Alternative Friday Factorio Fan Facts

This week’s issue #34 has Nanogamer7 start on a potential new series of articles about the very origins of Factorio. This week features a dive into potential inspirations for this masterpiece of a game, with a diversion into game design here or there. Stay awhile and listen!

In this delightful issue #33 of Alt-F4, Villfuk02 presents their most recent mod creation: The Recipe Randomizer! A spotlight is put on all the design problems that needed to be overcome to make a recipe randomizer that is actually good. After that, redlabel announces the most recent COMFY event, which will likely be pretty explodey.

Welcome to the shark-filled issue #2⁵ of Alt-F4. In these treacherous waters, The-Kool guides us towards putting speakers to good use, maybe even as a shark-warning-system, in the latest episode of Complexity Corner! Then, Hornwitser gets to some actual shark hunting using Wireshark, telling the story of how he tracked down network issues he encountered with the game. Grab a harpoon and jump in!

After a quick one-week break, Alt-F4 is back with issue #31. In it, pocarski returns to talk about yet more ways to build computer logic in Factorio, featuring combinators this time, which turn out to be simpler to use than you’d think! Afterwards, Big Community Games announce another exciting event of theirs, this time with Industrial Revolution as the central focus.

Crossing into the realm of numbers that start with a three, issue #30 has stringweasel bringing a bit of a new format to Alt-F4: an interview, sort of. He talked to YouTube famous person Zisteau about his perspective on various topics relating to this game of ours.

This week, for issue #29, we have a rare double feature again! First up, TheKool, who can’t stop talking about modules, rounds out his Complexity Corner saga by talking about beacons and what they are good for. Then, oof2win2 returns to put the spotlight on their mod No Belts, which offers a very interesting alternative perspective on playing the game.

This fine week in March, first-time contributor Ph.X talks about their very compartmentalized system for laying out a base using isolated modules and connecting them through a Logistic Train Network. Taking inspiration from software development and the lessons learned there, Ph.X uses the concepts of Modular Programming to their advantage.

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!