That's compilatron! It was the tutorial companion in old version of the game. See relevant FFF.
P.S. It's recommended to update to 1.1, many QoL and other changes from the old version you are using.
here's the hacky mess of code i use to add the half million cancel craft commands to the replay.dat of a save that has the crafting queue already teed up https://pastebin.com/1mhzgvM5
i used this source image https://pixabay.com/illustrations/mandalas-colorful-abstract-1084082/
theres some mistake doing discontinuity in the diagonals, somethings getting mirrored.
Yeah this was going to be the endgame after launching a rocket or something. It's probably not going to be a thing though.
You can probably read more about it in this friday facts.
https://www.factorio.com/terms-of-service.
Is it your fault you didn't read their TOS. They warned you.
>> There is a demo available if you are unsure about the game.
Sidebar →
You'll know for sure if you want to buy the game after finishing the demo - but beware that you may look up and realize 5 hours have passed :P
Explanation: Steam Link App for Mobile - Link - In my case I used the Android version (Pixel XL gen 1). There are options to add a controller (such as a Steam Controller) or customize touch controls. I think it still needs some work, but it's pretty rad!
Edit: One possible solution would be to randomly offset/scale the "web-like structure" (assuming that is the current implementation) relative to (0,0) so that it doesn't always ruin a natural starting lake in all directions evenly.
My main request for map generation is to have water that can range between 0.16's extremely stringy patterns and 0.12's incredible oceans.
It's a tough problem because of the need to reach resources, but having a chance to be on the edge of a giant lake at the start is very satisfying. Meanwhile, 0.16's noodle land-bridges are often frustrating mazes, trolling you by connecting (or not) by the smallest of margins when you least expect.
I know there's large-scale variation and things change a lot as you travel away from the starting area (including some massive lakes indeed), but it would be nice to see more large-lake coastal starts. You get free defense from biters, but on the other hand it restricts expansion directions. Tradeoffs inspire creativity. :)
Yes, but also no.
It would require a rectangular object in order to fill a square. However, the tiles are square.
Thus, if you look very carefully, if you make a grid of chests, they're quite close together horizontally, but there's a pretty big gap between them vertically.
Welcome to /r/Factorio!
Factorio is a video game about making a factory. Your end goal is to shoot a rocket into fucking space. (edit: Well, one rocket is the "goal", but nothing says you can't shoot 10 or 10.000)
The game is available on Windows, Mac and even Linux! /r/linuxmasterrace
If you are at all curious about the game, then fear not! There is a free demo available on Steam and on their website!
This sounds like you should make an inquiry via https://www.factorio.com/support/contact or more specifically the official forums. The people there are very helpful and the devs / mods are very attentive. I wish you best of luck in this endeavor. If you have to modify the game assets yourself to enjoy this game maybe the devs have a heart and are willing to cooperate with you on a new colorblind mode.
No it's fucking terrible, it'll only last you, what, 2000 hours ? Ridiculous.
Totally not worth it. /s
More seriously -> https://www.factorio.com/download-demo. Try it yourself, if you like what you see, go buy :D
No. Diesel-punk is the style of Factorio, and bright colors are not part of that color scheme. The whole point of the style is that everything is clobbered together with what the engineer has on hand, it’s not produced in a sterile laboratory. In addition, in a recent FFF, it’s implied that the engineer’s home planet and machines are more clean and colorful, but when you crash land on a deserted planet, you make do with what you have.
According to the devs, the real end game that is still in the works is the rockets allow you to construct a space platform. Then you can build a factory in space, collect materials from asteroids, and possibly even go to other planets. There is also supposed to be intelligent aliens in the game that also have technology. This is all mentioned in a couple of the devs posts on the website. All very indev but also really interesting.
Edit: source: https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-111
The devs release a blog post each Friday where they talk about some of the things they are working on. You can find them all here: https://www.factorio.com/blog/
This one in particular briefly talks about that they hope to accomplish for the 1.0 update: https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-189
The devs have a whole series of automated tests that check a whole bunch of mechanics so they can easily tell when something breaks. They talked about it in FFF#62.
Alright, since the devs didn't include a straw poll, here's an unofficial one to get a feeling for which proposal people prefer the most:
https://www.strawpoll.me/15991216/r
edit: I would be grateful if anyone can post this poll to their forum as well for bigger coverage, I'm not registered there.
The official statement:
> The good deals that are not so good. > > One of the problems we had in the past months were the credit card frauds, so let me explain how exactly it works. > > - Someone obtains credit card numbers somehow. > - He buys Factorio keys (among other things) with these cards on our site > - Then these keys are transferred somehow to these "good deal" sites where they can be bought for cheaper price. > - Eventually, the card owner finds out and cancels all the transactions, we get a notice about every faulty transaction > - Not only we don't get the money paid, but we have to pay extra $20 fee per every transaction that was cancelled. > - As reaction to this, we have to deactivate all keys bought this way, which results in steam key deactivations as well. > - So in the end, we are 20$ short and we lost time dealing with it and the buyer doesn't have the game he paid for. > > Although it is a giant inconvenience for all parties involved, it is not currently a large financial burden for us, I don't want to guild trip anyone, just to get the message out. The conclusion is, that we strongly advice to buy Factorio, or any other game just from reliable sources. In our case, it is factorio.com, steam, gog, and humble store currently. Pirating the game hurts us less than using these sites.
