hckrnws

I played this! The quadcopter with the straw hat got me. Funny and great fun. At the end I was still full of ideas for optimizing my code and the dev was making breaking changes that would require a full rewrite (a good time guaranteed) but I was more compelled to go back to Factorio due to the Space Age expansion. The rest of this comment would be about Factorio but writing on HN does not help the factory to grow.

As someone with hours of time in Factorio pre-space age update, I've really struggled to get back into the game. I really want to build out a mega base with the new train logic, but every time I try to get into it it just feels like work. Space age seems like it had a pretty lukewarm reception, and some of the tech tree changes seem like artificial padding (cliff explosives).

That was my first impression when I picked it up -- the game strongly suggests you start from the start, and re-loading a pre-Space Age save will result in many things breaking. I gave in and started over, worried I'd need to spend dozens of hours just building up to where I was before.

But this wasn't the case — Space Age isn't only new content, but a complete re-balance of the original game. It is far far less grindy and requires much less baby-sitting of production.

Your first space platform, the ships, and the planets, are best thought of as unique Factorio-inspired puzzles. Each planet is like a Factorio game-mode to solve, with its own restrictions to design around.

I think those who have hundreds of hours in the base-game have to un-learn of the base game to pick up the DLC. Many of the complaints are pointed at the tech tree changes — they wanted an expansion on what was there, not a recreation. But for me now, I wouldn't recommend Factorio without Space Age.

I'll be honest, I don't think Space Age was all that good as an expansion. The developers really focused on giving the player new types of logistics challenges to solve, but that was never what I wanted. I wanted the same Factorio gameplay, but with more stuff to build. So out of the four new planets, the only one I actually enjoyed building on was Vulcanus (because it plays pretty much like vanilla Factorio but with new recipes). The lead dev is also well known for disliking logistics bots and wishes they had never been added to the game. And the expansion shows that, with (again) three of the four planets having mechanics to make use of bots more difficult if not outright impossible (Aquilo).

All in all, the developers have a very different vision of what makes the game fun than I do, and that meant the expansion wasn't much fun for me. If I play the game more in the future, I'll probably do so with the expansion disabled.

Luckily, there are lots of mods which make the base game more. I really enjoyed my bobs + angels run. I'm sure it would be even more fun if you opted into quality on top to really go mad.

Yeah, the cliff explosives being gated behind vulcanus sucks a bit but they made the cliffs a lot more bearable in 2.0 I think for a megabase run its a matter of how fast you can reach legendary and process everything in it and once you got that you can go really into megabasing this game. Sadly they nerfed trains so hard by introducing Quality since everything got better but trains stayed the same which is a shame

Trains still got buffed by overhead rails. Those enable very compact designs, allow for easier hookups and reduce the usual intersection/signals pain by a lot.

I agree that no quality or endgame upgrades for trains is an odd choice, but I guess that's what the mods are for.

For me factorio is a one playthrough kinda thing. I don’t get off on endless optimization and making it bigger for the sake of bigger, feels like work.

That said, I was more than happy to build the base back from scratch in space age, and I find the expansion to be every bit as fun as the base game. So I endorse it. Especially as you already know how to do some things quicker.

To make a programming game true to life, it could have a prestige mechanic where you keep all your code/scripts, but the api introduces breaking changes and you have to rewrite.

“Good job! Halfway through the workday on Thursday, some big brain engineer in a distant department has decided to change the order of for loop clauses in the interpreter, so now it’s “for variable declarations; variable modifications; conditional checks {}”. They adamantly refuse to revert the change because “it makes more sense to group variable stuff together”. Prod is down now. Have fun!

Documentation should often be wrong.

There should be five options for each piece of tooling, none of which quite work the same way, all of which have a fan-base singing their praises, and three of which have critical problems you probably won't find out about until you try them. Then the one you pick gets abandoned when you're part way done. (this feature only for the Javascript and Python DLC)

Example farms should use old versions of libraries that are no longer maintained.

Interfacing with other farms should require manually faking a downgrade of some protocol you're using, because the older one is no longer available for you and they can't/won't upgrade.

You should be forced to design certain parts of the system in ways that are harder to use and constantly break when changing other parts, just so the appearance of those parts is "on brand". This should require re-writing functionality that would otherwise be supplied "for free" by a library.

When you're finally getting things how you want them, your farm should get cancelled and the whole thing abruptly burned to the ground because your parent company just decided to buy a different, existing farm instead.

It’s like you’re an omniscient narrator for my career.

