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Seven Years of Factorio Friday Facts (2020)

alexwebb2 5y ago
Quick links to the five "must read" posts that William highlighted: > FFF #243 - New GUI tileset: Showing off their GUI design document. A MUST READ, if only for a good example of a comprehensive design style that fits the game theme perfectly. (https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-243 https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-243) > FFF #176 - Belts optimization for 0.15 : Incredible analysis of transport belts and optimizing their performance. A MUST READ. (https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-176 https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-176) > FFF #204 - Another day, another optimisation : Solid technical writeup on how a prefetching optimization patch works across a number of resource-heavy factory builds. A MUST READ. (https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-204 https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-204) > FFF #296 - All kinds of bugs : The snippet at the bottom is a perfect encapsulation of their attitude towards problem solving. It’s such a simple concept, just going a little farther, that can take tremendous discipline and focus. A MUST READ. (https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-296 https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-296) > FFF #356 - Blueprint library for real : Michal “kovarex” Kovařík, one of the two cofounders, talks about falling out of the development process, losing his sense of purpose, and how playing Factorio with his son brought him back. Reading this one, even through the sometimes-broken English, is inspirational and a wonderful look at how things fall apart and come back together. Like I mentioned in the intro, this is one of those rare, special offerings that is technical in nature but deeply personal and human-centric in form. A MUST READ. (https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-356 https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-356)
- scrollaway 5y ago
  356 is a really nice read. inspirational indeed.
  - throwawaw 5y ago
    Yeah, that one caught my eye (and then moistened it). The way he breaks his slump by sharing Factorio with his son -- what a wonderful, unexpected benefit of working in games. How many of us will get to do something like that?
- bombcar 5y ago
  > Earlier this week we got a bug report about the game freezing, consuming all of the available RAM, and then crashing when it ran out of RAM. It was again a modded save file so my first instinct was to blame it on a mod. Again, I had to test it. And again... it's never what you think it is. > So, I still repeat the phrase: "Crashing on dereferencing null? Just add a null check!" as a reminder to myself and others to always look deeper into why and never stop at the basic symptom of a problem. I feel this is a very important rule that people often forget - most anytime your "safety" code triggers, something went wrong somewhere else and it can be worth tracking it down.
  - pdpi 5y ago
    It's a perfect example of how useful it is to think in terms of what invariants should hold and why.
- unspecified 5y ago
  > FFF #176 - Belts optimization The last bit of this post mentions UDP packets not making it through ISPs if their checksum is 0x0000 or 0xFFFF...what is THAT all about? This would have been in February of 2017. > If you remember from the previous FFF, our map downloader was having some extremely rare problems with some mysterious packets that would always get filtered over the Internet. We already had a fix for it, but I was curious what was going on. Thanks to the investigative power of the Factorio community, we found out that all those mysterious packets, before NAT, had a checksum of 0xFFFF. Admalledd from the forum sent some hand-crafted packets through his Internet connection and surprise, all packets would go through, except those with a checksum of 0xFFFF or 0x0000. At this point I would just assume this ISP(and some other few ISPs around the world) have some faulty hardware or software that do not handle these special cases of UDP checksums.
  - zamadatix 5y ago
    If the checksum comes out as all 0's you're supposed to make it all 1's (0 in a UDP checksum means no checksum) so really it's related to that singular value and, if you've ever seen the quality of some of the dirt cheap hardware with ancient firmware some carriers use, it's really not that surprising for it to be bugged as described as they really don't care about dropping the occasional UDP packet when it's probably dropping more than that of general traffic due to how cheap and overrun it is anyways.
daolf 5y ago
I've been a huge fan of Factorio since 2014. A huge fan of the game, the team, and the entrepreneurial adventure. Their willingness to share insights, every weeks, for 7 years is quite rare in the industry. It was also awesome to read the thought process behind each design decision alongside some nerdy story about C++ optimization. Factorio team, if you're ready this, thank you!
