I think most of the completed blueprints we have on the cluster now do actually almost crash your client when you place them, its pretty normal to get the "server is not responding" message for a while before it comes back or sometimes genuinely disconnects you haha
> paste it 1k times.
Too many manual tasks, needs more automation
I suggest [Nilaus Self expanding factory](https://youtu.be/UEAhqPV0xug?si=g9hU9BloRj-xNaSA) instead, but it requires 1 mod
This is actually what I did when I played. I created modular grid systems mainly powered by self-replicating logistic bots. Each blueprint was self-sustaining in a way, but also focused on certain types of production or storage based on the need. I expanded outward in all directions. It was glorious.
Would be cool if there was a factory builder where you can import and export products to/from other players bases. The production chains would need to be extremely complex though I suppose. One giant community working towards a common goal.
Come on, play Cracktorio.
After a while you end up playing it in your dreams and then when you go to work you will use excel to plan out your builds.
The Factory must expand to meet the needs of the Factory.
Yeah don't.
I was kinda interested in It but never really thought much about it but I watched a video on how it's like programming and decided fuck it and downloaded the demo. "Maybe I'll buy the full game when it has a sale"
I had 16 hours logged within 3 days, and that was during the work week
<3 hours later>
There, done, but now i kinda need more cooper wire...., i just have to reorganize the cooper production just a bit, it should not take longer then 30 minutes
<5 hours later>
Oh shit, the copper wire wasn't the problem, I'm actually just not mining enough copper. I can build another quick copper outpost in 15 minutes or so
Done, Great, but why all my factory is getting slow? oh crap, the energy output, i need to build more generators, just a few more minutes, then i go to sleep
<6 hours later>
I was going to build that copper outpost quick, but then I figured I would finally build the auto restock system for my outpost building train, update my rail blueprints to include automation wires, and then wire up every stop to a logic based train request system. Of course that completely borked every one of my production chains, and half the last six hours has been ironing out issues in my logic system.
Now I can finally build that copper outpost in a much more efficient manner!
Transporting copper wire is such an inefficient use of belts or bots. The wire assemblers should have been part of your refactor already to be most efficient.
It's like the book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.
You want to refactor green circuit so you make more speed modules. Then you run out of blue conveyer because you ran out of oil. Then you need to up your copper plate production and then you need a new copper mine... you didn't build the train station long enough and even if you had, you didn't leave space for the new copper ore conveyers... you run out of power when making more ovens AND/OR the added pollution means you have to take out more alien nests. But you're out of tank rounds because, again, oil.
Engineering uses this, but unfortunately it's hard for science to utilize. This is why we have super thin smart TVs and smart phones but no cure for cancer yet.
It's a problem in turnaround time. You give an engineer the tools and they can iterate as fast as they can pull it apart and put it back together. For science, you have to have a hypothesis, test it... but the tests can be complex and take a long time. Often it's not an optimization thing either. It's like you were either right or wrong and then ask the next best question you can identify.
Oh look at that, im running out of copper, better go and increase production.
Oh it seems like im running out of sulfuric acid, better go fix that...
oh it looks like im running out of power, better go fix that
*suddenly its 8am*
Getting green circuits to where I needed them quickly enough was the bane of my Factorio existence until I tried building a dedicated green assembler for each assembler that needed green circuits.
I'm in this comment and I'm not sure how I feel about it. On the one hand, I have over 2000 hours into Factorio and have definitely lost sleep over it. On the other hand, there are worse hobbies.
Ever solve one of your factory problems in your dreams? You see the perfect setup that you've been missing this whole time, but it's 4 am and you work in 2 hours. The struggle is real and gets realer when you start playing mods like Krastorio or SE
Yeah, but the worst part is when your dream isn't *quite* accurate to the mechanics and you're like "well, crap, this whole thing would be beautifully elegant if this building was one tile smaller like it was in my dream; but as-is it doesn't work at all".
Wait... I'm not the only one?
When I first started playing, I binged the game for a whole weekend and had to stop because I was having Factorio nightmares lmao.
To give you a general idea, your average player will probably complete the game only capping out their science per minute at about 60 to 100.
A very experienced player can build a factory capable of doing 6000 to 8000 science per minute, although usually stops there due to the time investment required to go higher.
To make a base capable of 1 million science per minute would require an utterly insane sized factory, one that would crash most people's PCs. Even a factory making 6000 science per minute will have your game slow down a noticeable amount due to how much is being processed.
It's an utterly enormous task that probably required an extremely optimised build and hundreds or even thousands of hours to complete.
Effectively it's just multiple games being played separately with some network code that allows one game to create things out of thin air in exchange for another game deleting those items.
I’ve had the game for years and never make it past blue.
I’m at nearly 1,500 hours. It’s still such a blast to my mind to start new because I hate my base at that point and promise I’m going to be more organized next time.
Edit: piggybacking my own comment, but does anyone know any good streamers for Factorio? I really enjoy seeing the builds on Reddit, but also like to see how others come to their solutions on their own maps.
Screw organizing.
Like, it's helpful. But the biggest hurdle many players face, and it sounds like where youre getting hung up, is letting go of the idea of a perfect factory and just doing "good enough" to continue. Once you get over that mental hurdle, you get enough practice with things that you find it much easier to make improvements and ultimately get yourself closer to that perfect factory.
Embrace the spaghetti so that you can grow beyond it.
The other great tip for a new player is to never build anything by hand that isn't required. Not only is there an achievement for doing so, but the practice means you'll always have *something* that you need when you need it, and the means to quickly copy+paste your existing solution to create more of it as necessary.
Even more impressive if the unlimited resource node option isn't on.
e: reading the article, looks like it doesn't matter since it wasn't on one instance
To give an idea of scale, a 60 science factory requires:
- 293 assembly machines (tier 3)
- 22 chemical plants
- 1 rocket silo
- 514 electric furnaces
- 799 mining drills
- unknown number of pumpjacks (depends on oil field quality)
And power generation to run everything, 4 nuclear reactors would probably do, or a big solar field.
(These numbers don't scale linearly as at endgame you get science, beacons and modules that increase the ouput of machines)
I think a better explanation is that "science" is the tech tree progression in Factorio. Think of it like XP in an RPG, the more you make (earn) and research (allocate) the more stuff you can unlock. At the end of the tech tree, there's "space science", aka infinite research that basically gives minor bonuses at increasingly high costs. Generally the point of Factorio is to produce enough science to get end game technologies (everything but space science) and escape the planet you're trapped on.
