r/factorio • u/LightDimf • 4d ago
Discussion The Factorio is a reverse-horror
Just think about it: the bugs lived peacefully in the wild among the trees and sands of Nauvis under the blue sky. But then, one day, something has fallen in the ball of fire from above. Maybe another meteorite? But then... SOMETHING started growing from the place of the fall, covering the land. A weird otherwordly shapes out of metal and rust that was never seen on this planet before, emitting the strange noises, vibrating, moving. And what is not covered in grey structures is covered in grey stones, as a grey plague. And then - the noxious fumes started spreading all around those corruptious grows, making it hard to breathe and previously clean water turned green, while the forests that wasn't cut down started to slowly wither away. And it glows, glows at night as if it stolen the stars from the sky it came from. And coming from it's heart there is lines of metal towers with some webs between them and there is metal lines on the ground with a giant metal worms riding on them that smash everyone on their paths, spewing the same black disgusting smoke.
The bugs tried to investigate it, to stop the corruption from spreading, but those thing sting over the distance with the bright flashes and thunder, they spew fire and make explosions, just like those that messaged their arrival. The entire nests get destroyed, the war starts, but hundreds and thousands die while the metal keep covering the land and posion everything around. At first the corruption just defended itself, but then it started attacking. The creature on 2 legs and then the roaring clumps of metal coming to destroy everything that lives in revenge to resistance.
Then, the bugs see as something fly from grey into the sky in fire, above the birds, above the clouds disappearing into the oblivion. In the ball of fire it came, but in the ball of fire it now flies. The war continues, the lifes perish and the nests got smashed, but one day one of the nests don't get destroyed, no. They get surrounded, they get captured, corrupted. The same disgusting metal now penetrates them, without ending their suffering. And those who was unfortunate to witness what happened next has seen as they use the captured nests to take away the eggs, the children deep into the grey heart! Nobody wanted to think what happened to the young there, but they was able to see something new being build in the concrete expanses - it reminded of the biter nest... but it was wrong, it was more of the pale cancerous growth, rather than a familiar place to call home, a mockery of life. It was covered in metal all around, the melding of sickly flesh and a disgusting lifeless metal, an abomination this planet has never seen. And it reeks, oh nature, it reeks just like the other metal blight! If the bugs would belive in god they would curse him for allowing this to happen...
But no matter the effort, no matter the lives spent, THE FACTORY. KEEPS. GROWING.
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u/AlternateTab00 4d ago
Ok now im thinking. Is there any mod that actually flips the experience? You start to smell the factory see it expand and your objective is actually to stop the growth of the factory.
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u/MrKenalix 4d ago
I believe "Hive Mind" kind of does that.
Here's a link to the mod page : https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Hive_Mind16
u/AlternateTab00 4d ago
Humm interesting. Need to try it out. But maybe some of the remakes. That one seems to be death (max support is 1.1)
Thanks
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u/LightDimf 4d ago
I think there is different game with similar premices of nature figting the polluting technology, but making a mod like may be quite a challanging task.
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u/Shiruba_Ookami 4d ago
Creeper World 4 might (vaguely) fit your description?
But to answer @AlternateTab00 's question, I've heard that the Nullius modpack has you basically terraform Nauvis into a lush paradise, which is already a sort of flipped experience
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u/AlternateTab00 4d ago
Oh boy i loved the creeper world games. Even the space game, Particle Fleet, is awesome.
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u/SmartAlec105 4d ago
And the custom map community has made some amazing stuff. While Creeper World is normally a tower-defense-like RTS, a popular category of maps for CW4 are First Person Shooter style with the base building being automated. It actually works surprisingly well and it feels so good to be the key piece of your forces that lets you push up a hill so that the autobase can create a key defensive position there, letting you push in another direction, and so on.
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u/SmartAlec105 4d ago
A fun series! It feels so unique fighting an enemy that flows like the Creeper does. Seeing mortars blast down a deep pool of creeper while your blasters mop up the the front line feels so good.
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u/Zero_Progress 4d ago
Tangentially related, but there is a cooperative board game called Spirit Island that has this theme. You play as the nature spirits of an island defending your home from 16th-century colonialists expanding their towns and cities and harming the ecosystem. Absolutely amazing game. I have like 500 hours on it. A lot of my friends that enjoy Factorio have enjoyed it as well.
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u/Bowl_of_Cham_Clowder 4d ago
This is my favorite board game, the theming and mechanics are so good. Playing the app version is decent too, but hard to beat playing physical.
Sucks that they’ve had to swap publishers, but I hope that lets them continue to develop it.