- cogman10 5y ago
  The game is also seriously fun :D. It has such replay-ability for me. You can either make new factories or you can infinitely tweak old ones. So much fun tweaking lines to increase efficiency and throughput.
- ghostbrainalpha 5y ago
  Any tips on where I could go to read more about the entrepreneurial adventure?
TheMerovingian 5y ago
Probably the best game I have ever played and the only game I bought not once, but thrice (two were gifts). As a developer, it allowed me to determine what kind of developer I am, where my interests lie, and how I contribute to code (or a base). The analogue between coding and Factorio is incredible.
- agentwiggles 5y ago
  Preamble: I mean this as a compliment to the game, so I hope I don't come off too negative. Factorio is so analogous to coding that I just couldn't get into it. I laid out a neat little factory and then requirements changed and I realized that I needed to basically abandon what I had and build something new. My factory was not really "open to refactoring". Something about that feeling felt so similar to what I have to do at work all day that I closed the game and haven't gone back to it since. I got really into a technical Minecraft mod back in my college days (Better Than Wolves). For some reason I never really had the same problem with that, in fact I really enjoyed crawling around in tunnels and changing things around. Something about the 3d-ness of Minecraft made it feel more like tinkering maybe. Idk, this post has become a ramble - but suffice it to say that Factorio felt _too much_ like programming for me to truly enjoy it. Maybe that says something about the kind of developer _I_ am ;)
  - kortex 5y ago
    That is an oft-echoed sentiment. I've experienced it a little bit myself, but the main reason I've fallen out of it (after a few fiercely addicted bouts) was it felt like I was exacerbating some RSI, especially with my mousing hand. But yeah once you start thinking about on-demand rail delivery using signals as RPC...it's pretty work-like. :D The async nature of the inventory system means long-range signal transmission handling ends up feeling exactly like bit-banging on a microcontroller, which is sufficiently out of my current work scope that it's fun and interesting. Oh no, this makes me want to attempt the Ben Eater computer in factorio...
  - clows 5y ago
    I've played a few hundred hours of factorio, so by no means a _lot_ but I've launched quite a few rockets and "finished" the game a few times. Depending on how long you played you might have missed out on the part that's the most fun (for me at least) - the later/end game. Once you have bots the game changes a lot and you stop building stuff yourself and let bots build stuff for you. Once you have a few hundred bots (and resources) you can build/destroy/rebuild/scale up huge parts of the factory. The starting factory is usually abandoned but a megabase can be a beast of it's own with constantly tweaking bottlenecks - which can be quite a lot of fun (or it is for me at least)
nindalf 5y ago
For those wondering why this game about factory management keeps showing up on the front page of HN, it’s because the gameplay reminds its fans of software engineering in subtle ways. People who are good at one are likely to be good at the other. More about this here - https://blog.nindalf.com/posts/factorio-and-software-engineering/ https://blog.nindalf.com/posts/factorio-and-software-enginee...
- derefr 5y ago
  An interesting thing about Factorio to me (beyond what’s stated in the linked article), is that it contains a nearly a perfect 1:1 analogy to software concurrency. • Belts are blocking CSP channels, as seen in e.g. Golang (where N producers have to share — or eventually “merge onto” — one channel representing the blocking-receive point of the consumer; which are best only used to transport messages of a single type, or if not, then the sum-typed channel must be demultiplexed at the end, with this tending to lower throughput; where messages of a given type “queue up” until the channel is full, and then all producers block when attempting to write to the channel; where if you’ve got producers producing at different rates, then the fastest ones can hog the capacity of the channel, decreasing throughput and unevenly spending input resources such that some components fail long before others; where the solution to this is to give each producer its own bounded outbox channel that multiplexes onto the consumer’s channel, such that the producer will block itself rather than blocking its siblings; etc.) • Logistics robots are message-queue topics (where N producers can publish messages of a given type, without worrying about how they’ll get to a consumer; where consumers [demand chests] subscribe to specific event message types; where the bus itself can get overloaded, causing delivery failures of