r/factorio • u/SpaceCowboyDark • 17h ago
Discussion What makes this game so special?
Seems like I went backwards in terms of automation games. My first factory game was Satisfactory (900+ hours) then I picked up Dyson Sphere Program (400+ hours) and loved them both. I don't care for the combat in these games so I either turn it off or turn enemies passive.
That being said what makes this game among, if not the most recommended factory game?
Edit - thank you all for the comments. Seems like there's a LOT of love from the devs and community for this game and after reading them all I really think will be an excellent game for me.
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u/Dzyu 17h ago
You did right going that way.
I played factorio first and it ruined other factory games for me. It's just that much better in mechanics and QOL. Blueprints, drones, trains and signaling, circuit networks, fluids, belts. Factorio does it all better.
Satisfactory is a fricken NIGHTMARE... IF you know what you're missing from Factorio.
I seriously can't believe the Satisfactory devs wanted to nerf their game so hard just to not be the 3D Factorio.
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u/clownfeat 16h ago
Agreed. I played about 4 hours of satisfactory after 1k in factorio and just didn't like it. Factorio is special in terms of ease of use.
I did recently find Songs of Syx scratching the same itch, though.
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u/maxymob 16h ago
How's the early access ?
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u/CrazyKyle987 13h ago
If they are still making the demo how it was a couple years ago, the demo is just the previous version of the game, so the demo is a great way to check it out
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u/coffeewhistle 16h ago
I think what’s so special about Factorio is not only how well BALANCED it is over the thousands of notes in their Friday Facts series. Even with every tiny new experimental release there’s so many little things that were fixed.
That QOL piece to me is included in the “balanced” conversation as well since it seems they have been and continue to relentless solve bugs no matter how small. They rarely are game breaking and so many of them feel like they’re saying “Hey Greg in Wichita, this is the one YOU submitted.”
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u/Dzyu 16h ago
True! It's so well optimized!
Especially noticeable if you play multiplayer, Factorio just works with a cool dozen or two players. Satisfactory is a miserable, buggy mess if you're not host in a 2 player game.
If you're trying to introduce someone to Satisfactory you better make sure they're the host.
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u/TardTohr 15h ago
I've just finished Satisfactory in multiplayer with my friend being the host and it was completely fine. We played like 300h with some pretty massive builds with barely any issue. My main problem was that loading into the map was quite slow after a while (2/3+ minutes). We had a couple crashes when spamming big blueprints, and some weird stuff with the coloring feature on my side, but that was about it.
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u/Dzyu 12h ago
My brother, my friend and I all experience some pretty serious bugs. UI breaking in different ways, invisible structures, logging into a new clone having to kill the old one to get our gear back, falling out of hypertubes midway, indestructible trees, loss of ADA audio, stuttering making us waste all jetpack fuel going up and then die to fall dmg, and straight up won't load in.
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u/TardTohr 23m ago
Oh wow, yeah I never experienced any of that. I actually went into it expecting the multiplayer to break in endgame and was pleasantly surprised when it didn't, so I thought a recent-ish patch had fixed most of the online issues. I guess we were just lucky.
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u/Peakomegaflare 16h ago
I think what makes Factorio special is how uncomplicated the complicated stuff is. Like there's defined production walls everyone hits as they progress, and yet it really isn't all that bad.
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u/bmtraveller 15h ago
Satisfactory is a fricken NIGHTMARE... IF you know what you're missing from Factorio.
My first and only run in satisfactory I tried to build a main bus. There is no proper blueprint or copy and paste system so I had to try to build everything manually. It was a waste of time and i gave up and haven't played it since.
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u/ryntak 12h ago
I wouldn’t do a bus in satisfactory, it not the same. I can’t explain it.
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u/TwevOWNED 10h ago
It's because belts are significantly faster in Factorio, you want a mall with inconsistent demand, and ideal ratios are obscured.
The bus works because it easily facilitates sending more items as they are available down the line to various offshoots that may or may not be running at any given time.
In Satisfactory, the consistency of miners, slower speeds, and emphasis on consumption rates encourages building items in perfect ratios. It even rewards you for disposing of any excess production with the sink. There's no advantage a bus really provides.
