At this point this is a tradition, and the result is always a mix of frustration and accomplishment. But lets go there later. Some of this has been streamed over on Twitch, if you are interested in such things, feel free to leave a follow on twitch.tv/xenontechs.
The Map
Over on the Factorio subreddit are monthly community challenge maps. they’re not much of a “challenge”, but more of a “lets play the same map and share results”. Every start of the year, this map includes mods. Lots of mods. A bunch of them are mandatory for the map, a big bunch more is optional, in the end our game contained ~80 mods, where the “base” mods are essentially Bobs & Angels, a complete overhaul of the production in terms of progression and complexity, bumping the recipes you’ll need up by the hundreds.
What does “more complexity” mean? glad you asked! while in the base game there’s one part where you can have too much production (oil refining), every other part is based around the principle that you can produce an output as long as you supply it with input. Miner mines ore, ore gets smelted to plates, plates get manufactured to gears. The challenge is to get the inputs at scale.
With Bobs/Angels, a focus on output gets added into many steps, quite early on. Your mine-able ore is turned into crushed ore and crushed stone, then sorted into iron and copper ore. that alone adds two steps before you arrive at the same step in vanilla, and adds two possible “waste” items where you need to make sure they don’t clog and stop your production. This scales throughout the game and even lets you unlock more intermediate steps for added efficiency.
Just a few more examples about the “upscale” from vanilla:
- next to Oil is a multi step crackling process of natural gas, resulting in methane, ethane and butane, as well as waste water
- smelting ore to plates extends to a 6 step process that includes multiple gases and other chemical products (what even is sodium hydroxide anyways?)
- rocket fuel is a chemical process you better draw out (screenshot later)
The Players
A bit more of a general perspective about who should play such modded maps. Factorio already speaks to the people who like to plan things out and crunch numbers, these mods just require another magnitude of that, so it’s not really beginner friendly, but definitely something one can get into, even more in multiplayer.
A lot of play is just “We need X, do we have X? should I make X? it takes Y and Z, do we have Y and Z?” and then you add another piece to the puzzle. The challenge is to not get overwhelmed by the scale of everything at once. Here’s a few “player types” that have their place and are very valuable in multiplayer:
- The designer: everything needs to line up and needs to be nicely blueprintable while also being space efficient
- The brute: give this person a tank and some ammo, biters need to bite it. Will probably automate ammo for free
- the progresser: will jump into the newest available recipe for accomplishments and build it somewhere, somehow. Suddenly you have ammonia available to upgrade some other productions
- the mastermind: just knows way too much about the factory as a whole and can plan out where which parts go effectively, and what scale is required
- you: because whatever type of player you are, you’re welcome in the factory
The Gameplay
As always, it’s great to always have power and defense in mind at all times. This helped immensely, although biters were an issue 3 times in 250 hours, the settings are probably set to pretty low.
A slight miscalculation happened about how much ore sorting to scale for, and suddenly all expectations were off by a factor of 2. It was pretty though!
A few science packs in, you’re jumping into a world of chemistry, suddenly it’s all about randomly colored gases and liquids, most of them probably not safe to drink.
A note on transportation: the personal goal is always to go to bots ASAP. The early-game Angels bots are a heap of garbage, even though they technically have a good throughput, they always take full stacks and carry it around very slowly, that does not scale well in an n:n environment, so might as well skip them entirely. The possibility of having superfast robots (Bobs), combined with the amount of inputs and outputs of each production line, hardly create a use to properly “outsource” something. So a block of a robot base, supplied with minerals by trains, is the best you can do (at least until you count rockets per minute).
A note on balancing: circuit network is your friend, but there’s nothing to be scared about. you don’t want fancy logics, you just want to prioritize, so adding a few inserters to the logistic system and set them to enable only if things run low, helps you a lot in using the most efficient technologies. The rest should essentially balance directly though supply and demand in the network.
The End?
this is a very short way to describe hundreds of hours of gameplay, but in the end, we launched the rocket, while having rockets/minute in mind, so some things were already heavily upscaled. We’ll keep going a little bit until we feel like having launched enough rockets
More Screenshots
