Show HN: Factorio Blueprint Visualizer

piebro · 2025-01-09T11:23:03.000Z

Hey there, I'm a big fan of the game Factorio and the beauty of factories in the game. That's why I created a website to artfully visualize Factorio blueprints a few years ago. With the new 2.0 update, a few things broke. I took the opportunity to rewrite everything from Python to JavaScript and support Factorio 2.0 and the Space Age DLC. It's now also possible to easily modify the style of the drawings. Let me know if you find any bugs or if you have ideas for features.

jvanderbot 1 year ago |

This is amazing.

I did a similar thing for the game Highfleet, until I ran into roadblocks with the dev team.

My ultimate goal was to have a "print poster" button that would generate the image and ship it off to one of those poster drop-shippers for a small fee. In that game, you can annotate the maps, and the world map with battle annotations is really special with lots of memories of victories and defeats. Alas, no dice.

I suggest you do this for blueprints! The first thing I'm going to do is take my favorite space platforms and outposts and make posters - the colored block imagery is really artful.

And, if you want a real challenge, you could parse the end-game uploads (galaxy) if available, or save files themselves.

Or, slightly less ambitious - a game mod that generates links to this site directly.

Very nicely done!

alexpotato 1 year ago | |

Had never heard of Highfleet but it looks pretty awesome!

Plus, I grew up playing MicroProse games in the early to mid 1990s so wild to see that they are still around and making great content.

I also loved this quote from the reviews:

"A typical Microprose game in that you need to a) immerse yourself in it and b) READ THE GOSH DANG MANUAL in order to have any hope of enjoying it." [0]

0 - https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197989787811/recomm...

jvanderbot 1 year ago | | |

Oh it's alarmingly fun.

1. radio decryption and cyphers

2. Complete flying fortress customization

3. ancient tech-obsessed desert culture kinda like homeworld

4. merchant raiding and resource constrained survival

If you get deep into building customized ships, I have an automated optimizer for you to check your stats against :)

Pannoniae 1 year ago | |

"until I ran into roadblocks with the dev team." What kind of roadblocks?

jvanderbot 1 year ago | | |

There were a few things that were difficult to render properly that made the maps incorrect in ways that would really look bad to a veteran player. Like certain cities not having the right links via trade routes (which is a huge part of the game).

I got radio silence from everyone when I tried to confirm the way to correctly determine links. So I moved on to an easier problem.

piebro 1 year ago | |

I actually printed a few designs and hung them up in frames in my home. Maybe I'll add the idea and some links to the readme. Can you recommend a printing service?

I think it's not possible to access the actual file upload using the galaxy hall of fame (https://www.factorio.com/galaxy) or I just can't find them. Otherwise it would be pretty cool.

Oh yeah, I like the mod idea. That should also be quite doable, thanks.

pbronez 1 year ago | | |

It's cool that you support plotters. I don't have a plotter, but I DO have a 3D printer, and those can also do some pretty cool 2D visualizations.

There's a good ecosystem for Lithophanes [0][1] and maps [2][3]. This would be a cool addition to that.

[0] https://all3dp.com/2/how-to-3d-print-your-own-lithophane/

[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCU13fzqAu4BTAhOSHJgHRqg

[2] https://blog.prusa3d.com/how-to-print-maps-terrains-and-land...

[3] https://map2stl.com/

piebro 1 year ago | | |

Oh nice, I didn't know one could print Lithophanes. If you mount a pen in your 3D Printer and the right settings it should also work as a pen plotter. But I don't know how practical that is.

The map2stl tool is also cool. I created a similar tool [0] for pen plotters using OpenStreetMap Data a while ago, which is fun to play around with.

[0] https://piebro.github.io/plotting-maps

mystified5016 1 year ago | | |

Plenty of people have taped a pen to their 3D printer. The main problem is the same issue for all plotters: they just aren't actually that useful. They're neat as hell for sure, they just don't solve a problem that most people have.

polishdude20 1 year ago |

I wonder if you could add in the production / consumption rates of various machines into this and have the visualizer show bottlenecks and other data

rollcat 1 year ago | |

Remember that factorio simulates every inserter swing, the exact position of each item on a sushi belt, every dip in the power grid, every biter egg about to hatch.

Some designs in 100% runs use sushi (e.g. red circuits, as they take a lot of space/time but few resources, and must initially be built by hand). You can estimate the rates, but you won't be able to find a bottleneck.

Inserter timing often comes up in plastic builds - on paper it's easy to build the exact amount of chem plants to saturate a blue belt, but if you ignore inserter timing you'll be leaving tiny gaps.

Also remember spoilage is now a thing (,: as well as loops, probabilistic recipes, thruster efficiency, probably some more.

Only Factorio can simulate Factorio. The best way to automatically find bottlenecks is probably with a mod.

caspar 1 year ago | | |

A mod such as Bottleneck Lite[0], plus your eyeballs :)

[0]: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/BottleneckLite

natebc 1 year ago |

thank you for the artistic contribution to the factorio community! So much stuff around this game is ruthless efficiency it's very nice to have something with some style.

grufkork 1 year ago |

Nice! I might actually try drawing our factory with a shoddy pen plotter I built, could give some cool results. Well-built factories are really pretty, looks like small ecosystems growths when zoomed out. All the draw settings should make it easy to generate some good outlines

piebro 1 year ago | |

Thanks, pen plotting was my motivation for doing this as an SVG and not on a canvas. I never got around plotting an actual factory though, but I might do it this time.

readyplayernull 1 year ago |

Almost full circle from discrete processing element board to diagram, the next step is: circuit design to board diagram to factoring.

spieswl 1 year ago |

Thanks for refreshing and sharing this again!