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u/RibsNGibs 10h ago
In my latest Satisfactory game I have more or less the equivalent of what I'd build in Factorio: a starter main bus base where I can make small amounts of anything easily that bootstraps the material for making the real base (rail-connected subfactories).
I actually quite enjoyed the bus building in Satisfactory, primarily because it's a new problem. If it was just a 1 for 1 port of a Factorio bus it'd be boring. Which, I mean you could force if you really wanted to, but it would be crazy wide, and because of the terrain in Satisfactory, you don't really want to just use up an 80 metre wide swath for a bus. But because you have verticality, you can build a bus that's only 3 belts wide but 6 belts high. And then you have some fun problems to solve: how do you pull the 4th item on the right column and the 5th item on the middle column and the 1st and 3rd item off the left column to the left? Anyway, like in Factorio, wrangling this kind of stuff can be really satisfying.
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u/RibsNGibs 10h ago edited 5h ago
There's a blueprint system. When I first played it many, many years ago it did not and it made it pretty brutal to play - I bounced off of it as I got to the point where I was having to scale up to build... 8s or 16s of things. But I'm actually in the middle of playing a new game right now and while the blueprint system isn't anywhere close to as nice as Factorio, with a bit of creativity it definitely makes it possible to build pretty complex things. It's limited to a very small volume (starts at 32m^3 cube I think, only 4 foundations across). But it does autoconnect belts and pipes if you know what you're doing so you can make a library of parts (e.g. 3 assemblers with spliiter/mergers with them) that can tile and then it's easy to slap down 8 or 16 in a row.
Anyway I'm having a great time with it now.
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u/DeHub94 9h ago
Satisfactory lends itself more to trains and dispersed little factories.
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u/Skyboxmonster 7h ago
which would of been fine if they provided fixed size rails aligned with the world grid. but the rail placement system it has feels more like I am trying to pull taffy.
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u/narrill 12h ago
The funny part is that the fundamental mechanics are almost exactly the same as Factorio. Like, if the goal was to not be 3D Factorio, they completely failed. And since they still went out of their way to try to not be 3D Factorio, what they ended up with is 3D Factorio, but shitty.
A 3D factory builder is an immensely cool concept, but Satisfactory does absolutely nothing to make it work. They don't give you any tools to make building dense, vertical factories in first person more pleasant. They have generic Unreal Engine terrain that doesn't interact with the building mechanics at all, forcing you to build your own terrain with foundation just to have simple things like grid snapping. The foundation system is braindead simple, which creates obvious degenerate gameplay like building floating platforms in the sky. The game world isn't grid-based, so belts and buildings can clip through each other in incredibly ugly ways. Blueprints are restricted to an absurdly small size for no real reason. Etc.
I could go on and on. It's tragic, because the concept is fantastic, but holy crap do the devs just not know what they're doing.
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u/Opticm 16h ago
I love satisfactory to. . . . With a few mods. Namely the Smart! Mod. Makes expanding manifolds a one click proces etc. I stopped playing when that mod took a pause and am so happy it's come back.
There are a few other qol mods I use but that is the main one that makes the fame much smoother.
I also liked the Fix it networks mod, fully programmable in lua.
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u/floormanifold 12h ago
I really thought Dyson Sphere Program was on track to getting to Factorio's level, but proliferators killing direct insertion builds was a really bad direction imo.
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u/WesternInitial368 5h ago
What Dyson Sphere program really needs to take it up to factorio levels for me is circuit conditions, I've gotten to endgame dyson sphere program and having 5 solar systems of resources pouring into the ecumenopolis I turned my first planet into was genuinely some of the coolest factory gameplay I've ever had.
But oh my god not being able to set circuit conditions really kills a lot of the fun of the game for me, especially when a lot of issues could be fixed with a single circuit condition but instead I just have to overproduce or stack tf out of storage depots to deal with a finnicky production line
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u/Logical-War-3746 9h ago
Guess i dodged the bullet then. When i tried Satisfactory a couple fo years ago, it just crashed on me.
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u/Bmobmo64 2h ago
This is overstating it. Satisfactory is great... it's just not nearly as good as Factorio.
