I Played Every Factory Game and You're Playing Them Wrong

Whether you're a regular player or just starting out, I share some approaches and tips to enhance your factory-building experience. Watch to find out how you can optimize your production lines, improve efficiency, and, most importantly, have more fun while playing factory games!

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SOCIALS

[veteranxt]

Don't plan, don't make most efficient factory, play a game, make a mess and have fun. That is what factorio teached me.

[FriendlyCobblestone]

There's this famous saying of "when given the chance, players will optimize the fun out of the game" and while optimization is often the fun of the factory game genre, there's a lot of ways in which you can still do optimize the fun out of it. Planning ahead can in fact be part of that. Running into problems can teach you new things but if you look for optimal solutions through guides or in some cases through blueprints, you can end up having someone else play the game for you in a way, optimizing the fun out of the game just so you end up with an optimal factory in your game.

[АлексейАпарнев-еш]

I've read "I played every factory game"
and my brain autocompleted it "so you don't have to"

[Deathdealer]

For those interested in Dyson Sphere program: You actually have the option to make resource nodes infinite when you create a new save. You can even turn them down to minimal amounts which makes progression later on interesting. Through super late game research you can make finite resource nodes effectively infinite.

[fuzzy-]

Just f-ck around and have fun. I treat them as sandboxes to make a mess.

Or plan as much as you want. Up to you

[TehGM]

One pro-tip re burn out I saw on Reddit not too long ago:
Set time limits on your playtime, so you end your session while you're still wanting more. This will lead you to be excited to return to the game later.
Of course... easy to say, I know. I fail to do so myself. But it makes sense.

[Ty-Dy]

Give Josh/Lets Game It Out some credit, the man has the strength, courage, and sheer willpower to do what we are all too cowardly to do. Embrace the Spaghetti, Become the Spaghetti.

[chaosordeal]

In Factorio, by the time you run out, bringing in new resources is trivial.

[Werrf]

Re. avoiding burnout - I tend to have two different games on the go at a time. One will be a factory builder/strategy game - I cycle between Satisfactory, Dyson Sphere Program, and Stardew Valley - and the other will be something more RPG or shooter-y, like Fallout or Fallen Order. When I finish a task in the builder and realise "oh, great, now I've got to...", I log out and play half an hour of reset juice, then come back to building with new energy.

[PatricioINTP]

One thing I like is to make notes how I am making my factory/logistic network while playing. Sometimes I find something that I could have done and insert what I should do into my notes so I will remember the next time I play it. Other times it helps me notice when a game patch has changed something, requiring me to rethink everything that will affect later. Over time my own notes grow and improve making the inevitable event of me restarting from the beginning go that much more smoother and faster.

[bastoktok]

The main error people do is "not building proper factories". The only good way is to make dedicated factories. One task, one building (one factory which take iron ore in input and turn it to iron ingot in output). Then you'll never have any issue with space, planning, fail safe, spaghetti etc... And it make debugging way more easy. It make the begin of the game a bit more complicated but when your base setup is done, you just upgrade basic factory when demand increase. For most people "modular" mean "small", where it should mean "atomic"

[rumpelstilzchen]

After reading the title and looking at the thumbnail my very first thought was "What a cocky idiot. Thinks he is the only person in the universe who knows how to play".

After watching the video I have to admit that you made some valid points. The most important of all: Play at YOUR pace. If you "just" want a working and maybe nicelooking factory don't care about endless calculations how to optimize your factory. There is no boss that fires you at the end of the month for wasting materials or producing to slow. You are the boss. If your factory puts out what YOU want it to put out everything is fine. And there might be the wish to get to endgame as fast as possible. Cutting it down to "handy portions" will help to keep up fun and motivation. Planned to finish the power supply and are done with it? Save the game, go out for a beer or two and come back another day to start the next step. Don't make it weekends with 40 hours playtime that feel like unpayed work.

I can confirm your last point: You may be impressed by some gigafactorys you've seen. But if you haven't mastered your construction skill don't even think about rebuilding it. You WILL end up watching hours of videos to learn how to (e.g.) build circles with rectangles, another few hours with sometimes frustrating tries and often end in deleting the outcome of the day. Sometimes you will get to the point of deleting complete maps because what you did isn't even near to what you aimed at.

Been at all those points myself in several games. And what I learned: Best way to keep up fun is to avoid frustration.

[bananabrainz]

that way of playing (mentioned @2:24 ) where you have factorys away from nodes and solid logistics .. thats exactly how I play satisfactory as well, it's way more efficient. 1000h in the game and its working amazingly well .. 4 seperate train loops, covering every part of the map, with every wagon carrying one resource, infiinitely refilled from nodes all over the place. Works amazingly well. So arguably, thats the optimal strategy. It also negates stage 2 you mentioned because you dont need to plan as much because its a flexible approach. It also helps with stage #3 because factories can be anywhere.

(RE avoiding burnout, I just play alongside a game thats the exact opposite - racing games. So if you burnout with the building stuff, just go whizz about for a bit. Cured!)

[chekote]

IMHO planning is optimizing the fun out of the game. It’s just a job at that point. The course corrections and full on disasters are part of the fun.

[seannewell]

Automation games are their own career. It has its own burnout loop.

What have we done.

The factory must grow.

[chainingsolid]

You made me realize I plan in Satisfactory like Factorio, build a factory where ever there's space, plan to expand it, never build one factory just to feed another (there all meant to feed any other factory that they may need too) and the though of running out of possible mining output just doesn't occur. And trains solve any logistic problem harder/longer than the next row of machines.

[michaelturner]

For me part of the fun is making the same mistakes over again, and cursing past me. "I just need something quick and dirty to triple my copper sheet output real quick, I'll come fix it later" and then forget about it, coming back after a while and it's more horrifying than running face first into an Alpha Stinger.

But yeah, the point is definitely to have fun, and it's worth noting that planning ahead can be its own level of satisfaction, scrambling to fix a major mess-up can be someone's jam too.

[lazarix]

I've been on this planet for 41 years, and believe it or not, you're the first person to be able to accurately describe burnout to me. I now understand how it feels, and can watch out for it :)

[humanimperfect]

4:07 Total: "Don't just wing it.. Plan it."
In case you forgot Total, there is a reason the !plan command says "The man without a plan, Mr TotalXclipse. (He only has a vague idea)". 😉

[johnchristianson]

You havent played dyson sphere until you made your game a slide show by having your 10 layer blue giant sphere visible