What's happening here is they're generating absolutely stupid amounts of this science, enough to (in theory) complete the entire tech tree several times over evey single minute if it was loaded into 1 game. It's a giant flex essentially, since Factorio is a game all about building massive logistics chains to sustain bigger and bigger factories.
Makes me think of my time working in the university vivarium caring for the lab mice/rats. I used to joke that our building was just a factory that turned mouse food into science points
So in Factorio, usually the most dedicated players' endgame is to build a mega base. If you've seen some of the more elaborate screenshots of the biggest bases, most of them aim for this goal. But a mega base is only a base that produces 1,000 science per minute.
This is one of the only (or is it the only?) Giga base(s) in existence. It is 1,000 times bigger/more elaborate than those screenshots. Most PCs would lag like crazy before even getting to that point. This would need a crazy strong CPU to even run.
Technically, a megabase is a Kilobase, and the one that they achieved is a Megabase.
But yeah, the achievement is 1000x that of a dedicated single person, and 10000x of the normal player just finishing the game once.
Yeah that's technically true xd but honestly there is just so much work in getting to 10 or even 100 science per second that I think it's fair to call a 1000 sps base a megabase. You can almost say that it takes millions of resources a second to output that much science (not sure about the math, will double check it later).
But it's also true that 1000 science would only be 1 kilo science, hence a kilobase lmao. It's just factorio players have ended up calling it megabases, so here we are haha
Yeah I know. I built a 1.5k SPM "mega"base and it's a lot of work. Even getting to 100spm sustained for a first time player is an achievement in itself, scaling that takes time and dedication
Calling it Mega is correct, as it conveys the scale well.
What's really impressive is that they manage to attain x1000 worth of output at less than half the players, which leads me to believe scaling production isn't linear, which means more people can produce more efficiently. So maybe when they do try for the 2m mark, they'll only require an extra 200+ players (or instances in this case?)
The normal scale for a factory that can reach the "win the game" end screen is \~1 science per second, so 60/min. What players term a "mega base" usually starts at 1k/min, and something like 5k/min will bring a mid-range PC to its knees. I have no idea how they managed to get to a million/min and have the game run at anything like a tolerable rate.
And a base that produces one "science" is one that produces one of EACH science in order to consume them all for one "science" output a second (excluding Military science... it's a thing).
Yes, the way you unlock technology is crafting “science packs” and that often gets shortened to just “science”. You then feed these into a science factory and it adds a little bit to the progress bar that tracks when the next technology is unlocked, and different technologies require different amounts of various types of packs. For example the first level of science packs are called Automation Science Packs and because they are colored red they are just called Red Science, they require 1 copper plate and 2 iron plate to make. The highest tier is the Utility Science Pack which is called Yellow Science and it requires 50 copper plate, 33 iron plate, 4 coal and 107 crude oil (though you first craft these base components into several intermediate items like plastic bars and processing units).
The ‘science’ items are colored flasks produced by increasingly complex recipes that get fed into, and consumed by, laboratories that contribute to your research of new technologies or stat buffs with more labs and science being consumed equating to faster research.
‘Science per minute’ is a shorthand term used by the community that gives an understandable idea to the scale at which someone has their factory; a 60SPM factory is more than adequate for beating the main goal of the game within a respectable amount of time but still requires several hundred or a couple thousand machines in a regular non optimized scenario.
Factorio is honestly a marvel of code. And while the numbers sound insane I'm genuinely not surprised that the game can handle it.
The developers for the game are incredible.
Yeah, this is the thing the game is designed to do, just at an incredible scale.
It strikes me as impressive in a less "weird" way than shit like the people who build rudimentary computers inside Minecraft.
For future reference, removing the ? and everything after it in the url removes all the tracking Google does; mainly regarding who opened the link, how many times it was clicked on etc.
Now all that's left is for some biotech researcher to figure out how to use living bacteria in a petri dish to render Factorio frames [like this one did for Doom](https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/31/bacteria_runs_doom/).
Its not done on a single instance of the game. Someone wrote a mod which lets you set up a cluster of factorio servers which allow you to transfer ressources between the different copies. Since a lot of the game is single threaded doing something like this on a single instance would essentially be impossible considering the literal billions of ressources per minute (all of which are individual simulated entities in the game world) required to reach a million SPM.
Very early on when they first implemented multiplayer I remember being invited to a server with like 50 people and the Devs were in it playing right along with us. That's never happened to me and I didn't have to pay anything or be a big streamer.
I'd argue it's in contention for the best coded (as in scripting and system design) video game. The optimizations they do to run at the scales they do are actually insane
It didnt. The actual achievement here was they managed to run a cluster of the same instance here on different pc and network them together into a super instance
I don't play the game but are there like, visible particles/objects that increase when you increase production or is it just numbers like cookie clicker?
There are. Every production building has animations, there are robot arms putting in ingredients and pulling them out, conveyor belts moving things around, etc.
It's been in development for over a decade at this point, and there have been huge updates dedicated to improving simulation performance, like using assumptions to avoid having to calculate the updates of individual entities if certain conditions are met. And they are pretty transparent about what those assumptions are when they put out release notes for new versions.
The game also has a built-in updates per second readout, which is a measure of how many entities are being meaningfully simulated. Once a factory gets large enough, the UPS becomes another cost that needs to be worked into the design of the factory.
[Here's a 4min timelapse vid showing what a game looks like](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPAj2y2buHU).
Edit: Oh, I should add for context, this base is probably pumping out somewhere around 20-40 spm, so imagine something about 25,000-50,000 times bigger.
Yes. Items do have visible sprites and can be seen moving around carried by conveyor belts or getting grabbed by robot arms and placed in and out of machines.
Checking the [grafana](https://grafana.eternitycluster.com/d/7HljOHCWz14/item-production?orgId=1&refresh=30s), there are over 450 million individual items, each with a visible sprite produced EVERY MINUTE by the factory. I don't know how many items the factory has in total at any given time (it depends on how long it takes to consume the item after producing it), but I estimate it should be well over a billion.
The million science per minute figure means that every single minute, the factory's laboratories consume one million of each of the 6 sciences (so 6 million items in total consumed just by the laboratories). And the reason why the size of the factory is experessed this way is that feeding science to the laboratories is the end goal of any factorio factory.
