This is the story of Perfection Eden, a Factorio Death World that has seen the rise and fall of many great civilizations.
In my exploration of robinsonades (novels/stories about castaways surviving in remote locations alone), I cannot help but look to my favorite video games as contemporary leaders in the narrative tradition. Video games are capable of taking survival narratives further than books by allowing players to actually undertake the kinds of creative processes that protagonists in survival novels can only go so far as to describe in text. The Crusoe fever dream that so enraptures childrens’ imaginations can be brought to life through gameplay. Like playing pretend with rocks and sticks in a forest, games offer “playgrounds” or “sandboxes” where imaginative play can thrive even among adults that haven’t used their childhood imaginations in decades. This post is about a particularly magical situation I managed to play out in Factorio, a game that, according to Steam, has devoured over 200 hours of my life.
Factorio is the perfect example of a robinsonade game not only because it arranges its players in a scifi castaway scenario on an alien planet, but because it forces players to consider their own footprint as a castaway. What sets Robinson Crusoe and its heirs apart from other wilderness survival tales is that distinct relationship that the castaway forms between himself and his island (or in this case, planet) and the natives that already inhabit the land. Henry David Thoreau had a grand old time learning about his little forest, but he didn’t have to worry about disturbing Indians. So much of the tension in Robinson Crusoe hinges on his fear of being set upon by cannibals, and Factorio sets up the same relationship between the player and the alien planet’s voracious insectoid lifeforms. Crusoe sets out from the start to build a camouflaged, defensible fortress in anticipation of attack, and Factorio players that wish to live long enough to get off the rock and return home would be wise to do the same…
But is this true? Do you really need to construct hard walls and endless lines of automated machine gun turrets in order to survive and thrive? Like any great sandbox game, Factorio makes few strict demands of the player, and a few months ago I found myself in an incredible situation that changed my entire perspective on the game. Violence is an effective answer to many problems in Factorio just as it is for Robinson Crusoe himself, but when the biters came to devour my factory, I was forced to find an alternative path.
Here is the scenario: my friend Mark and I had generated a Death World, a map variant loaded with a huge quantity of biter nests (biters are the name for the alien insects that live throughout the Factorio world). The biters are set up to multiply and seek the player more rapidly, and respond more ferociously to the player’s actions, than in the default game. We felt the pressure immediately: the more biters we gunned down, the more seemed to emerge from the forests to take their place. Our defensive walls needed constant maintenance, and we could barely produce enough bullets to meet demand. We forged on, however, extracting and burning ever greater quantities of wood and coal to keep our boilers running. The factory must grow, and there was no Lorax around to warn us of impending consequences! We did not quite realize that a storm was brewing beyond our borders.
Interlude: Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, a work that I suspect holds some influence on Factorio, poses a similar relationship between humans and giant insects. Nausicaa takes place in a post-apocalyptic setting in which humanity clings to life on the fringes of vast, poisonous fungal forests inhabited by large and potential sentient bugs. As the story goes, greed eventually propels these human kingdoms to seek the industrial powers of the past and wage war across the land. Bombs and chemical biological warfare return, and this destruction of the land triggers an event known as the “Daikaisho,” a great wave of insects that emerge from the forest to flatten humanity. Nausicaa takes place on the verge of one of these prophesied daikaisho events, and the titular protagonist Nausicaa desperately seeks a way for humans to live at peace with the forest and its inhabitants.
Little did Mark and I realize that our own Daikaisho was at hand. The biters that surrounded our factory fortress were incensed, and they came upon us from all directions at once. We were overwhelmed–our beautiful production lines, rows of belts and machines, were crushed and devoured. Our walls crumbled away as the reserves of bullets drained. The steam engines slowed as the flow of coal become a trickle. Soon, they were dormant, the cold heart of a factory that no longer existed. Hours of work had been lost, literally eaten, before our very eyes. Mark gave up and disconnected, but I decided to play on.
While the biters had their way with my factory, I fled east. Before the Daikaisho, Mark and I had established our very first rail line with plans to establish an eastern mining outpost that would have given us more iron than we could have ever used. Thankfully, our train was not yet destroyed, though the outpost with its many expensive electrical miners was surely gone. Locomotives, marvels of engineering they might be, are not very useful without goods to transport and rail lines to follow. I rode the track for a while before hopping off near a strand of undisturbed trees in the wilderness. Exiled and forlorn, I wandered into the woods and settled into a clearing. I was a little depressed, if I can speak honestly. I didn’t move for some time. I mostly watched the dwindling map feed of my old base as the insects crushed it to nothing. My bird’s eye view of the carnage shrunk as radio dishes lost power or were eaten, and eventually the feed cut out entirely. I was completely cut off then. Alone.
After many days and nights I woke myself up and took stock of my situation.
I had in my possession a few rounds of ammunition, a machine gun, various crafting odds and ends, automation machines, belts, and a solar panel. That last item was the product of some new energy research that had been completed shortly before the fall. Among all the weapons science that we had conducted to stave off the biters, how fortunate that we bothered to make any solar panels at all! Even with my boilers silent and many miles removed, I could still harness the power of electricity. I immediately installed the panel and hooked it up to some crafting machines set to transform my pockets of crude metal into the armaments of vengeance. My encampment was cozy, if anything. I had a few storage bins loaded mostly with junk, the means to craft complex items on a very small scare, and a natural wall of trees to hide me from the biters. I set my crafting machines to pump out bullets and dumped all the metal I had into the input bins. I didn’t think anything else could have been useful.
The factory was dead, but I suspected it was not entirely obliterated. Perhaps I could take it back and restart the steam engines? Certainly, there could be materials enough left over to craft even more bullets. Yes, I decided then that all hope was not lost.
TO BE CONTINUED…
With fresh ammo and an unquenchable thirst for biter blood, I set off to my old factory to take it back. What I find there brings me to the brink of despair.
