Episode: 4138
Title: HPR4138: Linux Gaming: Factorio
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4138/hpr4138.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 20:06:48

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This is hacker public radio episode 4138 for Wednesday the 12th of June 2024.
Today's show is entitled Linux Gaming Factorio.
It is hosted by Cedric DeVroey and is about 8 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
This summary is a weekly show on which I talk about a game that I'm playing.
Linux games only.
You are listening to a show from the Reserve Q. We are airing it now because we had free
slots that were not filled.
This is a community project that needs listeners to contribute shows in order to survive.
Please consider recording a show for hacker public radio.
So can and they from HBR released this memo on them mailing lists saying that they have
problems finding enough people to create new shows.
So yeah, that's why I'm creating this one.
I thought maybe it's a good idea to have like a weekly show where I talk about the games
that I like to play.
I left the world of windows and all its magic and frustration years ago which means that
since then I am 24-7 working on Linux because I really like it a lot.
It also means that I cannot play like the really shiny famous new games that come out
on Windows systems.
So I'm very much focused on games that are compatible with Linux or at least run very
well on wine on Linux which yeah you probably know wine is like a Windows emulator for Linux
and you can run like a bunch of games within that emulator like Age of Empire 2 runs great.
So it's not that when you are on Linux that you cannot play any Windows games you just
need to look very carefully at their compatibility with wine.
Anyways so the game that I am currently playing I only recently started playing it is Factorio
and Factorio is very much fun.
It's like if you I think they call these category of games they call them idle games I think
to give you the gist of it basically you land with like a spaceship you well actually you
don't land you crash with your spaceship on some Mars like planets and there is nothing
there there's only rocks and stones and there are minerals which you can start mining
and basically you need to you the invader you need to start building like a factory on that
planet to generate the resources for you to create weapons and the end goal of the game is that
you create a rocket with which you can then leave that planet on which you crashed.
It's very much fun the game so basically it's an automation game so you start by mining for
ore like coal and iron and then you need to set up like automation flows to make from these
two resources first you need to make iron plates and then you use these iron plates for example
to make guns and then you can also make bullets from those iron plates then if further along you
can you can start doing ironium processing and such and the amount of detail in the game is just
very awesome if you like if one of the fun aspects of Age of Empires gaming for you was to
advance very specifically into that science tree then factorial is definitely for you because
the science tree is just so extensive it's huge the the different ways you can improve in the game
by by researching new technologies and such it's really awesome and then yeah it's not only automation
and and and building stuff of course there's also a fighting a fighting component to this game
so when you are building these factories to build your stuff you start to generate pollution
of course like you're for melting iron you're you're burning coal so you're generating a lot of
pollution and this pollution actually attracts the natives the the the the aliens the natives
from that are living on this planet they don't like this pollution and they will start attacking
your base once they detect that you are the origin of this pollution so yeah you will need to build
defensive infrastructure to protect your factory from these aliens and yeah that's about the game
it's not it's not very complicated you it's basically a factory builder in combination with some
survival elements where you need to protect your your base from the alien invaders that's
factorial it's a very very nerdy game it takes quite some intelligence once you get beyond
let's get started level and you you really need to start thinking about efficiency and how you
build those factories it's such just to to make everything run smooth and there's there's tons of
videos on YouTube about people that totally go nuts on this efficiency patterns in the in that game
so yeah if you if you like that kind of stuff if you like idle gaming if you like automation
and such then definitely try out factorial it's very cheap I think I bought it for a less than
25 dollars on steam and yeah as I said I'm a Linux gamer so it's definitely compatible with Linux
and yeah it probably also runs on any other system that's out there um yeah I'm not like a very
avid online gamer so I can't share anything about the multiplayer capabilities from this thing
I did set up a server once um and play the game together in co-op with a friend of mine and it was
very fun but how the public game servers are and what the crowd is like I cannot tell you much
about that but hey maybe that's a reason to try it out yourself have fun see you next time
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