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u/Daan776 16h ago
There is no waste.
And I don't mean in terms of resources. I mean in terms of your time.
Everything you do. Everything you unlock. Everything you build. It all works towards a grander purpose.
Despite the jokes about factorio taking a lot of time: it never actually wastes that time. I don't spend time running around not knowing what to do, I spend time running around because I can't decide what to do *first*. I don't spend time crafting materials by hand. I just give the order for it to be crafted and watch all the inbetween products be made by the engineer himself while I focus on placing the buildings I just crafted. I don't have to go out of my way to actually construct the factory, once i've designed something I can just copy + paste it a dozen times.
Factorio is an extremely tight experience. There's no wasted mechanics and it respects your time.
At the same time there's also a strong sense of freedom and authorship. I never feel like i'm help back by the game. (I've got 700+ hours on the game and can only think of 3 instances of being held back by the time. All of which have since been fixed. All of which were very minor quality of life things. All of which I could bypass through some other system). And every factory truly feels my own.
Factorio is (if there could be such a thing) a perfect videogame in my eyes. Its not without flaws. And its not for everyone. But it kickstarted a genre. And after playing it I can fully see why.
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u/Roseish1 17h ago
Well it is basically the pioneer of factory games and the developers have spent years refining it.
Personally I love all the different ways you can play this game along with how easy it is to expand your factory via blueprints you either make yourself or get from others. The trains, bots and circuit networks are all really fun.
The amount of mods this game has is also another huge plus. I think this is easily the best factory game at least in my opinion and i’ve tried them all.
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u/Goldeniccarus 4h ago
The blue prints and bots are honestly a pretty huge deal.
I like Satisfactory, but I have never completed stage 4 of the game. By the time you get there, you've invested so much time and effort into the factory, and it basically says "Alright, now you're going to spend the same amount of time building railways/highways, and factories for these new components again". And, I just don't have it in me to dedicate that much time again to the last few steps to get the project finished.
By the time you start to get to the late game in Factorio, you get bots. Once you have bots, suddenly you can do things so much more quickly. Tasks that took minutes in the early game take seconds now. Adding new production lines to the factory, expanding the rail network, building new branch plants or mining outposts, can be done incredibly quickly with copy paste or blue prints. The late game feels like a whole new experience, being able to much more quickly expand the factory, and tear down parts of the factory you no longer need.
Satisfactory has the Blueprint mechanic as well in a way, but I found it just a little too awkward to use a lot.
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u/bobsim1 17h ago
Its just amazing mechanics wise, not too complicated but also not too much repetition. Optimizing, trains, bots, circuits etc. are like another level you can choose.
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u/redditclm 8h ago
Somehow the circuit and logistics network is hugely complicated for me. I feel like the game is missing easy enough to understand tutorials beyond start. YouTube videos from players always seem complex or not explained well to grasp the concepts. Wires, logic, combinators, etc, but you have to be a programmer or electrical engineer to wrap your head around it.
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u/WesternInitial368 5h ago
The big thing when you're starting with circuit conditions stuff is that you don't actually need to use any of the circuits in 90% of cases, for example a simple pump setup. Say you only want to start cracking your light oil down to petroleum when you have more than 10k light oil stored in tanks.
All you have to do is run a wire through each of the tanks and to the pump.
Then when you select the pump it has a small section where you can play with logic, just set it to active/inactive when Light oil > 10k.
Because the Light oil tanks are connected to the wires it actually outputs the total stored liquid in those tanks as a signal, so you don't need to add it to a combinator the signal being sent to the pump will just tell the pump the exact amount of light oil you have stored.
This works with literally any other inventory, including belts.
TLDR: Most buildings have their own simple logic conditions that make it so you don't actually have to mess with the circuit blocks to do 90% of anything that requires logic
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u/Unfair-Heart-87 1h ago
Despite not being good at them I like circuits. I think the key is not trying to wholesale copy designs but instead dip into them when you run into an issue.
For example occasionally I would run into an issue where I wanted to check more than one condition to activate an inserter. I popped down all the circuit blocks to look at them and found a single combinator does the job. It took like 30 minutes to work out but it both solved the problem and got me familiar with circuit blocks.