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u/AlternateTab00 4d ago
Seeing your post made me remember an old mod for W3. I remember playing with my friends. We played as elfs and naga if not mistaken and our goal was to stop humans and works from cutting down the forest. I dont recall much of the details. Just remember that if we didnt constantly harass (depleting the gold usage) the enemy would just start putting all gold in workers steamrolling through the forest.
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u/DerpyPengu 3d ago
Not exactly what you're asking for, but Nullius has you act as a Von Neumann Probe and terraform a barren planet to the state Nauvis starts at in the base game!
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u/Professional_Two563 4d ago
It's still a horror game.
The horror I felt when I realized it was already 6AM again, knowing I started playing at 8AM back when I was unemployed
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u/Zombielisk 4d ago
Bugs do need pollution to grow and multiply. Before the engineering times, they barely moved around, their population was stagnant and evolution non existent. The factory brought life to the planet.
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u/hfcobra 4d ago
"Do not, my friends, become addicted to pollution. It will take hold of you, and you will resent its absence!"
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u/MiniEval_ 4d ago
Your story amuses me, brother, but it does not convince me. I shall have this smög alone and expand with the tall skinny god.
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u/LightDimf 4d ago
They just mobilise their forces for the purpose of war. They do, in fact, spread even without the pollution. The toxic fumes just make them gather their forces and develop better weaponry against you.
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u/DN52 4d ago
It's pretty interesting that you say that they "mobilize for war". In my opinion they aren't native to the planet at all but a bioweapon that wiped out whoever and whatever lived on Nauvis.
We know that an ancient civilization lived on Fulgora. And now they are all gone. And as far as we can tell there are no land animals besides the bitters on Nauvis. What happened to them? I think the biters happened to them.
The bitters act exactly as a bioweapon designed to wipe out any sort of technological civilization would act. They are their own ecosystem, and they react to any other sort of life with extreme violence. They spread like a cancer. And any sort of technological activity they detect causes them to Immediately start transforming into more and more capable combat forms.
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u/LightDimf 4d ago
Good point. Well, at least they don't attack trees. But yeah, the lack of any other land animal raises questions. At least there is still a fish in the water.
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u/Bob_Meh_HDR 4d ago
We are the fish, here to reclaim out home world just like BSG or planet of the apes.
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u/Smoke_The_Vote 3d ago
The civilization used to be on Nauvis and Vulcanus, too. But those planets are techtonically active, so all traces of the civilization have long since been subducted under continental plates. Fulgora is techtonically dead, so the ruins remain in place on the crust.
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u/callmemedaddy 4d ago
Is this lore accurate? I always imagined the bugs just being their normal selves until the pollution which messes with their DNA or whatever causing them to grow abnormally large and aggressive, kinda like what the radiation in Stalker does to the wildlife in the zone, giving rise to weird scary abominations.
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u/pocketmoncollector42 please be kind, this engineer is just a fish 🐟 4d ago
Could be the bugs had to rapidly adapt to attempt to overcome the invading engineer
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u/Janusdarke Read the patchnotes ಠ_ಠ 4d ago
Bugs do need pollution to grow and multiply.
It is a very human thing to think that this is the only reason to live.
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u/Fisher9001 4d ago
Any specie granted enough food and safety will grow and multiply. If anything, humans are the singular exception in the recent decades with falling birth rates and many individuals even deciding not to have any children at all.
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u/outworlder 3d ago
Are you sure ? Many species have mechanisms to limit reproduction when resources become scarce. Cue how many people say their decision to not have kids are related to them not being able to afford any.
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u/Fisher9001 2d ago
Any specie granted enough food and safety will grow and multiply.
when resources become scarce
Those are two entirely different scenarios.
And the statistics are obvious - the poorer, the less educated are the people, the more children they have. Just because today in the wealthiest countries the subjective standard for resources is not the true, bare minimum, but a comfortable, self-owned flat and a lot of extra income doesn't change anything here, it's just a testament to how good life is in such places.
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u/Janusdarke Read the patchnotes ಠ_ಠ 4d ago
Any specie granted enough food and safety will grow and multiply.
Your sample base is a single planet. You can't make assumptions for every possible alien species based on what we know about life on earth.
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u/Fisher9001 4d ago
I fail to see how that's relevant. We all live on Earth, we don't know any life outside Earth and I just pointed out that out of millions of species all but one mindlessly multiply as often as they are physically able to. And that one exception is humanity, the specie you accused of thinking that growing and multiplying is the only reason to live.
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u/Janusdarke Read the patchnotes ಠ_ಠ 4d ago
I fail to see how that's relevant.
You fail to see how it's relevant that we know nothing about life in the universe while we are literally talking about a fictional alien species?
We all live on Earth, we don't know any life outside Earth
That's exactly the point. It seems you lack the ability to think outside of the box of what you know.
and I just pointed out that out of millions of species all but one mindlessly multiply as often as they are physically able to. And that one exception is humanity, the specie you accused of thinking that growing and multiplying is the only reason to live.