I will try making it more organized since i love using patterns!
For example here is the solar panel electricity system: <strong>https://snipboard.io/VzF2UD.jpg</strong>
I really like them they make the whole thing feel more futuristic :)
Some details of the coloring algorithm are mentioned in https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-201
Basically the game picks the lowest numbered color that isn't already touching the current block. If the color number index goes above 5 or 6 it just starts over. No need for global computation and results are good in normal situations.
It's FFF #201. They use a greedy algorithm, not a normal one for graph coloring. It can fail, but it's better at using fewer colors in real situations, and it's incremental.
Fun fact: There is warning about addiction to the game in the TOS the first time you run it. Unfortunately it's to late to go back at this point. :P
>Especially we are not responsible if you stay awake all night long playing Factorio and can't go to school / work in the morning :)
>
>via: https://www.factorio.com/terms-of-service
​
I appreciate you bringing this to light, it's important to point out potentially malicious apps. But in this case I have no idea why it would require Screen Capture.
Here are the permissions listed on Google Play: This app has access to: Photos/Media/Files: read the contents of your USB storage Storage: read the contents of your USB storage receive data from Internet view network connections full network access prevent device from sleeping
I don't see anything about Screen Capture, and if there was, I'd want to remove it.
I'm a relatively new android developer, and this is my first and only app written i Flutter. So there might be something that I've done incorrectly. But I think I can motivate why it needs those permissions that are listed on Google Play:
There is a feature in the app that lets you import json files with datasets of recipes. This is ment to let you (with some work) use the app for modded recipes. That's why it needs to read your storage, since when I tested, you couldn't copy paste that big files into the app. You had to click the Share With App button on the file which requires Read Storage Permissions.
Internet access is used for AdMob, Googles Ad service.
I'd love to get some help on how i can remove that permissions that you saw, but I don't know what to do since I can't see it on the Google Play page.
It's pretty much the original 'colony survival' game (think Rimworld or Banished). You have a little group of dwarves and your goal is to stop them dying from starvation/invasion/infighting/wild badger attacks. It's notorious for two reasons:
It's pretty great. Because of those two things, it has a bit of a reputation for being unfriendly to newcomers, which is true, but not as bad as some people make out. Once you work out the basic controls it's simply a matter of learning one new mechanic at a time and learning through failure until you have a fort that can survive a few years.
I'm a bit of a fanboy. Can you tell?
I've still got a long ways to go and much to learn. Currently working on setting up the ingredients for Gold Science. My Oil Factories weren't cutting it Sulfiric Acid-wise, so I found another Oil Patch and dedicated it to 100% Cracking to Acid.
It's going slow, but it's going. How does it look so far? :D
​
Edit:
For those who want a full tour of my base as of today (8-23):
https://imgpile.com/images/nakd33.jpg
Warning; Large File. Do not view on Mobile unless you want your Data eaten.
For planning my megabase i'm normally using the kirkmcdonald-calculator. But although you can highlight certain steps it's visual representation can become a bit cluttered.
So i tried an online sankey-diagram builder and got a better feeling of "where the stuff goes".
The above picture was created by SankeyMATIC and the following code:
>Refinery [402] Petrol
>Petrol [402] Plastic
>Refinery [15] HeavyOil
>Refinery [69] HeavyOil
>HeavyOil [15] Lube
>HeavyOil [69] HeavyCrack
>Refinery [214] LightOil
>LightOil [214] LightCrack
>Refinery [56] Petrol
>Petrol [56] Sulfur
>Refinery [160] LightOil
>LightOil [160] RoFuel
>HeavyCrack [29] RoFuel
>HeavyCrack [39] LightCrack
>LightCrack [192] Petrol
>Petrol [192] Plastic
>LightCrack [27] Petrol
>Petrol [27] Sulfur
I think this sankey builder is quite easy to use and very helpful.
The codes can even be created in excel if you use some "concatenate-magic".
The Google-charts-API has a similar approach and is also relatively easy to use.
As a consequence of this chart I am thinking about a divided refinery to reduce train traffic - one for plastic alone and one for all the rest. (my factorysetup is slightly too much focused on trains.)
This is (for me) a hugely anticipated improvement. Normally, when a train station opens, all the available trains rush to it. Only once a train reaches it and disables the station again (e.g. by removing enough ore from the chests), do the others get to repath. This is especially an issue if there is no other station open, as they will then go back, empty, to the unloading station. This causes a lot of useless back-and-forth of trains.
