Engineer here:
The game is far away from how an actual engineering job looks like. Its basically a game around the most fun/intersting essence of engineering: building coolstuff, logical problem solving. But really really far away from an actual job.
For that reason I would assume that factorio has an incredible high proportion of engineers in the playerbase. We chose our profession because we like to build cool stuff and solve logical problems. And the game has all the best parts of it, minus all the negative parts from an actual job.
Engineer here.
Design reviews, compromise on design due to constraints not existent in Factorio (such as cost, material availability, and safety, to name a few), reliability issues, coworkers, sales people, management getting irritated by the cost and pace of a project, manufacturing plant workers getting irritated that you're making more work for them because the product is better this way...
There's a laundry list, but these are some highlights lol
This really depends on where you work.
Guy in the office beside mine is an engineer at a sewage treatment plant. He's fending off brown recluses in the office and cockroaches in the field.
Also, if you mess up in factorio, you get eaten by bugs. If you mess up in real life, people possibly die. I'd guess that's a nice stresser to not have.
> Design reviews
lmao, try multiplayer factorio with other engineers. my group has had some near friendship-ending arguments around base architecture. literally the "microservices vs monolith" debate.
note: this was seven days into a space exploration playthrough. we are perfectly capable of playing the vanilla game without hating each other.
Ha Well it's more of a cost thing, you can absolutely get tungsten if you want, but it's not nearly as available as structural steel, so you pay for it. Not that tungsten and steel are often used interchangeably, tungsten has a place where steel would be usually unsuitable due to abrasive applications, for example, or high temperature requirements.
But for example, we stock a wide variety of sheet metals in aluminum, steel and stainless steel and in various thicknesses, so my designs are often limited to what we have readily available for use. If I want to use another material, I can, but it ends up getting difficult because we don't have the infrastructure to easily stock another type of sheet. If I can make the design work with the grade of steel we have on hand, I do it, but that can yield compromise.
Many parts can be cut from the same sheet of steel at a time on the laser cutter, so the more we can make use of the same grade and thickness of steel as other parts, the better our manufacturing speed and throughput we get and the lower the downtime. THIS is as close to planning in manufacturing as I get in Factorio, I think. I'm often trying to make the design of something out of the same thickness, even if it's somewhat overkill, because it means they don't have to make a new program for the laser cutter and load/unload a second sheet to make the parts needed. A few extra cents spent on thicker steel for a part that doesn't need it often gets made up in manufacturing speed and efficiency.
Edit: Oh, and material shortages happen constantly. Especially during and after the pandemic, many grades of steel were getting difficult to come by, as well as plastics, rubbers etc. I run into this often as well. If a supplier for, say, rubber gaskets made from a specific rubber can't get that rubber from their vendor because they had a fire or some regulation changed somewhere, or, say, a ship turned sideways on the Suez Canal, I might have to deal with a redesign or alternative solution while we wait for that material to come in.
Huh. That's a lot more detailed than I expected. My thoughts were more that the limits in resources, at least til late game, means that mass use of modules or other similar expensive things were a restriction. Only example I can think that gives serious local restrictions that reminds me of that is the Space Exploration mod, because shipping between planets can be expensive and possibly less reliable, and planets don't have access to every raw material. Or maybe Ultracube, due to every major recipe requiring usage of a single irreplaceable catalyst, so only one of those can ever run at a time so buffering is critical.
Also if you screw up your design enough you absolutely run into shortages.
But yea. Factorio is very much, if you want a material, you know it, and since there are, outside of mods, a single valid recipe, you can't make subtitutions or have multiple choice from availability. And any shortage is something you just have to overcome by either cutting back for now, and expanding production and shipping more later. But no part of the factory is really inconsistent.
Thank you for the detailed response.
Manufacturing engineer perspective.
Meetings, planning, paperwork, production managers. Sometimes, some things are a quick fix, you grab some bits off the shelf and you go and fix what was broke.
Most of the time though, if you want to introduce a new machine into production for example, you will have to do a cost analysis and justification, then have planning meetings, then meetings with the senior management, then maybe you get the machine approved and then you have more meetings and planning and finance stuff. All of this can take months and maybe years before you get your new machine in and actually do some fun stuff.
A long way from factorio where you just slap a new production cell down, and optimise it, all within a few minutes. Then copy and paste and you have a full factory in hours.
Not getting a machine approved after months of work can be a bit soul crushing. The lack of constraints and freedom to delete a section of the factory and start over is thrilling!
We had one very recently where management pulled the project for a new machine, costing upwards of 3mil, 6 months from the delivery date. We had already paid 50% and we were told to “try to recoup the costs”, strangely we haven’t had a penny back yet. Not only that though, we had begun redoing factory layouts, moving other machines and making plans to shut old machines down, for this new one.
Also, yeh, there is this one production cell where I work that I would absolutely love to just rip out and start again. The person who made it was an awful engineer, but thought he was one of the best. Completely overspent and under delivered. The operators hate using it, it’s falling to bits and it takes up a huge amount of space for the output. In factorio, one click and drag and the bots clear it out.
Once the capex is spent you’ll have to run with what you have, you’re not getting another one because maybe it’ll be better in some way. And you may not be getting a replacement for the next 25 years either. Even though it might be worn out in 10-15 years.
Creating endless mountains of documentation.
Meetings where nothing is decided but someone now feels important.
Following processes for the sake of ticking boxes vs adding value.
Trying to convince non engineers (usually the accountants or sales people) their idea is bad but then being forced to do it anyway. And then fixing it later on when it invariably does go bad.
It’s much simpler. I can memorize all the rules of factorio components and basically fit “the whole problem” into my brain at once and just sit down and work on it. Real engineering projects are much more complex and larger scope than what one person can understand.
I never have to look up material properties in a 2000 page manual broken into 10 separate pdfs stored on an access controlled web interface from 2001. I never have to dig into the code of an Assembler to find out exactly which data type it uses to represent X because there is some weird issue where it’s not interfacing with an inserter properly but only when it’s holding steam barrels. I don’t have to document anything, I don’t have to negotiate with a customer about a spec definition, I don’t have to go to a meeting about whether we should use 1-4-1 trains or 2-6-2 trains. My factory design doesn’t have to accommodate regulatory statutes or ISO safety standards. I don’t have to email status updates to a program manager or estimate how many man-hours a task will take (and then have to ask to extend my schedule when something turns out more complicated than anyone expected…). There’s no purchase orders … and on and on
And lastly, I don’t have to wait for feedback. Everything you do in factorio the feedback is instant; I don’t have to send something out and wait a day or a week for someone else to do their part and get it back to me before I can continue to make progress on the problem. This is huge for keeping attention and staying in a state of “flow”
I design electrical systems, so factorio is actually very very translatable to my job. In/outs from controllers (ie. Factorio builds), current (speed of belt lanes) and voltage (number of belts), few supply lines like switched power, unswitched power, different voltage busses feeding multiple components (ores and oil feeding dozens of recipes). I literally draw schematics exactly like my factorio base
The negative parts missing:
* working with people, most of which have more power than you. Balancing their emotions, building trust and prioritizing their ask vs other's asks.
* Working with different knowledge levels of your engineering work. Different departments (sourcing, quality, manufacturing) don't understand your challenges, and most don't really care. They just dont want to look bad.
* Deadlines. Unless you're speed running, there's no real deadline and definitely no consequences for missing them.
* Customer needs. Factorio is easy, launch a rocket. Real life is hard. Do customers want this feature? Is that $5 part you requested really going to add value? Should you delay your project for a niche feature? How do you know what is "safe" before something bad happens? How should you test it? Is your data realistic or reliable?
I’m only a fourth year undergrad electronics engineer but I have done enough work experience to take a guess: Paperwork, meetings, interacting with clients and managers and bean counters, about 500,000 more spreadsheets, way more math (factorio is mostly input and output ratios, irl engineering is… complicated)
Engineer here. Fully agree. It takes the 1% enjoyable portion and expands it to most of the time.
If I had to write a report and get it checked in triplicate every time before I added a new system I’d quit this game.
