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Show HN: Factorio Blueprint Visualizer

github.com

450 pointspiebro104 comments

Hey there, I'm a big fan of the game Factorio and the beauty of factories in the game. That's why I created a website to artfully visualize Factorio blueprints a few years ago. With the new 2.0 update, a few things broke. I took the opportunity to rewrite everything from Python to JavaScript and support Factorio 2.0 and the Space Age DLC. It's now also possible to easily modify the style of the drawings. Let me know if you find any bugs or if you have ideas for features.

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This is amazing.

I did a similar thing for the game Highfleet, until I ran into roadblocks with the dev team.

My ultimate goal was to have a "print poster" button that would generate the image and ship it off to one of those poster drop-shippers for a small fee. In that game, you can annotate the maps, and the world map with battle annotations is really special with lots of memories of victories and defeats. Alas, no dice.

I suggest you do this for blueprints! The first thing I'm going to do is take my favorite space platforms and outposts and make posters - the colored block imagery is really artful.

And, if you want a real challenge, you could parse the end-game uploads (galaxy) if available, or save files themselves.

Or, slightly less ambitious - a game mod that generates links to this site directly.

Very nicely done!

I actually printed a few designs and hung them up in frames in my home. Maybe I'll add the idea and some links to the readme. Can you recommend a printing service?

I think it's not possible to access the actual file upload using the galaxy hall of fame (https://www.factorio.com/galaxy) or I just can't find them. Otherwise it would be pretty cool.

Oh yeah, I like the mod idea. That should also be quite doable, thanks.

It's cool that you support plotters. I don't have a plotter, but I DO have a 3D printer, and those can also do some pretty cool 2D visualizations.

There's a good ecosystem for Lithophanes [0][1] and maps [2][3]. This would be a cool addition to that.

[0] https://all3dp.com/2/how-to-3d-print-your-own-lithophane/

[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCU13fzqAu4BTAhOSHJgHRqg

[2] https://blog.prusa3d.com/how-to-print-maps-terrains-and-land...

[3] https://map2stl.com/

Oh nice, I didn't know one could print Lithophanes. If you mount a pen in your 3D Printer and the right settings it should also work as a pen plotter. But I don't know how practical that is.

The map2stl tool is also cool. I created a similar tool [0] for pen plotters using OpenStreetMap Data a while ago, which is fun to play around with.

[0] https://piebro.github.io/plotting-maps

Plenty of people have taped a pen to their 3D printer. The main problem is the same issue for all plotters: they just aren't actually that useful. They're neat as hell for sure, they just don't solve a problem that most people have.

"until I ran into roadblocks with the dev team." What kind of roadblocks?

There were a few things that were difficult to render properly that made the maps incorrect in ways that would really look bad to a veteran player. Like certain cities not having the right links via trade routes (which is a huge part of the game).

I got radio silence from everyone when I tried to confirm the way to correctly determine links. So I moved on to an easier problem.

Had never heard of Highfleet but it looks pretty awesome!

Plus, I grew up playing MicroProse games in the early to mid 1990s so wild to see that they are still around and making great content.

I also loved this quote from the reviews:

"A typical Microprose game in that you need to a) immerse yourself in it and b) READ THE GOSH DANG MANUAL in order to have any hope of enjoying it." [0]

0 - https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197989787811/recomm...

Oh it's alarmingly fun.

1. radio decryption and cyphers

2. Complete flying fortress customization

3. ancient tech-obsessed desert culture kinda like homeworld

4. merchant raiding and resource constrained survival

If you get deep into building customized ships, I have an automated optimizer for you to check your stats against :)

I wonder if you could add in the production / consumption rates of various machines into this and have the visualizer show bottlenecks and other data

Remember that factorio simulates every inserter swing, the exact position of each item on a sushi belt, every dip in the power grid, every biter egg about to hatch.

Some designs in 100% runs use sushi (e.g. red circuits, as they take a lot of space/time but few resources, and must initially be built by hand). You can estimate the rates, but you won't be able to find a bottleneck.

Inserter timing often comes up in plastic builds - on paper it's easy to build the exact amount of chem plants to saturate a blue belt, but if you ignore inserter timing you'll be leaving tiny gaps.

Also remember spoilage is now a thing (,: as well as loops, probabilistic recipes, thruster efficiency, probably some more.

Only Factorio can simulate Factorio. The best way to automatically find bottlenecks is probably with a mod.

A mod such as Bottleneck Lite[0], plus your eyeballs :)

[0]: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/BottleneckLite

thank you for the artistic contribution to the factorio community! So much stuff around this game is ruthless efficiency it's very nice to have something with some style.

