Does the rule about Minecraft modpacks also apply to Factorio and Terraria? Are the two types of Factorio modpacks Minecraft and Terraria?
Yes, actually. Though the two games are evaluated at the mod-level rather than the modpack-level.
Given Factorio's nature to be more focused on logistics and factory building, its a bit different there, too. The two types of Factorio mods are "Computer Science & Engineering" and "Starship Troopers".
Despite the focus of the mod being to attain better and better methods of crossing the galaxy, extracting new and unknown resources, and to refine them into more and more efficient ways to kill the ever-increasingly problematic hordes of biters, Space Exploration is Computer Science & Engineering (something that's probably unsurprising for anyone who knows what the mod is).
Similarly, this applies to Terraria. Its two types of mods are "Dark Souls" and "Anime".
Calamity Mod? Dark Souls. Stars Above? Anime. Mod of Redemption? Dark Souls. Starlight River? Anime. Infernum? Dark Souls. Thorium? Anime.
Despite the mod being famous for its difficulty modes providing an experience of vast and complex boss patterns, which severely punish you for your mistakes and require an immense (but fair) amount of learning and honing your strategies, Fargo's Souls is anime. I will not elaborate further.
That's Space Exploration the factorio mod (played v0.6), not Space Age the factorio expansion coming soon. I have finally completed SE with the cooperation of two friends across 300+ hours, I don't think I would have bothered to finish on my own, but it was a fine reason to hang out and chat. I had fun, but it was very irregular fun between good bits (spaceships!!) and facepalm bits.
It's A Scale Challenge
Space Exploration is a scale challenge, and I lead with this because I find the documentation misleading. On the Getting Started SE wiki page, which is also linked from the SE mod page, it says:
Space Exploration is mostly a complexity challenge and not a scale challenge. It's completely possible to beat the game with only 20SPM, unless you play with a science multiplier. But it'll still be hard!
Similar descriptions abound. However, Space Exploration has individual technologies mandatory for victory that cost more to research than the entire tech tree of the base game up to and including the Rocket victory research.
It's even worse than that sounds.
"Cost more" can be calculated in a quick and dirty way that vanilla Factorio's Rocket Silo victory tech costs 1000 sets of science packs to research.
Its prerequisite Rocket Control Unit costs 300, and so on back down to basic Automation technology costing merely 10, all of which add up to 5750 in total.
Space Exploration has a mandatory 6400-cost tech, some 5000s, a 4000 and a 3200, several 2000-cost techs used as filler in an already overpriced and bloated tech tree, and a 8000-cost (max spaceship size) that's theoretically optional but avoiding it requires you to play Tetris with your size-constrained spaceship layout.
But the numbers are not directly comparable, and the more detailed count makes Space Exploration look even worse. "5750 sets" vanilla includes several early technologies where the set is a subset, even one single science pack, it costs 50 of [Automation Science] for basic technology and gradually fills out to the Rocket Silo costing 1000 of [Automation, Logistics, Chemical, Utility, Production Science] which is a set of 5.
Space Exploration, meanwhile:
Which is 5000 of a set that's twice as large as the largest in basegame, so more like a 10K victory tech compared to the 1K victory tech in basegame.
But that number still isn't a direct comparison, because the multi-striped science packs in there are high tier packs whose ingredients include lower tier science packs that also need to be produced. Deep Space Science 4 (the black stripes) is made with various input resources + a DSS3 pack, which is made with more input resources + a DSS2 pack, and so on. If you count the fifteen intermediate science packs, it's something like a 25K victory tech compared to the 1K in basegame.
There's numerous techs like this. If you ever play Space Exploration, I advise you to slice a zero off everything. Set the tech cost multiplier to one-tenth. It is severely padded.
Pretty Cool Spaceships
Spaceships are of course the big draw of Space Exploration, though they come pretty late in the game, and before them there's two other methods of moving stuff between planets: Cargo rockets and railguns.