See also FFF #361: https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-361
Fortunately upgrade planner is getting integrated into the next Factorio release.
The factory always needs more iron. And green circuits. And space.
Oil is definitely the biggest roadblock, I think mostly because it's the first time you have a recipe that produces multiple outputs, and it's not immediately clear that assemblers, including oil refineries, stop if there isn't room for all of the outputs.
My 2 cents:
>According to a statistic, only 11% of factorio players have ever launched a rocket
According to a Steam stat. That only counts players who bought the game there and only played vanilla. I bought the game on GOG and launched a rocket in a modded save, for instance.
>I guess a lot of people don't play factorio that much because they find they don't like that
What? How did you come up with that conclusion? The average play time for this game is 85 hours.
Regarding the question, I only did it because I wanted to get it out of the way of me building a layout that I liked for the factory.
It ended up being pushed back to 0.16, but it's really just optimizations to how they're tracked and updated. Nothing game play wise.
The devs did mentioned once about bring micro transactions into the game.
"In the beginning player gets a credit to produce let's say 1000 items. When he does that he can choose to buy another credit or simply continue playing by crafting items manually. One thing we want to avoid for sure is making the game annoying for people who decide not to pay."
https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-132
Luckily it was only for April fools.
The Four Colour Theorem just says that it is possible to do it, not that it's at all practical. Finding a four colour solution for the entire rail system, each time you move a rail or a signal, would be a massive waste of resources.
The game uses a much simpler algorithm. There are a list of 7 colours. For each new block, the game just picks the next lowest colour that isn't in use by any adjacent block. This is fast, doesn't involve non-adjacent blocks at all, and rarely uses even 5 colours.
In case you're interested, they posted their reasoning in this FFF:
> No Factorio sale
> We state it on our steam page, but people are still asking about it so I want to state it officially. We don't plan any Factorio sale. I'm aware, that the sale can make a lot of money in a short period of time, but I believe that it is not worth it in the long run, and since we are not in financial pressure we can afford to think in the long run. We don't like sales for the same reason we don't like the 9.99 prices. We want to be honest with our customers. When it costs 20, we don't want to make it feel like 10 and something. The same is with the sale, as you are basically saying, that someone who doesn't want to waste his time by searching for sales or special offers has to pay more.
To add to the automation you could use PixelGetColor before line 33 to check if the pixel to be clicked is of the right red color, and only click then.
Then you could clear bigger areas faster.
All of the sprites in the game start out as 3d models (made in Blender iirc). They then render and down-sample the image to make the sprite and its animations.
To be fair, the Friday Facts Blog Posts tend to have all sorts of interesting insights into the development process. Then again, a full AMA once fully released might be fun.
https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-364
> When we were releasing the 1.0 FFF-360, we actually stated that there were "around 150 bugs on the forums and around 80 internal tasks to be solved". These were obviously minor issues, things hard to reproduce or very rare problems. In other words, it was quite reasonably stable, which normally goes without saying when it comes to Factorio stable versions. But it proved to be a mistake wording it this way, since some media picked up on it and presented it as a "fairly bugged release".
> So I'm pretty thrilled to finally get to the point, where we actually have 0 known issues and 0 active bug reports on the forums.
There's a whole post about how making the trains appear the same length in an isometric space is a challenge. Your view is not "top down" so the top of the screen is "further away" from the camera's perspective but the grid is actually still perfectly regular. This means that when the train is vertical vs horizontal it needs to stretch.
But yeah here you go https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-133
> 41.570 Uploading log file
That made me wonder so I searched the crash reports and:
> \src\entity\furnace.cpp (123): Furnace::canInsert
> \src\entity\inserter.cpp (633): Inserter::getPickupTarget
> \src\entity\inserter.cpp (886): Inserter::update
> \src\surface\chunk.cpp (575): Chunk::updateActiveEntities
> \src\surface\chunk.cpp (624): Chunk::updateEntities
> \src\surface\surface.cpp (1191): Surface::update
> \src\map\map.cpp (1302): Map::update
> \src\game.cpp (163): Game::update
> \src\scenario\scenario.cpp (865): Scenario::update
> \src\mainloop.cpp (1001): MainLoop::gameUpdateStep
> \src\mainloop.cpp (868): MainLoop::gameUpdateLoop
> \src\util\workerthread.cpp (36): WorkerThread::loop
> ...
> Stack trace logging done
> 34.109 Error CrashHandler.cpp:174: Map tick at moment of crash: 1911239
> ...
> 41.570 Uploading log file
> 41.597 Error CrashHandler.cpp:225: Heap validation: success.
> 41.598 Creating crash dump.
> 41.721 CrashDump success
Fun stuff.
> multithreading the sound load with the sprite load seems like low hanging fruit, and in my case would save ~2s of loading time.
Indeed. This is for 0.16, of course.