Nice! I might actually try drawing our factory with a shoddy pen plotter I built, could give some cool results. Well-built factories are really pretty, looks like small ecosystems growths when zoomed out. All the draw settings should make it easy to generate some good outlines

Thanks, pen plotting was my motivation for doing this as an SVG and not on a canvas. I never got around plotting an actual factory though, but I might do it this time.

Almost full circle from discrete processing element board to diagram, the next step is: circuit design to board diagram to factoring.

Thanks for refreshing and sharing this again!

The visualizations are so similar to integrated circuit layouts; they immediately reminded me of some of the coasters that GamersNexus sell which represent simplified computer subsystems.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29381969 - Nov 2021 (15 comments)

I wonder if Factorio multiplayer could be used to play with an AI companion? Here is what I am thinking:

Computer 1 - Human

Computer 2 - Claude Computer Use or other controlling the other

A chat interface or voice interface (Whisper Speech to Text) for Human to feed instructions to Computer 2?

Amazing benefits of doing this:

- infinitely scalable

- could let agents continue to implement strategy and unblock themselves without needing constant intervention

I am a bit sad I finished factorio space age, it was such an amazing game, I wish I could have spent more time on it.

All good things have an end.

I really hope Wube could make it more interesting to play in multiplayer, in games of 50 or 100 players, unfortunately there are no incentives for it.

I suggested to add some resources trading and currency, coupled with a land ownership system, to prevent trolls and scale the game so that any player can join, but it would probably require some balancing.

This game is already 10 years old and still going strong.

Unfortunately mods are not very good quality, or too difficult to enjoy.

Space age is interesting because new planets are being added by fans, but I don't think they're going to be as well designed and really bring anything interesting.

I love Factorio, although I haven't gone far in the expansion. I don't expect any more from them. They've done a lot for this game and they've done it for a very long time. I assume they're now interested in doing something new and I hope they find success at that.

For multiplayer it's really about the people you play with, with is the incentive. Basically doing that stuff with friends is a ton of fun. And you can also include some people new to the game which multiplayer makes much easier for them.

How many hours did it take you to finish space age?

I'm also surprised they already finished it. Without rushing, we're playing for many weeks now, not every evening but then during christmas holidays a lot so maybe that evens out, and are about to go to Aquilo (4th planet, or place to visit idk, out of the 6 new ones)

381:52:32

Uhh roughly 100 hours of play got from nothing to you win screen. Could be rushed, or you could slow down and and get all legendary and spend 500 hours.

> Unfortunately mods are not very good quality, or too difficult to enjoy.

Most of my playtime in Factorio is with overhaul mods, there's a lot of quality content there. I'm not sure how many of them have been brought to 2.0 or even will be. I'm curious where you think quality lacks.

Space Exploration has been my favorite, but Ultracube, Krastorio2, and Nullius were all quite fun. I'll admit I haven't finished Ultracube and Nullius, but I have restarted my Ultracube run in 2.0.

> Space age is interesting because new planets are being added by fans, but I don't think they're going to be as well designed and really bring anything interesting.

Check out Maraxsis and/or Cerys, these were the kinds of planet mods I was hoping for in Space Age. Maraxsis is an ocean planet and you build underwater and in deep trenches, and the planet's building has a base 50% quality. Cerys is a moon of Fulgora that's really quite small and it's more of a puzzle than anything.

What I mean is that the game design is poorly made, unbalanced. Only vanilla and space age seems like they're accessible games.

Generally game design revolves the concept of a effort-reward loop: the player must feel he is regularly advancing in the game, at a steady pace, with a difficulty that slowly increases.

Mods are often badly designed because they are made by hardcore factorio fans who don't understand this or follow this golden rule.

There was a FFF who talked about a game designer they hired, and wube constantly had to make his designs simpler so the game can be a success. It requires a lot of work.

Making a great game is about "easy to learn, hard to master". A lot of people don't understand it, but a game must be attractive enough for casual to medium players, or it just will not sell.

The magic of factorio vanilla and space age is that the difficulty is well designed. Mods often just don't follow that rule, or have a lower quality.

There is more psychology behind game design that we want to admit.

I've been told to checkout Krastorio 2, and myself I've enjoyed the Space Exploration mod

- https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Krastorio2

- https://mods.factorio.com/mod/space-exploration

Thanks I was meaning to find a reason to spend the next 200 hours playing factorio

Nice.

For when Factorio has turned into a Job. And the engineer inside cant' help but optimize.

