I'll be honest, I don't think Space Age was all that good as an expansion. The developers really focused on giving the player new types of logistics challenges to solve, but that was never what I wanted. I wanted the same Factorio gameplay, but with more stuff to build. So out of the four new planets, the only one I actually enjoyed building on was Vulcanus (because it plays pretty much like vanilla Factorio but with new recipes). The lead dev is also well known for disliking logistics bots and wishes they had never been added to the game. And the expansion shows that, with (again) three of the four planets having mechanics to make use of bots more difficult if not outright impossible (Aquilo).

All in all, the developers have a very different vision of what makes the game fun than I do, and that meant the expansion wasn't much fun for me. If I play the game more in the future, I'll probably do so with the expansion disabled.

That was my first impression when I picked it up -- the game strongly suggests you start from the start, and re-loading a pre-Space Age save will result in many things breaking. I gave in and started over, worried I'd need to spend dozens of hours just building up to where I was before.

But this wasn't the case — Space Age isn't only new content, but a complete re-balance of the original game. It is far far less grindy and requires much less baby-sitting of production.

Your first space platform, the ships, and the planets, are best thought of as unique Factorio-inspired puzzles. Each planet is like a Factorio game-mode to solve, with its own restrictions to design around.

I think those who have hundreds of hours in the base-game have to un-learn of the base game to pick up the DLC. Many of the complaints are pointed at the tech tree changes — they wanted an expansion on what was there, not a recreation. But for me now, I wouldn't recommend Factorio without Space Age.

Yeah, the cliff explosives being gated behind vulcanus sucks a bit but they made the cliffs a lot more bearable in 2.0 I think for a megabase run its a matter of how fast you can reach legendary and process everything in it and once you got that you can go really into megabasing this game. Sadly they nerfed trains so hard by introducing Quality since everything got better but trains stayed the same which is a shame

For me factorio is a one playthrough kinda thing. I don’t get off on endless optimization and making it bigger for the sake of bigger, feels like work.

That said, I was more than happy to build the base back from scratch in space age, and I find the expansion to be every bit as fun as the base game. So I endorse it. Especially as you already know how to do some things quicker.

Documentation should often be wrong.

There should be five options for each piece of tooling, none of which quite work the same way, all of which have a fan-base singing their praises, and three of which have critical problems you probably won't find out about until you try them. Then the one you pick gets abandoned when you're part way done. (this feature only for the Javascript and Python DLC)

Example farms should use old versions of libraries that are no longer maintained.

Interfacing with other farms should require manually faking a downgrade of some protocol you're using, because the older one is no longer available for you and they can't/won't upgrade.

You should be forced to design certain parts of the system in ways that are harder to use and constantly break when changing other parts, just so the appearance of those parts is "on brand". This should require re-writing functionality that would otherwise be supplied "for free" by a library.

When you're finally getting things how you want them, your farm should get cancelled and the whole thing abruptly burned to the ground because your parent company just decided to buy a different, existing farm instead.

That's why I don't tend to play these games. I was about 5 hours into trs1000 when I was like man I could just learn GPU or fpga with a real editor instead but that would be useful. And stopped playing. With factorio I could be laying out circuit boards. So I did that instead.

Awesome!

I've considered trying to do some hyper optimisation, taking into account the number of cycles each instruction takes - it seems that a lot of people are interested in that.

That's not my natural style though. I've had plenty of criticism for not being performance sensitive, but that's not really how I unwind (although I do plenty of optimisation at work!).

It could be fun to explore ingame though.

Just looked it up: looks cool & added it to wishlist. Did you happen to play "Solar 2" years back?

Did you pay DangerouslyFunny on Youtube to play that or does he just play every new steam demo with incremental features? It is his business basically.

Excellent news, I can play the game on my Steam Deck with the on-screen keyboard!

What's so special about artists?

Farming is an ancient human practice. It would be a huge loss to society if we forgot how to do it with our hands, without automation.

> Is it still bad if the farmer gets replaced?

A farmer is an owner of a farm. To replace the farmer you would have to completely eliminate the entire concept of human ownership that we hold. Socialist or other community ownership structures around farms wouldn't do as that would not replace the farmer, it would make everyone a farmer.

> society benefits from its automation

Economies benefit from its automation. It's far less clear if societies benefit. Farm work is hard, but there is a sense of accomplishment when it is done, which is good for the psyche. The never ending "bullshit" jobs that most people seem to find themselves in nowadays has not lead to happiness.

I like the word farmer to be replaced.

It usually means EITHER land cultivator OR animal exploiter.

My choice of word maybe gives away that I'm not so okay with the latter category. While I think the first category is doing God's work on earth feeding the ever growing human population.

The farmer is taking the next step in their career journey!

You're absolutely correct. A better name would be "The Farmer Was Augmented <emdash> By Your Friendly AI" <emoji "happy"> <emoji "friednship">

More like "the farmer was sent to live on the farm"