#and the part of the game you actually play being this monotonous deterministic connecting of prefabs

[definitelynotplanetfall]

what i mean by the last bit is: the main bus construction paradigm is a fully-general solution to all production problems. it can do literally anything, all you have to do is (figuratively) plug in the values and evaluate to find x. this doesn't involve decisionmaking or tradeoffs or insight.

i knew this from 2015-2018, when i knew about factorio but had not played it yet. this did not prevent me from enjoying the first few playthroughs. maybe people are more structure radical in how they define the term main bus than me and would say my bad 2018 base was a main bus because there were dedicated areas for each thing instead of a roughly homogeneous furnace assembler soup

the interesting thing, for me, is the spatial things. the green circuit trapezoid feels like it ought to be the introductory puzzle to an interesting problem space of Fitting Stuff Together and then it's just aggressively and conspicuously not a thing. beacons force boring identical rows, you have to build a memory eraser to prevent yourself from remembering logistic bots exist and solve all problems.

i think this is why i can't bring myself to turn the biters off - partly because i need an antagonist other than my own motivation to do anything at all other than metabolize glucose asymptotically approaching zero as the days pass, but mostly because they offer space constraints that enforce cramped and therefore puzzle-to-make solutions.

but still, even without beacons, the boring rows of one machine, not even rows of a complex cluster of machines, kind of just fall out of the mechanics without poking them much.

and yet i was able to make a stupid bad base in 2018 and now i have to look up other people's fucking solar blueprints (SOLAR ISN'T EVEN COMPLICATED) just to know which tradeoff the community has deemed not cringe to make (i'll save you the trouble: it's more substations than necessary) to prevent official-kircheis from teleporting into my room and calling me an idiot because i find it more thematically interesting to make objects and components than really specific alloys with realistic rather than gamefun ingredient ratios because you fucking buffoon it's all just items with names and icons they aren't literally different objects and then ripping my eyes out and replacing them with sensors that give a numerical readout of wavelengths because to a good person those are equivalent to being able to see and if I suffer because of this it is because I am a bad person

increasingly i wonder if my alleged annoyances with various factorio modpacks are actually disguised annoyances with the core gameplay, which i can't perceive as such because i have ever had a good time with the core game but have not had that good of a time with the mods, which i started after becoming invisibly tired of the basic mechanics.

i also wonder if something changed about me psychologically, too gradually to notice, that makes it impossible to get into the right headspace anymore