The RPS Advent Calendar 2024, December 1st

Open the first door and get ready to work

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.

Behind door number one is Factorio: Space Age!

Ollie: As I’m sure is often the case, Factorio was the game that got me into factory-building games. My first three or four playthroughs were faltering, agonisingly slow attempts to learn the language of conveyor belts, inserters, fluid dynamics, and biter defence. It took me about 400 hours before I got to the playthrough that I actually took to the end of the game. And since then, it’s all clicked. I understand what I need to do and when to do it.

And then Factorio: Space Age came along and turned everything on its head. In a conscious reversal of my previous experience, the first hundred or so hours went incredibly smoothly as I built up my factory in all the familiar ways. And then the moment I launched my first rocket, everything ground to a halt. Out there beyond the atmosphere, different rules apply. I thought I knew the language of Factorio, but it turns out I just knew the one basic dialect. With each new frontier, each new planet, I was forced to abandon much of what I knew and start fresh. And that made visiting each planet for the first time some of the most exciting gaming moments I’ve had for years.

Take the lava planet of Vulcanus, for instance. Here, there are no iron or copper deposits in the ground. You have to manually hit rocks to get tiny amounts of the basic ores, and slowly grow up to the stage where you can begin to pipe lava directly into Foundries to produce iron and copper by the beltload. Instead of water, you have sulfuric acid geysers which you can combine with calcite to create steam for electrical power. And you have to keep your builds compact, because you’re in a tiny safe space surrounded by the territories of gigantic, nigh-invulnerable worms called Demolishers which will kill you with a single touch.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Wube Software

Not strange enough? How about the spongy landscape of Gleba, where everything spoils into unusable gunk in a matter of minutes? Rather than starting with iron and copper, you need to harvest fruits, and combine them in organic machines that take no electricity but instead run on nutrients, like an organism. And if anything gets backed up, your entire production line will spoil into nothingness, which brings with it some of the most brain-bending new logistic challenges I’ve encountered in any factory game.

Or perhaps you’re after the oil-filled oceans of Fulgora, where lightning storms pummel the surface at regular intervals, and ancient ruins litter the landscape. In an ingenious reversal of regular Factorio rules, you have to start from the top of the tech tree and work your way down on Fulgora, breaking apart the high-tech ruins and salvaging processor chips and modular frames, then breaking them down further so you can get the basic building blocks of iron and copper. And all the while you need to build lightning rods to protect yourself from the storms, which can also supply your factory with potentially limitless energy if you can harness enough lightning.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Wube Software

Factorio: Space Age is gobsmacking in its scope and inventiveness. Playing it feels like playing several different factory games at once, all cleverly linked together, and each of which would separately be among the most interesting and satisfying games in the genre. It may be overwhelming at times, particularly on a first playthrough, but there’s also a level of focus on the player’s quality of life that is unmatched in any other game I’ve ever played. A thousand hours later, I’m still discovering wonderful little quality of life tricks that I can’t believe I spent so long playing without. I’m finding new ways to build, new ways to expand, new methods of slaughtering the indigenous lifeforms of the planets I must exploit.

It’s been a phenomenal year for factory games, perhaps the best ever. Satisfactory reached its full release, Shapez 2 was released, and Factorio: Space Age made it very clear that this game is still the king of the genre. I’d say you should set aside some time next year to give it a go, but really you might want to set aside the entire year.

Head back to the advent calendar to open another door!