Posted by 005vc16607 1 day ago
The games I play instead are wholly unrelated to my work life, such as FPS or RPG ones, where there is a clear distinction between what I can do and what I want to do.
"Okay wth, today we're going to make the entire base solar powered"
When making software that's supposed to be used, you can't mess around that much. At the end of the day, someone has to use it and if its weird it'll be bad.
But in Factorio? Nobody is using it so sure, make it bizzare. Change the rules, let yourself go. Don't test the design just send it.
Bored? Too challenging? Don't bother finishing the design do something else.
This makes me sad.
You don’t need to make software for mass appeal.
Git is weird and bizarre (especially when initially released), but it’s used and well loved.
Hear, hear. I would tell you all about the tools my household runs on but it is as you say. Still gives me a lot of satisfaction to make stuff that makes life better, and for someone more adventurous than me it might also be something you can use to try out new technologies or build something for on your CV. The only downside is that internet connectivity being down means, e.g., you need to remember to load the grocery list before leaving the house that has the server in it and better hope your phone doesn't decide for you that the page needs to be unloaded on the way!
> need to remember to load the grocery list before leaving the house that has the server in it
^ remote access
and
> better hope your phone doesn't decide for you that the page needs to be unloaded on the way
^ unreliable tech
I use this with obsidian and it's a game changer, removing need for the cloud
I am getting disgusted by people who need to have that screen in their hand, all waking hours.
I mean, maybe some of this will be blunted over time as open source slowly eats away at these utilities, but until then I view my phone like a grenade, or a drug, or a slot machine, or a money-eater.
Why anyone wanted to unlock their door with their phone instead of tapping a fob, I’m not sure, but the only interesting feature (temp access for friends) doesn’t seem worth it.
Why do I even need a smartphone the go to a restaurant and eat something? Why would anyone effectively refusing service to people who don't have smartphones or do not want to use them? If I need their service and have money to pay for it why would they put additional obstacles in my way? What's their motivation for scaring of a potential customer using totally arbitrary criteria that has nothing to do with the service they provide?
Oh, I hate it so much.
Some people, like myself, enjoy writing code but need a purpose to write code. If I don’t have a reason, or problem to solve, I can’t just sit down and start coding.
Endless fun to be had trying to recreate shaders and having cool ideas for different vfx.
I gotta say, I think I agree.
Maybe it's just rose-tinted-glasses, but I remember a time when software was split between "IBM-Corpo" culture, and zany SV/MIT/Caltech culture where people threw things at the wall and proceeded when stuff stuck.
It kind of saddens me that it feels like it's now only IBM-Corpo, and everyone feels the need to be ever-productive and adhere to strict rules and schema.
tl;dr : I remember when the fun Factorio game was qbasic.exe and no one blinked about it. We all had fun.
(p.s. I love factorio now too)
I think about this whenever I see a new open source library hosted on its own domain with a polished and slick promo material. I really don't mean to throw shade at designers for making nice designs, but it just feels weird and corporate-y to me that the polish is a priority.
There are, of course, open source projects that serve as a hook for selling SaaS products, which is corporate by nature and thus doesn't trigger the same feeling in me.
otoh lack of basically centralized source control / git / hub / lab etc would also be missed dearly
depending on context: corporate polish can be fine; especially if software "is infra"; let truly (?) fun inconsequential software be messy and / or fun if sparks joy
apropos permaculture: i enjoyed TIS-100 but never got interested by factorio (maybe its art?) but anyways i'd personally find it more interesting to see more declarative / triggered simulation / play out in ever interesting ways
so maybe biologic systems over industry in space?
maybe there exist such games already? they do in my mind at least; i should look into current simulation frameworks maybe and read up on ecology
Gosper was there as part of Marvin Minsky’s party. He got to engage in discussion with the likes of Norman Mailer, Katherine Anne Porter, Isaac Asimov, and Carl Sagan, who impressed Gosper with his Ping-Pong playing. For real competition, Gosper snuck in some forbidden matches with the Indonesian crewmen, who were by far the best players on the boat.
