If anyone is interested I made a build that can make most items at the highest quality possible using a single assembler by switching the active recipe on the assembler. You just throw in the basic resources for the base items in the recipe and it just builds the whole thing at legendary quality.

https://www.reddit.com/r/FactorioBlueprints/comments/1gl5v50...

It takes a bit of setup for each item you want to make though and doesn't work if the process takes more than one fluid. The default in the blueprint is to make blue circuits.

Unfortunately factorio has this mechanic where if you switch the item an assembler is making it loses progress for productivity bonuses, so this setup is not really practical for many items. Plus it takes a lot of space. But it is fascinating to see it work.

The systematic and scientific approach is absolutely warranted if you want to produce legendary quality at scale. I brute forced my way to legendary mech armor with manually steered recycler loops and wasting millions of iron and copper in the process. Since playing on a Linux developer laptop with 0GB VRam and an onboard GPU (at 60FPS!) I couldn't have scaled it much larger anyways but the entire game, it's a fever dream of optimization and I love it.

The difference between Washing and Upcycling is enormous. That does fit my observations, it's nice to see it quantified.

Another aspect that is nice to see quantified is how big the effect of better quality modules is. You likely underestimate that initially since it's not linear.

The Space Casino mentioned in the post is not possible anymore in Factorio 2.1. Which is experimental at the moment, but I'd assume will be released soon. And experimental Factorio tends to be as stable or more as the stable versions of other games.

I would elect the people that does this kind of analysis and management for President.

You can make the descriptive / non-math text in LaTeX look better in math mode by using \text{} e.g. $T_\text{products}=...$!

I wonder how much we could optimize real world agricultural and industrial processes if we reallocated just a tiny fraction of the energy that goes into this game.

There is another very interesting post on this, but abusing the rng of factorio to always get what you want, amazing work...

https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/1weddwd/tired_of_...

I played Factorio a fair bit before Space Age came out, it's awesome. I played it for ages with my kid, and it's a great tool for having him think about software decisions.

However I hit a wall with the game that has a relation to how AI has upended the programming world.

Basically, I got bored, and it might be because of the automation.

In the early game, you are running around with an axe, manually putting down inserters and assemblers, manually crafting items. You eventually make some assembly lines to automatically build stuff, and the outputs then go into more and more complex recipes for which you need to organize the flow of resources.

Along the way, you gain the ability to build trains to move goods from faraway places. Along with a number of other mechanics that are introduced, this creates a bit of novelty, because you discover some slightly different requirements and you get to exercise your brain in how to connect things together.

But then at some point, you learn how to make robots. Robots can place factory components as well as just moving goods around. You make a blueprint, plonk it down, and then the robots get all the necessary pieces, and place them down for you. This completely alters the game, because a blueprint can have a huge number of pieces while still being modular. There are people with libraries of square tiles encompassing every aspect of the game, that can simply be snapped together like legos.

I got to a point where I was assembling libraries and caring more about building a good set of components than actually wiring things together into a factory. I got an auto-placement mod, which I figured was a bit like predictive text in an IDE, it saves you from having to put down inserters and turn them, that kind of micro thing that can mess up your factory if you screw it up, but is actually tedious.

Armed with my new library of everything and my auto-placement mod, I destroyed my enjoyment of the game, somehow.

I had played the game enough times to understand what was needed, and so I got to a place where I just needed to place down a mall (a special kind of factory that mainly makes components) along with the bus (assembly lines of outputs), and things kinda couldn't go wrong. I didn't do any more of the typical early-game fiddling with making ad-hoc designs, because I knew what would work, and I didn't want to do the micro. I just satisfied myself that a few belts and rail lines would be enough to glue my libraries together, and that was that.

What does this have to do with AI? Well, I hear a lot of people's complaints with AI is that they were no longer actually coding. Without the need to type out anything, the micro is gone. People were already glueing libraries together, but at least there was some delight in writing the little bits of knitting. Now, you can just execute your architecture with a prompt, and the LLM will just do it all for you. There's still a necessity of checking what comes out, but the character of the work has changed.

I've tried to get into Factorio multiple times because I really love 2D isometric games, but the learning curve is incredibly steep. In my opinion, franchises like the original Command & Conquer were much more accessible for non-hardcore gamers like myself. Factorio feels less like a game and more like managing a complex software architecture.

I very much doubt the fun was found in the physical act of placing units. Instead I’d wager it was in the immediacy of the chaos, and correction of it, as you dealt with the smaller problems — and the micro-optimizations you could apply being involved with every minor detail of the system.

When you switch to blueprints, you move up the abstraction chain; there’s still some optimization in constructing blueprints but largely you’re now just plumbing… chaining together higher level components, simply ensuring inputs == output, and all the microoptimizations are hard to justify because they disrupt your blueprints. The patterns and structures have reduced to only what you’ve specified in your library (where previously you were discovering them out of the many operators the game provides).

But the literal act of placing objects wasn’t the point, yet that’s all the game has become.

>Armed with my new library of everything and my auto-placement mod, I destroyed my enjoyment of the game, somehow.

it takes a very long time to build a library of everything now with the DLC. and then there are high quality overhaul mods with far more convoluted production chains.

Factorio is an unreasonably good metaphor for software engineering. I think what you experience is a simulation without a penalty for increasing entropy and complexity too much, something that isn’t possible in the real world: The more you tower up layers of abstraction and increase complexity, the more the failure rate increases, so you’re incentivised to actively lower it or avoid some approaches entirely. In addition to that, you’re bound by natural resources, and money, in a way that you are not in the game. Finally, and that might contribute to the drain: You’re solely responsible for maintaining all the abstraction layers.

I can recommend turning off biters, or at least biter expansion. That way you can at least focus on building your factory, without getting distracted by attacks.

Using a main bus where your factory is built in comb like rows on one side (so you can make the bus wider on the other side) is simple and will work pretty well for the starter base (i.e until you fire your first rocket and "win" the game).

I often split my starter factory in 4 quadrants with sufficient space for belts between them:

1. Smelters

2. Main bus based factory

3. Oil processing

4. Personal fabrication and mall (especially once logistic bots become available)

> Factorio feels less like a game and more like managing a complex software architecture.

There is literally a mod [0] for integrating Factorio with Grafana. Yep.

[0] https://github.com/remijouannet/graftorio2

I had the exact same experience as you until I finally tried it for a third time. After working through the tutorial I was completely hooked. I had quite a few hours of fun until I decided I was playing too much and had to delete it. I would agree the learning curve is fairly steep. It's not complicated, just dense.

My issue with it is the same that I have with things like Shenzhen IO. It’s fun to solve such problems but only with the right tools. Restrictions become very irritating when solving something like a programming problem, especially when it’s “refactoring” related