Overview of Factorio
Factorio is a 2D factory building / automation game developed by Wube Software. It was
released in 2020 after first being available in early access for four years. The
player plays as an engineer who has crash-landed on an alien planet. The engineer
wants to leave the planet by building and launching a rocket. This requires:
- Gathering resources such as iron and copper
- Crafting items from the collected resources and other crafted items
- Constructing buildings to automate crafting of items
- Automating the transportation of resources and crafted items to move them
around the factory to where they are needed - Optionally defending the factory from hostile native wildlife
- Conducting research by crafting and consuming various science packs to unlock
new technologies to help and improve all of the above, culminating with
discovering how to build the rocket
In the beginning, the engineer has to collect resources by hand and manually
feed them to machines for further processing, including manually fueling the
machines with burnable fuel such as coal. But soon the engineer can get access
to electric power generated with boilers and steam engines. Resources can be
moved around automatically with transport belts and fed into machines via
robotic arms. Later, the engineer will be pumping and refining oil, constructing
railways for moving large amounts of resources from faraway outposts to their
base, powering their factory with nuclear power, and using flying robots to move
items and expand the factory. All the while, the factory automatically
produces hundreds or even thousands of various items per minute, which would take
days for the engineer to craft by hand.
Factorio’s core gameplay thus is about planning and problem-solving by using the
tools the game offers and continuously expanding the tool selection via research.
It is also optionally about surviving the attacks of alien life which does not
appreciate all the pollution the factory is producing. The game can be very
addictive, and players have spent hundreds or even thousands of hours playing it
and optimizing their factories. Although the victory goal is the rocket, for some
players the game only starts from that point since it allows nearly limitless
expansion possibilities. After all, the most important rule of Factorio is that
the factory must always grow.
Factorio Access accessibility mod overview
Factorio is made accessible to blind players with the Factorio Access mod. It
makes almost the entire gameplay experience accessible, with some minor caveats
that mostly relate to more advanced game features which are not required for
beating the game. Factorio Access features include:
- Screen reader integration for speaking menus such as the player inventory
- Speech feedback for the game’s cursor used to interact with the environment,
reporting what is under the cursor when it is being moved - Reporting of player and cursor position coordinates via speech
- A scanner feature for exploring the engineer’s surroundings and finding things
like resources and factory buildings - Kruise Kontrol for optionally automating movement, various factory building
activities, and combat - Optional teleportation for more efficient navigation
- Audio cues for various things such as crafting and combat
- Audio ruler for helping in factory planning and building
- Fast travel menu for saving important places on the map
For more info, check out the Factorio Access
GitHub. Notably, it contains
a wiki with very detailed documentation about the game and the mod.
Available Platforms
- PC (Windows, Mac, and Linux) with Factorio Access
- Nintendo Switch (not accessible)