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Factorio – Visualizing construction material dependencies
- fergie 2y agoIs Factorio HNs favourite game or is it Civ V?
- bschne 2y agoI 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. :)
- fabian2k 2y agoFactorio 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.
- Iulioh 2y agoAnd 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 https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-432
- fabian2k 2y agoToday will be the last FFF before the expansion launches next week.
- jeffhuys 2y agoIt's NEXT WEEK?! That made me so happy I got goosebumps. I gotta take some vacation days.
- karamanolev 2y agoAnd not just next week, but Monday next week!
- Iulioh 2y agoFactorio Space Age countdown https://vojtykcz.funsite.cz/factorio-expansion-countdown/ https://vojtykcz.funsite.cz/factorio-expansion-countdown/
- jeffhuys 2y agoI'm off every Monday! So let's hope it's morning at my place when it drops.
- oefrha 2y agoMore like you need to be off every October and November to start playing the expansion when it drops.
- 0points 2y agosee you in another year!!!11
- kgf1980 2y agoI’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
- kentrf 2y agoFactorio. 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.
- Iulioh 2y agoThe last part is a truly unrealistic
- rollcat 2y agoIf 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!
- jeffhuys 2y ago> 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.
- voidUpdate 2y agoI'm expecting a large dropoff in HN activity when the new expansion releases
- red_admiral 2y agoI'm half expecting FAANG stocks to move downwards as engineer productivity takes a hit.
- HPsquared 2y agoHedge funds currently trying to work out how long they expect the developers to be enthralled with the Factorio update.
- dailykoder 2y agoI like tetris. I found these two to be the most fun for me: - https://www.goodoldtetris.com/ https://www.goodoldtetris.com/ - http://farter.cn/tetr.js/ http://farter.cn/tetr.js/ First one is "NES-style" with fast lock in, no ghost and so forth. Second one is for fast play, with ghost and no fast lock-in. I have no clue about current tetris, but i think that's the modern style, no??? Edit: I believe tetris friends was the website where i started playing more tetris some years ago and the version from farter came closest to it, after it got shut down
- zigman1 2y agois Civ big on HN? I rarely see it mention. Its my favorite, so would love to find people here who enjoys it as well
- yen223 2y agoPlease don't drag me back in, I've already lost a good chunk of my twenties to that game
- y1n0 2y agoI’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
- Iulioh 2y agoThere 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgQ39dt3Qmc
- voidUpdate 2y agoSee also DocJade, Ryan Brown and Venzer
- changexd 2y agoI 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
- fouronnes3 2y agoIt'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.
- jeffhuys 2y agoFactorio 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).
- bregma 2y agoNon-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.
- veidelis 2y agoMy vote goes to Oxygen Not Included
- MaxikCZ 2y agoI 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
- HPsquared 2y agoThat'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.
- jeffhuys 2y agoOooh, 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!
- jnwatson 2y agoThere 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.
- orangepanda 2y agoYou'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 https://github.com/R-O-C-K-E-T/Factorio-SAT
- red_admiral 2y agoLooking at the big one, I have an idea for a screensaver.
- egeozcan 2y agoI 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.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- karamanolev 2y agoSide 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.
- fouronnes3 2y agoFactorio is crack for programmers.
- iwontberude 2y agogithub 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.
- nilsherzig 2y agoThere is a big grafana chart showing issues and contributions for all cncf projects https://k8s.devstats.cncf.io/d/12/dashboards?orgId=1&refresh=15m https://k8s.devstats.cncf.io/d/12/dashboards?orgId=1&refresh...
- vincnetas 2y agoNOOOOOoooooooooooOOooooooooooooo.... I was/am sober for more than a year now...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- birracerveza 2y agoIt's weird to know the date of your death (of your social life, at least).
- HPsquared 2y agoThe Factorio forum is your new social circle.
- red_admiral 2y agoGood 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.
- implements 2y agohttp://doomeer.com/factorio 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.
- zelos 2y agoThat's starting to sound like State Task Networks/Resource Task Networks from production process design/scheduling.
- p_l 2y agohigh-end factorio is all about process design/scheduling, IMO...
- hdjfjjfjc 2y ago[flagged]
- ilrwbwrkhv 2y agoWolfram and Mathematica are such interesting tools. Maybe one of the only two tech companies that won capitalism along with Valve.
- teekert 2y agoThose 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.
- benplumley 2y agoThat's a coincidence, that the author only picked recipes that are made without cycles. Other Factorio recipes (e.g. nuclear fuel processing) are cyclic.
- perihelions 2y agoThere aren't any other ingredient cycles in unmodded Factorio (besides the trivial barrelling/un-barrelling of fluids).
- benplumley 2y agoI 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.
- cetu86 2y agoWow, looks nice! Can you do that for SE and add quantities?
- dimava 2y agoThe most advanced calculator for Factorio is definitely YAFC, "Yet Another Factorio Calculator", based on Google's OrTools solvers [https://github.com/shpaass/yafc-ce https://github.com/shpaass/yafc-ce] (gifs readme at [https://github.com/shpaass/yafc-ce/blob/master/Docs/Gifs.md https://github.com/shpaass/yafc-ce/blob/master/Docs/Gifs.md]) The flowcharts are generally made with Foreman2 [https://github.com/DanielKote/Foreman2 https://github.com/DanielKote/Foreman2], yet another external tool Both the calculator websites, https://factoriolab.github.io https://factoriolab.github.io and https://kirkmcdonald.github.io 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 --- 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
- MaxikCZ 2y agoAnd heres a Pyanodon graph: https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/12w2w3i/the_full_pyanodons_space_science_flowchart/ https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/12w2w3i/the_full_...
- HPsquared 2y agoStuff of nightmares.
- dmurray 2y agoWhen 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.
- seanhunter 2y agoThis is perfect timing - just when Space Age is about to come out.
- nusl 2y agoWith 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.
- scotty79 2y ago> 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.
- nusl 2y agoI 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.
- scotty79 2y agoIn 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.
- Nihal_rg 2y agoWhere can I buy/install this game?
- MaxikCZ 2y agoFactorio.com, steam, gog....
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Seb-C 2y agoI 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/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/2597060/Astral_Divide/ And the first draft of the new version: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@sebc/113327870376150885 https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@sebc/113327870376150885
- perihelions 2y agoFor 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"] }