Apollo 17 was to be the first manned space shot initiated at night, and the cruise boat was sitting three miles off Cape Kennedy for an advantageous view of the launch. Gosper had heard all the arguments against going to the trouble of seeing a liftoff—why not watch it on television, since you’ll be miles away from the actual launching pad? But when he saw the damn thing actually lift off, he appreciated the distance. The night had been set ablaze, and the energy peak got to his very insides. The shirt slapped on his chest, the change in his pocket jingled, and the PA system speakers broke from their brackets on the viewing stand and dangled by their power cords. The rocket, which of course never could have held to so true a course without computers, leapt into the sky, hell-bent for the cosmos like some flaming avenger, a Spacewar nightmare; the cruise-niks were stunned into trances by the power and glory of the sight. The Indonesian crewmen went berserk. Gosper later recalled them running around in a panic and throwing their Ping-Pong equipment overboard, “like some kind of sacrifice.”
The sight affected Gosper profoundly. Before that night, Gosper had disdained NASA’s human-wave approach toward things. He had been adamant in defending the AI lab’s more individualistic form of hacker elegance in programming, and in computing style in general. But now he saw how the real world, when it got its mind made up, could have an astounding effect. NASA had not applied the Hacker Ethic, yet it had done something the lab, for all its pioneering, never could have done. Gosper realized that the ninth-floor hackers were in some sense deluding themselves, working on machines of relatively little power compared to the computers of the future—yet still trying to do it all, change the world right there in the lab. And since the state of computing had not yet developed machines with the power to change the world at large—certainly nothing to make your chest rumble as did the NASA operation—all that the hackers wound up doing was making Tools to Make Tools. It was embarrassing.
Gosper’s revelation led him to believe that the hackers could change things—just make the computers bigger, more powerful, without skimping on expense. But the problem went even deeper than that. While the mastery of the hackers had indeed made computer programming a spiritual pursuit, a magical art, and while the culture of the lab was developed to the point of a technological Walden Pond, something was essentially lacking.
The world.
As much as the hackers tried to make their own world on the ninth floor, it could not be done. The movement of key people was inevitable. And the harsh realities of funding hit Tech Square in the seventies: ARPA, adhering to the strict new Mansfield Amendment passed by Congress, had to ask for specific justification for many computer projects. The unlimited funds for basic research were drying up; ARPA was pushing some pet projects like speech recognition (which would have directly increased the government’s ability to mass-monitor phone conversations abroad and at home). Minsky thought the policy was a “losing” one, and distanced the AI lab from it. But there was no longer enough money to hire anyone who showed exceptional talent for hacking. And slowly, as MIT itself became more ensconced in training students for conventional computer studies, the Institute’s attitude to computer studies shifted focus somewhat. The AI lab began to look for teachers as well as researchers, and the hackers were seldom interested in the bureaucratic hassles, social demands, and lack of hands-on machine time that came with teaching courses.
Levy, Steven. Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution - 25th Anniversary Edition
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Factorio is hacking again. It's kludging it together to make it work. When you read things like https://wiki.factorio.com/Balancer_mechanics or the JK latch and the SR latch ( https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/92tdgm/jk_latch_s... and https://wiki.factorio.com/Tutorial:Circuit_network_cookbook#... ) and get into r/technicalfactorio/ it is reminiscent of HACKMEM ( https://archive.org/details/HAKMEM ) written by Beeler, Gosper, and Schroeppel.
Big and flashy bets are expensive, many small bets are a far, far better way to explore the design space, especially now that we can share all the results with almost no cost.
Having lots of fun tinkering with Proxmox, Wled, Shelly devices to manipulate electric rollers, and more. Couldn’t quite get Valetudo running on my robot vacuum (my model isn’t the easiest to hack) but the concept is so cool. Triggering automations With dirt cheap NFC tags or a cheap wireless numpad is so satisfying.
Building an *arr stack is another area where there’s tons of amazing creativity online and the hacker spirit still lives on.
The formerly-counterculture conventions got so cult and big they grew a counter-counterculture of smaller places.
Outside the walls of the AI SaaS grind. There be life.
I think it's an extremely powerful tool, and it's worth knowing how to wield it well, but that power comes at the expense of user friendliness, especially for junior devs who don't have an intuition of git internals and how commands map to them.
When I asked Kovařík about this, he brought up Euro Truck Simulator, a wilfully mundane game about hauling cargo. The developers, who are friends of his, once told him that many of their most enthusiastic players are ... truckers. Truckers who spend their time off from their trucking jobs pretending to do more trucking ... a lot of people actually enjoy the work they do. They just don’t always enjoy their jobs that much, because of all the things that get in the way of the work.
- Modern Farming. Has really good working models of expensive farming equipment. There are videos of real farmers playing it.
- Lawnmower Simulator. Yes, really. Mow enough lawns, get a better mower.
- Power Wash Simulator. Not kidding.[1]
The first game in this category was probably the famous Desert Bus.