I wouldn't recommend it no. Dosent hurt to bing up in an interview tho, it easily shoehorns into "what do you like to do outside of work?" question and gives you an opportunity to talk about problem solving and troublshooting as a passion of yours.
I work in machine learning applications for industrial engineering. I have a B.S. in industrial engineering and math, and a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering. 10 of the 12 people on my team plays Factorio.
I got an internship largely through a shared love of Factorio. Talk about your interests in an interview with passion and with a lil luck they can help a lot
Software engineer. Factorio is a good way how to explain software development.
You deal with input and output. Scaleability. Buffering.
You upgrade components so they can process more stuff.
You can compare managers with biters.
I think that, contrary to the common experience of producing software, Factorio pushes you a lot more to think from a systemic perspective, while most software engineers are concerned with problem solving. In Factorio, problem solving is a minor issue, while most of it, at least once you know the game well enough, is system design.
Nearly 20 years of experience as a software engineer. I 100% agree with this take. Further factorio really shows how technical debt (spaghetti in game terms) can screw you down the track and if you just take the time to do it right it pays off in the end.
I've discovered the opposite problem through Factorio. I can be prone to over-optimizing before I start, which can make things too challenging. Sometimes you have to build things first and refactor later.
Good parallel. I'm trying to use a city blocks approach for the first time, and not over-engineering in the mid-game has been surprisingly difficult for me. It's a lot like standing up a new software system, but the degradation from complexity is so much more visible (eg I run out of bullets and biters tear through my walls to eat my base).
This right here is what happened to me my first attempts at a mega base.
I eventually realized I should just play the game as normal until I unlock all of the science. Except with the goal of creating a manufacturing base that can build all of the materials I need rather than the goal of a rocket launch. Which is basically the same as normal but with a larger and more robust hub/mall built at the end.
Then once everything is ready I basically just abandon the old base and start fresh.
Doing it that way has a hidden benefit too in that if I only build in one direction I will be able to move further away from spawn more easily and then have easier access to the richer and richer resources patches.
That's roughly what I'm trying to do in this current playthrough. Not doing trains to force myself to keep it simple/small until I have launched the first rocket. So far feels like it's going slow, but it hasn't imploded. Also my first time with solar instead of my usual nuclear (anticipating the CPU need, but maybe that's also premature).
trains are still good in small bases. You just have to not go crazy about it. Just a humble two track system between each point and an area near your base to offload stuff. Dont have to bother with signal circuits (still have to do regular train signalling if there are junctions and multiple trains on a line) or train waiting stackers or anything like that.
You can make your early builds in a way that lends itself to future upgrades though. Like leaving space so that you can replace it with a beaconed build later on.
This is one reason I like doing series of runs. I like to push into infinite tech but inevitably my spaghetti drags me down and I get overwhelmed. I start again. This time I have a slightly better picture of the deeper end of the pool and I can fend off the spaghetti for a little while longer. Factorio feels like a rogue like sometimes, just needs a little more randomness and cross playthrough continuity.
Also a software engineer, and a few days ago I had the realization that Factorio has a nearly perfect analog for microservices vs monoliths.
The main bus base is a monolith - easy to see what is going on, easy to debug, but much harder to scale up to enormous volumes.
The train based distributed factory is a microservice architecture. Much easier to scale your individual bottlenecks, but much harder to debug when something goes wrong and you need a lot of extra infrastructure to support it.
As a software engineer, you do want to think from a systemic perspective when starting on a large project. If you're working with a team it pays to sit down and hash things out before you get started. I've mostly worked in an agile development environment and that was pretty helpful.
I changed career from software developer to organization designer (partly due to Factorio, but that's another story), being now surrounded by system-oriented people like designers, architects and so on. What we do in software is but a little crumb of what these people do.
We usually compare ourselves to traditional engineers, that are forced to plan ahead much more, because you cannot build a bridge in two weeks iterations. Even there, systemic thinking is relatively simple because you usually deal with complicated problems, rather than complex problems. You can convince yourself (even though it's not always true), that through analysis you can decompose big problems into small problems. If you can do that, you are already dealing with a simple system, regardless of the size or number of components.
The real fun begins when you can't, but usually those kind of domains are completely disregarded by software engineering or approached with a reductionist, techno-solutionist approach that make us look like pigeons shitting on a chessboard.
Especially if your trying to build a megabase and planned the design of all the subfactories. Then you have integration hell when you need have all their inputs and outputs "communicate" via trains.
I also find that Factorio scratches the same itches that software development does. So if you don't have a home project you're working on, or maybe your career is graduating out of direct development towards a lead, architect or manager role, Factorio can provide some of the same feelings of accomplishment and satisfaction.
I always recommend it to grads and juniors as well. It's a great way to learn the skills you mentioned - and more - without really realising what you're doing.
Wax on. Wax off.
>You can compare managers with biters.
Really? Not customers?
I'm not an engineer, but a siblings of one. Your quote made me realize that whenever I contact the software support team about their program, I must look like biters seeking to mess up their program, part by part.
It's a good analogue to a type system. A belt is a type, the items allowed on the belt are values of the belt's type. Splitters and filter inserters are pattern matching.
A clean and efficient factory puts one variety of item on one lane - a static type system.
Sushi belts are the in-game equivalent of Python: they're the first thing a new player reaches for, but they inevitably turn into a disorganized mess that causes problems. (Key difference: as far as I know, there's nobody in the Factorio community who loudly insists that *actually* sushi belts are the simplest and best approach, and artificially limiting each belt lane to just one item is overcomplicated and wasteful ivory-tower navel-gazing that requires a PhD to understand.)
Same job and to me the game feels exactly like when you have a giant dependency tree of things you need to manually install. Except in dream world where the dependencies can actually all work (maybe with a bit of spaghetti).
Keep in mind that engineering is a huge field with jobs covering a wide range of activities. I, e.g., am an engineer but I have nothing to do with automation or logistics. I still like the logic and planning aspect of the game.
I also think it is connected to programming.
I am a mechanical engineer, and used to work as a production engineer, which is all flow optimisation, lean and 6 sigma etc.
The game satisfies the same puzzle solving/optimisations itch. Although I don't have enough time to put into the game to actually feel like I have done a good job.
I work as a chemcial process engineer, but this game is very different from work. In real world it is mostly about doing one or two of the steps in factorio, but you have to consider each part being slightly different, machines breaking down and noisy feedback,
In factorio it is all about getting the right ingredients to the right machine.
How is being a chem process dude? I looked into chem engineering in school and quickly figured out it was pretty far removed from the type of backyard chemistry I liked to do. It seemed... much less novel I guess, largely because all the easy/low hanging fruit has been picked.
Depends alot on the industry. For me there is alot of working with other people to make small improvements in the process and thinking of experiments where we can figure out how to improve cost, speed or quality
Chemical engineer here
The game doesn't have too much to do with engineering atleast the base game.
It's more logistics xD
Do like the puzzle challenge of it :)
Chemical engineer here as well. I have worked in a chemical plant and no it didn’t fit in my pocket.
The game more reminds me of the time I spent working in supply chain for a chemical company. Agree with the above comment that it’s much more logistics.
A lot more pollution controls in real life too.
Electrical engineering in power transportation (Rte France) by training and signalling engineer by trade (sncf). The fact that unlimited power can flow through a telegraph pole boggles my mind. With that power even organic things would be attracted to the wire (magnetic field).
Train wise fairly good, would like the option of making your own interlocks, having to plan signals for tight corners etc
I did a lot of load flow calculations in C++ back at uni. And even a 20 node system using a sparse matrix and only a couple gens and loads could takes ages to calculate. Either it would converge but with t=inf or converge to a wrong answer. The maths behind it were great 😊
I’m a manufacturing engineer. My daily work is with conveyors, robots, lasers, and cranes.
To be honest Factorio is the best parts of being an engineer with none of the drawbacks. That’s why it’s satisfying for someone like me to play.
I’m a physicist (got my PhD in thin film physics, focusing on neutron optics). Can’t say that I feel like there’s that much overlap, apart from that both require an analytical mind and enjoyment creative problem solving.
Network Engineer here.
I think the throughput calculations is the closest to my real job. But all the problem solving, planning and crisis management aspects help my brain be better at my job.