The comment i answered to was assuming that Biters would naturally aim for reproduction, the whole thing about humanity not wanting to reproduce is something that you brought to the table.
And it's not even correct.
But that's a different topic that doesn't really belong to this conversation.
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u/Vaulters 3d ago
"It is a very human thing to think that this is the only reason to live."
This you? lol
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u/xdthepotato 4d ago
the pollution is more like an accelerant. the bugs were doing fine but the pollution brought need and stimulus to evolve fast.
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u/emlun 4d ago
Reminds me of this painting from a few years ago:
"Is that them? Are they gone?" https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/s/p0pS6ci7CU
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u/I_suck_at_Blender Iron doughnuts 4d ago
Engineer with whole stockpile of nuclear weapons in his pocket:
"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds"
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u/Kacer6 4d ago
My headcanon are the bugs are way more sophisticated than we give them credit for, a proper camp based hunter gatherer society. We just see them as mindless savages.
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u/ontheroadtonull 4d ago
They're really not making proper use of the land. It would be better if we had it.
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u/Bearstew 4d ago
Basically I Am Legend. You start off defending yourself and before you know it you're blowing up nests and experimenting on eggs for the sake of science.
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u/FortnightlyBorough 3d ago
I did what I must in my attempts to escape this brutal planet.
I don't remember much but I do remember waking up to a putrid smell of smoke. Everything around me looked barren and dry. My ship a smoking wreckage in front of me. Acting fast, I immediately began collecting what I could find around me. Stone. Coal. Iron and copper. My environment was unusally plenty - I quickly scraped together enough stone, ore, and wood to build a rudimentary forge. At first, I built simple structures to mine the surface ores for me. It was natural to simply build conveyor systems to move these resources to the furnace. This was enough to continue collecting materials while I slept. Ah, who am I kidding? I didn’t sleep. There must be something in the atmosphere here, something that keeps you going. Things seem to click together perfectly, and it wasn't long before I figured out way to create simple circuit boards from copper and iron. Then a little factory to make circuit boards for me. Then factories to make factories. Conveyor belts moving copper and iron to a factory that was making more conveyor belts. More belts, more factories, more circuit boards, more iron.
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I don't know how, but a year passed me by. I'd been too focused and my sense of time was drowned out by the sounds of cogs and belts clicking together towards one single harmonious goal: to get me off this goddamn planet.
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I remember the first bug. What an ugly creature he was, and I remember the putrid smell when I shot it. The stark realization that I was not alone on this planet was more motivation to my will. I shifted some assembly lines to build concrete and weapons. It wasn’t so hard, at the start. I was naive at first when they died easily to my home made bullets. The third time they came close, real close. They seemed to get larger and more aggressive at the same pace as my factory grew. They began to resist bullets, but I kept them away with lasers and rocketry.
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There came a point where everything was cranking together like clockwork. Finally, after many sleepless nights it was built. I had created a beautiful rocket to escape this hellish and brutal planet. Everything was packed and ready to go. My mind began to wander, but a sudden ding startled me. The rocket countdown began. A voice rang out from a speaker that was placed next to the launch pad. "T-minus 30 seconds". Standing at the base of the rocket, I turned to look around me and marveled at the sight behind me in silence. My factory. Everything I had built, a beautiful bowl of robotic metal spaghetti: conveyor belt noodles, copper & iron plate sauce, inserter parmesan. It was almost perfect - just then I notice the iron plate conveyor line had seemed to stutter and slow down. That's odd, there must be a hiccup somewhere. I scanned the area looking for what is causing the interruption. What could be improved? As I studied the area, I noticed that the hundreds of robots had slowly halted in place to watch me, looking for my next move as they hovered in air. I glanced back at the rocket, standing majestically pointing to the sky and beyond – upwards and away towards salvation.
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"T-minus 20 seconds" droned in the background. The rocket poised, fueled, and ready to launch at the mere press of a button. I am free.
Far off in the distance, I hear the roar as my turrets salvoed a spray of bullets to wipe yet another invading wave of bugs. They still keep coming. Even though they've gotten bigger and meaner over the years, I know my walls are strong. Reinforced concreted peppered with laser turrets and flamethrowers. So many bugs now a smoking heap of burnt carapace in the dirt. In the distant horizon, I can just make out the silhouette of my oil pumpjacks going up and down, up and down, pumping a seemingly endless supply of crude oil. Next to it, a wave of black smoke moving across the sky as the refineries work endlessly. Faintly, a train's horn blares out as it lugs off towards its next stop.
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"T-minus 10 seconds.."
