Making an Overhaul Mod for Factorio (Devlog 1)

I've not really used Blender before but you parts look...odd. It's like they aren't rendered in perspective but rather an off off axis isometric giving them a skewed and back heavy look to them especially the things that you would expect to be dimensional such as the I beams and square tube. maybe its a lighting thing.

Cool! I had the same idea about making specialized machines for the parts but just have them more efficient than assemblers and nothing about these different metals.

So nice I wanted to like it twice! But instead I realized I can hit the tipjar :)

Don't furnaces already work like this? They'll take whatever fuel source and whatever ore and produce something.

I'm currently working on my own suite of mods that will integrate with vanilla but also support a few of the popular overhauls currently.

I've seen you (or atleast your mods) mentioned in a few discords and I'm happy you've decided to make a small tutorial on your process.

Thank you!

When I'm thinking about all of the mods I've played, I'm sort of shocked that there hasn't been a large RTS overhaul mod (though maybe there is and I missed it.) I get strong broodwar vibes every time I play Factorio and that really inspires me. Your videos have encouraged me to look into making my own overhaul mod! It's difficult to find the time to code after doing it all day at work, but in the meantime, I can live vicariously through your work.

I can't wait to see what happens with your mod in the future!

Woah. Awesome concept and great execution thus far. And also awesome channel - I checked out a few other videos and this is awesome. Keep up the good work and take breaks as needed!

As I was watching this, I kept going "YES. YES YES.' With a few "FUCK YES"es thrown in.

I have always wanted to watch a deep dive into making mods for factorio there just isn't a lot of videos out there I tried to get into it programming mods for factorio as programming is passion of mine and factorio is just the icing on the cake its just hard to figure out where to start and how to actually get things working I must not be looking in the right areas on how to actually start though

have you ever thought about naming the minisemblers to constructors?
cause they do all the part constructing i think

Hey man, any chance of a Part 2 in the foreseeable future? I can't stop thinking about this..

Factorio is one of the games, that deserves a Game-Of-The-Decade titel.
It's one of the few games that I would recommend even to young people at about 12 years instead of all that call of duty shit that isn't suitet for children anyway. Or that stupid ass Fortnite/Overwatch etc. Those games don't make you clever at all.
It turns you into a cringe baby that loves to throw a tantrum non-stop.

I’ve thought about something like this for a long time, and I’m excited to see where it goes!

a note on texturing objects: you really want to use some sort of a geometry-aware information to shape your textures. for examples, oxide layers tend to get scraped off around sharp edges of your geometry, gunk typically builds up in crevices, etc etc. usually they do this kind of stuff with substance painter/substance designer, but maybe you can do something similar in blender.

Your idea for intermediary crafting actually sounds like the Modern Industrialization mod for Minecraft - which funnily enough was inspired by Factorio

Advanced renamer looks really good...

See.. This is how you do stuff! So many people hard code stuff and its so hard to scale.. We live in a age where the computer can do millions of things a second, so make the computer do all the hard and repeating stuff

Ohh and by the way, are you saying that Factorio does not support something as basic as multiple items as a ingredient without making it a whole new recipe?

i latly have been wanting to make a factorio mod, and i just havent been able to find a good tutorial, could you release a step by step guide? good vid btw.

What I got from this, is you don't play Warhammer.

Just Wow this is some incredible stuff

Factorio devs please implement it

BTW In Anno 1800 there are special "specialists" that work like modules in beacons, some of them for example allow to use Iron Ore instead of Iron. Could that be implemented by factorio modules? So you could make high throughput aseembly line that take only intermidate products, or, for example you could place module that make your engine assemblers take iron instead of steel, iron instead of gears, iron instead of pipes and ore instead of iron. So you place 4 "utility modules" as trade of "productivity" or "speed"

I'm don't sure about tons of intermediate product, but idea of replaceability 1 of X to 2 of Y is very appealing to me. And I think more in terms of "options" like You could make something with 1 iron ingot, or 1 iron plate, BUT you could use special production line that would make from 1 ingot 2 plates.

And also, could you alternate production time depend on input?

Ore Ganic as in "they have 4 sprites for every ore but they look kinda boxy or square-ish".
Sometimes I miss the ore blobs from 0.16 just because they have curves.

