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diff --git a/content/pyblock/introduction.md b/content/pyblock/introduction.md index c020c28..e2f4d89 100644 --- a/content/pyblock/introduction.md +++ b/content/pyblock/introduction.md @@ -1,50 +1,50 @@ --- title: Introduction -date: 2026-01-01T13:57:41-05:00 +date: 2026-01-02T16:10:41-05:00 +summary: | + Welcome to PyBlock Hard Mode. --- -Welcome to PyBlock Hard Mode. +Factorio is a game of industrial colonialism. -<!--more--> +The player arrives in a pristine wilderness, rich with natural resources, carrying a minimum of equipment. They bring with them no way to go home again. The game tasks the player with conquering that frontier and using its bounty to build an industrial system that can build the spacecraft they need to go home again. The game's _Space Age_ expansion extends this process, and tasks the player with colonizing and industrializing a whole sequence of planets in order to build a starship that can take them home. -## Background +In the course of this endeavour, the player is expected to kill and displace the native life on each planet, forcing it aside so that they can exploit the planet's resources. The game treats native life as mere animals, but the parallels to colonial displacement are so stark that [even the developers have commented on it][fff-268]. -Factorio is a game of industrial colonialism. The player arrives in a pristine wilderness near profuse natural resources, with a minimum of equipment and no way to return, and is tasked with building their way up from stone furnaces and hand-gathered fuel to a spacecraft capable of returning them to their home. In the Space Age expansion, gameplay continues, with the player then tasked with colonizing and industrializing a series of other planets in the same solar system, before fleeing the solar system in a starship of their own construction. In the course of this endeavour, the player must also deal with the native flora and fauna, displacing or exterminating anything that gets in their way. +[fff-268]: https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-268 -The game has a goal (build a spaceship and go home), but it's an open secret that the game is "meant" to be played endlessly. The game provides a number of infinite goals to pursue, and pursuing those goals rather than completing the game leads to continuing work to expand the factory (or factories) and to solve new problems. That's fun in its own right. +These goals would see the player eventually giving up their invasion and going home, leaving their factory behind to falter, fail, and eventually decay. However, it's an open secret in the community that the game is meant to be played endlessly, with the player staying in and expanding their factory forever. Nauvis, and the rest of the game's solar system, is the player's new home, and the game provides a number of infinite goals to pursue to improve and expand that home for as long as the player's interest holds out. The factory need never fail, and the natives may never reclaim their homes; instead, the factory must grow. -The game presents a highly-polished but also very simplified manufacturing process, whose key steps are +The game gives the player tools that represent a simplified version of a modern industrial manufacturing system. The key steps are -* Resource extraction, using mines, water pumps, and pumpjacks to produce raw ores, water, and crude oil; -* Smelting, using furnaces to convert raw ores into basic materials like iron and copper; -* Manufacturing, using generic assembler buildings, plus a small collection of specialized buildings, to convert basic materials into more complex products; -* Research, using labs to convert the final products of manufacturing into further upgrades, new recipies, and other ways to expand the factory; -* Logistics, ranging from mechanical arms to conveyor belts to cars and trains to move goods from where they're made to where they're needed, -* Rocketry, using rocket silos and landing pads to send goods to orbit and retrieve the results; and, finally, -* Military, using finished goods to force native creatures ("biters") out of their territory so that the player can extract and exploit the resources they were obstructing. +* **Extraction**, using mines, water pumps, and pumpjacks to produce raw ores, water, and crude oil; +* **Smelting**, using furnaces to convert raw ores into basic materials like iron and copper; +* **Manufacturing**, using generic assembler buildings, plus a small collection of specialized buildings, to convert basic materials into more complex products; +* **Logistics**, ranging from mechanical arms to conveyor belts to cars and trains to move goods from where they're made to where they're needed, +* **Research**, using labs to convert the final products of manufacturing into further upgrades, new recipies, and other ways to expand the factory; +* **Rocketry**, using rocket silos and landing pads to send goods to orbit and retrieve the results; and, finally, +* **Violence**, using the weapons of an advanced industrial system as a lever with which to suppress or exterminate all resistance to the factory's growth. -Even in a simplified form, a normal Factorio playthrough is expected to take tens of hours. Speedruns for the base game clock in at a bit over an hour, and for the expansion, at six to eight hours. It's not uncommon for players to take hundreds of hours if they play more slowly, or if they're working on a particularly large base. +A normal Factorio playthrough is expected to take tens of hours. On the low side, speed runs for the base game clock in at a bit over an hour, and for the expansion, at six to eight hours using heavily-optimized strategies to complete the game as fast as possible. At the other extreme, players regularly play on the same saves for hundreds of hours, incrementally expanding and optimizing an ever-growing factory before achieving the game's final goal of escape. -Progress through the game is marked