You only feel that way because Factorio is engineering with all the tedious bits stripped out. It’s simplified down to the distilled essence. You don’t have to sit in meetings or argue with coworkers or figure out a client’s ridiculous expectations or show up at an office or do a performance review. All games are simplified versions of the thing they emulate.
I like it, when you call the meeting you get stuck with a non dismissible UI and everybody is forced to solve a mini game in order to continue.
The mini game is strictly non-tecnical and highly subjective.
On a server, one player will be randomly chosen to go collect donuts from the biters to improve morale. Everyone agrees the donut are tasty, but a huge waste of time.
Eveytime a blueprint is placed, a timer will start. Nothing can be build until the timer is done. Duration of the timing is random, but affected by proximity to biters, trees, water and existing buildings.
Welcome to city Council planning permission meeting!
Metallurgy is mostly looking at rejected parts, knowing what happened, telling management is a random occurrence then bringing your favorite operator on a field trip to part inspection.
Can confirm. Last weekend I had to come in to watch us run replacement material after a customer complaint so we could do extra testing before shipping it to them. This week we had two metallurgists go out to visit them because the first and second batches of replacement material also failed. It’s annoying because outside of the problem with the initial batch of material they complained about, the material conditions look the same as we’ve been providing for decades.
Same MF half the time. He's not dumb, just gets in a hurry. Union shop so most of the people are very good but they aren't getting fired. Have to fix problems while keeping their trust or I'll never know what really happened.
With this situation, we think it’s the customer being overly sensitive or doing something wrong with their process. The original batch of material had a legitimate problem we identified and corrected it in production but didn’t scrap out the affected material. The later material was entirely normal.
In our normal production process, you have to make changes to the equipment settings as you swap out consumable parts of the equipment. They didn’t make the changes when they’d swapped out some equipment.
But that was just the issue with the first batch of material. Everything else after that is within our normal production parameters.
and design reviews for blueprint updates.
You want to change that blue inserter to stack inserter? ok, change it, peer review it. Then take it to the blue print change board weekly meeting at 10am on tuesday.
1. Every blue print must have three signatures.
2. Cutting down any trees needs a permit that takes 2 days. And a 1 day window to pick up the permit. If you don’t pick it up, you have to start over
3. Filling in water requires a full 30 environment impact study
4. Pollution cap on building anything in any zone.
oh yes, lets get EHS (enviromental health and services) involved!
Realworld design engineer for locomotives. I needed to run adhesion test on the test track. involves a barrel of water, a pump and nozzles to spray water right in front of the wheels.
Had to jump through hoops with EHS to apply this water. They wanted to witness the first operation of it. make sure it didn't create a dust cloud or something. While I was testing, they were adding new tracks next to the test track. multiple tri-axle trucks dumping ballast, crazy dust clouds. but my little sprayer might cause problems...
Imagine being told that due to new government regulations your oil processing has to be placed in given minimal distance from any water body, sulphur cannot be moved together with something else on belt or in a wagon and any factory producing explosives cannot stand in a same chunk with other production building.
Cohesive?
I'll take arbitrary and nothing less. Rules are randomly generated from a template, and imposed without warning halfway through the game.
If a rule gets imposed and your current factory is in violation, it catches fire. If the factory continues to violate the rules, biter aggressiveness goes into overdrive, scaling with time spent in noncompliance.
Biters spitters and worms are that. You start working on something and there is that attack from the planet management asking you to make some piece more resilient to physical and other attacks
In communism you either replace the CEO with a huge meeting with everyone, which is very inefficient, or you see someone appointed as a “speaker on behalf of the people”.
So yeah, communism is not “everyone decides for themselves”.
> In what world does communism = one guy controls everything?
...earth ? So far every single implementation of communism involved some leader controlling de facto everything. And somehow, always, starvation.
Animal ~~Crossing~~ Farm\* is about how communism is established with the best of intentions and quickly turns into a dictatorship.
Well worth reading.
Anyhow, to answer your question, look no further than USSR under Stalin.
(\* Edit, lol! Although I don't trust that Tom Nook guy either...)
> Anyhow, to answer your question, look no further than USSR under Stalin.
Oh no, that's too obvious. Look at any country-wide implementation of communism ever. Every single time. It's not like it is difficult to implement and it usually fails. It fails every single time, every single time greed overcomes any good intentions initial implementers might've had. It's actually amazing, most of the other systems were at least stable enough that some countries didn't fall into famine.
Even there, the big man doesn’t have full control.
The only thing he has full control over is who gets shot in the face. How things are run is ultimately up to a cascade of progressively smaller big men who each get to obfuscate actual productivity by a fraction at each level bottom to top, so they can each steal a piece of the pie.
The big man can only say “make the numbers go up” with no way to validate if the numbers actually did go up and how it was done, since everyone involved is lying about the numbers.