I really liked the concept of Factorio, but stopped playing after a few hours. I think one of the main reasons was, that it's really hard to visually grok the factories from the in game visuals. All the shades of brown and gray made it not really enjoyable either (I like pretty and colourful virtual environments, there is enough gray and brown in the real life).

If the game would look more like those visualizations, I might have enjoyed it more.

Did you press ALT?

It displays icons over all fabrication and storage devices showing what they are making/holding.

I don't remember, but probably yes.

I agree that the visual style was not for me. I had a much better time with satisfactory, which is quite pretty. It also spares you the threat of factory destruction.

Satisfactory's scale is so massive for building that it was a shock coming from Factorio. I started a project over the holidays and I'm pretty sure it's going to end up at nearly 200x50. I am not sure it'll fit in a screenshot, hah.

When you’ve built 5KM of train tracks just to get around xD

Guilty as charged.

The scale is both the best and worst thing about Satisfactory. On the one hand, once you finish a build it's really fun to admire everything you built. On the other hand, it's an exercise in utter tedium to actually build those things.

This is not helped by the fact that Coffee Stain has been aggressively anti-QoL as they developed the game. They absolutely refused to put any sort of blueprint feature or tool to speed up placing foundation for the longest time. Then when they finally added those things, the features sucked compared to what players had done with mods because they were so crippled. Then in 1.0 they finally grudgingly added slightly bigger blueprints, which are inexplicably locked behind high tier tech, and they actually make fun of the player for daring to want blueprints that don't suck. It's just baffling how hostile the developers have been to making the building part of the game (which is by far the biggest part) user-friendly.

> they actually make fun of the player for daring to want blueprints that don't suck

In their defense, Coffee Stain/Satisfactory makes fun of the player for absolutely everything. They always have. It's just the culture of their studio.

Satisfactory is on my list, once I replace my ~10 year old GPU.

Which one do you have? A friend recommended Satisfactory but all I have is a 5970 and an M4 Pro lmao

1050ti, which satisfies the minimum spec. But it would probably mean playing on lowest graphics settings at low resolution.

Mine is surprisingly still serviceable at 60fps 2560x1600 on older games, but I feel like it'd choke hard on this one too. The laptop performs much much better but obvs can't run it.

I like the threat of factory destruction. It adds to the flavour, and makes designing the factory not just about pure optimisation

Agreed. I started playing Satisfactory a few years ago, before I ever picked up Factorio. And I played A LOT of Satisfactory. Into the thousands of hours.

I'm currently at a couple hundred hours into Factorio and I can safely say I like it better. It is way more polished and way more in-depth. It has definitely had much more time to mature and respond to user feedback. Also the threat level keeps it more interesting. But I do find Satisfactory much more beautiful, and I think the idea of having belts go directly into/out of buildings, etc, without the need for inserters, a much better style than inserters.

Factorio has "loaders" but they're not enabled in the default game, but easy enough to add with a mod (some do as part of the mod, some enable just them, some even try to make them balanced).

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/loaders-modernized or https://mods.factorio.com/mod/vanilla-loaders-hd or this one made by a Wube developer: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/aai-loaders

Lol, it's funny I played both and like factorio much more for precisely those reasons. It's post-apocalyptic and gritty, and has enemies. Satisfactory is great but I need a threat to stay focused. To each their own :)

I always turn off the enemies when I play.

Turning off biters is one of the options during game creation. There are several options in fact, you can keep biters but reduce aggression or just eliminate them entirely.

Look into Dyson Sphere Program.

It's a lot more bright and colorful, though I think it lacks some depth relative to Factorio, but I think that just makes it more approachable.

I wonder if a mod that changes the graphics to a visual style shown in the link (I'm thinking the Carbot graphics [0] swap for StarCraft 2 in terms of scope) would make it feel more to your liking.

[0] https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/article/23053098/starcraft-c...

Probably yes!

This also affects gameplay, but your map will have a lot more green if you turn up the moisture setting on world gen :) and you can have fresh green trees all the time in the space age DLC once you unlock tree farming

The Factorio development blog has occasional samples of concept art [0] which are more stylized and saturated than the final, "realistic" assets. I honestly prefer the concept art style, even though the more realistic sprites complement the brutalism and grittiness of the game.

[0] https://cdn.factorio.com/assets/blog-sync/fff-422-concept-v3..., might be a minor spoiler for a late-game turret.

Just checked Steam: May 2020. So probably after this change.

When was that ? Factorio has increased its colourfuness several times to make it more appealing :

https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-320

(There's also now a saturation slider in the graphics settings.)

And maybe again with 2.0, including some more colorful new planets in the Space Age expansion.

