#Making counters in infinifactory tv#

You are judged on the efficiency of your design but only relative to other players who labour under the same restrictions as you. You’re not tasked with making a profit so the game doesn’t punish you for throwing trees in a bottomless landfill. Infinifactory walks a somewhat fine line here. The thing is, waste is morally reprehensible to the capitalist as much as to environmentalist. Junking perfectly fine inputs just because of stupid systems design is waste. The thing that Infinifactory does show you, is waste.

I cannot tell if this is an oversight, a development shortcut or some clever point about all sides being the same regardless of rhetoric. You’re even still killed with the same warning signs if you wander off the plantation. When you progress to the ‘liberation’ campaign and work for the brave resistance, nothing much changes though. It tells you that the people you’re doing this for (in the first campaign) are evil and stupid. The unending and supposedly irresponsible consumption of your output. The energy use or the environmental costs. Infinifactory doesn’t concern itself with byproducts of your endeavours. What is interesting is whether you can make a point about our current system of consumption and production in a game that on the face of it delights in endless production cycles. It’s all probably a gibe at the video games industry, executives, crunch or something like that but it’s mostly neither funny nor interesting. They’re also portrayed as stupid and pompous. The only overt political point the game makes is that an alien race (which itself lacks engineering skills) that abducts people to work for them as engineers is morally in the wrong. Meat on the floor, worry no more Blubber congealing, I’ve got a bad feeling You only have some many processing machines so I was forced to junk half the whale because my machines couldn’t keep up. And hey, whaddayaknow, there’s and empty bottomless void right over there! Some of the same thing goes for whale meat processing.

So the efficient thing to do is to dump it as quickly and unceremoniously as possible. You can save it up but there’s no point: You’ll keep receiving new trees for each new bottle and lid. But you only need say a fourth of the tree to produce one ‘output’. The lotion scenario produces bottles, lids and trees in equal measure. So if the output is made of 1 part X, 1 part Y, and 2 parts Z, the inputs of X, Y and Z come out in the ratio of 1:1:2. Here’s the catch: In standard scenarios all component parts are created in the proper ratios. It has to be ‘squeezed’ out of the wood and into cannisters and then lidded. You’re making a lotion of some kind out of trees. No, it was probably more the next scenario that got my gall. However, as a good alien abductee I had internalized the efficiency creed and was mostly concerned with the preventing the squirellikes from jumping off the production line.

#Making counters in infinifactory tv#

Factory farming makes a somewhat disturbing appearance when you’re tasked with fencing in little critters and converting them straight into tv dinners. Weapons of war feature early on – as does what looks like a disco dance floor but I wouldn’t put too much in that. More than Spacechem, Infinifactory tells a story by the output you’re producing. better) place why are you eating dog food? If you were truly making the world a more efficient (i.e. In Spacechem you were fed fish sticks, in Infinifactory you’re given red and yellow food pellets, dispensed by a machine. Under the surface though you question where this is all leading. You make better and better machines that will continue to convert input into output, steadily and reliably. Zachlikes – the shorthand for the genre that Zach Barth and Zachtronics spawned – are expressions of the belief in endless growth. Now, I know that it’s a distant relation of Infiniminer which to some may be enough but allow me to speculate: Infinifactory is a progression in Zachlike naming into the self aware stage. Granted it’s not exactly an exciting naming convention but at least it delivers on both parts. I get the factory bit, just not the inifini bit. You finish the last puzzle and you get an ending. And without spoilers I can say, that the neverending story this is not. The game features a limited amount of scenarios, each requiring a finite amount of output.