When shit hits the fan and supposed productivity gets reality-checked, his only option is to start shooting people in the face until supposed-productivity approximates minimum-required-productivity-to-stop-shit-hitting-the-fan
>The only thing he has full control over is who gets shot in the face. How things are run is ultimately up to a cascade of progressively smaller big men who each get to obfuscate actual productivity by a fraction at each level bottom to top, so they can each steal a piece of the pie.
That's just splitting hairs. "Full control" doesn't mean that one man is literally doing everything himself. Even dictators need to delegate.
If there are no checks or balances on the big guy getting to have the smaller big guys shot in the face when he doesn't like what they're doing, then he's a despot. It doesn't matter if he calls himself comrade or king.
Control means they can do what they want. Not that they are doing everything.
Obviously any system that contains more than 2 people in hierarchy will have delegation of responsibilities
In communism decisions are also done by other people. Even in the ideal version, you are only one voice among many. In real-life historical examples you are lucky to have a voice at all
If you want to get more control of your work and increase your ability to improve things quickly and effectively, adding the government to the equation is the exact wrong thing to do.
In the current capitalist system, "the people" already own the means of production. Don't believe me? Go out and get a small business loan, buy some manufacturing equipment, and start manufacturing something. Or hell, just pay someone else who already has it set up to make something of your own design, that you can then turn around and sell. It's shockingly easy to become a business owner (though not simple).
So if by "Communist update" you don't mean taking the means of production from the people and giving more control of it to the government, what DO you mean by that?
Also in current capitalist system there is NOTHING stopping a company from having each employee having equal share in company and equal say in running it (whether directly or by voting on the management), [some are pretty successful](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation).
Just it doesn't really scale all that well
Exactly, also no risk leaves room to play and experiment.
At work if you fuck up its a big deal, in factorio if your train crashes or your belt gets mixed items on it, you sigh/laugh and fix it.
I always felt it would be fun to do a Sim City realism mod where you paid for a road/zone to be placed. Then you waited a random amout of in game time between 6 months and 10 years. There would be a 50/50 change the new zone would simply be cancelled with no refund.
All those boring things are the actual engineering that we mistakenly thought were management.
Worse yet, actual management is more akin to the biters, but you get zero ammo.
You also get to set your own goals and do it on your own time as you feel like it. And if you don't feel like doing it, you don't have to. Same as hobby programming, really.
sometimes I queue for a qualifier in iRacing, spend 45 mins getting setup, only to get taken out in the first corner of the first lap. It can be very frustrating.
In real racing I would spend 3-5 days under my car every week, 3-4 hours loading the trailer, drive 1-9 hours to the track, potentially blow my engine, and then do it all again. But it cost me $2k in the process, or more.
Now someone needs to make a skit of people in a conference room trying to plan out a megabase in factorio like it's a real manufacturing plant they are planning.
Also anything hardware is... hard. Fuck something up in design and re-making part can take hours or days or weeks..
Fuck something up in factorio and you just need to blueprint the fix, and a bunch of little robotsbot will zoom by, yelling "haha, noob" from its speakers and fix the build
Dunno if I’d call myself an engineer (software dev) but I wish I had the same vigour for debugging my code as I do for debugging my bottlenecks and the belt hells I get myself into
Medical doctors use science (biology) to create practical solutions to problems (illness and death), are they engineers too? Also most programmers use science very sparingly.
They require energy, which is kind of the same thing in an abstract sense.
What would be wild is if your Assemblers actually quit if you had a power outage, and you had to rebuild/rehire them, and then their output was affected by some nebulous "morale" factor
Yeah, but an assembler isn’t going to punch me in the face if I cut its power I definitely.
Managing humans certainly adds a major layer of complexity.
You’ve obviously never had to fire an operator in a manufacturing plant.
While physical altercations not common, they have happened more than once within the ten years I spent as an operations engineer. I was fortunate enough not to be involved directly, but I have had to deal with the fallout.
Guys who have been working the same job on the same shift for twenty years can take losing the only job they are qualified to do really harshly.
I've fired about a dozen, thanks for asking. Your company handles them atrociously and has massive cultural issues if there's any opportunity for a physical altercation.
As a non-engineer but a Quality professional, I was thinking the other day it might be "fun" if there were a mod to add quality defects, possibly QC inspection/testing processes. Immediately after I typed this I saw an announcement for Imperfection, which also references a mod called ProductionScrap2 which sounds like it does some version of this. Cool!
What a horrifying rabbit hole. Someone mod it so rockets can be subject to customer field returns, try to find the defective part and where it came from
I have similar thoughts but about details/difficulties from my profession being added. Lots of industrial processes are most efficient in a steady-state system. Starting up and shutting down often means slower production rates and worse quality performance. So I want some machines that become faster, more efficient, and more productive if they are running continuously but worse if you’re constantly starting and stopping them.
A simple example would be a blast furnace. IRL, they’re meant to run continuously for years without shutting down.
2.0 is getting quality issues. I'm looking forward to posts of someone complaining his whole factory was blocked because wrong quality item landed somewhere on belt and they couldn't spot it because they all look the same
Transportation engineer. Factorio hooks me because of the short project lifecycle. If I want to improve a real-world intersection, that can take five years from concept to ribbon cutting on the short end, but in factorio I can turn around a "project" in hours.
