This year’s RPS Advent Calendar has arrived, and it’s time for us to fill the nook behind each door with 24 delightful game-shaped chocolates. But man, it’s hard work making these chocolates. Too much manual labour. I wish we could automate the process somehow - perhaps we just need to exploit the planet’s resources and turn it into a giant chocolate-making factory spanning the entire solar system. Yes, that should work.
]]>A little teaser story to end the week, care of Maw reader MiniMatt. Factorio devs Wube Software have dropped the vaguest of hints about their next game project, or at least, shared one of their current inspirations: World Of Warcraft.
]]>To say that Factorio: Space Age throws out the rulebook is an understatement. It'd be more fitting to say it's somehow automated the whole process: an inserter plucked out the rulebook from my brain and deposited it in hot magma, while a new rulebook was churned out in a nearby machine and plopped into my brain from the other side - only for that to be immediately plucked out and incinerated as well. With each new planet and each new phase, Space Age reinvents itself. I'm battling hyperbole here, but ah hell, I admit defeat. Factorio: Space Age is a masterpiece, the final form of perhaps the most well-crafted building game I'll ever play.
]]>Back in the protean stink of 2013, the beast we call Factorio sprouted in lowercase early access form and began its meticulous, ravenous conquest of the emerging factory sim genre. Some say that Factorio gave that genre life, though I'd point at Dwarf Fortress as one among many notable forebears. Today, the terrain of factory simming is hotly contested by rival piles of conveyor belt spaghetti. I'm not just talking about Satisfactory or Shapez - they're even making philosophical factory sims these days. They have cosy factory sims now.
Accordingly, the immense, smoke-rimmed cyborg eye of Factorio has turned from the exhausted soil to the relatively untapped heavens. Somewhere up there, there is unspoilt territory. Somewhere, there is land that has never known the roar of a smelter - and in Factorio's behemothic Space Age DLC, out today, you will find it.
]]>Factorio’s whopping Space Age expansion has been in the works for a good few years now, and we finally know when we’ll get our hands on it. Space Age will arrive this October alongside a major 2.0 update for the moreish factory-automating hit, with the expansion costing as much as the base game. It sounds like there’ll be plenty to show for that price, mind.
]]>Factorio developers Wube have been teasing an expansion for a couple of years, but they've now announced what it is. It's called Factorio: Space Age, and it's about constructing space platforms in orbit and then visiting four new planets, each with their own resources for you to exploit and challenges for you to overcome with conveyor belts and robot arms.
]]>Automated construction sim Factorio now has controller support. Originally added to the experimental branch with update 1.1.87, it's now available on the main stable release. Among other benefits, it means the all-consuming management game should now work better on Steam Deck.
]]>New games have become more expensive in recent years, but older games have continued to remain the same price or to get cheaper. Excellent factory construction sim Factorio is bucking that trend. On January 26th it's going to raise its price from $30 to $35, says its developer.
]]>Some games are just December games. When the air turns biting, I hear their siren song in my bones. They Are Billions. Frostpunk. Phoenix Point. Factorio. None of them are exactly what you would call a Christmas-y game. In fact, they're all pretty bleak and threatening in tone. But they're also amazingly comforting.
Just imagine: sitting down in your favourite chair, electric heat pad on your back, cat on your lap, mug of hot chocolate or coffee by your side. Legions of undead roiling at the gates, trying to break through your cosy little town's defences. Ahhhhh. It's Christmas.
]]>It takes a very special game to give you so much to learn, so many ways to do everything, that even after 1000 hours of playtime you still feel like a beginner. Factorio is daunting in the extreme, and I remember bouncing off it the first time I tried. Thank goodness I gave it a second chance. Building up a gigantic world-spanning, atmosphere-destroying factory slowly and methodically over dozens of hours is probably my favourite singleplayer experience in games.
]]>Horror games are great and all that, but what about games that make you the monster? Yeah. Chew on that for a second.
I'm not just talking about games that belong to the horror genre, either. In fact, spare those asymmetrical multiplayer games that are all the rage with their worryingly young audiences, there are few actual horror games that let you assume the role of the villain. But that doesn't mean there isn't a deluge of titles where you play as a creature so vile, so menacing, that the residents of their worlds undoubtly view the player as evil incarnate. Far from it. The games on this list may not all be spooky in tone, but your character is still the stuff of actual nightmares.
