Factorio – Visualizing construction material dependencies | Hacker News Reader

Factorio – Visualizing construction material dependencies

community.wolfram.com

184 pointsbschne84 comments

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

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...

Factorio is crack for programmers.

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

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 victory, not the crazy secret puzzle victory).

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

Anyone who buys an expansion pack to Factorio is a logistics masochist. And they know it and that’s fine.

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 SE 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.

I'm firmly in the "Civ 1 was the best Civ" for this reason, along with being able to play an entire game in a single extended sitting. But surveys show that all other versions of the game poll significantly higher.

I agree. Have played all but Civ 4. Civ 1 has a few faults like way too many game deciding dice throws. Say a turn 6 goody hut spawns either a new city basically doubling your victory chances, or 6 barbarians most likely ending your game really soon. But it's still the best overall. It seems they really understood the power of decisions there. There's no decision clutter about 15% bonuses or so.

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

Hopefully the Factorio expansion doesn’t feel like the constant new buttons added to CK and EU. Those ultimately add nothing to the experience. Why do we need a fourth way to spend political points to improve your regions?

> 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.

Have you actually read what new content is coming, or are you just saying things?

There is a ton of new mechanics. Theres a ton of improved mechanics. And then there's a ton of new content. Everything you critises as missing is actually in the DLC

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...

Factory must grow.

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.

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.

For those unfamiliar, there's alternatively a standard FOSS tool, graphviz, that's roughly equivalent to what these Wolfram examples do. It has a trivial syntax: this is a complete example that draws exactly what it says,

    digraph { a -> b -> c -> a }

Here's minimal syntax for drawing directed graphs with image nodes, in the style the Wolfram example uses:

    digraph {
        node [label="", style="none", shape="plaintext",
              fixedsize="true", imagescale="false",
              width=1.0, height=1.0]
        copper_plate [image="Copper_plate.png"]
        copper_cable [image="Copper_cable.png"]
        copper_plate -> copper_cable [label=" 50 trillion"]
    }

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

Stuff of nightmares.

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.

I struggle with DSP or games where I can't determine throughput of a building for that reason. It's hard to plan things when you don't know how much will be used. I like having numbers for these kinds of things.

In theory you can calculate throughput because they say for example that single production cycle takes 5 seconds, uses 3 units of substrate and produces two units of a product. So input is 3/5×60 per minute and output is 2/5×60 per minute. But that's too much for me to be doing in my head all the time so I don't. Satisfaction is nice enough to just give you result and ensures it's somewhat round so you can do further calculations with it in your head.

Okay, I wasn't aware of this. I've played another game named Oddsparks Automation Adventure where the "conveyor belts" are individual units that carry items, and the throughput is calculated by how long the walking track is combined with how many units are on that track.

I don't really have the will to do the math in my head either, specially since things may change frequently as you upgrade/add/remove things and a throughput at one place causes a cascading change throughout the production chain.

I am developing a game called Astral Divide, which has in common with Factorio to have factories and a tech tree.

Until this week, I had a fancy tree visualization similar to the article's content (except that the location of the nodes was hardcoded). I spent quite some time to implement it and get it right, and it was difficult to maintain and update when adding new content.

Also, one feedback that I got from early testers is that this is confusing, and they didn't know how to read it.

I think that the main problem is that in such a graph, it is difficult to know if a branch means "A is an ingredient to make B" or "A is a machine that you can use to make B".

I spent time this week replacing it with a dumb list showing individual recipes in the form of an equation like "A = B + C", and I find it not only easier to understand, but also way cheaper to maintain.

You can see the previous version in one of the screenshots (fifth thumbnail): https://store.steampowered.com/app/2597060/Astral_Divide/

And the first draft of the new version: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@sebc/113327870376150885

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.

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.

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...

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!

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.

There aren't any other ingredient cycles in unmodded Factorio (besides the trivial barrelling/un-barrelling of fluids).

I thought you could go between heavy and light oil cyclically, but I think the recipes I'm thinking of are from UltraCube. The others are a subset of nuclear (Kovarex and reprocessing), so I think you're right.

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.

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!

Factorio Space Age countdown

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

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.

see you in another year!!!11

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

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 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.

Non-productive activity time is a Good Thing that improves everybody's life when done in moderation. At least Factorio is generally better than drinking, doomscrolling, or gambling in terms of social responsibility.

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 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. :)

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