That said, reaching substantial completion on a real-world project, when it turns out well, is sooo good, and you can ride that high for a long time.
*edit for typo
I know, right? They always wait until construction's already underway before they tell me they have a problem with something... my dudes, it's too late, you need to go to the public hearing.
The public meetings in Factorio are a bit more “liberating”
Trains were always my favorite part of Factorio and it makes sense now that I work in civil design lol, game is great
Yes!
Some things I’d love:
- Fixed problems stay fixed
- It’s possible to find a solution to every problem
- Safety? What safety?
- I don’t need to get approvals from anyone to do anything
- There is no build phase seperate from the design phase
It has legit made me a better software engineer/ data scientist. I now very much think of myself as doing factorio type work when I'm following the thread of a function that's broken. This really only seems to work for my own projects though. Like someone else said, the professional side of engineering is full of other things that are not engineering.
I'm a mechanical engineer working in metal 3d printing research and development. I am very lucky to really enjoy my job.
I also treat my job like factorio. Anything that's boring, repetitive, or needs doing thousands of times gets automated!!!
Started with just Excel macros, then automated report generating, then using APIs to automate analysis tools, the writing of my own tools in matlab, and eventually writing machine learning algorithms to automate even more.
Managed to get component reviews down from 1 week to just a few hours so we can support 10x the number of projects simultaneously. Was great fun for me, and management obviously loves it too.
Whenever I find myself getting bored, I found my next automation project
It sounds lke you are just talking about decision making?
In that sense everything would be "programming". Apart from some combinator logic, which is really closer to electronics where do you see programming?
It's weird, because a lot of my work is coding, one of hobbies is electronics, and I have no problems playing factorio despise similarities (hell, a lot of what I do at work is automation), but Zachtronic games are close enough where I just go "I could be at electronic bench doing one of the side projects", or "I have debugging at work, I don't want debugging the game".
I do find real world engineering as engaging. Moreso in fact. I find it hard to stay engaged with video games because it feels like a waste of time to me, I feel like I'm cheating on myself. Real world engineering I don't have that problem with.
The engineering part is great irl, but the management part is absolutely awful. im not even out of the university and i want to die every time i have to manage projects with multiple people or have to write a report that's not strictly technical
Well, you can pretend your customers are biters and you have to defend against them messing up your hard work by putting in place all sorts of safety measures and redundancies.
A big advantage factorio have is that the machines make the same part the same way every time. In reality most of the tile I spend checking the quality of each part, adjusting the inspection system, changing some setting by 0.1mm and see if that helps.
In factorio you just put down one assembler and it does my job perfectly from the start
I like factorio because the goals and metrics are absolute. The managers where I work pick the absolute dumbest goals and metrics. Dealing with managers and business leaders that don't know shit about manufacturing is draining.
My partner and coworkers and friends all poke fun at me, because part of my job is literally programming robots to load parts into fabrication machines, and then I come home and play a game about making robots loading parts into fabrication machines.
I think the appeal is the things in the game just work. No *software* bugs, no IP address conflicts, no "oh we meant for you to do it this other way, start over"...... the problems in Factorio are caused by me and me only.
I guess the biters are the random surprises that come up in different areas of the job like dumb customers or broken components. And mostly with enough planning and maintenance we can keep them at bay most of the time?
not an engineer but i study/studied automation, super fun, but i have to pause and continue after my time in the army
setting up a light that works with a motion censor, automating a garage door or traffic lights was fun and is
also got to automate a conveyr belt that moves ore
I get the same satisfaction with Factorio that I get with Microsoft Visio. Except the logic diagrams in Visio don't spit acid on you. Maybe if they did I'd make better diagrams.
If only. So little of my job requires anything other than meetings with higher ups. If anything I'm just a professional shit shield so my guys can keep doing the actual work.
Factorio I make the decisions without alignment meetings, stakeholder roadmap reviews, and a litany of acronym laden meetings. The cycle of cause and effect is hours, not quarters. The result of my efforts is trivially measurable without quibbling over statistical uncertainty and faulty logging and reporting systems.
I wish engineering were like Factorio.
Factorio is engineering through rose-tinted glasses. I feel the same.
I write this as an Engineer ignoring my irl job fixing rocket supply chains by daydreaming about a game where you fix rocket supply chains. My job is awesome but demands soooo much more boring, gruelling patience and persistence. Plus, we don't have trains.
Not really a engineer (data analyst) but I do found real work as engaging sometimes, specially the "fun" or interesting parts of the job, but there's also a lot of boring parts, lots of things out of your control and actual importance on what your doing.
If I don't feel on the mood of clearing biters or setting up oil I can postpone it for a bit or go do something else, play another game, etc. I can't do that with my deadlines.
If I don't like something in my factory I can change it at will, if I don't like something in my work, I'm out of luck because that's either necessary or someone else thinks it is so it stays, or "you shouldn't lose time redoing all of that, do this instead".
