I just finished a blind playthrough of Factorio: Space Age (aside from reading the Friday Factorio Facts published before release). The entire playthrough was streamed in 12h sessions on Twitch. (see 20250831004959)

Now that I'm done playing, I wanted to take some time to reflect on the experience.

What I liked

I really liked the space platform and the planet Aquilo. Both of these present space optimization puzzles, but differ in slightly different ways.

• Space platforms have more dense, packed layouts due to weight constraints and a lack of electric poles.
• Aquilo has more spacious layouts due to heating pipes.

In general, I don't really enjoy grinding that much; I just enjoy doing fun, interesting puzzles. I felt that Factorio leaned more in the direction of fun, interesting puzzles because it tended to give you new mechanics to play with rather than what is effectively the same item but with a different number and graphic.

For example, steam power, solar power, and nuclear power in Factorio all come with different challenges and solutions. An example where Factorio doesn't do this well is when you research yellow belt, then red, then blue, then green. It's just the same mechanic, but you have a better version of it now.

However, I feel like Factorio has tended to lean in the direction of interesting puzzles in the past and it's why I like Aquilo and the space platforms.

Space Platforms

For a space platform, the bigger it is, the heavier it is and the harder it will be to move it around. Electricity is delivered automatically, so you don't need to place any electric poles. You also cannot place any boxes to store items.

For space platforms, I think I just enjoy space optimization puzzles. There was also a logistical challenge of moving things between planets and space platforms, but I didn't find this aspect of the game to be that interesting since all you do in response to it is either change what you deliver or you just scale (which I find grindy).

Aquilo

On Aquilo, every belt, pipe, and building (except for electric poles) needs to be heated by heating pipes which cannot go underground. This caused me to consider different ways of laying out the factory. There's an interesting interplay between this mechanic and the existing mechanics in the game that can be surprising and funny (at least if you are on Aquilo, since it doesn't apply anywhere else).

Figuring out how to lay everything out takes a few attempts, as you figure out smaller, more flexible ways to place all of the building elements. You find yourself being more constrained by where you can place anything that goes around a production building, like inserters, belts, and pipes.

What I didn't like

However, I did not find the rest of the game to be that interesting in general. In particular, I did not like Vulcanus and especially Gleba.

Vulcanus

Vulcanus is just a more convenient place to make many things, and the puzzle of making things on Vulcanus is easier than it is on Nauvis. So, you just end up moving production over to Vulcanus, but you still have to manually set up all the production to use the new, improved (but also simpler) production setup.

This feels grindy because I feel like I'm doing the same thing; the puzzle is not interesting or novel. It's just production with fluids again. There is a combat challenge on Vulcanus, but I don't really enjoy direct combat in Factorio anyway, so all I did was scale until I had enough DPS to kill the worm.

Gleba

According to chat, Gleba is a controversial planet in the Factorio community -- people either hate it or love it. Despite really looking forward to it, Gleba was the worst part of the game for me because I didn't find the puzzle to be satisfying. I tried several different solutions for the puzzle that did not work to my satisfaction, and settled on a solution that worked but was not enjoyable to build or watch.

The reason I don't like Gleba is because I found myself being pushed towards one solution that involved not caring about how spoiled an item is by throwing everything away -- regardless of an item's freshness -- into a fire to get rid of it.

I think one way to fix this problem is to give the player a more powerful way to introspect the freshness of an item. Right now, the only control you have is to either pick the least fresh or most fresh item from a box or from the belt directly in front of an inserter. However, getting the "most fresh" item doesn't actually mean the item is fresh and vice versa. The information is actually literally useless in practice, because it doesn't tell you anything about the freshness of the items. Of course, adding the ability to introspect freshness and make decisions on it (like picking up all items with a freshness greater than a certain percent, or filtering all items on a belt with a splitter with a freshness under a certain percent) would require playtesting and I'm not totally convinced this would make Gleba more fun.

However, the lack of introspection ability seems to mean that either:

• Freshness tends towards mediocrity, or spirals into decay
• You don't think about freshness, because you throw any excess into a fire immediately such that freshness is the same as how short the distance is from source to destination

The fact that both of these options involve a negative relationship with the new freshness mechanic -- you either design a solution that lets you ignore it or you watch as the items you produce become less fresh -- is deeply frustrating and unsatisfying to me.

I've heard a lot of suggestions to either remove the freshness mechanic completely or to increase the time it takes for items to spoil (for example, temporarily with refrigeration or permanently with a mod) -- but in my view, these have the effect of removing the need to deal with the new mechanic in the same way throwing all of the items into a fire immediately has. You still, at every point in the chain, have no ability to know if the item you are moving is close to spoiling.

I wanted the game to tempt me into a hubris-induced meltdown, when the decisions I've made go awry. I want to take greater risks with accidentally ending up with "oops, all spiders", but instead of this I just throw all the excess eggs into the fire because that's both the easiest and best thing to do.

I wanted to enjoy a satisfying puzzle, but the only viable option is to just throw everything into the fire at the end of the belt. Filtering out the spoilage item on its own ends up feeling tedious rather than interesting, because it feels like there's only one way to design your factory to deal with this problem.

It's possible, perhaps, that I haven't seen the good side of the Gleba puzzle yet, or that I haven't spent enough time with it. Maybe I could grow to like the puzzle in the future, but at least on my first playthrough I found myself really frustrated and disappointed, especially since it was by far the most exciting feature I was looking forward to.

I never saw a single Pentapod trying to wreck my facility on Gleba, but maybe that's for the better, because I really didn't like being on Gleba.

Interplanetary Logistics

Something that is a bit disappointing is that you don't have very many necessary dependencies between planets.

You end up going to planets to get specific items, but once you have them you can basically leave. At most, you have small ships going between planets to transport science packs and a handful of special buildings or items.

It feels like a missed opportunity to lean into a logistics puzzle. You don't need to build really big freighters or really fast ships and you don't need to make automated decisions about where to go based on demand.

The only times the game manages to make the planet-to-planet logistics a bit more interesting is when planets on their own have their own special bonus. The best example of this is the forge, which can only be used on Vulcanus because that's where the lava is. I ended up building most of my building materials and armaments on Vulcanus or in Vulcanus's orbit. However, even this feels like a weak example. By the end of the game, it felt like the ideal setup would be to do literally everything on Vulcanus, including research, and have small science pack production being done on all the other planets (including Nauvis).

I think this is happens because everything that you might want to produce, you don't need to do so with regularity like you have to do with science in order to beat the game.