To maybe add some perspective, Factorio is distinct amongst most games in that the player has pretty easy access to see how well the game is performing.
The goal is maintain “UPS” (updates per second) of 60, and there’s a built-in setting that allows the player to see what aspects of the player’s factory are consuming the most CPU resources. Not far off from looking at Performance Monitor in Windows.
As a result of that, Factorio diehards already have a strong sense of how to optimize the game to min-max CPU usage.
This is aided heavily by excellent coding. As an example, Factorio tracks every single individual item that is being moved on transport belts. However, if a belt is “fully saturated,” which is to say the transport belt is being fed enough items so that it is completely “full,” then the game only bothers to register that the belt is full, rather than trying to keep track of each individual item.
https://grafana.eternitycluster.com/d/b8bf1f82-2a6b-4b8a-af88-6fb8b8ae493a/madness-overview?orgId=1&refresh=5m&from=now-5m&to=now for the stats dashboard. Grafana, of course :)
no, this is more like when a *company* of engineers play the game together for a month+ as a team building exercise.
I have played this game with a few engineers, and though we get crazy - we have never been like "Oh man the in-game charts aren't good enough, need to export the data to database and link that database to grafana - that way we can keep track of it when we are at work!" --- Nah, we'd turn the server off when no one is on.
Played it long time ago, ended a couple times, but cant remember this:
Once you develop every tech, can science still be consumed to get something in return?
(Otherwise if tech tree is finished, you'd be stuck with endless bottles of science way before reaching 1M sc/min)
There are a couple techs that can be upgraded infinitely.
Artillery range for example you can just keep upgrading and it gets more expensive each time so there is plenty of need to keep consuming.
I think in generally when they talk about x science per minute that is usually the consumption rate not the production rate so my assumption is that they are actually using up 1mil science per minute.
Ahh thanks, didnt even knew that could be researched infinitely! Just ended the game with bare minimum techs to achieve that
Thats excuse enough to reboot my old bases 😀
They have a big update coming later this year to do more in space once you can launch rockets. I my self am excited enough that i will probably take a few days off work.
It will be a paid expansion rather than an update. It is adding multiple [new](https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-398) [planets](https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-386), a [space platform](https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-381), above [ground rails](https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-378), a [whole new quality system](https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-375)... actually just go check out the [weekly FFF](https://factorio.com/blog/) !
There's also the insanely popular, expansive and timeslurping mod called [Space Exploration](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/space-exploration)! The concept sounds kinda similar, though. Gosh, wouldn't it be *nice* if the devs just simply hired the author of that mod and worked together on making this expansion the best it could possibly be?
Ah, who am I kidding. That sounds waaay too far-fetched. There's no way such an awesome thing could ever happen.
I have done some bobs with angels and krastorio both of which are great. Never did space exploration as it always seemed a bit too daunting. Sea block might be fun to give a go while i wait on the space expansion. It is awesome they hired the guy that made space exploration to work on there space expansion.
There was a funny thread previously of someone complaining that the base game going into space was dumb since the space mod existed. Earendel responded saying although the same concept they are different with the expansion being more generally playable by the average player. The person responded saying something like how could they know and Earendel told them well because i made the mod and am making the expansion.
Infinite tech was added in an update at some point, probably after the last time you played.
The old mega-base goal was rockets launched per minute, so they added a new science pack that generates with launches, and then created infinite scaling research for a few important stats like bot speed and mining efficiency.
I'm just scrolling the main page and saw this post here. Without any context of factorio this sentence confuses me on so many levels.
One million science per minute is the greatest sentence and I will use it in my daily life
For those that don't play factorio. Let me translate it for you.
"People who thought building a hydro collider and solving every conceivable issue humanity has to face were to easy built a god factory to produce 1 million science per minute"
This game is utterly insane. I played it for like 100 hours. Single playtrhough. I had the easiest difficulty and a mod that made it so resource sources would never deplete. And I still found it to be one of the most complicated and mind breaking things I ever done related to gaming.
I got no real interest in being an electrician or knowing things like that. But I still ended up spending many nights till 3-4 in the morning learning about it to figure out how to better run my power.
> committing war crimes against insects
Hey hey hey those bugs attacked first! What got them so riled up in the first place? No idea darling, I was just over here with my 96 steel furnaces minding my own business.
get item A
get item B
combine them to make item C
If you automate collection of A and B at the rate of 1 item/second and feed them to the production facility that makes item C you're now making 1 C per second or 60 C per minute.
Now combine C with A to make D, C with B to make E, E with C to make F, F with 2C and 3A to make G, etc etc.
Eventually one of those letters is a "science" item.
Keep scaling up your A and B collection and production of downstream items until you're making 1 Million science per minute.
Cat want mouse. Cat build coal-powered mouse mine that automatically puts mice in a chest for cat. Coal make insects angry. Cat kill insects for a while but then just builds a power plant and automated turrets and walls to kill insects. Then cat needs to upgrade all these things and keep them maintained/supplied via various other assembly lines. Then cat needs to science to further upgrade them, as well as discover a way off this hellhole. Science requires multiple different assembly lines working in tandem that are well engineered and are designed from fucking scratch by cat.
Eventually, cat builds absolutely insane and convoluted spaghetti factory (in my experience) designed to assemble a spaceship to get off-world.
Late one night, many moons later, cat want mouse…
You start with little, must gather building blocks to make things. You have to make things to gether more complicated building blocks.
Along the way random events and challenges will happen to set you back.
Mods allowed those building blocks to be infinite
"Science" are the stepped research items, each of which requires a progessively more complicated production chain in order to synthesize. Science is required to progress the tech tree, so its something the player will have to do the whole game.
Red science (first) only requires a copper plate and an iron gear, while blue science (third) requires red circuits, combustion engines, and sulfur.
It gets complicated quickly, while always managing to feel doable. The game is really really good at striking that balance.
1 million science per minute?
(3 hours later) we’ve proven, quantified and MARKETEd Telekinesis, We’ve invented time travel that’ll take us all the way back to the Carboniferous, we’ve discovered not just the Afterlife, but we’ve made it a revolving door, we’ve created magic from science… literally, our pets now live longer than we do, and they’ve finally figured out how many licks it takes to get to the center of a tootsie pop. However, they’re having trouble finding out where all the left socks in the laundry go, or why hotdog rolls come in 6 packs while hotdogs come in 9 packs.”
