

This makes all the concepts we’ve been mentioning come alive. When you hit an obstacle, you have two basic ways to overcome it. In Factorio, you deal with obstacles all the time. People have this habit of quitting or escaping when stumbling upon an obstacle. You can only do it one assembler at a time. In Factorio, you can’t build a factory all at once. We often want to have the essay already written, the picture already drawn. When creating, people often deal with feeling overwhelmed because they think that the work should have already been done, or they feel like they can’t ever complete it. We’re so used to consuming content all the time that it can be overwhelming to try making anything on our own. Factorio teaches you skills for creatingĬreating, making, and building can be daunting. This practice is the best way to deal with any open-ended problem, in game or in real life.Īnd in Factorio, you have to practice it all the time. This process teaches you to break complex things down into smaller parts. Many times throughout the game, you need to sit and think through how you need to design your factory to make it function well.
#FACTORIO INFINITE ORES HOW TO#
In order to launch a rocket, you need to figure out how to get advanced building materials from raw resources like stone ore or crude oil. You have a goal (launch a rocket into space) but there are infinite ways of achieving that (open-ended problem). A simple part of a factoryįactorio teaches you how to solve open-ended problems. It can be hard at times but that’s what makes it satisfying.
#FACTORIO INFINITE ORES FULL#
After you start playing the full game, the difficulty is steeper but still manageable. However, their neatly built tutorial takes you by the hand and guides you through elements of the game step by step. If you threw a newbie into the game, he would be lost. Most games like this are usually difficult to learn, and in the beginning, they are simply overwhelming (grand strategies like Europa Universalis IV or MOBAs like DOTA 2).įactorio is even closer to open-ended problems on the spectrum. They’re getting closer to open-ended problems. We’re not used to dealing with a lot of uncertainty, the next steps being unclear, not having a clear objective, etc.īasically, imagine open-ended problems and close-ended problems as a spectrum.Ĭertain games are further away from close-ended problems on the spectrum. On the other hand, we usually struggle with solving open-ended problems. Gamers are amongst the best close-ended problem solvers. We talked about how gaming teaches us to solve close-ended problems, problems that have clear rules, clear instructions, and clear boundaries. Factorio teaches you to solve open-ended problems Storytelling: there is not much in terms of a story. Can be a really good way of bonding with friends. Socializing: can be played both in single-player or multi-player. Stress-reducing: can be stressful at times If you look at Factorio based on the rating we created in the last part:

If (math.random() > 0.We’re not shills, we simply like the game and think that it can be valuable for developing grit, systems thinking, and focus. I'd need to check how easy it is to add it but it might mean some non-trivial work to make sure it won't break anything.įor x,_ in pairs(grid) do for y,_ in pairs(_) do It would then proceed with normal generation schema (it will very richness by certain amount and potentially modify size) and then place what it calculated.
#FACTORIO INFINITE ORES PATCH#
And it would not be able to spawn exaclty what you want in terms of size for example - there is a lot of calculations going to create nice patch shape.īest what it could potentially do would be a method that asks for ore name (needs to be ingame name can't parse natural displayed name I think) and location, size and approximate richness of patch. Question is what do you mean by naturally looking ore patch - RSO can only spawn ones similar to what it generates already. And it wouldn't be counted for natural spawn limits.

There is no interface to spawn certain ore patch at specific location.Īdding that kind of interface could work but it will not be fully recognized - it would get removed when regenerating ores for example. RSO only spawns those automatically based on random rolls. So I'm looking for any way to manually spawn naturally looking ore patches. I tried to look for a full list of RSO's commands, but there doesn't seem to be one, or there are only very few special commands implemented at all. There's a command to spawn a square resource patch at.
