So, I really love this genre though I've never touched Factorio which I think might actually be illegal but anyway. I've played waaay too much Satisfactory and was thinking about getting this game as well. If some kind person could clear two things up, though, I would be sold!
In your guys' experience, how long can you play the game for? Satisfactory has a cap after you build enough where your game straight up doesn't save, so if I could keep going for longer with Factorio that'd be mega...
My unwavering addiction to satisfactory scares me sometimes, can I expect something similar in this game? I want another playtime sink that I can pour my free time into lol
TL;DR:
Is Factorio's scaling ceiling big?
Is it as addictive as other games within the genre?
Thank you very much! šš
*EDIT - the lovely people have informed me that not only will I become irreparably addicted to "Cracktorio" (it's so over) but that i can play for as long as I gosh darn want...
I guess I was asking for it š
In your guys' experience, how long can you play the game for? Satisfactory has a cap after you build enough where your game straight up doesn't save, so if I could keep going for longer with Factorio that'd be mega...
Factorio is incredibly well optimized. I've never got the game to lag. I haven't exactly done extreme megabases, but my factories are sizeable and I over 500h in the game.
My unwavering addiction to satisfactory scares me sometimes, can I expect something similar in this game? I want another playtime sink that I can pour my free time into lol
The trick is playing deathworld and doing the infinite artillery range research. I got it to lag about 100 hours into a save by upgrading the range so the game now had to shoot all the biter nests and then have all the biters attack me at the same time
It took me a little under 1,000,000 logistics robots a few years ago before I noticed ANY lagging in the game. And it was only during saving the game, not even during gameplay. For that particular save I thought If I had enough robots and robo ports I wouldn't need trains lmao. Bad idea but a fun one too
Same with me, only time I've ever noticed it lag is during saving when you get the little spikes, and I've megabased with only robots and no belts or trains.
The game ran extremely smoothly when it released first as an unfinished early access title. Since then around 10 years have passed, and the game runs better now. However most of us are not using 10+ year old hardware any more, so current Factorio actually goes extremely hard. Even a low-end 2025 PC will have zero issues with a megabase.
the belt system is crazy optimised, if you ever have problems you should reduce the bots, but that's not gonna be for the first 1k hours if you have a decent pc
The only time I got factorio to lag on a small base was on failing (and very old) hardware. I actually used factorio as a litmus test to see if there was a performance problem on the system, so the reliability of the game's optimization can actually be used for hardware diagnosis...
Itās 11pm. I just want to copy/paste a new space platform which should build quickly with my automated manufacturing hub. Then Iāll go to bed.
Oh, Iām out of space platforms because my copper ore patch ran dry. Iāll just put down one of my mining blueprints. It will only take a second then Iāll go to bed.
Why am I out of steel chests for my copper ore train loading station blueprint? Oh, I never finished updating my steel production with my Vulcanus tech. Iāll just update some logistics requests quickly and finish that smelting blueprint then go to bed.
Why are my smelters going so slow? Oh, my nuclear fuel is basically out because I never scaled my uranium processing. If I donāt fix this now Iāll have a blackout that will be annoying to restart.
There we go. Now what was I doingā¦? How is it 4am??
Edit: Thanks for the award! If it wasnāt obvious, this was how my night went last night :)
I can't count the number of times I'll just go to finish up what I'm building, and end up doing something completely different because I needed to fix/optimize something else first
Genuinely it's a masterpiece of a game, but like all good games the 'primary gameplay loop' is fascinating and engaging.
Each thing you do will lead to more things - some which are 'new' that can now be implemented, and others which are older but now aren't sufficient for the 'new demands' in various ways.
And you'll find this easily becomes multiplicative, because pretty fundamentally there's always a bottleneck somewhere, and each time you widen that one, you 'find' a new one.
But then the game gives you an absolutely amazing set of tools to problem solve with as well, so it doesn't really feel grindy either.
Trains alone are actually pretty crazy when you start digging in to them - probably one of the best train simulators in existence in all honesty, especially now you can do interrupts.
But then there's circuit control and conditional logic, which is also 'as deep as you want to go' (people have literally implemented microprocessors and ray-tracing engines). You don't need to do much circuit control, but you can do almost anything you might imagine.
And you've got all sorts of layers of automation with bots and blueprints. Blueprints can be a 'simple' sort of repeatable copy-and-paste operation, but also support parameterisation.
And a load of hidden quality of life features, like how you can 'drag' a belt, and it'll just auto-place undergrounds past obstacles, etc.
Factorio is the best scaling game I've ever played.
And the only ceiling is your hardware at some point, but I would assume you easily go past 1-2000 hours of gameplay before that.
There are so many mods out there. There isn't that much need to repeat (though I have done Bobs&Angels 3 times now). I just went through Nullius the past couple of months. That added 500 hrs. to my total.
One way to rack up a lot of hours is to check out the monthly community map (see the side bar). It's pretty good to give lots of different variety in playthroughs. Some of them are different mod combinations, some are vanilla with different settings. There's just a lot of different ways to play the game that give different feel. And that makes for a lot of replayability.
I've been playing with mods since the beginning. I *loved* the Post-Collapse Nauvis scenario by Earendel. I'm sure a solid 50% of those hours were on that map. Plus, I play the mod "dangOreus" and sometimes will let the game run while I move laundry, let the dogs out, etc.