The rockets are very fuel-hungry to launch and also "consume" most of their ingredient parts as stages. The delivery railguns can't move fragile objects or players, and are same-solar-system only. (They double as expensive interplanetary weapons!) Spaceships are reusable as long as you keep them refueled, and much more fuel-efficient, as well as being able to mount laser/gun turrets for defense if landing on a hostile planet. You can even put artillery in a spaceship, which my team used to create a very short-distance-hop spaceship that was more like a suborbital bomber/mobile artillery platform for clearing the hostile fauna off our home planet.
Eventually you get spaceships to transport stuff at custom speed and scale between planets, with the ability to build and design your own. Then, the ability to set spaceship automation with docking clamps and the circuit network, and can give a spaceship instructions amounting to "go to planet X and wait until your onboard storage has 40K Cryonite, go to planet Y and wait until your onboard storage has 0 Cryonite and your fuel tank is refilled". It's the Factorio experience of automating stuff you were manually handling before, but at the much larger scale of interplanetary transport.
Here is my mini-spaceship for personal transport between planets, used to go over and tinker with things, has a few chests but doesn't take bulk cargo:
The side notch is to help me align the refueling underground pipes.
The Mod Maker Is A Control Freak
In the base game you have the opportunity to research Logistics Robots, small flying drones that carry items around for you, making automated transport more convenient so you no longer have to weave together transport belts, underground belts, railroad tracks and other physically connected means of item movement in the infamous "belt spaghetti".
Space Exploration comes with a mandatory dependency on the Robot Attrition mod, which makes logistics robots randomly collide and explode destructively if you're using more than 50 of them. (There's more than 50 item types in SE, so you will want far more than 50 logistics robots.) You can't not include this other mod when playing Space Exploration. There is a game setting which looks like it disables robot attrition, but it actually only disables robot attrition in the starting zone.
"Surely there's another mod which restores robot functionality?" you might ask, since Factorio has a lot of mods. Not that I could find, possibly because Space Exploration is distributed under a "no modding my mod any further" licence, formally the Factorio Mod Limited Distribution Only Licence.
You may make alterations for your own private personal use only. You are not allowed to distribute any content from the mod, or anything altered or derived from this mod with the following exception: You may post partial modified sections of this mod in Earendel's discord https://discord.gg/ymjUVMv for the purpose of providing bug fixes or enhancements.
Binding or not, I think that's an amazingly dick move for your Cool Spaceships mod to degrade some unrelated basegame functionality and tell people they aren't allowed to post a modmod which restores that functionality.
In other control freakery, Space Exploration is flagged as incompatible with infinite resource supply/non-depleting ore patch mods for Factorio, because the SE modder feels it would ruin the intended balance of his mod.
It's flagged as incompatible with teleportation mods, to force you to use rocket/spaceship transport.
It's flagged as incompatible with waterfill mods to prevent you digging wells where the modder wants to enforce a logistic challenge of delivering water in barrels.
It's even flagged as incompatible with some mods that change the stack size of some items, because the modder wants to ensure you are inventory-constrained and pay for logistics.
Bizarrely contrary to the spirit of modding, if you ask me, trying to enforce that the mod is played the specific way one person wants you to play it.
Padding, Filler, and Bloat
It's not just the tech tree that suffers this, it's many aspects of the mod, and I'm going to list enough of them to make this post feel ironically padded.
In regular Factorio, when you put a drill on an iron ore patch, it produces iron ore, which you put in a Furnace to smelt into iron plates.
In Space Exploration, when you put a drill on an iridite ore patch, it produces iridite ore, which you put in a Pulverizer to crush into... a random mix of crushed iridium, stone (waste byproduct), and iridite ore that you have to feed back into the pulverizer and try to crush again.
To me this is something I shouldn't have to interact with in Factorio, it should be pre-automated below my notice. If an input ore is not properly crushed in the crushing machine, the crushing machine should keep crushing it until it's crushed, rather than demanding extra player attention to its one job. Reeeee. I have no interest in my factory's machines having what is effectively a random failure chance at doing their job. There is no upgrade tech or better machine which gets rid of that random failure chance.
It might have been interesting with one processing step whose unique gimmick is a failure chance and a need to filter-loop the output back onto the input, but Space Exploration recycles this recycle gimmick over and over again to pad out different processing steps with "do it again".
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Speaking of random failure chances...