> # Game startup time - Sounds > With the loading of graphics and mod data no longer being the slowest parts the next thing that started taking the majority time was loading sounds. I realized, after my work on improving map loading, that there wasn't any reason I couldn't just load sounds in parallel with the graphics. It was a 20 minute 'fix' and now by the time graphics are finished loading, sounds have long finished meaning it can proceed straight to the main menu.
> -Rseding91
Nice to see an annoncement on what appears to be Steam Forums (?), but this has been told way back on Xmas:
Friday Facts post #118 (25.12.2015):
>We have been pushing the stem release forward for a pretty long time, but we finally have a definitive release date of Factorio on steam. The date is 25. February, exactly 2 months from now.
Was about to get all pissy cuz thinking this was a repost of stuff from this https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-132
Take the upvote for proving me wrong!
They actually use a much simpler algorithm they explained in FFF #201. TLDR 4-coloring is always possible but can be hard, 6-coloring is easy but the algorithm wasn't suitable for changing rails in real time. So they tried something simple and imperfect.
I don't have a link but the devs said themselves at some point that they are unsure where they will go after 1.0. They mentioned both maybe adding content to Factorio or maybe trying their hand at a new game.
edit: actually FFF #151 has a promising tidbit at the very end for after 1.0
I remember the switch to the new train gfx. I think they're a vast improvement. Seeing this old trailer reminds me of just how far the game has come graphically.
The funny thing is I like the new one for the same reasons you mentioned you like the old one. The old one is too clean and based too much on rl train engines. The new one seems more thrown together and haphazard like the rest of the tech in Factorio. :)
Check out the high res side view render from when they were introduced: https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-141
Hm, I can try.
normal behavior:
overflow behavior:
everything gets messed up and the third splitter routes items to overflow belt.
This principle was featured a long time ago in Friday Facts #122 (bottom of page).
https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-184
While it's not on the old version page, there's a download link to 0.1 on this blog post to it. It's free for everyone.
I think the new quickbar is one of the best changes yet. It makes much more sense for it to be a shortcut menu that holds pointers to objects in your inventory rather than a a secondary inventory/shortcut menu hybrid; it makes inventory management less of a hassle, and it gives the player 10 sets of shortcut bars instead of 2 so we can have a bar for most any situation - yellow/red/blue belts, fluid works, outposting, railway building, combat, etc. I did a quick search and found the FFF that talks about it, going over some of the reasons for the changes: https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-278
Really the only major difference is that the quickbar isn't actually an inventory, rather it holds shortcuts to those items which are all contained in the main inventory. Personally, I don't even use more than a few quickbars; for example, I don't even have pipes on a quickbar; I just use "Q" to pipette-select objects since there's usually one nearby, and if not I don't find it much of a hassle to open the inventory and grab something, then clearing the cursor with "Q" when done placing.
It's not like Wube hasn't thought about that. They did.
> At this moment, there is no danger of the reactor meltdown, there is just maximum temperature of the reactor and the rest is wasted. We might add some risk into the reactors, but we might as well leave it as it is.
Obviously, Wube has decided against the danger of a meltdown. I guess it's because of balancing issues: Why deal with meltdowns when you can just place another solar field? That would be just another disadvantage.
Per the name they are every friday... https://www.factorio.com/blog/
.15 was marked stable, so now is a few months where they work on making .16 internally before making it available as .16 experimental. It will have a couple new features and potentially be the 1.00 release candidate.
Try to emphasize spatial skills. Spatial skills are not usually emphasized or tested, but are extremely important for many areas of knowledge.
Being able to manipulate objects on multiple axis in your head turns a lot of arbitrarily hard tasks into arbitrarily easy ones. Case in point, protein folding.
Factorio is decent at this, but really, a full 3D building game would be better. I'd recommend either Infinifactory or Minecraft for this task, as adding a third dimensional axis is multiple orders more complex than anything Factorio can currently crank out.
Once upon a time, there was going to be a whole section where you launch a rocket and then build a factory in space. That was abandoned in favor of infinite research but it did sound fun.
I believe the plans for the (Spidertron) [https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-120] are up in the air at this point but I think it's one of the last great hopes we have for a new feature before release.
This is in response to the recent devblog, where the devs revealed they deduplicate blueprints based on CRCs. Well, it turns out making CRC collisions is pretty easy.
