History VideoGame / Factorio

** You can craft things by hand while continuing to move around, and can even mine resources with your pickaxe and shoot at biters while the item continues to be crafted. Logically you would think that crafting circuitboards or robot arm inserters would require some precision and dexterity, but having to hold still while crafting them would just make the game slower, especially in the early game when you don't have automation yet.

** Logistics robots will continue to move very slowly once they run out of power. Of course, this is so that if a robot is caught outside a logistics network, it can eventually make its way back to your character or a roboport to recharge. Since the logical alternative is that powerless bots would just drop to the ground useless and either be destroyed or need to be picked up, this feature is not minded.

** large and behemoth biters and spitters will occasionally get stuck pathing through especially thick forests and rock clusters. If they can't figure a way through after a couple of seconds, they'll resort to attacking the offending tree/rock.

** Trains are one of the fastest ways to transport materials and supplies in bulk, but you need to manufacture the rails, rail signals, and associated infrastructure to fuel the trains and load/unload their cargo. In addition, the rail network will need to be defended and requires lots of room for the rails to be laid.

* NoOSHACompliance: Averted. Factory machinery can't harm the player...except for the train, which can kill the player if it hits you at full speed. In 0.15, the Nuclear Reactor is completely safe while operational and will not malfunction or melt down on its own.

* DifficultButAwesome:
** The nature of the game itself makes it easy to learn yet hard to truly master. It will make you think about your factory's layout, power, and infrastructure as you build bigger, which may necessitate your tearing down of buildings in order to build them in a more optimal layout. On top of that, you need to keep an eye on your pollution and the slowly encroaching biters. Not for nothing do some players in the community joke about "The factory expanding to meet the needs of the expanding factory" as your needs for production force you to find increasingly large fields of ore and work on your slowly-expanding smelting facility, and then go on to make you seek out more land to build larger solar power farms and nuclear reactor setups just to power everything.

** Planting chests right in front of mining drills early on. At the start of the game, the player likely hasn't unlocked electricity, meaning that they'll only be able to use coal-powered mining drills and inserters - and as coal-powered inserters will consume some of the coal excavated by mining drills, at a time when the player likely needs as much coal as possible, simply planting a chest will save a lot of time by letting you stockpile stacks of coal and ore/pre-smelted metal plates while you work on breaking ground for your newborn factory. Stone furnaces can be used in the same way, which is vital for the Lazy Bastard achievement.

** Electric Furnaces consume a lot of power (especially if you put modules in them, which is the primary reason to use them in the first place), cover a 3x3 area, and require a lot of Steel and Advanced Circuits to make, so you need a steady supply of both. On the other hand, Steel Furnaces are smaller, don't use electricity (they just need fuel; see the next bullet for that), and can be made with Stone Bricks and near-half the Steel of Electric Furnaces. They're some of the earliest tech you can research and you'll likely rely on them up until you're ready to expand into a megabase and have the infrastructure to support the manufacturing and powering of Electric Furnaces.
** Coal. It's one of the game's basic resources and will be mined throughout the game as it's a perfectly good fuel for your burner devices, and coal patches tend to be more numerous and bountiful than other resources so you're unlikely to run low. Later in the game when you move away from Steel Furnaces and don't need so much coal anymore, you can then divert it into Coal Liquefaction to boost your petrochemical production, an area that is very resource-hungry and necessary for most end-game items.

** A lot of things that you would think would require electric power — conveyor belts, splitters, offshore water pumps — don't need to be powered in-game because doing so would just add a layer of annoyance and not add anything to the gameplay.

** Inserters placed by the waterside are able to grab any fish that swim into their grasp.

In February 2021, the development team announced plans to release a large DLC add-on to the base game, but refrained from sharing details at the time. The ETA on its completion is unknown, but they believe it will be more than a year.

An [[https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-373 official announcement from the developers]] in August 2023 unveiled the development of the official Factorio: Space Age expansion pack, which has the lead designer of the Space Exploration fan mod as a major member of the development team.

