joke about how awful you are in games like this.

Then on the other side of the coin here, we have, say, Satisfactory. A game in the same weird subgenre as Factorio (do we have a name for these yet? Convey’em Ups?) but... really gross. The player is explicitly just heading down to this really beautiful planet to extract and process all the resources they can. You’re rewarded for killing... basically all life you see despite it not generally posing any sort of real threat to you, clear cutting all the vegetation, and to keep the factory building vibes nice and chill, when you tap into a coal vein or set up an oil well, you get an endless supply of those burnable fuels to use forever, with absolutely no consequence, as you just consume all the things to make all the other things and ship them out to meet quotas. And that’s... kinda gross? Again, the fact that nothing you do has any sort of consequence despite half of it being stuff that is literally killing the world in reality makes it way worse.

Meanwhile, lately I’ve been keeping a lot of modded Minecraft videos going in the background to stave off the social isolation with the whole plague and all with some human voices, and see what cool new ideas people are testing there. One of the real popular new mods is this one called MineColonies, and you know what? It’s really neat. The idea is you find a big open plot of land somewhere, throw down blueprints for really huge multiblock structures of houses and workshops and such, get those built up a little, and NPCs start wandering in you can start giving jobs to. Here’s someone to harvest and replant trees, someone to go mining for underground resources, someone to build and upgrade the rest of these buildings, people to provide renewable food and medicine to all these other NPCs. Schools for their kids to get their stats up to good places by adulthood, a whole higher learning system to advance a tech tree, it’s cool.

But the thing is, as you probably gathered from the name, it’s DISGUSTINGLY colonialist. All these people coming in are explicitly white, with British accents, explicitly gendered and explicitly heterosexual too incidentally, and a huge part of the general infrastructure building is having to set up guard posts and barracks all over, training knights and archers to defend against the local barbarians native to the land you’re building on who wander out of the wilderness to attack everyone with some regularity. And I mean, how messed up is that? This mod is explicitly adding in native people’s just so there’s someone for you to displace and murder as you colonize some big chunk of unspoiled wilderness in the name of prosperity for your... British colony. Which of course works on an explicitly feudalist system (and then also for some reason has everyone grumbling about how you’re spending your gold, which you aren’t even doing). It totally thematically ruins what I’d otherwise be super super into. And not long after this was released, baseline Minecraft did basically the same thing. There are now roving barbarian tribes who go around trying to kill you and any villagers near you and you have to concern yourself with wiping out whole groups of them with some regularity, whereas previously the only enemies you really had to deal with were zombies and skeletons and a few other weird explicitly monstrous things. It’s gross.

My distaste for slaughtering barbarians extends to the civilization games too. Which... I mean I have put a LOT of hours into a lot of Civ games so it’s obviously not a total dealbreaker for me, but... you’re always this weird immortal dictator and even if you set your civilization up as a democracy, you sure do win every single election regardless of how unhappy people are with you, and you spend a good chunk of time slaughtering local barbarians. And increasingly, with each new game, smaller independent nations because they really keep putting more and more emphasis on military conquest being, if not the best path to victory, one you have to push pretty far no matter what you’re going for.

And it doesn’t have to work like that. My favorite game, mostly in the franchise, is still Alpha Centauri. Where the “barbarians” are brain eating space worms, not other humans, and even then, you can (and I consistently do) be a big tree-hugging hippy, enact worm-friendly social policies, make friends with them instead of killing them, and have them go devour a bunch of violent anti-science anti-environment right wing creeps, strongarm everyone else into adopting similar policies, and, like Subnautica, leave the world better than you found it by foregoing all the easier wins and doing the thing where you find a permanent solution to the local planetary superconsciousness accidentally going berserk and eating itself at periodic intervals. Happy ending for everyone! Except for Miriam. Screw Miriam.

Meanwhile, someone I know not to long ago just randomly pitched a game where there’s a big nature ravaging industrial sprawl, but you play as some sort of reclaiming embodiment of nature, strategically... I guess spreading trees to grow up through everything and have rats chew through the wiring and stuff, and yeah, I would play the hell out of that game. If nobody else gets to it before I clear my plate of all these other projects, I might even make that game.

I should stress again too that it’s not even that I don’t want games to ever put me in such a role as the player, just if you’re going to do it, acknowledge that that sort of thing isn’t cool, and either make it clear that the player character has been forced into a really unfortunate position, or that said character is just awful. Or both, both works.

What I don’t want to ever see people do is rationalize a way out of the issues. “Oh this is an infinite supply of clean-burning coal” does not fly with me. “Oh we’re establishing a colony but it’s on an alien planet” is still colonialism. The weird fetish the whole game industry seems to have with leveling forests is not made better by having those trees give you saplings that fully replace every tree cut down in like 2 minutes. If you don’t want to unpack the moral implications of something, you can just not include it to begin with. None of the stuff I’ve been laying out here is actually necessary for any of these games to work. Just... quit being weird and making me play coal-mining conquistadors already.