In regular Factorio, the "science packs" are kinda high-level abstractions. You put together a pair of engines, several electronic circuits, and a handful of sulphur to create "Chemical science", which could be taken to vaguely represent a process of destructively testing or consuming something and measuring it.
In Space Exploration, the advanced sciences are data-driven, which is a cool idea. For example you put together plates of iron, copper, stone, plastic, concrete and iridite with a blank data card to create "Tensile strength data" and recycleable scrap, then you use the data card in another recipe to create "Material science" and also outputs "Junk data card" representing data you've already analyzed and can't learn more from, and then you put the junk data card into a spacecomputer to erase the contents and get back a blank data card again.
It's a neat abstract representation of science involving data collection and material testing, with a reusable computer component and am expended material component, and it's undermined by the fact that erasing junk data has a 30% failure rate. That's the chance that the Super-Engineer Protagonist, with nuclear reactors and supercooled computers, will somehow fail to turn a Junk Data Card into a Blank Data Card and will instead break the card. So the data cards are in practice still expended consumables; you'll need to produce millions of them.
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In regular Factorio, the various grades and kinds of steel (high carbon, low carbon, stainless, etc) are abstracted into a single "Steel plate" item which has many different uses. Storage chests, trains, power poles, handgrenades, armorplating, automation robots all use the same Steel Plate as ingredient.
This design holds true across the game: items represent broad classes of a material, also machines are multipurpose and an "Assembler" machine can be set to make gears, wire, pipes, or other stuff by configuration. One Assembler turns iron plates into gears. The next Assembler combines gears and more plates into engines. The next Assembler combines engines and more gears into transport belts.
In Space Exploration, there's several machines which only have one use, and there's even items which have less than one use.
The only thing the Xray Observation Telescope does is produce Xray Observation Frame items, the only use for Xray Observation Frame is processing into Xray Observation Data, and the only use for Xray Observation Data is combining it with Microwave Observation Data, Infrared Observation Data etc. to produce Astrometric Science. That's also the sole use for those other Observation Datas. All the different wavelength telescopes, the different observation data items, and the different observation data frame items collectively serve one purpose when put together, so I count them as having a fractional use each. Someone call an editor, fucking cut these.
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In regular Factorio, drills on a copper patch produce 1 Copper Ore per production cycle, which smelts into 1 Copper Plate.
In Space Exploration, drills on a beryl patch produce 1 Beryl Ore per production cycle, and 20 Beryl Ore smelts into 1 Beryllium plate.
(both ratios can be improved somewhat with Productivity Modules in your furnaces)
Which brings me back to the extremely overcosted science packs, because that blue-striped Astronomic Science Pack that you need 5000 of for the rocket victory? Its cost in raw materials for a set of 8 looks like this:
displaying 580 beryl plates instead of the 5800 ore needed, 725 per pack, plus some more for the data cards that don't calculate raw material correctly, adding yet another multiplier layer of bloated tech cost. I am infuriated by whoever wrote "not a scale challenge" on the Scale Challenge Mod which asks you to mine millions of ore to research a single technology.
Arcospheres
I have another post on these, so I'll keep it short: There is a type of special item necessary to win the game, which are only available in limited supply, which you can permanently lose by accident or bad luck.
The available supply is several times larger than what's needed to win, so I wasn't actually threatened by this, but I dislike it on principle.
Also, they're spoiler-enforced by the control freak modder who keeps the helpful information off the official discord, wiki, and mod page.
Verdict: Thumbs Down
I was suckered into this partly because I believed the "not a scale challenge" advertisement when my friend group was considering what to play next, and I regret it. Halfway through we felt it starting to drag, but we were having fun and community and spite so we powered through. This is a reason I have emphasised the bloat so much in my review. This mod really, really needs an editor to cut down numbers and cut out items and simplify processes so you can get to the Fun Spaceships part without so many Mine Literally Million Ore part.
Factorio Space Exploration: Arcosphere Cookbook with explanations
I found the arcosphere puzzle intriguing but poorly explained and clunky, and when looking for advice I found a lot of other frustrated people who were brute-forcing the puzzle, using giant combinator fields, and/or copying entire solution blocks from other people's blueprints. I have further complaints, like the strict spoiler policy and the F:SE wiki deliberately avoiding this info, so I'm going to talk about arcospheres and try to make this be something like the reference I wanted. I will try to explain principles, not just solve, to help people understand. This will be long, and have colored diagrams.
