The most advanced calculator for Factorio is definitely YAFC, "Yet Another Factorio Calculator", based on Google's OrTools solvers [https://github.com/shpaass/yafc-ce] (gifs readme at [https://github.com/shpaass/yafc-ce/blob/master/Docs/Gifs.md])

The flowcharts are generally made with Foreman2 [https://github.com/DanielKote/Foreman2], yet another external tool

Both the calculator websites, https://factoriolab.github.io and https://kirkmcdonald.github.io also have both Sankey and Box-line flow diagrams

In-game calculator mods are Rate Calculator (that just shows the production ratios of selection), Helmod and Factory planner, don't have flow diagrams afaik

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But with the new 2.0 DLC Quality and Recycling mechanics which makes every graph connection quintuple and bidirectional, the difficulty to calculate what's the best way to craft something of high quality is going to skyrocket

When I saw the domain I assumed it would be Stephen Wolfram's blog and he'd soon be detailing how, instead of writing a dozen books and developing a new kind of science and changing the way all of computing works, he'd spent 5 years building the bestest Pyanodon megabase.

Side note, Factorio 2.0 + Space Age is coming in a few days (Monday, the 21st). Ardent players, be ready to press the pause button on your non-factory life and dive deep.

It's weird to know the date of your death (of your social life, at least).

The Factorio forum is your new social circle.

In my case, it was the channels the regular group met... OTOH, we already met there before Factorio, we just got dragged into Factorio together...

I guess I'm old but in many of these games, they don't get any better if just more stuff is added. It's already complex enough.

Civilization: add more civics and techs and special resources, more civs, more units... It doesn't bring anything to the game. It just makes the excel more annoying to deal with. I paid for Phoenix Point (from the creator of XCOM). Nice game but when they asked for feedback it was just about wishing either more units or more maps or more factions, which would you prefer? None! How about making the core mechanic more fluid so there's less "oh I didn't mean that"? Or the crashing and having to start over after many updates.

What would really make Factorio better? I don't know. Maybe a simplified interface? There's so many ctrl-click things and having to place and stock turrets in a hurry that it just makes me not want to start the game etc.

The expansion is extensively described in the Factorio blog entries. There are a lot of new mechanics there, they tried to avoid having the new planets to be just more of the same. We'll see how well they succeeded.

There are also a lot of Quality of Life changes in the new version.

I’ve read all of the FFFs as they came out. I have a feeling that between space platform constraints, spoilables, and recently revealed heating mechanics, they may have taken the logistics puzzle idea a bit too far for the average player. This is coming from someone who has finished Space Exploration (spaceship win, not the crazy secret puzzle win).

Guess I’ll have to wait and see for myself when I have organized my life around another Factorio dive.

Space exploration, the mod, added so much more than just more, it added new kinds of logistics and an exciting setting of exploration and gradual conquering of a solar system.

I would say, still, that SE was the missing expansion so I've already had the expansion and I'm not that tempted by the new updates (Except for elevated rails!)

The SR author also showed impeccable taste in game design, improving on the base game, their beacon change being a good example, running over pipes another one.

Agreed. Adding more choices doesn't make a game more complex if the choices aren't meaningful: to me it feels like adding fake depth.

That's how I feel when I jump back into CK3 for a bit every few months and there's a new mechanic in my existing playthrough

Factorio is crack for programmers.

NOOOOOoooooooooooOOooooooooooooo.... I was/am sober for more than a year now...

Factory must grow.

github commit, pr creation/merge, stars frequency would probably noticeably decrease. would love someone to accidentally leak some observability dashboard as a meme. MSFT is a big company, no one will find you, its cool.

There is a big grafana chart showing issues and contributions for all cncf projects

https://k8s.devstats.cncf.io/d/12/dashboards?orgId=1&refresh...

There are several Factorio dependency trackers and calculators already. Importantly, there are several mods that make the vanilla game's graph look like child's play.

