Factorio

Based on Wikipedia: Factorio

There's a video game so addictive that employees at Shopify, the massive e-commerce platform, can write off purchasing it as a business expense. The company's co-founder, Tobias Lütke, apparently believes that understanding this game makes you better at building systems. The game has earned the nickname "Cracktorio" among its devoted players, a not-so-subtle nod to its habit-forming qualities. And in perhaps the strangest tribute a video game has ever received, a researcher named a newly discovered species of scorpion after it.

The game is Factorio, and it turns the act of building automated factories into something approaching meditation—or madness, depending on how deep you fall into its rabbit hole.

The Premise: Stranded Engineer, Hostile Planet

You crash-land on an alien world. You're an engineer, alone, with nothing but the resources around you. Your goal: build a rocket and launch yourself back into space.

That sounds simple enough. It is not.

Between you and that rocket lies an almost absurd amount of work. You need iron. To get iron, you need to mine ore. To mine ore efficiently, you need mining drills. To build mining drills, you need iron. You see the problem. Everything requires something else, and getting that something else requires still more things, each dependency branching outward like a fractal of industrial necessity.

But here's where Factorio diverges from most survival games. The point isn't really the rocket. The point is the factory you build to make the rocket possible. And that factory—the sprawling, churning, belt-driven, robot-assisted monument to automation that you construct over dozens or hundreds of hours—becomes the actual game.

What Makes a Factory Tick

To understand Factorio, you need to understand what a factory actually is. Not in the abstract sense of "a place where things get made," but in the mechanical sense of inputs, outputs, and transformations.

Raw materials enter one end. Finished products emerge from the other. In between, machines perform operations: smelting ore into plates, assembling plates into gears, combining gears with other components into increasingly complex products. Each step in this chain requires the previous steps to function. Stop the iron plates, and the gears stop. Stop the gears, and the machines that need gears stop. The whole system is interconnected, and a bottleneck anywhere ripples through everything downstream.

Factorio forces you to think about these connections. Really think about them. How many iron plates per second do you need? How many copper plates? If you're producing one rocket part every thirty seconds, and each rocket part requires fifty iron plates, that's a hundred iron plates per minute. How many furnaces does that require? How many mining drills to feed those furnaces? How many belts to carry the ore from the drills to the furnaces, and then the plates from the furnaces to the assemblers?

This is the kind of thinking that would normally require a spreadsheet and an engineering degree. In Factorio, it becomes intuitive. You develop a feel for throughput, for ratios, for the elegant efficiency of a well-designed production line.

The Beautiful Problem of Scaling

Small factories are easy. You plop down a few miners, run a belt to some furnaces, hand-feed the results into an assembler, and manually grab whatever you need. It works fine when you're making simple things in small quantities.

Then you need more.

Suddenly your little setup can't keep up. You need more miners, more furnaces, more assemblers. But where do you put them? The new miners need belts to carry their ore. Those belts need to merge with the existing belts, but the existing belts are already at capacity. So you need more belts. But more belts means longer paths, which means items take longer to arrive, which means you need buffers to smooth out the delivery, which means you need more space, which means you need to redesign the whole thing.

This is the core loop of Factorio: build, encounter limits, redesign, expand, encounter new limits, redesign again. Each iteration pushes you toward more sophisticated solutions. Hand-feeding becomes conveyor belts. Conveyor belts become robot logistics networks. Simple circuits become complex conditional logic. Your factory evolves from a crude survival camp into something that would make an industrial engineer weep with either joy or horror.

The Enemies You Create

The alien planet isn't uninhabited. Creatures called Biters, Spitters, and Worms roam the landscape, and they don't appreciate what you're doing to their home.

This is where Factorio gets philosophically interesting. Your factory pollutes. Every furnace burning coal, every chemical plant processing petroleum, every piece of your industrial empire pumps pollution into the atmosphere. That pollution spreads across the map, and when it reaches the alien nests, the creatures get angry. The more you pollute, the more frequently they attack. The more they attack, the more defenses you need. More defenses require more production. More production creates more pollution.

You can play on peaceful mode, where the aliens only fight back if you attack them first. But in the standard game, you're locked in an escalating conflict of your own making. It's an ecological parable embedded in the mechanics themselves, though the game never preaches about it. It simply presents the feedback loop and lets you draw your own conclusions.

The Social Factory

Factorio supports multiplayer, and playing with others transforms the experience entirely.

In cooperative play, factories grow larger and faster because multiple people can work on different sections simultaneously. One player might focus on oil refining while another handles circuit production. The challenge shifts from pure problem-solving to coordination and communication. Whose design philosophy wins when two players have different ideas about how to organize the smelting area?

The game also supports competitive modes and dedicated servers that can run continuously, with players logging in and out while the factory keeps running. Some communities have built factories of staggering size, production lines stretching across virtual continents, the result of hundreds of hours of collective effort.

The Modding Ecosystem

Factorio was built with modification in mind. The game uses Lua, a lightweight programming language popular in game development, for its modding system. The developers maintain an official portal where mod creators can share their work, and an in-game manager lets players browse and install mods without leaving the application.

Some mods make small quality-of-life improvements. "Squeak Through," for instance, simply lets your character walk between buildings that would normally block your path—a tiny change that removes a constant minor annoyance.

