Mixed Feelings
Factorio, I love you and also dislike you.
You’ve taken what should have been my most productive time and turned those hours into an autistic pleasure.
Those hours will be remembered as lost with a happy smile, a face which does not regret those 80 hours spent on setting and polishing the train system, those countless spaceships lost into the void and remade, rebuilt, polished and repurposed into complete self sufficient factories, those hundreds of hours spent on refactoring the base into hubs, blocks, modules, again, again, and of course, again.
Hopefully I’ll never reach the shattered planet.
Reflection
After spending ~1.5K hours on the game, starting in Vanilla (SE, bad decision) and moving onto the space age, I do admit, I got the bug, and will find it hard to release anytime soon. The game plugs most of my leasure gaming time necessities and the modding scene expands that into infinity.
It taught me lessons about engineering, time management (YES), logistics & systems thinking and actually improved my ability to make things from scratch.
After building so many custom factory designs, I find that my approach to software has improved. I find it easier to work with lower level components and the documentation directly while earlier it was easier to simply rely on guides, in addition, my sense of coupling and module separation has increased and somewhat matured.
I find it easier to work with smaller modules and create them with clearer boundaries.
I find it easier to move information and the flow in logistics terms.
Bottlenecks are real and got a new face from now on.
Unused (sometimes spoilable) material is concrete and reflected in timeouts, lost frames and system clogging garbage.
While teaching and improving the skills above through some personal reflection it intrigued me to learn about some of the processes in the game and to learn about their real life counterparts.
In general: 10/10, will do again some day.