Fun to see that a proto-inspiration was minecraft with industrial mods. That's how I got into Factorio. I was talking to a coworker in 2015, and I mentioned that I loved the combined automation aspect of industrialcraft, buildcraft, and immersion engineering, but I found it annoying that it had gotten harder and harder to find a minecraft version that was compatible with newer versions of all three. So he suggested I give Factorio a try.