Alt-F4 #58 - Mods for Your Swamp 2022-04-01
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!
Sights and Sounds
The mod portal features quite a few mods, small and large, that offer visual and/or auditory changes. Here is a fun selection:
Emotes and Speech Bubbles Kiplacon
This handy mod makes multiplayer interactions a lot livelier, especially when you can’t use a microphone. Messages you send in chat and emotes you use will appear over your head and will be visible to other players!
The emotes are displayed by clicking the middle mouse button to open the emote hotbar and left-clicking one to show it. Right-clicking an emote on the hotbar lets you switch it with another from the full library. The mod helps enhance your fun and funny moments: You can point left/right at directions to explore or places of interest. You can vibe with emotes for partying. You can display when you are thinking and boast or praise big-brain moments with the matching emote. And, of course, you can “press F” or declare “rekt!” when your friend gets hit by a train!
Disco Science danielbrauer
Science is the heart of progress, but via this little mod, it is also the life of the party! It makes research labs light up with the colors of whichever science packs they are consuming. Excellent for sprucing up your AFK Zone Discos! If you want to go further and add faint music to your disco domes, there is this other mod.
Shrek jerzygorski
This mod retextures your character as Shrek, and shows that against all norms and expectations he can do rocket science, just like how he could rescue the princess! He mines with his fists and has his own armor and weapon texture too, perfect for getting those pesky bugs out of your swamp!
Bumble Bots Maxreader
If you ever thought of your bots as your little worker bees, here is a mod making that literal! The mod replaces the textures and sounds of combat robots, construction and logistic robots, roboports, and logistic chests. The organic structures (especially flowers) among the machines make for an interesting environment for your busy bees to buzz in.
Sushi Mod Xaetral
Sushi belt fans, this mod gives you the means to truly flex your skills! It also refreshing for those tired of eating only raw fish! The menu has 6 sushi and 6 maki types. Each can be crafted from one raw fish and has the same properties as it, apart from the enhanced taste. Bon appetit!
1000 Sounds to die for vralfy
This sound mod allows you to customize a number of sounds, in particular character deaths. Yes, death in Factorio is usually a tragedy, but you can make it more comedic! Got hit by a train? Hear it honk! Killed by another player? Why not set that to the classic Wilhelm Scream? You can also customize sounds for a few other events like starting/completing research, launching a rocket, or players entering/exiting a game. The sound library of this mod borrows from Doom and Quake, among some other places. If you like this mod, along the same lines is one for pain sounds which are selected from Doom or your custom sound pack.
Choleric cars Therenas
Did your car/tank just crash into a rock again? Yeah, that sucks. This sound mod lets the engineer express his opinion about it very clearly (sometimes with expletives). It definitely captures the feeling of the moment, often comedically well!
There are many more little sound mods out there. For example, Command & Conquer fans might like this pack of Red Alert sounds for programmable speakers, while another mod lets you even do this with speakers. Among the more specific mods, there is one playing the Thomas the Tank Engine theme when you get hit by a train, while viewers of Trupen might enjoy a custom rock mining sound.
Crazy Combat
You have many options for combat in vanilla Factorio, but there are also many mods that offer crazy weapons which redefine combat:
MLG FactOreo Kiplacon
If combat in Factorio is too bland for you these days and you want to summon the essence of Major League Gaming montages, with all their dubstep-rich glory and dank memes (and some expletives), look no further. This mod delivers. You can craft a sniper rifle for your 360 no-scope pwnage of them noobs. And don’t forget to craft meme magazines to deal some aptly named “dank damage” with any bullet-firing weapon, including turrets and cars.
Train Gun Twu.4.25
Alright, perhaps you are more interested in a weapon that is more… Factorio-style. We all know that the ultimate killer in the game is no mere biter, but the mighty train! Armed with this knowledge, this mod delivers the formidable late-game superweapon that is the train gun. Unlocked after nuclear missiles, this powerful gun launches nuclear-fueled locomotives that furiously spin and tear through hoards of enemies and rows of machines alike, before exploding magnificently! Choo choo!
Wonka Level Logistics
Renai Transportation Kiplacon
And for last on this mod list we have saved the largest and most imaginative. This amazing mod introduces a whole world of new transportation options that can liven up your factory by making just about everything soar through the air! While the mod is chaotic, the additions can also be highly practical and you can make cool bases with them, like ‘The Dolphin base’ made by famed creator of JOSEF, or this smelting setup that is described by its designer as “Air spaghetti”.
Let’s look at the mod’s features individually:
Flying items!
Renai Transportation makes you ask: Why deal with bots or belts when you can just let the inserters throw the items where they need to go? It introduces thrower inserters that can toss items with precision into open chests that are ready to receive them. You can also “blow install openings onto things” via hatches so that you have direct insertion to machines from a distance!
Flying you!
The mod doesn’t stop at items, also featuring player launchers as a new means of fast travel. Watch where you land, though!
Bouncing too!
The flight doesn’t have to end with one toss, as the mod has all kinds of bounce pads: For both players and items they can extend jumps or change the bounce direction. Some bounce pads can send circuit signals or be set to distribute items across areas. Some items can also be primed on a special bounce pad, allowing things like inserter-thrown grenades or defender capsules!
Ride the lightning!
If being flung across your factory isn’t your thing, you can instead take a zipline trolley that runs along your power lines, zooming above your factory!
Flying trains!
The mod even gets your trains airborne using ramps and bounce pads! Admittedly it is a little hard to precisely set up the ramps, but the electrically powered magnetic ramps offer a stable alternative. Factorio doesn’t need bridges or train tunnels after all!
Instant train unloading!
The mod has also found the fastest way of emptying your trains: Slam them straight into a concrete “unloader” block and let the items fly directly onto the belts… genius!
And more mods!
Today we provided an overview of many of the humorous mods on the mod portal, but there are more out there and new ones are emerging as time goes on. You may ask “How did these come to be?”, but we barely scratched the surface. The possibilities are endless when it comes to modding, offering you both the coolest ideas, and the weirdest, as demonstrated by the aptly named modpack Whyyy. Many thanks to our modding community who have (and continue to) come up with such colorful additions to Factorio!
Contributing
As always, we’re looking for people that want to contribute to Alt-F4, be it by submitting an article or by helping with translation. If you have something interesting in mind that you want to share with the community in a polished way, this is the place to do it. If you’re not too sure about it we’ll gladly help by discussing content ideas and structure questions. If that sounds like something that’s up your alley, join the Discord to get started!