Automation Games and the Need to Build

Confessions of a not especially skilled Factorio dropout.

July 17, 2025

A former boss of mine was a big fan of Minecraft and Factorio. In a company Minecraft session, I watched him use various game mechanics to set up a quick auto-smelting system that would allow all of the players to quickly smelt items by placing them in a single chest. He spent the entire online session simply building machines out of the game’s distinct blocks, each to serve a practical purpose. It’s an approach to a building game that is characteristic of someone with an engineering mentality. He also played a lot of Factorio, a game where you are stranded on an alien world and must build a megafactory to automate the creation of ever more complex machines in the hopes of eventually constucting a rocket to escape your predicament.

I discovered Minecraft in high school and played many hours of it there, but was spared of the temptation to engage in automation mechanics as they had yet to exist—the first version of Minecraft I played was 1.0.15 Alpha, a version which predates the addition of fences into that game.

Many students I met while doing my undergrad played Factorio, and it was from their recommendation that I checked it out. Factorio would easily consume many hours of my free time whenever I would play it. This was rarely to the detriment of obligations. For me—though not for my former colleague—the game never created an addictive effect. Even at times when I struggled to progress forward with the game, my lengthy play sessions would often leave me feeling quite satisfied.

That feeling of satisfaction is what I want to talk about.

Factorio is a game about creating factories to automate the extraction of raw minerals, the refinement of materials, the fabrication of components, and the assembly of machines which are necessary to build more of the factory, attain higher levels of technology, and eventually reach the manufacturing capacity needed to build an entire space program. At times, you may find that a part of the factory is bottlenecked—unable to to keep up with the demand for materials needed by a later section of the assembly line. Mineral deposits may run dry, requiring the player to seek out other sources of raw materials. Problems will arise which require good engineering to reliably overcome.

Building an efficient factory in Factorio is an exercise in non-stop problem solving.

Building software is a lot like building a factory in Factorio.

Starting with a few libraries (raw materials), you build a codebase that uses said libraries to solve a real problem that you or your users might face. It’s a process of creating all the infrastructure to leverage basic functionality into something more advanced which you and others can easily use. While building an application, other secondary problems may arise—a bug in your dependencies, or a bug in your own code, an assumption that doesn’t pan out or an idea for a new feature that will improve the product—and you may need to build clever solutions to overcome those problems.

My former boss told me he lost a year of his life to Factorio. He would spend his whole day just building more of his factory, slowly increasing his ability to build. Another former colleague once built a compiler for Factorio where he could state the amount of a certain component he would need, and it would output a blueprint for an entire factory that would build the requested items every minute, which could be imported into the game effortlessly. This same colleague once bragged about having a factory that would build and deploy one space-bound rocket per minute. Many others I know have similar stories of this game—or other, similar games—thoroughly roping them in and commanding all of their passions.

My point here is that these games have a unique appeal to people who enjoy solving problems, those who have a need to solve problems, or those who are simply unable to not build things.

I come away from a session of Factorio feeling satisfied that I built something to automate a task to make it easier to build more things. Factorio is honestly quite satisfying to play, in the literal sense that it satisfies my deep need to engineer robust solutions. That’s a serious problem when the problems I solve are utterly meaningless and the things I build are totally superfluous. The net result is that my passions are wholly misdirected. I spend hours of my time tricking my brain into believing I’ve done something worthwhile when I could be building real software that is useful to real people while enjoying that process just as much if not more than I would playing the game.

On reflection, what I find peculiar about automation games compared to other games where you build things (like farming simulators or RPGs with construction components) is that these other games do no satisfy the same itch. I do not come away from a session of Harvest Moon or Tears of the Kingdom feeling like I’ve just engineered something important, even if both games have mechanics that are designed to create opportunities to engage in creative problem-solving. It might be a matter of complexity—Factorio has it in spades where those other examples do not.

As I write this, Steam currently has a sale on automation games. Many games providing ample opportunities to engineer rigorous solutions to complex problems are on offer at a discounted price. I recommend not getting any of them. If you want to build something, I say you should save that energy for where it really matters.