![]() Your early sources of power come from burning wood & coal, so as you scale up your power production, your noise & air pollution scales up in kind.ĭid I mention the building-sized bugs don't like pollution? OH GOD GET THEM OFF ME THEY'RE BIGGER THAN A TANK Meanwhile, you are (in parallel) trying to scale up your power needs (since all those drills and inserters require fuel). I demand to see the manager responsible for this mess And as you switch gears to clean-up those bottlenecks, you find yourself producing new issues of resource starvation – parts of your factory that aren't getting enough materials. Without intending to, you introduce bottlenecks into your processing centers. Routing belts back and forth between sources and destinations quickly becomes a mess. Remember that burner drill I pointed out earlier? It requires a stone furnace as an ingredient. As the game plays out, you come to find that processed materials are themselves needed for larger, more complex devices. In the early stages of the game, setting up dozens of automated belts, miners and inserters is an free-form design exercise, lacking consistency or convention. To answer this, we must dive into where things go off the rails. What is so novel about Factorio's approach? Why does it lend itself particularly well to lessons needed in scaling a business? The escape from a distant & hostile planet is certainly not a new concept as far as video games go. A simple automation that digs coal & iron, produces iron plates, and sustains itself with fuelĪnd thus, the race to automate everything begins. ![]() the epiphany finally takes shape: With some thought and planning, it becomes clear that you can design a process that will sustain itself, digging, fueling, and processing ore, without any human intervention whatsoever. a conveyor belt transferring materials from location (a) to location (b) for you,.an inserter handing-off materials for you, and.(in a Laurence Fishburne voice) "Machines!"Ī few more materials beyond that, and you may craft an inserter – a robot-like device with a claw that can transfer an item from a source (eg. Thomas Robbins would be proud!Īs your stockpile of processed materials grow, you gain the ability to build a mining drill that will dig for you (provided you supply the drill with fuel), depositing its results directly on the belt. You determine that laying this belt between the source of the ore and the smelter eliminates the manual labor of hauling these items on your own – you may simply dig and deposit them on the belt, where they are carried to the smelter automatically. Repeating this process – digging, smelting, and the schlepping of raw earth to-and-fro – eventually produces enough iron plates to create a single conveyor belt. Iron ore goes in on the left, iron plates come out on the right As the kiln roars to life, the sweat of your labor bears fruit in the form of your first processed material: iron plates. The golden rule: whomever smelt it very likely dealt itĮventually, you collect enough materials to toss into your smelter. You assemble your first smelter (a stone furnace) and break your own back carrying coal and iron ore to it. You procure bits of raw stone and wood by hand. The opening moments of a new game demand you embrace physical labor. You are increasingly seen as a threat that must be neutralized. Meanwhile, far off in the distance, alien life (think: building-sized bugs) are aware of your presence. You start with nothing, save but a few salvageable raw materials left in the wake of the crash. Only the raw materials on the surface of the planet are what you have to work with: water, wood, iron, copper, stone, coal and (eventually) oil and uranium. In it, you (the player) have crash landed on a distant planet and must gather the necessary raw materials to repair your ship and return to space. So, what's the dealio with Factorio? The Martian, minus potatoes You are here (but where is that?)įactorio is a worldbuilding/survival game. This idea is spreading □ - tobi lutke February 13, 2022 The Kerbal-Factorio Business School: how sim games teach mental modelsĮven the Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke raves about it, bragging that the company allows employees to expense game licenses:.What is it about this game that appears empirically linked to success in business? Articles include: 10 min read Factorio, a worldbuilding/survival game, may secretly be the best business book to dateĪsk a growing contingency of fans in the tech industry what their favorite business book is and they'll tell you to scrap the books in favor of Factorio.
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