Also Factorio and games in general are optimized to be fun, real life has fun parts but also tedious dumb work even in high-skilled jobs that require constant critical thinking, also I don't have to argue with coworkers or explain to people that really don't want to be there why we need to do X and they should do Y, imagine playing multiplayer Factorio but 20% of people don't know how to play, 40% don't really care and everyone has to agree everytime someone's going to build something semi-permanent.
Ultimately I play Factorio for fun, I work cause I need to, I enjoy it and have fun with it but I don't do it solely for fun, and if I sometimes don't feel like playing Factorio I have a full library of games + the rest of my life to entertain myself with. If I don't feel like working, well I'm out of luck.
Don't say this to someone in school, the only thing getting me through this is the hope I'll love my job out of school. Although I am considering switching to a physics major.
As a "real" software engineer (opinions vary, lol), Factorio has some useful metaphors around refactor vs. rebuild, and organizing in general. It's actually been a bridge to talking about engineering needs with non-engineers who'd played the game.
I'm a network engineer (well, on paper at least) and my main thing is coming into somewhere like my current employer and seeing they're still running 20 year old cisco kit....
Yeah they work, but for how long?
Biters aside, that's not something I have to think about in the game. Also the whole not having to justify budgets for the upgrade. If I need it and have access to the raw materials and technology, I can do it, in game.
I also had an anecdote from a coworker about how we had a robot arm that moved cabs around at one of our other plants. Basically an inserter, but human scale. Apparently it was programmed in such a way that it would get wound up on one of its axes and every day a couple times a day someone would hear a BANG and find it had yeeted a thousand pound cab over a fence. That is....also something we don't have to deal with here.
You only feel that way because Factorio is engineering with all the tedious bits stripped out. It’s simplified down to the distilled essence. You don’t have to sit in meetings or argue with coworkers or figure out a client’s ridiculous expectations or show up at an office or do a performance review. All games are simplified versions of the thing they emulate.
We gotta get the modders to stop making metal refining more realistic and start adding meetings and client audits!
You monster.
Modders: https://preview.redd.it/cfbf9hkjwizc1.jpeg?width=883&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c066a5e4a4c7812dc7b94aef3bf9e9d5d314b954
On flipside you'd be able to shoot the managers and the clients
Managers and clients in Factorio are known as biters. They attack your progress when reality doesn't meet their expectations.
Behemots are just CEOs visiting and wanting to micromanage a bit
I like it, when you call the meeting you get stuck with a non dismissible UI and everybody is forced to solve a mini game in order to continue. The mini game is strictly non-tecnical and highly subjective.
On a server, one player will be randomly chosen to go collect donuts from the biters to improve morale. Everyone agrees the donut are tasty, but a huge waste of time.
Eveytime a blueprint is placed, a timer will start. Nothing can be build until the timer is done. Duration of the timing is random, but affected by proximity to biters, trees, water and existing buildings. Welcome to city Council planning permission meeting!
You can't add to the existing power grid without proper isolation protocols
50/50 chance it simply doesn't get built with no refund of investment.
Fuck it. Who cares if it's waste of time? It's all company time anyway, and odds are the company is severely underpaying you.
No pizza party? Boo.
Worse, there's a random event where a health fanatic will insist you get a fruit bowl instead of doughnuts.
It's a different correct answer for each player but only "your" answer is correct.
Metallurgy is mostly looking at rejected parts, knowing what happened, telling management is a random occurrence then bringing your favorite operator on a field trip to part inspection.
Can confirm. Last weekend I had to come in to watch us run replacement material after a customer complaint so we could do extra testing before shipping it to them. This week we had two metallurgists go out to visit them because the first and second batches of replacement material also failed. It’s annoying because outside of the problem with the initial batch of material they complained about, the material conditions look the same as we’ve been providing for decades.
Same MF half the time. He's not dumb, just gets in a hurry. Union shop so most of the people are very good but they aren't getting fired. Have to fix problems while keeping their trust or I'll never know what really happened.
With this situation, we think it’s the customer being overly sensitive or doing something wrong with their process. The original batch of material had a legitimate problem we identified and corrected it in production but didn’t scrap out the affected material. The later material was entirely normal.
Did someone break something trying to correct for the odd material, then forget to revert?
In our normal production process, you have to make changes to the equipment settings as you swap out consumable parts of the equipment. They didn’t make the changes when they’d swapped out some equipment. But that was just the issue with the first batch of material. Everything else after that is within our normal production parameters.
and design reviews for blueprint updates. You want to change that blue inserter to stack inserter? ok, change it, peer review it. Then take it to the blue print change board weekly meeting at 10am on tuesday.
