Biters should drop raw materials, plates, intermediate products, filled barrels, and various factory components. Bigger biters or biters which are in close proximity to large amounts of other biters should drop better items and in greater quantities Don't ask where they get the loot. Oh, and by &quo...

Belts and bots are both extremes on the same spectrum, flexibility. Belts are 100% static and player driven, while bots are 100% dynamic and automatically managed by the game. The main points are: The path of each item on a belt is fixed and predetermined by the player, through the placement of spl...

The routing mod is somewhat of a complicated beast (and can be quite rewarding). So, to make it a bit more useable to others, I wrote a brief technical description and guide. Eketek's Routing and Pathfinding Mod: A Guide Routing & Pathfinding guide, TLDR edition: The blueprints and explanation t...

I made a fair amount of progress with the mod. It seems to be stable and working properly. The biggest errors lately been turning out to only be errors in the combinator setup. So, to help people get started with my routing mod (and perhaps make it a little easier to understand what it does and how ...

Which version of the game are you using? 0.15 would "migrate" the content of the blueprint library, afaik 0.16 should no longer do that. That would be 0.16.22 I'll look into this a bit more in-depth later today and see if anything actually breaks if I start the previous version of my mod ...

I decided to restructure a mod which I am working on and put together a migration script to do so. So far as I can tell, the migration properly adjusted all of my identifiers without anything breaking. However, the displayed text on the "Migrated Content" message contained a lot of bogus i...

Type: Mod Name: Eketek's Routing and Pathfinding Mod Description: Adds a circuit-controlled routing and pathfinding mechanism to the game License: MIT license Version: 1.0.0 Release: 2018-02-06 Tested-With-Factorio-Version: 0.16.25 Category: Gameplay Tags: Routing Combinators, Logistics, Circuit Net...

I think that there is a major utility disparity between belts and logistic bots which ought to be addressed. Bots can take items from anywhere to anywhere, with minimal consideration toward design, whereas belts are only able to take items along a single path (routing with combinator-based machines ...

Since they're fun and since I like to over-engineer my designs, I built an asynchronous multiplexer. For those less technically inclined, asynchronous multiplexing basically means everything on the network with something to transmit attempts to do so immediately after the network appears to be quiet...

I was thinking about ways to improve map generation and possibly making a mod for it (the design I have in mind seems to go way beyond what it looks like Factorio supports for terrain auto-placement, so I'd probably have to generate every tile). Part of this was thinking about noise algorithms and h...

The radar hardware is technically capable of scanning a circular zone (and much if the weather is decent). However, the person who crafted your radars (or who configured your assembler(s) to manufacture them) is afflicted with obsessive-compulsive disorder and thus has coded the radar controller pr...

The radar hardware is technically capable of scanning a circular zone (and much if the weather is decent). However, the person who crafted your radars (or who configured your assembler(s) to manufacture them) is afflicted with obsessive-compulsive disorder and thus has coded the radar controller pro...

I didn't notice any similar suggestions when I searched, but this is a pretty obvious issue which has been around a while. Presently, Factorio wastes a lot of of power and keeps my system fans running while the game is paused or minimized. Please consider suspending any threads that don't need to be...

I was going to recommend an overly complicated scheme that comes with lots of somewhat irrelevant features and potential for variety and efficiency (shader-based texture blending with various procedural generation options), but ended up concluding that I'd really just be recommending "layers&qu...

If you want to control energy production so that energy can only be extracted from specific power sources, you might consider taking reduction and oxidation into account when defining chemicals, reactions, and the fuel values of output products. And make sure any productivity and/or efficiency bonus...

There is a very elegant solution to this problem, and you don't need any mods, cheating, or ridiculously over-engineered logistics to use it: Shotgun

Pipe in your way? BOOM! Problem solved.

A few months ago, I posted a mildly complicated combinator construct which (though useless for most purposes) allows for signals to propagate across a circuit network in such a manner as to have signal components traceable toward their origins from any point within the network, but I was a bit sketc...

I have designed a simple & easily constructable hierarchical circuit network which propagates all input signals and indicates the directionality of the components of the signal on the network (by providing two separated signals at each link between sub-networks indicating what the is coming from...

The locomotives have Mr. Diesel's name stamped on them, so the locomotives are obviously powered by Diesel Engines. I don't want to suggest anything reasonable (such a portable implementation of the Fischer-Tropsch process), so I would encourage everyone to believe that Factorio Diesels are the most...