]]>One year after announcing a paid expansion for Factorio, the developers still haven't revealed much of what it'll bring. But they have now confirmed something that might not be big but is large: they plan for the expansion to feel as big as the whole base game all over again. Factorio is not a small game, so that's an impressive plan.
]]>Some players have reported lag in Factorio for years. Lag always seemed fair to me given the sprawling, complex bases you can build in the game, but the latest patch might make things better. Version 1.1.46, released this Saturday, makes several changes which should reduce multiplayer latency.
]]>Introversion Software, the makers of Prison Architect, have been making a video series about all the prototypes they've created and scrapped over the past several years. This month's prototype is 'Minecraft Factory' or 'Voxel Factory', an attempt in 2017 to make a Factorio-like game out of Minecraft-style blocks.
You can watch a video where they demonstrate the prototype and why they binned the idea - and then you can buy and play it, if you like, with all the money going to charity.
]]>Factorio, the conveyor construction sim, is going to get a big expansion - although not for at least a year. This was discussed in a development update post marking the release of 1.1, the last major update for the base game.
]]>What's up gamers? It's 2021 and that means it's time to round up the team's favourite games of 2020. You'll already know our selections if you read our annual Advent Calendar, but this post gathers all those words and games together in one convenient package.
]]>The last couple of years have been pretty good for management games, but only the select few have made the cut for our list of best management games you can play right now. If you're looking for something to sink into over the holidays, check out our picks below.
]]>From our first years we know what it means to build. As babies we're given clacky wooden blocks and colourful Duplo bricks. We are architects long before we are capable eaters of raw carrot. If you're anything like the staff of RPS, you've not outgrown the habit of child-like town planning. Yes, building games often take a managerial approach (at least many on this list do), but a sense of play is always present. It's there when you draw out a road in Cities Skylines, just to watch it populate with toy-like traffic. When you brick up another hole in your mighty Stronghold to fend off enemy swordsmen. When you painstakingly dig a trench for water to flow in Timberborn, just like you did all those years ago on the beach, in an effort to stop the tide washing away your sandcastles. You'll find all these games and more on our list. So here you go: the best building games on PC.
]]>Blueprints are one of the most genius systems at work in Factorio, and it's a crime that many players don't know how to make proper use of Blueprints to save time and effort when building their factories.
Our Factorio Blueprints guide will not only walk you through how to get started using and creating blueprints, but also invite you to use RPS's very own Factorio Blueprint Book (along with a few other community-made blueprints) to help kickstart your factory!
]]>Struggling to get started in Factorio? Have your friends told you time and time again about the joys of building factories, but you find yourself completely lost when it comes to starting your own? Or perhaps you just want a few pointers on how you can get set up even quicker in your next world?
Whichever of the above, this Factorio early game walkthrough is here to help. I'll take you along for the ride as I play through my first hour or so of a new Factorio world; and in that time, I'll show you how to be productive with your first steps, so you can create a solid foundation which you can then turn into a glorious, pollution-chugging factory.
]]>Using Factorio's in-game console, players can do just about anything they could ever want to do in this marvellously addictive factory management game. From modifying the world around them to controlling the spread of biters, from instant teleporting to increasing your inventory size, from adjusting the game speed to enabling instant crafting of items, our Factorio console commands guide will show you exactly how to use all the most useful and powerful cheats in the game.
]]>Factorio mods have been around almost as long as the game itself - and for good reason. While already an enormous and startlingly polished game, introducing the right mods into the fold will not only expand the game with tonnes of new features to discover and master, but also simultaneously improve the base game experience with dozens of quality of life improvements.
Keep reading for our list of the very best Factorio mods for 1.0 out there, along with instructions on how to get started downloading mods of all shapes and sizes to augment your game.
]]>"The factory must grow." It's a mantra that all Factorio players know - or at least they should. But it's one thing knowing it, and quite another to put it into action. The truth is that it can be tricky for new players to know just how to grow their factory from nothing into an energy-guzzling, environment-poisoning behemoth of efficiency and automation.
Our Factorio guide for 1.0 hopes to solve this problem for new players, as we delve into our top 15 Factorio tips covering everything from quality of life improvements to building strategies, and much more.
