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---
title: Introduction
date: 2026-01-02T16:10:41-05:00
summary: |
Welcome to PyBlock Hard Mode.
---
Factorio is a game of industrial colonialism.
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.
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].
[fff-268]: https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-268
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 gives the player tools that represent a simplified version of a modern industrial manufacturing system. The key steps are
* **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.
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. 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 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 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.
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.
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.
7. Convert 2 copper plates into 4 copper cables in a burner assembler.
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.
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 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 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. 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 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 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][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.
[pyhardmode]: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/pyhardmode
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 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:
* [Enable all Feature Flags](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/enable-all-feature-flags), specifically so that I can use the game's spoilage mechanic. Pyanodons adds several "interesting" spoilable resources, including most radioactive compounds (clever!) and the native flora needed to build the first science packs.
* [AAI Loaders](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/aai-loaders), which is a recommended optional addon to Pyanodons Hard Mode. A "loader" is a building that allows a belt to be fed directly into a building, rather than having items moved individually between belts and buildings by inserters. The Py Hard Mode mod description notes that it "adds loaders, but at what cost" and I'm excited to find out about that.
* [Inserter Configuration](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Inserter_Config), which allows bent inserters and controlling where an inserter drops its outputs. This also allows inserters to run at noticably higher throughput if they're not rotating through a full 180°, though the game's inserter throughput limits will still be a significant factor.
* [Recipe Book](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/RecipeBook), which provides a more comprehensive and more configurable view of the multitude of recipes and processes than the built-in Factoriopedia feature allows.
* [Updated Construction Drones - Forked](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Construction_Drones_Forked), which adds a small number of construction robots to the player's starting inventory. These robots, unlike vanilla construction drones, are restricted to the ground, and must be able to find an open path to their destination. I'm long past the point where placing every last item by hand is interesting, so this will take the edge off of early construction, and they'll also make moving and removing foundation easier. I can't make more bots until I can make simple circuits, and I don't intend to make more then, either.
* [Even Distribution](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/even-distribution), to make hand-feeding buildings in the early game less tedious.
* [Factory Planner](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/factoryplanner), to sketch out production chains before building them. However, based on past experiences I probably won't be relying on this that heavily, as it tends to bait me into over-building my infrastructure and requires a lot of babysitting to make sure it understands how Pyanodons' alien life recipes work.
* [Rate Calculator](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/RateCalculator), because doing arithmetic to work out the throughput of a block of buildings is a bad use of my time.
* The built-in Elevated Rails mod.
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 preserving the crashed ship from the game start. Even the most grotesque industrial excesses needs a human touch somewhere.
Wish me luck.
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