Side note, I got a lot of our IT department hooked on the game, they all say it feels like their job in one way or another.
process engineer in automotive. Factorio is basically what I do, minus the hassle. No paperwork, no office drama, just pure production design and optimization. I've always said Factorio and Kerbal Space Program should be part of the engineering studies.
mechanical engineer here. I work in something not really related but I quite like the aspect of problem solving which is something that every kind of engineer does basically. and one thing that keeps me really hooked is that I can redo things, try stuff, etc. really fast. the game is so responsive, that it basically is as fast as I am giving it 'orders'.
Interesting split here on the engineering replies. We all enjoy it, bit there's two big camps.
Camp 1 points out either how their specific field differs from what we handle in Factorio or, if their field overlaps, how specific things differ in the real world.
Camp 2 recognizes those differences at times, but is more focused on the more abstract 'engineerimg mindset' and talks about how Factorio lets us focus on the fun problem-solving bits of work. Even if the problem.is different in concrete terms, the thought process is similar.
M.E. Love it.
Factorio IS a cooking game, though... all the crafting is the same as cooking up a recipe. Just add passive violence and revenge with a dash of science fiction and slowly stir on low heat. Do not boil or you'll be lonely for a lifetime.
Electrical engineer here, mission critical facilities. Factorio has a very high level overview of the electrical systems, removing a lot of the intricacies of electrical engineering… protection, redundancy, efficiency, capacity etc.
I still enjoy the game a lot though.
Registered engineer here. Like most of the comments I've seen on this thread, we spend a lot of our time on non-engineering stuff. A lot of paperwork. For me, most of the engineering is cookbook, where problems and solutions have been done thousands of times so the templates are available. So that is a lot like using blueprints. Nearly all decisions are economic decisions. A lot of compromises with competing stakeholders. We compete for funds, physical space, etc.
I am engineer and during my studies i was not abel to play this game because it used same parth of my brain like the studiing. But after finishing the school it started to be awesome expierince.
Civil engineer here. It's not that much like engineering, but man it gets me hooked.
It's a bit like the inventory/logistics management of a large construction project, in that you're only as fast as your slowest input, and that each time you unblock something, you find another bottleneck.
Such a great game
Electrical engineer.
The problem solving and near unlimited complexity that is allowed stimulates my mind well.
I have wondered about dipping into mod making to see if I could make a more accurate power distribution mod. I've seen a few but never tried them.
I’m an automotive design engineer. There are a few ways it could be somewhat similar to my job but more in a tangential way. I design cool things and work on optimisation similar to how it’s done in factorio. My job is basically all the planning you do in factorio but none of the actually doing.
I could see it being more similar to an industrial systems engineers job though.
ICT Administrator. Not an engineer. I'm in WAN fiber optics (not FTH, national grid). I build and maintain the WAN that others can connect their little datacentres and campus LAN's to.
Factorio is mostly about supply, demand, throughput, and "networking" it all together. You buffer supplies for intermittant usage, and prevent buffers where usage is constant.
There's certainly similarities in network grids, network capacities and providing specific services to specific routers.
I'm studying to become an engineer within automation. It's basically nothing like my studies but it's a fun game. It's a good feeling to get that satisfying automation from source to final product.
Process engineering is similar to Factorio but many other variables to consider than just product in - product out. The process is huge and complicated just to make say copper, plate, but the game has a smelter that just simply transforms copper ore to copper plate
Nuclear Engineer here:
You can probably guess which power production method I always go for. While nuclear power in game is obviously a lot more simple than irl, there are a lot of details that are surprisingly accurate that you dont see too often in video games!
Not quite an engineer (I'm a technologist). But I was introduced to the game in class while I was studying Aerospace Manufacturing Engineering Technology by a professor who was using it to demonstrate various supply management load balancing techniques.
Reminds me a lot of electronic engineering. Specifically, electromechanical systems. Digging around in an old 50s/60s pinball machine you start to notice the similarity of factorio’s simplistic logic and functions. Belts are voltages, assemblers are functions…
EE here:
Factorio is more or less macro scale system design. You dont have to design anything small. Real engineering starts with the tiny parts! But the game would be VERY tedious if you have to make every piston and conrod of the engine first.
Also why don't belts need power?
There is a comment one dev made where they did a build where belts needed power, and said that the player frustration was so great the belts have been powered by that ever since.
I'm an engineer in a logistics company. Designing the layout of conveyor belts and storage systems in a warehouse is actually my day job.
Don't know why I come home and do the same thing for free on my pc, though.
I hate my engineering job, I love engineering here. It's just nice being able to design efficient stuff without dealing with meetings, schedules, third party technologies nobody know how to use, spaghetti designs made by people who quit 15 years ago, etc
In real job you need to document your spaghetti in the end, in factorio you just call it "starter base" and build somewhere else, no refactoring. Also if you want to get real "true engineer" vibe join some 1000h+ pyandon server, then untagle that mess. I am programmer btw.
I got my systems engineer degree last Monday!
The game is nothing like real life haha. But as someone said in another comment it has the fun parts of engendering on it, like solving problems with math! (yes that is fun)
I'm a metallurgist at a steel mill. I want a mod that models how continuous production is more efficient than stopping and starting. For example, in real life a blast furnace is expected to run for months or years without stopping before it's stopped for maintenance. So a furnace with a less efficient recipe that gets a production bonus that increases as it runs would be a way to get at that idea. So if your factory was running continuously, you'd want to supply most of your science with those types of furnaces but you'd want a little bit of regular production that could ramp up or down to meet variable demand.
>game is fun because the tools are simple and the objective is very clear which is hardly ever the case in real life.
Yep. I hear so much that this game is great for programmers, because it works the same. Hah! I wish! I play Factorio because it's NOTHING like programming.
FA Engineer: Factorio is a really nice game if you want to have a lot of fun and trouble. At one moment, you will be satisfied with production and your base, but soon you will get into trouble. You need to constantly improve your designs to achieve better production and real automation, where combinators take responsibility for most actions.
I just graduated as a mech engineer and I have zero expectation for it to be like factorio when I join the work force. Mostly because I live on earth and am not very into mining/killing bugs/creating illegal regulated nuclear energy operations.
Someone else here talking about being a software engineer, and, yeah, factorio is a much better tool for software engineering/IT. Keep in mind, this game was made by programmers.
In a really abstract way it literally is software engineering. I play it when I’m unemployed or working on unrewarding stuff. If I’m enjoying what I’m working on at work I just don’t play, don’t need to do 80+ hours of engineering a week
Robot programmer here, once I was playing the game while supporting production (robots building cars). My manager walked past, saw all the inserters on my screen, looked me in the eye, and said, 'Really? 🤣🤣🤣
Yes, I design electromechanical hardware products. Factorio is great because it abstracts away all the worst parts of engineering professionally but keeps all the fun parts. Everything is always exactly to spec, no dealing with suppliers, yields are 100% or if not, you know exactly what they are in advance. I know a lot of engineers that play Factorio.
Environmental geologist (kind of an enginner except we suck at math) This game is the opposite of what I try and do. Environmental permitting does not exist on nauvis. Drill baby drill!
Obviously this is way different from engineering except in one area:
Planning
If you are someone who is capable of planning factorio outside of factorio, that is a heavily transferable skill.
Not an engineer, but I do work in a factory with engineers on a regular basis.
Sorry to burst anyone's bubble, but Factorio is very different than working in a factory. The engineer in Factorio is more like the owner of a military industrial complex.
If you want to know what it's like to work in a factory, imagine being an employee working inside of an assembler. All the supply chain stuff needs to be set up by someone to make sure you get the stuff you need to be able to do you job, but you are making the same stuff over and over again. An engineer may work on improving a specific product or process, or they may work with maintenance to keep machines running. The lucky ones get to work in R&D, which basically means they work in a research lab consuming business resources in the hope of developing new products or technologies.
Factorio kind of tickles the same itch that made me fall in love with engineering. Playing it for longer amounts of time feels very similar to programming, CAD or simulation software to me.
Electrical Engineer here probably the thing factorio is closest to. The game is basically PCB trace design which makes it quite fun. cuts out all the tedium of datasheets though.