unrelated topics as delivery-threads sit around holding a message unable to deliver it; where the solution to this is to add reliable MQ-internal storage [network-linked storage chests] for the agents to offload produced messages to until demand comes for them.) (Sadly there’s no exact equivalent to Erlang-style message-passing, where producers target messages of arbitrary type at a specific consumer, which all go to the consumer’s single inbox; and where, if that inbox is full, then the message just “evaporates” en route, since the passed message has async semantics where the producer isn’t linked to its delivery. But, interestingly, that type of concurrency totally could be added, with a not-even-very-complex mod — just add a “outbox” chest object that can be configured to “target” a specific “inbox” chest somewhere else; and a second type of logistics robot that only moves stuff from outbox chests to inbox chests, not according to “demand” but just because anything currently sitting in an outbox chest is “intended to be” in the corresponding targeted inbox chest; and then ensure that this alternate type of logistics robots have non-reliable delivery semantics, where if the “inbox” chest signals to the network that it’s full, then all active delivery-threads targeting that inbox will literally “drop their messages on the ground”.) IMHO it’s actually possible to learn how to be an effective distributed-systems engineer, just by playing Factorio and trying to scale the throughput of a resource-constrained system. In the process, you’ll likely re-invent many real-world concurrent software design patterns. Doing this first, and then reading a Distributed Systems textbook, will have a much more visceral impact on you, because you’ll have already faced these problems, struggled with them, and now you’re being handed all the techniques for solving them on a silver platter.
TOGoS 5y ago
The Friday Facts were fantastic. I don't know of any other non-open-source project (but counterexamples are of course welcome) that encourages the developers to put that much technical information about what they're up to out on the website. I especially loved the ones about belt optimizations, multi-threading, and the networking model, since those are all interesting problems that any game developer is likely to think about but not necessarily get around to really solving the way that Factorio did. The FFF's inspired me to, on a total lark, send over my resume, which turned out to be good timing. I think my "holy crap I'm working on factorio, pinch me" was equivalent to some people's "holy crap I'm working for Microsoft." I still remember the odd smell of the office when I first walked in ("sorry it smells like acid in here", I was told, and was later disappointed to learn that when Europeans say "smells like acid" they just mean it smells bad; there was no open use of entheogens while I was there). I'm glad fff-200 made the cut for this guy's list, as that's the one where I announced the new 'programmable noise' terrain generator. More deets in https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-207 https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-207, https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-258 https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-258, and https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-282 https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-282, among others.
- drewmate 5y ago
  Thanks for writing (the code and the blogs!) What are you up to these days?
  - TOGoS 5y ago
    These days I'm at a 'regular job' that is far less interesting, but pays a lot better, which I was especially glad about when the furnace needed replacing. So it goes, sometimes. I mostly blame the US healthcare^W extortion system.
- spieswl 5y ago
  Absolutely. I'm a sucker for good writing and I feel that you all set an excellent example of how to do technical writing and analysis correctly.
spieswl 5y ago
Author here. Wow, uh, I definitely did not expect to be featured on HN this morning, but seeing this linked put a massive smile on my face. There are just so many examples of captivating writing, innovative problem solving, and candid discussion throughout the FFFs. Taken all together, the Factorio journey is one of my favorite _stories_ to read...and it contributed to becoming a better designer and engineer along the way. I really encourage people to read more of their blog than just what I've linked, since it crosses so many areas of interest. To anyone reading that's worked on Factorio, thank you and you all are wonderful people.
01127790781 5y ago
هكر
FredPret 5y ago
My biggest Factorio lesson was this: I no longer start a new factory from scratch if I want to do things differently. I use my existing - and now outdated - factory to launch a new one a few minutes run away.
- kortex 5y ago