Such freedom is extremely rare when you get paid for writing or maintaining software.
If you’re building oss with no users, or just for yourself, you’re functionally doing something more like art than coding in terms of how you prioritize and execute.
I sometimes do project euler puzzles for fun. I'm a CS professor - this starts to feel kinda close to my job. But it's relaxing and there's no pressure and no one is affected when I screw up; I just get to keep kicking at it, or put it down. The freedom makes a big difference.
The "solving an interesting problem" part of my job is the part I love. It's the other stuff I need a break from sometimes. :)
Also, I just think it’s good to not look at something that’s too much like work once in a while. Even if factorio is closer than many other things.
Sue you do. And you’re not obliged to keep it in some workable form just because they use it, they can use something else.
More counter-examples: LaTeX, vim, Regex, Blender, SAP, most Unix CLIs...
(Don’t think I want to start a debate, I loved the 3 games and played them a lot, it’s just that Satisfactory won my heart… even the name is great).
It’s just different games. Factorio is excellent as building production lines while Satisfactory is excellent as making feel you « in » your creations with 3D, a lot of architectural options, a really immersive sound design (quitting your noisy machine room to a corridor and hearing the sound go down when the door closes).
It’s different. But there is one important common thing with Factorio though : they are both made with a lot of love and with a lot of attention to every detail. In fact, both games could be an exemple of design and ergonomics for even professional softwares.
I can play the min-max game without any unknowns that comes from real life management. Or I can destroy everything and mess everything up too.
It's my escapism.
While we're on the topic of assuming intent: that invented word "problematic" - problematic to whom? Something being a problem is almost always a subjective stance, not a universal truth as that word implies.
I also don’t get people who look up YouTube videos on how to do things in Factorio.
What’s the fun part left to do if you just use someone else’s factory or belt design?
The gameplay is fun at first. You have a ressource and something you want to produce. You look at the ratio of things, what the layout you will have to put in place, how fast things will have to move. You painfully build that. It works. You feel good. Then you realise it will just be more of the same ad infinity with the first time you do train design and liquids the sole inkling of novelty. It’s all fairly simple conceptually so it gets tedious and boring quite fast (at least to me). I think part of the issue is also that I tend to play it wrong by calculating and planning - literally work for which the in game tooling is not optimal - while I think I would have more fun just winging it and fixing things as they happen.
What I mean is I think it’s not a game for everyone but I can see why it’s catnip for its intended audience.
It started with games that are basically engineering work. But now it's anything with resource management or long-term strategic thinking (basically whenever I think "hmm, I need to note down my thoughts so I can pick up my strategy where I left of next time I play").
Everything you describe requires interaction with people. Those are too often toxic, incompetent, overly demanding and keep changin schedules and priorities. At least in single player games you get to drop all that crap.
Ironically the game goal is to leave that place :D
After beating prepatch PCR, I switched back to Call of Duty for a bit.
I think my attitude changed the games I play also. I used to play MMO when I was younger but FPS games give me that dopamine rush without any commitments.
Sadly it's only when I'm sick do I feel I'm able to just cozy up without these "you can be doing something else" thoughts and truly enjoy games for what they are, tedious or not.
You then walk away from the game, inspired to apply such process-thinking to your actual work and life, and realize that it's actually rare to be able to do.
This is me, but extended to all games. I stopped playing games because I feel like I can always do something more productive with my time instead. If I really want to check out, I watch some TV instead. But games (especially modern ones) take too much work without any real reward.
And, even Factorio being my favorite game, I still need to take a long breaks from it because building a factory is a lot of mental effort.
Minecraft with a kid was my gateway drug and I got into Factorio really quickly after. It’s actually a really special game. There are elements of it that are practice for real world scenarios, but it is very relaxing, stress free and commitment free. It’s a great game to sit down with for an hour after work to decompress and become normal again.
It’s also an incredibly fun game to share with a group of people on one device. That’s something I haven’t experienced since the 1990s, but it’s really enjoyable to get together with a group and build together. It’s an excellent cooperative game and is a great way to really get to know people. It’s even more fun when you play it with people from a range of professions - one of my favourite Factorio groups is a bartender, a cook, a lawyer and a software developer. We think differently but when it all comes together, it’s really neat.
I understand that it’s not for everyone and I’ll be honest with you, I don’t have nearly the reflexes for FPS so we’re likely quite different in terms of the games we like. But I find it very relaxing and very enjoyable. It reminds me a lot of QBasic on an old Tandy - it’s that same thrill of tinkering because tinkering is fun.