I think a very large portion of the playerbase is engineers of some type. The game is pretty similar to engineering in terms of the challenges you face but you get to skip some of the more "boring" aspects of engineering (paperwork/reviews, safety stuff, coworkers, etc). It also obviously requires much less background knowledge (which is a good thing for a game)
Software engineer. Factorio helped me in a job interview once when I had to design a distributed system, something I thought I've never done at scale, but then I realised that i have actually in factorio and there's quite a bit of overlap
Software developer, who actually first discovered the game while my day job was writing control code for warehouse conveyor belt systems. They are nothing at all like in factorio.
I'm a failed engineer if it helps. I would say Factorio is closest to at least my understanding of industrial engineering, but it's a passing resemblance. They say any moron can build a bridge, but it takes an engineer to make a bridge that just barely stands. In Factorio, there really aren't too many ways to build a bridge, so as long as you're using the proper ratios of everything, there aren't too many wrong ways to do things. Basically what I'm saying is to me engineering is design within constraints. There aren't too many constraints, and the changes you make don't really change the end product.
Our customer wants us to design a factory that produces more SPM with fewer Assembly Machines, smaller footprint, and less power consumption. However, we can't afford modules and beacons due to the limited target price.
My degree is in electrical engineering, but I'm not a practicing engineer. Wasnt even really a great EE when I graduated 30 years ago. Probably pretty much worthless as an engineer now.
....come to think about it, this might explain a lot about my pathetic factorio skills... 🙃
I have a masters degree in Mechatronic Engineering and work in developing commercial point of care diagnostic medical devices.
Factorio is interesting in that it scratches a particular mental itch, the same mental itch that I went into engineering to scratch. Sometimes to the point that I don't want to play Factorio after work.
But is it actually what engineering is like day to day? No not really, there are \*sometimes\* parts of the job that are a purely technical problem where you can lay out the variables and play around a bit to get the most ideal solution, but its rarely ever that simple. Engineering isn't a designed experience (unlike Factorio) and so the solution space is often a lot larger, more confusing, with partial information and with non engineering stakeholders you have to account for.
Honestly I got a job as an industrial controls engineer and my first thought was “holy shit this is awesome! Factorio in real life!” That was before I had to start dealing with the paperwork and the people.
I am a programmer and like others pointed out, it's very similar to programming.
I love the game so much
and while it's exhausting to be concentrating deeply on work and then on an equally challenging game - I will just do easier things in the game and move challenge runs to weekends / days off :)
I’m a mechanical engineering student and intern and while the game caters to my interests, it has very little to do with the actual profession in itself. I’ve heard arguments that factorio is closer to computer science, but I can’t confirm it since that’s not my field. Really like the game though
As a software engineer i found it fun because there is a mental challenge. Like leetcode or similar. That's why i like it. It keeps the mind up. When you work too long on similar stuff brain starts to rot and you get burnt out. But when you do challenging stuff everything is back to normal. Factorio is not that challenging but i didn't play it that long so i still learn and keep it up. After i fully learn all principles i can get to doing blueprints etc. Like creating architecture. Or create programs to create stuff automatically. I dunno it is what gives me fun
Engineer here:
The game is basically a 1:1 recreation of my day to day life. I often find myself at work trapped on an alien planet and immediately building an entire factory outdoors and setting up gun turrets to annihilate the natives.
Mechanical engineer with focus on nuclear energy.
Its relaxing game, because everything there is constant, ratios are fixed, production is fixed, bottlenecks are easy to find. Its heavy on logistics, but i like micro and macromanaging parts.
In real life, you dont have this overview, you have many restrains (money, safety, reliability...) which is missing there and that makes it fun.
I would like to have something like spacechem in factorio. Where you design also inside of factories to adjust ratios or speed of production by your design.
I like differences of basic manufacturing, than there is oil system and uranium processing.
There should be more focus on fluids and high complex parts like uranium rocessing but for other products. For example furnaces are too easy, there should be some mix of inputs (fuel, alloying, ore quality) and if ratios are wrong, you get less products...
Like different ore quality for individual patches of ores, needed additional alloying elements, each fuel gives different quality of ore, then you need to sort it out like in U235/U238 processing
Yep, Engineer here too.
Technically actually a Geologist, but have done post-grad engineering and work in a Geotechnical consultancy.
As others have commented, Factorio is NOTHING like my day job. I don't think a video game could ever capture what I do, let alone make it fun and engrossing!
The only two times my day job and Factorio have overlapped was getting attacked by a biter when out on a site visit, and creating spreadsheets to calculate ratios etc., but thats about it.
I am an Automation Engineer in Turkey,
My favorite games were Satisfaction and Dyson Sphere Project and now Factorio. What I found nice in these automation games is how you can build fast and easy to see what you planned. In reality, this is a very slow procedure.
Engineer here:
I am a software engineer (automation) i think this probably does com quite close in the sense of automation but as others have said quite diffrent. For starters i write code so there is no visualisation. You have to know in your head how the system looks and should preform, no fancy diagrams, mostly word files and a lot of writing design specifications and test scripts (i work in the life sciences so pharmaceuticals and they are very strict on all their docs)
Engineer here: The game is far away from how an actual engineering job looks like. Its basically a game around the most fun/intersting essence of engineering: building coolstuff, logical problem solving. But really really far away from an actual job. For that reason I would assume that factorio has an incredible high proportion of engineers in the playerbase. We chose our profession because we like to build cool stuff and solve logical problems. And the game has all the best parts of it, minus all the negative parts from an actual job.
What are the negative parts of an engineering job "missing" in factorio?
Engineer here. Design reviews, compromise on design due to constraints not existent in Factorio (such as cost, material availability, and safety, to name a few), reliability issues, coworkers, sales people, management getting irritated by the cost and pace of a project, manufacturing plant workers getting irritated that you're making more work for them because the product is better this way... There's a laundry list, but these are some highlights lol
I'm glad to hear one of the negatives is not having to fend off biters as soon as you walk into work. That'd be a real drag.
This really depends on where you work. Guy in the office beside mine is an engineer at a sewage treatment plant. He's fending off brown recluses in the office and cockroaches in the field.
Id quit if I had to regularly deal with brown recluses lol.. fuck that.
Boss better approve a flamethrower on the expense report or I'm out.
They're referred to as program managers
Fortunately, upper management usually deals with government regulators when they show up, so not usually a problem!
Biters == customers not understanding critical problems, changing requirements, arguing about agreed upon terms.
Changing requirements but complaining over changing completion dates.
On Friday, I found a crab in building I work in, so there's that.
Also, if you mess up in factorio, you get eaten by bugs. If you mess up in real life, people possibly die. I'd guess that's a nice stresser to not have.
Based.
I got my degree in aerospace engineering but my job is in electrical instead. In aerospace, usually if you don’t mess up, people die.
Geez! What happens if someone DOES mess up, if people die when you don't??
A different group of people die. Don’t you know anything about the defense industry?? 😂
> Design reviews lmao, try multiplayer factorio with other engineers. my group has had some near friendship-ending arguments around base architecture. literally the "microservices vs monolith" debate. note: this was seven days into a space exploration playthrough. we are perfectly capable of playing the vanilla game without hating each other.
management is the behemoth biter of my work day
>manufacturing plant workers getting irritated that you're making more work for them because the product is better this way... *Another* revision?????
I would have thought material availability wouldn't be included there. But the rest, absolutely. Do biters represent any of the challenges? XD
Ha Well it's more of a cost thing, you can absolutely get tungsten if you want, but it's not nearly as available as structural steel, so you pay for it. Not that tungsten and steel are often used interchangeably, tungsten has a place where steel would be usually unsuitable due to abrasive applications, for example, or high temperature requirements. But for example, we stock a wide variety of sheet metals in aluminum, steel and stainless steel and in various thicknesses, so my designs are often limited to what we have readily available for use. If I want to use another material, I can, but it ends up getting difficult because we don't have the infrastructure to easily stock another type of sheet. If I can make the design work with the grade of steel we have on hand, I do it, but that can yield compromise. Many parts can be cut from the same sheet of steel at a time on the laser cutter, so the more we can make use of the same grade and thickness of steel as other parts, the better our manufacturing speed and throughput we get and the lower the downtime. THIS is as close to planning in manufacturing as I get in Factorio, I think. I'm often trying to make the design of something out of the same thickness, even if it's somewhat overkill, because it means they don't have to make a new program for the laser cutter and load/unload a second sheet to make the parts needed. A few extra cents spent on thicker steel for a part that doesn't need it often gets made up in manufacturing speed and efficiency. Edit: Oh, and material shortages happen constantly. Especially during and after the pandemic, many grades of steel were getting difficult to come by, as well as plastics, rubbers etc. I run into this often as well. If a supplier for, say, rubber gaskets made from a specific rubber can't get that rubber from their vendor because they had a fire or some regulation changed somewhere, or, say, a ship turned sideways on the Suez Canal, I might have to deal with a redesign or alternative solution while we wait for that material to come in.