  Throw the first one away. Especially when starting a run, plan on throwing away the starter base. I learned this trick watching AntiElitz speedruns. He'll build a manual bootstrap "factory" (really just mines and smelting) to get plates, then build a very-polished-through-iteration bootstrap base which builds all the development essentials - circuits, arms, belts, ammo, etc. That's used to build the real base.
  - zentiggr 5y ago
    That sounds a lot like the old Gentoo stage 1 / 2 / 3 build system... Makes me a little more interested, in general.
- ThatPlayer 5y ago
  I've done this once, but ended up spending three days building a rail in one direction because resource patches get bigger the further you are away from spawn. I ended up using nuclear powered trains to traverse it and it was still about 15 minutes to travel.
mikewarot 5y ago
I find myself playing Rocket Rush, without the rush. This allows access to all the tech without the grind. I've built so many small nuclear plants with a bunch of steam tanks to store the power until needed. I've also built a ton of solar arraignments. The constant things I always buy are 4 heavy oil, and 200 plastic. I usually get 10 miners, electric furnaces, and level 2 assemblers. Once I have power, and coal gasification up and running for plastic/explosives/batteries, it's just a grind. I've settled on using an Island terrain, to give it an end, rather than just not wanting to keep expanding forever. Once the island is cleared, and has radar, it's time to start again.
stevenpetryk 5y ago
This reminds me of a cool article I read about how Kerbal Space Program 2 renders orbits. I love reading things like this: https://www.kerbalspaceprogram.com/dev-diaries/6509/ https://www.kerbalspaceprogram.com/dev-diaries/6509/
- chairmanwow1 5y ago
  Those disclaimers at the beginning of the article are so out of touch
  - Kiro 5y ago
    Why?
  - J5892 5y ago
    I... what? How?
- DonHopkins 5y ago
  In stark contrast with the company that developed Factorio, the companies that developed KSP (Squad, and then Take Two who bought them) totally fucked over their developers. https://www.mcvuk.com/development-news/squad-devs-blast-kerbal-space-program-studio-for-high-crunch-and-low-pay/ https://www.mcvuk.com/development-news/squad-devs-blast-kerb... https://www.destructoid.com/former-kerbal-space-program-developers-slam-studio-for-poor-pay-and-crunch-time/ https://www.destructoid.com/former-kerbal-space-program-deve... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23402639 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23402639 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-03/kerbal-space-program-2-release-disrupted-by-corporate-strife https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-03/kerbal-sp... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12639564 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12639564 https://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/55vozd/theres_no_easy_way_to_say_this/ https://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/55vozd/... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20742105 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20742105
and0 5y ago
To anyone who loves Factorio as much as I do, I strongly recommend the new game Dyson Sphere Program. I never truly beat Factorio the way I did DSP, so I can't compare them completely, but DSP takes the concept to a 3D planetary scale and is in many ways much friendlier. Also no combat/bugs, at least not yet. The dev team is Chinese and are releasing amazing quality-of-life updates at a rapid clip, too. Truly impressive piece of software.
- glenneroo 5y ago
  Glad you mentioned DSP so I didn't have to ;) It really feels like the perfect extension/progression, or what I imagine Factorio 2.0 would/should be. The graphics are absolutely stunning as well, which is one point that started to really turn me off of Factorio after hundreds of hours, especially on a 4K monitor... not to mention watching spaceships fly cargo around the solar system is way cooler than trains ;) Also a lot of the tedious build-up that killed my interest in restarting Factorio for the Nth time is handled IMHO much nicer, such as giving you drones from the start. I haven't played in a couple months, still waiting for blueprints, which are supposedly right around the corner. I'm also very curious what/how they plan to implement enemies...
  - and0 5y ago
    Yeah, nothing in Factorio can quite match watching all of your solar sails and ships orbiting and snapping into place around the sun in the sky. Which you can also fly right up to and watch all the little details in person.
ddoubleU 5y ago
From what I remember from this older interview with the two founders (in Czech) the main inspiration for doing Factorio were Tekkit-like mods for Minecraft.
DarmokJalad1701 5y ago
I wish they had expanded on the demo/tutorial mode's "story line". I liked how there were these secret half-built/half-destroyed bases waiting to be found.
- db48x 5y ago
  You could try the Space Exploration mod; it’s got some exploration and discovery to do.

