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I feel like if you want a 3D favtorio then going back to the mother: modded minecraft, is the best option. I have put multiple thousands of hours into industry

I feel like if you want a 3D favtorio then going back to the mother: modded minecraft, is the best option. I have put multiple thousands of hours into industry games over the past ten years (few hours in the past two years though). Gregtech was what got me started and in some ways is still the best. GT6 is complete and a standalone game (Mechanatia I think) is currently being worked on. Factorio definitely wins on ability to automate and scale up, but it is very wide and not very deep. That is to say, there is no exponential growth power or resource requirements by moving up 5+ tech tiers. Combining many tiers with powerful automation would be a very fun combo. Modded factorio is probably the best place to look for this. For now, afaik, the biggest factorio mods are focused on going even wider.

DonHopkins 6y ago
I love Minecraft, and have played waaaay many hours of that too. But I'm not up to date on the latest mods, so thanks for the recommendations! Both Minecraft and Factorio use grids, which make automated building with blueprints a lot easier. But I can't imagine a good way for Satisfactory to support reusable blueprints in an unconstrained 3D world, the way Factorio does in a gridded 2D world (or the way Minecraft could in a cubic 3D world), where a big part of Satisfactory is building around the landscape, natural artifacts, and threading tangled conveyor belts around your other machines and belts and architecture. When you're working with a 2D grid, it's easy to make reusable blueprints that you can systematically stamp out and plug together. (It's a lot like GPU programming, parallelizing tasks by spreading out the data to multiple processors, processing it in efficient units, making tradeoffs about bandwidth and buffering and transports, and merging it all back together again). But there is so much variation in Satisfactory's 3D world and degrees of freedom in construction, that everything you build is unique and not nearly as modular and replicable as Factorio's blueprints. On the other hand, Satisfactory's 3D building tools are fantastic (and it would be frustrating and impossible to play if they weren't so good): they make it really easy to connect up machine inputs and outputs with conveyor belts and pipes, and route them around like spaghetti code. Here's something I posted earlier, quoting Dave Ackley on why he didn't transform his Moveable Feast Machine from 2D to 3D, who said: "I need to actually preserve one dimension to build the thing and fix it. Imagine if you had a three-dimensional computer, how you can actually fix something in the middle of it? It's going to be a bit of a challenge. So fundamentally, I'm just keeping the third dimension in my back pocket, to do other engineering." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22304110 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22304110 Dave Ackley, who developed the Moveable Feast Machine, had some interesting thoughts about moving from 2D to 3D grids of cells: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21131468 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21131468 DonHopkins 4 months ago | parent | favorite | on: Wolfram Rule 30 Prizes Very beautiful and artistically rendered! Those would make great fireworks and weapons in Minecraft! From a different engineering perspective, Dave Ackley had some interesting things to say about the difficulties of going from 2D to 3D, which I quoted in an earlier discussion about visual programming: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18497585 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18497585 David Ackley, who developed the two-dimensional CA-like "Moveable Feast Machine" architecture for "Robust First Computing", touched on moving from 2D to 3D in his retirement talk: https://youtu.be/YtzKgTxtVH8?t=3780 https://youtu.be/YtzKgTxtVH8?t=3780 "Well 3D is the number one question. And my answer is, depending on what mood I'm in, we need to crawl before we fly." "Or I say, I need to actually preserve one dimension to build the thing and fix it. Imagine if you had a three-dimensional computer, how you can actually fix something in the middle of it? It's going to be a bit of a challenge." "So fundamentally, I'm just keeping the third dimension in my back pocket, to do other engineering. I think it would be relatively easy to imaging taking a 2D model like this, and having a finite number of layers of it, sort of a 2.1D model, where there would be a little local communication up and down, and then it was indefinitely scalable in two dimensions." "And I think that might in fact be quite powerful. Beyond that you think about things like what about wrap-around torus connectivity rooowaaah, non-euclidian dwooraaah, aaah uuh, they say you can do that if you want, but you have to respect indefinite scalability. Our world is 3D, and you can make little tricks to make toruses embedded in a thing, but it has other consequences." Here's more stuff about the Moveable Feast Machine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15560845 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15560845 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14236973 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14236973 The most amazing mind blowing demo is Robust-first Computing: Distributed City Generation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkSXERxucPc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkSXERxucPc And a paper about how that works: https://www.cs.unm.edu/~ackley/papers/paper_tsmall1_11_24.pdf https://www.cs.unm.edu/~ackley/papers/paper_tsmall1_11_24.pd... Plus there's a lot more here: https://movablefeastmachine.org/ https://movablefeastmachine.org/ Now he's working on a hardware implementation of indefinitely scalable robust first computing: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1M91QuLZfCzHjBMEKvIc-A https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1M91QuLZfCzHjBMEKvIc-A
