The Farmer Was Replaced [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aP2WHQKJVsw

by surprisetalk • 9 months ago

99 63 9 months ago

skeltoac• 9 months ago

I played this! The quadcopter with the straw hat got me. Funny and great fun. At the end I was still full of ideas for optimizing my code and the dev was making breaking changes that would require a full rewrite (a good time guaranteed) but I was more compelled to go back to Factorio due to the Space Age expansion. The rest of this comment would be about Factorio but writing on HN does not help the factory to grow.

candiddevmike• 9 months ago

As someone with hours of time in Factorio pre-space age update, I've really struggled to get back into the game. I really want to build out a mega base with the new train logic, but every time I try to get into it it just feels like work. Space age seems like it had a pretty lukewarm reception, and some of the tech tree changes seem like artificial padding (cliff explosives).

mixel2• 9 months ago

Yeah, the cliff explosives being gated behind vulcanus sucks a bit but they made the cliffs a lot more bearable in 2.0 I think for a megabase run its a matter of how fast you can reach legendary and process everything in it and once you got that you can go really into megabasing this game. Sadly they nerfed trains so hard by introducing Quality since everything got better but trains stayed the same which is a shame

jpalawaga• 9 months ago

For me factorio is a one playthrough kinda thing. I don’t get off on endless optimization and making it bigger for the sake of bigger, feels like work.

That said, I was more than happy to build the base back from scratch in space age, and I find the expansion to be every bit as fun as the base game. So I endorse it. Especially as you already know how to do some things quicker.

nness• 9 months ago

That was my first impression when I picked it up -- the game strongly suggests you start from the start, and re-loading a pre-Space Age save will result in many things breaking. I gave in and started over, worried I'd need to spend dozens of hours just building up to where I was before.

But this wasn't the case — Space Age isn't only new content, but a complete re-balance of the original game. It is far far less grindy and requires much less baby-sitting of production.

Your first space platform, the ships, and the planets, are best thought of as unique Factorio-inspired puzzles. Each planet is like a Factorio game-mode to solve, with its own restrictions to design around.

I think those who have hundreds of hours in the base-game have to un-learn of the base game to pick up the DLC. Many of the complaints are pointed at the tech tree changes — they wanted an expansion on what was there, not a recreation. But for me now, I wouldn't recommend Factorio without Space Age.

bigstrat2003• 9 months ago

I'll be honest, I don't think Space Age was all that good as an expansion. The developers really focused on giving the player new types of logistics challenges to solve, but that was never what I wanted. I wanted the same Factorio gameplay, but with more stuff to build. So out of the four new planets, the only one I actually enjoyed building on was Vulcanus (because it plays pretty much like vanilla Factorio but with new recipes). The lead dev is also well known for disliking logistics bots and wishes they had never been added to the game. And the expansion shows that, with (again) three of the four planets having mechanics to make use of bots more difficult if not outright impossible (Aquilo).

All in all, the developers have a very different vision of what makes the game fun than I do, and that meant the expansion wasn't much fun for me. If I play the game more in the future, I'll probably do so with the expansion disabled.

vrighter2• 9 months ago

I had spent ages optimizing my maze solver ( https://github.com/VrIgHtEr/TheFarmerSolvedAMaze ). Meticulously going over which operations take how many ticks. But then the dev made a bunch of breaking changes and couldn't be bothered to rewrite everything.

soultrees• 9 months ago

Run an agent on it. This is what they excel at.

__jonas• 9 months ago

the dev was making breaking changes that would require a full rewrite

This is funny because I already get the feeling a lot with management sim / automation type games that I'm pretty close to doing the kind of thing I'd do at work, except only the fun parts and without getting paid. Often that's the reason I quit playing these types of games after a while - having to deal with migrating legacy code after breaking API changes would bring this feeling to a new level I bet.

grogenaut• 9 months ago

That's why I don't tend to play these games. I was about 5 hours into trs1000 when I was like man I could just learn GPU or fpga with a real editor instead but that would be useful. And stopped playing. With factorio I could be laying out circuit boards. So I did that instead.

abtinf2• 9 months ago

To make a programming game true to life, it could have a prestige mechanic where you keep all your code/scripts, but the api introduces breaking changes and you have to rewrite.