I wish real programming tools were this much fun.
Now that is what I call tedious!
Meanwhile open ended pvp multiplayer games can drain hundreds of hours with no feeling of accomplishment. Those are the games that make me feel I should be doing something more productive.
But I like the fact that I can see it working in realtime, its just pretty, this machine I built that I can zoom into and see the smallest detail actually working.
Wish software was more like that, a good debugger can get closer to that but way more clunky and poor performing than Factorio.
I agree debugging tools could make more use of visualisation. I remember the excellent HTML 3d view in Firefox, removed from version 47. For some reason we can't have nice things: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqHV625EU3E
Not sure if there's a way to get it back. I heard it's available in Edge, but I don't use that browser.
Consequently, that's why I'm so disinterested in learning these games. The discussion about them shifts into a thin one layer abstraction for other people to try to brag about their accomplishments and what they self injected as their experience instead of the game itself. This doesn't affect the gameplay, but it affects my perception of the game as a shallow vehicle for attention seekers more than it promotes the ideas of fun gameplay.
That said, sometimes the style of gameplay resonates with a style of development you might have been interested in understanding more and can use it as a way to get motivation or inspiration for ideas. Automating pipelines, physics simulations, etc. I think it's always worth a shot on games that have notable recognition of quality to see if it jives with what you enjoy, but it's been the exception more than the rule in my case.
The people I spoke with were from the Army. And they found CS-style games agonizing to watch. So many people running around with no plan, so much friendly fire, so many unrealistic tactics. You could practically see them shudder.
They also had some people who worked in logistics. I remember one of them saying, "If the United States decides to invade a country, the software we wrote could calculate how much toilet paper we'd need."
Do you finally get it now?
The other aspect is there are plenty of people that like to think like programmers, but have no experience programming and the barrier to entry for a videogame is substantially lower than even figuring out a "hello world!" program for someone who wouldn't even know how to pick a programming language.
It's instant gratification: I don't have as much fun practicing at .75x speed with a metronome to learn the hard part of a piece. Instead a video game tells me how great I am at "guitar" by being able to push buttons and strum on the beat, not to mention that I hear the sounds of my favorite songs come out when I do it.
For a similar reason, I like Rocksmith (guitar hero but with a real guitar), but the gratification is not quite so instant. They gamify the practicing part but I still need to do it, otherwise the part I'm playing actually sounds bad. And sight-reading is so much harder when there are more than 5 buttons.
Designing a satisfying skill progression takes a lot of work. I know what I will have to do if I, say, take up mandolin again seriously, and it's daunting- and worse, maybe it won't even lead to a satisfying or useful end... I will still do that at some point. I had the same feeling about cello or pedal steel guitar, and they all turned out okay.
At the same time I totally understand why following simple tutorials, running a preset course, climbing an established route, riding already-cleared bike trails, or playing a video game with few possible outcomes can be satisfying.
e.g: making bluetooth 10% more energy efficient in the next few revisions
In fact there are probably infinitely many.
If you just walk up to the mailing list with the complete designs, documents, experimental results, schematics, trade offs, feasibility studies, you know what you're going to get? People saying "whoa, hey, great work but let's talk about this. I see here you've made assumption X about implementation area Y and that actually conflicts with the direction that we had in mind for the upcoming release, so let's talk more. To start, we'd like to see if we can explore option Z, thoughts?"
That ain't fun. It's rewarding but it ain't fun. Not like sitting down and messing with Legos in your own house is fun, or building a silly factory in Factorio is fun.
Nobody is going to believe anyone short of that bar would have even fully understood the bluetooth specification. So even a regular genius would have a starting credibility of roughly zero.
I never said any particular technical problems would be realistically solvable or even tractable by non super-geniuses.
But there are likely infinitely many waiting for that 99.9999th percentile HN reader to come along.
I find that pretty amusing.
It's the trucking game for truckers in my mind, only a madman would play it after work.
Exactly yes, I wouldn't say it's only for engineers, it is perfect for smart people who chose a different path in life and need to feed this part of their brain with a fun simplified simulation of what it's like to be an engineer.
Of course, engineers would love this game, but we already engage in this type of activity all day much more intensely precisely because we love it, we already know how to do more interesting and valuable things with the same effort.
Similarly, I really lost the appetite for hard decision-making strategy games when I founded my startup. I was already having to take plenty of hard decisions, thank you very much, the real thing is much more interesting and more than enough.