** The three tiers of computer chips are colored green, red and blue.

* ColorCodedForYourConvenience:
** Primarily for speed:
*** Basic transport belts are yellow, fast ones are [[RedOnesGoFaster red]], and the fastest tier are blue.
*** Gray (Burner) inserters are the slowest, and use coal instead of electricity. Yellow is medium speed, and slowest to run on electricity. Red inserters are mildly faster than the yellow ones, but have twice the reach. Blue inserters are the fastest-moving. Purple inserters pick specific items, green inserters pick up items in stacks, and white inserters [[BreadEggsBreadedEggs pick up specific items in stacks]]. The last three move as fast as blue inserters.
*** Gray assembly machines are the slowest, then blue, then yellow/green.

** The most important intermediate products (iron plates, copper plates, steel plates, stone bricks and plastic bars) are easily distinguishable by their color alone, especially when on-screen in large amounts while travelling on conveyor belts.
** All liquids are uniquely colored to allow for easy identification, and the game helpfully adds windows to every other pipe segment so you can actually see what's in there. Water is blue, crude oil is dark grey, heavy oil is red, light oil is yellow, petroleum gas is purple, lubricant is green, sulfuric acid is also yellow (but of a different hue than light oil), and steam is white.

** 0.16 features Nuclear Fuel (enrich Rocket Fuel with processed Uranium), which has a fuel value of [[Film/BackToTheFuture 1.21 Gj]]. Great Scott!

** Uranium-enriched Rocket Fuel has tremendously densely-packed energy at [[Film/BackToTheFuture 1.21 GJ]] per full tank, but the amount of power spent to refine the uranium and petrochemicals (and thus the solid fuel and then rocket fuel), in addition to the increased amount of pollution it releases into the environment when used, makes it less efficient than simply using regular rocket fuel; the final nail in the coffin is that unlike regular Rocket Fuel that can be loaded in bulk at 10 tanks per stack, nuclear rocket fuel takes up a full slot per single tank, making it less viable for long-distance vehicle fuel due to how much additional bulk in storage a stable stockpile requires.

** ComplexityAddiction: Mods that scratch this itch (yes, even moreso than the base game), such as Angel's Mods, are ''very'' popular with the playerbase.

An [[https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-373 official announcement from the developers]] in August 2023 unveiled the development of the official Factorio:Space Age expansion pack, which has the lead designer of the Space Exploration fan mod as a major member of the development team.

* GameMod: Factorio natively supports mods, which can be managed via an in-game system that connects to the official Factorio servers to allow you to download and update mods. The selection available varies from simple mods to changed recipes or make minor adjustments to gameplay, such as the Long Reach, Arborium, and Autofill mods, to entire game-changing mods that add in new resources and enemies and/or make radical changes to the tech tree, such as the collections of mods collectively referred to as Bob's and Angel's Mods. Concepts and ideas from several mods have been adapted into official game mechanics. The developers are also extremely supportive of the modding community, and commonly work with the community to find and fix bugs in the base game which are only normally exposed by mods. The Switch port does not have mod support by default, due to certain security concerns with the potential for mods to break out of the sandbox.

** The very first Inserter in the game, the Burner Inserter, requires no electrical power to run, just a steady feed of coal. During development it was made capable of feeding itself coal (or other fuels) from an input lane on an adjecent conveyor belt, even if it didn't have any fuel to begin with. Furthermore, it does not produce a single speck of pollution during operation, so it will never add to any smog problems you might have attracting biters.
*** Basic inserters don't require any electronic circuits, even though in real life fully autonomous robotic arms, being able to grab arbitrary objects on the move precisely, would require quite complex hardware and software to work.
** When a train runs out of fuel, it's automatically set to manual mode. This helps because the only way to fuel a train without being there in person is to have robots build an inserter that loads fuel into the train a few pieces at a time, and it wouldn't help much to have the train zip off as soon as it has one piece of coal inside only to run out again without getting to a proper station.