If you'd like to try it yourself, here's the blueprint strings:
> 0eNqdlltugzAQRfcy36ZihkcStlJVFUncyBIxyDZVUcTea0CR0oQ09vBj8fC5d/BlzAX2TS87o7SD6gLq0GoL1fsFrDrpupmuuaGTUIFy8gwCdH2ezr5q6xLbNco5aWAUoPRR/kCFowib60ytbdcal+xl424INH4IkNopp+RiZT4ZPnV/3nutCp+YENC11s9q9aTsSQkJGPyAb4XHH5WRh+UuTSbvqPSX2nsz5mRaPy4GH+jpAs/u0OJac9u7rp8Ke5DKmFIUL5XHSiX4oiyln0gV/67vUyEaV1hlHItWPecr4A0LTK/jsw0N5bXskEzugpOeLdQ0hIpp5AcURsW4V7tkOn29ZEisYKUBljOO5QTXEos5L/4YYLPg9QtGu8CS2S8oul3ghlcVMqrastYGA7K54/ST1ZZHKQcVEB/CuNa0slv6DXnewaubnwUB39LY+YEyz6nMcn/sxvEXzMLHPQ==
Blueprint B:
> 0eNqdldGKgzAQRf9lniMkaWqrv7KURdthCWiUJF0qkn/fWF922QF1fJEYPd7cucPM0HZPHL11EeoZ7H1wAeqPGYL9ck23PIvTiFCDjdiDANf0ywpfo8cQiugbF8bBx6LFLkISYN0DX1CrdBOALtpocSW+F9One/Yt+vzCFkvAOIT8+eAWFRlZaAFTvqn8l4f1eF/3yiT+wTUbrv/CDQE/HYZLUrgm2Oa4cLXblTNXuN5ml2zhetuVy2E4bQpVzSuXvUN3xY2hSgRNSS5OkjjFjAMtTnMDsKMrFLfl6IOzm0xu94E6M/O0I6qqZLJpGy7cOGkSd2XWiKZV3BqROC2ZzmVanmPv2Vf/GpUCvtGHNQTG6PJk8lWl9ANC8HuF
Edit: Note, this might change in future factorio versions, I don't know how sensitive their map representation is to version changes. Easy enough to redo at that point though unless they use a real hash.
it's a tongue in cheek reference to the "no sale" policy as highlighted here https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-140
people are just jealous of the 50 lucky backers that got it for 7$ during the initial campaign
meanwhile I'm sitting here watching these peasants like https://i.imgur.com/tzy9M6s.png
In summary, belts are chunked into belt segments, which are segments of belt that are interrupted by a splitter or inserter. Using underground belts doesn't change the number of belt segments, so it doesn't change affect UPS. This FFF goes into many of the technical details of the main optimization: https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-176 (in a later FFF, they explain that it is only merged into 0.16), though several other optimizations, discussed in other FFF's also help.
You know... this might be a good candidate for "Cleanup of mechanics".
Do dedicated fluid inputs add anything to the game? What if the chemical plant and refinery simply didn't care as long as they got one pipe of each fluid they need?
https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-255
>When you build a blueprint of something, pressing Ctrl+Z cancels all the ghost entities, and if some of them were constructed already, they are marked for deconstruction.
>When you deconstruct something, pressing Ctrl+Z cancels the deconstruction, and for entities that have been removed already, it places a ghosts so they will be rebuilt again
This is a fun but impractical science design. You can do as many science as you want (I'm doing 7 here). It's not really useful because it's not space efficient. But it looks cool!
!blueprint https://hastebin.com/raw/ikirobojuj
Iirc there was an update that gave connected, non-branched belts, a singluar computation. This is a simplification, you can see the FFF below. Belts are probably one of the most efficient things in the game.
https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-176
They considered giving pipes similar treatment as it helps immensely. However, I cannot find evidence of them implementation of merging as the algorithm is fairly good so long as you are only doing oil. Nuke requires so many changes in fluids and such it's just too intensive for UPS efficiency.
https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-274
Bots are all individual entities. Much higher ups drain.
Man, that terrain looks so good. Those decals really add a lot of detail to the surface. The cliffs look so good as well, I can't wait to spaghetti around them.
Speaking of cliffs and spaghetti, are we going to see belts that go up the cliffs? Visual example, done in the best graphics program available.
Indeed they are. GUI and UIX are covered in FFF191. Here's a quick snip of the relevant pieces you referred too.
> As a bonus, this goes well with another idea: building ghost buildings without having the required item. When you click a shortcut for something you don't have any items of, you grab a ghost of that item in your cursor. Placing the ghost item places a ghost of the building.
> Another use case is making future plans by placing items you are not crafting or you haven't researched yet. Simply make a shortcut for any item you want and you can now easily build ghosts of that building.
The easiest way is to grab the standalone zip version of 0.18.47 from https://www.factorio.com/download/archive and copy your save to it, load and resave your game, then copy it back to your normal install.
If you're using steam you CAN tell steam to downgrade your install to an old version with the Betas tab in the game properties, but that has issues with a) deleting your blueprints and achievements because it can't read the newer format, and b) not loading because it can't read the new config parameters. Using the standalone avoids those issues.
There are some recipe changes you'll need to deal with, but nothing too major. I have a megabase that was from 0.15 that's running fine in 1.1 without too much work - I think the purple science recipe changes were the most annoying to fix. Terrain generation is gonna look weird- there'll be a clear break from what was generated in the old version and the new version. In my game, I hadn't noticed anything major though, just abrupt grass/desert transitions.
This already exists. that’s what I use on my servers.