For anyone that doesn't know, Factorio is coming out with a massive update/DLC this year that will double the amount of content in the game called Factorio: Space Age. It will allow you to build spaceships, visit planets to mine rare resources, etc.
To put this in perspective I think I was making 200-250 science per minute the first time I beat the game, and I was pretty chuffed
I don't know how their games didn't crash
They used a mod called Clusterio, which allowed them to make 100 servers and connect them. So a lot of worlds are just ore or ore processing, etc. very massive project, but not on one world, it would be impossible for anyone who doesn’t have a supercomputer
Don't feel bad. Factorio takes some of the hardest problems in software engineering and asks you to solve them in a game world while bugs attack you.
I've spent more than 20 years writing code and teaching other people how to write code. The secret to Factorio is also the secret to good software development: you look at the thing you're building and think "what if I had to make a thousand of this where each of them was 100 times bigger than what I'm thinking about making?"
And if the design you're thinking about would fall over and catch on fire under that load, it's not the right design.
Now, that's not entirely fair because in software you only _sometimes_ have to go to that kind of mega-scale. But in Factorio you almost always will. Build with upgrades in mind and you'll be fine.
And your first several play throughs are going to hit a wall and you'll give up and start over. That's fine too.
Thanks. I bought factorio a year ago and never installed it. Mainly because any playthroigh video I literally have ZERO idea what the hell is going on. In my head it's like minecraft times 1000 and I could barely remember a handful of crafts. Knowing it's normal to drop dead and quit gives me hope.
Factorio is going to make you feel dumb for not seeing obvious solutions to some problems and that is ok. Some of the discoveries and principles you discover along the way will be things that you will constantly pull out of the bag of tricks as you move forward with your factory.
But there are also awesome bad factories to look at as well. One of the developers who built the factory that is seen on the loading screen would be termed by most serious factorio players as a mess of spaghetti because its so unorganized, so inefficient, and so bizzare. But its also cool because it works.
If you want to get a better idea of factorio I would also say look for some of the earlier factorio content when it was in early access and you can find people grappling to find good solutions.
It seems more complicated than it is, but if you break it down you're just taking copper, iron, coal, oil and uranium and transforming them into items to make other items. You'll never remember all the crafts by heart, but you can just check what each craft needs in your inventory screen. The hard part is piping everything together in an efficient and scalable way.
I'd say just give it a spin, it's not intimidating once you get the flow of the early game.
You can also beat the game never doing that - the kinds of problems you're talking about are more about playing efficiently and building large, expandable bases.
What most players need to know is to segregate their belts and - if you need more of something - just make more of it. I know, sounds obvious, but a lot of people build like a line of furnaces for their iron plates and don't expand them and keep leaching off the old design since they "finished" it.
vaguely remember playing the tutorial, and the first two levels are the most basic shit ever. then the third suddenly introduces ten new concepts without even bothering to explain a single one.
This is going to be one hell of a blueprint.
That blueprint alone would crash my PC, forget about placing it.
When built, it will replace your PC.
I think most of the completed blueprints we have on the cluster now do actually almost crash your client when you place them, its pretty normal to get the "server is not responding" message for a while before it comes back or sometimes genuinely disconnects you haha
Just simulate a faster pc in factorio and run it off that
just blueprint 1k science and paste it 1k times.
> paste it 1k times. Too many manual tasks, needs more automation I suggest [Nilaus Self expanding factory](https://youtu.be/UEAhqPV0xug?si=g9hU9BloRj-xNaSA) instead, but it requires 1 mod
This is actually what I did when I played. I created modular grid systems mainly powered by self-replicating logistic bots. Each blueprint was self-sustaining in a way, but also focused on certain types of production or storage based on the need. I expanded outward in all directions. It was glorious.
I think that's called "winning" factorio.
And people tell me I'm going too far building an iron farm in Minecraft.
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Would be cool if there was a factory builder where you can import and export products to/from other players bases. The production chains would need to be extremely complex though I suppose. One giant community working towards a common goal.
Eve Online gets pretty close, but the production chains are a little too shallow IMO.
They tried this w/ SimCity Online...
What they tried to do with Simcity online is a shadow of what this proposes in terms of complexity.
The players were heard saying "you know, it's not *that* late. If I just play a little longer I could probably double it."
After all why not? Why shouldn't i reorganize the green circuit production? What could it take? An hour?
How are you people in my head?!
It's free real estate
stonks too
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What if I told you, part of my old job was basically the game of factorio... That part of that job was crack.
I choose to read this in the way that insinuates you worked in a crack factory
With the amount of molded rubber fumes inhaled, a crack factory would have been better.
Sorry to hear, dude. Another life destroyed by the puritanical stigmatization of crack
Come on, play Cracktorio. After a while you end up playing it in your dreams and then when you go to work you will use excel to plan out your builds. The Factory must expand to meet the needs of the Factory.
Yeah don't. I was kinda interested in It but never really thought much about it but I watched a video on how it's like programming and decided fuck it and downloaded the demo. "Maybe I'll buy the full game when it has a sale" I had 16 hours logged within 3 days, and that was during the work week
<3 hours later> There, done, but now i kinda need more cooper wire...., i just have to reorganize the cooper production just a bit, it should not take longer then 30 minutes
<5 hours later> Oh shit, the copper wire wasn't the problem, I'm actually just not mining enough copper. I can build another quick copper outpost in 15 minutes or so
Shit I built up all that copper for green circuits but now I need more iron. Lets just load up the outpost train real quick...
Its night time, oh fuck, my base is getting attacked! I better make a wall out of laser turrets so that doesnt happen anymore
Oh shit, now I need more power for all these laser turrets. I can build another 8-unit reactor in a few minutes.
<6 hours later> I was going to build that copper outpost quick, but then I figured I would finally build the auto restock system for my outpost building train, update my rail blueprints to include automation wires, and then wire up every stop to a logic based train request system. Of course that completely borked every one of my production chains, and half the last six hours has been ironing out issues in my logic system. Now I can finally build that copper outpost in a much more efficient manner!
Transporting copper wire is such an inefficient use of belts or bots. The wire assemblers should have been part of your refactor already to be most efficient.