]]>After seven years in early access, factory-building management sim Factorio is finally finished enough to launch properly. Update 1.0 arrived today and developers Wube Software have removed that "early access" label, though they're not done with patches yet. Factorio was already great in early access, plopping players on an alien planet to slowly build a vast network of mines, conveyor belts, processors, assemblers, defences, trains, cranes, pylons, and drones, until we've gone from chopping trees down manually to launching a rocket into space. Now it's bigger, prettier, and more polished. It has an updated free demo too.
]]>There it is, the trans-planetary pipeline. One long tube of metal scarring a rural alien planet. It brings coal and water to my power stations, and electricity to my factories. It has taken a day of planning, construction and pumping. Now, the pipeline stands before me, a snaking behemoth of energy consumption. Suddenly, a thought comes. Why didn't I just build coal stations next to the vein? I could have stretched a cheap wire across the planet, instead of a kilometre-long death pipe.
This is Satisfactory, a cracking first-person factory-builder that's been in early access on Epic for a while. It's coming to Steam today, so RPS management dispatched me to inspect the game's machinery and ruin the extraterrestrial idyll with smog and incompetence. They sent the right person.
]]>If anything was going to throw a wrench into Factorio's meticulously manufactured mechanisms, you'd never think it was a punk'd up cyborg in a leather jacket. Yet, even as they powered full-steam towards release, the folks at Wube Software have decided Cyberpunk 2077's launch-day noise risks drowning out their contraptions. This week, the developers announced plans to bring Factorio out of early access five weeks early, releasing instead on Friday, August 14th.
]]>Last year, second-hand games marketplace G2A made a bet: If any developers or publishers could prove that stolen keys were being sold on G2A, the storefront would pay back the money lost on chargebacks tenfold. Only one studio offered to take them up on the offer, Factorio developers Wube Software. Turns out, Wube were right to suspect stolen sales - and now G2A's gamble has cost the storefront $39,600 (roughly £32,360).
]]>There have been a great many games like Minecraft over the past decade. Which is to be expected, because who wouldn't want to capitalise on the runaway mainstream success of the geometric giant, one of the best-selling video games of all time? Minecraft has many interesting facets about it beyond the block bashing mechanics, so we've compiled our list of the best games like it out there right now so you can scratch that familiar mining and crafting itch.
]]>It's been an eventful decade for PC games, and it would be hard for you to summarise everything that's happened in the medium across the past ten years. Hard for you, but a day's work for us. Below you'll find our picks for the 50 greatest games released on PC across the past decade.
]]>The nicest thing I can say about Terminator: Resistance is that if a Terminator were sent back in time to wipe out its code, the timeline of gaming in general would almost certainly proceed unchanged. Confused by the apparent failure, Skynet would keep on sending Arnies back to delete it, unaware that the job was already done, and that its agents were just piling up awkwardly in the offices of developer Teyon. The killer AI would squander all its resources on needlessly ferrying metal strongmen into the past, spiral into logistical collapse, and leave humanity to be declared the winners by default. Hooray - Terminator: Resistance saved us all.
That's about it, however. Although I started out with a mind to write a Wot I Think about it, the truth is there’s barely any Wot to Think about in Resistance. Everything it does has existed in games since the advent of the mouse, and its particular format was perfected 15 years ago with Half-Life 2. They're remarkably similar in a lot of ways, but where Half-Life 2 offers everything with pace and precision, Terminator: Resistance is about as lively as that eye-ball Arnie scrapes out of his head in the first movie. As such, this isn't so much Wot I Think, but Wot Might Have Been: a glimpse into the alternate timelines where Terminator: Resistance was something fresh and fascinating.
]]>Factorio is one of those games that are brilliant but have never seemed to make it out of early access. Well now there's an end in sight for the Factorio at least because the devolpers say, and I agree with this, "if we just pushed the button to release 1.0, it wouldn't be a catastrophe." After exactly four and a half years Factorio will officially launch on September 25th, 2020. I know that date isn't even remotely close, but Wube Software have put it out there more so players don't allow them to procrastinate and continue to polish the way wires work and aliens attack forever.
]]>Despite being in development for a fifth of my lifetime, Factorio has somehow only reached version 0.17. Crikey, software development terms, eh? Whenever I've developed a game, I just make 'em up. Still, I wager the folk behind the mechanical monstrosity that is Factorio have everything scheduled out nicely, laid out on complex spreadsheets which work themselves out without human input. But still, their assembly line continues to self-construct. Nerds.
This week's latest stable release brings in new content for construction nerds old and new with a new tutorial and world-construction tools.