- willis936 6y ago
  Buildcraft’s builder can stamp complicated structures, but if you want to use it in factories then every stamp will need some hands on work. Ticking tile entities have fragile metadata that don’t like getting placed by non-players. There may be workarounds, but then you need to implement a blueprint system that can handle arbitrary ticking tile entity metadata. It might not even be a good idea to do this even if you can. Anyway, assuming these are solvable problems and someone has solved them, then you could have a factorio-like experience. The thing is, factorio came out swinging with better automation than any minecraft mod. It is much easier to place things together and have them run free. Logistics bots are an absolute game changer in industry games. The bar has been raised.
  - DonHopkins 6y ago
    I think there could be a whole book about designing reusable Factorio blueprints, like "C++ Template Metaprogramming". The kind you can easily stamp out rows of, and then hook up easily to standardized busses. You can sacrifice some space and efficiency and cost for modularity and ease of building big banks of them with robots.
- Kiro 6y ago
  There are mods that add blueprints to Satisfactory. Kind of wonky but definitely works. I'm sure official blueprints will work fine. My gut feeling is that we will see it in Update 4 since it's the most requested feature. Best game ever btw and this comes from a seasoned Factorio player.
- tialaramex 6y ago
  I more or less beat (I escaped but haven't gone back to do stuff in the "Real world") Compact Claustrophobia recently and one of the things that ends up teaching you is a 3D composability that wouldn't really apply to the real world. Compact Machines are pocket dimensions of fixed internal size (the first one you get is 3x3x3, the last you'll build is 13x13x13) that all exist as a single 1x1x1 cube on the outside. From inside you can reach any of the six sides of that cube with a "tunnel". So if you've got, say, a simple basic Minecraft furnace with fuel flowing in the left, and stuff input to the top, output from the bottom, you can replace that with a 5x5x5 Compact Machine, with three tunnels inside, and any amount of complexity that fits. Maybe inside the 5x5x5 machine you turn fuel into electricity, you run four electric furnaces, and you parallelise the processing. Externally though it behaves just like the furnace... except both faster and more efficient. The limited space in Claustrophobia (before you escape) means you feel compelled to actually solve problems in place this way, whereas normally you'd be tempted to just be lazy and add a few extra pipes here, an extra hopper there and soon it's a vast sprawling mess. When 13x13x13 seems impossibly large you cut that sort of nonsense right out.
gen220 6y ago
I haven't played minecraft in a while, but I really enjoyed Industrial Craft, and haven't heard of Gregtech. I looked into it a while ago, and noticed that IC hasn't been kept up to date with the latest minecraft versions, maybe it's a dying community. Would you say GT is a spiritual successor? Maybe it's time to fire up the servers this weekend :)
- Akronymus 6y ago
  GT is to minecraft what angelbobs is to factlrio IMO. A good entry point for GT is, I'd say, Gregblock.
  - Macha 6y ago
    Honestly I used to hate Gregtech when it was in modpacks I used to play with my friends for making things grindy, but playing Factorio gave me appreciation for what GT was trying to do. More large scale automation, but at the time we were too used to magic box mods that let you upgrade to faster magic boxes to realise.
    - Akronymus 6y ago
      My personal biggest problem was with the conduct of Greg. But honestly, even that is in the past.
      - Macha 6y ago
        My feeling is the modding scene as a whole and the people in it were much less mature in those days. See also fights between mod authors breaking people's worlds for unsupported combinations or attempts to block use in specific modpacks etc. And the ubiquitious overly modular mod so they could put each component behind its own adfly link.
        Akronymus 6y ago
        Yeah, with greg, neither side did well.
kazagistar 6y ago
Mine craft industry required a lot of manual mining and not nearly as much automation. Factorio refined the loop.
- willis936 6y ago
  Mining and crafting is a fine primary loop. It inspires zen much more than factorio. The more advanced tech mods require automation. I have never needed to set up a bang-bang controller for my fuel burner or spreadsheet out perfectly matched rates to avoid overflow/underflow issues in Factorio. In some ways modded minecraft demands more automation engineering, and I find that fun. Advancing in minecraft tech trees grants more powerful mining tools so you can clear entire veins in minutes, or set up quarries that mine everything to bedrock (with the sorting and processing system being a fun challenge). Factorio certainly cuts the chuff and opens up the ability to physically scale up to an absurd size. The controls work is less needed, but the geometric layout is more critical. Since minecraft bases are expected to be small, advancements in tech must be in faster, small machines.