> the dev was making breaking changes that would require a full rewrite

This is funny because I already get the feeling a lot with management sim / automation type games that I'm pretty close to doing the kind of thing I'd do at work, except only the fun parts and without getting paid. Often that's the reason I quit playing these types of games after a while - having to deal with migrating legacy code after breaking API changes would bring this feeling to a new level I bet.

That's why I don't tend to play these games. I was about 5 hours into trs1000 when I was like man I could just learn GPU or fpga with a real editor instead but that would be useful. And stopped playing. With factorio I could be laying out circuit boards. So I did that instead.

I had spent ages optimizing my maze solver ( https://github.com/VrIgHtEr/TheFarmerSolvedAMaze ). Meticulously going over which operations take how many ticks. But then the dev made a bunch of breaking changes and couldn't be bothered to rewrite everything.

Run an agent on it. This is what they excel at.

Why the fuck would I want an AI to play my games for me?????

I played this: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLesViK53beXfFohR1I08S...

Skip the first video. The early game is painful if you already know how to program (they gate things like variables, loops, and functions behind unlocks). And tbh I didn’t know how to make a video or use a microphone when I made that video. I just sat down one evening and played it - I had no idea it would resonate with people the way it did.

It’s a great game, and I imagine a very good way to learn programming in a goal oriented way. But I concur that there’s not a great deal of content if you already know how to program.

Fun to see you here - I discovered this game through your videos! I think despite the lack of raw "content", I got a LOT of playtime out of this game by trying to push higher on the leaderboards.

Awesome!

I've considered trying to do some hyper optimisation, taking into account the number of cycles each instruction takes - it seems that a lot of people are interested in that.

That's not my natural style though. I've had plenty of criticism for not being performance sensitive, but that's not really how I unwind (although I do plenty of optimisation at work!).

It could be fun to explore ingame though.

I am playing this right now! A very nice, addictive game. The programming language is a kind of subset of Python.

The in-game editor is still a bit clunky, but one can edit the source code in an external editor like VS Code. The game has an auto-reload option.

Caution! Just because one saves the code in the external editor doesn't mean the entire game state is saved! It cost me a few unlocked upgrades the first time I closed the game, not saving because I thought it automatically does so. One has to save the game state explicitly, before closing.

I already have the full game area and a max speed drone, but I'm only just about to implement planting cacti. So it'll be a while before I unlock multiple drones. But I have already implemented efficient algorithms for planting a giant Pumpkin, Sunflowers and Poly cultures.

What the game could have is that dictionaries retain their insertion order and a built-in array.sort. And it is sad that the nice music stops running as soon as one starts the game.

I bounced off this game.

It was fun and rewarding early on, as an idle game addict, but there's a massive complexity cliff.

You go from "just plant the newest crop on every square" to "Okay, now you need to manage farm-wide state in a way that the tools do not support, and develop powerful planning systems and priority systems to actually yield meaningful results and higher level crops" and I just don't understand why.

The reward for rewriting an entire working (nice and simple) system to a behemoth full of complex logic and systems engineering is.... another crop? At least until you get to spawn new drones which is locked off until you've already basically beaten the game for some reason?

Like it feels like there is massive missing transition and purpose to that complexity. In factorio, you deal with the insanity of petrochemicals because it gives you fun toys.

I found myself quite unable to engineer an entire system like that just to... improve my rate of resource growth. Somewhat.

Maybe don’t do everything at once. Try cycling through optimized whole-farm algorithms and clear() between them

I did not play this (yet!), but just by watching this video I see how it overlaps with the coding games on https://code.org/en-US (Hour of Code!) in terms of having a code + gaming view to solve a challenge.

When I was teaching coding to kids, code.org was the to-go place besides using Scratch, to introduce coding patterns (mostly: conditional, loops).

An example is the famous Minecraft labyrinth [1]. There is also a Frozen themed one. If you have kids (~6y+), that's some fun way to get started instead of diving directly into actual code.

[1] https://studio.code.org/courses/mc/units/1/lessons/1/levels/...

Solid 2-3 hours of entertainment; assuming you know python. It's also not as complicated as I expected.

Currently a sweet spot with Steam games if you price them correctly to the value they bring.

I'm working on a very simple incremental game that has exploded in popularity called, A Game About Feeding A Black Hole.

Did you pay DangerouslyFunny on Youtube to play that or does he just play every new steam demo with incremental features? It is his business basically.

Just looked it up: looks cool & added it to wishlist. Did you happen to play "Solar 2" years back?

Turtles are old-school, farming is the new cool. Is there a dating-option? Just asking as a Stardew Valley-friend..