]]>The summer of 1991 was all about ants. I was seven years old, and I spent the entire school holiday camped in the garden, gently catching winged queens and housing them in shitty coke bottle formicariums. There I would watch them lay eggs and create workers, who would dig tunnels, search about the place, and scurry in lines with grains of food in their jaws. I was captivated by my bottled nests, by their self-organising complexity, and although I had no idea at the time, I think that those ants might have been my first defining games experience.
]]>This is the shipping forecast; the synopsis at 5pm. Solid Snake just west of cloak room, expected to move towards Sam Fisher on dance floor before midnight. Wrecking Ball from Overwatch, mild at 1am, becoming rabid with lust at 3am. Agent 47 from Hitman: confused, occasional peeping, becoming horny later. Red Prince: cyclonic, mainly drinking alone, peering at Steve from Minecraft with questionable motives, occasionally licking lips.
(Yes. We did a podcast about romantically matchmaking game characters.)
]]>Satisfactory, the Factorio-style automated building game from Coffee Stain, is going to be huge. It's going to be huge because there are going to be so many videos of huge things built within it, and we're all going to look at those and think "now I want to make something huge."
The overriding question here was always whether or not Satisfactory could successfully transpose the spaghetti junction of autonomous conveyor belts and heavy machinery traditionally beheld from a top-down, third-person perspective into shiny first-person 3D. How can one possibly manage these thumping, churning cat's cradles when even a small fraction of one fills the screen entirely?
]]>Coffee Stain Studios are probably tired of everyone saying that their Goat Simulator and Sanctum follow-up Satisfactory looks like a first-person Factorio, but I'd say that's a comparison to embrace. A very good thing given a new perspective, plus dune buggies and jetpacks? Yeah, g'wan.
It's been a bit quiet on the Satisfactory front for a while now, other than news that the factory-builder would be an Epic Games Store exclusive, but hot off the production line is this shiny new newsmobile - an early access version of Satisfactory is due later this month.
There's also a extremely fancy new trailer, which features erotic stroking of gleaming conveyor belts. They know their audience.
]]>We've just passed the half-way point of 2018, so Ian Gatekeeper and all his fabulously wealthy chums over at Valve have revealed which hundred games have sold best on Steam over the past six months. It's a list dominated by pre-2018 names, to be frank, a great many of which you'll be expected, but there are a few surprises in there.
2018 releases Jurassic World Evolution, Far Cry 5 Kingdom Come: Deliverance and Warhammer: Vermintide II are wearing some spectacular money-hats, for example, while the relatively lesser-known likes of Raft, Eco and Deep Rock Galactic have made themselves heard above the din of triple-A marketing budgets.
]]>We'll build machines to build machines to build machines to build a mysterious massive machine in Satisfactory, the next game from Sanctum and Goat Simulator developers Coffee Stain Studios. If that sounds a lot like Wube Software's fantastic Factorio, you'll probably think it looks a lot like it too after watching the new trailer. "It's x but y" is always a crude way to describe a game but... Satisfactory sure does resemble Factorio but first-person. Which, really, I am up for.
]]>The horrifically compelling sci-fi construction sandbox Factorio received another major update over the holidays, bringing much-needed performance improvements to the game along with adding a whole new subset of heavyweight military technologies. This update also marks the start of the final stretch of development, with Wube Software announcing that the price of the game will be increasing to $30 later this month.
]]>We've already seen which games sold best on Steam last year, but a perhaps more meaningful insight into movin' and a-shakin' in PC-land is the games that people feel warmest and snuggliest about. To that end, Valve have announced the winners of the 2017 Steam Awards, a fully community-voted affair which names the most-loved games across categories including best post-launch support, most player agency, exceeding pre-release expectations and most head-messing-with. Vintage cartoon-themed reflex-tester Cuphead leads the charge with two gongs, but ol' Plunkbat and The Witcher series also do rather well - as do a host of other games from 2017's great and good.
Full winners and runners-up below, with links to our previous coverage of each game if you're so-minded. Plus: I reveal which game I'd have gone for in each category.
]]>Another year over, a new one just begun, which means, impossibly, even more games. But what about last year? Which were the games that most people were buying and, more importantly, playing? As is now something of a tradition, Valve have let slip a big ol' breakdown of the most successful titles released on Steam over the past twelve months.
Below is the full, hundred-strong roster, complete with links to our coverage if you want to find out more about any of the games, or simply to marvel at how much seemed to happen in the space of 52 short weeks.