Quick links to the five "must read" posts that William highlighted: > FFF #243 - New GUI tileset: Showing off their GUI design document. A MUST READ, if only for a good example of a comprehensive design style that fits the game theme perfectly. (https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-243 https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-243) > FFF #176 - Belts optimization for 0.15 : Incredible analysis of transport belts and optimizing their performance. A MUST READ. (https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-176 https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-176) > FFF #204 - Another day, another optimisation : Solid technical writeup on how a prefetching optimization patch works across a number of resource-heavy factory builds. A MUST READ. (https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-204 https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-204) > FFF #296 - All kinds of bugs : The snippet at the bottom is a perfect encapsulation of their attitude towards problem solving. It’s such a simple concept, just going a little farther, that can take tremendous discipline and focus. A MUST READ. (https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-296 https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-296) > FFF #356 - Blueprint library for real : Michal “kovarex” Kovařík, one of the two cofounders, talks about falling out of the development process, losing his sense of purpose, and how playing Factorio with his son brought him back. Reading this one, even through the sometimes-broken English, is inspirational and a wonderful look at how things fall apart and come back together. Like I mentioned in the intro, this is one of those rare, special offerings that is technical in nature but deeply personal and human-centric in form. A MUST READ. (https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-356 https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-356)

scrollaway 5y ago
356 is a really nice read. inspirational indeed.
- throwawaw 5y ago
  Yeah, that one caught my eye (and then moistened it). The way he breaks his slump by sharing Factorio with his son -- what a wonderful, unexpected benefit of working in games. How many of us will get to do something like that?
bombcar 5y ago
> Earlier this week we got a bug report about the game freezing, consuming all of the available RAM, and then crashing when it ran out of RAM. It was again a modded save file so my first instinct was to blame it on a mod. Again, I had to test it. And again... it's never what you think it is. > So, I still repeat the phrase: "Crashing on dereferencing null? Just add a null check!" as a reminder to myself and others to always look deeper into why and never stop at the basic symptom of a problem. I feel this is a very important rule that people often forget - most anytime your "safety" code triggers, something went wrong somewhere else and it can be worth tracking it down.
- pdpi 5y ago
  It's a perfect example of how useful it is to think in terms of what invariants should hold and why.
unspecified 5y ago
> FFF #176 - Belts optimization The last bit of this post mentions UDP packets not making it through ISPs if their checksum is 0x0000 or 0xFFFF...what is THAT all about? This would have been in February of 2017. > If you remember from the previous FFF, our map downloader was having some extremely rare problems with some mysterious packets that would always get filtered over the Internet. We already had a fix for it, but I was curious what was going on. Thanks to the investigative power of the Factorio community, we found out that all those mysterious packets, before NAT, had a checksum of 0xFFFF. Admalledd from the forum sent some hand-crafted packets through his Internet connection and surprise, all packets would go through, except those with a checksum of 0xFFFF or 0x0000. At this point I would just assume this ISP(and some other few ISPs around the world) have some faulty hardware or software that do not handle these special cases of UDP checksums.
- zamadatix 5y ago
  If the checksum comes out as all 0's you're supposed to make it all 1's (0 in a UDP checksum means no checksum) so really it's related to that singular value and, if you've ever seen the quality of some of the dirt cheap hardware with ancient firmware some carriers use, it's really not that surprising for it to be bugged as described as they really don't care about dropping the occasional UDP packet when it's probably dropping more than that of general traffic due to how cheap and overrun it is anyways.