OK, jokes aside. I've started playing this, when 1.0 was released some weeks ago, and this is quite good for what it is. It's doing many things the right way, like allowing coding with an external editor, having a proper coding-experience even with the built-in tools, and collectable hats.

Everyone should buy this and learn the basics. It's cheap enough for most people.

Is this Windows only?

No the game is also fully playable on linux via Proton (About other platforms I have no clue)

If you get it working. They don't seem to have an own website, the publisher links to Steam as the only place to purchase it, and Steam says it's only supported on Windows. Surely you can work around it with VMs, emulation, or other solutions, but sadly the creator declines to support that

Excellent news, I can play the game on my Steam Deck with the on-screen keyboard!

teaching optimization this way seems ideal

The game looks fun and pretty, but am I the only one to get triggered by the “replaced” naming?

All of these eager claims to replace humans feel violently antisocial. (And in many instances hypocritical if coming from people who defensively claim “it's just a tool”…)

>All of these eager claims to replace humans feel violently antisocial

Then I suggest you dig ditches with a spoon.

The problem isn't replacing human labor in itself. It's a few hording all the resources and leaving the rest to starve, aka the luddites and why they revolted.

If you had a way to live, then boutique farming, or whatever would be leisure if you chose to do that.

Farming isn't artistry, society benefits from its automation

Is it still bad if the farmer gets replaced?

I like the word farmer to be replaced.

It usually means EITHER land cultivator OR animal exploiter.

My choice of word maybe gives away that I'm not so okay with the latter category. While I think the first category is doing God's work on earth feeding the ever growing human population.

> My choice of word maybe gives away that I'm not so okay with the latter category.

I initially figured that use of the cultivator was also intended to be in the same vein, as seen by the no-till advocates. I was quite surprised that you later call it God's work. Mouldboard mafia representing.

What's so special about artists?

Farming is an ancient human practice. It would be a huge loss to society if we forgot how to do it with our hands, without automation.

>What's so special about artists?

People like doing it

If you automate away jobs people like, their labor gets re-routed to other things they don't like. Like not being able to sell illustrations and turning to being a cashier

I don't disagree with your central point, humans were creating art hundreds of thousands of years before they started farming at large scales. Creating art is a fairly fundamental aspect of our species.

> Is it still bad if the farmer gets replaced?

A farmer is an owner of a farm. To replace the farmer you would have to completely eliminate the entire concept of human ownership that we hold. Socialist or other community ownership structures around farms wouldn't do as that would not replace the farmer, it would make everyone a farmer.

> society benefits from its automation

Economies benefit from its automation. It's far less clear if societies benefit. Farm work is hard, but there is a sense of accomplishment when it is done, which is good for the psyche. The never ending "bullshit" jobs that most people seem to find themselves in nowadays has not lead to happiness.

> To replace the farmer you would have to completely eliminate the entire concept of human ownership that we hold.

Why?

> Economies benefit from its automation. It's far less clear if societies benefit. Farm work is hard, but there is a sense of accomplishment when it is done, which is good for the psyche. The never ending "bullshit" jobs that most people seem to find themselves in nowadays has not lead to happiness.

"Farming is good for the psyche" doesn't hold to the suicide rates.

Automate hard jobs where people kill themselves or destroy their bodies, future generations get jobs that are easier on the body and they get to live healthy longer. It's not rocket science!

Why aren't you a farmer?

> Why?

I already attempted to explained why. If there is a gap I overlooked or if something wasn't made clear, you're going to have to try and work with me with greater specificity.

> "Farming is good for the psyche" doesn't hold to the suicide rates.

Farmers are known to have high suicide rates, but being the owner doesn't imply doing the work. That is the role of the farmhand. I cannot find anything to suggest that suicide rates are high for farmhands.

> Why aren't you a farmer?

I don't understand your question. I am a farmer.

Ok I get the confusion

The framing of the debate is not using your terminology so this isn't useful

Being a farmer isn't owning a farm, it's doing the farming. Farmhands are farmers. This is the definition that most people have, and if we use your definition, the entire debate doesn't make sense. Remember we're talking about a game, and the game is called "replacing the farmer", in which you don't play a humanoid android handing out cash to a previous owner to buy a farm and then sitting on his ass paying out farmhands. The game is about automating the farming. There is no reference to ownership.

> Being a farmer isn't owning a farm

Not according to the government. To legally become a farmer you need farm receipts of a certain amount or more. Selling your labour to a farmer is not that. And not according to the dictionary either. There are multiple words surrounding this topic for good reason.

> Farmhands are farmers.