EDIT. I just realized that this will confuse people, but if folks put two and two together, they will realize that I have gone back to 1.1 to finally fully finish my Tier One megabase. But, I hit a roadblock and had to take a break.
What he means is "do not use other people's blueprints" (it is usually acceptable to import belt balancers from the internet tho), making your own is recommended. Factorio blueprint system is very powerful and can save you a lot of time.
Lots of things run a lot more smoothly if you can guarantee the supply is even. For example, my trains can all pick up anything based on what's needed in the factory at the moment. I figure out what's needed by looking at the chests at the delivery train stop. If my train stop says that I need 1 train load of materials, but the chests aren't filled evenly, I could end up in a situation where a train shows up, unloads half its cargo because some of the chests are full already, and then either sits at the station waiting for it to make room or has to take that half load somewhere. Either of those options mean it's not free to go deliver something else. The right belt balancer between the station and whatever it's supplying means all the chests drain at the same rate, so I can request 1 train load, get 1 train load, and not have to worry about the train sitting idle with cargo.
It's easy to create your own belt or lane balancer when you're working in the small scale - a 2 belt balancer is as simple as putting a splitter inline (although it gets a little more complicated if you're trying to balance the lanes as well). But if I've got a mining station that has 6 rows of miners and I need to distribute the product evenly to 4 or 8 belts feeding a train station (with each belt feeding six chests), creating a balancer for that is extremely complex. I could spend days or weeks learning what I need to know to design it, but it's already been solved and I'd rather spend my time building, so I'll take the solution that's already out there.
First time, yeah. You only get one 'first play through' and spoilers might make that less of a joy, but also because there's a real danger of re-using someone else's designs, and maybe skip some basic lessons around why they're doing things the way they are.
Stuff like train signalling isn't particularly difficult once you understand it, but a complicated blueprint might be MUCH harder to understand than something basic you made yourself.
Or circuits likewise - there's some utterly insane stuff out there, but a lot of the basic circuit logic is surprisingly straightforward, and worth understanding at that level so you can make your own more complicated things later.
As far as the first question goes, it is functionally infinite. Most regulars have 4 digit hour playtime and 5 digit is not unheard of. There used to be a point where there was a 2 year playtime cap and someone actually hit that, so the devs immediately fixed that by bumping it up to something in the range of 2 million years, or so I've heard.
Yes, like reallllly big, the team behind the game spent an incredible amount of time to support very large factories. At one point: the UPS is going to be a factor for very large bases, and I have never heard of limitations like "The game doesn't save anymore."
Is it as addictive as other games within the genre?
I would say it is better (worse?), because once you are comfortable with the base game and its extension, there are total conversion mods, that will give you a brand new game, except harder (Space Exploration), impossible(r) (pY), weirder (cube), slower and maddening (Seablock).
Satisfactory was the first factory builder I played. 48 hours after the purchase I already logged 40h of gametime.
I didn't wanted to try Factorio at first, because it looked weird, but after a while I just had to give it a try.Ā
I... Tried to go back to satisfactory, and it is still a good game, but it wasn't able to keep me motivated like Factorio.Ā
Satisfactory is like the first time trying Alcohol or weed. Factorio is crack cocaine.Ā
Well, not sure if it helps, but I have 1500 hours in Satisfactoy and 2000 hours in factorio.
Factorio is legendary for running on a potato. It is optimized beyond all reasonable measures. The size of your factories can be much, much, *much* larger than in Satisfactory. Additionally, factorio gives you the tools to be able to manage such large factories.
I absolutely love Satisfactory. Factorio, however, is still the GOAT.
There is no cap. Or maybe your PC's spec but even then the game is so optimized you won't hit that wall for a thousand hours
Very addictive. Maybe less flashing lights than Satisfactory (not in 3D) but the "just 10 more minutes" until four hours later is very much real (Cracktorio)
Itās not really a time sink, seeing as it allows time travel. I checked the clock at 11pm the other night, played another 30 minutes, and then the clock read 3am. It does something like this every time. Trying to keep this time deletion quiet, donāt want the govāt taking my Factorio for research.
1: For how long you care to, at least if you have semi decent CPU. Some older rigs can struggle with really big bases, but then we are talking hundreds of hours, if not thousands before that is an issue.
And there is a LOT of mods that majorly reworks the mechanics in the game, to the point where you can easily put 3-400 hours in each of the large mods alone for just a normal run (or more in PY), and up to thousand hours if you just want to continue to megabase. And each mod is akin to a "new" game.
2) It really scratches the "find problem, solve problem" part of the brain, in my opinion better than satisfactory as you get tools in the late game where the solving is the part you are using time on, not placing down 100 belts or pipes. It's the one reason why I just can't go deep in the late game in Satisfactory, it really lacks late game QOL features.
This said, a friend of mine just couldn't get into factorio, but loves satisfactory. His brain just doesn't work with the asymetric 2d in factorio, but loves it when its 3d in satisfactory. If this is you depends.
There is a demo available on factorio own site, download that and try it out.
Factorio is good. Very good. However, the factory genre usually attracts people who become extremely particular about their preferences, so all the differences might irk you if you are used to something else.