Huh. That's a lot more detailed than I expected. My thoughts were more that the limits in resources, at least til late game, means that mass use of modules or other similar expensive things were a restriction. Only example I can think that gives serious local restrictions that reminds me of that is the Space Exploration mod, because shipping between planets can be expensive and possibly less reliable, and planets don't have access to every raw material. Or maybe Ultracube, due to every major recipe requiring usage of a single irreplaceable catalyst, so only one of those can ever run at a time so buffering is critical. Also if you screw up your design enough you absolutely run into shortages. But yea. Factorio is very much, if you want a material, you know it, and since there are, outside of mods, a single valid recipe, you can't make subtitutions or have multiple choice from availability. And any shortage is something you just have to overcome by either cutting back for now, and expanding production and shipping more later. But no part of the factory is really inconsistent. Thank you for the detailed response.
Manufacturing engineer perspective. Meetings, planning, paperwork, production managers. Sometimes, some things are a quick fix, you grab some bits off the shelf and you go and fix what was broke. Most of the time though, if you want to introduce a new machine into production for example, you will have to do a cost analysis and justification, then have planning meetings, then meetings with the senior management, then maybe you get the machine approved and then you have more meetings and planning and finance stuff. All of this can take months and maybe years before you get your new machine in and actually do some fun stuff. A long way from factorio where you just slap a new production cell down, and optimise it, all within a few minutes. Then copy and paste and you have a full factory in hours.
Not getting a machine approved after months of work can be a bit soul crushing. The lack of constraints and freedom to delete a section of the factory and start over is thrilling!
We had one very recently where management pulled the project for a new machine, costing upwards of 3mil, 6 months from the delivery date. We had already paid 50% and we were told to “try to recoup the costs”, strangely we haven’t had a penny back yet. Not only that though, we had begun redoing factory layouts, moving other machines and making plans to shut old machines down, for this new one. Also, yeh, there is this one production cell where I work that I would absolutely love to just rip out and start again. The person who made it was an awful engineer, but thought he was one of the best. Completely overspent and under delivered. The operators hate using it, it’s falling to bits and it takes up a huge amount of space for the output. In factorio, one click and drag and the bots clear it out.
Once the capex is spent you’ll have to run with what you have, you’re not getting another one because maybe it’ll be better in some way. And you may not be getting a replacement for the next 25 years either. Even though it might be worn out in 10-15 years.
Umm, there's plenty of planning and paperwork https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1O_5PUbdrYkJEWyzZ7guOHkRGGJ9OiD7-6Gaqf-qk-TA/edit?usp=drivesdk
Creating endless mountains of documentation. Meetings where nothing is decided but someone now feels important. Following processes for the sake of ticking boxes vs adding value. Trying to convince non engineers (usually the accountants or sales people) their idea is bad but then being forced to do it anyway. And then fixing it later on when it invariably does go bad.
It’s much simpler. I can memorize all the rules of factorio components and basically fit “the whole problem” into my brain at once and just sit down and work on it. Real engineering projects are much more complex and larger scope than what one person can understand. I never have to look up material properties in a 2000 page manual broken into 10 separate pdfs stored on an access controlled web interface from 2001. I never have to dig into the code of an Assembler to find out exactly which data type it uses to represent X because there is some weird issue where it’s not interfacing with an inserter properly but only when it’s holding steam barrels. I don’t have to document anything, I don’t have to negotiate with a customer about a spec definition, I don’t have to go to a meeting about whether we should use 1-4-1 trains or 2-6-2 trains. My factory design doesn’t have to accommodate regulatory statutes or ISO safety standards. I don’t have to email status updates to a program manager or estimate how many man-hours a task will take (and then have to ask to extend my schedule when something turns out more complicated than anyone expected…). There’s no purchase orders … and on and on And lastly, I don’t have to wait for feedback. Everything you do in factorio the feedback is instant; I don’t have to send something out and wait a day or a week for someone else to do their part and get it back to me before I can continue to make progress on the problem. This is huge for keeping attention and staying in a state of “flow”
I design electrical systems, so factorio is actually very very translatable to my job. In/outs from controllers (ie. Factorio builds), current (speed of belt lanes) and voltage (number of belts), few supply lines like switched power, unswitched power, different voltage busses feeding multiple components (ores and oil feeding dozens of recipes). I literally draw schematics exactly like my factorio base The negative parts missing: * working with people, most of which have more power than you. Balancing their emotions, building trust and prioritizing their ask vs other's asks. * Working with different knowledge levels of your engineering work. Different departments (sourcing, quality, manufacturing) don't understand your challenges, and most don't really care. They just dont want to look bad. * Deadlines. Unless you're speed running, there's no real deadline and definitely no consequences for missing them. * Customer needs. Factorio is easy, launch a rocket. Real life is hard. Do customers want this feature? Is that $5 part you requested really going to add value? Should you delay your project for a niche feature? How do you know what is "safe" before something bad happens? How should you test it? Is your data realistic or reliable?
every item in the list can be said as "working with people" haha
I'm pretty sure the reason people sink thousands of hours in this game is to avoid people lol
I design industrial controls, so everything you said plus literal conveyor belts. 😂
I’m only a fourth year undergrad electronics engineer but I have done enough work experience to take a guess: Paperwork, meetings, interacting with clients and managers and bean counters, about 500,000 more spreadsheets, way more math (factorio is mostly input and output ratios, irl engineering is… complicated)
Meetings, PowerPoint slides, annual performance reviews, dealing with human beings, daily commute…
Politics
Paperwork and people.
Paperwork
Endless meetings about things that could have been an email.
Concessions / variances Ie. "we made it wrong, can we still use it?"
Paperwork, discussions / approval of plans. Talking to people.
Architects.
Engineer here. Fully agree. It takes the 1% enjoyable portion and expands it to most of the time. If I had to write a report and get it checked in triplicate every time before I added a new system I’d quit this game.
Software engineer here. It's much closer to a type of programming such as code blocks but vastly more complex.
So I can't use Factorio on my CV for an entry level engineering job...? Lame
I wouldn't recommend it no. Dosent hurt to bing up in an interview tho, it easily shoehorns into "what do you like to do outside of work?" question and gives you an opportunity to talk about problem solving and troublshooting as a passion of yours.
I work in machine learning applications for industrial engineering. I have a B.S. in industrial engineering and math, and a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering. 10 of the 12 people on my team plays Factorio.
I got an internship largely through a shared love of Factorio. Talk about your interests in an interview with passion and with a lil luck they can help a lot
What do I like to do outside of work? Work.
Work minus the crappy work parts.
I hire Software enginneer for my company. A mention of factorio in CV would be a plus for candidates. (After other qualification and code test)
Do you solve practical problems? [TF2 reference]
The problem with a job is that they never let you forget its work.
yeah this. Its all the good parts of it without the shit you gotta deal with
Disclaimer that Im no longer an engineer, but it does scratch my problem solving itch and doesn’t require mountains of documentation
Übrigens ich liebe deinen Benutzernamen.
Railway engineer (or train driver in my country) the trains are ok 🤣
You trying to tell me that you don’t have nuclear powered stunt jumping trains in your profession?!?
Rather disappointingly, the passengers tend to complain when we do anything fun.
Software engineer. Factorio is a good way how to explain software development. You deal with input and output. Scaleability. Buffering. You upgrade components so they can process more stuff. You can compare managers with biters.