both by research, mentioned above, and by qualitatively distinct gameplay phases where the player's capability to manipulate the world around them grows substantially. Initially, the player must make and place every item by hand, mining the raw resources themselves if necessary. Most players progress to automating _manufacturing_ of basic items like belts and assemblers, but then must walk to collect them and place them. The player's inventory and walking speed are then augmented with powered armour and with vehicles, before being rendered almost entirely irrelevant once the player sets up construction and logistics robots that can place things in the world _en masse_ from player-designed blueprints or by copying existing designs. By the end of the game it's very common for players to spend nearly all of their time in the map view, ignoring their character entirely in favour of directing automatic systems. +Progress through the game is marked both by research, mentioned above, and by qualitatively distinct gameplay phases where the player's capability to manipulate the world around them grows. Initially, the player must make and place every item by hand, mining the raw resources themselves if necessary. Most players progress to automating manufacturing of basic items like belts and assemblers, but still must walk to collect them and place them. The player's inventory and walking speed are then augmented with vehicles and with powered armour, before being rendered almost entirely irrelevant once the player sets up construction and logistics robots that can place things in the world _en masse_ from player-designed blueprints or by copying existing designs. By the end of the game, it's very common for players to spend nearly all of their time in the map view, ignoring their character entirely in favour of directing automatic systems. ## Pyanodons -Pyanodons is a [collection of mods][pymods] to the game, intended to add complexity and _drastically_ slow the growth of the player's capabilities. Each mod replaces some set of manufacturing steps with a much larger process, often using more specialized buildings and generating byproducts that must be handled for production to continue. They also add entirely new production chains, dealing with things like alien life, that are structurally unlike anything in base Factorio. The mods can be used individually, but they're at their most interesting when used together. +Pyanodons is a [collection of mods][pymods] to the game, intended to add complexity and to restrain the player's growing capabilities. Each mod, taken individually, replaces a category of the game's manufacturing steps with a much larger and more complex process, using more specialized buildings and generating new byproducts that must be handled. They also add entirely new production chains parallel to the base game's formulary, dealing with things like alien life. The mods can be used individually, but they're at their most interesting when used together. [pymods]: https://mods.factorio.com/user/pyanodon -As an illustration, consider the basic transport belt, used in the thousands to move items around the player's factory. Assuming that the player has access to iron and copper ores, the process for producing conveyor belts in vanilla Factorio is: +As an illustration of the mods' approach to complexity, consider the basic transport belt. This is an item that, in vanilla Factorio, players build in the thousands starting very early in the game, in order to automatically move between process stages. The process for producing conveyor belts takes three steps and a pittance of resources: 1. Smelt 3 iron ore to make 3 iron plates. This process happens in furnaces, and will either consume a small amount of fuel (usually coal, which is a raw resource to be mined), or, later in the game, electrical power. 2. Convert 2 iron plates into 1 iron gear wheel. This process happens in assemblers, or in the player's inventory; when done in an assembler, it takes a small amount of electricity. 3. Convert the remaining 1 iron plate and the 1 iron gear wheel into 2 tiles of transport belt. -This process consumes very few resources and is easy to both memorize and implement. Automating belts is often one of the player's first automation projects once they've set up iron smelting. - By comparison, the same process in Pyanodons is: 1. Smelt 40 iron ore to make 5 iron plates. This process happens in a furnace, which will burn fuel and may produce fuel byproducts, such as ash. Electric smelting is an option, and is available much earlier than in vanilla, but it consumes dramatically more power and specialized buildings. -2. Convert 2 iron plates into 4 iron sticks. This process happens, initially, in a _burner_ assembler, which also consumes fuel and produces fuel byproducts. +2. Convert 2 iron plates into 4 iron sticks. This process happens, initially, in a burner assembler, which also consumes fuel and produces fuel byproducts. 3. Convert 4 iron sticks into 4 iron bolts. This is, again, done in a burner assembler, so that also requires fuel and byproduct removal. 4. Convert 2 iron plates into 2 iron gear wheels. This requires another burner assembler, with the associated infrastructure. 6. Smelt 16 copper ore to make 2 copper plates. As above, this either consumes fuel and produces fuel byproducts, or happens in expensive and specialized electric furnaces. @@ -52,42 +52,39 @@ By comparison, the same process in Pyanodons is: 8. Convert 3 iron bolts, 3 copper cables, and 1 iron gear wheel into 1 small parts in a burner assembler. This leaves 1 copper cable and 1 iron bolt unused, which can be either output as byproducts or buffered and reused. 