Factorio Resurgent

So — my first rocket launch over the holidays took at about 35 hours (game time, not real. Game time pauses on some menus). Actually building the rocket took ~7 hours. I took a break but then tried again (this time with Aliens not peaceful) and got around 15 hours. I had the rocket researched at 10, but it still took me 5 hours to build.

I’ve never really watched Twitch (or whatever the videogame stream is), although my kids and nephews did (Minecraft, Five Nights at Freddy’s, etc). But hearing about a sub-two hour (real time) launch? That seemed worth watching.

Watching a World Record run is interesting. To be fair it’s a stacked game, but this was the record for a ‘seeded’ board. A map with ginormous resources and a friendly layout and he’s replayed the same map hundreds of times, so he knows the exact layout he wants to build before hand. Still, even with all those advantages? Impressive.

Hypnotic, even. Like watching an organically grown circuit diagram. Every few minutes (after about the 30 minute mark) he zooms out to make sure nothing is wrong, and it reminds me of a VLSI layout. To be sure, this is of much more interest if you play the game, because you can get a lot of strategy advice by watching.

After watching that I decided that:

1. I needed a lot more straight lines in my factory
2. I need a lot more resources
3. To not crowd things together, unless I had a good design layout. (The speedrun was chockablock full of interesting design decisions. Particularly the Blue Circuit layout). Obviously this had a hyper optimized (space) run, but you can’t plan out every rock or whatnot.

Anyway, after watching I decided to try a map with ginormous resources. I’ve almost researched the rocket 5 hours in, but I need to get blue circuits started. Petroleum was a bottleneck: the nearest crude was quite far away. I’ve got much more spaghetti — but I didn’t tune the map besides a few restarts for bad ones.

The TaoLing wants me to continue post rocket, and I may try to build a megabase that can launch a rocket every X minutes (instead of X hours). We’ll see. I did take a break for a week or so to get in ~40 games of Jump Drive, but now I’m back to Factorio.