- cross-posted to:
- comicstrips@lemmy.world
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BTW, it’s okay to ignore the story on Stardew Valley. Never let anyone tell you you’re playing it wrong. There’s no such thing.
Yeah half of the fun is just focusing on what makes you happy in that game.
I hate that devs put options in games and people think you’re bad for choosing it. Heaven forbid I want to experience Undertale’s genocide route or Stardew’s Joja story.
Cracktorio
Dont forget about satiscracktory
Oxygen not included - more evil than factorico - at least for me.
ONI has amazing “process engineering” where you take some substance, use a machine to transform it into another, feed it into a third, etc.
But, what’s extra great about it is that it also includes a pretty basic, but still fully functional simulation of chemistry and physics. So, you can feed oil to the oil refinery to get petroleum, but it’s only 50% efficient. If you want a more efficient process you can boil the petroleum instead by dropping oil onto something hot. But doing that generates petroleum that’s at hundreds of degrees so you need to cool it down. So, instead of just doing that, you can pre-heat the oil coming into the boiler using the petroleum that the boiler produces, creating a counter-flow heat exchanger that cools the petroleum while pre-heating the oil.
Factorio is great at making you automate to save time. Endless map, with more and bigger resource piles as you move away.
ONI is about fighting entropy. Everything starts in a nice and easy to use format, but as you use it, you make all this waste heat and matter. It’s about finding ways to use all the waste products, or build natural means to convert materials by running pipes through areas of excess heat.
Yeah, good description. Fighting Entropy is really the trick that makes ONI great. I just love how at the beginning heat isn’t even on your radar as something to worry about. You might not even know that the heat overlay exists. But, by the mid-game if you don’t start handling heat suddenly everything starts breaking.
Also, the size is another big difference. Factorio has that endless map where you just keep expanding your conveyor belts. The further out you go, the more you have to worry about aliens, but after a while that isn’t much of an issue. Meanwhile in ONI as you start making bigger and bigger colonies, it starts to feel cramped.
The factorio dev blog has some good reads about finding the right balance of tedium as driving mechanism to figure out automation and also needing the game to be enjoyable. Basically the moment an activity becomes stale they want you to be able to automate it
I do not want to admit how much time it took to build a working boiler. My magma volcano was under powered so the whole cooling with the oil generators didn’t work.
Then I moved (destroyed the old one) and built a brand new in the core layer. Now that worked. But meanwhile my hydrogen production and oxygen generayors died down because the natural gas geysers and the excess co2 clogged my airways…Yeah, a minor deviation from a working contraption can mean it fails completely. They’re often really unforgiving. But, they’re so satisfying when they work.
I have never felt more like a mad scientist. Beautiful game.
It’s my top game these days, and there’s always more to learn
It is an amazing adhd game :)
Oh man, ONI is the one I managed to get into for a while. I find the physics/chemistry simulation the most interesting. Having the environment itself trying its hardest to kill you is very fascinating. One doesn’t need any space aliens, the space itself is immensely hostile.
I do love that the biggest challenge is your own incompetence. If you don’t know what to look out for, if you forfot to fix something, ifyou don’t build contingencies… Everything is your own fault :D
I am genuinely convinced that the difference between female autism and male autism just literally is the difference between Stardew Valley and Factorio/Satisfactory.
Social vs operational silliness.
So, to combine both:
Make The Sims, but they are taught to be industrial engineers, who build factories instead of homes.
You can only partially direct their social and personal actions, you can’t do the builder aspect of The Sims now, you have to teach them how to do it.
And your Sims have to both hit production quotas, and also not all kill each other.
Or, make Factorio, but what you’re building is personality templates, who you then put into some kind of dollhouse type environment, and keep testing, untill you manufacture androids that produce the… sitcoms?.. that you desire.
Okay, but trying to guide a braindead little sim automaton through basically playing factorio would be incredible. “Oh my God, why are you running the blue circuit belt through there? Stop it! No! STOP CRYING DIANE, YOU CHOSE TO SKIP EATING AND USE A SUSHI BELT. Stop eating off the floor, there’s coal everywhere”.