Other mods completely transform the game. Overhaul mods like Krastorio 2 add new mechanics, new resources, new production chains, and entirely redesigned combat systems. For players who've mastered the base game, these mods offer hundreds of additional hours of challenge.

The Space Age Expansion

After years of development and over three million copies sold, the developers at Wube Software released Space Age in October 2024. The expansion essentially asks: what if launching a rocket wasn't the end, but the beginning?

In Space Age, players can build Space Platforms—factories that float in orbit and can travel between planets. Four new worlds await, each with unique challenges and resources.

Vulcanus is a volcanic hellscape where you can extract basic resources directly from lava. Fulgora is a desert planet scarred by constant lightning storms, littered with the ruins of an ancient alien civilization whose artifacts can be mined and processed. Gleba is a jungle world teeming with life that can be farmed and converted into resources. Aquilo is a frozen wasteland covered in liquid ammonia oceans.

Each planet introduces new enemies too. Gleba hosts Pentapods, spider-like creatures that hunt in packs. Vulcanus is home to Demolishers, massive worm-like entities that patrol territories and destroy anything that intrudes.

The expansion encourages factories of truly absurd scale. When your production chain spans multiple planets, when you're automating interplanetary logistics, when rockets launch continuously to shuttle materials between worlds—that's when Factorio transforms from a game about building a factory into a game about building an empire.

A Game Born From Other Games

Factorio didn't emerge from nothing. The lead designer, Michal Kovařík, has cited two Minecraft mods as primary inspirations: IndustrialCraft and BuildCraft. Both mods added industrial machinery and automation to Minecraft's blocky world, letting players build power systems, automated mining operations, and complex production chains.

Kovařík and his team took those concepts and built an entire game around them, stripping away Minecraft's exploration and construction focus to concentrate purely on the factory-building experience. The result is something both simpler and deeper—simpler because you're not worrying about building houses or fighting zombies or any of Minecraft's other diversions, deeper because every system relates to production and automation.

The game began development in Prague in 2012, started as a one-person project, and funded its early development through an Indiegogo campaign that raised about 21,600 euros in early 2013. A trailer released in April 2014 drove significant sales of the early access version, and the team grew slowly over the years. By 2024, Wube Software employed 31 people.

The Curious Case of G2A

In 2019, Factorio became an unlikely player in a broader controversy about video game key resellers. G2A, a platform where people buy and sell game keys, had long faced accusations that some keys sold on its site were purchased with stolen credit cards. When the fraudulent purchases were discovered and charged back, the developers—not G2A—lost the money.

G2A made a public offer: any developer who could prove, through an independent audit, that stolen keys were sold on the platform would receive ten times the value of those keys. Most developers ignored the offer, but Wube Software called G2A's bluff. They sent a list of 321 Steam keys that had been canceled due to chargebacks.

After more than ten months of investigation, G2A confirmed that 198 of those keys had indeed been sold on their platform. They paid Wube Software $39,600. The episode made Wube one of the few developers to successfully hold a key reseller accountable, and they did it by simply taking the company at its word and doing the paperwork.

The Scorpion Connection

Perhaps the strangest footnote in Factorio's story involves a scorpion discovered in Somaliland, a partially recognized state in the Horn of Africa. When researchers described the new species, they needed to give it a scientific name. One of those researchers was František Kovařík—the father of Michal Kovařík, Factorio's lead designer.

He named it Neobuthus factorio.

It's a small, venomous arachnid that now carries the name of a video game about industrial automation on an alien planet. Science is occasionally whimsical that way.

Why People Can't Stop Playing

Factorio has sold over 3.5 million copies despite graphics that look dated by modern standards. It's not a visually impressive game. The sprites are simple, the colors muted, the animations functional rather than flashy. You could run it on a laptop from a decade ago.

None of that matters.

What matters is the feeling of watching a system you designed work exactly as intended. The ore flows from the mines to the furnaces. The plates flow from the furnaces to the assemblers. The products flow from the assemblers to wherever they need to go. Everything moves, everything connects, everything works.

And then you notice a bottleneck. One belt is backing up. One assembler is starving for inputs. One small imperfection in your beautiful machine. So you fix it. And while fixing it, you notice another imperfection. So you fix that too. And suddenly three hours have passed and you haven't eaten and the sun is coming up and you really should go to bed but there's just one more thing to optimize.

That's Cracktorio. That's why people can't stop. The factory must grow.

The Connection to Real Systems

There's a reason Tobias Lütke thinks Factorio makes his employees better at their jobs. The game teaches systems thinking—the ability to see not just individual components but how they interact, where bottlenecks form, how changes propagate through interconnected networks.

This kind of thinking applies far beyond video games. Supply chains work like Factorio factories, with raw materials flowing through transformations to become finished products. Software systems have similar structures, with data flowing through processing steps. Organizations themselves can be understood as factories, with inputs, outputs, and transformation processes.

When you've spent a hundred hours optimizing virtual iron production, you start seeing the world differently. You notice inefficiencies. You think about throughput. You understand, viscerally, why that one slow step in a process makes everything downstream wait.

Maybe that's worth a business expense write-off after all.