daolf 5y ago

I've been a huge fan of Factorio since 2014. A huge fan of the game, the team, and the entrepreneurial adventure. Their willingness to share insights, every weeks, for 7 years is quite rare in the industry. It was also awesome to read the thought process behind each design decision alongside some nerdy story about C++ optimization. Factorio team, if you're ready this, thank you!

cogman10 5y ago
The game is also seriously fun :D. It has such replay-ability for me. You can either make new factories or you can infinitely tweak old ones. So much fun tweaking lines to increase efficiency and throughput.
ghostbrainalpha 5y ago
Any tips on where I could go to read more about the entrepreneurial adventure?

TheMerovingian 5y ago

Probably the best game I have ever played and the only game I bought not once, but thrice (two were gifts). As a developer, it allowed me to determine what kind of developer I am, where my interests lie, and how I contribute to code (or a base). The analogue between coding and Factorio is incredible.

agentwiggles 5y ago
Preamble: I mean this as a compliment to the game, so I hope I don't come off too negative. Factorio is so analogous to coding that I just couldn't get into it. I laid out a neat little factory and then requirements changed and I realized that I needed to basically abandon what I had and build something new. My factory was not really "open to refactoring". Something about that feeling felt so similar to what I have to do at work all day that I closed the game and haven't gone back to it since. I got really into a technical Minecraft mod back in my college days (Better Than Wolves). For some reason I never really had the same problem with that, in fact I really enjoyed crawling around in tunnels and changing things around. Something about the 3d-ness of Minecraft made it feel more like tinkering maybe. Idk, this post has become a ramble - but suffice it to say that Factorio felt _too much_ like programming for me to truly enjoy it. Maybe that says something about the kind of developer _I_ am ;)
- kortex 5y ago
  That is an oft-echoed sentiment. I've experienced it a little bit myself, but the main reason I've fallen out of it (after a few fiercely addicted bouts) was it felt like I was exacerbating some RSI, especially with my mousing hand. But yeah once you start thinking about on-demand rail delivery using signals as RPC...it's pretty work-like. :D The async nature of the inventory system means long-range signal transmission handling ends up feeling exactly like bit-banging on a microcontroller, which is sufficiently out of my current work scope that it's fun and interesting. Oh no, this makes me want to attempt the Ben Eater computer in factorio...
- clows 5y ago
  I've played a few hundred hours of factorio, so by no means a _lot_ but I've launched quite a few rockets and "finished" the game a few times. Depending on how long you played you might have missed out on the part that's the most fun (for me at least) - the later/end game. Once you have bots the game changes a lot and you stop building stuff yourself and let bots build stuff for you. Once you have a few hundred bots (and resources) you can build/destroy/rebuild/scale up huge parts of the factory. The starting factory is usually abandoned but a megabase can be a beast of it's own with constantly tweaking bottlenecks - which can be quite a lot of fun (or it is for me at least)

nindalf 5y ago

For those wondering why this game about factory management keeps showing up on the front page of HN, it’s because the gameplay reminds its fans of software engineering in subtle ways. People who are good at one are likely to be good at the other. More about this here - https://blog.nindalf.com/posts/factorio-and-software-engineering/ https://blog.nindalf.com/posts/factorio-and-software-enginee...