… Some time back I put forward the idea of just making a game that is like, half splinter cell/mgs stealth combat, and half dating sim.
Basically, you have to guide the neediest, clumsiest, insecure, easily distracted, most frustrating npc through what is ostensibly a combat game… but the game just actually is an escort quest, with extra steps.
I put it forward as a joke, and a surprising number of people said they’d play it.
Apparently, fun, … is just a kind of frustration, that I guess… seems solvable.
That fits. I think games where you need to care for a dumb little creature hit a couple buttons in our psychology. You want to make it do the right thing because you want to succeed at the game and get that reward of “it did good”. It’s struggling, which means you’re paying attention to it, and it’s doing so with enough charm that you’re not just entirely indifferent. Most importantly, it needs to succeed often enough to make sure you know it can, and slowly get better so you have the long term satisfaction of having improved it. Extra bonus points if you can give a bit of wish fulfillment fantasy. “My sim who regularly eats old fish out of the trash is somehow a self employed artist who lives in a great house I got distracted and built to my dream specification. I would totally play pool until I wet myself and fell asleep crying on the floor.”
I think there’s actually a lot of truth to fun being related to frustration. If something is too easy you don’t get the dopamine hit, because why would your brain reward you for learning something trivial? If it’s too hard the path to most joy is giving up. At the sweet spot it’s obviously possible, but you struggle enough that you get a dash of dopamine for succeeding. The trick is keeping the struggle varied or infrequent enough that you’re brain doesn’t declare it a source of diminishing returns.
Shitty mobile games are the king of it, since they have a standard/easy ramp that quickly moves to just above most people’s threshold with the “out” of a loot box that has a chance to give you a bonus labeled as just a small boost. And they’re normally $10/10, but the 50 packs is $15 for the moment, and since you’re new you get $10 off…
Not-those types of games tend to just try for “balanced difficulty scaling”.
This is such a good comment that I have been trying to think of something useful to add for days, and I can’t.
So I’m just gonna star/bookmark it for future reference =D
There are lots of stories like Last Starfighter where someone is recruited through video games for some fantastical job and some General or something is like “You have the highest score ever, only you can save us!” Always seemed pretty far fetched to me.
But if we were going to another galaxy and they wanted someone to lay out production infrastructure? I could totally see recruiting based on most playtime on steam for Satisfactory.
A planned economy created by factorio players is as genius as it is frightening
“Pack it up, space is cancelled.”
“What, why?”
“We left you alone for a week and now every square inch of this planet is completely covered in factories. It’s unlivable. We’ll have to get the Planet Crafter guy to terraform a new planet and start over.”
“Hey there it’s Josh from Let’s Game It Out.”
Dear god! Who sent him .
Joel from Arrowhead looks up
“Covered in factories you say? Sounds like a breeding ground for Automatons.”
🎵Buh buh buh bunhh🎵
Get the Minecraft Reclamation lady to fix it
Hand over the reins of one nation each to the top players of: Factorio, EVE Online, Dwarf Fortress, HOI4, Minecraft, Kerbal Space Program, Cities Skylines, etc.
City skylines would be the best place to live, and would have a natural friendship with factorio.
It would be a bit weird making a bowl of cereal and having a freight train blast up to your house at 200mph, a robot flies out of the depot just past the dog park, skims above the pedestrian walkways at just under the speed of sound, unloads the single stack of of cereal boxes that the train is carrying and sticks it in your pantry before they both vanish just as fast. You only had a half a box of raisin bran left and you hit the resupply threshold.
Guess I need to finally play Factorio.
I would recommend it. It can take a minute your first time through to get to some of the intense optimization stuff, but a lot of it’s there really early.
The dominant gameplay loop by far is “you have tools. There’s a new problem to solve with those tools that’s hard/tedious. Solving it means you can make tools that make the problem easier. Goto step one”.
Yeah, same here. Nothing beats building a massive industrial complex from scratch
Don’t forget to call Josh from Let’s Game it Out to create forward outposts that the enemy will find first
If you want to know what could go wrong with anything you’ve built, just leave Josh alone with it for a few minutes.