I’m running them under ESXi VMs, the VMs are stored in a FreeNAS share with ZFS snapshots and the game backups go to another NAS array.
Funny enough, I happened to be on the Factorio team page yesterday, check out the profile pic for Lubomír Grund. Definitely knocked me down a peg or two seeing that before posting this ;)
There's many ways to play. A bus seems popular because it's easy to describe. Bus with 4-4-2-1 or whatever for whatever item types is a simple description, super organized, and easy to wrap your head around.
Another big benefit of a bus is that it's easily understandable, readable and adaptable as a rule, meaning that you can easily organize a multiplayer game where you do have the shared bus that everyone understands, and feeds into the sub-factories that not everybody needs to understand.
But it does almost entirely remove a lot of magic in the game, and it's probably not "efficient" either. You have to build a lot of "pointlessly long" belts especially early on, use a lot of space that you need to defend, ... and instead if you get good at building without this organization, I believe you could be much faster.
As a shameless off-topic personal input, I enjoy to cause belt hell to myself. ( https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-236 ) If it's infernally tough to connect A to B in my base, then that's exactly the Factorio that I want to play. It's not for everybody and not for every "mode" of playing the game, and that's fine. :)
Unfortunately these keys aren't rebindable either from within the game, or the external config file.
I'd suggest looking for information specific to your laptop (the manual is your friend), you can usually find an "Fn" key that will enable the function keys.
If that doesn't work, you can rebind something else to that specific key (even temporarily) using software like AutoHotKey
> increase the text size
It's not part of the official graphics menu, but the font sizes are also configurable somewhere in the bowels of the scripts. If you purchase the game and the basic UI Scaling is insufficient, then this may also be a possibility.
Before you purchase the game, please do give the Factorio demo a chance.
Openra is an open source rebuild of the old CnC games, for basically any OS you can imagine. It has fully functioning and pretty well balanced multiplayer for Tiberian Dawn and Red Alert. The single player missions are still incomplete, and progress is somewhat slow going, but the multiplayer is top notch with modern controls like attack move and a proper fog of war.
There's also word of work on Tiberan Sun and Red Alert 2 mods. I believe there is a buggy, incomplete build of tiberan sun somewhere.
I recommend it to anyone who wants to try scratching that itch.
One reason is there was good reason not to trust 3rd party sellers:
https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-171 (The section labeled "Grey Market")
People would buy keys and then issue a chargeback and then turn around and sell those keys on 3rd party platforms. When the chargeback finally went through the keys would be revoked.
So yeah, there is a good reason to stick to only the official sellers.
I never really liked factorio interface (to be fair it has improved a lot since its early days), but I also knew it was a WIP all along.
Now, I see these mockups and screenshots (look at the GUI Update Part II as well) and they are amazing. I love the style, it fits so good with the overall theme.
Factorio dev team never cease to amaze me. Great job, hats off!
From the website:
Technologies used
If anyone missed it..
they're hiring!
paste from bottom of the post:
We need people
It is more than obvious, that we should get more people now. We can afford it, there is practically infinite amount of improvements or additions we could work on, and we feel there isn't enough of us. So if you know a good C++ programmer or 3D artist, please send him/her our way, specifically to https://www.factorio.com/jobs
You want a save to be the state of the entire world at one particular moment; otherwise items could be duplicated or erased if the state of a chest was saved the moment before an inserter pulled something out for example.
You could do the save itself in a separate thread, but you would have to, at the very least, make a copy of the entire world state at that moment in memory, so that that save thread would have one consistant moment in the game to look over and save all the data from.
This might seem like a good idea, but while it would be slightly faster on high-end computers (the world would still have to be paused, briefly, during the 'copy' process) it could be much slower on computers that don't have a lot of spare RAM.
Factorio is written primarily in C++, and uses Lua for Scripting/Modding^citation
There's a free Android (and iOS) App called "Balance" that is presented by Statnett who are the Norwegian Power Operator. You have to balance a power grid using three different types of power cable, including the use of Substations to split from High Power to low power. I cannot imagine how much would break (and how many complaints there would be) if Factorio implemented something like that.
Not sure if has a pitchfork, but you can probably build one.
https://www.amazon.com/Wenger-16999-Swiss-Knife-Giant/dp/B001DZTJRQ
That number seems low to me, if the goal is all non-infinite science and launching a rocket. Before the 0.17 research redesign, Twinsen calculated out that it would take 3.5 million copper and 5.2 million iron to complete all non-infinite research. Obviously those numbers are no longer valid but I would be surprised if it's changed by that much.
I think they mentioned in some Friday Facts they would like to finish it till the end of the year, but in the article is something else... so maybe the estimate have changed.
This summer is highly unlikely already, 0.17 is not even out yet and I think they still have a lot of work to do, when it's released then few months of fixes so maybe the next summer is not so stretched.
