It's the sort of game I don't think I'd like. And I definitely don't have time to throw into it.

Where I'm at with this:

- ate one meal yesterday
- forced myself into bed at 5am
- encouraged my girlfriend to spend the day with her friends instead of joining me for dinner
- wondering what excuse I can conjure to get out of all the plans I made for the coming days

Not sure I ever enjoyed a game so much despite being utterly shit at it. A talented engineer I definitely am not. I like how every solution you find to a problem brings further complications to be addressed. Or maybe that's just because of my sticking-plaster approach to problem solving; don't find and fix the root cause of the problem, rather direct  it elsewhere with a short-sighted and temporary solution. Love it.

A tangent but sort of related in terms of puzzling and routing:

I've been doing some basic electronics stuff with building a mic preamp recently and I've discovered how much of a fun and challenging puzzle that can be. Unless you have a good methodology translating a circuit diagram into a physical stripboard layout can be a bit mind melting, it's a pretty complex non-linear process to arrive at a reasonably efficient functional solution that works in terms of fitting into a small physical space.

I've found that translating the circuit diagrams into a simplified parts/nodes format is way more useful for planning out where components need to fit into stripboard, the rails/breaks. And then the actual soldering and assembly process has it's own challenges where you ideally need to do some things in a particular order. It all requires some real dedication of thought, but it's bloody rewarding once you test the device and it works like a charm.

For this kind of problem solving / planning / engineering stuff Factorio is also great, but personally for me right now circuit building is really scratching that itch, so I'll be focusing on that for a while I think.

I would think that having a pen & paper handy while playing this would be ideal, for making lists of things you need, drawing flow diagrams, etc. I've started using a physical notebook quite a bit recently for assisting me in thinking about things, it's fun when it's helpful in games.

Next time I’ll definitely leave enough room for the central conveyor belt system. Next time. Every time.

how am I the only person in love with this. there's  a good chance it the not too distant future it will overtake slay the spire as my most played game of all time.

Also, if you want more life-destroying addiction by having a Factorio type game on your mobile or tablet, Mindustry is a great mix of the base/production/pipeline/conveyors of Factorio with wave-based Tower Defense.

https://mindustrygame.github.io/

Well, experience is just accrued mistakes that you've learned from, so putting the time in for learning means that eventually you'd be good at it. Just if the planning out the base (architecture), pipeline optimisation (code profiling and refactoring) and bringing order out of chaos is something you enjoy in Factorio, it might be worth looking into some intro to coding tutorials online - see if any of it clicks with you. Just a thought.
Maybe it's just me looking at Factorio through the lens of a programmer, but there's a lot of parallels to me (including the construction bots, creating the layout templates etc.).

I guess it depends where you want to go with it - vocational stuff like learning about machine learning or web tech might be a bit dry.
There's about a billion different courses you could do, lots of free stuff, but yeah, it's a bit overwhelming to try and pick what to start with.

In that respect, I always like to learn new things by grabbing something that already exists and hacking around with it - especially useful if it has a visual component as it's a great way to get immediate and rewarding feedback while you hack away at the code and figure out what it does, how it does it and how you can change bits of code here and there to change the behaviour.

So - maybe try downloading a version of Unity with a template project (they have some decent mini game templates, so you don't have to start from scratch), then have a dig around in the C# code to try to adapt some of the code in the game to do different things with it:  https://unity.com/how-to/learning-c-sharp-unity-beginners

C# is very approachable in that respect, and Unity has lots of great stuff you can drag and drop in e.g. so you can try just messing about and turning machine gun bullets into grenades for a billion explosions.

Hacking away at daft, fun stuff like that is how I learned and stayed motivated during the process. 
You never know, you might really enjoy the creative aspects of it. You might not though, everyone's different. If it does hook you in, once you've got a bit of practical experience then you can start digging into some of the courses, online resources or books to start learning the background in a more structured way. But I always favour practical, hands-on hacking first - then theory second.

Other than Unity, there's those Lego robotic kits these days that might be fun to mess about with.

shameless self-promotion of the only thing I 'achieved' since corona. My baby:

from afar (that's about half of it in this pic)

pointlessly symmetrical smelting



yellow science



blue science



purple science

Impressive.

I've tried to get into this a couple of times recently but after playing Dyson Sphere for 250 hours I found the controls a bit fiddly. I'll try again at some point.

I've never taken the plunge because I worry about getting hopelessly addicted.

Yes, Noxy. Yes yes yes. Outstanding work.

The difficulty scales with your ability, so I doubt it can ever be too hard. Rather it's always challenging. Whenever I found the game especially tough, it was simply because my ability did not meet my ambition at a given moment in time. You can definitely complete the game and take a lot of pleasure from it even if you're relatively shit at it, as I was for quite a long time. Most of the difficulty in this comes from optimisation; from devising new systems and methods of processing materials that can handle ever larger quantities of raw materials. Just doing the bare minimum- which is totally fine- is kinda easy. The fun comes from pushing yourself, and this game gives you so much creative freedom in problem solving.