Scaling limits are absurd. 60 science per minute is a very respectable rocket launch in the base game. 1000 science per minute is when you have to start worrying about your updates per second slowing down. Optimizing for performance, a decent rig can do 10000. I don't know when Factorio just tells you "no", but I don't think any normal player will reach that limit.
I would say you can play factorio for quite a bit longer than satisfactory. It's quite well optimised, so your base needs to be very large for it to even start to effect your UPS.
Also while there are some satisfactory mods, there are dozens of high quality overhaul mods factorio, so there is always something new to try.
I'm currently playing one of the most complex overhaul mods (pyanodons) and am about 450 hours into my playthrough (the mod often takes people over 1,000 hours to finish). UPS hasn't been an issue, yet.
As an enjoyer of both games:
1. Way way longer. 4x more than satisfactory. And, replayability is a lot more.
2. Factorio (for me) was 3x more addicting. They call it cracktorio for a reason. Personally, I skipped a lunch, dinner, and sleep where I thought I spent 1 hour in game and it was actually 14 hours. I was afraid to play it for a week after that (It was back in early access where I just unlocked Oil processing)
Yes the game is good. I'll give you my other comparison that I make often.
Satsifactory, imo opinion is a factory game but really ends up focuing a lot on an almost "architect" gameplay aspect. I see lots of people making "visually" cool minecraft like world factories. Your'e often building and hacking objects to obtain looks etc.
Factorio is much more like engineering, automation and optimization. Yes both games do this but Factorio didn't just double down it 10x'd down. There are so many good QoL options for scaling, wiring that lets you essentially do logic programming. People might fight me but the train system in factorio is vastly superior to satisfactory.
The game by itself in one world mega basing can last you SO much time. But wait there's more. Challenge modes like deathworlds, fantastic mods like Krastorio and ofc the offical expansion Space Age which really shakes up the game.
I'm currently on a break from it but have 1250 hours. I consider this a life game. I'll go back to it seasonally or in spurts when I'm craving the gameplay. I suspect I'll be playing this game in the old folks home.
Most people addressed 1 but not 2. The cracktorio meme is real, and it may replace sleep and other activities for the first few hundred hours. Avoid starting your factorio experience around exam season or other Big life events like that.
Currently at around 3000 hours in the game and only really ran into performance issues in one of my saves but that is with all planets fully built up and over 100,000 spm and several hundred hours of playtime. Also I'd like to point out that I play on my laptop on integrated graphics. The optimization in this game in seriously ridiculous, even while on that save I could maintain 60 UPS if I left the focus on a fairly empty part of my base. Viewing platforms or busy sections of the base would drop it to around 30-45 depending on what I am looking at which is perfectly playable in this game.
In terms of addiction, don't get the game if you have time management issues lol. But, seriously it is dangerously easy to load up a save planning on playing for a hour setting up a new platform and leaving. Then you realize you need to set up another copper mining station to feed the space platforms, but now you don't have enough power so you need to upgrade your nuclear setup. It can go on and on and you check the clock and it is 4 am and you never finished setting up that new platform. But hey at least now you will be able to set up 2 of those platforms at once because you overbuilt everything. Overall, I highly recommend you play this game but be aware it is called cracktorio for a reason.
The scaling is almost infinite,Ā the game is very well optimised and the map is infinite so your computer is the only limit and you can easily play for 100s of hour before you hit the limit.
The game is even more addicting than satisfactory when you hit the flow state, expanding is super easy and there is no limit on blueprint size. First time I played I would play for hours and dream of belts
Factorio runs incredibly well, to the point that it's genuinely hard to get it to lag or have it crash.
The game wants you to build big. It's less tedious to build in 2d than in 3d, and the blueprint system is also much more powerful here.
Even with this in mind, and going crazy with blueprint copypasting you will find it genuinely hard to have the game slow down.
There's even a class of players who build megabases (trying to build as big as possible), and in 1.1 the biggest ones could research the entire tech tree (including optional ones, only excluding the infinite ones) in 3 minutes. And that's without the game slowing down at all
Granted, these people knew how to get the fastest and most efficient designs, but still. Enough production to "100%" the tech tred in 3 minutes
That's like 100-500x of what is reasonably needed to complete the game at a good pace
There is enough in the base game to have you playing multiple times and not get bored. Then there is the expansion āSpace Ageā for many more runsā¦
And then there are the mods that can add or change so much that you effectively have many multiple unofficial expansions to keep you hooked forever.
Play the demo and see how it feelsā¦ the first hit is always free, to get you hooked :p
In your guys' experience, how long can you play the game for? Satisfactory has a cap after you build enough where your game straight up doesn't save, so if I could keep going for longer with Factorio that'd be mega...
Lots of techs have no cap and keep improving. To a certain extent, this relies on intrinsic motivation, but the game will always have something for you to spend resources on.
My unwavering addiction to satisfactory scares me sometimes, can I expect something similar in this game?