Once I get successful in it, I'm like "but I should be making money in the real world, not this world" as I do have side projects. the game does turn into a slog, if you approach it that way
The advantage a game like factorio has over DtD is that you can kind of abandon huge sections and "start fresh" while still collecting rent from the work you did earlier to fund your new excursions. I guess DtD does this to a degree, but there's a lot less freedom of intellectual movement.
This is why I like Against the Storm. It is a novel (if familiar) challenge every time, and every time you "beat the odds" the game forces you to move on to the next harder challenge, "you beat this puzzle, you need a harder on."
so thats what made it too much like real life for me, because you're like struggling but then pretending like you are flexing (look at the size of my house! my farm!), but really everyone barely made it at all
maybe Against the Storm as a single player journey makes more sense
Against the Storm is all about setting up complex production chains, not necessarily linking them explicitly like in Factorio, but more about balancing resource availability and assigning workers. It's a lot like other resource-focused city builders like Anno, but it is very well designed to impose a constant pressure on the player, always on a rush to meet goals before the whole thing crumbles, constantly putting out fires in the system (sometimes literal fires).
The name is perfect, in that you build this complex machine, and it is constantly stress-tested by periodic hazards. It's an awesome rush to "hold-fast", scramble to desperately fix things, constantly on the edge, hoping that the storm will end soon because the whole thing is about to crumble, while rushing to fulfil the objectives so you can get out of there before it gets too bad.
Frospunk evokes this feeling really well too. I suppose Factorio is kinda similar with the alien attacks. Come to think of it, the pressure to feed the family and the final scramble for points in Agricola are not so dissimilar either.
Life is a slog if approached that way. Spending your time chasing more money instead of enjoying life is the quickest way to have a miserable existence.
But I wasn’t looking for devil’s advocate or solutions, us guys need to affirm each other’s experiences more often.
I also do enjoy very profitable sessions in life, the pursuit of money itself is fulfilling for me as it already is a massive multiplayer game pvp. Additionally, I would usually prefer to be doing entertainment options exclusive to the level of profits that have been manifested. But I love the existence that allows me to play video games with no consequence.
The timeline (quick returns, but a long scale of challenges you can build up to. Lots of side projects out there with 0 users.)
You can play with friends
You can also pay 1/4 attention until you need to design something complex in the game. I find it fun, I can turn my brain off for a bit but then re/engage for the fun complex stuff.
I stopped playing as much myself because I wanted to either work on professional development (side projects, learning more) or actually make things with my hands (woodworking, chair making, fixing an old truck) that were real breaks from software engineering, and easier to share with my kids.
* edited for clarity, typos
It's called replayability, the crucial selling point of every successful game.
I haven't played Factorio so far; for those who haven't programmed, do you think you're learning something new and somewhat transferable?
What makes a side project better than Factorio?
You're on big space rock, dude.
Factorio was the last game I played. I lost a weekend and ended up with a raging headache.
Before that an MMORPG did the same
A year before that it was Civilization IV, exactly the same, lost an entire weekend then never played it again.
I don't think I am suited to games. Or maybe I just need more free time
Anyway, if you like Factorio, you might also enjoy Mindustry: simmilar-ish, less constructional depth, more tower-defence and fighting.
At least it doesn't take up the whole basement like the sets previous generations played with.
I work in performance - a space where we're thinking about threading, parallelism and the like a lot - and I often say "I want to hire who play with trains". What I mean is "I want people who play Factorio", because the concepts and problems are very very similar. But fewer people know Factorio, so I say trains instead.
I think I know why it's enjoyable even though it's so close to work, too. It's the _feedback_. Factorio shows you visually where you screwed up, and what's moving slowly. In actual work the time and frustration is usually in finding it.
Versus say Call of Duty or whatever that you might lose yourself in, which is also not productive, but bears no resemblance to work.
Pilot communities probably say similar things about flight sims (or flight components of games) that aren't good enough to be useful practice?
but that's the extend of it, you don't have to do heavier programming practice like algorithm, complex state management, input parsing and validation (unless sushi), or anything involving combinators until finishing the 1.0 version.
many people feel it feels similar to coding, in the way you have to slowly refactor designs + work involves a recursive breakdown of tasks + tracing/debugging of issues
For typical gameplay, the only puzzles you run into are the ones you build yourself into. The name of game is to design your factory in a modular and extensible way so that you do not build yourself into a puzzle.
I’ve hated puzzle games all my life. Most likely because they’re artificial.
