Alternative Friday Factorio Fan Facts

This week, pocarski continues his descent into belt-related madness by taking a look at universal balancers. The result is as crazy as it is useless, so you know we’re in for a treat!

In this week’s 26th issue of Alt-F4 (half a year of issues!), oof2win2 goes into the Factorio multiplayer and explains some of the technical machinations behind it. If you’ve ever wondered what a desync is or how the game manages to handle hundreds of players and many thousands of entities at once, please feel free to dive right in!

In this silver birthday issue of Alt-F4, TheKool returns for this third and final instalment of his series about modules. In it, he covers efficiency modules by talking about the theory and then presenting a real(ish)-world experiment!

This week, we’re following up on pocarski’s piece from last week that was all about how to build a computer inside Factorio using only belts. This time, we’re trying to teach it how to remember things. Let’s see how that goes.

After a hiatus of two weeks due to a couple of FFF’s hot off the presses, we’re back this week with two articles all about belts. In the first one, Recon419A explores an interesting concept that has belts deliver items in a just-in-time fashion. Then, things get truly nerdy as pocarski takes a deep dive into building a turing machine only using belts. Computer Science degree recommended!

For today’s 22nd issue of Alt-F4, Conor_ wanted to share his rather strong opinions on blueprints with us, and why they might prevent you from having the most fun while playing Factorio. We’re sure he’d be happy to hear your take on this, so please feel free to share it in the comments!

This week, we’re back to our regularly scheduled programming with another episode of our favorite series: The Nauvis Archives! stringweasel cracks open the history books once again to look at some old mods, and how they eventually became part of the vanilla experience. At the end, we have a quick poll for you, dear reader; we’d appreciate it if you could take the two minutes to answer those questions.

Rounding out the first five months of issues, Alt-F4 #20 brings the second part of our retrospective and look behind the scenes. Nanogamer7 takes us through how the translation process got started and what some of the problems are that came up. But before that, Conor_ presents us with a sort of mission statement, which puts our thoughts on the project into a succinct form.

This week, in the new year, we wanted to take a look back at the project Therenas started four and a half months ago to fill the void that the absence of the FFF left in all our hearts. We asked the people involved in the process about their specialty, making them write down a bit of history of how this all evolved.

As the year draws to a close, we picked two mod-related topics for this week’s 18th issue of Alt-F4. First, Hornwitser gives us some insight into the long development progress of Clusterio 2.0 and the challenges that it poses. Then, DedlySpyder talks about their process of developing a simple mod and the compatibility challenges they face.