derefr 5y ago
An interesting thing about Factorio to me (beyond what’s stated in the linked article), is that it contains a nearly a perfect 1:1 analogy to software concurrency. • Belts are blocking CSP channels, as seen in e.g. Golang (where N producers have to share — or eventually “merge onto” — one channel representing the blocking-receive point of the consumer; which are best only used to transport messages of a single type, or if not, then the sum-typed channel must be demultiplexed at the end, with this tending to lower throughput; where messages of a given type “queue up” until the channel is full, and then all producers block when attempting to write to the channel; where if you’ve got producers producing at different rates, then the fastest ones can hog the capacity of the channel, decreasing throughput and unevenly spending input resources such that some components fail long before others; where the solution to this is to give each producer its own bounded outbox channel that multiplexes onto the consumer’s channel, such that the producer will block itself rather than blocking its siblings; etc.) • Logistics robots are message-queue topics (where N producers can publish messages of a given type, without worrying about how they’ll get to a consumer; where consumers [demand chests] subscribe to specific event message types; where the bus itself can get overloaded, causing delivery failures of unrelated topics as delivery-threads sit around holding a message unable to deliver it; where the solution to this is to add reliable MQ-internal storage [network-linked storage chests] for the agents to offload produced messages to until demand comes for them.) (Sadly there’s no exact equivalent to Erlang-style message-passing, where producers target messages of arbitrary type at a specific consumer, which all go to the consumer’s single inbox; and where, if that inbox is full, then the message just “evaporates” en route, since the passed message has async semantics where the producer isn’t linked to its delivery. But, interestingly, that type of concurrency totally could be added, with a not-even-very-complex mod — just add a “outbox” chest object that can be configured to “target” a specific “inbox” chest somewhere else; and a second type of logistics robot that only moves stuff from outbox chests to inbox chests, not according to “demand” but just because anything currently sitting in an outbox chest is “intended to be” in the corresponding targeted inbox chest; and then ensure that this alternate type of logistics robots have non-reliable delivery semantics, where if the “inbox” chest signals to the network that it’s full, then all active delivery-threads targeting that inbox will literally “drop their messages on the ground”.) IMHO it’s actually possible to learn how to be an effective distributed-systems engineer, just by playing Factorio and trying to scale the throughput of a resource-constrained system. In the process, you’ll likely re-invent many real-world concurrent software design patterns. Doing this first, and then reading a Distributed Systems textbook, will have a much more visceral impact on you, because you’ll have already faced these problems, struggled with them, and now you’re being handed all the techniques for solving them on a silver platter.

TOGoS 5y ago

The Friday Facts were fantastic. I don't know of any other non-open-source project (but counterexamples are of course welcome) that encourages the developers to put that much technical information about what they're up to out on the website. I especially loved the ones about belt optimizations, multi-threading, and the networking model, since those are all interesting problems that any game developer is likely to think about but not necessarily get around to really solving the way that Factorio did. The FFF's inspired me to, on a total lark, send over my resume, which turned out to be good timing. I think my "holy crap I'm working on factorio, pinch me" was equivalent to some people's "holy crap I'm working for Microsoft." I still remember the odd smell of the office when I first walked in ("sorry it smells like acid in here", I was told, and was later disappointed to learn that when Europeans say "smells like acid" they just mean it smells bad; there was no open use of entheogens while I was there). I'm glad fff-200 made the cut for this guy's list, as that's the one where I announced the new 'programmable noise' terrain generator. More deets in https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-207 https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-207, https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-258 https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-258, and https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-282 https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-282, among others.

drewmate 5y ago
Thanks for writing (the code and the blogs!) What are you up to these days?
- TOGoS 5y ago
  These days I'm at a 'regular job' that is far less interesting, but pays a lot better, which I was especially glad about when the furnace needed replacing. So it goes, sometimes. I mostly blame the US healthcare^W extortion system.
spieswl 5y ago
Absolutely. I'm a sucker for good writing and I feel that you all set an excellent example of how to do technical writing and analysis correctly.

spieswl 5y ago

Author here. Wow, uh, I definitely did not expect to be featured on HN this morning, but seeing this linked put a massive smile on my face. There are just so many examples of captivating writing, innovative problem solving, and candid discussion throughout the FFFs. Taken all together, the Factorio journey is one of my favorite _stories_ to read...and it contributed to becoming a better designer and engineer along the way. I really encourage people to read more of their blog than just what I've linked, since it crosses so many areas of interest. To anyone reading that's worked on Factorio, thank you and you all are wonderful people.

