I have an idea for a mechanism which could feasibly be used to make parts of the factory virtualizeable. Also seems like it would fit into the game reasonably well and has additional uses in general gameplay. Concept: Synchronized Factory Blocks A synchronized factory block would be an arbitrary col...

When I consider the question, I come up with a simple solution and a complex solution. The simple solution is to set up an updater/launcher/configuration program which maintains multiple versions of Factorio (and which would load and run whichever version is requested by the mods/modpack). The compl...

The most fun way I can think of to balance it would be to significantly raise the efficiency of 1-N sorting and provide a set of alternate ore generators which consume manufactured products/intermediates instead of raw resources - preferably products which are predominately made of one metal but als...

Trains are really just thinly disguised biters. If you really want train-safety, wall off all of your tracks, set up gated crossing points, and wire up all of your train stops to disable the moment you enter a crossing point anywhere in your system.

You got my vote but only if you can bake cupcakes. You probably don't want to belt those. 1 Dough and 1 frosting makes a dozen cupcakes. The Industry-Standard Solution is to [individually] place each cupcake into a wrapper, then load wrapped cupcakes onto trays, then load the trays into racks, then...

I thought a bit more about how it can work. I think it would work reasonably well to use rail stops and train signals as anchor points for launch track. The next rail signal could be used to determine whether the train should accelerate or decelerate (green/yellow/blue -> accelerate, red -> attempt ...

The general idea is to add a new type of locomotive that use rapidly accelerates or decelerates on launch tracks and passively coasts along on regular track. This would allow trains to get in and out of stations & busy junctions much more quickly, make railroads substantially more complex & ...

Seems to me that the there are a few potential optimizations closely related to the topic which might be a bit more realistic for common cases: There may be performance to gain simply by identifying factory modules which are isolated from the rest of the factory and processing them separately from t...

It seems to me that the train-with-no-destination problem can be resolved by allowing trains to go to a depot when there are no valid/reachable stops on its schedule. Or even better: Conditional train stops, with 'next mandatory stop is disabled/unavailable' as one of the conditions which would caus...

I am not opposed to breaking mods -- but I do think that it would be nice if mod-breakage could be tracked (at least on the level of mod + required dependencies), such that mods that break (either raising an exception during load or referencing a renamed vanilla entity) in a pending update (not yet ...

What is UPS unfriendly with large warehouses is that every time an inserter wants to ... insert something in a container, it has to cycle through all the slots to see it there is room in that slot for the given item. The source with a lot of details here : https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?...

Short-distance item teleportation is intended to make the routing system accessible (I would really prefer it be comparable in difficulty to a bot-based logistics setup) and cut down on the logistic hub footprint a bit. Not having the teleportation is what drove a lot of the difficulty in the previo...

Over the past couple days, I went from thinking about it to starting development (because I want the new mod more than I want the ideas to merely be floated). The mod (both the previous one and the planned one) is pretty abstract (and a lot of it is in the 'coherent only in my head' phase), so I'll ...

Some time ago, I put together a mod that can be used to route items across a complex network of belts & inserters (general logistics for bot haters). It works off of circuit-network signals (inputs are signals repeesenting network topology, supplied items, requested items, and processing trigger...

I also noticed this, though I tend to be a bit more bothered by graphical inconsistency between things from the base game and things added by mods. I think that it would be nice to have a mod which completely replaces the base game graphics with something simple/minimalist which emphasizes colors an...

Simplest thing I can think of is to invert all of the "diagonal" lanes (flip half of the roads between left and right hand drive), join the inverted lanes with the then-aligned lanes on either side (either merge or run them along-side), and feed it into your choice of 4-way intersection (m...

I think that character logistic requests could be improved a lot by adding a mechanism to make one-time requests (non-persistant) for a specific amounts of items - such requests would be independent of the current inventory and would not persist after fulfillment (possibly even make it work like pul...

I have designed a transmitter which is able to share a single circuit network with an arbitrary number of other transmitters of the same design. The transmitter is clockless (doesn't use time slots, opting instead to attempt immediate transmission and use collision detection and resolution). It send...

I found a partial workaround for this (and presumably a specific place to start troubleshooting from): I was able to get my inventory to mostly show (7.5 rows of it and scrollable) by putting the Custom UI scale slider at 75% (Interface Settings).

TL;DR Add an optional parameter to train stops to limit the number of simultaneous inbound trains. What ? The train stop GUI should provide an optional field for specifying the maximum number of *inbound trains. When the limit is reached, any other trains that would otherwise be routed to that stop...