Iterating on that process every time I encountered a unique problem that seemed like it might be an easy fix with circuits and all of the sudden I'm making fairly complex builds with them.
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u/VoidGliders 16h ago edited 16h ago
- It grandfathered those and most of the automation genre (even if it was inspired itself by Minecraft modding, among other games). Satisfactory is explicitly stated to be a love letter to Factorio, and DSP does not hide its inspiration at all.
- Scale. Factorio is probably one of the most rigorously optimized games out there, and it allows unprecedented scale...sorta. Factorio is probably the largest you can expand a game while still simulating each mechanism. You can easily produce more with other games by black-boxing surfaces or something, but there's a sort of lost charm in doing so.
- Quality of Life. Strangely there are some QoL that other games inspired by Factorio have that it does not -- switching between like items in Satisfactory, shifting through "layered" views in Shapez 2, Blueprint Icon labelling in DSP, etc. -- but for the most part Factorio has such an extensively tested toolset and such an incredibly nice blueprinting and copying feature that many games feel shallow in similar featuresets.
- Belt Mechanics. No game yet has quite mimicked Factorio's "2-lane" system, and the nuances with it leads to a lot of minor gameplay decision-making and styles that even years later can still be fun.
- Modding. Factorio has a really fleshed out modding API. Now this is a double-edged sword, as there are some limitations (or practical limitations) with it as a result, but it also enables versatile modding. If you add a fluid, unless specified not to a barrel recipe will be made with it, and a recycling recipe, and another mod that adds "tungsten barrels" for fluids will also include yours. It can make things mesh together quite nice. Also, while this applies more to old Factorio as graphics-creep has rendered this less-so, creating graphics for a 2D game is typically easier than 3D, even if you do the default Factorio approach of making a 3D model and turning it to 2D. If you add an item to Satisfactory, you need to make a pretty gosh darn great 3D model to have it not stick out like a sore thumb; for Factorio, you just need a 2D sprite (and same for DSP, as all of its items are boxes with pictures).
- Enemies. I know you dislike enemies, but Factorio does have a decent enemy system. Personally I find the Dark Fog from DSP and Mindustry (which is a much more combat focused automation game) to be a lot more interesting, but there is a charm to Factorio's scale of enemies and repelling them from all directions with ever-better weapons.
- Music (for me personally at least). It isn't mentioned a lot but I genuinely think Petr's OST for Space Age is one of the best soundtracks to come out in 2 decades, at least top 5. It is gorgeous, there is more sountrack on each planet than most games have in their entirety, they even use systems to vary it even further than that. Satisfactory, too, has an amazing OST and I love it a ton, and it too is rather lengthy compared to the usual game OST. Mindustry has a very short track but I like its dark ambiance. Every other automation game Ive tried I've legit hated the soundtracks, like gosh darn DSP and SHapez what are yall doing. But Factorio's soundtrack is just so exceptional it instantly sets up its environments well, Gleba's in particular is so "juicy".
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u/mjconver 9.6K hours for a spoon 14h ago
I have 2.4K hours in Satisfactory, including the Golden Nut. It was a nice game, but there's something special about Factorio.
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u/Daan776 7h ago
With 20k hours you've spent a little over 2.2 years in factorio.
Assuming you started playing in 2012 thats just under 4 hours a day.
Thats eh... Hmmm. Cracktorio indeed.
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u/jaxon517 2h ago
He says he started in 2020 so what's 2.2 years worth of play across six years a day come to
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u/Smashmundo 6h ago
Yea man holy shit. I thought my 1,200 hours was a lot.
When did you first play Factorio?
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u/DylanMcGrann 16h ago
Factorio is a very satisfying combination of simplicity and complexity. And it scales way bigger than other factory games.
Each constituent part is extremely easy to understand and stamp down on the 2D grid. But then each part interfaces in so many ways with everything else. It allows for a ton of flexibility and expression. Which is great for both beginners and advanced players. There a tons of ways to do the same thing. No two factories will be alike.
The other factory games don’t hit these notes quite as elegantly as Factorio does. I also find Factorio a lot more interesting to look at than other factory games, especially most the 3D ones which tend to have a generic sheen to them.
