Alternative Friday Factorio Fan Facts

After a somewhat lengthy pause, Alt-F4 returns with an issue reminiscent of the good ol’ FFF: A dev blog! Only here, it’s not about the game itself, but a very unique and slightly crazy mod. Credne brought Dana into this world, and it took quite a bit of doing to get there. Lots of technical detail and cribbing ideas from Football ahead, so dive in!

This week’s issue #62 is an exciting one, as first-time contributor Laurence makes their debut by tackling a question that a lot of you probably asked yourselves at some point: What’s the difference between some of these big modpacks again? And why might I enjoy one over the other? Laurence played through a few of the big ones, and offers a comprehensive answer to those questions.

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!

在今年的最后一期 Alt-F4 中，我们想回顾一下异星工厂的旧时代。彼时它还是一块璞玉，颇具潜力但也存在问题和烦恼。我们采访了社区中的不同人士，了解他们对早期异星工厂的看法，回忆他们进入游戏的时间，以及游戏是如何变得更好的。

在第55期Alt-F4中，stringweasel 为大家准备了一个非常特别的节目，让多位 Mod 作者谈论他们制作 Mod 时想出的最深层、最阴暗的黑科技。我们有MagmaMcFry、raiguard、Deadlock989、Anachrony、PFQNiet 和 Earendel 都在忏悔自己的罪过！

在本年度最后一个月的第一期，首次供稿人 GreenFlag 向我们呈现了他们的第一个大型 Mod 项目，旨在为游戏添加一个 RTS 风格的战役，作为原版游戏教程的精神续作。这可是个具有意义也非常有趣的事。