//EDIT from Friday Facts #223 - Reflections on 2017
> We've said it before, that the game will be finished and released during this year and we mean it this time. There is even the joke in the office that the game is always to be released 'next summer', which never comes. But this time we really really mean it, we want to finish the game in 2018.
Maybe this changed I don't know...
Reminds me of the time eve online had an issue and it ended up being related to their logs. The usual "the logs show nothing" meme came to life.
edit: Found the post-mortem
> No Factorio sale
> We state it on our steam page, but people are still asking about it so I want to state it officially. We don't plan any Factorio sale. I'm aware, that the sale can make a lot of money in a short period of time, but I believe that it is not worth it in the long run, and since we are not in financial pressure we can afford to think in the long run. We don't like sales for the same reason we don't like the 9.99 prices. We want to be honest with our customers. When it costs 20, we don't want to make it feel like 10 and something. The same is with the sale, as you are basically saying, that someone who doesn't want to waste his time by searching for sales or special offers has to pay more.
Auralux. It's the only mobile game I've played that I feel was good enough I should recommend it to others. There is likely some crossover of Factorio people who'd enjoy its challenge.
Yup, Wube looked at the options for where to go with Factorio and decided a large expansion pack was the best idea.
For those who don't know Friday Factorio Facts was the weekly blog by the Dev team during development giving a very insightful look at the behind the scenes an upcoming features.
For anyone curious about that readership spike around June 1 of last year, I think it refers to FFF-245, which gives the first hints of an updated campaign and tech tree.
They mentioned adding Razer Chroma support in FFF #218.
It has (at least that's what they mention in the post):
Its introducing the artillery train. We've been teased with and awaited this train for I want to say the last 2 major patches. No lamenting it!
Yes.
The tasks that multi-thread the best are always those that have no dependence on others. As you add dependencies, you increase the cost of synchronization of the results. You also end up in the realm of very focused problems and very focused optimizations: this is where Factorio multi-threading is at right now. The multi-threaded version runs slower than the non-multi-threaded version, because of cache invalidation on the processor.
Rust doesn't make these problems go away, it just moves them to being optimized by the compiler, instead of by the programmer.
> The only currently planned gameplay features are the artillery train and (probably) the spidertron.
> artillery train
Vehicle equipment grid support Another feature of 0.14 is support for equipment grids in vehicles. Initially none of the base game vehicles have equipment grids, but the hardest part is already done: making them work in vehicles.
Vehicles that have equipment grids can use all of the current equipment; tanks can go faster, have shields, provide night vision to any players in them and so on. The only equipment that doesn't function "fully" is the roboport equipment in Locomotives and only because the locomotive has no inventory to store robots or items.
Cars, Tanks, and Cargo wagons all work fully with the roboport equipment. By default cargo wagons won't deploy robots while the train is in automatic mode and not in station or while under manual control while moving (this can be toggled if that's desired). When a vehicle with a non-empty equipment grid is picked up it retains the equipment so you don't need to re-insert it all when built again. No doubt modders will go crazy with all the new possibilities, which will help us test and bugfix any potential issues.
From the start equipment grids were designed to do far more than they do in armor. With 0.12 came the addition of the Personal roboport equipment, but other than that they haven't had any significant changes or additions. There may be additional equipment modules coming in the future, but for now we are unsure of what functionality they could provide, so we'd like to hear your ideas. https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-153
They are completely different. Minecraft is played in first person perspective, while factorio is 2D, for starters. The scales are totally different too. In 4 hours on factorio I can create a mining operation that is far beyond what I could build in modded minecraft.
It's overly reductive to say that any particular game is redundant simply because there is another game that lets you do very similar things. Look at League of Legends vs DOTA 2, for example.
I would say: try it before you dismiss it and go back to minecraft. There's something immensely satisfying about building it yourself (moreso than watching someone else build)
From FFF 176:
>Currently we move every item on every belt that can move. So if you have
20,000 items on belts in your giga-factory - each of those items will
consume CPU to advance its position forward. The thing to notice here is
that topology of items on belts does not change all that often - i.e.
when a transport belt is not blocked by something, items easily flow
without changing relative position to each other, and when that belt
gets blocked, that property is still true for items located before that
blocked part.
>
>So in addition to uniting belts into several consecutive pieces sharing
the same array of items, we decided to rethink the way we store their
coordinates. We no longer store absolute coordinates of items, instead
we store the distance between items. Look at this visualization:
Here blue lines represent the distance between items, and yellow lines
represent the initial and final gap to extremes of the cumulative
transport line. Most of the time only those yellow things change which
asks for an uber-optimization, where for every transport line of like
20-100 belt segments you only increment/decrement those terminal gap
sizes, and do not touch items at all! Which technically this means
incrementing/decrementing two integers instead of incrementing the
position of all 200 items on those belts. The only place you waste
performance is rethrowing an item from one sequence to another - that's
why we want to keep transport line sequences as long as possible. There
is another issue though - it's when belt gets blocked:
While it is correct that they mode all items at once they don't keep track of the items themselves but rather the gaps between them and/or to the "ends" of the belt, and since there is no gap between any of them on the inner lanes they "can't" move.
