Moreover, doing everything by hand is out of the question, for two reasons: first, because many items can only be produced within machines and second, because-even if it were possible-doing so would consume literal years of a player’s time. As one may expect from beginning alone with a scant few machines and resources, the task of constructing a functional rocket is herculean. The goal is immediately comprehensible, yet dauntingly complex: build and launch a rocket into space. In a humble and succinct text box, you are given a concrete and specific goal. You arrive in the world of Factorio privy only to a small set of facts: your player-character is a lone human survivor of a spacecraft crash on an alien planet the planet is inhabited by an enormous insect-like species which reacts violently when approached by the player-character or when in proximity to structures created by the player-character and the planet is lush in natural resources-not only forests and waterways, nor only metal and coal deposits, but even subterranean oil reserves and naturally occurring pockets of uranium.
How can this be? Let’s take a closer look: A Summary of Factorio: Yet it still rides that line-between being a productive presentation of environmental topics and being a destructive presentation of the same-so closely that I can easily imagine different players having widely varying responses regarding whether Factorio’s depiction of humanity’s interaction with nature is a net positive or net negative in the wider conversation about such topics. In fact, it is precisely because Factorio does so much to emphasize the topics of resource scarcity and pollution that its weaknesses in the realm of environmentalism shine so brightly. Nevertheless, despite its demonstrable steps in the right direction, Factorio preserves a great many of the negative practical and psychological trends embodied by such optimization- and development-focused titles.
Even games like Terraria and Minecraft, which go so far as to represent resource acquisition as a zero sum game, nevertheless depict all processing, combining, and consuming of those resources as a pollution-free, byproduct-free non-zero sum game.īy contrast, in Factorio, resources are finite resources don’t always combine cleanly into singular products pollution results from production and pollution has consequences for both the world and the player. Similarly, while Infinifactory does periodically foreground topics like mining, exploitation, and waste in its story and puzzle design-it nevertheless provides an infinite supply of inputs that can be accelerated or decelerated at will, even when those inputs are living creatures. In Stardew Valley, for instance, not only do forests rapidly regrow and lakes never deplete of fish, but quarries, mines, and caves also replenish with stone and ore from day to day. Any analysis of the relationship between the player-character and their environment in Factorio must begin with an acknowledgement that Factorio is a game that does considerably more to accurately depict the environmental impact of human industrial development than the vast majority of its peers in the simulation, management, strategy, and puzzle genres.
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