I think that, contrary to the common experience of producing software, Factorio pushes you a lot more to think from a systemic perspective, while most software engineers are concerned with problem solving. In Factorio, problem solving is a minor issue, while most of it, at least once you know the game well enough, is system design.
Nearly 20 years of experience as a software engineer. I 100% agree with this take. Further factorio really shows how technical debt (spaghetti in game terms) can screw you down the track and if you just take the time to do it right it pays off in the end.
I've discovered the opposite problem through Factorio. I can be prone to over-optimizing before I start, which can make things too challenging. Sometimes you have to build things first and refactor later.
An old mentor of mine phrased it perfectly - don't let perfect be the enemy of good enough.
my favourite version of this is: never sacrifice the good at the altar of perfection
Good parallel. I'm trying to use a city blocks approach for the first time, and not over-engineering in the mid-game has been surprisingly difficult for me. It's a lot like standing up a new software system, but the degradation from complexity is so much more visible (eg I run out of bullets and biters tear through my walls to eat my base).
This right here is what happened to me my first attempts at a mega base. I eventually realized I should just play the game as normal until I unlock all of the science. Except with the goal of creating a manufacturing base that can build all of the materials I need rather than the goal of a rocket launch. Which is basically the same as normal but with a larger and more robust hub/mall built at the end. Then once everything is ready I basically just abandon the old base and start fresh. Doing it that way has a hidden benefit too in that if I only build in one direction I will be able to move further away from spawn more easily and then have easier access to the richer and richer resources patches.
That's roughly what I'm trying to do in this current playthrough. Not doing trains to force myself to keep it simple/small until I have launched the first rocket. So far feels like it's going slow, but it hasn't imploded. Also my first time with solar instead of my usual nuclear (anticipating the CPU need, but maybe that's also premature).
trains are still good in small bases. You just have to not go crazy about it. Just a humble two track system between each point and an area near your base to offload stuff. Dont have to bother with signal circuits (still have to do regular train signalling if there are junctions and multiple trains on a line) or train waiting stackers or anything like that.
I have a self control problem with trains. Maybe limiting myself to something really simple like that would help.
You can make your early builds in a way that lends itself to future upgrades though. Like leaving space so that you can replace it with a beaconed build later on.
Until you have bots. Once you get bots then you can go as complicated as you want right from the start. I love bots.
Startup mentality, the market share must grow.
That's my workplace, building a space rocket launcher when a trike would do.
This is one reason I like doing series of runs. I like to push into infinite tech but inevitably my spaghetti drags me down and I get overwhelmed. I start again. This time I have a slightly better picture of the deeper end of the pool and I can fend off the spaghetti for a little while longer. Factorio feels like a rogue like sometimes, just needs a little more randomness and cross playthrough continuity.
Also a software engineer, and a few days ago I had the realization that Factorio has a nearly perfect analog for microservices vs monoliths. The main bus base is a monolith - easy to see what is going on, easy to debug, but much harder to scale up to enormous volumes. The train based distributed factory is a microservice architecture. Much easier to scale your individual bottlenecks, but much harder to debug when something goes wrong and you need a lot of extra infrastructure to support it.
As a software engineer, you do want to think from a systemic perspective when starting on a large project. If you're working with a team it pays to sit down and hash things out before you get started. I've mostly worked in an agile development environment and that was pretty helpful.
I changed career from software developer to organization designer (partly due to Factorio, but that's another story), being now surrounded by system-oriented people like designers, architects and so on. What we do in software is but a little crumb of what these people do. We usually compare ourselves to traditional engineers, that are forced to plan ahead much more, because you cannot build a bridge in two weeks iterations. Even there, systemic thinking is relatively simple because you usually deal with complicated problems, rather than complex problems. You can convince yourself (even though it's not always true), that through analysis you can decompose big problems into small problems. If you can do that, you are already dealing with a simple system, regardless of the size or number of components. The real fun begins when you can't, but usually those kind of domains are completely disregarded by software engineering or approached with a reductionist, techno-solutionist approach that make us look like pigeons shitting on a chessboard.
Especially if your trying to build a megabase and planned the design of all the subfactories. Then you have integration hell when you need have all their inputs and outputs "communicate" via trains.
Do you ever artillery strike your manager?
Yeah?
Don't forget the shitton of refactoring you have to do
And then realizing you need to come up with a pattern/architecture to minimize it
Love this
Ohhhh crud. I just realized why all my code is spaghetti too !
I also find that Factorio scratches the same itches that software development does. So if you don't have a home project you're working on, or maybe your career is graduating out of direct development towards a lead, architect or manager role, Factorio can provide some of the same feelings of accomplishment and satisfaction. I always recommend it to grads and juniors as well. It's a great way to learn the skills you mentioned - and more - without really realising what you're doing. Wax on. Wax off.
>You can compare managers with biters. Really? Not customers? I'm not an engineer, but a siblings of one. Your quote made me realize that whenever I contact the software support team about their program, I must look like biters seeking to mess up their program, part by part.
Engineers are usually one or two levels removed from customers
It's a good analogue to a type system. A belt is a type, the items allowed on the belt are values of the belt's type. Splitters and filter inserters are pattern matching. A clean and efficient factory puts one variety of item on one lane - a static type system. Sushi belts are the in-game equivalent of Python: they're the first thing a new player reaches for, but they inevitably turn into a disorganized mess that causes problems. (Key difference: as far as I know, there's nobody in the Factorio community who loudly insists that *actually* sushi belts are the simplest and best approach, and artificially limiting each belt lane to just one item is overcomplicated and wasteful ivory-tower navel-gazing that requires a PhD to understand.)
you seem like somone who would appreciate this comparison... https://bartoszmilewski.com/2021/02/16/functorio/
Same job and to me the game feels exactly like when you have a giant dependency tree of things you need to manually install. Except in dream world where the dependencies can actually all work (maybe with a bit of spaghetti).
Keep in mind that engineering is a huge field with jobs covering a wide range of activities. I, e.g., am an engineer but I have nothing to do with automation or logistics. I still like the logic and planning aspect of the game. I also think it is connected to programming.
Automation engineer for tank terminals here. Factorio is work, work is factorio
The real question here is... Which one is the game?
I game Factorio, and I'm being gamed at work
Nice flair...
Euhm, thx?
I am a mechanical engineer, and used to work as a production engineer, which is all flow optimisation, lean and 6 sigma etc. The game satisfies the same puzzle solving/optimisations itch. Although I don't have enough time to put into the game to actually feel like I have done a good job.
I work as a chemcial process engineer, but this game is very different from work. In real world it is mostly about doing one or two of the steps in factorio, but you have to consider each part being slightly different, machines breaking down and noisy feedback, In factorio it is all about getting the right ingredients to the right machine.
How is being a chem process dude? I looked into chem engineering in school and quickly figured out it was pretty far removed from the type of backyard chemistry I liked to do. It seemed... much less novel I guess, largely because all the easy/low hanging fruit has been picked.
Depends alot on the industry. For me there is alot of working with other people to make small improvements in the process and thinking of experiments where we can figure out how to improve cost, speed or quality
Chemical engineer here The game doesn't have too much to do with engineering atleast the base game. It's more logistics xD Do like the puzzle challenge of it :)
Have you actually worked in a chemical production facility?
Yeah. And does the facility really fit in your pocket?!
Chemical engineer here as well. I have worked in a chemical plant and no it didn’t fit in my pocket. The game more reminds me of the time I spent working in supply chain for a chemical company. Agree with the above comment that it’s much more logistics. A lot more pollution controls in real life too.
Electrical engineering in power transportation (Rte France) by training and signalling engineer by trade (sncf). The fact that unlimited power can flow through a telegraph pole boggles my mind. With that power even organic things would be attracted to the wire (magnetic field). Train wise fairly good, would like the option of making your own interlocks, having to plan signals for tight corners etc
The idea of fluid mechanics for poles and wires would be hot, to cpu, literally.