]]>I've had a go at Factorio [official site], and even managed to automate resource mining and production. I thought I had a good grip on the game until I saw what DaveMcW was able to create. Using just the components available in the base game, he managed to build what is essentially a video stream decoder and display program.
]]>"These charts are supposed to be weekly, Meer." "I know, but I keep having to go away for unhappy reasons." "Oh OK, but you'd damn well better tell me what were the top ten best-stelling Steam games last week, or I'm going to spraypaint pictures of bottoms onto your house." "Alright, alright, here you go."
]]>I wasn't around to cover the previous week's Steam Top 10 as per usual, so you'll have to wildly imagine the shape of it yourself. I can take an educated guess if you like: I'm pretty sure Soldner was a shock number one, with Limbo of the Lost and Aliens: Colonial Marines hot on its heels. Strange that they're completely gone from the latest chart, below, but that's the fickle nature of the millennial digital consumer for you, innit?
]]>RPS has sealed itself inside a chocolate egg for the duration of the UK's long holiday weekend, to emerge only when the reign of Mr Hops The Doom Rabbit has run its dread course. While we slumber, enjoy these fine words previously published as part of our Supporter program.
I've long inclined more towards anxiousness than ambition, and I'm becoming more so as tired bones increasingly seek to stay in known and safe places. I'm not just talking about throwing myself down mountains or entering rooms full of young people hepped up on goofballs - I'm similarly hesitant about unknown-quantity games too. Professionally, I am duty-bound to fight the instinct to shy away from something that I can't immediately equate to something else at first glance, and thank God - because most of the best gaming experiences I've had recently are those which forced me out of my comfort zone.
]]>Fans Of Things Not Staying Exactly The Same All The Time will be glad to hear that the latest weekly Steam top ten is quite a changed one from the previous week. A new number one, surprise re-entries and a loosening of Ubisoft's chokehold on the charts.
]]>Yup, I'm trying to make this a regular thing again. I know you're very excited about that. Bit late this week as I wasn't around for the first two days of it, but there is still MUCH TO LEARN from the top-ten best-sellers on Steam last week.
It's a strong mix of independent and mega-gazillion blockbuster; though the overall shape of the chart isn't hugely surprising, the number one winnah perhaps is.
]]>Show's over, building games. It's time to go home.
]]>A run-down of the previous week's top-selling Steam titles is something I used to do regularly, but a combination of it tending to be fairly unchanging week-to-week and being a feckless human being who can't stand to do the same thing for long meant I fell out the habit. These are changed times, though: with indiepocalypses here and flash sales there, the Steam charts are now wildly changeable, so I like to look in from time to time, like an old aunt raising a withered eyebrow at reports of what her nephews are up to at university. This week: a whole lot of Ubisoft, not a lot of XCOM and an unofficial Hunger Games (or an unofficial Running Man, if you prefer the awful classics).
]]>Hypothetically speaking, if you were to crash land on a remote foreign planet, how do you reckon you'd survive? Would you forage for food, build shelter and eventually draw a face on a discarded volleyball? Or would you mine resources, create machines and build your own multi-functioning warehouses, championing your own pseudo industrial revolution? Factorio [official site] is a game about designing and building factories that suggests you try the latter. After years selling alpha access directly themselves, developers Wube Software have now launched Factorio onto Steam Early Access.
]]>Each Monday, Chris Livingston visits an early access game and reports back with stories about whatever he finds inside. This week, building efficient machines to make other efficient machines in strategy game Factorio.
I've got coal-powered drills digging up resources, mechanical arms collecting the raw materials, and conveyor belts transporting it across the landscape where more arms collect it and deposit it into fabrication machines, after which the resulting product is plucked out by still more arms, dropped on more belts, moved on to more factories. Clouds of pollution fill the air, production lines twist and turn haphazardly, electrical poles and storage units appear to have been placed by a confused and drunken city planner. It's a mess. A big mess. But it's a beautiful mess, because it all works.
]]>I used to play Command & Conquer almost exclusively for the base-building; I'd turtle-up, build walls around my home, and get frustrated when enemies would bother me by attacking. If you share my addiction to anal-retentive building placement and efficient production lines, you need to watch the trailer for Factorio immediately. Not only does it evoke the grit of mid-'90s sprite graphics, it's a game entirely about conveyor belts and machine arms. There's even a demo! Cor.
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