Trivia / Factorio

• Fan Speak:
  • Balancer: A set of splitters that are laid out to ensure that unequal loads of items incoming from different sources are distributed evenly across the outputs after some splitting and merging. Comes in two flavors:
    • Lane Balancer: evenly distributes the contents of the two lanes on a single incoming belt onto an outgoing belt.
    • Belt Balancer: evenly distributes the contents of a number of incoming belts onto a number of outgoing belts.
  • Bootstrap Base: An early to mid game factory designed to get the player enough resources to build a much larger megabase, often using a different factory style.
  • Bus: See Main Bus.
  • City Block: The newer of the two most popular factory layouts. A grid of train tracks is laid out, typically in a rectangle or square, with stations on the sides and intersections at the corners. Each block inside the grids is dedicated to a single task: mining, smelting, production of a particular intermediate, production of a particular end product, electrical generation, a mall, and so on. Belts and pipes are only used to move things inside each block; all movement between blocks is done with trains. When more of a particular thing is required, another block is simply slapped down on the edge of the existing grid using blueprints and bots. This decouples the various steps of production, allows for easy expansion, and prevents spaghetti. Using blueprints, each type of block only needs to be designed once, and once the base grows large enough, outposts for raw materials will no longer be needed as the factory expands on top of them. The heavy reliance on blueprints makes this in some ways an easier strategy than a main bus, but it comes with the disadvantage of requiring some mid-to-late game technologies—primarily trains and bots—to be viable, and thus a "starter" or "bootstrap" base is required. Still, with a good layout, very high SPMs are possible.
  • Dragon's Teeth: separately from or in conjunction with conventional walls, this is an arrangement of disconnected wall segments designed to allow enemies to advance towards a factory's defenses while slowing them down so that they can be easily taken out. This takes advantage of biter behavior and pathfinding to make them easier to kill. Biters and spitters will prioritize miltiary targets, then pollution generators, and will ignore inert objects like walls, power lines, and train tracks, unless they are blocking a path towards their target and it would take too long to go around. Dragon's Teeth take advantage of this by forcing biters to path around them, but don't make the path so long that they attack the obstacles, allowing plenty of time for defenses, and particularly slow-spraying flamethrowers, to engage them. Named after the Real Life anti-tank obstacle.
  • Main Bus: The older of the two most popular factory layouts, a main bus is a style of organized factory building involving a set of parallel belts that run down one side of the factory. Resources are gathered from various outposts and brought to the factory, by belt or train. All resource processing from raw material into intermediates is done at one end and fed to the bus. All assembly is done on one side of the bus using belts that are "tapped off" of the main bus belts. This decouples raw resource gathering from resource processing from end-product assembly, preventing Spaghetti, and also gives visual feedback when a particular resource or intermediate product is running low. There is some debate on exactly which resources to bus and which to not, but the general layout is fairly universally agreed upon. Compared to City Blocks, this factory style can be maintained all the way from the early to late game, and doesn't technically require any blueprints, but is sometimes considered "boring". For truly gigantic factories, the slower throughput of belts vs. trains may become a limiting factor.
  • Mall: A grouping of production machines that manufacture and stockpile things the player needs to expand the factory (assembly machines, belts, inserters, etc.), giving them a centralized hub to gather supplies from.
  • Megabase: A very large, late-game factory.
  • Spaghetti: The tangled maze of cramped, twisting, overlapping, and mashed-together conveyor belts, pipes, wiring, and assembling machines with their inserters. New players naturally create spaghetti, while some experienced players deliberately enjoy trying to make spaghetti work at large scales.
  • SPM: Science Per Minute, which is one way of characterizing a factory's productivity. Often a goal of megabasing is a specific (large) SPM.
  • Starter Base: See Bootstrap Base.
  • Sushi: Belts that are sorted and filled with many different items to feed many different assemblers on the same line, akin to the looping conveyor belts used in some sushi restaurants to deliver a constant parade of platters past prospective diners. This is very efficient in terms of materials and space used, but requires precise timing and/or complex circuit arrangements to properly execute, and is not strictly necessary to create a functioning factory, making it more of a Self-Imposed Challenge for experienced players.
  • UPS: Updates Per Second. As internal game logic is intentionally separated from graphics rendering for stability, it necessitates a different term to refer to game performance analogous to Frames Per Second. Player's actual IRL machine still needs to track and process every single machine, item and biter in the whole game, which can't be dealt with by just looking away like one would avoid looking at graphically intensive special effects in other games. The game by default seeks to achieve a tickrate of 60 UPS, but it can be set higher in Transport Belt Madness and Tight Spot campaigns or in regular game by scripts. With massive bases, avoiding operationally intensive designs and machines gains a lot of importance. For example, nuclear power is avoided because it requires a lot of fluid processing in heat pipes and steam turbines, while solar power is favored thanks to being a mere multiplication of (Number of solar panels) times (Power generation in a single panel) times (State of the in-game day-night cycle).
• Science Imitates Art: The scorpion Neobuthus factorio was described by František Kovařík, the father of Michal Kovařík, the game's lead designer, who decided to name the new species after his son's game.

---