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The original was posted on /r/factorio by /u/hopefulwarrior on 2024-10-11 17:19:21+00:00.
Apologies for the long post in advance. I wanted to share my experience with the game I’ve loved since 2021.
I used to play the game in 2021 and got addicted to it. I launched my first rocket at about 24 hours and then immediately started another run to do other achievements. I was playing for 6 hours straight post work every night (sometimes till 4AM) and reading the wiki in breaks between work. In my best run I was able to launch a rocket in 18 hours (no cheesing). I didn’t watch any let’s play videos, just tried figuring it all out on my own (and the wiki).
In over a month I had over 80 hours in. Finally, the addiction got to me (and lack of social life) and I had to stop playing. When I had stopped, I had started the Lazy Bastard achievement run but never finished it.
Cut to Christmas last year: I had been reading the weekly Friday blog posts (since they started talking about Space Age) and it motivated me to play another run and launch another rocket. I didn’t plan on doing any more achievements but guess after watching a few Factorio videos I picked up enough pace to do it in 13 hours or so without cheesing at all (getting No time for chitchat).
I thought that was that. Another desire to play when stuck at home and nothing to do in July this year made me try out the Lazy Bastard one.
Again, I thought that was that. And I’ll never finish the game in less than 8 hours.
Lurking on the sub introduced me to Michael Hendriks’s Factorio guide on default settings () which I found quite funny and I watched it out of curiosity. It seemed doable but I didn’t feel motivated to try it.
Earlier this month as the Space Age expansion launch grew closer and after reading in FFF #409 that beacons were getting nerfed, I decided to finally try the Hendrik’s guide (albeit cheesing the settings). I took out a weekend to play and got done in about 7 hours. A big relief because I feared the expansion would make the achievement unattainable.
Again, I thought that was that. In my last run I was producing less than 500 green circuits per min and had 16 millions more to produce. I calculated it would take me 128 hours or so to get the achievement. So I stopped for a few days. However, the missing achievement kept “calling to me”.
Finally, a few days back I decided to play the game one last time before the expansion and build a mega base. I slowly got the green circuits to 1k/m and adding another outpost to reach closer to 2.5k/m. Again, this wasn’t enough either and would take me 40 hours of playtime. So I kept trying to expand by 1k/m every time I played.
This required building 2 4x4 nuclear reactor setups and highly optimized beacon production setups which I saw on Youtube (thanks Nilaus!). I had decided to reach 10k green circuits per min and then just monitoring the game till I got it. Ultimately, I ended up with over 20k green circuits per minute and built dozens of storage chests to “consume” them. This made the achievement a breeze and I added over a million green circuits an hour finally unlocking the last achievement.
To be honest, I don’t feel a lot of emotions now having done it. The journey of building different bases is what was rewarding. I’ve played this game for over 175 hours and I’m sure this number would double with the expansion. Thanks for reading this far. That’s all I had to say.
tldr;
played the game in 2021 and got hooked
restarted Christmas last year after reading the blog posts
did achievements I thought I’d never do
excited to play the expansion now