Factorio beats all.

I tend to fall into a trap with these kinds of games. I try to start out just doing whatever, but then I start to worry about not doing this game efficiently or wasting time, etc. it’s funny how we project our neuroses about productivity onto games

I really like the game, but haven’t played much recently.

I used some kind of steam guide to get a sense of what kind of systems you want (fuck cooling that shit sucks and I’m terrible at it) and generally follow that kind of template still.

I tend to do OK drilling down to lava and having a somewhat sustainable base, but doing much with oil or producing enough steel to get to space (with meteor protection) always makes my games stop; I’ve never launched a ship.

Also I have a hard time with overpressurization. It doesn’t really cause problems, but I’ll end up with like 2.3 kg oxygen per tile around my base because I purify dirty air but polluted o2 sources keep producing.

Francis John makes some of the best ONI videos I loved watching them. The tutorial series is great for tips.

I have sunk more hours than I care to admit into this game, at least a couple hundred. Ironically enough I have never even got started on the whole space missions and interstellar research, I always get bogged down with side projects like “trying to tame a water geyser” or “trying to tame a volcano” or “trying to create a fully automated geothermal plant”, which invariably end up spilling large amounts of super heated steam over large sections of now uninhabitable space.

Nowadays I have settled on a small number of replicants, 6-8 , for a much more relaxed play-through. I’ve tried to keep just 3 and it kinda works, you can spend a long time without even having to worry about food, but it takes a long time to build a bigger project. On the other side, with 20 replicants you are always frantically scrambling after new sources of water, consuming everything on your path. You spend most of your time just trying to keep everyone alive.

The first real breakthrough I had playing was learning how to build an efficient oxygen plant using an Electrolyzer combined with a Hydrogen Generator and a couple of sensors. You actually generate more power than you consume, spending water in the process. Once you get that going you free up a lot of labor and attention to focus on other things.

My second project is to completely surround the starting biome with insulated tiles. Heat will slowly cook your colony alive if you let it, and the starting biome is a lot cooler than most other environments. Beware of heated abyssalite, as it will heat the air around it. I found out that abyssalite has actually a finite heat capacity (my first hypothesis was that its temperature was unchangeable) by using a bunch of cold abyssalite as the heat sink of my colony and watching it slowly warm up and render my whole refrigeration design worthless. Could’ve just checked the wiki instead, I guess.

For energy I will usually start with a generator room that is thermally insulated from the rest of the colony and connect it to where it needs to go with heavy wires that are passed on the outside of the insulated wall to avoid the large decor penalty. I will then plug in a transformer near where the power is consumed and finish the installation with normal wire. Always use smart batteries to orchestrate the order in which the generators come online and to avoid idly burning fuel. The first generator to come online should always be the hydrogen generator that is keeping the hydrogen produced by the Electrolyzers in check, followed by renewables, with coal coming in last.

I could go on and on, I will be happy to discuss about any topic. On the other hand, I am not even sure how well I actually play it, since I have never followed the community and have no idea on the current state of the metagame. I find it more interesting to figure things out for myself. I did spend a lot of time optimizing systems in sandbox mode though.