Link: https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/tarn-adams-co-creator-of-dwarf-fortress-has-over-1-400-hours-in-factorio-and-is-currently-obsessed-with-terraforming-games-dwarf-fortress-just-doesnt-accommodate-a-full-on-sci-fi-thing/

Bay 12 Games' co-founder talks playing The Planet Crafter, Beast, and more than 40 years of saved desktops.

1400 hours... He might understand late-game efficiencies and modularization. it's nice to see he's starting to take an interest.

here i am with my 270 hours. restarted a few times now that I have trains “down”.

Can’t wait for Dwarf Fortress 40k, the updated sci-fi version.

I really hope I'm dead before Tarn is dead. He's my favorite genius

It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out I could put locomotives on both ends of the train instead of having to build loops to turn around...

that is cool! i like the loops but wondering - modern trains are diesel generators running electric motors. i wonder if we could find a mod to use trains to power your electric grid when they are idle at stations.

Throughput is greater if everything flows one way into a station. Don't have to go in and back out again to get a second train in. My more populous outposts have what looks like a train parking lot full of empties waitin' for 'em.

I'm on my first playthrough of Space Age currently and while I've got something fairly complex on Nauvis with multiple stops and interconnects and loops and a half dozen or so trains... a lot of my needs on other planets are just point-to-point single train transfers. e.g. running a line out to a scrap patch on another island with millions of units of resources on Fulgora after exhausting the initial scrap I mined out. I don't even need multiple cargo wagons let alone multiple trains to max out my factory's input belt capacity there at the moment... Could the whole thing be more efficient? Oh yes -- but sometimes simple is good enough, and not having to build loops before I got the deep elevated rail support and/or foundations helped tremendously!

I think I was probably supposed to figure out the double locomotive thing in the train tutorial -- I don't remember there being loops on the track there... -- but I'm pretty sure I'd already built at least simple factories on everything but Aquilo before I realized it was even an option. :p

In 1.0 I played bobs+angels and ran on a 100 square cell structure

In 2.0 I've still only done vanilla, but I went with a 200 square cell this time for bigger trains.

My only regret is exploring south and not east or west

The creeping horror for other players is making them zoom in to realise the scale of the thing. Its a long time to traverse even with rocket trains and go fast legs.

Edit: I should have included a picture of one of the cells for scale

I have to get back to DF. I played it like a mad person during my time as a student, scribbling mad construction ideas during classes. Instantly bought the game on steam but barely played it since. Not having a 100% keyboard doesn't help but the reality is I just have to get creative and program it to make it possible to play DF with it... And now I want to play Factorio again :(

It's like these folks never played OpenTTD.

I was just about to say the dev should consider making a sci-fi version.

Rimworld is just way more fun imo

He must be protected at all costs

TIL

I actually picked that up a while back but haven't really had time to play it. Same for Dwarf Fortress and Factorio...

I've heard they're all pretty great though.

DF has the deeper and more impressive simulation, but Rimworld is more fun to play imo.

I wouldn't put Factorio into the same category as it's "only" about building factories and making them more efficient.

It's okay, it's not like any of those games claim a lot of your time.

Oh good, as long as they aren't like Civ or Slay the Spire. Can't wait to try out these totally casual games that will only take up a little bit of my time!

Isn't a pure square grid inefficient, because trains get stuck? That happened to my square grid megabases, so I stopped doing them.

Fuuuck

Occasionally I'd get jams. The jams would manifest with a train sat occupying the corner, so i put a circuit in each one that sets off an alarm after 60 seconds of being continuously blocked. Then I'd investigate.

Generally, given that my stations only became available if they had > 1.0wagonscapacity*stacksize the trains mostly sat in "parking" waiting or at "parking" nearer the raw resource in the far outposts.

It required a little tuning, some modules have a lead-in perimeter loop where 5-6 trains can be stacked waiting to unload.