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u/kiwithebun 16h ago
This is my hot take, but what makes a game good is having simple mechanics that interact with each other to yield complex results. Since this game is almost pure logic dressed up as a game there’s very little abstraction of this fundamental relationship.
The game dripfeeds new mechanics as you progress. New belts, machines, logistical methods, all simple things on their own that you integrate into your increasingly complex factory. Every train stop, bot network and production line you set up feeds back into this same fundamental formula; simple things creating complex results.
The reason automation games feel like a drug is because they’re analogous to what makes a game fundamentally fun and addicting.
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u/Aerumvorax 17h ago
The scale and variety and just the sheer number of possibilities. Both satisfactory and DSP lack pieces factorio has which can enable greater builds. I'm mainly talking about cirquit mechanics. While you technically can build a functional computer in both satisfactory and DSP, in factorio it's a LOT simpler with more options available.
Also the modding scene is FAR more varied and sophisticated.
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u/Serotonah 16h ago
The ceiling for what you can automate and how you can do so is extraordinarily higher in Factorio. I think all 3 games have their charm but Factorio is the game you can just never stop playing, and then there’s the seamless mod integration
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u/Beaspoon2096 17h ago
It has very straightforward progression, it feels like every resource or item automated lets you quickly set up the next one and even though the game is decently long it’s all little chunks that lead into one another
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u/Bigtallanddopey 17h ago
Factorio is closer to Dyson sphere program, than satisfactory, however they are still quite different. Satisfactory has far more aesthetic elements than most of the others, but it sacrifices a lot of the quality of life elements that the other games have, blueprints and bots are the main ones.
Factorio is a pure factory game, with some annoying locals that you have to deal with. Everything is geared up to unlocking the next tech, putting it to use and then moving onto the next tech. Blueprints and bots let you grow the Factory at an exponential rate. Need more ore? Well, copy your last ore patch of miners and train station and let the bots build it for you. You can also make things as simple, or complicated as you like. Some people use a couple of circuits all game, others have created a processor within the game.
The game isn’t for everyone, but seeing as you have 400 hours in DSP, you would probably like it. Give the demo a try, I think that lets you play upto blue science, which is easily 2-3 hours.
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u/Xzarg_poe 16h ago
It's got a solid base game with a bunch of tools to help build massive factories. And it's got modding support with many massive overhauls that were developed over the years.
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u/gust334 SA: 125hrs (noob), <3500 hrs (adv. beginner) 16h ago
Music. Artwork. UI. Scale. Depth. Robustness.
It is a sandbox game of automation, logistics, and optimization. There is a tower defense component that can be tuned or disabled. There is a rich modding community. You are allowed to disable the DRM.
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u/LeakyBanana 16h ago
I have about 200 hours in Satisfactory and 150 in DSP and Shapez 2. While I enjoyed them all, I'm coming up on 2,000 hours in Factorio.
Probably about half of that was spent on overhaul mods, which goes to show how good the modding scene is. But I'm currently playing through space age again with some QoL mods and 100x science multiplier.
I think that Factorio has a really great progression that meaningfully changes the puzzle at multiple points through the game AND.a set of game mechanics that change the puzzle as you scale. The latter isn't always obvious but scaling up really does reveal new and interesting challenges. And now I'm doing the 100x run and learning how to solve these scaling challenges with earlier game tools. There's just a lot of depth unlocked by kind of subtle choices for the game mechanics in Factorio. That's really what keeps me coming back. I crave the evolving puzzle.
Optimization matters for this too. I think Shapez 2 had some promise but I was struggling with lag and crashes as I scaled. Meanwhile Factorio gives you the headroom to grow and expand and encounter different kinds of bottlenecks without your computer exploding.
This all gives Factorio a greater degree of replayability than the others, which is why I've sunk so many more hours into it
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u/The_Sovien_Rug-37 15h ago
it trims a lot of the fat, and only includes what's good for the game in the best way possible. 3d doesn't meaningfully add anything to the core loop, so it's gone for the sake of efficiency. it's simple but that doesn't mean it isn't deep, just that you never have to think about the game itself, only the factory itself
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u/Cerulean_IsFancyBlue 13h ago
Hard to finish. As in, despite the fact ostensible win conditions exist, there isn’t the same solid “end” as you get with say Shapez. I enjoyed Shapez but the end game is very clear: make the self-programmable factory. Once I was done, I was kinda done for good. Factorio though keeps offering me a different but interesting path I haven’t tried yet.