It is possible that a farmer also works on his farm, or another farmer's farm for that matter, but they would be a farmhand while in that capacity. People can be more than one thing, unsurprisingly. But not all farmers are also farmhands and not all farmhands are also farmers. Many farmers never lift a finger, so to speak. I personally work with farmers who don't even know what is growing in their fields.

> Remember we're talking about a game, and the game is called "replacing the farmer"

Actually, we were talking about some pedantic take on the word "replace", which transitioned into a pedantic take on the word "farmer". There is no discussion about a game going on in this thread. This indicates that you didn't bother to read the thread before replying. Why?

>> Being a farmer isn't owning a farm

> Not according to the government.

Why would we care what they think? Depending on the government we're talking about, that could be an ignominious distinction. One government that comes to mind most recently focused its efforts on creating fake memes and myspace pages of political opponents, to troll them, while the same government failed to provide basic services to its people (and continues to do so).

Instead of asking the government what words mean (Orwell wrote on this idea), we can just ask the people what the words mean. And the people say that 'farmer' includes folks doing the actual cultivation, even if they don't own a thing.

> Why would we care what they think?

Well, with the exception of Hong Kong, which isn't exactly a farming mecca, Singapore, and Eswatini, all other English speaking countries are democratic. Which means that the government and the people are the very same thing, so when the people have decided that's what farmer is, that's what farmer is to basically everyone (there are always outliers who like to go against the grain, of course).

> we can just ask the people what the words mean.

There's an old saying: "Actions speak louder than words". People will make up bullshit if you ask them. More revealing is to look at how people actually use the word "farmer" in practice. And it turns out that we do — and then record that use in a book known as the dictionary. Like I said in an earlier comment, it echoes the same.

> And the people say that 'farmer' includes folks doing the actual cultivation

Sure. There are also people who use the word "farmer" to refer to someone who creates web/social media content. But these are outlier uses. Obviously all words have been made up on the spot, and can be made up on the spot (again) any time you so wish. You've not stumbled upon any kind of revelation there. But in going that way you've made it clear that you're not paying attention to the discussion that is taking place.

> democratic. Which means that the government and the people are the very same thing

This is an unrealistic, idealistic assumption which evidence does not bear out. Examples: Ask people whether they think "farmer" includes non-owning cultivators; Look at majorities voting and losing due to things like the electoral college; Look at gerrymandering seeking to minimize government representation of the people.

If the government and the people are indeed the very same thing, then we can just ask the people, because according to you, the government agrees with the people anyways, or it is undemocratic.

> People will make up bullshit if you ask them.

In general, this goes double for governments. As for this example, it's impossible for the majority of people to "make up bullshit" for word meaning, because the meaning of a word is what most people say it is.

On the other hand, it's totally possible for a government to "make up bullshit" in that case.

> There are also people who use the word "farmer" to refer to someone who creates web/social media content.

There are also people (perhaps even governments!) who exclude non-owning cultivators from their personal definition of "farmer", but that is an outlier use, in some cases only applicable in niche contexts, like tax law. Most people do not use such a definition.

> you're not paying attention to the discussion that is taking place

Please don't attack other posters. That behavior is perhaps better suited for more well-known social media sites. You are smart and capable of making your point without attempting to detract from me as a person.

> Ask people what they think "farming" includes non-owning cultivators

"Farming" usually refers to all that surrounds the entire activity. That includes farmers, farmhands, supportive family, etc. But we've been talking about "farmer".

With that, I'll assume you accidentally mistyped "farmer". Let's take a look at a practical example. Soybean and cattle farmers have recently been all over the news with stories about their current low/high profitability. Do the masses watching the news understand these people as being the hired hands out in the field/in the barn collecting a fixed wage? Or do they understand these people as being the business owner with a product to sell?

> because the meaning of a word is what most people say it is.

Not quite. The meaning of the word is how the speaker (or author) has decided to use it.

But, yes, since we are currently talking about what most people consider the word to mean as a general rule, not a specific person using it in a particular way, "farmer" is deemed to be the business owner. We know this not only from anecdotal observation but also because there are people whose job it is to determine how people use words and that is what they have determined is most common.

The game chose to use the word differently, in a less traditional way, but the discussion has made it clear that we aren't talking about that specific instance. Going there would be nonsensical.

> Please don't attack other posters.

The computer screen you are looking at cannot attack you. Perhaps what you really mean is that your emotions are leaving you to feel unpleasant? These feelings stem from the mind's view of the world not matching the reality it is starting to understand. This confusion, for want of a better word, can feel like an attack of sorts. However, it does not stem from external force. It is an internal process. When this happens, it is time for personal introspection.

