Factorio MCP Server

[BeBoxer]

I'm not sure where this fits in terms of the Boards here. It's not actually a mod and it's only sort of a tool. I've been working on a Factorio MCP server which lets you wire up Factorio to a language model and let it try and play Factorio. I'll be honest up front and say that I haven't had much success at getting an LLM to play so consider this a work in progress. But if anyone is interested in trying it I'd be curious how it works for you and what suggestions you might have. It's on Github at FactoMCP. So far I've only been using it with Claude Code but it should be easy to use it with any other coding agent you want to try.

My goal with this is that it controls the player character and builds the factory as you would, walking around, mining, crafting, placing, etc. The Lua API isn't really geared to this use case but the key functions are there so as long as it's using tools other than the run_lua() one it should be more or less following the rules. The biggest gap in the toolset I know of is that I need to write up some tools for understanding belt topology. Trying to understand what the belts are doing just by looking at the placement of the individual belt entities is kind of a lost cause.

I'm running everything on a single Mac laptop so it's easy to plumb it all together. Factorio is running a multiplayer server so it has an RCON server available. Claude Code is running in a terminal with the MCP code in the same folder. I'd expect that Codex or Aider or any number of other coding / agent tools that run on your laptop would work as well. Other setups like Claude in the web browser accessing it would require the MCP to be on a publicly available server somewhere which is possible but I haven't tried to set that up.

Also fair warning that at least with the Claude Code setup it burns through tokens. I've got the Pro plan and I regularly burns through my usage limits without always getting a lot done. One of my next steps will probably to try out some of the free tier models on OpenRouter and see how those do. If you have the hardware to run a local LLM that's a possibility too although I haven't personally tried it out.

Anyway, if you think you might be interested give it a try. Let me know if you run into issues or have suggestions. It's a pretty new project of mine and I'm not great at writing documentation.

[pioruns]

Interesting. How far Claude went into playing the game and building a factory, in your testing?

[Tertius]

You're building an AI agent to automate playing Factorio, an automation game. Cool! That's the spirit!

[BeBoxer]

Interesting. How far Claude went into playing the game and building a factory, in your testing?

Not very far. I've got a couple of blog posts with some random thoughts but in general it's not very good. It burns through tokens so I can't let it just run for days on end. In my experience it will rely on hand crafting and mining far more than it should. But progress in fact? I've never gotten it to build an end to end working factory line. Like all the way from ore->furnace->assembler->lab. I want to see if I can at least get it to have some amount of fully automated red/green science. It seems like that should be achievable. I've got a couple of screenshots here. Last play through it did get the assemblers for red and green built and hand fed them from chests with hand crafted stuff.

My next step is to try a different framework instead of Claude Code, probably Hermes agent which looks promising. OpenRouter has a bunch of models available for free so I'll use that as a way to see how much of a difference model choice makes. I've only tested with the Anthropic stuff because I already had a subscription and it was an easy path to take. But that means I only have experiment with one harness and model so far and there is so much more out there!