> No Factorio sale > > We state it on our steam page, but people are still asking about it so I want to state it officially. We don't plan any Factorio sale. I'm aware, that the sale can make a lot of money in a short period of time, but I believe that it is not worth it in the long run, and since we are not in financial pressure we can afford to think in the long run. We don't like sales for the same reason we don't like the 9.99 prices. We want to be honest with our customers. When it costs 20, we don't want to make it feel like 10 and something. The same is with the sale, as you are basically saying, that someone who doesn't want to waste his time by searching for sales or special offers has to pay more.
This actually was the original plan for the post-rocket-launch gameplay; they never gave detailed plans, but the intent was that you'd build a space platform which would (waves hands) do things.
They had trouble making it fun and ended up abandoning it, but the multiple-maps-in-parallel functionality that a lot of mods now use was originally developed for this idea.
I can confirm that most of what OP says is true. And I also share some of his frustrations. I have a bit of experience from hosting the massive multiplayer events and I like hanging around the r/factorioMMO servers. So here are some more thoughts.
Factorio headless is mostly single threaded. It still does many things in other threads so I don't expect it to run well on just one core. Going beyond 4 cores will have no performance benefit imo. If you want to be able to run a big server with a big map, look for CPUs with good single-thread performance http://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html.
I absolutely hate virtual cores from VPS because they are usually trash.
Since 0.14, many people don't realize that the game is sometimes greatly slowed down by a slow server. They look at the FPS and see 60 UPS/60 FPS. But they don't know that many of those 60UPS are duplicated, because they are waiting for the server. You can see this is happening if the multiplayer waiting icon is blinking constantly, after you activate it in the debug options.
But! There is one advantage to a slow server. It becomes more accessible to players. Slow server means people with slower computers can join, since the game kicks or makes the game unplayable for anyone that cant keep up with the server. Also people joining mid-game can catch up much faster.
As for internet, Factorio is still quite sensitive to bad connectivity. And good connectivity, quality and high speed usually go hand in hand. Try to look for a provider with good peering. A server of around 200 people needs 2MB/s of traffic for game packets. But you need to have a good speed(or limit the map download speed) to make sure that map downloading packets don't slow down the game packets. 1Gbit is what I recommend for MMO events. 100Mbit(with map download limit) for small servers.
According to https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-242 they run a consistency check on every patch update, that if failed, crashes your game, generates crash report and sends it to them. Constant small updates mean more such consistency checks, more potential reports and bigger chance to nail some bugs down.
I'm not saying that 1 icon change patch was just to generate more crash reports.. But you never know ;)
Plus we might be getting really close to .17, and they want to push all the "trivial" stuff before the big-bad-will-defo-break-your-machine updates start rolling out.
I used OBS Studio to record and then youtube and gfycat to upload.
You can also use ShareX to do small recordings to mp4 or gif, but I only use it for screenshots that get directly uploaded to imgur.
If you need to clip / trim / concatenate videos, then it gets a bit more problematic without a proper video editor. :S
>I bought the game via Steam, can I get the Factorio login for that as well? Yes, it is possible. In game you will have the option to register an account on our webpage. You can also create a free account at factorio.com and then head to your profile/settings page where you will find directions on how to link it to your Steam account. It is strongly recommended to create the account with the same username you have on Steam already.
For anyone interested, you can download this version for free in this weeks FFF
Link: https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-184
edit: you guys should go and try the version out... its really impressive to see how far Factorio has come.
A word I haven't seen in this thread is refactoring. Refactoring is something I do a lot in Factorio (and in software development). It the one word to describe what you've coined the second system effect. When playing Factorio, I find myself constantly refactoring, tweaking and improving my past work to make it more efficient, removing temporary workarounds etc. I do this rather than attempting to completely remove and replace certain modules in my factory. This is a perfect example of the tradeoff between maintaining an existing software system versus developing a completely new one (a rewrite). In Factorio, moving modules slightly to fit extra assemblers is less effort than re-making a whole section of your factory, but there is only so much fitting and reworking you can do before you have to accept that you can do a better job and re-make that whole electric engine assembly line. However, building a whole new assembly line takes time and even then, you may not get it right in your new design, wanting you to do it again (Robert C Martin's book, "Clean Code" mentions this in it's first chapter, mentioning how many projects get re-written, then the rewrite is scrapped because it isn't good enough).
Refactoring is how most modern, agile software development is practiced: teams race to get a minimum viable product (MVP, the simplest working version of the software), then iterate on it. In Factorio, you set up a minimum factory first (e.g. a simple set of drills and smelters to make iron plates) then iterate on that to eventually having a system so complex with so many moving parts that you can hardly remember what each part does.
Check out SpaceChem. Nothing with mining but a while lot of automation and routing problems to solve :-)