History Videogame / Factorio

** Once you ''do'' build a parts "mall" that can fabricate any kind of Inserter, Belt, Assembler, Mining Drill, or Power Pole, logistics will become much easier in that you constantly have your mall of assemblers filling a set of chests with prefabricated infrastructure, ready for you to pick up and deploy, but it does require you to do quite a lot of research beforehand and set everything up first.

** Steel Furnaces are one of the first Steel technologies you'll unlock, and they'll be the backbone of your production until the endgame when you begin transitioning to Electric Furnaces; they'll small, easily to keep fueled, and easy to produce with a handful of Steel and Stone Brick. Electric Furnaces are only more effective once you have modules to increase their output and a large-enough power grid to sustain them.

** Coal is one of the game's most basic resources and will be useful throughout the game. Early on it's your best source of fuel for burner devices like furnaces and the only fuel source you can mine (trees need to be chopped down manually and you don't have oil production yet for solid fuel). Later on its required to product Plastic, which is required in some manner for a lot of end-game items, and once you unlock Coal Liquefaction Coal can be diverted to your oil supply to drastically boost its output. Patches of coal to mine also tend to be found more often and in more dense patches than other resources, so you can easily expand your supply lines to meet your factory's demand for it.

* AllThereInTheScript: The planet ''Factorio'' takes place on is called Nauvis. The only place you'll find that word is inside the game's code. And the map editor.

** Steam is treated as a fluid, ergo it is transported via pipelines and can be stored in fluid tanks and transported in fluid train cars to be saved and used to power engines and turbines as needed later. Once produced, steam will remain at a consistent temperature, rather than cooling or condensing back into water, as logically it should. However, needing to monitor steam temperature would add a layer of complexity to the game's fluid and nuclear power generation mechanics (both of which are already pretty complicated) without really adding anything to the gameplay, so presumably this is the reason players don't need to worry about their steam cooling.
** A lot of things that you would think would require electric power — conveyor belts, splitters, water pumps, etc — don't need to be powered in-game, because doing so would add a layer of further complexity and annoyance and demand some means of pumping water without electricity to get your first boilers going.

** The Kovarex process is a scientifically simplified version of the 'breeder reactor' process that is used in real life to enrich uranium to make it concentrated enough to be used as nuclear fuel. There's suppposed to be a lot more going on to control and regulate the reaction process, but in Factorio this is simplified into an automated centrifuge process that takes two isotopes of uranium and processes it to make more fuel-grade isotopes so players would not need to create a complicated and heavily wired setup to run a real-world-accurate breeder process.

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.

In February 2021, the development team announced plans to release a large DLC add-on to the base game. The expansion [[https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-373 was revealed in August 2023]] to be titled ''Factorio: Space Age'', based on the Space Exploration mod for the game (and the leader designer of that mod is on the development team). The expansion will see the Engineer visit different planets to refine new resources on space platforms to unlock new science packs and items. The expansion will be accompanied by a major update to the base game with new quality of life features and improvements to the engine.

* UnitsNotToScale: Possibly. The top-down style makes it hard to tell how big things are. For example, defence walls look like they're about [[InsurmountableWaistHeightFence half the height of the player]] which [[FridgeLogic doesn't make sense if you think about it]]. It's nonetheless accurate to how they function in gameplay, with Spitters and Worms able to launch their projectiles right over the walls at targets behind them, so they're really just for obstructing enemy movement.

* ShotgunsAreJustBetter: The standard shotgun has a very bad spread making it less effective at range but deals the most damage of all the weapons that the player can wield until they unlock the even more powerful combat shotgun, which gives a 20% damage bonus on top of any shell damage upgrades you've researched. Ironically it is not very efficient against biter swarms, but is very efficient at clearing spawners and trees.

* ObviousRulePatch: Most intermediate products are compatible with productivity modules, with one exception: fluid barrels. Naturally this is because otherwise a player could create an endless cycle of refilling and emptying barrels to get free liquid products.

** Nuclear bombs are great for annihilating the massive late-game biter nests and always [[IncrediblyLamePun a blast to use]], but it needs a huge amount of the game's rarest resource (Uranium-235) plus a bunch of additional resource-intensive stuff to build even one. When you finally have one, actually using it has a good chance to get yourself killed if you failed to notice that the blast radius is significantly larger than the rocket launcher's maximum range. It's usually a lot safer, cheaper and easier to tackle these bases with turrets and a train pulling one or two artillery wagons plus ammo supply.

* AntiStructure: The artillery turret and wagon, added in 0.16, will only target spawners and worms, destroying them in one shot. You ''can'' manually set targets for them outside of their automatic attack range, but hitting a fast-moving bug with the slow-to-react artillery is more trouble than it's worth. They're also useful for besieging other player's bases in PvP, as their range allows them to sit out of radar vision range and snipe away at enemy defensive fortifications or turrets.

** 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.

* {{Retreaux}}: The graphics are very similar to early 2000s strategy game, in the style of ''Command and Conquer'' or ''Age of Empires'', created by using highly detailed 3D models which are subsequently run through a program to make 2D sprites.