Contributing to my frustration is that Arcospheres are a finite*, accidentally losable resource that are required for victory. On the Cruelty Scale from interactive fiction, Arcospheres put Space Exploration somewhere around Nasty. Having a spoiler policy on top of this is rude!
So. When you first get spaceballs, they are bland grey. You can get some from looting ancient ruins and the Interburbul game on other planets, but the main source is from the deep void, by launching arcosphere collectors from deep space asteroid fields. These have diminishing returns, so start with about 5 from each field. Make sure to launch the collector, not the arcosphere, I've seen one guy lose his spheres that way because he was outputting silo spheres into the same container that collectors were loading from, and the loader loaded arcospheres instead.
Then you put them through Arcosphere Polarization. This takes in 4 grey balls and puts out a set of 4 colored arcospheres: either [Lambda, Zeta, Epsilon, Gamma] or [Xi, Theta, Phi, Omega]. Do some of both recipes to get all 8 types. A machine set to run continuously will randomly flip between them - this comes up later - but you can manually set it for your first few spaceballs.
Arcospheres are unusual in that they're not consumed like most ingredients in Factorio, instead they are merely transformed between the different polarities. The recipe for a Naquium Tesseract takes in 3 arcospheres [Lambda, Xi, Zeta] and outputs 3 arcospheres [Theta, Epsilon, Phi].
Productivity modules are banned here, naturally.
*Finite: Arcospheres are hard to produce, with arcosphere collection from space having logarithmically diminishing returns, which means at some point it would take a lifetime of play to get another set. Make sure to keep them well protected from biters, meteor strikes, spaceship landings, and so on.
Since the full names are heck to diagram and the greek letters are heck to type, I'm going to refer to the 8 polarizations by their English-language initials: L, X, Z, T, E, P, G, O. That's the order the items are sorted ingame, don't blame me.
Next it's useful to visualize the various arcosphere folds and transforms. Since there's 8 of them, we can map them to the corners of a cube, and a cube is relatively simple to diagram as two squares. I will label the corners in semi-clockwise order, which makes several of the folds easier to visualize the patterns for, and color them correspondingly. Starting with the Arcosphere Polarization, you can see it produces either inner (LZEG) or outer (XTPO) spheres.
Next is the Arcosphere Inversion basic recipes, it would be a nuisance to memorize exactly which four invert, but with the diagram...
...it's swapping the diagonals. Inversion is invertible.
Then there's 8 kinds of basic Arcosphere Folding. The first one is [LO] -> [XT] and we can think of this as X-centric. Each fold is centered on a corner: it takes in the "previous" (counterclockwise) and the parallell sphere, outputs the chosen corner and the "next" (clockwise) sphere. Each fold takes one inner and one outer sphere, outputs either two inner or two outer. Here's the X-centered and the L-centered fold.
Here's all eight of them in a block. Stare at it, feel the patterns.
With this, I find it much easier to think about recipes in terms of "I have..." and "I need..." when I know they move sorta-clockwise, and are output in adjacent pairs.
Also, each column as presented forms a combination to build from. If you have [OL,XG] you can run the two leftmost recipes and output [XT,LZ]. Reorder these and it's [LXGO] -> [LXZT]. We have used LX as a catalyst to turn GO into ZT.
This generalizes by rotation. If you have one of the half-diagonals such as [LX], [ZT], [EP] or [GO], you can convert it into the opposite half-diagonal this way. This is the 1st combination recipe.
Here's what this looks like in practice in Factorio, with the pair from the fourth column that combines [GP]->[OX] and [EO]->[GL], with a net result of [EP] -> [LX].
[EP] comes in at left, is taken up by the first set of filter inserters. [GO] is a catalyst, passed between the two gravimetrics machines indefinitely. [LX] is output to the right.
In addition to turning a half-diagonal-pair into its opposite with 2 catalyst spheres, any two of a single polarity can be turned into their opposite with 1 catalyst. (Opposite corner cubewise, so L becomes P, not E.) This is the 2nd combination recipe.
