Factorio

It's an extremely addictive game and I've spent tons of hours expanding my factory. I will talk about it's gameplay, excellent mod support and it's upcoming 2.0 update and DLC.

You can get the game either on their steam page or on their Website.

The game itself is described as an automation and slight tower defense game and I totally agree. The items you craft and automate get more complex the longer you play and defending your base also gets increasingly more difficult even if the base game lacks a bit of a challange for more experienced players.

Gameplay

The trailer on the steam page shows off some gameplay in form of a factory show off and it might look really intimidating at first but don't be scared you start out really simple. The first few minutes of any new world are spent gathering basic resources like coal, stone and iron ore. You use the stone to build furnaces in which you smelt the iron ore with the coal in to get iron plates. Those iron plates can then be crafted into more miners which produce more iron ore which then can be used for more iron plates and the show goes on. It's essentially an exponential growth of getting more iron plates.

After gathering enough iron plates you may begin to wonder what you have to do next and the only logical answer is to build machines that make your life easier like belts and inserters. However burner inserserters are somewhat useless if you don't have an automatic way of supplying them with coal so you want to use the normal ones that use electricity. The question now is how do you get electricity to power your new shiny inserters. The answer is steam power and you will also need a bit of copper for the water pump. You end up building a small steam power plant that gives you enough electricity to power hundreds if not thousands of inserters. You also discover electric mining drills which you use to replace your burner mining drills. Now that all of your factory is automated you wonder what's next.

Science, that's what's next! You look at the red science packs and craft a few by hand putting them into a lab and researching your first technologies. Underground belts, splitters, assemblers and much more. You get to crafting many new gadgets and machines that will aid you in building your factory further and improving it's efficiency.

Now that you have aquired assemblers you can begin fully automating parts of your factory like crafting inserters or belts. You will soon also automate red science and green science and notice how big your factory has become. Once your factory has reached a decent size you will get a few visits from the natives which will knock on your doors and tell you to stop. Your reaction should be to gun them down and build walls and gun turrets for future visitors to fend their door knocking off.

From this point onwards it's in rough the same steps. You aquire the knowledge of a new science pack. You will see a few unknown items that it needs and you get to automating those in some decent quantities. You set up the science pack while defending your base from the natives and research some technologies to do everything better. You research the next science pack and continue.

At the end you research the final assembling machine needed to complete the game which is the rocket silo. You set everything up and launch your first rocket with a satellite and finish your game.

Mod support

The mod support for this game is excellent. The base game already has a first party mod manager and the mod portal has tons of mods to either overhaul the entire game, add some quality of life things or just some trains that drive at over 3000 km/h.

Another great thing you notice is when you join a server with mods you get a prompt to download missing mods or update mods, restart the game and join the server in one button click.

2.0 update and DLC

Wube, the creators of Factorio, publish a blog post every friday and they talk about a feature from the DLC and 2.0. Sofar the DLC will feature a couple new planets, new resources, enemies and machines. It will release quite soon as of writing this post and I personally am really hyped for it. The 2.0 update itself will also feature a ton of cool new features like improved bot pathing and job queueing, spidertron performance improvements and new rails as well as a new train system. There isn't much else I can tell you about as I do not want to spread false information but I can link to the blog of wube.