And I think that's mostly due to the lack of constraints in most programming jobs. I don't have to think about throughput or optimizing op codes or almost anything else because our machines have absurd amounts of compute and more memory than most hard drives I've had in my life, the networks are broad and fast, and there's a commercial solution for most of the hard problems.
Maybe I'd think differently if I worked on microcontrollers, but my brief foray into Arduinos and Raspberry Pies didn't feel that much different. I mean, I was using Python on the Arduino. I felt more constrained by the pins than anything else - another problem with several well explored solutions.
The analog controls in real life are heavier, more raw, somewhat imprecise, and you can feel them knocked around by the wind for example. Night and day difference. It honestly makes the most state of the art simulator feel like you’re operating a NES.
When I first started flying my instructor specifically recommended against flight sims for that very reason.
Now that I have my PPL I only use them to practice approaches for new airports that I’ve never visited before and to familiarize myself with the cockpit layout for planes I haven’t flown before. It helps build some minor muscle memory so I can focus on the harder parts of flying.
Scratch that - I'm using "money" as a proxy for "value". Let's talk value directly. All things being equal, if I can enjoy Activity A totally in isolation, and Activity B equally much, but B leaves something behind which other people can use and get their own value out of, then B is clearly a better or more noble use of my time. Being productive just makes you a better person on net.
Now... I do not choose the "max productivity" strat with each and every second of my being, far from it. I'll probably buy and play Factorio sometime in the next few months, and it will be Steam game #3 added to my library after FTL and Slay the Spire. But I'm not going to sit here and pretend it is somehow better for the world outside of myself to play Factorio rather than e.g. improve the FOSS software I maintain that helps people learn Finnish. Let alone something like contribute to the Linux kernel. This is a philosophical non-question to me.
When I play games, I never play competitive or intense games, I see it as a therapeutic activity.
I play relaxing single player games like Stardew Valley or Tiny Glade. Cultivate some crops, feed my chicken, pat my cat. No real end goal other than to just relax. I urge anyone to try, especially in co-op with with a friend or partner. It really is therapeutic.
I’ve wanted to play Valheim for ages. I even bought the Factorio DLC on launch day and barely played it because nobody wanted to play.
For some the latter is facotrio. I tried it myself, didn't get past the demo. I think if I'm doing something not productive in terms of not using my time towards something that actively makes me money, I would feel better doing something like learning another programming language, do some quick projects to automate parts of my life, try to write myself a game or a piece of toy software that challenges me and is also fun to implement.
I think I'd rather do those than play facotrio.
That’s why startups appeal to me, because they appeal to my nature. It’s in my nature to desire being productive.
So asking “why must you always be productive” on a site full of startup enthusiasts … well, you’re going to get a lot of the same answers
Everyone has different ways of unwinding and finding meaning, and productivity doesn’t need to be the sole measure of time well spent, at least for me anymore.
Ironically, Factorio is all about productivity. Mine more resources, produce more items, expand more land and build more factory.
Though, with AI looming to take this last shred of human dignity too, maybe having a bit of fun along the way isn't such a bad idea.
Trivia on farming: Medieval peasants worked far less than modern employees (at most 150 days a year). It was obviously harder physical work than sitting in an office all day, but they had plenty of downtime
With the understanding that you can regularly leave Factorio running overnight or even all week to build up resources, how many hours have other hard core Factorio players logged?
My Factorio play time is up to 6,573.2 hours at this point.
I love Factorio for the same reasons I love SimCity. 6,573.2 hours seems like a lot of time, but I've probably logged even more hours playing SimCity since 1989. (But much of that was actual productive time porting it to various platforms, testing, debugging, and optimizing the actual source code and user interface, etc.)
https://github.com/SimHacker/MicropolisCore
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fVl4dGwUrA
I habitually translate "X thousands of hours" into "full time employment years".
You've been playing Factorio as the equivalent of a full time job, for 3 years and 3 months.
[Edit: Many of those hours were probably background farming, so not a direct comparison.]
Just modeling what we (US, 40hrs/wk and 50wks/yr) consider a "full-time" commitment to any task/activity.
I wonder if they'll pay for their employees' copies of Wilmot's Warehouse, too.
Edit: official forum link stating thus: https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?p=159626#p159626
I was wondering if I somehow missed it going on sale, or it never had.
Glad I know it isn't likely to any time soon.
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wowzers, "hate" is not a strong enough word for how I feel about that raging piece of junk. Holy hell, I'll never get that 15 minutes of my life back