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Comment by IntelMiner | Hacker News Reader

Given this was posted in 2020, perhaps they'll do a 10 year one? I know they've been doing weekly updates about their upcoming expansion pack due next year, heavily based on the "Space Exploration" mod

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What's more fascinating is how they've found things to talk about every week for 10 years. Shows how detailed and complicated the game can be

They took a long break from them after 1.1, the first version was finished. They started again recently in preparation for the 2.0 release, which will hopefully be sometime next year.

Just got 14th gen i5 5.2 GHz with 6.4GHz ram and rtx 3080, and the game I'm waiting the most for will run on my 12y old i5 2nd gen Thinkpad

Factorio benefits greatly from faster CPU. GPU, not so much.

As for RAM, anyone trying to sell you on faster RAM is a snake oil peddler.

In Factorio's very specific case, overclocking your RAM is probably the best way to eke out that little bit of extra performance. FWIW.

> As for RAM, anyone trying to sell you on faster RAM is a snake oil peddler.

Quite to the contrary. Factorio benefits even more from memory speed than CPU speed.

If you want to boost your Factorio'ing with memory speeds, you grab a 7800X3D from AMD.

Claims of faster RAM being a significant benefit is and always will be snake oil, unless you have very specific needs and you know what you're doing (no, Factorio usually doesn't fall under this).

For most people, you get faster RAM after you've maxed out everything else and there's nothing left to possibly improve. Because most of the benefit will be in the form of Johnson Stroking than actual performance.

The most common benchmarks (e.g. flame_sla 10k) overstate the performance of the X3D processors. They're great at running benchmarks on smaller maps whose working set fits entirely into L3 cache, but they're also overkill for that -- being able to run benchmarks at 300+ UPS hardly matters when you only need 60 for realtime. The gap closes quite a bit on larger maps.

The usually go deep in algorithms and data structures used to model the game mechanics and systems. Also they discuss refactorings in pretty good detail. They have a lot of topics to talk about, and some of them are pretty good software engineering texts to read.

>heavily based on the "Space Exploration" mod

I'm pretty sure it's actually the same guy.

They hired the guy, but AFAIK it's going to be very different from SE, apart from the basic "multiple planets" concept.

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