9. Convert 1 small parts and 1 iron plate to 2 tiles of transport belt. -Most obviously, this is a longer process with more steps. Many of those steps also require additional inputs (fuel, in this case) or generate additional outputs (frequently ash). These amounts are _low_ - assemblers can be reasonably hand-fed fuel early on, and ash removal doesn't need to be automated right away either - but they do need to be accounted for or the process will stop. It can also be done in the player's inventory, as with vanilla, in which case it requires no fuel and produces no byproducts, but the player themselves must deal with the excess bolts and cables somehow. Finally, the process consumes drastically more raw resources - 36 iron ore and 12 copper ore on average, to vanilla Factorio's 3 iron ore per belt. +Not only is this a longer process with more steps, but it also requires a wider variety of resources, and produces unwanted byproducts, such as ash. It's also available to the player somewhat later: automated assemblers aren't unlocked until several steps into the technology research system, and the player will either have to hand-craft belts themselves, or go without, until that technology is available. -This is characteristic of Pyanodons approach to difficulty and is one of the simplest examples. The result is a _very_ slow gameplay pace. Where vanilla Factorio or Space Age is expected to take tens of hours on average, Pyanodons runs are expected to take around a thousand hours. Amenities that players rely on very early in Factorio, like conveyor belt splitters, are locked behind research and production chains with tens of steps. More capable logistics technologies, like trains, are similarly delayed. The mods use this to force the player to come up with alternatives to Factorio's most common design solutions. +This is characteristic of Pyanodons approach to difficulty and is one of the simplest examples. The result is a very slow gameplay pace, where the player must stop, consider, and plan each step. Where vanilla Factorio or Space Age is expected to take tens of hours on average, Pyanodons runs are expected to take around a thousand hours. It is a meme in the Factorio community that unlocking splitters in under 40 hours means that you're speedrunning the mod, when the vanilla game can be completed entirely within that time. -Unlike baseline Factorio, Pyanodons acknowledges that the real goal is to grow the factory: its victory condition is not escape, but rather the completion of the "Pyrrhic Victory" research target, at the far end of its sprawling research system. The player's character never notionally escapes; the factory is where they'll live forever. +Unlike baseline Factorio, Pyanodons bluntly acknowledges that the real goal is to grow the factory. Tts victory condition is not escape, but rather the completion of the "Pyrrhic Victory" research target, at the far end of its sprawling research system. The player's character never notionally escapes; the factory is where they'll live forever. As with vanilla Factorio, the mod also includes several infinite research options, to give the player something to do if they've built everything they're interested in building but don't want to end the game just yet. -While Pyanodons ultimately amplifies the game's industrial excesses, it often tones down the colonial excesses. The mod pack was not designed with biters in mind, and early ammunition production is a major tax on iron-related industry. The documentation recommends turning biters off (and pollution, since it primarily serves to drive biter-related game loops and is fairly CPU-intensive for large bases). PyBlock, described below, doesn't generate biter nests by default either. +While Pyanodons ultimately amplifies the game's industrial excesses, it often tones down the colonial excesses. The mod pack was not designed with biters in mind, and early ammunition production is a major tax on iron-related industry. The documentation recommends turning biters off (and pollution, since it primarily serves to drive biter-related game loops and is fairly CPU-intensive for large bases). PyBlock, described below, doesn't generate biter nests by default either. Without biters, the player is experiencing a pristine and morally-empty frontier, rather than one populated by native life, and while that is arguably a worse kind of colonial fantasy, it is at least a simpler one. ## PyBlock -Pyanodons is not the only increased-difficulty mod collection. An earlier set of mods, collectively known as [Angels] and [Bobs], implemented a similar set of ideas, though at a less-extreme difficulty and complexity. Players rapidly observed that Angels and Bobs allowed players to produce infinite resources (very slowly) using only water and air as inputs, which lead to the creation of the [Sea Block] mod, formalizing this idea by starting the player in an infinite ocean without any normal resources to find and challenging them to complete the game from there. (The name comes from a Minecraft mod with [a similar premise][skyblock]). +Pyanodons is not the only increased-difficulty mod collection. An earlier set of mods, collectively known as [Angels] and [Bobs], implemented a similar set of ideas, though at a less-extreme difficulty and complexity. Players rapidly observed that the Angels and Bobs mods included recipe chains that allowed players to produce infinite resources (very slowly) using only water and air as inputs. That observation lead to the creation of the [Sea Block] mod, formalizing the idea by starting the player in an infinite ocean without any normal resources to find and challenging them to complete the game from there. (The name comes from a Minecraft mod with [a similar premise][skyblock]). [Angels]: https://mods.factorio.com/user/arch666angel [Bobs]: https://mods.factorio.com/user/bobingabout [Sea Block]: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/SeaBlock [skyblock]: https://skyblock.net -PyBlock takes the same observation and applies it to Pyanodons, instead of Angels and Bobs. The player is dropped into an open ocean or on a lonely and resource-minimal island with a small collection of starting resources, and challenged to complete the same Pyrrhic Victory research. PyBlock is considered extremely hard even within Pyanodons' own community. To