I’d keep getting screwed because in RL, you need to build supports before the building they support, not as an afterthought to make it look more realistic.
“Need a bridge? Zoop mode, aaaaand it’s done!” Longest part of building a bridge comes from finding or fighting things on the way.
That movie gave me legit anxiety as a kid. I had this subtle fear that my high score on games at the local arcade or bowling alley would draw me into some deep shit.
I like my idea for a Factorio movie.
An engineer crash lands on a planet during a corporate visitation to another planet. Desperate, he finds his company’s schematic drive on factory creation. He builds his way up to a satellite, which is preprogrammed to beam his SOS home. Relieved, he hits the button to launch it, watches it go up.
Then, looks down at everything he got to build on his own, with no oversight, no managerial correction, all his own efficiency. He’s even made his own greenhouses to make his own food. Automated a logistics bot to attempt a new mix of coffee each morning, warmed by residual nuclear reactor heat.
Something stirs in him, and he “accidentally” veers the satellite 8 degrees off course. It sheers against the atmosphere and burns to a crisp, its wreckage destroying his semiconductor production (which is then rebuilt automatically within the hour). The engineer resumes his next project.
From there, eventually a passing ship does a scan of the planet, curiously finding it inhabited and very industrialized. They send a lander to the surface to investigate. It’s shot down by a fleet of hundreds of missiles.
The issue goes to Earth’s military command. They have no idea who is on this planet but need to take the threat seriously. Another scouting contingent is deployed, able to land on a safer side of the planet, but on the way down, they spot a “city” in which buildings are arranged in the words “GO AWAY”.
Landing, the scouts work out that the nearby bots are from the corp’s schematics, and slowly work out what happened. They attempt a few more efforts to extract the engineer, now as a prisoner for shooting down a craft, but the “war” continues.
Eventually, a psychologist is able to ask the engineer about his feelings of loneliness on the planet. He replies that he’s been alone for far longer than his space flight, and even on Earth no one connected with him - machines just made sense. He curses his company’s greed for infinite growth, and declares the planet is off limits.
The psychologist accepts his terms - but also ridicules him, since his factory exhibits the same pointless growth as his company. And so, he remains, a prisoner of his own planet.
Sounds like an origin story for Dr. Robotnik.
In my head this works quite well as an animated short film.
Yeah if the movie industry got their hands on it, Jack Black would be the engineer and the machines would talk (or act like animals that perfectly understand him and communicate effectively via body language) and the psychologist would end up an unlikely love interest that ends up remaining with him and his wacky machines at the end of the movie.
And after the conclusion, there will be a shot of his love interest looking at something in horror and saying, “ew, bugs!”, setting up the sequel that never gets made because the people who would like it aren’t drawn to Factorio, and those who are drawn to Factorio are disappointed that the only thing it has to do with Factorio is that it has machines. The execs played the game for 5 minutes and came up with a building system that involves him quickly building things by hand and Harvey Cavil quit production two weeks in, once it was clear they didn’t care about the actual lore.
Would still watch
Bravo man. I like it!
…and Dyson Sphere Program.
Having way too much time in both, I view stardew as a gateway drug. It hooks you with cozy vibes but for sure rewards min/maxing. At least you don’t have to worry about UPS limitations!
It’s all fun and games and cozy vibes until you get that ancient seed.
Then you find yourself calculating if you should go home or pass out 100 levels deep in a remote cavern in a desert for a chance of getting something to pet your goats
See, if you were playing a real game like Elin, you could actually lick it for a taste. Can lick anything with the right trait in Elin.
Anything can be licked, anyone can be milked.
Begin your dream of a dungeon crawling stripper commune now, in Elin.
Just bought it based on your review. But beware: if there’s not enough milking, I’ll lick you in your sleep!
What happens when you lick things?
It’s been a while since I did a factorio run…
Okay I’ve nearly managed to automate green science
Not bad in 4hours!
The comic is highly accurate, I just wish that Factorio didn’t feel so similar to work. I like Stardew Valley overall, but I just don’t want to make friends with NPCs and play a fishing minigame.