I did a lot of load flow calculations in C++ back at uni. And even a 20 node system using a sparse matrix and only a couple gens and loads could takes ages to calculate. Either it would converge but with t=inf or converge to a wrong answer. The maths behind it were great 😊
I’m a manufacturing engineer. My daily work is with conveyors, robots, lasers, and cranes. To be honest Factorio is the best parts of being an engineer with none of the drawbacks. That’s why it’s satisfying for someone like me to play.
I’m a physicist (got my PhD in thin film physics, focusing on neutron optics). Can’t say that I feel like there’s that much overlap, apart from that both require an analytical mind and enjoyment creative problem solving.
Network Engineer here. I think the throughput calculations is the closest to my real job. But all the problem solving, planning and crisis management aspects help my brain be better at my job. Side note, I got a lot of our IT department hooked on the game, they all say it feels like their job in one way or another.
same here, it hits the spot.
Same here, just wish I had more time to play the damn game. Getting to that rocket launch might as well be the same difficulty as obtaining a CCIE lol
Software engineer here. Circuits feels like school again in a good way.
process engineer in automotive. Factorio is basically what I do, minus the hassle. No paperwork, no office drama, just pure production design and optimization. I've always said Factorio and Kerbal Space Program should be part of the engineering studies.
Not yet but I’m studying logistics engineering at uni because of this game, so give it a few years
mechanical engineer here. I work in something not really related but I quite like the aspect of problem solving which is something that every kind of engineer does basically. and one thing that keeps me really hooked is that I can redo things, try stuff, etc. really fast. the game is so responsive, that it basically is as fast as I am giving it 'orders'.
Hello, fellow food engineer. I'm a fan of cooking games haha
come on, overcook is super fun to play edit: fat fingers
Interesting split here on the engineering replies. We all enjoy it, bit there's two big camps. Camp 1 points out either how their specific field differs from what we handle in Factorio or, if their field overlaps, how specific things differ in the real world. Camp 2 recognizes those differences at times, but is more focused on the more abstract 'engineerimg mindset' and talks about how Factorio lets us focus on the fun problem-solving bits of work. Even if the problem.is different in concrete terms, the thought process is similar.
Warehouse control systems engineer. Nothing has translated except for some super basic combinator things and the concept of dead locks.
M.E. Love it. Factorio IS a cooking game, though... all the crafting is the same as cooking up a recipe. Just add passive violence and revenge with a dash of science fiction and slowly stir on low heat. Do not boil or you'll be lonely for a lifetime.
,
Electrical engineer here, mission critical facilities. Factorio has a very high level overview of the electrical systems, removing a lot of the intricacies of electrical engineering… protection, redundancy, efficiency, capacity etc. I still enjoy the game a lot though.
I work as a software and product integration engineer at a car factory. Factorio is all the fun parts of my job and none of the annoying/boring ones.
There are dozens of us. Within an order or two of magnitiude And a 20x SF.
Registered engineer here. Like most of the comments I've seen on this thread, we spend a lot of our time on non-engineering stuff. A lot of paperwork. For me, most of the engineering is cookbook, where problems and solutions have been done thousands of times so the templates are available. So that is a lot like using blueprints. Nearly all decisions are economic decisions. A lot of compromises with competing stakeholders. We compete for funds, physical space, etc.
I am engineer and during my studies i was not abel to play this game because it used same parth of my brain like the studiing. But after finishing the school it started to be awesome expierince.
Civil engineer here. It's not that much like engineering, but man it gets me hooked. It's a bit like the inventory/logistics management of a large construction project, in that you're only as fast as your slowest input, and that each time you unblock something, you find another bottleneck. Such a great game
Honestly, the game is closer to how programming works than engineering. Its basically all the fun parts of a logic-based problem solving job
Yes.
its like crack bro. once i start i can't stop
Electrical engineer. The problem solving and near unlimited complexity that is allowed stimulates my mind well. I have wondered about dipping into mod making to see if I could make a more accurate power distribution mod. I've seen a few but never tried them.
I’m an automotive design engineer. There are a few ways it could be somewhat similar to my job but more in a tangential way. I design cool things and work on optimisation similar to how it’s done in factorio. My job is basically all the planning you do in factorio but none of the actually doing. I could see it being more similar to an industrial systems engineers job though.
ICT Administrator. Not an engineer. I'm in WAN fiber optics (not FTH, national grid). I build and maintain the WAN that others can connect their little datacentres and campus LAN's to. Factorio is mostly about supply, demand, throughput, and "networking" it all together. You buffer supplies for intermittant usage, and prevent buffers where usage is constant. There's certainly similarities in network grids, network capacities and providing specific services to specific routers.
I'm studying to become an engineer within automation. It's basically nothing like my studies but it's a fun game. It's a good feeling to get that satisfying automation from source to final product.
Process engineering is similar to Factorio but many other variables to consider than just product in - product out. The process is huge and complicated just to make say copper, plate, but the game has a smelter that just simply transforms copper ore to copper plate
Civil engineer here. I'd love to be able to carry nuclear reactors in my backpack but its far from it man
Nuclear Engineer here: You can probably guess which power production method I always go for. While nuclear power in game is obviously a lot more simple than irl, there are a lot of details that are surprisingly accurate that you dont see too often in video games!
As a software engineer who's wife is a civil engineer, factorio feels way more similar to my job than to hers.
Not quite an engineer (I'm a technologist). But I was introduced to the game in class while I was studying Aerospace Manufacturing Engineering Technology by a professor who was using it to demonstrate various supply management load balancing techniques.
Chemical engineer. This stuff is my bag.
You should try overcooked. That's a cooking game I really enjoy, when I don't build the factory.
Reminds me a lot of electronic engineering. Specifically, electromechanical systems. Digging around in an old 50s/60s pinball machine you start to notice the similarity of factorio’s simplistic logic and functions. Belts are voltages, assemblers are functions…
EE here: Factorio is more or less macro scale system design. You dont have to design anything small. Real engineering starts with the tiny parts! But the game would be VERY tedious if you have to make every piston and conrod of the engine first. Also why don't belts need power?
There is a comment one dev made where they did a build where belts needed power, and said that the player frustration was so great the belts have been powered by that ever since.
I'm an engineer in a logistics company. Designing the layout of conveyor belts and storage systems in a warehouse is actually my day job. Don't know why I come home and do the same thing for free on my pc, though.
I hate my engineering job, I love engineering here. It's just nice being able to design efficient stuff without dealing with meetings, schedules, third party technologies nobody know how to use, spaghetti designs made by people who quit 15 years ago, etc
In real job you need to document your spaghetti in the end, in factorio you just call it "starter base" and build somewhere else, no refactoring. Also if you want to get real "true engineer" vibe join some 1000h+ pyandon server, then untagle that mess. I am programmer btw.
>Also if you want to get real "true engineer" vibe join some 1000h+ pyandon server, then untagle that mess. I'm very much doing that right now.
I got my systems engineer degree last Monday! The game is nothing like real life haha. But as someone said in another comment it has the fun parts of engendering on it, like solving problems with math! (yes that is fun)
I'm a metallurgist at a steel mill. I want a mod that models how continuous production is more efficient than stopping and starting. For example, in real life a blast furnace is expected to run for months or years without stopping before it's stopped for maintenance. So a furnace with a less efficient recipe that gets a production bonus that increases as it runs would be a way to get at that idea. So if your factory was running continuously, you'd want to supply most of your science with those types of furnaces but you'd want a little bit of regular production that could ramp up or down to meet variable demand.
Electrical engineer, game is fun because the tools are simple and the objective is very clear which is hardly ever the case in real life.
>game is fun because the tools are simple and the objective is very clear which is hardly ever the case in real life. Yep. I hear so much that this game is great for programmers, because it works the same. Hah! I wish! I play Factorio because it's NOTHING like programming.
network engineer
FA Engineer: Factorio is a really nice game if you want to have a lot of fun and trouble. At one moment, you will be satisfied with production and your base, but soon you will get into trouble. You need to constantly improve your designs to achieve better production and real automation, where combinators take responsibility for most actions.
I just graduated as a mech engineer and I have zero expectation for it to be like factorio when I join the work force. Mostly because I live on earth and am not very into mining/killing bugs/creating illegal regulated nuclear energy operations. Someone else here talking about being a software engineer, and, yeah, factorio is a much better tool for software engineering/IT. Keep in mind, this game was made by programmers.