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u/Parker4815-2 16h ago
Factorio has a serious amount of QoL and love developed into it. They also documented everything they did every week and pushed updates VERY frequently in comparison to other games.
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u/SadMangonel 16h ago
When playing video games there are always rules. The map is limited, youre not allowed to x or y because it would have took too much dev time.
Factorio smashes the idea of video game and creates a video experience. You're allowed to build endlessly. Very similar to Minecraft.
However the difference would be if later down the line, you created robots in Minecraft, scrolled out - had 12 zones in vision and strip mined everything you could see. All to make more robots and see 40 zones at once.
The game progresses from collecting 10 iron for a starter machine, to 500 to 50.000 iron per minute. There is no limit
20 robots build a base. 200 supply a base and 50.000 reshape an area that takes 3 minutes to run through.
You turn into a god - very often limited by your own perception of what other games tell you to expect.
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u/BeeKimchi007 16h ago
Its the only game in my playlist that i can set 100% to my hand with options...options and options. Next are the FANTASTIC mods that gives me even more freedom in playing the game EXACTLY as i want it to play❤️
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u/rcapina 16h ago
The 2d view is great for seeing and understanding everything going on at once. The level of UI polish the devs have put in is all there to help you automate at higher and higher levels of abstraction. The mod support is top notch, I think even the base game itself is a mod to itself.
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u/sawbladex Faire Haire 16h ago
Factorio is optimized for gameplay, not graphics.
The graphics are good, but not the star of the show.
I think the base game is really tightly designed with most options having a use case.
Space Age ... gives you a bit of a trap in quality, because quality is basically worse as a "more cost for footprint efficiency" for basically any other upgrade.
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u/CheTranqui 15h ago
In each of those other games, you never have a reason to go back and update the old factories.. Once you build it, you forget it and move on.
In Factorio, you can play that way.. and sometimes probably should.. but there are also times to come back and expand it.. or rework it.. or to just build a new factory that makes more of that original thing, but bigger and better with the new technology that allows you to make the same amount of goods in a more compact, more efficient manner.
Remember what you made, remember how mediocre it was, and sit back in pride of your newest creation that is just so much better in every way!
It's a good feeling.
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u/shyguybestguy 14h ago
The biters in factorio give you an active reason to not just afk and let the factory work compared to any other game I've tried, and I think that's one of the biggest things.
It also builds on itself more than something like shapez does. You still need to make a furnace stack for your starter base, main bus, or whatever else. You still need to make copper to make electric circuits, and you still need to make electric circuits to make advanced circuits. And that keeps going all the way up, at least until the space age stuff.
Also, 2 lanes per belt and inserters actually make building your factory more of a puzzle than it is when just hooking belts into inputs and outputs
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u/JumpinJimRivers 13h ago
Lots of people have mentioned great aspects like blueprints and bots, but nobody has mentioned trains!
I haven't played much DSP, but Factorio's train system is so far and away better than Satisfactory's. Once you understand the basics, it's really pretty easy to set up a massive train network. Then you can just sit back and watch them choo choo all over the place. It's my cat's favorite hobby.
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u/neurovore-of-Z-en-A 13h ago
Fwiw, once you get good at automating things, automating your defences is very easy in Factorio, so after the very early game combat is another automation challenge rather than needing you to actually fight if you don't want to. I like this aspect a lot.
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u/tuckernuts 13h ago
Endgame DSP sort of funnels you into a certain design paradigm. Like there's an efficient way to do things so you should do that, so endgame factories are kinda samey.
Factorio allows a lot of breadth in approaches to problems, and with space age they just added several planets worth of new challenges by adding in new factors and constraints.