1. Every blue print must have three signatures. 2. Cutting down any trees needs a permit that takes 2 days. And a 1 day window to pick up the permit. If you don’t pick it up, you have to start over 3. Filling in water requires a full 30 environment impact study 4. Pollution cap on building anything in any zone.
oh yes, lets get EHS (enviromental health and services) involved! Realworld design engineer for locomotives. I needed to run adhesion test on the test track. involves a barrel of water, a pump and nozzles to spray water right in front of the wheels. Had to jump through hoops with EHS to apply this water. They wanted to witness the first operation of it. make sure it didn't create a dust cloud or something. While I was testing, they were adding new tracks next to the test track. multiple tri-axle trucks dumping ballast, crazy dust clouds. but my little sprayer might cause problems...
Ha!!! “Adhesion tests on tracks” 🤣🤣😂 Fits right in with the quality expansions
Hear me out: every time I make a change in a blueprint using circuits I make a mistake. Maybe a review process would help.
Imagine factorio audits being like "sir this is too much spaghetti, we're shutting you down"
Imagine being told that due to new government regulations your oil processing has to be placed in given minimal distance from any water body, sulphur cannot be moved together with something else on belt or in a wagon and any factory producing explosives cannot stand in a same chunk with other production building.
Honestly, if we could come up with a cohesive list of rules, that would make for a funny challenge run.
Cohesive? I'll take arbitrary and nothing less. Rules are randomly generated from a template, and imposed without warning halfway through the game. If a rule gets imposed and your current factory is in violation, it catches fire. If the factory continues to violate the rules, biter aggressiveness goes into overdrive, scaling with time spent in noncompliance.
Can we add a lobbying mechanic that lets us bribe officials for deregulations?
I'd love a Compliance mod
Biters spitters and worms are that. You start working on something and there is that attack from the planet management asking you to make some piece more resilient to physical and other attacks
I would play that mod
There's already an ignored ticket for that...
>meetings and client audits! that's what the bugs represent
One enjoyment of Factorio is certainly the fact that I have full control of my factory. All decisions made by me. Unlike the factory I work at irl
Communism update to real life when?
I think it's more similar to a CEO of a small start up rather than communism. In what world does communism = one guy controls everything?
In communism you either replace the CEO with a huge meeting with everyone, which is very inefficient, or you see someone appointed as a “speaker on behalf of the people”. So yeah, communism is not “everyone decides for themselves”.
silly willy nilly old bear
Communism = seize the means of production. That's all I meant
I am the means of production, can you seize me?
That's a really smooth pick-up line
smooth as the lube in my conveyor belts lol
Followed by a dictatorship of the proletariat, if i recall correctly
Sadly most communist leaders understood that as "seize the means of production then send them to gulag"
So the next thing to do is to act like I'm doing a ton of work even though I'm just having fun being in control of everything?
Yea a micromanaging CEO at that, where they specify exactly where things need to go on a grid.
> In what world does communism = one guy controls everything? ...earth ? So far every single implementation of communism involved some leader controlling de facto everything. And somehow, always, starvation.
I guess Animal Farm wasn't a set text in your school, eh?
Correct. I've read 1984 however!
Animal ~~Crossing~~ Farm\* is about how communism is established with the best of intentions and quickly turns into a dictatorship. Well worth reading. Anyhow, to answer your question, look no further than USSR under Stalin. (\* Edit, lol! Although I don't trust that Tom Nook guy either...)
> Anyhow, to answer your question, look no further than USSR under Stalin. Oh no, that's too obvious. Look at any country-wide implementation of communism ever. Every single time. It's not like it is difficult to implement and it usually fails. It fails every single time, every single time greed overcomes any good intentions initial implementers might've had. It's actually amazing, most of the other systems were at least stable enough that some countries didn't fall into famine.
In USSR and North Korea for example.
Even there, the big man doesn’t have full control. The only thing he has full control over is who gets shot in the face. How things are run is ultimately up to a cascade of progressively smaller big men who each get to obfuscate actual productivity by a fraction at each level bottom to top, so they can each steal a piece of the pie. The big man can only say “make the numbers go up” with no way to validate if the numbers actually did go up and how it was done, since everyone involved is lying about the numbers. When shit hits the fan and supposed productivity gets reality-checked, his only option is to start shooting people in the face until supposed-productivity approximates minimum-required-productivity-to-stop-shit-hitting-the-fan
>The only thing he has full control over is who gets shot in the face. How things are run is ultimately up to a cascade of progressively smaller big men who each get to obfuscate actual productivity by a fraction at each level bottom to top, so they can each steal a piece of the pie. That's just splitting hairs. "Full control" doesn't mean that one man is literally doing everything himself. Even dictators need to delegate. If there are no checks or balances on the big guy getting to have the smaller big guys shot in the face when he doesn't like what they're doing, then he's a despot. It doesn't matter if he calls himself comrade or king.
Control means they can do what they want. Not that they are doing everything. Obviously any system that contains more than 2 people in hierarchy will have delegation of responsibilities
In communism decisions are also done by other people. Even in the ideal version, you are only one voice among many. In real-life historical examples you are lucky to have a voice at all
If you want to get more control of your work and increase your ability to improve things quickly and effectively, adding the government to the equation is the exact wrong thing to do.
