Friday Facts #371 - Apple Silicon

[FactorioBot]

Here it is! (beep boop)

https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-371

[brunzenstein]

I'm now running Factorio on a MacBook Air M2 24 GB under Ventura 13.0.1 thanks to your adaptation now smoothly in silicon wrapping-
thank you for your effort to make this possible.
Actually I bought the MBAir not the least to run Factorio smoothly

[Wuck]

Is there a chance to get the same for the Surface pro x (arm64)? That would be soooooo nice

[brainfart21]

So... Now that Factorio runs on ARM I can have headless Factorio running on an ARM server?

[SHiRKiT]

Glad to see small FFF updates like this!

[jodokus31]

Stupid question maybe (Mac newb), can you have multiple standalone installations on mac?
There is a dmg file, which lets you install factorio the usual way, but is the a zip version for mac?

[thereaverofdarkness]

Now compare these Macs with PC!

[Akronymus]

Why was the porting considered so confidental?

[bombcar]

Why was the porting considered so confidental?

They didn’t want to accidentally leak any hints about Nintendo. Just seeing ARM probably wouldn’t have but seeing some of the changes made to ARM might.

[Akronymus]

Why was the porting considered so confidental?

They didn’t want to accidentally leak any hints about Nintendo. Just seeing ARM probably wouldn’t have but seeing some of the changes made to ARM might.

Ooooh, it seems I misread that part then. Thanks for clarifying.

[StrangePan]

Stupid question maybe (Mac newb), can you have multiple standalone installations on mac?
There is a dmg file, which lets you install factorio the usual way, but is the a zip version for mac?

You can place the factorio.app package contained in the DMG anywhere you want on your computer, and you can give it any name you want; you don't have to place it in the Applications directory, and it doesn't need to be named "factorio.app". You could have multiple Factorio installations by downloading the DMGs for each version you want and copying them into different directories, or by simply giving them different names and putting them in the same directory.

[StrangePan]

I'm now running Factorio on a MacBook Air M2 24 GB under Ventura 13.0.1 thanks to your adaptation now smoothly in silicon wrapping-
thank you for your effort to make this possible.
Actually I bought the MBAir not the least to run Factorio smoothly

You're welcome! How well does a MacBook Air run Factorio? I haven't had the opportunity to use one of those yet.

[StrangePan]

So... Now that Factorio runs on ARM I can have headless Factorio running on an ARM server?

If it's an Apple Silicon Mac server, then yeah!

I don't think we're preparing ARM binaries for Linux or Windows machines right now. Maybe one day it'll happen, but right now, everyone's pretty focused on the expansion.

[McRib]

finally a another Friday Fact... i missed them so much! Thx for sharing this insides with us.

[Stargateur]

everyone's pretty focused on the expansion.

As someone that really really want a factorio server on my rasberry Pi 4 I say:

[LordBlackwood]

Stupid question maybe (Mac newb), can you have multiple standalone installations on mac?
There is a dmg file, which lets you install factorio the usual way, but is the a zip version for mac?

You can place the factorio.app package contained in the DMG anywhere you want on your computer, and you can give it any name you want; you don't have to place it in the Applications directory, and it doesn't need to be named "factorio.app". You could have multiple Factorio installations by downloading the DMGs for each version you want and copying them into different directories, or by simply giving them different names and putting them in the same directory.

In this scenario, the separate instances would still end up using a single, shared user data directory, right? (~/Library/Application Support/factorio, presumably.)

AFAIK there is no easy way to have separate installations (with separate user data directories) that doesn't involve manually replacing the contents of the user data directory when switching version.

[Bilka]

In this scenario, the separate instances would still end up using a single, shared user data directory, right? (~/Library/Application Support/factorio, presumably.)

AFAIK there is no easy way to have separate installations (with separate user data directories) that doesn't involve manually replacing the contents of the user data directory when switching version.

You can have separate user data directories, see https://wiki.factorio.com/Application_directory#macOS for instructions.

[jodokus31]

Stupid question maybe (Mac newb), can you have multiple standalone installations on mac?
There is a dmg file, which lets you install factorio the usual way, but is the a zip version for mac?

You can place the factorio.app package contained in the DMG anywhere you want on your computer, and you can give it any name you want; you don't have to place it in the Applications directory, and it doesn't need to be named "factorio.app". You could have multiple Factorio installations by downloading the DMGs for each version you want and copying them into different directories, or by simply giving them different names and putting them in the same directory.

Great, thank you.

In this scenario, the separate instances would still end up using a single, shared user data directory, right? (~/Library/Application Support/factorio, presumably.)

AFAIK there is no easy way to have separate installations (with separate user data directories) that doesn't involve manually replacing the contents of the user data directory when switching version.

You can have separate user data directories, see https://wiki.factorio.com/Application_directory#macOS for instructions.

Thanks, good point.
So, I can create several totally independent installations for each modpack.

Would not want to miss that, esp. for retaining the replay

[Redpossum]

Very nice, thanks for sharing.

Personally, I haven't touched a Mac since the early 90's, and have no desire to do so ever again, but I'm happy for you.

The factory must grow.

[Spectere]

Now compare these Macs with PC!

It compares pretty favorably, given the M1's strong single-core performance (though I imagine the latest gen AMD/Intel parts would do quite well, albeit with greater power consumption):

Code: Select all

Lenovo ThinkPad T15 Gen 2, i7-1165G7, Arch Linux (KDE Plasma): Map benchmarked at 124.538 UPS

Ryzen 5900X, Windows 11 x64: Map benchmarked at 150 UPS

2021 MacBook Pro 16", M1 Pro, macOS Ventura: Map benchmarked at 160.57 UPS

I got these results using the flame_Sla 10k map. Both laptops were plugged in during testing.

Kind of odd that my M1 Pro ended up getting results closer to the normal M1 or x86_64 results (per the blog post), considering the primary difference between the M1 Pro and M1 Max is the GPU.