The real innovation was just teased at the end. Balancers (systems of belts and splitters than evenly distribute the contents of n belts to m belts) are tricky to get right and compact and so far as I know are only human-designed. A mechanism to automatically design them would be very interesting.

You're in luck! There is a SAT solver for finding the optimal belt balancer for any size (Though it might take a few months/years to compute)

https://github.com/R-O-C-K-E-T/Factorio-SAT

Looking at the big one, I have an idea for a screensaver.

I would be very thankful if somebody actually did this!

Also make it dynamic so every time screensaver activates CPU gets hot, heating the room, removing the need for me to keep pressing the space bar.

With Satisfactory's recent 1.0 release and Factorio 2.0's upcoming release, I'm really loving that factory games are being recognised more widely. They're incredibly fun, addictive, and rewarding. I've sunk quite a lot of time into Satisfactory but less into Factorio. Perhaps 2.0 is a good time to start.

Satisfactory has a range of useful tools like this to plan your factory (if you don't want to do it manually), and they can quickly explode in complexity.

At first it's mind-bogglingly daunting but breaking it down into smaller parts then addressing them down the DAG makes it more digestible. When you finally complete an end goal it's very satisfying.

> Satisfactory has a range of useful tools like this to plan your factory

I think Satisfctory has some interesting game design choices that promote that. Since mines give a fixed round number of primary resources and factories also process round number of items like 15, 12, 30, 60, 90 and so on I'm immediately incentivsed to think how many factories of each type do I need along the chain so so that all inputs are processed. No other game prompted me to do this much simple math in my head. Thinking about whole network of dependecies with their throuput is the natural next step and since it's getting unwieldy for a brain then writing a tool for this is the next one since you already understand what the tool needs to do very well because you were doing it yourself up to that point.

In games like Factorio or Dyson Sphere Program the information about throughput of factories is somewhat obscured so it's not easy to do these calculations in your brain so I don't do that and just go with visual feedback about whether factory is starved or overwhelmed.

Where can I buy/install this game?

And heres a Pyanodon graph: https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/12w2w3i/the_full_...

Stuff of nightmares.

Good graphs, but if possible I'd have put labels on the edges showing resource required per second or something like that to keep the production line running. Some of these need a lot more iron than others.

Then you can go figure out how many iron ore mining drills you need to keep a purple science factory running.

That's starting to sound like State Task Networks/Resource Task Networks from production process design/scheduling.

high-end factorio is all about process design/scheduling, IMO...

http://doomeer.com/factorio does that. You can specify how many of each product you want to produce per second, minute or hour and it shows how many assemblers and what raw material production is required.

Those are Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs), like used in make, and Snakemake. No mention of that word though. There are some nice libraries and visualization tools for DAGs.

That's a coincidence, that the author only picked recipes that are made without cycles. Other Factorio recipes (e.g. nuclear fuel processing) are cyclic.

This is perfect timing - just when Space Age is about to come out.

Is Factorio HNs favourite game or is it Civ V?

Factorio is much more like software development. Especially when you notice that your earlier assumptions were wrong and you need to refactor your base, tearing down all the stuff you build earlier.

I’ve tried Factorio and could never get into it … Satisfactory on the other hand is a game where I can look at the time and realise I should of had lunch two hours ago

And the fact that the dev has a weekly newsletter with dev updates, that helps

FFF (Factorio Friday Facts)

https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-432

Today will be the last FFF before the expansion launches next week.

It's NEXT WEEK?! That made me so happy I got goosebumps. I gotta take some vacation days.

And not just next week, but Monday next week!

I'm off every Monday! So let's hope it's morning at my place when it drops.

More like you need to be off every October and November to start playing the expansion when it drops.