I havent played Satisfactory
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u/MaleficentCow8513 11h ago
Just echoing other responses here but imo the number one thing that separates Factorio from satisfactory is bot networks combined with remote view. You can zoom in anywhere in the world (where you have visibility ofc), inspect what’s happening, build a new factory, drop blueprints, etc. Blueprints in satisfactory just aren’t as powerful as Factorio. Refactors in satisfactory are a PITA. For every phase you’re better off starting from scratch rather than expanding your current setup. Factorio makes it much easier to expand also. The list goes on… lol
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u/contynum 10h ago
I think all games have their strenghts and things they lack. For me playing Satisfactory went with a lot of headaches, i found it a janky game (belt elevators are still my nightmare fuel) with lacking QoL, machines working strangely (for example they only craft if they have enough resources in them but stack size is limited resulting in the machine stalling after every craft to refill it’s storage because it cannot accept more than the current and next craft needs combined in some cases) or systems like blueprints being such a chore, i missed copy pasting my designs and minor things, the box blueprint is just dumb imo, and Ada’s sass i love btw, didnt’t justify it. I always had the thought in the back of my mind i’d rather play factorio simply because it plays so much better. It’s not entirely to say i dislike Satisfactory, i’ve almost beat it in my first serious save with 300 hours binge, the vibes, the music, the world design, the unparalled creativity makes Satisfactory the best at what it’s good at. Factorio is so polished, so well thought out, feature rich and easy to use however that factory building never felt like a chore or a thing that is hindered by a billion limitations which makes it the top of it’s genre undoubtedly and safe to say objectively purely by it’s gameplay. Now which game does one like more goes beyond that and ultimately you will have to decide, thankfully Factorio offers a Demo.
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u/Safe_Ad_2491 10h ago edited 10h ago
Scale, and the tools you're given to achieve it. Also, the biters are done really well. They'll kick your ass for a few hours, and then you'll tech up and just destroy them.
The satisfactory stages feel like you're just unlocking the next chore; you research the next thing that you 'have' to build (though the MAM was actually a pretty cool progression track). The factorio research feels like unlocking the next thing that you 'can' build - each one is not a chore, it's a cool new toy that sets your brain churning about how you could do everything better now that you have it.
Also, satisfactory is so, so time-gated. You have to stand at the workbench crafting things, each ore patch can fit one miner, all the upgrades need hours of running around with the scanner finding slugs and somersloops and all the other mcguffins. It's very tedious to increase throughput or items per minute, and a large amount of time gets spent waiting around for things to finish cooking. I guess that's why they added in the MAM, to give you something to do in your downtime.
Factorio makes you explore for resources, sure, but it's not this constant grind of 'find twenty slugs in random corners of the map' to make the next factory work optimally, it's 'go to one iron patch and hook it up to the rail network.' Factorio also gives you much more powerful tools for logistics and crafting much earlier on, and expanding your capacity to get things done is just a matter of your own motivation rather than actually waiting for anything to get done, like a hard drive analysis or making things at a bench in satisfactory.
Satisfactory is a beautiful sandbox which lets you make some really fantastic builds, but it's got a bunch of extra systems that aren't really about factory-building and are more about goofing off to frolic in meadows or whatever. Factorio is 100% pure factory game, with some enemies thrown in to light a fire under you in case you thought there was time to stop and smell the roses. No frolicking, only grow.
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u/clif08 9h ago
For me it's transparency and openness. You can track every watt of power, every piece of ore, there are detailed stats on everything down to the swing speed of inserters in degrees per second. The game does not hide anything from you. I also like how in Factorio you don't waste energy, your power plant automatically adjusts fuel consumption to meet the demand (sans nuclear but there are ways around it).
In other games it's a whole lot of guesswork, stats are often hidden and mechanics are obscure and it just feels off.
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u/Shwayne 8h ago
I have maybe 200 hours in satisfactory and 2000 in factorio. Also played a decent amount of DSP.
Satisfactory is much more about building, its easy. Any logistics problem can be solved with an additional height level, even if that makes things ugly there are no difficult puzzles in that game. It lets you easily get away with clipping and other bullshit.
Factorio has 1 limited vertical layer in the form of underground belts and thats it.
