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I like my idea for a Factorio movie.
An engineer crash lands on a planet during a corporate visitation to another planet. Desperate, he finds his company’s schematic drive on factory creation. He builds his way up to a satellite, which is preprogrammed to beam his SOS home. Relieved, he hits the button to launch it, watches it go up.
Then, looks down at everything he got to build on his own, with no oversight, no managerial correction, all his own efficiency. He’s even made his own greenhouses to make his own food. Automated a logistics bot to attempt a new mix of coffee each morning, warmed by residual nuclear reactor heat.
Something stirs in him, and he “accidentally” veers the satellite 8 degrees off course. It sheers against the atmosphere and burns to a crisp, its wreckage destroying his semiconductor production (which is then rebuilt automatically within the hour). The engineer resumes his next project.
From there, eventually a passing ship does a scan of the planet, curiously finding it inhabited and very industrialized. They send a lander to the surface to investigate. It’s shot down by a fleet of hundreds of missiles.
The issue goes to Earth’s military command. They have no idea who is on this planet but need to take the threat seriously. Another scouting contingent is deployed, able to land on a safer side of the planet, but on the way down, they spot a “city” in which buildings are arranged in the words “GO AWAY”.
Landing, the scouts work out that the nearby bots are from the corp’s schematics, and slowly work out what happened. They attempt a few more efforts to extract the engineer, now as a prisoner for shooting down a craft, but the “war” continues.
Eventually, a psychologist is able to ask the engineer about his feelings of loneliness on the planet. He replies that he’s been alone for far longer than his space flight, and even on Earth no one connected with him - machines just made sense. He curses his company’s greed for infinite growth, and declares the planet is off limits.
The psychologist accepts his terms - but also ridicules him, since his factory exhibits the same pointless growth as his company. And so, he remains, a prisoner of his own planet.
Sounds like an origin story for Dr. Robotnik.
In my head this works quite well as an animated short film.
Yeah if the movie industry got their hands on it, Jack Black would be the engineer and the machines would talk (or act like animals that perfectly understand him and communicate effectively via body language) and the psychologist would end up an unlikely love interest that ends up remaining with him and his wacky machines at the end of the movie.
And after the conclusion, there will be a shot of his love interest looking at something in horror and saying, “ew, bugs!”, setting up the sequel that never gets made because the people who would like it aren’t drawn to Factorio, and those who are drawn to Factorio are disappointed that the only thing it has to do with Factorio is that it has machines. The execs played the game for 5 minutes and came up with a building system that involves him quickly building things by hand and Harvey Cavil quit production two weeks in, once it was clear they didn’t care about the actual lore.
Would still watch
Bravo man. I like it!
Oh no, poor soul. Just lost thousands of hours of their life.
also acceptable: “I’ve just sucked one year of your life away.”
There’s a game that’s like if Factorio was set in Stardew Valley. I just started playing it on a whim last night.
It’s called Little Rocket Lab. I’m not to far into it so don’t take this as a recommendation necessarily, but there is a dog. You can pet it. You can play fetch with him.
there is a dog. You can pet it. You can play fetch with him.
So I have bought a new game
Did we just become best friends?
Also, it’s in GamePass if you have that.
The comic is highly accurate, I just wish that Factorio didn’t feel so similar to work. I like Stardew Valley overall, but I just don’t want to make friends with NPCs and play a fishing minigame.
I think with Stardew Valley, you don’t necessarily “have to” …
Factorio feels way too much like work (as a developer) to me. I played it all weekend once and then when I had work on Monday I didn’t feel any weekend relief that I expected.
That is exactly how I feel with Factorio. With Stawdew Valley, you essentially hit a wall if you aren’t willing to grind out some specific things (fishing for instance). It’s not the end of the world and I got enough enjoyment out of it to not consider it a waste of money, but I haven’t been able to check out any of the last few recent content updates because most of it was on the other side of the “wall”.
I think there needs to be a large part of the game to ignore to make the bit you want to do feel better.
Thats a good insight, i think youre right. I felt that playing fallout new vegas
I feel it when I’ve got tedious paperwork that needs to be done. Suddenly I’ve got so much energy and motivation to run the vacuum cleaner around.
As a person who plays both of these games frequently, this is very accurate.
Same here honestly
The factory must grow
The farm must grow
Never enough watts
Mmmh I wonder if factorio will run on my steam deck…
It is steam deck verified. It runs great. It even has a custom control scheme to use the touchpad for mouse movements
It does and runs great. It runs my 10kspm factory no issues
Satisfactory > Factorio
Once you start riding your powerlines as zip lines you’ll never want to go back.
My overly ambitious Minecraft mod I long since gave up with was basically a pollution and yield mod to incentiveise a flow or early manual work > midgame automation > lategame manual work for the best resources.
Praise the Omnissiah!
“The Farmer Was Replaced” has you covered
Factorio is like an addiction… I hate this game and I hate myself for not being able to stop playing it.
I’m playing it for a week now and even using a modlist with automation mod to play it like factorio.
BTW, it’s okay to ignore the story on Stardew Valley. Never let anyone tell you you’re playing it wrong. There’s no such thing.
I hate that devs put options in games and people think you’re bad for choosing it. Heaven forbid I want to experience Undertale’s genocide route or Stardew’s Joja story.
Yeah half of the fun is just focusing on what makes you happy in that game.
