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There are lots of stories like Last Starfighter where someone is recruited through video games for some fantastical job and some General or something is like “You have the highest score ever, only you can save us!” Always seemed pretty far fetched to me.
But if we were going to another galaxy and they wanted someone to lay out production infrastructure? I could totally see recruiting based on most playtime on steam for Satisfactory.
A planned economy created by factorio players is as genius as it is frightening
“Pack it up, space is cancelled.”
“What, why?”
“We left you alone for a week and now every square inch of this planet is completely covered in factories. It’s unlivable. We’ll have to get the Planet Crafter guy to terraform a new planet and start over.”
“Hey there it’s Josh from Let’s Game It Out.”
Dear god! Who sent him .
Oxygen not included - more evil than factorico - at least for me.
I have never felt more like a mad scientist. Beautiful game.
ONI has amazing “process engineering” where you take some substance, use a machine to transform it into another, feed it into a third, etc.
But, what’s extra great about it is that it also includes a pretty basic, but still fully functional simulation of chemistry and physics. So, you can feed oil to the oil refinery to get petroleum, but it’s only 50% efficient. If you want a more efficient process you can boil the petroleum instead by dropping oil onto something hot. But doing that generates petroleum that’s at hundreds of degrees so you need to cool it down. So, instead of just doing that, you can pre-heat the oil coming into the boiler using the petroleum that the boiler produces, creating a counter-flow heat exchanger that cools the petroleum while pre-heating the oil.
I do not want to admit how much time it took to build a working boiler. My magma volcano was under powered so the whole cooling with the oil generators didn’t work.
Then I moved (destroyed the old one) and built a brand new in the core layer. Now that worked. But meanwhile my hydrogen production and oxygen generayors died down because the natural gas geysers and the excess co2 clogged my airways…Yeah, a minor deviation from a working contraption can mean it fails completely. They’re often really unforgiving. But, they’re so satisfying when they work.
This just sounds like Factorio with Angel’s mods…
Oh god oh no.
I played the sea island mod a bit. This is very different to ONI.
Loved it. Can’t recommend (if you love your time that is)
Factorio is great at making you automate to save time. Endless map, with more and bigger resource piles as you move away.
ONI is about fighting entropy. Everything starts in a nice and easy to use format, but as you use it, you make all this waste heat and matter. It’s about finding ways to use all the waste products, or build natural means to convert materials by running pipes through areas of excess heat.
Yeah, good description. Fighting Entropy is really the trick that makes ONI great. I just love how at the beginning heat isn’t even on your radar as something to worry about. You might not even know that the heat overlay exists. But, by the mid-game if you don’t start handling heat suddenly everything starts breaking.
Also, the size is another big difference. Factorio has that endless map where you just keep expanding your conveyor belts. The further out you go, the more you have to worry about aliens, but after a while that isn’t much of an issue. Meanwhile in ONI as you start making bigger and bigger colonies, it starts to feel cramped.
The factorio dev blog has some good reads about finding the right balance of tedium as driving mechanism to figure out automation and also needing the game to be enjoyable. Basically the moment an activity becomes stale they want you to be able to automate it
It’s my top game these days, and there’s always more to learn
Oh man, ONI is the one I managed to get into for a while. I find the physics/chemistry simulation the most interesting. Having the environment itself trying its hardest to kill you is very fascinating. One doesn’t need any space aliens, the space itself is immensely hostile.
I do love that the biggest challenge is your own incompetence. If you don’t know what to look out for, if you forfot to fix something, ifyou don’t build contingencies… Everything is your own fault :D