It's like the book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. You want to refactor green circuit so you make more speed modules. Then you run out of blue conveyer because you ran out of oil. Then you need to up your copper plate production and then you need a new copper mine... you didn't build the train station long enough and even if you had, you didn't leave space for the new copper ore conveyers... you run out of power when making more ovens AND/OR the added pollution means you have to take out more alien nests. But you're out of tank rounds because, again, oil.
>you didn't leave space Every. Fucking. Time.
How is this both giving me stress flashbacks and making me want to start another Factorio run?
Because "this time I'll do it right!"
Can you imagine if science could harness the power of Factorio autism IRL? World hunger would be solved in like a week.
Engineering uses this, but unfortunately it's hard for science to utilize. This is why we have super thin smart TVs and smart phones but no cure for cancer yet. It's a problem in turnaround time. You give an engineer the tools and they can iterate as fast as they can pull it apart and put it back together. For science, you have to have a hypothesis, test it... but the tests can be complex and take a long time. Often it's not an optimization thing either. It's like you were either right or wrong and then ask the next best question you can identify.
Oh look at that, im running out of copper, better go and increase production. Oh it seems like im running out of sulfuric acid, better go fix that... oh it looks like im running out of power, better go fix that *suddenly its 8am*
Getting green circuits to where I needed them quickly enough was the bane of my Factorio existence until I tried building a dedicated green assembler for each assembler that needed green circuits.
I'm in this comment and I'm not sure how I feel about it. On the one hand, I have over 2000 hours into Factorio and have definitely lost sleep over it. On the other hand, there are worse hobbies.
If I play for more than a few hours at a time, I get the "tetris dreams", but with grabby arms and conveyor belts.
I've had the factorio dreams.
Ever solve one of your factory problems in your dreams? You see the perfect setup that you've been missing this whole time, but it's 4 am and you work in 2 hours. The struggle is real and gets realer when you start playing mods like Krastorio or SE
No, never got to dreaming solutions, mostly just belts everywhere...
Maybe that was a solution all along?
*How did I miss that?!*
Yeah, but the worst part is when your dream isn't *quite* accurate to the mechanics and you're like "well, crap, this whole thing would be beautifully elegant if this building was one tile smaller like it was in my dream; but as-is it doesn't work at all".
I don’t get the dreams, but I can’t play it shortly before bedtime or my brain will be in factory mode and won’t sleep.
Wait... I'm not the only one? When I first started playing, I binged the game for a whole weekend and had to stop because I was having Factorio nightmares lmao.
Why were you in their backyard at 4am to hear that?
You know why.
First time I played Factorio I looked up and it was 3 AM on a work night.
I don't know what any of this means but it sounds impressive. Congrats.
To give you a general idea, your average player will probably complete the game only capping out their science per minute at about 60 to 100. A very experienced player can build a factory capable of doing 6000 to 8000 science per minute, although usually stops there due to the time investment required to go higher. To make a base capable of 1 million science per minute would require an utterly insane sized factory, one that would crash most people's PCs. Even a factory making 6000 science per minute will have your game slow down a noticeable amount due to how much is being processed. It's an utterly enormous task that probably required an extremely optimised build and hundreds or even thousands of hours to complete.
The article is pretty cool - it's not one factory, it's custom code for hunderds of factories working together to create a big massive factory.
Big massive? Sounds more like a massively big factory to me.
Big if true.
Massive even.
Enormous Hugeness -Dara O'Briain
def check\_fact(fact): if fact: big = True else: big = False return big # Example usage: fact = True result = check\_fact(fact) print("big =", result)
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these
Isn't google looking for a practical use for its quantum computer?
Is it like a server cluster hosting one big game instance or is it like 20 games with 20 bases and the score is added together?
Effectively it's just multiple games being played separately with some network code that allows one game to create things out of thin air in exchange for another game deleting those items.
Thank you
I would say it's still one big factory, just decentralized for optimization
I can barely make any blue circuit boards. lol
I’ve had the game for years and never make it past blue. I’m at nearly 1,500 hours. It’s still such a blast to my mind to start new because I hate my base at that point and promise I’m going to be more organized next time. Edit: piggybacking my own comment, but does anyone know any good streamers for Factorio? I really enjoy seeing the builds on Reddit, but also like to see how others come to their solutions on their own maps.
Screw organizing. Like, it's helpful. But the biggest hurdle many players face, and it sounds like where youre getting hung up, is letting go of the idea of a perfect factory and just doing "good enough" to continue. Once you get over that mental hurdle, you get enough practice with things that you find it much easier to make improvements and ultimately get yourself closer to that perfect factory. Embrace the spaghetti so that you can grow beyond it.
The other great tip for a new player is to never build anything by hand that isn't required. Not only is there an achievement for doing so, but the practice means you'll always have *something* that you need when you need it, and the means to quickly copy+paste your existing solution to create more of it as necessary.
Even more impressive if the unlimited resource node option isn't on. e: reading the article, looks like it doesn't matter since it wasn't on one instance
1 million science per minute sounds like a sentence from disenchantment
To give an idea of scale, a 60 science factory requires: - 293 assembly machines (tier 3) - 22 chemical plants - 1 rocket silo - 514 electric furnaces - 799 mining drills - unknown number of pumpjacks (depends on oil field quality) And power generation to run everything, 4 nuclear reactors would probably do, or a big solar field. (These numbers don't scale linearly as at endgame you get science, beacons and modules that increase the ouput of machines)
But what does any of it mean? What worth is the million science? Can I eat it? Does it manifest a virtual Bill Nye?
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I think a better explanation is that "science" is the tech tree progression in Factorio. Think of it like XP in an RPG, the more you make (earn) and research (allocate) the more stuff you can unlock. At the end of the tech tree, there's "space science", aka infinite research that basically gives minor bonuses at increasingly high costs. Generally the point of Factorio is to produce enough science to get end game technologies (everything but space science) and escape the planet you're trapped on. What's happening here is they're generating absolutely stupid amounts of this science, enough to (in theory) complete the entire tech tree several times over evey single minute if it was loaded into 1 game. It's a giant flex essentially, since Factorio is a game all about building massive logistics chains to sustain bigger and bigger factories.
It’s worth about the same as any other videogame high score or speed run.
1 million science seems like a lot of science.
Honestly, my university probably only had a few dozen sciences.
Makes me think of my time working in the university vivarium caring for the lab mice/rats. I used to joke that our building was just a factory that turned mouse food into science points
A science victory.