P.S.: The Industrial Revolution overhaul mod might also be to your liking ?

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/IndustrialRevolution3

> P.S.: The Industrial Revolution overhaul mod might also be to your liking ?

Sadly, it's not compatible with Factorio 2.0, and the developer has no intent to update it or allow others to do so.

That's not going to matter much for someone with hardly any Factorio experience. (But computer-savvy enough to install v1.1, which I would assume a HNer to be.)

I wouldn't recommend IR3 to a new player. It's significantly more difficult than the base game - there are a lot more intermediate products involved in making almost everything, the steam phase is a wacky layout puzzle, and it's got some mechanics like ore washing which require circuit controls.

It's a neat mod which I enjoyed playing (and I wish it were playable in 2.0!), but it's aimed at experienced players. Someone with only a few hours in the game will hit a wall pretty quickly.

I'd be surprised if there wasn't a mod for this already. Personally I like the art style and direction, I just want more details and maybe even in 3D to rotate the camera. Hopefully they're working on the sequel with some of this.

I recently played The Planet Crafter. Some similar concepts to factorio, but not quite as deep. But it becomes wonderfully colorful.

Some observations - get off a planet, but in first person perspective. No guns/fighting. Less of a time suck than factorio. Upgrades seem to be less tightly tied to exactly what you do. It's somewhat unclear how to even know how to progress, but maybe it doesn't matter. When automation becomes available, it is easier. There's a struggle for food, water, air at the beginning I didn't like at first (even in menus it doesn't pause). I learned to accept and enjoy it though, and things you do make it less of an issue.

Have you played Shapez? It is a simpler version of a factory game, but I really enjoy it and love the complexities of the shape stacking. It is on Steam or you can play for free here: https://dimava.github.io/shapez/modZ/

I don't picture Factorio's base pallette to be drab, but if you do, you should check out the color blind mod that amps up the colors and adds distinct visuals for things that would otherwise need color to distinguish . ETA: did you play 2.0 or an older version? They've spruced up the color a few times over the years.

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/colorblind_ultimate

I burnt out mid-Aquilo. RIP

Same. I didn't like Fulgora, then I didn't like Gleba, but pushed through to get to Aquilo so I could see all the content. But then Aquilo wasn't fun either thanks to the massive amount of ice platform I needed to build and how slow it is to build. I just stopped playing. Overall I was pretty unhappy with Space Age, as it doesn't really feel like Factorio any more (except for Vulcanus which is excellent).

I actually found the new mechanics on Fulgora and Gleba very enjoyable. Fulgora especially, for whatever reason. I enjoyed spaghetti-ing my way through all the planets by primarily using the resources available on that planet ("starter" rocket full of belts and power poles notwithstanding).

Aquilo is just so barren. The new mechanic it introduces locks down player choice, as opposed to the other planets that are rife with opportunities for exploration and creativity.

I think that Nauvis+Vulcanus you can still build gnarly mega bases, if the full space age isn't your thing.

I find fulgora and gleba a bit tedious, but I appreciate that each of them bring unique new restrictions/mechanics/challenges to the game. Vulcanus is actually the least inspired, from a mechanics perspective. Mining->lava. It's a good lead-in to those wilder planets.

I didn't like fulgora for a long time...I think I started having fun with it when I got fusion power there and deleted the accumulator farms. Gleba was a thorn in my side for a long time but finally got it to a place of stable (over)production. It's begging for a rebuild (massively abusing robots there currently).

I can imagine that getting different power would help. My biggest problem with Fulgora is that even on the largest islands, it's so cramped because you have to have huge amounts of accumulators to keep things up through the pauses between storms. The island where I built my Fulgora factory (not including scrap processing) is 50% filled with accumulators, and even then I still will lose power sometimes.

There's a few alternative ways to go about it. If you have heating towers from gleba, you can burn some excess solid fuel (and melted ice) from scrap to make steam. Might be short on ice but could drop some from orbit (if your asteroid processing tech is good enough?). Or cart in nuclear stuff from nauvis. If you've started on higher quality stuff you could probably recycle extra batteries and make higher quality accumulators (a little more space efficient...but if you're still power constrained you probably wouldn't be removing the old low quality ones...).

Did you forget that you also have steam power? It is much more energy dense than accumulators, and there is plenty of fuel around.

> Vulcanus is actually the least inspired, from a mechanics perspective.

I agree with that, but I also think that the huge mechanical divergence of the other planets is a bad thing. Like I said, building on other planets it really doesn't feel like Factorio any more... more some new game with Factorio graphics.

I've thought about this comment a bit, and I was debating on whether to "agree to disagree" or state my case.