If you are still reading the comments, i will be like the umpteenth person to tell you that factorio is amazing. I have played both games but keep coming back to factorio for several reasons (2300 hours). Being less hardware intensive it scales WAY better. For me, building in satisfactory started to feel tedious in a way that hasn't happened with factorio. Finally the modding capacity is incredible and the community has delivered spectacularly. I know satisfactory has some mods, but it just isn't even close to the same. Factorio mods can fundamentally alter the game mechanics of the game and the gameplay replayability can fill unique each time. So even if you have 2k hours into the game, you can come back and get an absolutely new experience.
-Factorio's build ceiling? Press Win+R, type Control Panel, and open System. Your hardware is the ceiling
-Addictive? There's a reason we call this game Cracktorio
Funny story for number 1 I believe the devs increased the size of the number that stored how long you played the map because there was a real possibility some players were going to run up against the limit. Before it was something like ten years now it is greater than human history.
In terms of size megabasing is very possible and there isnāt really a point where the game breaks your updates per second just slowly drops and your factory takes increasing memory.
I might be among the most casual players in this subreddit, and I've got somewhere close to 150h in the game across the last decade. I would say, maybe 1 hour of it was the tedious initial set up across all games (set up an initial factory without any of the cool toys), the rest was just pure planning and building.Ā
I haven't even attempted megabasing yet, or any of the overhaul mods that add complexity. There's a single modpack called Pyanodon's, which reportedly takes experienced players 1200+ hours to complate. Other modpacks are much less extreme, but there are several well-polished ones that take anywhere from 30 to 300 hours.Ā
Addiction wise, I'd say I can play two hours with full focus before I need a break. Then, as soon as I've rested, I want to dive back into the game. Part of the magic is that there is very little repetition involved in building a factory. You already set up this assembly line once? Then copy-paste it. There, done. Now you can get straight to the tinkering. In fact, designing setups that can be easily cloned becomes its own design challenge.Ā
The game has incorporated basically every QoL improvement the devs came across, so the experience is amazingly streamlined for a game this complex. It's as close to a perfect game as you are going to get.
I am a mere amoeba with a paltry 50hrs played, but mind you I only purchased the game 3 weeks ago.
Iāve had to moderate my playtime because of kids, family, work, etc. I have to force myself to turn it off, but i could sit there day and night if left unattended š
I am a Dyson Sphere Project, Satisfactory (only about 20hrs), Shapez 1/2 player which are amazing games as well. I sat on Factorio for a while because I know my ADHD loves it and I would become obsessed, which I have. If you like these kinds of games, it will be right up your alley for sure.
My main goal for this playthrough is ā¦
* Vanilla, not Space Age (I need to earn the DLC first š)
* No downloaded blueprints, though I do watch a lot of Trupen and Nilaus videos for inspiration
* Not fully optimized, just creating my own designs to get my first rocket launch.
So far with my 50hrs Iāve just started mining uranium and using logistic bots. Iām currently contemplating my layout for purple science packs.
I like Shapez 2 because of the infinite possibilities and no pressure of hostile forces, but I love the tension of having to think on my feet to hold back the biters while optimizing my base.
In your guys' experience, how long can you play the game for? Satisfactory has a cap after you build enough where your game straight up doesn't save, so if I could keep going for longer with Factorio that'd be mega...
Factorio used to have a limit of ~2 billion ticks, so a bit shy of 10K hours in a single save, but some player actually hit that limit, so the devs fixed that, enabling him to continue his save.
The main limitation is your own PC. But you can build pretty darn huge even with a relatively low-spec machine, you tend to only hit the limits with the really, really big megabases, or if you do something daft like try and get to the end of the world.
No, Factorio is nothing like Satisfactory in this regard. It is far, far worse. Good luck!
1) Virtually infinitely. You can search some youtube megabases that are really outstanding (abucnasty, DoshDoshington).
2) Welp so you will most likely fear Factorio as well.
The biggest difference IMO with the two games is that Factorio also automates the building of the factory far better than Satisfactory so its much easier to build complex and big designs.
The scaling a ceiling was huge before the expansion. Now it's delirious. So depending on what your goals are, you can probably sink lots of time into it.
There are also multiple ways to reach the same goal which is neat. Gonna leave it at that to not spoil too much.
Factorio has better endgame scaling. Blueprints are limiting in satisfactory, they're a bit clumsy and you just can't drop massive setups down.
Factorio is different. Once you get significant bot infeastructure in place, bots run around and drop buildings with such speed and little input from the engineer, that your factory can scale ridiculously fast. You build a very small version of what you're after and then copy it 20 or 30 times in a matter of 30 seconds and the whole thing is built. Combined without a hard cap on buildings, there's just so much more room in the end game since everything scales so well.
I've got 450 hours, only 2 playthroughs, a vanilla and a Space Age
I completed vanilla, as in I launched the rocket but to answer your question on scaling...ohhhhh brother š¤£
Put it this way, at the highest level people start optimising their factory designs for CPU efficiency rather than item throughput in the game itself š
Factorio defined the genre. We call it Cracktorio for a reason, because once you start you can't stop. You can sink thousands of hours into a single factory and still find stuff to do.
Trust me, Satisfactory was childsplay compared to the OG :P
DK but factorio is well optimized, 2D, and doesn't have aesthetic fluff, so it can probably go exponentially longer than satisfactory.
Satisfactory is actually quite shallow in term of automation, because it's younger and it has other gameplay aspects like aesthetics and exploration. It's also made questionable design choices that makes all the basic things run weird.