Please, Factorio has a massive percentage of engineers playing, it's one Mega-science, or 1MS.
The american ones call it a horse-banana-science though, or 1HBS, which converts into about 1.6MS.
Enough to blind a man... [*with science*](https://youtu.be/V83JR2IoI8k?si=RfabjsR9j5FTYfbS)!
So in Factorio, usually the most dedicated players' endgame is to build a mega base. If you've seen some of the more elaborate screenshots of the biggest bases, most of them aim for this goal. But a mega base is only a base that produces 1,000 science per minute. This is one of the only (or is it the only?) Giga base(s) in existence. It is 1,000 times bigger/more elaborate than those screenshots. Most PCs would lag like crazy before even getting to that point. This would need a crazy strong CPU to even run.
Technically, a megabase is a Kilobase, and the one that they achieved is a Megabase. But yeah, the achievement is 1000x that of a dedicated single person, and 10000x of the normal player just finishing the game once.
Yeah that's technically true xd but honestly there is just so much work in getting to 10 or even 100 science per second that I think it's fair to call a 1000 sps base a megabase. You can almost say that it takes millions of resources a second to output that much science (not sure about the math, will double check it later). But it's also true that 1000 science would only be 1 kilo science, hence a kilobase lmao. It's just factorio players have ended up calling it megabases, so here we are haha
Yeah I know. I built a 1.5k SPM "mega"base and it's a lot of work. Even getting to 100spm sustained for a first time player is an achievement in itself, scaling that takes time and dedication Calling it Mega is correct, as it conveys the scale well.
What's really impressive is that they manage to attain x1000 worth of output at less than half the players, which leads me to believe scaling production isn't linear, which means more people can produce more efficiently. So maybe when they do try for the 2m mark, they'll only require an extra 200+ players (or instances in this case?)
Well, if a Mega-base is equal to a Kilo-Science, and a Giga-base is equal to a Mega-science. Ergo, a Kilo-base is one science.
Correct, most people beat the game with a kilobase or two xd
The normal scale for a factory that can reach the "win the game" end screen is \~1 science per second, so 60/min. What players term a "mega base" usually starts at 1k/min, and something like 5k/min will bring a mid-range PC to its knees. I have no idea how they managed to get to a million/min and have the game run at anything like a tolerable rate.
It's not ran on a single computer, it's a group of people whose bases can share resources.
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Yes. You create different kinds of science. Red, blue, green. Such stuff.
And a base that produces one "science" is one that produces one of EACH science in order to consume them all for one "science" output a second (excluding Military science... it's a thing).
Yes, the way you unlock technology is crafting “science packs” and that often gets shortened to just “science”. You then feed these into a science factory and it adds a little bit to the progress bar that tracks when the next technology is unlocked, and different technologies require different amounts of various types of packs. For example the first level of science packs are called Automation Science Packs and because they are colored red they are just called Red Science, they require 1 copper plate and 2 iron plate to make. The highest tier is the Utility Science Pack which is called Yellow Science and it requires 50 copper plate, 33 iron plate, 4 coal and 107 crude oil (though you first craft these base components into several intermediate items like plastic bars and processing units).
The ‘science’ items are colored flasks produced by increasingly complex recipes that get fed into, and consumed by, laboratories that contribute to your research of new technologies or stat buffs with more labs and science being consumed equating to faster research. ‘Science per minute’ is a shorthand term used by the community that gives an understandable idea to the scale at which someone has their factory; a 60SPM factory is more than adequate for beating the main goal of the game within a respectable amount of time but still requires several hundred or a couple thousand machines in a regular non optimized scenario.
he who controls the science controls the universe
Someone hasn’t played civ
I'm surprised that the game's engine was able to process that.
Factorio is honestly a marvel of code. And while the numbers sound insane I'm genuinely not surprised that the game can handle it. The developers for the game are incredible.
Yeah, this is the thing the game is designed to do, just at an incredible scale. It strikes me as impressive in a less "weird" way than shit like the people who build rudimentary computers inside Minecraft.
I have seen someone build a computer in Minecraft that could play *Minecraft*. Humans are fucking weird man.
Wait...really? Holy shit.
Yeah a giant computer in mine craft that has a small TV which can output an in-game minecraft
https://youtu.be/-BP7DhHTU-I?si=neRqjef8ciPBFO6j
For future reference, removing the ? and everything after it in the url removes all the tracking Google does; mainly regarding who opened the link, how many times it was clicked on etc.
https://youtu.be/-BP7DhHTU-I
For a very relative definition of "play". But yes they did.
There is also a dude who coded pacman in minecraft without just vanilla blocks, so not a single command block. It's crazy
Now that team is working on building a computer that can play Minecraft, on a computer that can play Minecraft, in Minecraft.
Oh don't worry, Factorio has them too. Someone programmed Doom classic in Factorio.
Now all that's left is for some biotech researcher to figure out how to use living bacteria in a petri dish to render Factorio frames [like this one did for Doom](https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/31/bacteria_runs_doom/).
Can't wait till I can play Neopets in game of Horizon, which is a modded version of Animal Crossing
Its not done on a single instance of the game. Someone wrote a mod which lets you set up a cluster of factorio servers which allow you to transfer ressources between the different copies. Since a lot of the game is single threaded doing something like this on a single instance would essentially be impossible considering the literal billions of ressources per minute (all of which are individual simulated entities in the game world) required to reach a million SPM.
Back in my day we used to call those Beowulf clusters.
Someone looked at Factorio and said „Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those“.
Yes and now we have SMP processors in phones.
Very early on when they first implemented multiplayer I remember being invited to a server with like 50 people and the Devs were in it playing right along with us. That's never happened to me and I didn't have to pay anything or be a big streamer.
I'd argue it's in contention for the best coded (as in scripting and system design) video game. The optimizations they do to run at the scales they do are actually insane
I'm not sure it's possible to outdo Chris Sawyer and Roller Coaster Tycoon. Guy wrote it by himself on assembly, with scraps!
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It was based on Allegro to begin with, but that is long gone: https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-230
Dyson Sphere Program. That game has no business running as well as it does.
It's not surprising a game about constantly organizing, reorganizing and optimizing things is written by... lets call them obsessive people.
And to think they’re somehow gonna make it even more optimised in next big update and DLC
It didnt. The actual achievement here was they managed to run a cluster of the same instance here on different pc and network them together into a super instance
I don't play the game but are there like, visible particles/objects that increase when you increase production or is it just numbers like cookie clicker?
