Hacker News Reader

Comment by richwater | Hacker News Reader

I know it's a pipe dream, but these kinds of games (Factorio, Satisfactory, etc) would all benefit from sort of brain-game interface where I could just think about what I wanted to do.

The tedium and repetition is really what kills the enjoyment for me. The problem solving, planning, forethought, etc are super fun but it's killed by the former.

View on HN

Blueprints and construction bots, plus the well-thought-out and extensively battle-tested set of keyboard commands for them, are basically a brain-game interface for Factorio on the level that Vim is for text. For the grandparent’s “rip and replace coal burners” I am hitting mod-D and dragging a selection box over the offending area, then hover-Q on a nearby element I want to use and shift-click to plan it, once I have planned one instance of a subpattern its mod-C select, click hold and walk in a direction to tile it in one dimension, mod-C select, click hold walk to extend this over the other direction. It is now done, the bots will handle everything else - because Wube are an incredible bunch of UX engineers, I can place the new building before the old buildings are even removed, leave, and trust that everything will be done correctly. Highly recommend getting a “Starter Bots” mod that feels appropriately balanced.

> I am hitting mod-D and dragging a selection box over the offending area, then hover-Q on a nearby element I want to use and shift-click to plan it, once I have planned one instance of a subpattern its mod-C select, click hold and walk in a direction to tile it in one dimension, mod-C select, click hold walk to extend this over the other direction.

This just sounds exhausting.

I'd rather try to sneak into a hyper-religious xenophobic town and get captured and turned into servant labor at a mining camp. And I'm not even taking about visiting Texas!

Much like Vim, it is exhausting to read a description. But it’s like a second of muscle memory that happens instinctively.

It's basically just Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V in terms of complexity and ease of use. Factorio is very ergonomic and the only way I can interpret the abovementioned "tedium and repetition" is that they never played long enough to get to the bots stage.

Factorio rewards the players progression through the game by taking away points of pain. The helper bots being a key transition. Without that pain there would be no reward. The fact that refactoring is expensive in time and complexity is what makes it realistic - it makes the earlier decisions important and consequential.

You can always enter creative mode and make whatever changes you want in the game instantly, but in my experience that does make it less fun.

It's basically programming with really bad ergonomics. I'm a programmer by profession and I was immediately frustrated by Factorio because I realized I'd rather just write code and build a project because it would scratch the exact same itch while actually being useful.

I tried really hard to like Factorio, and I bounce off of it each time after playing a save for 4-8 hours for exactly this reason. I know a lot of programmers who love it, so I almost wish I could get into it.

Now I'm tempted to try again, because it feels like the kind of game I should really enjoy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com