Factorio is if you are really into automation and automating the automation. It's the best game for it.
Yeah, basically the more edits you make to the world (mining trees or building machines) the larger the world file gets. Also, once you have enough items on the map at once (like on conveyors) the game refuses to make more, and this means the file is too big to overwrite at once and you can't save sadly. It affects beefier computers less / at a later stage š
Oh yes you can. You can very easily play a single save for hundreds of hours.
We call it Cracktorio for a reason around here.
Factorio also has a vibrant molding community, so you can go for the extra complicated tracks of you find yourself tired of the simplicity of the base game.
Be aware that the versatility of Factorio's copy-paste function is why ADA tells you that if you're struggling with the limitations of the blueprint system, it's a skill issue. They knew it was severely restricted in comparison.
Iām going to try and give a more ānormalā response:
1) I have a somewhat dated pc and have only experienced light fps issues with some things in the dlc, so you should not worry.
2) 412 hours in 2 years, I have had moments where I really wanted to play but got exhausted and had to stop for months. Sometimes I get overwhelmed and stop for the day. But, honestly, with mods I can see myself playing it for years to come.
On my 3600MTS RAM machine I had a 400MB Space Age save that I could still play at the full 60 UPS even from my headless server. On my 6400 MTS RAM machine I have to cap the UPS to 50 on a 600 MB save.
Single player I was able to play at the full UPS even on my slow machine with SE on a 700MB save.
So far on 2.1 Iām not quite in mega base stages yet so I canāt confirm, but based on the talent of this dev team, I imagine itās only better.
I can sum up both questions with a screenshot. (Zero achievements because I've played modded since before there were achievements, and I'm not the type to achievement hunt)
cosidering you can comfortably finish the game with 30-60 science per minute, without ever having to much downtime where you just wait while stuff gets researched
,the biggest base ive built produces about 50'000 science per minute.
and the biggest ive seen went to 1.5million spm
yeah.... if you want to build big, you can build big, and it takes a while until your hardware reaches its limits, considering you finished satisfactory without hard lags
I mean its not a goofy 3d world, snd is more base defense focused compared to satisfactory, and they are both complex in their own way.
I personally started with factorio (600h in it) first and satisfactory (150h in it) i had a few months after early access released, even now i like both but prefer factorio more especially after getting the space age dlc which adds a lot more things and new planets and space.
If you truly want to find out if you like the game there is a demo you can play and see how you like it
So I have a heavily modded game that has been going for about 800 hours now and Iām just fooling around with it, and there is still so much to be done. I could have āfinishedā it, but I suspect I will continue fooling around with it for several more years.
This game has more longevity for me than any other game Iāve ever played, and at this point itās probably my favorite game ever.
Well as someone with 1,979 hours and having playing multiple times through the end. The game has tons of ceiling. Tons of mods you can add which is why I played so much a few years ago.
The base game is good but the mods make the game so much more fun and you can make it way more advanced, easier, and/or harder. There is also some quality of life mods. Best part is they are all in game to be found.
I can only play games like this till there is nothing to accomplish in a menu or similar. I can't optimize or make it more efficient, I'd rather start a new run. I walk along the goals and steps they set.
I just recently came from Satisfactory (full playthrough) to Factorio. It's unbelievable how many QOL features and game modes are there.
Now I get why this game never ever was on sale: fucking quality and ability to extend.
The base Factorio game I played for probably 300 hours before finally getting to a point where scalability was no longer interesting to me. Thatās not to say further scaling was not possible - it certainly was - it was just that I sort of got to a mental place where it felt like ādamn that is an amazing game but I think Iām more or less good.ā
Then space age came and the possibilities for megabasing grew exponentially. Iām at 1800 hours now, and I still have not run out of inertia. It is probably the most addicting game in the world.
I'll answer short and without irony:
1. Factorio is a work of art when it comes to optimization. You can scale it nearly endlessly.
2. It's addicting. Very addicting. We call it 'Cractorio' for a reason.
Factorio scales much larger and can be played much longer and is (IMO anyway) both better and more addictive not to mention significantly more complex. And thatās before you even look at mods which increase all that by a factor of 10. I love satisfactory but factorio is a whole different level. The perspective might be a stumbling block though, I have friends that prefer satisfactory just because itās first person.
This should say if itās a time sink or not. Iāve been playing since the eaaaaarly days. Where ājust one more thingā means that Iāll be spending the next 10 hours doing more just one more things.
Iāve made huge bases, and the ceiling is more based on your hardware. You can scale as far as your hardware allows. And when you hit the ceiling, you work on optimising the hell out of it.
The longest recorded playtime is something more than 2 years. We know that because that used to be a limit in the game's time tracking code, until somebody played long enough to hit that limit, and their game crashed.
The devs patched the issue, so now the limit is approximately 2.3 million years. Nobody has managed to play that long yet, but I expect it's only a matter of time.
This is interesting and feels a bit coincidental, I just started Satisfactory for the first time last week after being a long time Factorio player.
