Factorio
Teaches what finding a bottleneck means better than any book.
- Studio
- Wube Software
- Year
- 2020
- Played
- 310 hours
- Platform
- PC
A game played through professional deformation. Every factory is a distributed system: a production line is a queue, an ore patch is a resource pool, the rail network is a message queue. When something backs up, what you do is exactly what you do in production — find the slowest step and ignore the rest.
What struck me most is that the game never tells you where it is slow. Material just piles up or runs out, and you have to work out why yourself. It is like watching production without an observability tool.
After 310 hours I still make the same mistake: I optimise early. The game punishes it every time.