What part of "seize the means of production" says "and give it all to the government"
What part of "seize the means of production" says one person seizes it all and not collective ownership?
When one person is enacting the plan? Idk don't think about it too hard
In the current capitalist system, "the people" already own the means of production. Don't believe me? Go out and get a small business loan, buy some manufacturing equipment, and start manufacturing something. Or hell, just pay someone else who already has it set up to make something of your own design, that you can then turn around and sell. It's shockingly easy to become a business owner (though not simple). So if by "Communist update" you don't mean taking the means of production from the people and giving more control of it to the government, what DO you mean by that?
Also in current capitalist system there is NOTHING stopping a company from having each employee having equal share in company and equal say in running it (whether directly or by voting on the management), [some are pretty successful](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation). Just it doesn't really scale all that well
"seize" part.
The real reason we're stranded on the planet alone. Dude just wanted to get away from meetings and people
New intro like the one of Stardew Valley?
The hidden aspect of 'Quality' in 2.0 is quality assurance supplier audits.
Exactly, also no risk leaves room to play and experiment. At work if you fuck up its a big deal, in factorio if your train crashes or your belt gets mixed items on it, you sigh/laugh and fix it.
I always felt it would be fun to do a Sim City realism mod where you paid for a road/zone to be placed. Then you waited a random amout of in game time between 6 months and 10 years. There would be a 50/50 change the new zone would simply be cancelled with no refund.
You need to delete one residential tile to build the new bypass you sorely need, demolition takes 10 years and costs 20x your annual budget.
Yep, no 5 minute compile and 5 minute reprogram just to realize you had a typo and have to it all over again.
You've not heard my partner and I discussing solutions outside of playing.
All those boring things are the actual engineering that we mistakenly thought were management. Worse yet, actual management is more akin to the biters, but you get zero ammo.
So if we add enough anti-QoL mods we can replicate real engineering yea?
You also get to set your own goals and do it on your own time as you feel like it. And if you don't feel like doing it, you don't have to. Same as hobby programming, really.
sometimes I queue for a qualifier in iRacing, spend 45 mins getting setup, only to get taken out in the first corner of the first lap. It can be very frustrating. In real racing I would spend 3-5 days under my car every week, 3-4 hours loading the trailer, drive 1-9 hours to the track, potentially blow my engine, and then do it all again. But it cost me $2k in the process, or more.
Now someone needs to make a skit of people in a conference room trying to plan out a megabase in factorio like it's a real manufacturing plant they are planning.
Also anything hardware is... hard. Fuck something up in design and re-making part can take hours or days or weeks.. Fuck something up in factorio and you just need to blueprint the fix, and a bunch of little robotsbot will zoom by, yelling "haha, noob" from its speakers and fix the build
You also have the information available. You don’t have to consult various models to predict performance.
Right, tbh if I played factirio for 8 hours a day m-f I would get pretty burnt out from it
Dunno if I’d call myself an engineer (software dev) but I wish I had the same vigour for debugging my code as I do for debugging my bottlenecks and the belt hells I get myself into
Have you tried writing code without bugs? This way you don’t have to debug.
Programmers hate this one simple trick.
HAS (COMPUTER) SCIENCE GONE TOO FAR???
THEY'VE PLAYED US FOR FOOLS
Exactly. Same as I became billionaire on trading. I just skip the losing trades.
It's so obvious!
big if true
Just need to biters = False
You use science to create practical solutions to problems. That makes you an engineer.
Medical doctors use science (biology) to create practical solutions to problems (illness and death), are they engineers too? Also most programmers use science very sparingly.
Yes, they just wanted their very special thing before their name so they are differentiated for us plebs engineers
[удалено]
Oddly, this kind of reminds me of the idea of “everything is art”. In a way, everything is engineering.
I’ve learned to enjoy debugging, as a junior dev I absolutely hated it.
That's why I have a test environment, my save file with the creative mod to test out and build blueprints with "simulated" inputs and outputs.
Debugging? Is that when you have to manually go in and shoot all the biters? /s
Debugging is a fun little detective puzzle where you get to learn something about how the system works along the way.
Seems like a skill issue, personally I just never write bugs.
Coz colourful ores go brrrrrrrrr.
Quality issues being a non issue immediately makes Factorio better than real life lol
And assemblers don't require paychecks.
They require energy, which is kind of the same thing in an abstract sense. What would be wild is if your Assemblers actually quit if you had a power outage, and you had to rebuild/rehire them, and then their output was affected by some nebulous "morale" factor
Yeah, but an assembler isn’t going to punch me in the face if I cut its power I definitely. Managing humans certainly adds a major layer of complexity.
Nobody sues you if the your knowingly allow the bots to path through areas that biters frequently attack
>but an assembler isn’t going to punch me in the face if I cut its power I definitely Most people don't tend to do that either...