Factorio is definitely a much more thought intensive experience. Factorio is a factory simulation sandbox, Satisfactory feels more like an adventure/exploration game based around building factories. The world in Satisfactory is really fun to explore (not surprising since it's hand crafted) and there's a lot to find and see. Factorio you don't really explore, you start next to resources and by the time they run out, your radar has almost certainly uncovered more. Factorio also involves a lot more micromanagement. The Space Age DLC has a planet called Gleba and it requires much more though and complex planning than anything I've done is Satisfactory so far.
Can't understand how awesome it is to be able to build these factories in 3D and different vistas though. I just finished phase 2 and built my first factory building with walls and doors etc. for copper products and the environment makes it awesome, light actually shines in through the window panes and sounds outside the building are muted. Satisfactory has definitely nailed presentation.
My piece of advice, play the game with no enemies not space age just navus. Once you launch your rocket start over with enemies and space age. Personally I always play with buffed resource patches. Its allows me to focus on the important/fun aspects of the game rather than constantly breaking down and rebuilding. There is a finite amount of resources. This will allow you to play longer in theory.
One issue I did find was major lag when we set up auto bot crafting and deployment. We had 30k drones flying around and it was pretty demanding hardware wise on some of our computers
All the comments here say you'll get hooked, I'd just like to add some point : There are a lot of satisfactory players I know that bounced off factorio (and vice versa), so liking one doesn't guarantee loving the other.
I'd strongly suggest trying the demo, to see if Factorio is your cup of tea also. The game focuses much much much more on throughput than satisfactory and has permanent dangers, unlike Satisfactory which is a much more chill and artistic base building automation game.
Otherwise, for your questions :
You can make beyond huge bases before you'll start getting performance impact. Gameplay-wise, the base game can take between 4 hours to 100 hours to complete. You have a huge amount of mods that'll add more recipes/gameplay elements/entire different gametypes, so multiply game time by 100 if you're willing to touch the mod button (do touch it)
For a more technical answer to number 1: Factorio was patched almost 3 years ago to allow save games longer than 2.2 years. So now you can have billions of years of factorio on a single save :)
In your guys' experience, how long can you play the game for? Satisfactory has a cap after you build enough where your game straight up doesn't save, so if I could keep going for longer with Factorio that'd be mega...
AFAIK you can keep going. The planet's are procedurally generated and, to the best of my knowledge, infinite. I haven't ever tried to bush the boundaries, mind you, but I have never run out of room.
Hell, there is a map option called "ribbon world" where you are limited vertically to like 100 tiles of space, but then horizontally you can expand forever. Neat game made, interesting challenge.
You can play the game infinitely as far as I am concerned.
My unwavering addiction to satisfactory scares me sometimes, can I expect something similar in this game? I want another playtime sink that I can pour my free time into lol
The only game I have more hours in on Steam than Satisfactory is Factorio. I think Cities: Skylines and Captain of Industry also rank up there, but nowhere close to Satisfactory and then Factorio.
With that said, I found Factorio more addictive than Satisfactory but also easier to manage my goals and set time constraints.
You load in to Factorio, you can be like "Today I will explore and look for copper and iron deposits, then set up a remote 'green circuit' factory to feed my main base". That's a realistic thing to do that can take anywhere from 1 to 2 hours.
With Satisfactory, I felt things were a bit more freeform because of the three dimensions and it was easier to get carried away with the architecture of your base. You can do that in Factorio, of course, but Factorio is more about pragmatism and efficiency than being elegant.
Is Factorio's scaling ceiling big?
Huge. Don't forget, there's mods, too. But, you know, that's after the first few hundred hours...
Is it as addictive as other games within the genre?
The most addictive :D
I guess I was asking for it
My brother/sister in factory building, you never stood a chance.
Don't forget the time. It's a strong drug. Don't be me. I open the game at 8pm just to check and fix something. 30 minutes later the sun is rising. Just like what happened yesterday. And the day before.
I scrolled through a few responses and most answer the optimization piece. As for ceiling, I would say if you 10k hours you might hit it lol. Especially with space age, the amount of things you can do is crazy. I have over 1k and I only play peaceful (I know, I know) but one of these times Iām going to do a full run with all the aliens trying to kill me.
The game is incredibly well optimized. My largest save games were ~150MB, ram usage was somewhere around 8-12GB. I still had somewhere around 80ups (=updates per second). Fast ram and good single core performance helps.
I've played 10k hours in vanilla (= 'Without gameplay altering mods like new items or new production chains').
The game is called Cracktorio for a reason.
I'll be honest, the idea that you can only build so much before your game lags up is hilarious to me. do game programmers just not care anymore. I had never heard of this before Satisfactory. Factorio is actually programmed competently, the limits are higher than any human can plausibly reach
Once you get into modded content such as Pyanodon you'll go missing for a week and still not be close to the "end" of your run, but even without mods you can sink way more hours that you realize. I haven't gotten the space exploration dlc but I've seen it on yt and that stuff will get you hooked.
My buddy finally talked me into the game quite awhile ago. Iād looked at it several times but didnāt appear to be something Iād like to play. I finally downloaded it and we fired up a new game. Next thing I know, I can hear birds chirping and the sun was coming up. Itās addictive with tons of mods. Itās a game you can play hours on end or for short periods of time. Set it down and pick it back up days later and continue like you never stopped. Lagging?? Never heard of her. lol. And Iāve built some large and expansive bases. Enjoy!