01127790781 5y ago

هكر

FredPret 5y ago

My biggest Factorio lesson was this: I no longer start a new factory from scratch if I want to do things differently. I use my existing - and now outdated - factory to launch a new one a few minutes run away.

kortex 5y ago
Throw the first one away. Especially when starting a run, plan on throwing away the starter base. I learned this trick watching AntiElitz speedruns. He'll build a manual bootstrap "factory" (really just mines and smelting) to get plates, then build a very-polished-through-iteration bootstrap base which builds all the development essentials - circuits, arms, belts, ammo, etc. That's used to build the real base.
- zentiggr 5y ago
  That sounds a lot like the old Gentoo stage 1 / 2 / 3 build system... Makes me a little more interested, in general.
ThatPlayer 5y ago
I've done this once, but ended up spending three days building a rail in one direction because resource patches get bigger the further you are away from spawn. I ended up using nuclear powered trains to traverse it and it was still about 15 minutes to travel.

mikewarot 5y ago

I find myself playing Rocket Rush, without the rush. This allows access to all the tech without the grind. I've built so many small nuclear plants with a bunch of steam tanks to store the power until needed. I've also built a ton of solar arraignments. The constant things I always buy are 4 heavy oil, and 200 plastic. I usually get 10 miners, electric furnaces, and level 2 assemblers. Once I have power, and coal gasification up and running for plastic/explosives/batteries, it's just a grind. I've settled on using an Island terrain, to give it an end, rather than just not wanting to keep expanding forever. Once the island is cleared, and has radar, it's time to start again.

stevenpetryk 5y ago

This reminds me of a cool article I read about how Kerbal Space Program 2 renders orbits. I love reading things like this: https://www.kerbalspaceprogram.com/dev-diaries/6509/ https://www.kerbalspaceprogram.com/dev-diaries/6509/

chairmanwow1 5y ago
Those disclaimers at the beginning of the article are so out of touch
- Kiro 5y ago
  Why?
- J5892 5y ago
  I... what? How?
DonHopkins 5y ago
In stark contrast with the company that developed Factorio, the companies that developed KSP (Squad, and then Take Two who bought them) totally fucked over their developers. https://www.mcvuk.com/development-news/squad-devs-blast-kerbal-space-program-studio-for-high-crunch-and-low-pay/ https://www.mcvuk.com/development-news/squad-devs-blast-kerb... https://www.destructoid.com/former-kerbal-space-program-developers-slam-studio-for-poor-pay-and-crunch-time/ https://www.destructoid.com/former-kerbal-space-program-deve... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23402639 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23402639 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-03/kerbal-space-program-2-release-disrupted-by-corporate-strife https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-03/kerbal-sp... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12639564 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12639564 https://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/55vozd/theres_no_easy_way_to_say_this/ https://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/55vozd/... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20742105 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20742105

and0 5y ago

To anyone who loves Factorio as much as I do, I strongly recommend the new game Dyson Sphere Program. I never truly beat Factorio the way I did DSP, so I can't compare them completely, but DSP takes the concept to a 3D planetary scale and is in many ways much friendlier. Also no combat/bugs, at least not yet. The dev team is Chinese and are releasing amazing quality-of-life updates at a rapid clip, too. Truly impressive piece of software.

glenneroo 5y ago
Glad you mentioned DSP so I didn't have to ;) It really feels like the perfect extension/progression, or what I imagine Factorio 2.0 would/should be. The graphics are absolutely stunning as well, which is one point that started to really turn me off of Factorio after hundreds of hours, especially on a 4K monitor... not to mention watching spaceships fly cargo around the solar system is way cooler than trains ;) Also a lot of the tedious build-up that killed my interest in restarting Factorio for the Nth time is handled IMHO much nicer, such as giving you drones from the start. I haven't played in a couple months, still waiting for blueprints, which are supposedly right around the corner. I'm also very curious what/how they plan to implement enemies...
- and0 5y ago
  Yeah, nothing in Factorio can quite match watching all of your solar sails and ships orbiting and snapping into place around the sun in the sky. Which you can also fly right up to and watch all the little details in person.

ddoubleU 5y ago

From what I remember from this older interview with the two founders (in Czech) the main inspiration for doing Factorio were Tekkit-like mods for Minecraft.

DarmokJalad1701 5y ago

I wish they had expanded on the demo/tutorial mode's "story line". I liked how there were these secret half-built/half-destroyed bases waiting to be found.

db48x 5y ago
You could try the Space Exploration mod; it’s got some exploration and discovery to do.