What is this?

This project is an academic recreation of the factory game Factorio.

I created it as an exercise to see how far I could optimize the basic mechanics and algorithms of the genre in terms of performance. Another goal that emerged along the way, was learning about the way modern CPUs actually work.

Why did you start?

I was playing Factorio and started being unable to expand due to performance issues. So in my hubris I declared: "How hard can it be?". I hope that the next person with this thought can find this project, and build on the ideas I have had and continue to push the performance.

Current State

Most logic for the basic building blocks of factories are working. This allowed me to recreate a Factorio base, giving me a point for performance comparison. I was able to run a base comprised of 60 copies of this Factorio Megabase by Smurphy (a single of which Factorio runs at ~40 UPS) at 60 UPS on my machine (Intel 12400F CPU with DDR4 3600 MT/s RAM).

Megabase (40k SPM) with Solar

Gigabase (60x Megabase, 2.4M SPM)

Machines Producing Stuff

Running it

If you only want to try it out, a web based build is available on my website. The performance of running in the browser is not amazing (mainly due to the browser being limited to a single thread), but it should still be able to run a 40k SPM Megabase without issue. WASM being limited to 4GB of RAM also limits the size of the factories.

For the best experience, I advise using the native build. It should run on Linux, Windows, MacOS as WASM (Though only Linux and WASM are tested regularly). Assuming you have rust and cargo, just cargo run --release. On NixOS the included flake.nix contains the program packaged for nix, or a devshell with my VSCodium based development environment.

How it works

I am currently working on a writeup, explaining how I designed this project and what decisions lead me to this level of performance, and which decisions I regret and might change in the future. This writeup will be available here as soon as it is done.

Attributions

I am not affiliated with Wube and Factorio in any way. I am just a fan, being nerdsniped by their excellent game. All graphics used with the graphics feature are from the Factorio Mod Krastorio 2 Assets.