In Factorio, from the Czech developer Wube Software, you have crash-landed on an alien planet and your task is to build a rocket so you can escape. This entails single-handedly restaging the Industrial Revolution, from breaking up rocks for crude stone furnaces to refining oil into rocket fuel. One recent Sunday, I had just installed a pump on a lake shore to feed water to my concrete plant, when it occurred to me that I hadn’t drunk any real-world water in several hours. My head was aching, but I didn’t want to get up from my computer. I wanted to solve the problem with a click of a mouse, the way I would in the game, running a few metres of pipe from the kitchen tap to my hunched form (and perhaps another few metres of pipe from my hunched form to the toilet).
I’ve been sucked into plenty of games before, but few have so completely disabled my conscious will, my sense of time, indeed any region of my brain that isn’t devoted to growing the factory. Yet, by Factorio standards, I’m a mere dabbler. Two friends of mine once played a 24-hour session together with only a three-hour nap break in the middle. It’s not uncommon for serious players to have logged several thousand hours in total.
The game, which has sold about four million copies over the past eight years, and released its first expansion pack last week, has been nicknamed Cracktorio for its addictiveness. What makes this all the more remarkable is that Factorio makes so little effort to seduce you. It’s a dour and fiddly experience, with graphics that look 20 years old, where taking a shortcut is always punished down the line and in which, if you want to excel, you will spend at least part of your time calculating ratios.
It’s precisely this unapologetic rigour that has made it a cult pastime in the tech world. Tobias Lütke, co-founder and CEO of the ecommerce platform Shopify, lets his staff expense their copies of Factorio. “It’s just bound to be good for Shopify if people play Factorio for a little while,” he told the Invest Like The Best podcast. “Because part of Shopify is building warehouses and fulfilling products for our customers. We are building global supply chains, and Factorio makes a game out of that kind of thinking.” Elon Musk once tweeted that he was “speedrunning Factorio in real life,” while Andrej Karpathy, a co-founder of OpenAI and former Musk employee as director of artificial intelligence at Tesla, is also an ardent fan. The two friends of mine I mentioned are both mathematicians who went on to work in tech, which seems to be archetypal for a Factorio player. Michal Kovařík, Factorio’s creator, told me that when players email him to report bugs, they often ask for access to the code so they can attempt to solve the problem themselves.
Factorio appeals to software developers because it parallels their jobs on two different levels. Building a factory is a bit like writing a computer program. Just as programmers talk about spaghetti code — code so disorganised and self-referential it’s impossible to unpick — Factorio players talk about spaghetti bases, networks of conveyor belts so loopy and tangled you lose track of where they begin and end. In both cases, the ultimate solution is refactoring, or ripping up all your old mistakes and starting fresh. But also, building a factory is like growing an organisation and shipping a product, so much so that many people regard Factorio as an invaluable teaching tool.