The achievements in the game are a lot of fun to go after - they're mostly the right amount of painful/challenging and interesting to make you actually want to try for them.

That being said, I've put more than a few thousand hours into the game over the past few years and I think the base game finally got stale enough for me to move on to something else right as they're reaching 1.0, but that's okay. (The big problem for me is that I've been sinking a lot of time into mods like Seablock and after nearly 100 hours into this run I can't see starting over from scratch again just to be on 1.0. I'm not even sure I want to finish this run either knowing I'm unlikely to see bug fixes in the Seablock mod packs, and they definitely could use some work.)

I think the "Lazy Bastard" achievement is probably the worst in the beginning, it's quite an interesting one, though, since you later notice how much easier your life has become because you had to automate every little thing properly in the beginning.

I can't lie - this was one of the harder ones for me to figure out. I eventually found the speed running community to be quite good at this, as rain9441 would stream his 100% runs (that is, getting all of the achievements in one go), and it gave me a good hint on how exactly LB was supposed to work - I kept on screwing up saving the necessary crafts for oil refineries, since the way the game was setup before you literally couldn't build oil refineries in the machines you had, so you had to save a certain amount of crafts for them.

But yeah, it's just a good balance of "wow how the !#( does this work" to "ohhh I'm so glad it works this way."

Did you find anything good to move on to?

Honestly no. I really want to like Civ 6 but it's such a departure from earlier installments that I can't see myself pouring much more time into it. It's a fundamental design change where you're almost forced to play the same in a certain way that I just really don't like, combined with lots of nitpicky problems that earlier installments just didn't have due to being better balanced and better designed. (I think my comment on Twitter still stands - it feels like 2K really Sims 4'd this game right up.)

Played Satisfactory and couldn't get into it - it's just worse Factorio, capitalizing on the popularity of that game with good 3D assets but trading it for terrible planning, crafting and perspective.

I've considered using some of my funemployment time to write one of these kinds of games as I think I have a unique angle that hasn't been explored to death as of recently, but haven't committed to it.

I assume you will not be happy if we tell you that there are mods that drastically increase the granularity of production processes and will make you easily work 200h on a single map before ever launching a rocket..?

I think my loss of interest was more about discovering the entire tech tree, I don't think making things harder will be enough to draw me back. I know there are mods that add technologies, though, maybe those are worth trying.

Well, it sounds like you got plenty of value from the game so maybe moving on isn’t the worst thing. I love Factorio, but there’s so much out there demanding my time maybe it’s best that I also lost interest eventually.

Given the tech tree is infinite, that's impressive.

It's 'infinite' on a technicality. Having your last few technologies on repeat all so your investment in tech-making infrastructure doesn't completely go to waste just barely qualifies, nothing more.

It feels like the only reason they even left it in the game was that it became a bit of a measurement of how well your design scales past the end game - I cannot tell you how many otherwise meaningless 'X000 science per minute' base videos there are on YouTube, but the number is not insignificant. Most of the time it's just 'bot speed++' over and over again, since that's how many of those bases work without running into extreme update per minute (UPM) problems.

Infinite how? Seemed pretty finite to me.

There are some numerical upgrades which can be repeated indefinitely at increasing costs -- robot speed, mining productivity, damage for various weapon types, etc.

Pure angels alone is quite amazing. Especially if you enable the overhauls too. (Industries and technology)

I was the same, as soon as I launched a rocket I was done.

3 years later I played a multiplayer once a week with my buddies during COVID lockdown, as soon as we launched again I got bored. They are going again with more friends and I just join the discord for the chat, I don’t open the game up.

I don’t like solve the same fundamental problem over and over again so, I launched the rocket, done.

I think it is good design for a game to give a sense of closure to the player. You have reached the major goal of the game. Now you can move on to other things and it feels good.

I still boot the game from time to time when I want a low energy activity. I go through the moves. Bootstrap base, then smelting arrays, etc. I try to innovate on some designs a bit (mainly to make things more modular/scalable and avoid having one big resource bus). I find it relaxing.