“Good job! Halfway through the workday on Thursday, some big brain engineer in a distant department has decided to change the order of for loop clauses in the interpreter, so now it’s “for variable declarations; variable modifications; conditional checks {}”. They adamantly refuse to revert the change because “it makes more sense to group variable stuff together”. Prod is down now. Have fun!

phantasmish• 9 months ago

Documentation should often be wrong.

There should be five options for each piece of tooling, none of which quite work the same way, all of which have a fan-base singing their praises, and three of which have critical problems you probably won't find out about until you try them. Then the one you pick gets abandoned when you're part way done. (this feature only for the Javascript and Python DLC)

Example farms should use old versions of libraries that are no longer maintained.

Interfacing with other farms should require manually faking a downgrade of some protocol you're using, because the older one is no longer available for you and they can't/won't upgrade.

You should be forced to design certain parts of the system in ways that are harder to use and constantly break when changing other parts, just so the appearance of those parts is "on brand". This should require re-writing functionality that would otherwise be supplied "for free" by a library.

When you're finally getting things how you want them, your farm should get cancelled and the whole thing abruptly burned to the ground because your parent company just decided to buy a different, existing farm instead.

incomingpain• 9 months ago

Solid 2-3 hours of entertainment; assuming you know python. It's also not as complicated as I expected.

ckdarby• 9 months ago

Currently a sweet spot with Steam games if you price them correctly to the value they bring.

I'm working on a very simple incremental game that has exploded in popularity called, A Game About Feeding A Black Hole.

unquietwiki• 9 months ago

Just looked it up: looks cool & added it to wishlist. Did you happen to play "Solar 2" years back?

mrguyorama2• 9 months ago

Did you pay DangerouslyFunny on Youtube to play that or does he just play every new steam demo with incremental features? It is his business basically.

jgtrosh• 9 months ago

The game looks fun and pretty, but am I the only one to get triggered by the “replaced” naming?

All of these eager claims to replace humans feel violently antisocial. (And in many instances hypocritical if coming from people who defensively claim “it's just a tool”…)

gruez• 9 months ago

am I the only one to get triggered by the “replaced” naming?
All of these eager claims to replace humans feel violently antisocial

Yeah they should be using corporate euphemisms like "let go" or whatever!

lan321• 9 months ago

The farmer is taking the next step in their career journey!

blargthorwars• 9 months ago

You're absolutely correct. A better name would be "The Farmer Was Augmented <emdash> By Your Friendly AI" <emoji "happy"> <emoji "friednship">

afandian• 9 months ago

More like "the farmer was sent to live on the farm"

aduwah• 9 months ago

The Farmer Was Made Into Sausage By Automation

sebstefan5• 9 months ago

Farming isn't artistry, society benefits from its automation

Is it still bad if the farmer gets replaced?

9rx9• 9 months ago

Is it still bad if the farmer gets replaced?

A farmer is an owner of a farm. To replace the farmer you would have to completely eliminate the entire concept of human ownership that we hold. Socialist or other community ownership structures around farms wouldn't do as that would not replace the farmer, it would make everyone a farmer.

society benefits from its automation

Economies benefit from its automation. It's far less clear if societies benefit. Farm work is hard, but there is a sense of accomplishment when it is done, which is good for the psyche. The never ending "bullshit" jobs that most people seem to find themselves in nowadays has not lead to happiness.

cies• 9 months ago

I like the word farmer to be replaced.

It usually means EITHER land cultivator OR animal exploiter.

My choice of word maybe gives away that I'm not so okay with the latter category. While I think the first category is doing God's work on earth feeding the ever growing human population.

tantalor• 9 months ago

What's so special about artists?

Farming is an ancient human practice. It would be a huge loss to society if we forgot how to do it with our hands, without automation.

hosteur• 9 months ago

You are not alone. I don’t get why you are downvoted.

pixl97• 9 months ago

All of these eager claims to replace humans feel violently antisocial

Then I suggest you dig ditches with a spoon.

The problem isn't replacing human labor in itself. It's a few hording all the resources and leaving the rest to starve, aka the luddites and why they revolted.

If you had a way to live, then boutique farming, or whatever would be leisure if you chose to do that.

ceving• 9 months ago

Is this Windows only?

mixel2• 9 months ago

No the game is also fully playable on linux via Proton (About other platforms I have no clue)

intrikate• 9 months ago

Excellent news, I can play the game on my Steam Deck with the on-screen keyboard!