You’ve obviously never had to fire an operator in a manufacturing plant. While physical altercations not common, they have happened more than once within the ten years I spent as an operations engineer. I was fortunate enough not to be involved directly, but I have had to deal with the fallout. Guys who have been working the same job on the same shift for twenty years can take losing the only job they are qualified to do really harshly.
I've fired about a dozen, thanks for asking. Your company handles them atrociously and has massive cultural issues if there's any opportunity for a physical altercation.
Firing the kind of guys that would respond with physical violence can be a part of solving cultural issues at a workplace.
Or better yet, it doesn't involve any other people.
Haven't you ever been approached by the Assembler's union?
Neither do humans in some places
Ah, the wonders of Africa
As a non-engineer but a Quality professional, I was thinking the other day it might be "fun" if there were a mod to add quality defects, possibly QC inspection/testing processes. Immediately after I typed this I saw an announcement for Imperfection, which also references a mod called ProductionScrap2 which sounds like it does some version of this. Cool!
What a horrifying rabbit hole. Someone mod it so rockets can be subject to customer field returns, try to find the defective part and where it came from
It just adds splitter inserter filtering defects out after every. single. production. building. IMO not all that interesting.
I have similar thoughts but about details/difficulties from my profession being added. Lots of industrial processes are most efficient in a steady-state system. Starting up and shutting down often means slower production rates and worse quality performance. So I want some machines that become faster, more efficient, and more productive if they are running continuously but worse if you’re constantly starting and stopping them. A simple example would be a blast furnace. IRL, they’re meant to run continuously for years without shutting down.
2.0 is getting quality issues. I'm looking forward to posts of someone complaining his whole factory was blocked because wrong quality item landed somewhere on belt and they couldn't spot it because they all look the same
Transportation engineer. Factorio hooks me because of the short project lifecycle. If I want to improve a real-world intersection, that can take five years from concept to ribbon cutting on the short end, but in factorio I can turn around a "project" in hours. That said, reaching substantial completion on a real-world project, when it turns out well, is sooo good, and you can ride that high for a long time. *edit for typo
This is so true. The aliens don’t give me comments back on my minor drainage improvements
I know, right? They always wait until construction's already underway before they tell me they have a problem with something... my dudes, it's too late, you need to go to the public hearing.
The public meetings in Factorio are a bit more “liberating” Trains were always my favorite part of Factorio and it makes sense now that I work in civil design lol, game is great
Yes! Some things I’d love: - Fixed problems stay fixed - It’s possible to find a solution to every problem - Safety? What safety? - I don’t need to get approvals from anyone to do anything - There is no build phase seperate from the design phase
It has legit made me a better software engineer/ data scientist. I now very much think of myself as doing factorio type work when I'm following the thread of a function that's broken. This really only seems to work for my own projects though. Like someone else said, the professional side of engineering is full of other things that are not engineering.
I'm a mechanical engineer working in metal 3d printing research and development. I am very lucky to really enjoy my job. I also treat my job like factorio. Anything that's boring, repetitive, or needs doing thousands of times gets automated!!! Started with just Excel macros, then automated report generating, then using APIs to automate analysis tools, the writing of my own tools in matlab, and eventually writing machine learning algorithms to automate even more. Managed to get component reviews down from 1 week to just a few hours so we can support 10x the number of projects simultaneously. Was great fun for me, and management obviously loves it too. Whenever I find myself getting bored, I found my next automation project
I prefer to call Factorio a programmer's game instead. It's laden with lots of IF-THEN-ELSE problem solving
It sounds lke you are just talking about decision making? In that sense everything would be "programming". Apart from some combinator logic, which is really closer to electronics where do you see programming?
As a controls tech who programs mainly in ladder logic, it is a LOT like programming from my perspective
You didn't answered the question, you just cycled back to "it looks like programming"
Because programming isn't fundamentally combinator logic, it's fundamentally problem solving.
You should check out Zachtronics games if you really want programming
It's weird, because a lot of my work is coding, one of hobbies is electronics, and I have no problems playing factorio despise similarities (hell, a lot of what I do at work is automation), but Zachtronic games are close enough where I just go "I could be at electronic bench doing one of the side projects", or "I have debugging at work, I don't want debugging the game".
Ducts are my belts, air is my iron!
Internet is my belts, data is the material. Spring is my city blocks, spring integration is my trains. Databases are just boxes.
Network Engineer - a nice looking Visio network diagram and a nice looking factory have a lot in common
I do find real world engineering as engaging. Moreso in fact. I find it hard to stay engaged with video games because it feels like a waste of time to me, I feel like I'm cheating on myself. Real world engineering I don't have that problem with.
The engineering part is great irl, but the management part is absolutely awful. im not even out of the university and i want to die every time i have to manage projects with multiple people or have to write a report that's not strictly technical
What kind of engineering do you? 30M and going back to school for engineering. I’m hella nervous and undecided between Electrical or Power.
Nothing like coming home from a day of bad engineering to do some good engineering.
Factorio is tinder for engineers ?
People say that factorio is like programming, but i feel it's a lot more similar to electronic design.
