Hyperfocus Part 2: Humble Beginnings

_{Welcome to my Factorio blog!}

Haven't looked at this part of my base in hundreds of hours played.

You begin the game crash-landed on an alien planet.
You have nothing but your wits and raw resources laying on the ground.

_{No, I didn't do this, but I thought about doing it once.}

The object of the game is to go from nothing to a sprawling automated factory that pushes millions of units in volume and progresses one through the game. The ultimate goal is to build a rocket that will launch a satellite into space to signal for help. Because it's a sandbox you can keep playing after that, but it is the official win condition.

The first time I played the game I had no idea what was going on. This is the most complex game I have ever played by quite a wide margin. It has actual circuits in it for god sake. Do you know what an S-R Latch is? I do, and it's not because I took a class on circuits in college for my computer science degree. It's because I played Factorio. Game is cray.

Now that I'm a bit of an expert at the game I can beat it much faster than 80 hours. The world record is like 2 hours or something insane but that's just a master-level player who knows exactly what to do and he's figured everything out. I think it's kinda funny because that's exactly the opposite of what this game is all about. It's not about speedrunning, it's about solving puzzles and actually figuring stuff out.

_{Nefrums, you're nuts}

In any case! MODS!

A month or two ago I decided I was going to dare to be different. Instead of playing the vanilla version of the game (the one I've beaten over a dozen times) I instead took a look at the available mods. It just so happened that the SPACE EXPLORATION mod was trending that day (probably because there had been a big update recently). And thus began my journey into madness.

So far I've played in this same game for 316 hours and I haven't even made it to the end game yet. It's insane.

YUP. 316 hours (I thought it would take me 100-200). Guess how many hours I had played the game total before starting this game? 1000 hours. lol. So this one game accounts for a quarter of my total Factorio experience.

When did I start this game?

Well if I was averaging around 8 hours a day (sounds about right), then I started like 40 days ago. I guess August was my Factorio month. Goodbye Summer! Hello Fall.

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

As far as mods go, this is the most impressive mod made by one person that I have ever seen. In fact there must be some other guys helping him in the background because this mod not only has amazing balance and gameplay and a dozen new resources, but also there are new graphics and skins and buildings and things like that. I feel like the creator of this mod shouldn't even have time to play his own game, let alone create it. I'm told he's basically a full-time contractor getting paid by the main dev team. Makes sense. I bet he works like 14 hours days judging from what I see here.

_{He goes by the handle of Earendel, just in case anyone is wondering.}

Instead of just being on one planet and trying to signal for help, the space exploration mod basically begins (or rather signals the end of the early-game) after that first rocket is launched into space. I've colonized a half dozen planets thus far because each planet has a core of a certain resource that can be mined indefinitely.

_{These pics are just taken from the main mod page}

CORE MINING

Instead of mining a patch of resources that will eventually run out, we can instead mine the core of the planet indefinitely with one of these bad boys. The catch? They draw 25 megawatts of power (which is a lot and basically requires an efficient nuclear power solution).

Each miner placed on a planet has diminishing returns. The first one operates at 100%, but to double the yield you need 4 core miners, and to triple the yield you'd need nine (16 for quadruple). Thus far I've only put a max of 4 on any given planet, and I have a couple that only need one.

It's mechanics like these that make the Space exploration mod exponentially more balanced and interesting than the vanilla version. In vanilla, I could set up a single power plant that lasted me the entire game. Set up a 4 lane bus of iron and copper and the game would be over quick. Obviously I'm getting ahead of myself because I haven't even described the vanilla version of the game yet. Hard to compare the mod to an unexplained element.

The basics of Factorio:

Belts:

They move stuff around.
Some belts are faster than others, but also more expensive.
Belts are the simplest way to move product from one location to another.
Not always the best way though.

Inserters

These guys pick stuff up in front of them and move the item behind them. When combined with belts, they are extremely useful. The ones pictured above are grabbing iron off of a middle lane, loading it into a furnace that smelts it into steel, and then more inserters are used to place the steel onto a different belt.

There are 7 different kinds of inserters. Some are faster than others, some can move multiple stacks at the same time, and some can be programmed to filter which item they will pick up (blacklist and whitelist toggle option). I actually never used the blacklist feature ("don't pick up x item") until just recently when I built a massive sortation center in orbit.

_{I have made Jeff Bezos proud.}

---

Assemblers

This is where the bulk of the magic happens. A player can make most items by hand, but it becomes impossible to do that as the game progresses. Assemblers make items automatically as long as they have the resources to do so. They get the resources from belts and inserters and then turn it into new product that can often be used in other recipes. The above setup churns out thousands of these green circuit boards in short order. Red belts can move 30 items a second and this red belt is almost fully saturated. This one solution alone makes over 1000 circuits a minute, and I use them all. I even have a special alarm that will blast if production halts here (at the top).

