Alternatieve Vrijdag Factorio Fan Feiten

For this week’s issue of Alt-F4, we return to the roots of being a spiritual successor to the FFF by going deep on a technical topic. To that end, redruin1 presents his newest invention: Factorio Draftsman. Sure, there have been other projects trying to build a library for generating blueprints for the game, but this one tries to be the new gold standard. Motivations, technical details, and a few fun projects realized with it - all that, and more, this week!

On the diamond anniversary of Alt-F4, local madman Sir Fendi returns once again with a deep dive into Factorio’s thermodynamics. Or, said another way, he wants to find out how you can get the most out of your coal by further processing it into different fuels. Isn’t that nice of him? Modules are naturally also taken into consideration. No half measures.

A couple of weeks after the chaos that was r/place, resident historian stringweasel took it upon himself to go through the chronology of how the Factorio community tried to leave its mark on the canvas. Battles were fought, alliances were forged, and a lot of fun was had! If the article reminded you of a fun story about r/place that you want to share, we’d love to hear about it on Reddit or our Discord, both of which are linked at the bottom.

For no special reason, on this particular Friday, Sir Fendi took it upon himself to highlight up a few humorous mods that might not be useful, but sure are fun. We’ll start with mods that only change visuals or audio to add some unique flavors to your engineering experiences. Afterwards, we’ll look at some crazy new weapons that spice up the way you do combat. Finally, there’s a mod with a level of transportation pizzazz that Willy Wonka himself would be proud of. Silliness is guaranteed!

Another week, another Alt-F4 …? I guess we’ve been away for a while. It’s totally because we didn’t want to steal the spotlight from the FFF, which returned this year! Either way, let’s stop distracting from the great piece we do have this week: First-time contributor Sir Fendi wrote a very detailed piece on nuclear power in Factorio. It sometimes seems like the red-headed stepchild of power generation, but as Sir Fendi explains, there’s a lot of fun and efficiency to be had with it!

For the last Alt-F4 of the year, on the very last day of the year, we wanted to take a look back at ye olden days of Factorio. Back when it was still a diamond in the rough, with definite potential, but concrete issues and annoyances as well. We hit up various people in the community and got their hot takes on early Factorio, reminiscing about the time they got into the game, and about how things changed for the better.

For issue #55 of Alt-F4, stringweasel prepared a very special treat for everyone, getting various modders to talk about the deepest, dankest hacks they’ve come up with to make their mods work. We’ve got MagmaMcFry, raiguard, Deadlock989, Anachrony, PFQNiet, and Earendel all confessing their sins!

For the first issue in the last month of the year, first-time contributor GreenFlag presents their first big modding project that aims to add a proper RTS-style campaign to the game, in the spirit of the game’s tutorial levels. It’s pretty involved, and a lot of fun!

For the very prime real estate of issue #53 of Alt-F4, grandmaster Therenas himself returns to grace us with another article. Following up his previous masterpieces that mostly talk about his own mods, here’s more words about exactly those things. Those words explore the topic of automatically taking screenshots in Factorio. Although it’s really only about 20% technical details, with 40% philosophy and 50% bad jokes. You read that right, it goes to 110%!

For issue #52, stringweasel returns with part two of the Fluidic Power Experiment where he dives into the rather surprising performance implications of his creation. If you liked last week’s article, you’ll like the second part this week. What a surprise!