Hell, it's about time.

A lot has changed since I last tried (and subsequently purchased) Factorio: my career, my lifestyle, the state of the world in general, and - critically - my expectations of modern video games. So it's something of a relief that, six years later, Factorio 1.0 still satisfies the same industrial urges as the demo.

I will say that I'm a little disappointed at the lack of narrative complexity; Factorio's setup is more like a Civ "campaign" than a story-driven one. But hoping for anything more was a long shot.

In spite of how popular and bloated the Open World Survival Craft genre has become since 2014, Factorio's focus on logistical automation doesn't feel stale or samey. The game does have a tough balance to strike between big-picture objectives and detail work, due to how many intermediate layers are involved in some recipes -- but at least so far, it feels pretty good. I like standing back and marveling at my well-oiled machinery, and I also like diving into the conveyor belts to fix or optimize specific parts of my supply chain.

What I'm still getting the hang of is the integrate-or-refactor dichotomy. Unlike Zachtronics and other programming-puzzle games, Factorio doesn't just accept your solution and move on; you'll need to continue smelting plates, or assembling widgets, as dependencies of later manufacturing. And while it's tempting to plug output X directly in as an input to Y, this becomes a liability when you discover that you also need X as an input to Z. Sometimes the assembly line for X just needs to be painstakingly re-architected.

I definitely need some more practice to develop good planning instincts, for creating infrastructure that's modular and flexible from the start. ... kind of funny how Factorio's learning curve resembles professional software development in that way.

Progress: Finished the tutorial (after nine hours!).