Factorio – Visualizing construction material dependencies

With Satisfactory's recent 1.0 release and Factorio 2.0's upcoming release, I'm really loving that factory games are being recognised more widely. They're incredibly fun, addictive, and rewarding. I've sunk quite a lot of time into Satisfactory but less into Factorio. Perhaps 2.0 is a good time to start.

Satisfactory has a range of useful tools like this to plan your factory (if you don't want to do it manually), and they can quickly explode in complexity.

At first it's mind-bogglingly daunting but breaking it down into smaller parts then addressing them down the DAG makes it more digestible. When you finally complete an end goal it's very satisfying.

> Satisfactory has a range of useful tools like this to plan your factory

I think Satisfctory has some interesting game design choices that promote that. Since mines give a fixed round number of primary resources and factories also process round number of items like 15, 12, 30, 60, 90 and so on I'm immediately incentivsed to think how many factories of each type do I need along the chain so so that all inputs are processed. No other game prompted me to do this much simple math in my head. Thinking about whole network of dependecies with their throuput is the natural next step and since it's getting unwieldy for a brain then writing a tool for this is the next one since you already understand what the tool needs to do very well because you were doing it yourself up to that point.

In games like Factorio or Dyson Sphere Program the information about throughput of factories is somewhat obscured so it's not easy to do these calculations in your brain so I don't do that and just go with visual feedback about whether factory is starved or overwhelmed.

I struggle with DSP or games where I can't determine throughput of a building for that reason. It's hard to plan things when you don't know how much will be used. I like having numbers for these kinds of things.

In theory you can calculate throughput because they say for example that single production cycle takes 5 seconds, uses 3 units of substrate and produces two units of a product. So input is 3/5×60 per minute and output is 2/5×60 per minute. But that's too much for me to be doing in my head all the time so I don't. Satisfaction is nice enough to just give you result and ensures it's somewhat round so you can do further calculations with it in your head.

Okay, I wasn't aware of this. I've played another game named Oddsparks Automation Adventure where the "conveyor belts" are individual units that carry items, and the throughput is calculated by how long the walking track is combined with how many units are on that track.

I don't really have the will to do the math in my head either, specially since things may change frequently as you upgrade/add/remove things and a throughput at one place causes a cascading change throughout the production chain.