Aachen• 9 months ago

If you get it working. They don't seem to have an own website, the publisher links to Steam as the only place to purchase it, and Steam says it's only supported on Windows. Surely you can work around it with VMs, emulation, or other solutions, but sadly the creator declines to support that

sd92• 9 months ago

I played this: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLesViK53beXfFohR1I08S...

Skip the first video. The early game is painful if you already know how to program (they gate things like variables, loops, and functions behind unlocks). And tbh I didn’t know how to make a video or use a microphone when I made that video. I just sat down one evening and played it - I had no idea it would resonate with people the way it did.

It’s a great game, and I imagine a very good way to learn programming in a goal oriented way. But I concur that there’s not a great deal of content if you already know how to program.

shhsshs• 9 months ago

Fun to see you here - I discovered this game through your videos! I think despite the lack of raw "content", I got a LOT of playtime out of this game by trying to push higher on the leaderboards.

sd92• 9 months ago

Awesome!

I've considered trying to do some hyper optimisation, taking into account the number of cycles each instruction takes - it seems that a lot of people are interested in that.

That's not my natural style though. I've had plenty of criticism for not being performance sensitive, but that's not really how I unwind (although I do plenty of optimisation at work!).

It could be fun to explore ingame though.

slightwinder• 9 months ago

Turtles are old-school, farming is the new cool. Is there a dating-option? Just asking as a Stardew Valley-friend..

OK, jokes aside. I've started playing this, when 1.0 was released some weeks ago, and this is quite good for what it is. It's doing many things the right way, like allowing coding with an external editor, having a proper coding-experience even with the built-in tools, and collectable hats.

Everyone should buy this and learn the basics. It's cheap enough for most people.

nilslindemann• 9 months ago

I am playing this right now! A very nice, addictive game. The programming language is a kind of subset of Python.

The in-game editor is still a bit clunky, but one can edit the source code in an external editor like VS Code. The game has an auto-reload option.

Caution! Just because one saves the code in the external editor doesn't mean the entire game state is saved! It cost me a few unlocked upgrades the first time I closed the game, not saving because I thought it automatically does so. One has to save the game state explicitly, before closing.

I already have the full game area and a max speed drone, but I'm only just about to implement planting cacti. So it'll be a while before I unlock multiple drones. But I have already implemented efficient algorithms for planting a giant Pumpkin, Sunflowers and Poly cultures.

What the game could have is that dictionaries retain their insertion order and a built-in array.sort. And it is sad that the nice music stops running as soon as one starts the game.

madethemcry• 9 months ago

I did not play this (yet!), but just by watching this video I see how it overlaps with the coding games on https://code.org/en-US (Hour of Code!) in terms of having a code + gaming view to solve a challenge.

When I was teaching coding to kids, code.org was the to-go place besides using Scratch, to introduce coding patterns (mostly: conditional, loops).

An example is the famous Minecraft labyrinth [1]. There is also a Frozen themed one. If you have kids (~6y+), that's some fun way to get started instead of diving directly into actual code.

[1] https://studio.code.org/courses/mc/units/1/lessons/1/levels/...

djmips• 9 months ago

teaching optimization this way seems ideal

mrguyorama2• 9 months ago

I bounced off this game.

It was fun and rewarding early on, as an idle game addict, but there's a massive complexity cliff.

You go from "just plant the newest crop on every square" to "Okay, now you need to manage farm-wide state in a way that the tools do not support, and develop powerful planning systems and priority systems to actually yield meaningful results and higher level crops" and I just don't understand why.

The reward for rewriting an entire working (nice and simple) system to a behemoth full of complex logic and systems engineering is.... another crop? At least until you get to spawn new drones which is locked off until you've already basically beaten the game for some reason?

Like it feels like there is massive missing transition and purpose to that complexity. In factorio, you deal with the insanity of petrochemicals because it gives you fun toys.

I found myself quite unable to engineer an entire system like that just to... improve my rate of resource growth. Somewhat.

cheschire• 9 months ago

Maybe don’t do everything at once. Try cycling through optimized whole-farm algorithms and clear() between them

The Farmer Was Replaced [video]

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