You may want to copy the Eight Folds diagram to use as a reference for the individual steps here. Starting with for example two Lambda, we use an Omega as a catalyst, and perform the following folds, converting the pair marked in brackets at each step.
L [L O]
[L T] X
E [Z X]
[E T] P
O P P
And here's that built in Factorio:
Place an [O]mega catalyst in the upper left machine once the very first time, then insert many L in top chest. They will be converted to P, and the O catalyst returned to upper left after each pass.
The topmost filter inserters from the L chest are wired to take only when (Lambda > 1) to ensure even splits in my demo, you could use a splitter belt or something else for the same effect. The middle red long inserter uses a nonobvious Factorio feature: when pointing into a machine, inserters will only take ingredients needed in that machine's recipe, so it will only take the E and not the Z from the top-right machine to the lower-left machine.
The full set of 8 opposite-corner chains:
Now we've got the Inversion recipe that switches full diagonals of 4, turning a diagonally adjacent pair into the other half of the diagonal, and turning a single ball into its opposite corner, and. That leaves one more building block of useful folding combinations:
Turning an opposite-corner pair into the other two on its long diagonal. This phrase sounds clunky even to me, so here's the visual: starting with a bunch of L, generate LP, and from there XLEP.
The [LP] -> [XE] transform is accomplished with only one catalyst ball, but needs more balls to be converted. You need to start with LLPP, and use T as catalyst into XXEE, with subelements of [LP]->EE and [LP]->[XX]. This is the 3rd combination recipe.
The specific steps:
[TL] P
E [ZP]
EE G
and then use that G as intermediate catalyst for
[GP] L
X [OL]
XX T
giving you the T back.
This takes a little bit of sorting input to build the machines. Factorio build with similar 4-machine shape to the above, note again the wired inserters set to (L>1) and (P>1), can be replaced with belt splitters or other method of even distribution. The whole system can be rotated and rearranged. Think of this as a Lego-like toolkit, not a definitive solution. (That's why I'm posting diagrams, not blueprints.)
Place a single catalyst T in the top-left [LT] machine to start, and the system will turn sets of [LLPP] into [XXEE], returning the T.
The four sets of this are:
T as catalyst to turn [LLPP] into [XXEE]
O as catalyst to turn [XXEE] into [LLPP]
P as catalyst to turn [ZZOO] into [GGTT]
X as catalyst to turn [GGTT] into [ZZOO].
Let's revisit the diagram.
Starting from a bucket of one single arcosphere such as L, you now have the steps and components to:
Turn it into the opposite corner. (-> LP)
Turn those opposites into the rest of the diagonal. (-> XLEP)
Invert the diagonal. (-> OGZT)
Turn two diagonally adjacent balls into the opposite diagonal. (OG < - > ZT.)
and the rotations of these.
Combining these steps now gets you from any ball to any other ball, in sufficient quantities. For example, if you're running the Naquium Processor recipe that outputs five Lambdas, and you want to turn your stack of L into E:
L -> LP with opposite-corner
LP -> XE with on-diagonal
X -> E with opposite-corner.
With the building-block theory done for converting arcospheres, let's look at productive recipes featuring spaceballs. I'll start with the first data card from Deep Space Science 3: Space Folding Data.
The recipe for this card comes in two flavors: each takes Naquium Plate, Significant Data, -273C Thermofluid, and arcospheres [LX]. One flavor outputs ZT, and the other flavor outputs EP as our arcospheres. You can manually choose which the first time, but Factorio is all about the automation, and a machine set to automake Space Folding data may randomly swap between recipes each time a crafting has completed! So you need to plan for getting a mix of ZTEP out, unpredictably. Let's consult the diagram again. White for input, but grey and black for the two sets of output.
Well the EP is easy: just convert it back to LX, using a set of OG as catalysts.
The ZT output is a little harder. Convert half of it to OG (using a set of EP as catalysts) giving you the OGZT diagonal, then invert that into XLEP. Then filter the XL back into the data card maker, and and the EP can convert to XL.