Splitters

Splitters have a lot of functionality that can make the game easier if you know how to use them. Technically inserters can be used to come up with a solution to anything a splitter could solve, but splitters are one of those things (just like in programming) that make solutions more elegant, robust, scalable, modular, and aesthetically pleasing, even if they aren't theoretically required to get the job done. There's a reason why we use object oriented programming and scripting languages instead of assembly language. Sometimes sacrificing efficiency in exchange for time and sanity is the correct play. In fact that's usually the correct thing to do like 90% of the time. Optimization is something we do in the field after the bottlenecks show themselves.

In any case, a splitter, as the name implies: splits. Actually, again, it does a lot of things. It can turn one lane into two. It can turn two lanes into one. It can filter a certain item off the lane into another line. Output priority can be set to prioritize pushing resources one way or another. Input priority (used far less often) can be used to pull in resources from one source over another source.

The rules for splitters are simple but can produce highly unexpected outcomes. For the most part for every two items that come in it attempts to push one out on either side. There's a lot more to it than that but I've already spent too much time trying to explain it. Maybe some other post.

Other random logistics stuff.

There are also fluids and pipe, trains and track, power and poles, and even robots that can build stuff for you from blueprints and copy/paste functionality. Blueprints are actually pretty crazy and you can copy/paste text strings from the internet that will be correctly parsed into a Factorio blueprint.

They even made a an April Fools joke about turning blueprints into NFTs. Bastards. They'll come around eventually. Crypto will take over soon enough.

While NFT ownership over a blueprint is pretty worthless (especially considering plagiarism) there are many other things that could be tokenized in a game like this. It's all about content creation. People could be paid to produce campaign missions (which are sorely lacking) or even skins/graphics for the game. The ability to mod this game is obviously pretty in-depth.

Moving on.

So back to this garbage.

This is the first thing I built in my current game, and hot damn is it ugly. I really had no idea what I was getting into or what to expect, and it all turned to shit quite quickly (as is often the case in Factorio).

The Space Exploration mod uses another mod as a dependency called AAI industries. This changes a lot of the old-school recipes in the game and adds a few random resources like sand and glass. That was enough to really throw me off balance, and I honestly was not prepared for all the changes that were made.

I also built a bunch of my assemblers that pick resources directly off of the main line instead of splitting them off to the side. Big mistake that can suck the lane dry and leave other assemblers down the line with zero resources doing nothing. It's much safer to split resources off of the main line in half or in quarters (split and then split again) so that the buildings up front can't eat up everything all at once.

It's also a good idea to do this so the base is a bit more spread out and you have room to pivot if and when upgrades or modifications need to be made. I didn't really do any of that because I wanted to get into space as fast as possible. I guess that's the ironic thing about this game. You get lazy and cut corners thinking you'll get to the goal faster, but that almost always comes back to bite you in the ass later (again, a lot like coding).

In any case, what I've built here works, and has worked for hundreds of hours, which is nice. Like I said, this is the first time I've looked at it in a long long time.

I always start the game with one of these basic setups. These furnaces are super low-tech early game smelters, and I never manage to upgrade them to something better. Who's got the time!?! If it aint broke, don't fix it! These low tech furnaces are smaller than electric furnaces (2x2 instead of 3x3) but they require a line of solid fuel to actually operate (whereas electric furnaces just pull kilowatts off the grid). I'm fueling these furnaces with coal, which is the standard.

Having 12x4 furnaces allows me to have a fully saturated yellow belt that moves 15 iron and copper every second, which is good enough to progress into the mid-game. Usually in vanilla I leverage my sad starter base into another scaled up base with 4 lanes of copper and 4 lanes of iron. But the SE mod had other plans for me.

Research packs

The game would be over quite quickly if we had access to all the technologies right from the start. This is where research packs (which I call potions) and science labs come into play. It takes resources to make the 'potions' and then science labs consume the packs and allow new technologies to be unlocked. This is Factorio's version of leveling up like an RPG.

As we can see, the tech tree is absolutely absurd, with dozens and dozens of things that need to be unlocked to win. There's like three times as many things to research in the SE mod, and they are quite hard to get. I mean, obviously right? 300+ hours played. Just look at the thing I'm trying to research now. It requires 9 different packs x 500 times. Yikes! Of course at this point the first 6 packs are really easy to get and the real issue is getting the high level space packs.

Surprisingly it's been less of a grind than it sounds. Usually these thing would be boring but this mod is so balanced and so well made that the puzzles that need solving aren't monotonous and redundant. More on that later I guess.

Conclusion

2200 words and I wasn't even trying to pad this thing. Easy. 30k words here I come. If each picture is worth 1000 I only need like 30 total, right?

We got though most of the basics (sort of) and a bit of the mod stuff (not really). Seriously though this game is an infinite treasure throve of content. Or just insanity? One of those. Join me tomorrow for more cringeworthy hyperfocus!

_{Total approximate word count so far: 3300}

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