Factorio teaches you software engineering, seriously.

A video essay about how Factorio shares an incredible amount of similarities with Software Engineering and Computer Science. And how playing the game makes you a Software Engineer! (kinda sorta really).

Unless otherwise specified, all assets (besides logos) are either licensed legally through Envato Elements (not sponsored just paranoid) or self-created.

[TonyZhu]

Man this is the best fking community ever, ya'll are too nice and so freaking wholesome <3. Thank you all for being so cool and supportive, I'm definitely heavily looking into doing the second video now (no guarantees on the release timing, esp bc the holidays are coming) - thanks again for being such a chill group of ppl!!

Also, the comments are coming in too fast for me to respond to them all but I PROMISE I'm reading every single one!

[enyakstew]

Playing factorio gave me the idea of pursuing software engineering. After 3 years as a Software engineer, I finally reached my goal, which is to get better at Factorio.

[DoshDoshington]

Being a software engineer turned me into a Factorio Player

[Trupen]

Factorio is like the best part of programming turned into game
Which literally makes it a crack for engineers...

[rashkavar]

One thing that's worth noting: a lot of these shared terms actually come from a third, much older discipline called industrial engineering. Which is pretty much playing Factorio for real. Say you're running a textile business in the early industrial revolution. You work with linen, so you buy flax, you have to break it down into fibres, you have to spin those fibers into thread, you have to run that thread through a loom to make fabric, and you need to bundle that fabric up into bolts to be sold. And to make things complicated, you also make bedsheets and tablecloths, so you also do some sewing using thread and fabric to make your sheets and tablecloths. (No idea if these were available off the shelf in those days, I know clothing generally wasn't, but this is just to make a point.

Ok, so you've got a facility that produces thread and fabric. How many spinning jennies do you need? How many powered looms? What kind of steam engine do you need to run all that? And because the steam engine is noisy and disrupts the people who are sewing your sheets and tablecloths, you have them in a different facility - how often do you need to cart a shipment from your textile factory to your sewing people. The only facility available for this was across town, did you decide to transport your stuff all the way across town, or just pay some folks living nearby to make product for you in their own homes? If you did the latter, how are you managing your deliveries of materials and picking up of product?

These are literal business decisions that have had to be made pretty much since the advent of the factory in its earliest form, and have been studied by actual engineers for a similar length of time. I still have my notes from that class!

[Lithane]

If you really want to understand the sickness that is factorio, one of the recent changelog notes for the game mentioned the need to up the max save file time played from 2 ish years because someone hit that number awhile back and overflowed some variables, causing their save game to essentially be paused. The devs then decided to do the logical thing and increase the possible save file time played to over 2 million years. The factory must grow.

[ОбразцовТимофей]

You scale your factory, at some point something stops working, you invent a new design, you scale futher, repeat. Just like in software engineering.

[sarthakdravid]

Back in school, for my final science exam, i had a question on how a nuclear reactor works, I didnt study that part, It was an 8 mark question out of a 60 mark paper, I wrote down how a reactor works in factorio, I got 6 marks out of 8

[programmer]

If you build city blocks, you’re heavily into object oriented languages. If you build main bus, you code procedurally. If you build spaghetti, you code in perl.

[heyitskae]

My experience in Factorio has led me to a singular conclusion: I am not fit to be a software engineer.

[MuhsinFatih]

I'm a software engineer and you just convinced me to play factorio. Not even kidding

[Robin_Goodfellow]

This is actually why I struggle with factory builder games. I'm drawn to them because they're like programming, but then I stop when it starts to feel too much like my actual job

[xaaf]

I love how unhinged yet super solidly structured this video is
As someone who loves factorio and also studies computer science, I relate to this and love this explanation

[michaelclifton]

Bros got some clean editing skills. This video must have taken forever.

[CornusHolius]

I came to learn a little about software engineering, I stayed to figure out who the hell has been talking to my mom on Facebook. This was highly entertaining, good work.

[sergion]

1. The style and way this is done, is perfect. I wouldn't change a thing. 2. Giving me actual keywords I can put on my resume from hours of game time is AMAZING. More of this please! 3. This video also helps me better understand what careers would connect well with my gaming interests AND lets me justify my interests in gaming and translate them to real world use cases!! This is an INCREDIBLE thing you're doing, please do not stop!

[alexcrouse]

The new invention that blows my mind in this video is: a funny software engineer.

[matthewhambacher]

Okay so first, I learned what it's like to play Factorio with friends. Then I learned how NOT to play Factorio with friends (by learning what it's really like). But now I'm learning that playing Factorio will make me a software engineer? Incredible, this truly is one of the games of all time.

[eliucidate]

Train signals are probably a great way to talk about mutual exclusion and deadlocks when dealing with multi-threaded programs!

[Tano_cci]

The your mom jokes really tied everything together, I don't know if I would've understand all of it without them, great work!