How this might look in practice, zoomed out and labeled:
Zoomed in and cropped so it's easier to see filter settings:
Tracing the path through this system, start with the machine on the right. Insert some LX. If it comes out as EP, it takes the upper belt leftwards, and gets converted back into LX, easy peasy.
If it comes out as ZT, the two lower filters put that onto belts, and split them so that some ZT goes to become OG at the bottom, while the other ZT goes to join the fresh OG in the OGZT inversion machine on the left.
Space Warping Data is very similar and straightforward. You input [EP], get out OG and/or ZT, you convert as necessary until you have an OGZT set to turn into XLEP, and turn the extra XL into EP.
Space Dilation Data is a little harder. You input [ZO], and get out either LL or PP. Conditional wires on your inserters start to be useful here, as does having more arcospheres for a buffer when the random number generator is streaky. Hope for LLPP; but plan to convert LLLL or PPPP into LLPP. Turn some of the LP into XE, then a whole XLEP diagonal inverts to OGZT, and GT can be converted into OZ.
Space Injection Data gets tricky. You input [GT] and get out either ZZ or EE. For the first time, these aren't on the same diagonal. Oh well.
When you get Z, convert half of it to O with opposite-corner, then ZO to GT.
When you get E, convert half of it to X with opposite-corner, then convert half of the resulting EX mix to LP, giving you a full diagonal. Invert the XLEP diagonal to OGZT, and then convert OZ to GT. This requires five sets of folding combination machines, and it sprawls quite a bit and wants a large buffer of extra spheres.
I will note one more data card later in tech tree: Wormhole Data, [LZEG] -> [XTPO]. No randomization here.
This is a sneaky recipe, because the diagonal steps described above can be used but it gets much larger than necessary because they're a poor fit.
Notice instead how this takes inners and produces outers. What turns outers back into inners? The basic Arcosphere Foldings.
Produce a set of XTPO, and keep a spare set of LZEG as a catalyst. Run the lower four basic foldings from the Arcosphere Folding block once each, like [XG]->[LZ], producing [LZ]+[ZE]+[EG]+[GL], or two sets of LZEG.
For the other recipes, like Naquium Tesseract, hopefully these visualizations and combinations have helped you understand what's going on and how to build your own design from parts. Or you can download someone else's solved blueprint. You don't need to bash your head against a wall of obfuscated math to play with spaceships.
You are welcome to copy, annotate, share and edit this guide as you like.
Factorio space exploration is the popular mod for the game "Factorio" It is an expansion mod that dramatically expands Factorio's gameplay by introducing Factorio space exploration aspects. Please keep in mind that the mod may have received upgrades or changes
The following are some of the most important features and traits commonly found in the "Factorio: Space Exploration" mod:
Factorio Space Exploration:
The mode adds another frontier for players to explore: space. This includes launching rockets into space, building space stations, and colonizing other celestial worlds.
Players can conduct space exploration, which unlocks new technologies and features to improve their space exploration capabilities.
Celestial bodies:
The mode brings planets, moons, and other celestial bodies for players to see. Each of these locales has its own features and restrictions.
Orbital Logistics:
Manage space transportation, such as interplanetary logistics and housing related to orbital structures.
Satellites and Telescopes:
Mod introduces the concept of using satellites and telescopes to observe and communicate with distant planets and their environment
Space Warfare:
Protect your space assets from potential conflict invaders.
Spaceship: Build spaceships for your space adventure, each with their own tasks and capabilities.
Please keep in mind that mod content and features may change over time due to updates and community input. If you want to try out
Factorio Space Exploration
I suggest visiting the Factorio Mod Portal or the mod's official page on the Factorio forums for the most up-to-date information and updates. Before installing any mod, make sure it is compatible with your current version of Factorio.
What is factorio game
Wube Software developed and distributed "Factorio," a real-time strategy game. It was released in early format in 2016 and will be formally released in 2020. It can be played on multiple platforms including Windows, macOS and Linux
In "Factorio," players assume the character of an engineer who has crashed-landed on an alien planet. The major goal is to construct and operate automated factories capable of producing increasingly complex items. Players begin with basic resources such as iron ore and copper, which they must mine, process, and refine to build various objects and equipment.
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