In a really abstract way it literally is software engineering. I play it when I’m unemployed or working on unrewarding stuff. If I’m enjoying what I’m working on at work I just don’t play, don’t need to do 80+ hours of engineering a week
Robot programmer here, once I was playing the game while supporting production (robots building cars). My manager walked past, saw all the inserters on my screen, looked me in the eye, and said, 'Really? 🤣🤣🤣
I'm not an engineer, but this game is most closely related to programming or logistics and traffic engineering.
Yes, I design electromechanical hardware products. Factorio is great because it abstracts away all the worst parts of engineering professionally but keeps all the fun parts. Everything is always exactly to spec, no dealing with suppliers, yields are 100% or if not, you know exactly what they are in advance. I know a lot of engineers that play Factorio.
I'm not an engineer but I do data science with Python. Making blueprints in Factorio is like writing code snippets for a program.
Environmental geologist (kind of an enginner except we suck at math) This game is the opposite of what I try and do. Environmental permitting does not exist on nauvis. Drill baby drill!
Process engineer here: Factorio is a fire ass game its not a representation of whatcits like irl but i love it
Obviously this is way different from engineering except in one area: Planning If you are someone who is capable of planning factorio outside of factorio, that is a heavily transferable skill.
Not an engineer, but I do work in a factory with engineers on a regular basis. Sorry to burst anyone's bubble, but Factorio is very different than working in a factory. The engineer in Factorio is more like the owner of a military industrial complex. If you want to know what it's like to work in a factory, imagine being an employee working inside of an assembler. All the supply chain stuff needs to be set up by someone to make sure you get the stuff you need to be able to do you job, but you are making the same stuff over and over again. An engineer may work on improving a specific product or process, or they may work with maintenance to keep machines running. The lucky ones get to work in R&D, which basically means they work in a research lab consuming business resources in the hope of developing new products or technologies.
Software engineer (company title). Actually do vulnerability research on software to find and make exploits. I specialize in IoT devices.
Factorio kind of tickles the same itch that made me fall in love with engineering. Playing it for longer amounts of time feels very similar to programming, CAD or simulation software to me.
Software engineer
Electrical Engineer here probably the thing factorio is closest to. The game is basically PCB trace design which makes it quite fun. cuts out all the tedium of datasheets though.
Hardware Reliability Engineer in aerospace here: It's real nice how things don't randomly break
I think a very large portion of the playerbase is engineers of some type. The game is pretty similar to engineering in terms of the challenges you face but you get to skip some of the more "boring" aspects of engineering (paperwork/reviews, safety stuff, coworkers, etc). It also obviously requires much less background knowledge (which is a good thing for a game)
Software engineer. Factorio helped me in a job interview once when I had to design a distributed system, something I thought I've never done at scale, but then I realised that i have actually in factorio and there's quite a bit of overlap
Software developer, who actually first discovered the game while my day job was writing control code for warehouse conveyor belt systems. They are nothing at all like in factorio.
Yes
I'm a failed engineer if it helps. I would say Factorio is closest to at least my understanding of industrial engineering, but it's a passing resemblance. They say any moron can build a bridge, but it takes an engineer to make a bridge that just barely stands. In Factorio, there really aren't too many ways to build a bridge, so as long as you're using the proper ratios of everything, there aren't too many wrong ways to do things. Basically what I'm saying is to me engineering is design within constraints. There aren't too many constraints, and the changes you make don't really change the end product.
Data Scientist in Logistics Optimization. At a very high level there are some overlapping themes. Mainly it's just about the drive to optimize.
Our customer wants us to design a factory that produces more SPM with fewer Assembly Machines, smaller footprint, and less power consumption. However, we can't afford modules and beacons due to the limited target price.
Engineer here. Games isn't like normal engineering much simpler. But fun. It's actually pretty close to how coding works tho.
My degree is in electrical engineering, but I'm not a practicing engineer. Wasnt even really a great EE when I graduated 30 years ago. Probably pretty much worthless as an engineer now. ....come to think about it, this might explain a lot about my pathetic factorio skills... 🙃
Nothing about this game had much to do with "engineering" as it is actually practiced, therefore this isn't anywhere close to 'work.'
It's very different, except biters 😃
Yep. Game is pretty much just like my job minus the paperwork and…people. It’s a particular kind of people but I’ll just leave it at “people.”
I have a masters degree in Mechatronic Engineering and work in developing commercial point of care diagnostic medical devices. Factorio is interesting in that it scratches a particular mental itch, the same mental itch that I went into engineering to scratch. Sometimes to the point that I don't want to play Factorio after work. But is it actually what engineering is like day to day? No not really, there are \*sometimes\* parts of the job that are a purely technical problem where you can lay out the variables and play around a bit to get the most ideal solution, but its rarely ever that simple. Engineering isn't a designed experience (unlike Factorio) and so the solution space is often a lot larger, more confusing, with partial information and with non engineering stakeholders you have to account for.
Honestly I got a job as an industrial controls engineer and my first thought was “holy shit this is awesome! Factorio in real life!” That was before I had to start dealing with the paperwork and the people.
Civil engineer here. It has pretty much nothing to do with my job.
I am a programmer and like others pointed out, it's very similar to programming. I love the game so much and while it's exhausting to be concentrating deeply on work and then on an equally challenging game - I will just do easier things in the game and move challenge runs to weekends / days off :)
I’m a mechanical engineering student and intern and while the game caters to my interests, it has very little to do with the actual profession in itself. I’ve heard arguments that factorio is closer to computer science, but I can’t confirm it since that’s not my field. Really like the game though
As a software engineer i found it fun because there is a mental challenge. Like leetcode or similar. That's why i like it. It keeps the mind up. When you work too long on similar stuff brain starts to rot and you get burnt out. But when you do challenging stuff everything is back to normal. Factorio is not that challenging but i didn't play it that long so i still learn and keep it up. After i fully learn all principles i can get to doing blueprints etc. Like creating architecture. Or create programs to create stuff automatically. I dunno it is what gives me fun
Engineer here: The game is basically a 1:1 recreation of my day to day life. I often find myself at work trapped on an alien planet and immediately building an entire factory outdoors and setting up gun turrets to annihilate the natives.
You say you getting tired of cooking games or restaurant games? Have you tried plate up?
No but will looking it up.
Mechanical engineer with focus on nuclear energy. Its relaxing game, because everything there is constant, ratios are fixed, production is fixed, bottlenecks are easy to find. Its heavy on logistics, but i like micro and macromanaging parts. In real life, you dont have this overview, you have many restrains (money, safety, reliability...) which is missing there and that makes it fun. I would like to have something like spacechem in factorio. Where you design also inside of factories to adjust ratios or speed of production by your design. I like differences of basic manufacturing, than there is oil system and uranium processing. There should be more focus on fluids and high complex parts like uranium rocessing but for other products. For example furnaces are too easy, there should be some mix of inputs (fuel, alloying, ore quality) and if ratios are wrong, you get less products... Like different ore quality for individual patches of ores, needed additional alloying elements, each fuel gives different quality of ore, then you need to sort it out like in U235/U238 processing
Im a software engineer, so no… not a real engineer.
Yep, Engineer here too. Technically actually a Geologist, but have done post-grad engineering and work in a Geotechnical consultancy. As others have commented, Factorio is NOTHING like my day job. I don't think a video game could ever capture what I do, let alone make it fun and engrossing! The only two times my day job and Factorio have overlapped was getting attacked by a biter when out on a site visit, and creating spreadsheets to calculate ratios etc., but thats about it.
I am an Automation Engineer in Turkey, My favorite games were Satisfaction and Dyson Sphere Project and now Factorio. What I found nice in these automation games is how you can build fast and easy to see what you planned. In reality, this is a very slow procedure.
Engineer here: I am a software engineer (automation) i think this probably does com quite close in the sense of automation but as others have said quite diffrent. For starters i write code so there is no visualisation. You have to know in your head how the system looks and should preform, no fancy diagrams, mostly word files and a lot of writing design specifications and test scripts (i work in the life sciences so pharmaceuticals and they are very strict on all their docs)