Factorio Space Age countdown

https://vojtykcz.funsite.cz/factorio-expansion-countdown/

see you in another year!!!11

I really want to try factorio, but now I usually see games as non-productive activity (that's my problem and I know it, in my defense, I've already spent way too much time gaming in college and did nothing), I wonder if factorio can make my software skill better in terms of designing and critical thinking, if that's the case, I would love to have fun and practice as well

Factorio is definitely good for your brain - it rewards focus, refactoring, problem solving, linear thinking... But yes, in the end, it's non-productive in any physical sense.

A weekend of watching movies/shorts feels way worse than a weekend growing the factory. It's definitely a step up, but the best would be to get out of the house more often besides going to the office.

One day at a time (recovering from a lot of past emotional pain).

It's a great game but if you play it you WILL get addicted. Approach it with the care you would have when trying a new recreational drug.

Factorio.

As a developer, I'd never thought I'd like to solve for getting off the planet, fighting monsters, building trains and tracks while trying not to pollute too much.

The last part is a truly unrealistic

If you find pollution is not a challenge, try a deathworld run. If you can already beat a normal deathworld - turn down trees/moisture, turn up pollution diffusion ratio; then you can add rampant, armored biters, bob's enemies, etc. I recommend the infinite ore patches mod as well, you will be defending the starter patch for a veeery long time.

My favourite recent challenge was "New Game +", you start with all tech (perhaps except damage upgrades) unlocked, but biters also start at 1.0 evolution. You technically don't need any science to launch a rocket, but you still have to figure out how to build a mall (and enough defences) before triggering a single attack.

Factorio is an excellent tower defense game!

> Factorio is an excellent tower defense game!

It really is, isn't it. You're incentivized to protect every last thing, not because of some arbitrary points system, but because they're all part of a big, interconnected system that needs to work in order to survive.

In my book, Factorio is up there at the top of best games of all time.

I'm expecting a large dropoff in HN activity when the new expansion releases

I'm half expecting FAANG stocks to move downwards as engineer productivity takes a hit.

Hedge funds currently trying to work out how long they expect the developers to be enthralled with the Factorio update.

My vote goes to Oxygen Not Included

I want to love that game, but it has sharp corners that you only discover with time, and that require painful workarounds. Factorio devs, on the other hand, actively eliminate almost every such case, making the playtrough just pure bliss

That's something I have noticed with a lot of really good games. The edges are all lovingly smoothed off by hand. It's a lot of work.

I’ve played a lot of factorio but it did eventually get old for me.

In the same vein I am enjoying shapez (search for the free web version) and shapez2

There are a lot of Factorio overhault mods!

DoshDoshington is my favorite youtuber for this type of things, really intresting and the engineer mind that he has is fascinating

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgQ39dt3Qmc

See also DocJade, Ryan Brown and Venzer

I don't know, but I have to say I was surprised how quickly this one took off, esp. given it's the middle of the night across the U.S. :)

is Civ big on HN? I rarely see it mention. Its my favorite, so would love to find people here who enjoys it as well

Please don't drag me back in, I've already lost a good chunk of my twenties to that game

Considering how Civ' impacted my student years, I wowed to never touch it again. I thought I would never suffer addiction - I was wrong.

Did you see the Civ VII announcement? ;)

There goes my thirties too I guess

I like tetris. I found these two to be the most fun for me:

- https://www.goodoldtetris.com/ - http://farter.cn/tetr.js/

First one is "NES-style" with fast lock in, no ghost and so forth. Second one is for fast play, with ghost and no fast lock-in. I have no clue about current tetris, but i think that's the modern style, no???

Edit: I believe tetris friends was the website where i started playing more tetris some years ago and the version from farter came closest to it, after it got shut down

Oooh, I love Factorio, code, and graphs. What a treat! This'll come in handy soon; JUST finished my starterbase and want to use it to create a "megabase" (or probably "mediumbase" since it's my first time).

Thank you for sharing!

Wow, looks nice! Can you do that for SE and add quantities?

Wolfram and Mathematica are such interesting tools. Maybe one of the only two tech companies that won capitalism along with Valve.