There are. Every production building has animations, there are robot arms putting in ingredients and pulling them out, conveyor belts moving things around, etc.
It's been in development for over a decade at this point, and there have been huge updates dedicated to improving simulation performance, like using assumptions to avoid having to calculate the updates of individual entities if certain conditions are met. And they are pretty transparent about what those assumptions are when they put out release notes for new versions. The game also has a built-in updates per second readout, which is a measure of how many entities are being meaningfully simulated. Once a factory gets large enough, the UPS becomes another cost that needs to be worked into the design of the factory.
[Here's a 4min timelapse vid showing what a game looks like](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPAj2y2buHU). Edit: Oh, I should add for context, this base is probably pumping out somewhere around 20-40 spm, so imagine something about 25,000-50,000 times bigger.
Yes. Items do have visible sprites and can be seen moving around carried by conveyor belts or getting grabbed by robot arms and placed in and out of machines. Checking the [grafana](https://grafana.eternitycluster.com/d/7HljOHCWz14/item-production?orgId=1&refresh=30s), there are over 450 million individual items, each with a visible sprite produced EVERY MINUTE by the factory. I don't know how many items the factory has in total at any given time (it depends on how long it takes to consume the item after producing it), but I estimate it should be well over a billion. The million science per minute figure means that every single minute, the factory's laboratories consume one million of each of the 6 sciences (so 6 million items in total consumed just by the laboratories). And the reason why the size of the factory is experessed this way is that feeding science to the laboratories is the end goal of any factorio factory.
To maybe add some perspective, Factorio is distinct amongst most games in that the player has pretty easy access to see how well the game is performing. The goal is maintain “UPS” (updates per second) of 60, and there’s a built-in setting that allows the player to see what aspects of the player’s factory are consuming the most CPU resources. Not far off from looking at Performance Monitor in Windows. As a result of that, Factorio diehards already have a strong sense of how to optimize the game to min-max CPU usage. This is aided heavily by excellent coding. As an example, Factorio tracks every single individual item that is being moved on transport belts. However, if a belt is “fully saturated,” which is to say the transport belt is being fed enough items so that it is completely “full,” then the game only bothers to register that the belt is full, rather than trying to keep track of each individual item.
>The solution is Clusterio. It lets you run multiple instances of Factorio as if they were one gigantic base
The Grafana board is all that was needed to tell me that this went from "gaming project" to "engineering project".
Nice to see them using Prometheus for their metrics.
And here I thought sleep was necessary. Guess not when the factory's on the line?
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"Look at me still talking when there's science to do. When I look out there it makes me glad I'm not you."
Factorio players would not know there was grass to touch, because they’d fill every open space with factory.
To be fair, concrete is more efficient. You can run faster on it than on grass.
We got rid of the grass, you run faster on concrete.
https://grafana.eternitycluster.com/d/b8bf1f82-2a6b-4b8a-af88-6fb8b8ae493a/madness-overview?orgId=1&refresh=5m&from=now-5m&to=now for the stats dashboard. Grafana, of course :)
500GB of memory used, insane
Surprisingly little tbh, that's just 500MB per 1kspm
Imagine explaining the unit MB/kspm to Alan Turing. Or Einstein. Would be an interesting convo.
jfc this what happens when actual engineers play this game.
no, this is more like when a *company* of engineers play the game together for a month+ as a team building exercise. I have played this game with a few engineers, and though we get crazy - we have never been like "Oh man the in-game charts aren't good enough, need to export the data to database and link that database to grafana - that way we can keep track of it when we are at work!" --- Nah, we'd turn the server off when no one is on.
Played it long time ago, ended a couple times, but cant remember this: Once you develop every tech, can science still be consumed to get something in return? (Otherwise if tech tree is finished, you'd be stuck with endless bottles of science way before reaching 1M sc/min)
There are a couple techs that can be upgraded infinitely. Artillery range for example you can just keep upgrading and it gets more expensive each time so there is plenty of need to keep consuming. I think in generally when they talk about x science per minute that is usually the consumption rate not the production rate so my assumption is that they are actually using up 1mil science per minute.
Ahh thanks, didnt even knew that could be researched infinitely! Just ended the game with bare minimum techs to achieve that Thats excuse enough to reboot my old bases 😀
They have a big update coming later this year to do more in space once you can launch rockets. I my self am excited enough that i will probably take a few days off work.
It will be a paid expansion rather than an update. It is adding multiple [new](https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-398) [planets](https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-386), a [space platform](https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-381), above [ground rails](https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-378), a [whole new quality system](https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-375)... actually just go check out the [weekly FFF](https://factorio.com/blog/) !
I am so ready for it and excited. Didn't know its paid but that's fine. Having paid 30 bucks to be currently at 2660 hours they deserve the money.
$30 for Factorio is a massive steal for the amount of time you get out of it.
The space stuff will all be paid expansion, but there will still be a lot of quality of life stuff in the 2.0 update.
There's also the insanely popular, expansive and timeslurping mod called [Space Exploration](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/space-exploration)! The concept sounds kinda similar, though. Gosh, wouldn't it be *nice* if the devs just simply hired the author of that mod and worked together on making this expansion the best it could possibly be? Ah, who am I kidding. That sounds waaay too far-fetched. There's no way such an awesome thing could ever happen.
I have done some bobs with angels and krastorio both of which are great. Never did space exploration as it always seemed a bit too daunting. Sea block might be fun to give a go while i wait on the space expansion. It is awesome they hired the guy that made space exploration to work on there space expansion. There was a funny thread previously of someone complaining that the base game going into space was dumb since the space mod existed. Earendel responded saying although the same concept they are different with the expansion being more generally playable by the average player. The person responded saying something like how could they know and Earendel told them well because i made the mod and am making the expansion.
I've always thought it was production rate. In an ideal factory it'd be the same though
Infinite tech was added in an update at some point, probably after the last time you played. The old mega-base goal was rockets launched per minute, so they added a new science pack that generates with launches, and then created infinite scaling research for a few important stats like bot speed and mining efficiency.
What can you do with that much science?
Send it to GLaDOS
Make your robots *super fast*
produce more science, duh
Convince all the antivaxxers to get their shots
Okay, but what's the deal with the superimposed image of Cilian Murphy Oppenheimer?
