I cannot stress this enough if you’re remotely worried you’d get addicted you definitely should NOT play. I used to do opioids and I’m not exaggerating this game was more addictive for me. Like lose your job addictive. I’m adhd and on the ASD and absolutely obsessed with the concept of optimization. The thing is you’ll never really reach peak automation unless you do like this project, 400 people 10,000s of hours.

I’ll give you another reference point. I’ve also played wow, Arma Life, and Foxhole, all very common addicting games. I’d sit down to play one of those with a beer and after a ~3-5 hours and a few beers I’d take a break and notice time went by. Factorio I’d sit down at 6pm and never touch my beer, never move an inch from my seat and think a few hours went by when it’s now 8am and I only notice 14 hours went by because I see fucking sun light.

Fuck this video really makes me wanna play again haha.

some people use the logic gates in the game to create basic computers to automate expansion

It’s also just a game. No one needs it to be productive.

Edit, ok actually looked at Mindustry. It looks fun, but it’s also nothing like Factorio. Don’t know why you brought it up.

Besides, even if Factorio isn’t open source, it is available for Linux as a DMR free download. We should be supporting it.

Open source is more important for productivity software. Servers, Office Suites, Graphics and Game Engines. The game itself isn’t as important for opensource, as a game company changing the play mechanics wont effect someone’s income.