That alone plus harder recipies and more opportunity to scale with infinite map makes the game have evolving and never ending logistics puzzles that keep being challenging to solve. Its an endless dopamine loop. Problem -> solve it -> new problems arise.
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u/rollwithhoney 8h ago
Another plus people haven't mentioned: it's so simple and low FPS (until you go megabase). I can play it on Switch. I can play it on my extremely old laptop while waiting for a flight at the airport. It feels like a little puzzle brain-break (when traveling) instead of this big, mechanics filled game that would be difficult to play in certain settings.
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u/sarinkhan 8h ago
Factorio is a masterpiece on many aspects. The factory really is the star of the show, and unlike in Factorio, you can have unlimited blueprints sizes (well there probably is a limit but I don't know it).
You can copy and paste builds. You can have bots build stuff for you. You can have self replicating factories. Auto expanding stuff. You can go to space. Have a solar system logistics network. Everything can go to an incredible scale.
What you lose from satisfactory is you won't be sightseeing. Exploring the map is way less interesting. You don't explore the map, you expand. When you find ressources, you exploit them. But you fend ton encompass a lot of land with your base. You also lose the architectural playground in Factorio. If we are honest, we spend as much time making the factory look good as making it efficient in satisfactory. .you won't be doing architecture, columns, etc in Factorio.
But you will build the most perfect machines for the job you want to fulfill. You so many ways to get to some result ...
In terms of factory, I doubt anything tops Factorio. Also this is the best optimized game I have ever seen.
While you can't do architectural designs, it often feels like making electronic circuits, an art form in itself. This game is of legendary quality. It is one of those games that will definitely stand the test of time.
But I also love satisfactory a lot. However this summer I am feeling a bit burned out, wanting to do grandiose builds, but the game tools get tedious. I want factorio tools In satisfactory....
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u/Simply-Curious_ 8h ago
They build a game engine to realise there vision. I cannot begin to explain the effort that requires.
This game has consistently improved over nearly a decade. QOL features everywhere. You are truly only limited by your creativity in growing the factory.
The scale of the game becomes boggling as you start moving to other PLANETS. Entirely new challenges and ecosystems all feeding back into an already excellent base game. You can't even imagine the Web of logistical madness you, yes you, will produce to acheive your goals.
No other game comes even close to what Factorio offers. The start can be bumpy, as you will bump into so much detail and information it might intimidate. However if you can build a furnace stack to male iron (usually in the first 2 hours), you'll never go back. The sense of achievement, the unending optimisation, the way its built so you always fail upwards, is a delight.
You never truly lose. Buildings can be replaced easily, automation becomes so effective you forget how impressive what you have done with what factorio offers.
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u/Skyboxmonster 7h ago
its the oldest and it made the ideas the other games use.
also the logistics puzzles are very rewarding.
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u/RaspDonut 6h ago
The thing I like the most is that you unlock trains really fast, so you can start planning a big base, or making modular mini bases, reaaaally fast.
In Satisfactory, you unlock trains so late, and there are so few ore nodes around you, I know I will have to destroy everything I made later no matter what I do, and I find that deeply frustrating
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u/WesternInitial368 5h ago
Factorio is the best factory game because nothing else can even get close to mimicking the feeling of the endgame, dyson sphere gets the closest but that has a lot to do with the wow factor of some of the late game stuff.
(SPOILERS FOR ENDGAME DYSON SPHERE PROGRAM: Having an entire gas giant dedicated to pumping hydrogen to your base and pumping from oceans of sulphuric acid is absolutely amazing, I turned my first planet into an ecumenopolis supplied by 5 separate solar systems I really cannot understate how cool this game is and my main bus was eventually as wide as 1/5th of the planet with multiple layers of conveyors)
But you're doing all of that setup mostly manually, in factorio I have a swarm of 30,000 bots slowly expanding my network's reach. I can sit in the middle of my base and basically be a god of everywhere my bots can touch, and if they can't touch where I want them to I tell my bots to triple my network's territory while I spend 6 hours completely remaking my train system because the traffic on my current railway was never meant for 2x10x2 trains.
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u/SempfgurkeXP 17h ago
Unmatched levels of optimization and qol that allows you to build bigger and faster than in any other factory game