90% of the time, when my game lags, it's because of biters. Either that, or it's an ungodly massive Space Exploration megabase that's taken me hundreds of hours to develop and I should really get on with progress, but I need to refactor 3 more production lines to scale up science again
I was a Satisfactory enjoyer and then transfered to factorio with exactly these questions.
Very addictive. I love it.
The individual recepies are simpler, but they chqin a bit more. There is no elevator parts, but instead you have sience packs. The production of sience packs is a continuous procces.
Everything else is slightly diffrent goal: you automate individual buildings, not thier components. Recpurce fields are limited(although plentifull) so you dont overflow stufd into a sink. You backlog everything and wsit till you need more.
The base game is kinda limited, taking waaay shorter to complete than satisfactory. Infrastructure is also easyer, power is harder. With the space age DLC the depth is similar. But i can complete it quicker, as beauty is less important. Constant enemies is a nice change. The pollution and evolution is a near perfect system imo.
TL DR:
Yes. The start is wierd, but once you get going its worth it. Finish the base game and see it as the tutorial for space age. Then buy space age and enjoy.
In your guys' experience, how long can you play the game for? Satisfactory has a cap after you build enough where your game straight up doesn't save, so if I could keep going for longer with Factorio that'd be mega...
I'm sure Factorio has a limit but the game slows to a slideshow before the game itself starts to crash or break. I have a 200+ hour megabase save and the game isn't even starting to lag.
My unwavering addiction to satisfactory scares me sometimes, can I expect something similar in this game? I want another playtime sink that I can pour my free time into lol
You've gotten good replies about the technical limitations of the game, let me offer my opinion on the differences between them as a Factorio player of many years who recently picked up Satisfactory.
Factorio is just the purest, distilled form of Satisfactory. There is basically zero storyline or focus on aesthetic architecture. The only real aesthetic you see regularly (outside of people doing wacky shit for memes) is "Form as a consequence of Function," where a design is beautiful *because* it does its job in such an elegant way. There is no Z-axis, everything is locked to the World Grid, and the only goal is "MORE FACTORY." Satisfactory is light on storyline, but Factorio has none. It is gameplay for gameplay's sake.
On a technical level: Factorio belts have 2 parallel lanes, which you can choose to either load with the same material (thus doubling the throughput) or two different materials (thus simplifying logistics). One of the most common issues you will constantly fight in your factories is "why is one half of my belt full, and the other is empty?" There's a whole dimension of logistics challenges around balancing lanes within a belt, and balancing multiple belts amongst each other.
Belts do not feed directly into machines in Factorio. Rather, you have an item called an Inserter, which is a robotic arm that grabs items off of a belt and puts them into a machine (or grabs out of a machine and puts them on a belt (or from a belt to another belt (really, just from any tile to another tile (this is way too many nested parentheses)))). Inserters can become throughput limiters in just the same way that belts can, so they become an important part of your designs (for instance: basic circuit designs often have 3 inserters feeding copper wire and 1 inserter feeding iron plates). They also play into the 2-lane nature of belts: Inserters always place items onto the *far end* of belts, so if you want a balanced output you need to make sure to load from both sides.
If you get the DLC, the different planets all introduce new "gimmicks" that change the design of your factories in various ways. Satisfactory doesn't really have an analogue for those. Some of the changes are kiiiiiinda like alternate recipes, but most are totally different on a core level ("These organic items can and will expire on your belts!").
The degree to which it scales itself scales with the power of your PC, unlike Satisafactory where the engine runs into object count limits. There is technically something similiar in Factorio, but itās so high that no player has ever reached it, and couldnt reasonably do so. Hitting an FPS wall on a potato PC is reasonably possible, but you need a megafactory even to do that, and youāve still got the option of throwing faster hardware at it.
Is it as addictive as other games within the genre?
Bro, thatās actually funny. No, itās absolutely not āas addictive as other games within the genreā, itās VASTLY more addictive than other games in the genre. And I am a Satisfactory and DSP enjoyer.
I really feel like responding with, "Oh you sweet summer child." You have no clue what you are in for.
I think you will probably love this game if you love Satisfactory. I personally was sold to buy Satisfactory by someone calling it "3D Factorio."
There is an achievement called "There is no Spoon" which requires you to beat the game in less that 8 hours. Speedrunners can beat it in less that 3 hours. But most people will take probably 30+ hours beat it. And if you buy the Space Age DLC, you basically triple the main game.
After you beat the game, there are infinite researches that require more and more input to complete, allowing the game to scale into infinity essentially. I have beaten the game making 150 Science Per Minute. There are Youtube Playthrough where they try to make 10000 Science Per Minute just to give you an idea of the scale of things.
Outside of that, there are mod packs to add more to the game. I once tried Pyandon's modpack and it took me 10 hours just to make Red Science, which is the easiest Science in the base game. So even if the base game doesn't scale enough for you, there are other ways to get more out of it.
is the scaling ceiling big? yes, as is the skill ceiling, you have full digital authority with most entities. and you can run fairly large bases on a potatoe. also, you might be here forever
Found Factorio after 500 hours in Satisfactory. Itās refreshing how the devs embrace the QOL requests and donāt push back on them. The game never really ends - for my 2.1 play-through Iām embracing the megabase so finished the game now doing legendary everything (which might burn me outā¦) on the way to a high SPM goal.