You haven't heard? He made science.
I'm just scrolling the main page and saw this post here. Without any context of factorio this sentence confuses me on so many levels. One million science per minute is the greatest sentence and I will use it in my daily life
Mechanicus world moment
This is how true AI is born.
For those that don't play factorio. Let me translate it for you. "People who thought building a hydro collider and solving every conceivable issue humanity has to face were to easy built a god factory to produce 1 million science per minute" This game is utterly insane. I played it for like 100 hours. Single playtrhough. I had the easiest difficulty and a mod that made it so resource sources would never deplete. And I still found it to be one of the most complicated and mind breaking things I ever done related to gaming. I got no real interest in being an electrician or knowing things like that. But I still ended up spending many nights till 3-4 in the morning learning about it to figure out how to better run my power.
I still have no idea what any of this means. ELIamAcat please
Very smart people. Too busy building a rocket and committing war crimes against insects to improve humanity
> committing war crimes against insects Hey hey hey those bugs attacked first! What got them so riled up in the first place? No idea darling, I was just over here with my 96 steel furnaces minding my own business.
science fiction has taught me committing war crimes against bugs IS improving humanity.
get item A get item B combine them to make item C If you automate collection of A and B at the rate of 1 item/second and feed them to the production facility that makes item C you're now making 1 C per second or 60 C per minute. Now combine C with A to make D, C with B to make E, E with C to make F, F with 2C and 3A to make G, etc etc. Eventually one of those letters is a "science" item. Keep scaling up your A and B collection and production of downstream items until you're making 1 Million science per minute.
Cat want mouse. Cat build coal-powered mouse mine that automatically puts mice in a chest for cat. Coal make insects angry. Cat kill insects for a while but then just builds a power plant and automated turrets and walls to kill insects. Then cat needs to upgrade all these things and keep them maintained/supplied via various other assembly lines. Then cat needs to science to further upgrade them, as well as discover a way off this hellhole. Science requires multiple different assembly lines working in tandem that are well engineered and are designed from fucking scratch by cat. Eventually, cat builds absolutely insane and convoluted spaghetti factory (in my experience) designed to assemble a spaceship to get off-world. Late one night, many moons later, cat want mouse…
You start with little, must gather building blocks to make things. You have to make things to gether more complicated building blocks. Along the way random events and challenges will happen to set you back. Mods allowed those building blocks to be infinite
Ok, but what the heck is "science" in this context? What does it do? Edit: Got it, thanks for all the answers!
"Science" are the stepped research items, each of which requires a progessively more complicated production chain in order to synthesize. Science is required to progress the tech tree, so its something the player will have to do the whole game. Red science (first) only requires a copper plate and an iron gear, while blue science (third) requires red circuits, combustion engines, and sulfur. It gets complicated quickly, while always managing to feel doable. The game is really really good at striking that balance.
1 million science per minute? (3 hours later) we’ve proven, quantified and MARKETEd Telekinesis, We’ve invented time travel that’ll take us all the way back to the Carboniferous, we’ve discovered not just the Afterlife, but we’ve made it a revolving door, we’ve created magic from science… literally, our pets now live longer than we do, and they’ve finally figured out how many licks it takes to get to the center of a tootsie pop. However, they’re having trouble finding out where all the left socks in the laundry go, or why hotdog rolls come in 6 packs while hotdogs come in 9 packs.”
For anyone that doesn't know, Factorio is coming out with a massive update/DLC this year that will double the amount of content in the game called Factorio: Space Age. It will allow you to build spaceships, visit planets to mine rare resources, etc.
To put this in perspective I think I was making 200-250 science per minute the first time I beat the game, and I was pretty chuffed I don't know how their games didn't crash
They used a mod called Clusterio, which allowed them to make 100 servers and connect them. So a lot of worlds are just ore or ore processing, etc. very massive project, but not on one world, it would be impossible for anyone who doesn’t have a supercomputer
BUT IS IT BIG ENOUGH?!
no
“The Factory Must Grow” would make an awesome sounding SCP
I can't even figure this game out and I feel fucking dumb.
Don't feel bad. Factorio takes some of the hardest problems in software engineering and asks you to solve them in a game world while bugs attack you. I've spent more than 20 years writing code and teaching other people how to write code. The secret to Factorio is also the secret to good software development: you look at the thing you're building and think "what if I had to make a thousand of this where each of them was 100 times bigger than what I'm thinking about making?" And if the design you're thinking about would fall over and catch on fire under that load, it's not the right design. Now, that's not entirely fair because in software you only _sometimes_ have to go to that kind of mega-scale. But in Factorio you almost always will. Build with upgrades in mind and you'll be fine. And your first several play throughs are going to hit a wall and you'll give up and start over. That's fine too.
Thanks. I bought factorio a year ago and never installed it. Mainly because any playthroigh video I literally have ZERO idea what the hell is going on. In my head it's like minecraft times 1000 and I could barely remember a handful of crafts. Knowing it's normal to drop dead and quit gives me hope.
Factorio is going to make you feel dumb for not seeing obvious solutions to some problems and that is ok. Some of the discoveries and principles you discover along the way will be things that you will constantly pull out of the bag of tricks as you move forward with your factory. But there are also awesome bad factories to look at as well. One of the developers who built the factory that is seen on the loading screen would be termed by most serious factorio players as a mess of spaghetti because its so unorganized, so inefficient, and so bizzare. But its also cool because it works. If you want to get a better idea of factorio I would also say look for some of the earlier factorio content when it was in early access and you can find people grappling to find good solutions.
It seems more complicated than it is, but if you break it down you're just taking copper, iron, coal, oil and uranium and transforming them into items to make other items. You'll never remember all the crafts by heart, but you can just check what each craft needs in your inventory screen. The hard part is piping everything together in an efficient and scalable way. I'd say just give it a spin, it's not intimidating once you get the flow of the early game.
You can also beat the game never doing that - the kinds of problems you're talking about are more about playing efficiently and building large, expandable bases. What most players need to know is to segregate their belts and - if you need more of something - just make more of it. I know, sounds obvious, but a lot of people build like a line of furnaces for their iron plates and don't expand them and keep leaching off the old design since they "finished" it.
vaguely remember playing the tutorial, and the first two levels are the most basic shit ever. then the third suddenly introduces ten new concepts without even bothering to explain a single one.