I think that they are a terrific sequel/expansion to Factorio. It's still "Logistics: The Game".

Fulgora requires you to work in confined space and manage a complex situation regarding waste.

Gleba requires you to deal with stock that expires, sometimes dangerously. (Tip: Basically you need to keep refining the "dangerous" spoilable products into non-dangerous products constantly, or else burn it).

Aquilo I haven't gotten to yet.

These planets have expanded the scope of real-world logistics concepts one may think about in manufacturing, in my opinion. The expansion would have been a lot more boring if all they did was add stack inserters and turbo belts. If they are not fun, then there are mods to disable/modify recipes to not need them, while still getting all the cool new tech in Space Age.

> ... it doesn't really feel like Factorio any more...

Something that stands out is that Space Age is more of an adventure (overcome challenges in series) where Factorio the base game was a sandbox (challenges can be handled in parallel).

In the base game, if someone doesn't like rail then they can just ignore it for an entire playthrough. Ditto nuclear/solar, most military techs, most other logistics, and so on. If someone likes yellow belts and coal power that can carry them through an entire playthrough. If you don't like Gleba/spoilage, you can't skip it because it is necessary to see any parts of the game gated behind it which is Aquilo onwards. Heaven help you if you don't like how space platforms work, because they gate everything and are quite unique compared to the rest of the game which some players must hate.

For better or worse, Aquilo is designed to be a limiter against end-game tech. All the other planets you can drop in and get everything going from scratch; Aquilo is there to gate legendary items and railguns and fusion power, essentially, and it’s the first time that the quality of your shipping logistics really matters to the player, esp. through high danger areas.

That said, I loved the redesign work needed on Aquilo, it took me quite a while to get the hang of cascading temperature brownouts, heat fluid dynamics, and adding piping to layouts. I found that fun.

Eventually, Aquilo can work like any other base, with rare - legendary bots, it can be remotely laid out and expanded as needed; in reality, very very little needs to be built on Aquilo to support even relatively large economies. I’m on my second playthrough, I have legendary-only production lines up for everything but railguns and fusion power and I’m just thinking about adding my second pump jack for fluorine.

Anyway, come back to it in a year - you might find it’s fun after all. :)

I usually hit a burnout point in Factorio, and either I start throwing down blueprints obtained online (turn it into a resource discovery / train game) or I wander off.

TIL you can pull ammo from a turret to put in another like you can with research packs/labs.

I love all the mods/tools around Factorio, I don't think I've put more hours in any other video game, maybe Skyrim, maybe not. It tickles all right parts of my brain especially now that I write less code in my current position.

Factorio is so wild because you can sink 3,000 hours into it and still discover new tricks.

I like the emphasis on this being beautiful and the pen plotter experiments. There's plenty of productivity tools for Factorio, including several blueprint renderers. This one's special for having some aesthetics.

These would be more useful if assemblers had an icon showing which recipe is selected.

This is really cool. Finally the factories can look like chip designs.

Incredible work.

oh come on guys, i've got real work to do

You had real work ahead of you, but now you have a template for that.

true, i loaded up my save to try the visualizer, but i just have to fix my factory energy output first real quick

Nuclear go brrr.

yeah but getting from 1 to 10MW is a pain with all these pumps

Pumps, plural? I don't think we needed more than the default 1200 u/s that a single offshore pump gets (the one that you start out with) to scale from 0 until nuclear

With water changes, single water pump can now power 100+ heat exchangers.

The factory must grow

My partner doesn't understand I put all those extra shifts in the factory for the benefit of the family.

I downloaded the demo for Factorio last night and suddenly it was two in the morning. Amazing game, I'm scared to buy it.

Just wait until you start hearing the birds.

Who needs an alarm clock when there's always the damn birds to tell you when it's bedtime

No kidding

oh wow this is very cool, I can't wait to use it!

Does this work with mods?

Not out of the box. The easiest way to add mod support is to fork the project and add the buildings from mods: https://github.com/piebro/factorio-blueprint-visualizer/blob...

The file is normally generated automatically with the get_items.py script and this data dump: https://gist.github.com/Bilka2/6b8a6a9e4a4ec779573ad703d03c1...

why did you rewrite from python to js? just curious

Really cool!!

Very cool!

now make a program that lays out factorio components similar to how pcb auto routers work. Then we can all automate factorio instead of having to spend 200 hours a month on it.

> Ported everything from Python to Javascript for simplicity and performance

ROFL

The python code was running in the browser using pyodide before. It took a while to load and was kind of messy to use. But it worked well once loaded which was pretty cool.

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