** As of version 0.15 Roboports start off with a miniscule auxilary power charge to help define their logistics and construction zone before they start drawing power from your grid.
** As of version 0.16, Underground Belts and Splitters can be directly placed over existing Belts, replacing them, thus making it easier to retrofit or expand existing infrastructure without needing to remove all of the old belts by hand. Furthermore, Splitters were made capable of automatically filtering the flow of materials with both selective and lane input/output priority and output material filtering.
** Version 0.15 makes it more convenient to work with blueprints and construction bots - Shift-clicking now allows you to drop a blueprint directly into a forested area, which will cause construction bots to reclaim any obstructing trees and rocks before deploying your buildings.
** Versions 0.14 and 0.15 improved the UI for the Research window, making it easier to see the prerequisites and results of any research topic, in addition to integrating a research tree diagram to better illustrate inter-related research, thus allowing newer players to better envision the research path they would want to take.
** Versions 0.14 and 0.15 refined the railway system and added an automatic plotting mechanic to the rail-laying interface so you would not need to keep rotating track segments, as well as improved the UI for managing your trains and stations, allowing you to rename a station and have all trains assigned to that station automatically acknowledge the station-name update.
** Version 0.17 has been confirmed by the developers to optimize liquid and gas physics for water, petrochemical, and nuclear use, immensely improving the quality of life for players who previously bemoaned the framerate-tanking power of a sufficiently-large nuclear power plant.
** Starting with Version 0.17.60, Basic Oil Processing only produces petroleum gas, with heavy oil and light oil only being produced by Advanced Oil Processing and Coal Liquefaction. It is done in order to ease newbies into learning about the oil refining processes step by step, rather than dumping multiple kinds of production at once on the player once initial oil processing is researched.
** PowerArmor -mounted Personal Roboports automatically disable themselves and stop launching drones if the player is driving a vehicle faster than the drones can fly. This prevents moments where the player drives past something which is damaged, a group of drones pop out to repair it, and then the drones are left behind or destroyed because they can't catch up with the player's car.
** Version 1.1 came with a lot of [=QoL=] improvements like automatic underground belt placement when laying down belts across obstacles, improved remote control of Spidertrons, and a massive overhaul of the Trains GUI to make managing dozens of trains much less of a headache.

The game has both single-player and CoOpMultiplayer modes. A demo is available on the [[https://www.factorio.com/ Factorio website]], with the full game available on the website, and from [[http://steamcommunity.com/app/427520 Steam]], [[https://www.gog.com/game/factorio GOG]] and the [[https://www.humblebundle.com/store/factorio Humble Store]] for €35/$35. Don't wait for a sale, the developers have a policy of never discounting the game. Only ever raising the price once by 5$ on Jan 26th 2023.

** Electric Furnaces consume a lot of power (especially if you put modules in them, which is the primary reason to use them in the first place) and cover a 3x3 area, and require a lot of Steel and Advanced Circuits to make, so you need a steady supply of both. On the other hand, Steel Furnaces are smaller, don't use electricity (they just need fuel; see the next bullet for that), and can be made with a smaller number of Steel and Stone Bricks. They're some of the earliest tech you can research and you'll likely rely on them up until you're ready to expand into a megabase and have the infrastructure to support the manufacturing and powering of Electric Furnaces.
** Coal and Solid Fuel. Coal isn't anything glamourous, being early-game material, but it's also a good fuel for much of the game and is fodder for making plastics. Later in the game when you're ready to move away from burning coal for fuel, it can also be converted into oil - handy for maps where coal is easier to come by than crude oil. Solid Fuel is a practical use for excess petrochemicals (and a great substitute for coal once you start needing to use coal for petrochemical liquefaction and plastics production), and is thus easy to stockpile in the early stage of petrochemical production, when you need to use up enough heavy/light oil and petroleum gas to match the production ratios of your oil refineries. Furthermore, by lategame, Solid Fuel becomes a precursor to Rocket Fuel, which is even better for fuel density and getting more speed out of your fuel-consuming vehicles.
** Solar power requires nothing but resources spent on producing panels themselves and a sufficient amount of accumulators, no resource shortages that lead to power shortages. In comparison to nuclear power, which requires moving large amounts of liquid and gas around and is a major source of lag on large basis, the entire solar power array, no matter the size, takes less CPU power than a single inserter.

* MundaneUtility: When acquired, the tank is a terrifically powerful vehicle to use in combat. And it also makes a handy bulldozer for clearing straight paths through clusters of trees so you can run belts or trains through a forest without having to manually cut down each tree in the way. Construction bots are even more advanced technology and excel at the same job.

** Grenades are designed to be used against swarms of biters. Most people instead grab a crapload of them, run towards a forest and start hurling them as fast as possible to quickly clear trees. The same practice was exaggerated when ''nuclear weapons'' were added to the game.
** Poison capsules are supposed to be used to flush out worms from biter and spitter bases. They're just as effective as grenades when it comes to removing forests, being a bit more expensive, but also covering a bit more area.