I still need to launch the rocket, every time I get to the next level of resources, I make a mental note of the layouts and what I need, then start new.

The game I wish existed, but I will never bother to make, would be somewhat like the open world of Minecraft with 3d voxels, but with a deeper cave system with more layers like Terraria, and with automation like Factorio.

The core idea would be to make it so the automation mechanics are simulated separately to the world, as their own little DAG. What's being rendered and what is being simulated don't need to be that close to eachother, really. You could easily do a BuildCraft style quarry by just converting the entire area to be mined into a quickly accessed inventory ahead of time, and only checking what's been mined when the player bothers to peek inside.

I just want to make giant holes and feel like a terrible person for doing it, okay? And I want a game that isn't full of jank that leads to you losing all your items because you accidentally crushed a gravestone with an elevator, and fake players breaking gravestones cause the gravestone mod to freak out... yeah sorry I just really hate how Create ends up due to technical limitations. Really hope those guys make their own game.

Thanks for the insane production quality!

my takeaway from this is that art takes a long time

this is the most structured devlog vid I've ever seen

goddammit, man, i gotta work and ya'll keep coming up with the best experience possible. please, i gotta work

Ive always wanted to get into coding for games like factory but idk where I should start. If I should learn a particular coding language or generalize into different languages or whatever

This is awesome! I love hearing about it and your problem solving skills are A+. I hope to see more updates in the future :)

as someone who works in a machine shop. i look forward to playing this overhaul standalone.

The irony of the Warhammer abstraction point is that modern Warhammer has moved closer to vanilla Factorio's than your mod concept... nowadays they're pre-posed with predetermined weapons, and some now have thematically colored plastic.

Very Nice video

This is really really cool also I got a question hows project brutality going

i hope to not pressure you but, i cannot wait to play this.

This sounds amazing!

I'd love to have a mod like that, a really nice balance between "extra content that makes the game harder" and "adds so many millions of intermediates and extra steps and stuff that's just useless imo"

Have you considered opening a patreon or buymeacoffee? 🤩

Nice progress and good luck! As a note about the visual designs, you have a lot of good ideas, but I think you should exaggerate them more. Right now, while the base material might be distinct, some of the other parts get lost in a sea of noise, and with base Factorio, there’s the advantage that most things have distinct color and shape. Here, items may only have one and with the noise pattern from the oxidation, at even reasonable distances it can be hard to see at a glance what a processing line might be. Same thing with your minissemblers, the colors are too little of the overall object shape. Compare that to the Chemical Plant, where a decent fraction of the overall sprite had the color of the thing being processed, and in the base game all the fluid colors are quite distinct.

I've barely touched factorio mods and the recipe thing is something I've noticed to be an awful problem. I love extending progression and adding levels to things like turret lvl 2 which just costs a bit less materials and a bit less crafting time and it's a bit more optimized all of that for a tiny bit more science or even lamp lvl 2 since lamps are kinda just unlocked and never touched. This is hell for recipes and overall I think due to how the game works it's better to still craft the same turret with the cheaper recipes, but upgrade the turret with the upgrades so you don't have to check and replace all of them. I love this because it gives you an easier alternative short term choice which you can pick if you're up to it.

Holy Moly I had a VERY similar concept in mind, but instead of doing this as a mod to factorio (exactly stumbling upon the problem with polymorphic recipes, or as you call them fungible ingredients list), I started doing an abstract incremental where you place node graph on a canvas, similar how you do a node graph for shaders in blender. This way I can whip up a playable prototype much faster, without spending too much time on graphics, refining gameplay first. I am currently at engine & basic UI prototype phase :)

It kinda reminds me of greg tech new horizons

"puns are better than reaction videos"

Never have truer words been said

this sounds like a really cool mod idea, i am stoked to se how it goes

Great work, love this dev log, your take on adding mods is very interesting and educational

Wow.Just wow!
Thanks for taking the time to compile this. Sign me up!!
Also, nice to see the support your video is getting by the community is amazing! Keep it up!

Krastorio and Space Exploration with a ton of extra new intermediates. I never knew Factorio could be even more awesome. I really hope this mod will see the light of day. Even if not, thanks for the awesome work you put in already.

"i dont actually play warhammer"

unsubbed.