DonHopkins 6y ago

I love Minecraft, and have played waaaay many hours of that too. But I'm not up to date on the latest mods, so thanks for the recommendations! Both Minecraft and Factorio use grids, which make automated building with blueprints a lot easier. But I can't imagine a good way for Satisfactory to support reusable blueprints in an unconstrained 3D world, the way Factorio does in a gridded 2D world (or the way Minecraft could in a cubic 3D world), where a big part of Satisfactory is building around the landscape, natural artifacts, and threading tangled conveyor belts around your other machines and belts and architecture. When you're working with a 2D grid, it's easy to make reusable blueprints that you can systematically stamp out and plug together. (It's a lot like GPU programming, parallelizing tasks by spreading out the data to multiple processors, processing it in efficient units, making tradeoffs about bandwidth and buffering and transports, and merging it all back together again). But there is so much variation in Satisfactory's 3D world and degrees of freedom in construction, that everything you build is unique and not nearly as modular and replicable as Factorio's blueprints. On the other hand, Satisfactory's 3D building tools are fantastic (and it would be frustrating and impossible to play if they weren't so good): they make it really easy to connect up machine inputs and outputs with conveyor belts and pipes, and route them around like spaghetti code. Here's something I posted earlier, quoting Dave Ackley on why he didn't transform his Moveable Feast Machine from 2D to 3D, who said: "I need to actually preserve one dimension to build the thing and fix it. Imagine if you had a three-dimensional computer, how you can actually fix something in the middle of it? It's going to be a bit of a challenge. So fundamentally, I'm just keeping the third dimension in my back pocket, to do other engineering." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22304110 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22304110 Dave Ackley, who developed the Moveable Feast Machine, had some interesting thoughts about moving from 2D to 3D grids of cells: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21131468 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21131468 DonHopkins 4 months ago | parent | favorite | on: Wolfram Rule 30 Prizes Very beautiful and artistically rendered! Those would make great fireworks and weapons in Minecraft! From a different engineering perspective, Dave Ackley had some interesting things to say about the difficulties of going from 2D to 3D, which I quoted in an earlier discussion about visual programming: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18497585 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18497585 David Ackley, who developed the two-dimensional CA-like "Moveable Feast Machine" architecture for "Robust First Computing", touched on moving from 2D to 3D in his retirement talk: https://youtu.be/YtzKgTxtVH8?t=3780 https://youtu.be/YtzKgTxtVH8?t=3780 "Well 3D is the number one question. And my answer is, depending on what mood I'm in, we need to crawl before we fly." "Or I say, I need to actually preserve one dimension to build the thing and fix it. Imagine if you had a three-dimensional computer, how you can actually fix something in the middle of it? It's going to be a bit of a challenge." "So fundamentally, I'm just keeping the third dimension in my back pocket, to do other engineering. I think it would be relatively easy to imaging taking a 2D model like this, and having a finite number of layers of it, sort of a 2.1D model, where there would be a little local communication up and down, and then it was indefinitely scalable in two dimensions." "And I think that might in fact be quite powerful. Beyond that you think about things like what about wrap-around torus connectivity rooowaaah, non-euclidian dwooraaah, aaah uuh, they say you can do that if you want, but you have to respect indefinite scalability. Our world is 3D, and you can make little tricks to make toruses embedded in a thing, but it has other consequences." Here's more stuff about the Moveable Feast Machine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15560845 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15560845 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14236973 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14236973 The most amazing mind blowing demo is Robust-first Computing: Distributed City Generation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkSXERxucPc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkSXERxucPc And a paper about how that works: https://www.cs.unm.edu/~ackley/papers/paper_tsmall1_11_24.pdf https://www.cs.unm.edu/~ackley/papers/paper_tsmall1_11_24.pd... Plus there's a lot more here: https://movablefeastmachine.org/ https://movablefeastmachine.org/ Now he's working on a hardware implementation of indefinitely scalable robust first computing: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1M91QuLZfCzHjBMEKvIc-A https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1M91QuLZfCzHjBMEKvIc-A

