Factorio

Development

The game has been developed by a team of developers from Prague since mid 2012. The development team originally consisted of a single person, but has grown larger. To fund the game the development team began an Indiegogo campaign, which started on 31 January, 2013 and concluded on 3 March, 2013. The campaign raised €21,626 of the €17,000 goal. Following the crowdfunding success, Wube sold early access editions of the game to raise further funds. The developer credits the April 2014 release of the game's trailer as a significant driver of those sales.

One of the game's designers cited the "Industrial Craft" and "Build Craft" Minecraft mods for inspiration during the game's development.

The game was released on Steam Early Access on 25 February 2016, and its developers aim for a full release in late 2017.

Plot

The game follows the story of a spaceman who crash landed on an alien planet. As the only survivor, he has to harvest his resources by hand in order to build up an industrial infrastructure to eventually build a rocket and escape back to space, while facing inhabitants of the planet who defend their native environment.

Gameplay

Factorio is a resource gathering game with real-time strategy and survival elements, with influences from the BuildCraft and IndustrialCraft mods for the Minecraft computer game. The player survives by locating and harvesting resources to craft different tools and machines, which in turn create more advanced materials that allow for the progression to more sophisticated technologies and machines. The game progresses as the player continues to build and manage their automated factory-style system, which automates the mining, transporting, processing and assembling of resources. Players research advanced technologies that allow them to create new structures, items and upgrades, starting with basic automation that leads to drones and exoskeletons.

The current version of the game is formally "won" by launching a rocket with a satellite, although choosing to ignore this goal and instead continue to build a factory is possible, as Factorio is an open world game. Construction of a rocket requires massive amounts of resources, forcing the player to set up an sizable, effective factory in order to complete the game's goal. There are achievements for finishing the game in under 15 or under 8 hours, which indicates the expected completion time for a skilled player. The any% speedrunning world record is 1 hour 52 minutes, but that is with a favorable map seed and aliens set to peaceful.

Combat

The player is concerned with defending themselves and their factory from the planet's increasingly aggressive indigenous fauna, who become increasingly more hostile as pollutant emissions created by the player's industry increase, necessitating the importance for the player to consider the balance between their production and the enemy's aggressiveness. There are three types of enemies; biters, spitters, and worms which spawn from bases that are generated randomly. Combat can be done in the early game with a pistol, which then leads to a sub-machine gun, a shotgun and finally the combat shotgun. Ammunition also has multiple types, including 'penetrating' rounds which can pass through enemies and do damage to anything on the other side.

Early on, turret technology is available to the player, giving access to the construction of automated sub-machine gun turrets. These turrets will auto-fire at enemies and are useful for employing an automated defense in the early stages of the game. Mid-game technologies provide access to laser turrets which, unlike the automated sub-machine gun turret, do not consume ammunition, and instead consume electricity to function. They do more damage, and do not reload making laser turrets ideal for a mid-to-late-game defence system.

The rest of the mid-to-late game brings the engine technology to produce 3 different vehicles: the car, tank and train. The car is fast, lightly armored, equipped with a single sub-machine gun, and has a large inventory space, which is helpful for not only combating the enemies, but also for quick transportation of the player and large quantities of items. The tank is heavily armoured, equipped with a cannon and a sub-machine gun, but is much slower than the car. The tank excels at attacking enemy colonies from a distance which reduces the amount of local hostiles.

Multiplayer

Multiplayer mode allows people, both locally and via the internet to play together cooperatively.

Downloadable content

The game was designed to be customisable via mods to create additional content, such as modifications to gameplay or re-texturing of visual elements. The developers offer an online portal on the Factorio website for mod developers to host their content. To help support the modding community, there is an in-game mod manager that allows players to quickly download mods hosted on the Factorio website.