> All the isometric RPGs are very linear. You do act 1, then act 2, then act 3, etc.. What varies is how you complete them.

You can finish Fallout 1 in less than 5 minutes, skipping essentially all of the act [1], so not necessarily that linear. But even if we discount this specific case, isometric RPGs are not that different from Bethesda style RPGs in structure, it is that the latter have very different budget and have a huge amount of side quests.

That said, OP was speaking specifically of Fallout 3, and compared to the following titles, I find it was quite more constrained... lot of time spent in tunnels, areas that were off limits until you could cross a certain metro... Fallout NV and Fallout 4 feel more in line with the original games.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3Loo56_HX0

Or the 28,000 tons of coal [1]. Unrelated to LLM (except for the part where I asked Gemini to find the link) but somewhat relevant.

[1] https://thedailywtf.com/articles/Special-Delivery

> the game is about eventually building thousands of the new item.

I disagree that you need significant amount of thinking ahead. At the beginning spaghetti belt is fine, as you have little resources and you don't have the luxury of overbuilding. Once you start getting "bigger" and into more complex designs you can just leave what you already built how it is and build the new stuff somewhere else.

By the time you need to produce thousands of pieces of an item you can probably prepare a blueprint that builds the whole factory in a click.

My approach to factor.io is built on phasesw

1: build ad hoc infrastructure for the specific material that I need, close to the raw resources

2: prepare blueprints for specific resources, so that if I need more of something I can just build an extra factory. I make the blueprints so that I can compose them, like input belts on one side and output belt on the other. such "factories" are almost self contained, as in they get only a subset of materials (plates, plastic and stuff that involves liquids) and produce all the intermediate materials. This leaves some optimizations on the table, but simplify the logistic. Use trains to fetch resources from far.

3: compose the blueprints of the previous step to make "megafactories" with stations included. While at step 2 input and output of the factories are belts, at this step the input/output are train stations for specific material (with proper names, so I can add a new factory and trains will start delivering materials right away)

Of course my approach is not the only possible and probably not even efficient. I play for fun, with no care for the time it takes, as long as the time spent is enjoyable.

What is released under MIT (or BSD) will stay under that license forever, so it cannot "be closed anytime". The owner can change the license, but that will affect only future developments.

"Be quiet, small man."

The guy really think is above everything and everybody.