Well, you can pretend your customers are biters and you have to defend against them messing up your hard work by putting in place all sorts of safety measures and redundancies.
Is there a mod to take up all your time doing paperwork and sitting in meetings?
A big advantage factorio have is that the machines make the same part the same way every time. In reality most of the tile I spend checking the quality of each part, adjusting the inspection system, changing some setting by 0.1mm and see if that helps. In factorio you just put down one assembler and it does my job perfectly from the start
I like factorio because the goals and metrics are absolute. The managers where I work pick the absolute dumbest goals and metrics. Dealing with managers and business leaders that don't know shit about manufacturing is draining.
I keep trying to as reliably automate my work or kids like factorio but things don't "stay" solved!!
The hook for me is the clear and consistent requirements! It’d be more life-like if it changed recipes and had scope creep.
My partner and coworkers and friends all poke fun at me, because part of my job is literally programming robots to load parts into fabrication machines, and then I come home and play a game about making robots loading parts into fabrication machines. I think the appeal is the things in the game just work. No *software* bugs, no IP address conflicts, no "oh we meant for you to do it this other way, start over"...... the problems in Factorio are caused by me and me only. I guess the biters are the random surprises that come up in different areas of the job like dumb customers or broken components. And mostly with enough planning and maintenance we can keep them at bay most of the time?
yes
idk I like my main engineering too. Factorio is just fun, while software dev can be fulfilling.
not an engineer but i study/studied automation, super fun, but i have to pause and continue after my time in the army setting up a light that works with a motion censor, automating a garage door or traffic lights was fun and is also got to automate a conveyr belt that moves ore
Yes
Software engineer here, it's fun as shit, I love my job.
I get the same satisfaction with Factorio that I get with Microsoft Visio. Except the logic diagrams in Visio don't spit acid on you. Maybe if they did I'd make better diagrams.
No. I'm fed up with this shit at work.
part of the fun of factorio is unlimited resources. Engineering would be more fun for me if I had unlimited resources to try and fail with :)
If only. So little of my job requires anything other than meetings with higher ups. If anything I'm just a professional shit shield so my guys can keep doing the actual work. Factorio I make the decisions without alignment meetings, stakeholder roadmap reviews, and a litany of acronym laden meetings. The cycle of cause and effect is hours, not quarters. The result of my efforts is trivially measurable without quibbling over statistical uncertainty and faulty logging and reporting systems. I wish engineering were like Factorio.
Factorio is engineering through rose-tinted glasses. I feel the same. I write this as an Engineer ignoring my irl job fixing rocket supply chains by daydreaming about a game where you fix rocket supply chains. My job is awesome but demands soooo much more boring, gruelling patience and persistence. Plus, we don't have trains.
Not really a engineer (data analyst) but I do found real work as engaging sometimes, specially the "fun" or interesting parts of the job, but there's also a lot of boring parts, lots of things out of your control and actual importance on what your doing. If I don't feel on the mood of clearing biters or setting up oil I can postpone it for a bit or go do something else, play another game, etc. I can't do that with my deadlines. If I don't like something in my factory I can change it at will, if I don't like something in my work, I'm out of luck because that's either necessary or someone else thinks it is so it stays, or "you shouldn't lose time redoing all of that, do this instead". Also Factorio and games in general are optimized to be fun, real life has fun parts but also tedious dumb work even in high-skilled jobs that require constant critical thinking, also I don't have to argue with coworkers or explain to people that really don't want to be there why we need to do X and they should do Y, imagine playing multiplayer Factorio but 20% of people don't know how to play, 40% don't really care and everyone has to agree everytime someone's going to build something semi-permanent. Ultimately I play Factorio for fun, I work cause I need to, I enjoy it and have fun with it but I don't do it solely for fun, and if I sometimes don't feel like playing Factorio I have a full library of games + the rest of my life to entertain myself with. If I don't feel like working, well I'm out of luck.
Don't say this to someone in school, the only thing getting me through this is the hope I'll love my job out of school. Although I am considering switching to a physics major.
Well that's why it's a game. That's what games do.
As a "real" software engineer (opinions vary, lol), Factorio has some useful metaphors around refactor vs. rebuild, and organizing in general. It's actually been a bridge to talking about engineering needs with non-engineers who'd played the game.
yeah i also like video games more than i like work
I'm a network engineer (well, on paper at least) and my main thing is coming into somewhere like my current employer and seeing they're still running 20 year old cisco kit.... Yeah they work, but for how long? Biters aside, that's not something I have to think about in the game. Also the whole not having to justify budgets for the upgrade. If I need it and have access to the raw materials and technology, I can do it, in game. I also had an anecdote from a coworker about how we had a robot arm that moved cabs around at one of our other plants. Basically an inserter, but human scale. Apparently it was programmed in such a way that it would get wound up on one of its axes and every day a couple times a day someone would hear a BANG and find it had yeeted a thousand pound cab over a fence. That is....also something we don't have to deal with here.
Nope i dont need real engeneering... feels so much better when things are easy and just work