the best of the game's Discord community's knowledge, a single-digit number of people have ever fully completed it as of this writing. -PyBlock patches over some things that a normal Pyanodons run would require that are impossible to bootstrap without ores. For example, PyBlock adds early-game burner versions of several key buildings, including soil extractors and destructive distillation columns, that run slowly and inefficiently off of fuel or steam power rather than requiring electrical power, so that the player can make the resources to _set up_ their initial electrical network without having to have one already established. However, those affordances are invariably small and awkward to work with, and make difficult tradeoffs in return for being available early on. +PyBlock takes the same observation, and applies it to Pyanodons, instead of Angels and Bobs. The player is dropped into an open ocean, or on a lonely and resource-minimal island, with a small collection of starting resources, and challenged to complete the Pyrrhic Victory using only the air and seawater. PyBlock is considered extremely hard even within Pyanodons' own community. To the best of the game's Discord community's knowledge, a single-digit number of people have ever fully completed it as of this writing. ## Hard Mode -[Pyanodons Hard Mode][hard mode] is an optional additional mod to Pyanodons, usable in PyBlock, which makes it much harder for the player to automatically destroy unwanted fluids and gasses. _Many_ processes in Pyanodons produce these as byproducts: for example, washing soil to produce sand or stone also produces muddy water as a byproduct. In normal Pyanodons, you can route unused muddy water into a sinkhole to get rid of it. In Hard Mode, you can't - it has to be processed somehow. - -[hard mode]: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/pyhardmode +[Pyanodons Hard Mode][pyhardmode] is an optional additional mod to Pyanodons, usable in PyBlock, which modifies things about Pyanodons that the author thinks are too forgiving or too easy. The mod makes it much harder for the player to automatically destroy unwanted fluids and gasses, which are a common byproduct in many of Pyanodons' industrial processes. It also shrinks container inventories, modifies the energy value of fuels, and makes many other changes intended to make Pyanodons even harder. -To compensate for this, the mod adds a number of additional processes that take common fluid byproducts as inputs and _do something_ to them. The Hard Mode process for dealing with muddy water, for example, recovers some water and soil from it, though not in the ideal ratio for further washing. The excess water can then either be reused or thrown into a sinkhole freely, while the soil can be routed back into the soil-washing process' input to be processed again. +[pyhardmode]: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/pyhardmode -Hard mode also makes several changes to container sizes, logistics, power generation, and resource processing, all with the aim of making the already-quite-difficult Pyanodons mods even more challenging. +However, rather than merely restricting the player more and calling it a day, Py Hard Mode adds its own twist to those restrictions. Rather than preventing the player from disposing of muddy water, for example, it asks the player to find and set up additional processes to consume muddy water, which then have their own outputs, and so on. ## Goals -I'm not personally aware of anyone completing a Pyblock Hard Mode run. I'm not at all convinced _I'm_ going to complete the game this way - and that's not my goal. Instead, I want a project I can tinker with when I'm bored, and which will motivate me to write more. I also want to climb this particular virtual mountain more or less "because it's there." +I will be journalling a PyBlock Hard Mode run more or less whenever the whim takes me. I'm going to do my best to document the most important steps and observations along the way. This won't be a guide or a spoiler, but the lessons I learn about the game will be documented as clearly as I can, in the hopes of helping others through the mod, and I won't be marking spoilers. -I will be journalling a Pyblock Hard Mode run more or less whenever the whim takes me. I'm going to do my best to document the most important steps and observations along the way. This won't be a guide or a spoiler, but the lessons I learn about the game will be documented as clearly as I can in the hopes of helping others through the mod, and I won't be marking spoilers. +I'm not personally aware of anyone completing a Pyblock Hard Mode run. I'm not at all convinced I'm going to complete the game this way, either - and that's not my goal. Instead, I want a project I can tinker with when I'm bored, and which will motivate me to write more. I also want to climb this particular virtual mountain more or less "because it's there." I'll be playing with a few optional "quality of life" mods to take the edge off the parts of Py Hard Mode that I find the least interesting. The key ones are: @@ -103,7 +100,7 @@ I'll be playing with a few optional "quality of life" mods to take the edge off I may add or remove mods as I go. -I'll be using the Pyblock Classic start, which places the player on a single tile of foundation. There's no starting island, and there are no ore patches to harvest. Any resources I will need will either need to come from the seawater, be gathered out of the air, or collected from the litter floating on the ocean's surface. +I'll be using the _PyBlock Classic_ start, which places the player on a single tile of foundation. There's no starting island, and there are no ore patches to harvest. Any resources I will need will either need to come from the seawater, be gathered out of the air, or collected from the litter floating on the ocean's surface. I'll be preserving the crashed ship from the game start. Even the most grotesque industrial excesses needs a human touch somewhere. |