I think with Stardew Valley, you don’t necessarily “have to” …
Factorio feels way too much like work (as a developer) to me. I played it all weekend once and then when I had work on Monday I didn’t feel any weekend relief that I expected.
That is exactly how I feel with Factorio. With Stawdew Valley, you essentially hit a wall if you aren’t willing to grind out some specific things (fishing for instance). It’s not the end of the world and I got enough enjoyment out of it to not consider it a waste of money, but I haven’t been able to check out any of the last few recent content updates because most of it was on the other side of the “wall”.
I think there needs to be a large part of the game to ignore to make the bit you want to do feel better.
Thats a good insight, i think youre right. I felt that playing fallout new vegas
I feel it when I’ve got tedious paperwork that needs to be done. Suddenly I’ve got so much energy and motivation to run the vacuum cleaner around.
As a person who plays both of these games frequently, this is very accurate.
Same here honestly
Mmmh I wonder if factorio will run on my steam deck…
It is steam deck verified. It runs great. It even has a custom control scheme to use the touchpad for mouse movements
It does and runs great. It runs my 10kspm factory no issues
Ok but what figure would be “Little Rocket Lab”?
I’m not well versed in Stardew Valley, can someone explain?
The “game” in Stardew isn’t really about the farming, it’s always been secondary to the village side of things, namely making friends with your neighbours, completing the village improvement quests and generally having a cozy time making your grandfather proud.
A lot of players treat the farming aspect as an optimisation puzzle, which of course it is, but it’s a less important part of the game.
There’s a whole genre of logistics and optimisation games, exemplified by factorio where this is the core gameplay mechanic.
Stardew Valley is a logistics and optimizing game.
You’re just primarily optimizing social obligations, not some kind of mass, materially productive process.
Who’s the Mysterio guy?
Now I understand. Thanks!
Stardew is a fairly cosy, casual farming game that you can delve pretty deeply into min-maxing if you want. Usually that profit min-maxing is at the expense of a huge portion of the game’s content - no time to befriend local villagers or experience the story if you’re trying to meet your turnip quota.
Ah, got it. Thanks!
Stardew Valley isn’t just a farming game. There is a town with people. You can build relationships with them and each relationship is rated.
So is he saying that players generally ignore the “social” aspect? I played Harvest Moon games and like socializing with the townspeople. I just assumed Stardew Valley is similar (never played it)
Similar to Harvest Moon, with a good dash of influence from the Rune Factory side series specifically. It was originally made to fill in the farming game niche - hard to imagine now, but there was a time period where there weren’t good new farming sims coming out.
FYI: the new Harvest Moon games have zero to do with the people who made the original Harvest Moon. The localizers got the rights to the “Harvest Moon” name and started making garbage slop farming games to take advantage of the name recognition.
The original creators are making games under the “Story of Seasons” name, including Switch remakes of Friends of Mineral Town and A Wonderful Life.
Thank you for the explanation.
The most recent Harvest Moon I played was, I think, FoMT for the GBA (obviously not counting Innocent Life on the PS2, or Tale of Two Towns for the NDS which I played for like half an hour tops)
If you liked FOMT/the idea of farming games in general, you would probably like Stardew. IMHO, it is really good at balancing things so that you aren’t locked into optimizing anything - you could farm minimally and focus on the social elements and have a good time too. The stuff in the meme doesn’t feel too much like pressure, because you’ll just naturally encounter everything by the end of year one and know how to find it by the end of year two for the community center (the main goal of the game), and if you want to optimize everything for cash you can buy out an equivalent “win.” It’s very sandbox-y.
Unlike the Harvest Moon games, gender doesn’t matter for who you marry, which is something I personally always enjoy in a “cozy” game. There’s even a cute option where you can chose to move in a monster as a friend instead of choosing to get married.
One of the funniest things I’m noticing on my current play through is that the easiest way to romance the alcoholic is to give him alcohol. The quickest way to consistently casually gain a bunch of hearts is to hang out at the bar every night and give everyone there a beer.
It’s extremely similar to Harvest Moon.