willis936 6y ago
Buildcraft’s builder can stamp complicated structures, but if you want to use it in factories then every stamp will need some hands on work. Ticking tile entities have fragile metadata that don’t like getting placed by non-players. There may be workarounds, but then you need to implement a blueprint system that can handle arbitrary ticking tile entity metadata. It might not even be a good idea to do this even if you can. Anyway, assuming these are solvable problems and someone has solved them, then you could have a factorio-like experience. The thing is, factorio came out swinging with better automation than any minecraft mod. It is much easier to place things together and have them run free. Logistics bots are an absolute game changer in industry games. The bar has been raised.
- DonHopkins 6y ago
  I think there could be a whole book about designing reusable Factorio blueprints, like "C++ Template Metaprogramming". The kind you can easily stamp out rows of, and then hook up easily to standardized busses. You can sacrifice some space and efficiency and cost for modularity and ease of building big banks of them with robots.
Kiro 6y ago
There are mods that add blueprints to Satisfactory. Kind of wonky but definitely works. I'm sure official blueprints will work fine. My gut feeling is that we will see it in Update 4 since it's the most requested feature. Best game ever btw and this comes from a seasoned Factorio player.
tialaramex 6y ago
I more or less beat (I escaped but haven't gone back to do stuff in the "Real world") Compact Claustrophobia recently and one of the things that ends up teaching you is a 3D composability that wouldn't really apply to the real world. Compact Machines are pocket dimensions of fixed internal size (the first one you get is 3x3x3, the last you'll build is 13x13x13) that all exist as a single 1x1x1 cube on the outside. From inside you can reach any of the six sides of that cube with a "tunnel". So if you've got, say, a simple basic Minecraft furnace with fuel flowing in the left, and stuff input to the top, output from the bottom, you can replace that with a 5x5x5 Compact Machine, with three tunnels inside, and any amount of complexity that fits. Maybe inside the 5x5x5 machine you turn fuel into electricity, you run four electric furnaces, and you parallelise the processing. Externally though it behaves just like the furnace... except both faster and more efficient. The limited space in Claustrophobia (before you escape) means you feel compelled to actually solve problems in place this way, whereas normally you'd be tempted to just be lazy and add a few extra pipes here, an extra hopper there and soon it's a vast sprawling mess. When 13x13x13 seems impossibly large you cut that sort of nonsense right out.

gen220 6y ago

I haven't played minecraft in a while, but I really enjoyed Industrial Craft, and haven't heard of Gregtech. I looked into it a while ago, and noticed that IC hasn't been kept up to date with the latest minecraft versions, maybe it's a dying community. Would you say GT is a spiritual successor? Maybe it's time to fire up the servers this weekend :)

Akronymus 6y ago
GT is to minecraft what angelbobs is to factlrio IMO. A good entry point for GT is, I'd say, Gregblock.
- Macha 6y ago
  Honestly I used to hate Gregtech when it was in modpacks I used to play with my friends for making things grindy, but playing Factorio gave me appreciation for what GT was trying to do. More large scale automation, but at the time we were too used to magic box mods that let you upgrade to faster magic boxes to realise.
  - Akronymus 6y ago
    My personal biggest problem was with the conduct of Greg. But honestly, even that is in the past.
    - Macha 6y ago
      My feeling is the modding scene as a whole and the people in it were much less mature in those days. See also fights between mod authors breaking people's worlds for unsupported combinations or attempts to block use in specific modpacks etc. And the ubiquitious overly modular mod so they could put each component behind its own adfly link.
      - Akronymus 6y ago
        Yeah, with greg, neither side did well.

kazagistar 6y ago

Mine craft industry required a lot of manual mining and not nearly as much automation. Factorio refined the loop.

willis936 6y ago
Mining and crafting is a fine primary loop. It inspires zen much more than factorio. The more advanced tech mods require automation. I have never needed to set up a bang-bang controller for my fuel burner or spreadsheet out perfectly matched rates to avoid overflow/underflow issues in Factorio. In some ways modded minecraft demands more automation engineering, and I find that fun. Advancing in minecraft tech trees grants more powerful mining tools so you can clear entire veins in minutes, or set up quarries that mine everything to bedrock (with the sorting and processing system being a fun challenge). Factorio certainly cuts the chuff and opens up the ability to physically scale up to an absurd size. The controls work is less needed, but the geometric layout is more critical. Since minecraft bases are expected to be small, advancements in tech must be in faster, small machines.