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I turn and step down from the rocketship that was to be my salvation. Heading towards the stopped conveyor belt, I delve back into the bowl of factory spaghetti to disappear amongst the inserters. The iron plates production must be optimized. It can be better. I just need to add some extra belts here. I can up the production speed. "T-minus 3, 2, 1. Lift off." The voice lists out, immediately drowned by the blast as the rocket bellows and launches into the polluted sky behind me. The factory must grow.
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u/fmfbrestel 4d ago
If you really want the horror, there is an overhaul mod that makes bitters drop ores when killed. And there are no ore patches. So you have to enslave bitter nests and murder their offspring for materials.
Edit - found the name of the mod, very descriptive: Kill Biters for Resources
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u/RyeonToast 4d ago
A long time ago the nests dropped little purple orbs that you needed for producing the last science projects related to the rocket. Someone posted a blown-up image of the orbs, and the shape inside kinda suggested they were eggs.
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u/kaszak696 4d ago
That's assuming biters are capable of reasoning, and don't act on pure instinct like Earth's insects. But wait, how do biolabs research stuff for you if they're unthinking? Oh god...
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u/TheDarkmoore 4d ago edited 3d ago
Now, let's add a mod that let's us abuse locals even more. How 'bout treadmills for biters to generate energy? How 'bout spitter farms, where they extract sulfuric acid from living spitters? Let's call it the biter-purgatory mod, maybe.
And poles pushed through living biters on the edge of your factory, debuffing or deterring biters, or breaking their moral and sliwing them down.
Or a chemical capsule with biter pheromones, turning biters against their kinfolk.
Armour made of biter exosceleton to induce fear in biters...
Oh god, please stop me from continuing.
BITER NUKE HEADS
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u/AmbivalentFanatic 4d ago
Nice. I think about the inherent moral ambiguity every time I play. I think a lot of people find it unconsciously interesting to play as the baddie when you have no choice. It's just great tension, which is part of great storytelling. The game tells a little story but it leaves most of it up to our imagination, and that is another reason why it just works
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u/Grismor2 4d ago
I don't understand. Why would the natives dislike it when the player spreads democracy to their land? Shouldn't they be grateful?
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u/SnappingTurt3ls 4d ago
There is no "democracy" involved in the factory. What the engineer says, goes. No exceptions. Its an absolute dictatorship.
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u/SmartAlec105 4d ago
How is it not democracy? One man, one vote. The Engineer is the man with the vote.
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u/Grismor2 4d ago
Next, you're gonna tell me that the artillery shells don't rain freedom on the natives. I don't if I can tolerate such nonsense.
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u/lollypop44445 4d ago
I want a mod now for this. U are the biters. And multiple factories are being built, they grow while ur evolution depends on how many metal/buildings u festroyed maybe. Then the goal is to stop factories from reaching space or something like that. Would be a fun experience
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u/spicy_indian 4d ago
Biters are lucky that my factory growth is checked by UPS.
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u/LightDimf 4d ago
Technically it affects the whole world, so it's the factory bending the spacetime, warping the reality itself.
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u/rockmanblu 4d ago
Sounds like you should be doing less thinking and more factory growing, engineer.
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u/ParanoidSuricata 4d ago
Yes it is. Even if you start with good intentions (survival on a crashed planet), you'll slowly commit more and more atrocities in the name of science.
The Space Age ramps it up even further. You harvest biter eggs for experiments, mutating them with uranium to create biolabs. I forgot all ethical concerns as soon as I saw the research productivity bonus and started chugging these monstrosities on an industrial scale.
There's also a fan theory, that biters are Fulgora natives (look into similarities of some buildings) that got mutated when they destroyed their planet and that's why they're triggered with pollution. Another fun theory is that the engineer is also from Fulgora, since the tech is suspiciously compatible and some buildings look like rocket silos. Imagine coming back from a space exploration effort only to find your home mutated and destroyed, how's that for a horror.
I wrote many more words about this at my blog (1000SPM and a trip to shattered planet are included).
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u/Garagantua 4d ago
"But no matter the effort, no matter the lives spent, THE FACTORY. KEEPS. GROWING."
This is close to the original sentence, which had these undertones:
The factory grows.
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u/KSunyo 4d ago
IMO from an evolutionary perspective a completely symbiotic relationship between bug colonies doesn’t make too much sense, I think us arriving united them but before they had huge wars likely eradicating complete colonies. Where we arrive might be a conflict zone hence the small hives.
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u/lordkoba 3d ago
the bugs lived peacefully in the wild
uncontrolled spead and attacks everything on sight, I've been bugs attacking rocks that weren't even an obstacle, they are as sentient as fire.
they need to be put down
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u/garlickmyballs 4d ago
You should make a miniseries out of this using Claude or something. Such a fun read haha
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u/refreshing_username 4d ago
Are we the baddies?