Google AI: Farmer

comes from the Middle English word ferme, meaning "rent" or "fixed payment," which in turn comes from the Anglo-French fermer ("to rent") and medieval Latin firma. These terms are ultimately rooted in the Latin word firmus, meaning "strong" or "firm". The modern agricultural meaning developed because land was often held under a fixed-payment lease, or "fee farm," and since most such land was agricultural, the terms became synonymous.

Feels to me that demos who disagree tend to make the politically-expedient substitute "peasant" without thinking too much about it

some French folks might also think of tax-collectors..

> Let's take a look at a practical example.

Yes, lets! No need to complicate this: Ask a sufficiently large sample of people whether they think a non-owner who cultivates land on a farm is a farmer, and you will find that most do. For more confirmation, consult a dictionary to see whether the term includes this person (hint: it does).

> "farmer" is deemed to be the business owner

Since we are currently talking about what most people consider the word to mean as a general rule, not a specific person using it in a particular way, "farmer" is deemed to be more expansive than that, including non-owners whose job is cultivation on a farm. We know this not only from anecdotal observation but also because there are people whose job it is to try to determine how people use words, and that is what they have determined is most common.

> The meaning of the word is how the speaker (or author) has decided to use it.

Not quite. The meaning of a word is what most people say it is. If a speaker uses an incomprehensible, made-up word, and the audience derives no meaning from the word, then there is no meaning in the word. The speaker has failed to convey the meaning in their head, into words.

> [extensive snide defense of your personal attacks on HN posters]

Your insistence that your attacks on other posters are okay because you typed them onto your screen is unfortunate. Please consult the HN guidelines on the matter, rather than your pre-existing opinions.

> The meaning of a word is what most people say it is.

Interesting. Most people say that "gift" is a present. A much smaller set of people — those who speak German — say it is poison. That could lead to some awkwardness (even death). Luckily that's not how it actually works. That idea is logically flawed in so many ways.

> including non-owners whose job is cultivation on a farm.

Okay. Why, then, do you believe people are so concerned about the soybean farmers collecting a fixed wage? It is not like low soybean prices means anything to them. They get paid either way. Why would there be consideration for a bailout be extended to them on top?

> The speaker has failed to convey their meaning in their head, into words.

A rambling speaker may lose sight of what they were trying to say as the growing combination of words start to pile on, but a single word is highly unlikely to lose the intent. If you intended "foo" to mean one thing when you said it, you are still likely to consider "foo" to mean the same thing when you revisit what you produced a few minutes later. So, no, this is not true in any meaningful sense. The meaning is encoded just fine.

Third-party consumers may misinterpret it, sure, but that's their problem. It wasn't produced for them anyway.

> Your insistence that your attacks on other posters are okay because you typed them onto your screen is unfortunate.

"Okay" is found nowhere in said comment. Rather, it explains that what you claim is impossible. A computer screen cannot attack you. It goes on to speculate on what you did experience and that remains the most likely explanation.

> Please consult the HN guidelines on the matter

I see nothing in there about summoning a computer screen to launch an attack, I'm afraid. It is very possible that we do not have a shared understanding of words here (we've already established that as being so elsewhere). Your usage holds force, of course. You are the producer in this case. But that does mean I am in the position of being the consumer misinterpreting it, possibly.

I agree with you here. It's kind of like programmers are not really programming anymore (well many aren't they're telling AI what to do). Our "program-hand" is the LLM.

Telling what an AI/LLM what to do is programming in the same sense that telling a C++ compiler/virtual machine what to do is programming. In both cases you're just describing in language what you want the machine to execute.

But you may have a point that programming hasn't been a thing since toggle switches were the only input into a computer.

> Actually, we were talking about some pedantic take on the word "replace", which transitioned into a pedantic take on the word "farmer". There is no discussion about a game going on in this thread. This indicates that you didn't bother to read the thread before replying. Why?

? No the entire thing is about the game and the word "replace" in the title.

Initially there was a short quip about the game "looking fun and pretty" to establish the segue into what we actually are talking about. Beyond that there is nothing about the game.

Did you, uh, misread "thread" as "threads"? There are certainly other threads entirely about the game, but not this one.

>am I the only one to get triggered by the “replaced” naming?

>All of these eager claims to replace humans feel violently antisocial

Yeah they should be using corporate euphemisms like "let go" or whatever!

The farmer is taking the next step in their career journey!

You're absolutely correct. A better name would be "The Farmer Was Augmented <emdash> By Your Friendly AI" <emoji "happy"> <emoji "friednship">

More like "the farmer was sent to live on the farm"

The Farmer Was Made Into Sausage By Automation

You are not alone. I don’t get why you are downvoted.