The visualizations are so similar to integrated circuit layouts; they immediately reminded me of some of the coasters that GamersNexus sell which represent simplified computer subsystems.

toomuchtodo 1 year ago |

jharohit 1 year ago |

I wonder if Factorio multiplayer could be used to play with an AI companion? Here is what I am thinking:

Computer 1 - Human

Computer 2 - Claude Computer Use or other controlling the other

A chat interface or voice interface (Whisper Speech to Text) for Human to feed instructions to Computer 2?

Amazing benefits of doing this:

- infinitely scalable

- could let agents continue to implement strategy and unblock themselves without needing constant intervention

jokoon 1 year ago |

I am a bit sad I finished factorio space age, it was such an amazing game, I wish I could have spent more time on it.

All good things have an end.

I really hope Wube could make it more interesting to play in multiplayer, in games of 50 or 100 players, unfortunately there are no incentives for it.

I suggested to add some resources trading and currency, coupled with a land ownership system, to prevent trolls and scale the game so that any player can join, but it would probably require some balancing.

This game is already 10 years old and still going strong.

Unfortunately mods are not very good quality, or too difficult to enjoy.

Space age is interesting because new planets are being added by fans, but I don't think they're going to be as well designed and really bring anything interesting.

matt3210 1 year ago |

Thanks I was meaning to find a reason to spend the next 200 hours playing factorio

FrustratedMonky 1 year ago |

Nice.

For when Factorio has turned into a Job. And the engineer inside cant' help but optimize.

andix 1 year ago |

I really liked the concept of Factorio, but stopped playing after a few hours. I think one of the main reasons was, that it's really hard to visually grok the factories from the in game visuals. All the shades of brown and gray made it not really enjoyable either (I like pretty and colourful virtual environments, there is enough gray and brown in the real life).

If the game would look more like those visualizations, I might have enjoyed it more.

zelias 1 year ago |

I burnt out mid-Aquilo. RIP

joshstrange 1 year ago |

TIL you can pull ammo from a turret to put in another like you can with research packs/labs.

I love all the mods/tools around Factorio, I don't think I've put more hours in any other video game, maybe Skyrim, maybe not. It tickles all right parts of my brain especially now that I write less code in my current position.

mystified5016 1 year ago | |

Factorio is so wild because you can sink 3,000 hours into it and still discover new tricks.

NelsonMinar 1 year ago |

I like the emphasis on this being beautiful and the pen plotter experiments. There's plenty of productivity tools for Factorio, including several blueprint renderers. This one's special for having some aesthetics.

imoreno 1 year ago |

These would be more useful if assemblers had an icon showing which recipe is selected.

proc0 1 year ago |

This is really cool. Finally the factories can look like chip designs.

maxglute 1 year ago |

Incredible work.

npace12 1 year ago |

oh come on guys, i've got real work to do

colkassad 1 year ago | |

I downloaded the demo for Factorio last night and suddenly it was two in the morning. Amazing game, I'm scared to buy it.

ssl-3 1 year ago | | |

Just wait until you start hearing the birds.

lucb1e 1 year ago | | |

Who needs an alarm clock when there's always the damn birds to tell you when it's bedtime

DanielHB 1 year ago | |

My partner doesn't understand I put all those extra shifts in the factory for the benefit of the family.

dentemple 1 year ago | |

The factory must grow

InDubioProRubio 1 year ago | |

You had real work ahead of you, but now you have a template for that.

npace12 1 year ago | | |

true, i loaded up my save to try the visualizer, but i just have to fix my factory energy output first real quick

stackskipton 1 year ago | | |

Nuclear go brrr.

npace12 1 year ago | | |

yeah but getting from 1 to 10MW is a pain with all these pumps

lucb1e 1 year ago | | |

Pumps, plural? I don't think we needed more than the default 1200 u/s that a single offshore pump gets (the one that you start out with) to scale from 0 until nuclear

stackskipton 1 year ago | | |

With water changes, single water pump can now power 100+ heat exchangers.

spieswl 1 year ago | |

No kidding

bloopernova 1 year ago |

oh wow this is very cool, I can't wait to use it!

Does this work with mods?

piebro 1 year ago | |

Not out of the box. The easiest way to add mod support is to fork the project and add the buildings from mods: https://github.com/piebro/factorio-blueprint-visualizer/blob...

The file is normally generated automatically with the get_items.py script and this data dump: https://gist.github.com/Bilka2/6b8a6a9e4a4ec779573ad703d03c1...

swyx 1 year ago |

why did you rewrite from python to js? just curious

alexpadula 1 year ago |

Really cool!!

as2572 1 year ago |

Very cool!

matt3210 1 year ago |

now make a program that lays out factorio components similar to how pcb auto routers work. Then we can all automate factorio instead of having to spend 200 hours a month on it.