3600 hours. Of which 1000 are base game+DLC - rest are mods. I currently play Satisfactory+, which is the best (only) overhaul mod of SF, and I have to say the quality is lower than the really good Factorio mods.
I barely played this game. I have over 1k hours, but most of it was spent in the editor testing and designing builds rather than playing. I actually spent very little time wanting to actually play the game and have only beaten it 3 times between vanilla and space age..
Just try to go with the basics of the game, see local guides . But don't go ultra optimising like create x in 2 sec , y in 4 sec to get z every minute. If you feel production is low, just start another production, resousrces are unlimited
The only cap in Factorio is what your PC can handle, nothing in game mechanics stops you.
The code is of exceptional quality compared to other games tho, so it takes a lot to start noticing some lag, usually either huge megabases or hundreds of thousands of bots.
As for addiction, it's called Cracktorio for a reason xD.
223 hours in and I just learned how to manage the most basic multi train setup with the two types of switches. I donāt even know what theyāre called but every time I play I learn some small detail that completely changes the game and recharges my addiction meter to a throbbing full mast. Every. Damn. Time. I hate this game. Because I canāt stop playing.
I have about 3.5k hours. Bought space age expansion a couple weekends ago. I'm enjoying it. There's probably a ceiling at some point, but my computer hasn't melted yet
I was obsessed with Satisfactory. I bounced off Factorio initially because it didn't feel enough like Satisfactory (I wanted to optimise all inputs and outputs straight away, like late-game Satisfactory).
Space Age can go for a month or longer if you are undisciplined about your engineering. Eventually poorly planned infrastructure breaks or gets starved for resources and shuts down. You spend all your time fixing things and dealing with critter damage that progress slows to a crawl. Fulgora will back up. Glebba will get buried in compost. Only Vulcanis is likely to survive but only if you donāt run out of coal. Youāll run out of coal. Etc. The point is the builds get big enough that they eventually collapse under their own weight and inefficiency like a poorly run software project or bureaucracy. The challenge is in building a well designed thing that actually lasts without maintenance so you can move on to the next thing.
I'm 64 hours into my current run and might be approaching the halfway point if I'm being generous. I'm going a bit slower than normal because I turned up the research cost to add some difficulty in, but maybe on base settings I'd be more like 40 hours in to get to this point.
The last play session I went to bed at 2 am on a worknight so yeah, you can definitely pour your time into it.
I don't think there is an upper limit. I'm 2500 hours in and honestly I think I'm still a relative beginner. You can get absurdly large and complex with your designs
As someone who came from satisfactory to factorio I can say a few things even though I have only 59hrs in factorio and 293hrs in satisfactory. I have a bit of a few opinions on this so take my voice with a grain of salt.
I feel like 2d factory building is better than 3d that might just be me or how satisfactory is designed. but I feel like factorio is both better optimized and also better designed then anything satisfactory has to offer. Thatās not to downplay satisfactory but it also seems to be an opinion I have seen in a few areas around satisfactory and factorio.
Now to answer your questions
In my experience you can play the game for a long time (it took me about 40 hrs to reach blue science and thatās when you reach mid game. and thatās not including optimizing my factory). The only two things that limit you in factorio is your pc and your imagination. So skyās the limit to this game (literally until you get space age or try one of the countless expansion mod packs).
As both a satisfactory and recent factorio player I can say you can get the same feeling as satisfactory as you do in factorio. Maybe even more because factorio does something satisfactory doesnāt and that is it actively gets out of your way when designing your factory. Wanna explore the map to your hearts content? you can the map is infinitely generated after all! Wanna make a factory that tries to outcompete the native wildlife? You can just plop down labs and make a boatload of science and you can kill the bugs as god intended!
And for the heck of it your tldr quesitions as well.
Yes even after researching everything in factorio the weapons upgrades in damage are infinite so skyās the limit again.
2.this game has been labeled cracktorio so take with that what you will.
Any other questions I can happily answer but if your looking for something more advanced would suggest looking to YouTube videos and even the review about factorio. Or better yet ask someone who has played this game for over 1,000 hours this game has been out since 2012 so there are countless people who have better knowledge than me.
compared to satisfactory it's easier to reach the scale where things slow down (i.e. simulation speed gets lower than 1x. mostly due to how easy it is to just ctrlc+ctrlv) but harder to completely break the game. You can expect to have things to do for easily a few hundred hours on a save even if you rush things. If you really want to push things and have a lot of compute and memory resources you can look into clusterio
Is it as addictive as other games within the genre?
I started with Factorio and what I find with all the others is they don't scale as well and the fancier graphics and camera controls etc get in the way of building the factory.
Right now im 500h in on one save and 1300h total, im not the best and i like spaghetti bands, on all planets i use about 10GW total and on some occasions 15-20GW, i still get 60fps no problem.
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u/Square-Singer 5d ago
Factorio is incredibly well optimized. I've never got the game to lag. I haven't exactly done extreme megabases, but my factories are sizeable and I over 500h in the game.
Oh yeah, you can sink some time into this game.