> The rocket launch was only achieved through significant ‘manual’ effort on Sol’s part as it papered over its late-game failures to connect certain production systems by repeatedly ferrying supplies between areas of the factory.
Robots: they're just like us!
> Robots: they're just like us!
Hah I dunno, I think most human players wouldn't find that very fun and would instead take that as an opportunity to refactor the factory for optimized performance (i.e. the core gameplay loop)
Ish.
When you just need a few parts to be made, it is sometimes very tempting to drop a chest, fill it up with parts, then go do something else, one of the 1000 tasks you have been neglecting.
That's definitely true, but only to a certain point, after a while it becomes too monotonous to dig around in chests building and combining stuff in an ad hoc manner. LLMs have no problem with that kind of repetitive minutia though.
By end game you can just have blueprints and robots build everything for you.
Logistic bots, once they are unlocked, the game becomes trivial.
Once you make a few blueprints, then the real joy of factorio is found. Nothing like splatting down an outpost and watching it sprint into existence as thousands of “agents” build it out.
my husband plays exactly like that, and whines until I log onto the multiplayer server so that I can "make it work like a programmer".
I then log in, create a bunch of logistics chains, and then a few days later he whines about it again when he enters the next phase of gameplay.
This continues until fast logistics drones, then he takes over; less need to consider routing & order .
Factorio is interesting, a lot of players just treat it like they're playing Postal and just want to gun bugs down in creative mode equivalents, meanwhile i'm fretting about green boards per second.
New players can find refactoring the factory to be more difficult.
Yes and no - for a one-off I will just craft something "by hand" instead of doing a ground-up rebuild. (The exception, of course, was my build for the "Lazy Bastard" achievement.) I don't go into it thinking "oh boy it'll be fun to mule around these items across the width of my factory!" but it's also not so offensive that I strictly automate everything all the time. Not that I play the game entirely the way it's meant to be played
Naturally, "I'll do it once" starts as a temporary crutch and ends up a load-bearing liability. A phenomenon entirely absent from our day jobs ;)
i think its more of an effect of factorio's hidden information.
youre not really sure how to set up some of the logistics/how much of what you will need where ahead of time
What information is hidden in Factorio? I can't think of any stat that isn't shown to the player in some way.
He is not talking about stats.
When you start a new game in Factorio, if you never played it, you can’t know how much of each resource you’ll have to extract and neither how much of an item you’ll need to produce.
I know it’s easy to forgot after thousands hours of playtime, but the game starts with your character having to manually mine coal one by one.
> When you start a new game in Factorio, if you never played it, you can’t know how much of each resource you’ll have to extract and neither how much of an item you’ll need to produce.
Some of this information should be recoverable somewhere in the tech tree tooltips, if nowhere else.
More importantly, vanilla Factorio plays a nasty little trick on first-time players: The final sciences and launching the rocket both require scaling up. This means that either you refactor your factory, or you grind out that first launch super slowly using an inadequate production line.
Veteran players know ways to design some modularity into a factory, and when to yank out subsystems and rebuild them bigger somewhere else.
Factorio: Space Age is actually more forgiving about scalability. You don't need to scale up as much, and you have much more powerful tools for doing it. Instead, Space Age has lots of novel game mechanics to master, and higher total system complexity across the solar system.
Not true, every item shows its raw materials right there in its menu. The rest is just arithmetic.
Also the LLM probably has seen dozens of factorio-related websites and setups.
And also, player (artificial or natural intelligence) don't need to setup everything upfront, it's actually the main gameplay feature is to run between production areas to expand/optimize them.
The game tells you how much of each resource you need for each recipe, and it tells you how to get them. It doesn't tell you how many of each recipe you may need up front but that information surfaces as the game progresses.
Technically every item displays requirements and crafting time, but most human players will just eyeball production rates until they start trying to build larger scale factories that you can't easily jerry-rig fixes onto.
Possibly there is a lack of item-throughput figures for belts and stuff though.
Thats when you build a giant bus and select what you need out of it.
A bus doesn't solve this, because it still is contained by items/second. You can't just select copper, if there's no more copper on the belt. And you might not be able to jerry-rig another belt of copper onto your bus.
A bus doesn't solve the issue the person you replied to was talking about.
I still don't get the point. The information is there right from the beginning. For humans itS just tedious to calculate it and why should one?
Then also, you can finish the game even when not planning ahead.
That information is certainly in the training data.
IME the models know some basic information about all the popular games, including some basic strategy, but they don't know/remember the details to be even a moderately familiar player. And usually if you ask a question they will google it.
The answer is all of it and yes.
Yet, that's not how new players (human or AI) approach the game. If you look at AlphaZero, probably state of the art in learning e.g. chess (more information about rules than Factorio has in game) from scratch, using only rules, it just plays a lot of games with itself. It doesn't "just think a lot" to come up with a perfect strategy; it experiments.
The AI has trained on the entire factorio wiki along with every tutorial video ever made and who knows what else. I don’t see room for hidden anything in that scenario.
Models don't have perfect recall
If LLMs worked that way, you would never have to search for prior art again.
What do you mean? Factorio is an extremely calculable game and tends to show most of its information (ratios aside, those are in the wikis)
Unless I misunderstand, ratios are second-order and can be calculated; production rates are presented in-game.
If one provides it access to the wiki and reddit, if just from within game it's quite cryptic
How do you mean? (I have played 1 hour of Factorio)
I didnt think was possible to play for less than 1k hours.
Those are rookie numbers, you need to pump those numbers up…
We found the business guy.
I am not the OP but I have (many) hours in Factorio and I think what they might be talking about is things like how it’s not apparent at the start just how much copper infrastructure you will need by the time you get to rockets and space platforms because the early recipes are iron-heavy. Or how important green circuit scaling will become. Or how much oil cracking might change your layout.
If you know what’s coming you make different choices in how you build that heads off a fair bit of refactoring.
It certainly sounds like an actual factory in my experience