The factory must grow.
Show HN: Factorio Learning Environment – Agents Build Factories
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Re: Show HN: Factorio Learning Environment – Agents Build Factories
#82Re: Show HN: Factorio Learning Environment – Agents Build Factories
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Building a main bus vs spaghetti belts is one of the obvious examples here I'm an anti-bus extremist. ( I've even considered regsitering BanTheBus.com and doing an over-the-top static anti-bus website. ), so take what I'm about to say with a pinch of salt. Also note that my post applies to non-space-age. Space-age changes the gameplay fundamentally, so this really only applies to factorio 1.1 or 2.0 with space-age…
I dunno, main bus strikes me as an efficient way to feed all the mall assemblers in the early game before I can scale up to a train based base. After the early game, totally agreed, ban the bus.
Early game, I don't use trains either, I just spaghetti yellow belt around! I even run long belt lines to the first ring of mining outposts. It usually only costs ~500-1000 belt to do so, which sounds like a lot but really isn't much.
Advantage of yellow belt:
- Don't consume power - Don't produce pollution ( don't attract bugs ) - Are cheap. Rails themselves aren't too bad, costing only slighty more per tile than belts. But rails need stations, signals, chests, inserters for loading / unloading. Often combinators too. All add up to much higher investment, and critically in the early game, add up to more pollution produced before the pay-off of improved resources incoming. - Don't need lots of belt for the stations. A typical loading/unloading station can often have so much belt for "efficient" (fast) loading/unloading that you could have belt half your way to where you're going just laying that belt in a straight line.
If you're going further than the first ring of extra resources, then trains are amazing, but there are more than enough resources several times over in the first ring of resources to get a rocket launched. The first expansion ring tends to have 500k-1Mil per patch, and have several patches, so there's no need to go miles out pre-rocket.
It takes surprisingly little raw resources to actually launch a rocket. Someone did the maths once and calculated completing the game as needing a minimum of ~500k Iron ore. At 15/s, a single yellow belt can deliver that in under 10 hours, way below the time of a typical playthrough. This technically means a single smelting line is all you need to actually complete the game still in a reasonable time. Of course, trying to do so from a single lane would be extremely painful, and need a lot of attention to preventing over-production of intermediates, especially when it's much easier to make a few smelting lanes. I'm not recommending that, but I am recommending just slapping down new lanes and production wherever you feel like it and whenever you need, rather than pre-planning 4-lanes of plates that aren't actually useful of efficient.
Unless you mean your "main bus" is just 1x copper and 2x iron lane, in which case fair enough, but when I attack the concept of the bus, that's not what I'm railing against. What I'm railing against is the design pattern where people put down 4 lots of 4-wide lanes to bus far more iron, copper and intermediates than will ever be needed to actually launch a rocket.
Busses aren't efficient by any metric, other than minimising personality, creativity and thinking.
With a bus you just follow the same template done before, it'll get you to the end, but it teaches bad habits and isn't efficient. It isn't quick either, you'll spend a long time putting down lanes and splitters and undergrounds. All of which need producing.
For late-game (post-rocket), then either a bus design or train / city-block designs can work well. I prefer trains, but large busses have their place for mega-bases.
But for pre-rocket, or anyone starting out, spaghetti is absolutely the way to go. It'll also better teach you via your own mistakes.
Re: Show HN: Factorio Learning Environment – Agents Build Factories
#84OK, You’ve permanently nerd-baited me, and I wish to apply for a job at the Anthropic Factorio lab immediately.
I can’t tell from the paper or these comments if you’re sending multimodal data back — I’m guessing no, because many of these models aren’t multimodal. But some are — and of course we now have recently released Qwen 2.5 VLM which seems to be quite strong for its size.
You harp on this lack of spatial ability a fair amount, which - fair enough - and you mention difficulties in both planning and spatial planning. Are you sending images back? If not, any thoughts on this?
Thanks for this amazing bit of work, I really am reorganizing my day to play with it now.
P.s. seems like MCP enabling the python library is a natural must-do so that all tool-enabled LLMs everywhere can play factorio.
Re: Show HN: Factorio Learning Environment – Agents Build Factories
#85Very cool and also pretty expected results tbh. Some thoughts: Factorio is a game that requires SIGNIFICANT amounts of thinking ahead, often requiring investments into things that won't pay off until much later and which might even significantly hamper initial development. Building a main bus vs spaghetti belts is one of the obvious examples here. Humans with a little bit of experience playing factorio know that whil…
> Building a main bus vs spaghetti belts is one of the obvious examples here I'm an anti-bus extremist. ( I've even considered regsitering BanTheBus.com and doing an over-the-top static anti-bus website. ), so take what I'm about to say with a pinch of salt. Also note that my post applies to non-space-age. Space-age changes the gameplay fundamentally, so this really only applies to factorio 1.1 or 2.0 with space-age…
Lots of ways to play. That said, there is a significant amount of tooling to support the style of “stamping” working units down. In fact, I’d argue it’s a key part of the game in that you start with small working units, and the game helps you scale them up to midsize (say on the map view you can still see the parts) and then again to large scale (you can only see blocks on the map). This is why the blueprint tool allows offsetting and grid refinement.
So, I almost never build a large main bus style base, but it’s a fun (and helpful) part of the game’s design and tooling to allow you to create very large working systems out of a variety of component scales — “buses” enable this, and make it MUCH easier to implement.
Re: Show HN: Factorio Learning Environment – Agents Build Factories
#86Does it provide screenshots of the game state? I, too, would struggle to play the game pretty effectively if I could not visually see the game.
Agents don't have access to screenshots, as we are purely evaluating text-only models. All reasoning is conducted over object representations of the game (with positions etc). I have anecdotally tried using screenshots to help models debug their factories, but without training a custom CNN/ViT on the Factorio UI, the visual outputs miss critical things (e.g gaps in transport belts). That said, we have demonstrated vi…
Noddy, what’s “fair game” for this benchmark? e.g. do you wish to provide frontier models with a text goal, tooling info, and leave it at that? Or do you wish to have agent architectures compete? It seems to me like tiering the goal setting, layout and implementation are all separate tasks that would benefit from different agents.
Re: Show HN: Factorio Learning Environment – Agents Build Factories
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not convinced that factorio requires planning ahead for computer players . For human players it certainly does, because tearing up your factory and rebuilding to fix shortsighted designs has a steep time/labor cost. Even for human players though, this cost becomes mostly a psychological obstacle once you get construction bots.
Long-term planning is necessary if you have biters enabled: typically you need to secure territory/resources and invest in defenses before the resources run low and while the biters are still manageable. Otherwise things can get badly out of hand. Edit: IMO the biggest difference between Satisfactory and Factorio is that Satisfactory has no crises. If a Satisfactory base shuts down it is annoying, but you can dig ano…
We were thinking of creating a minigame resembling a "tower-defense" setting, where waves of bugs get released and the agent needs to create appropriate defenses. It would be interesting to see if agents are capable of defending the base and how much resources would they put towards defenses in a normal game where enemies are enabled
Re: Show HN: Factorio Learning Environment – Agents Build Factories
#88Very cool and also pretty expected results tbh. Some thoughts: Factorio is a game that requires SIGNIFICANT amounts of thinking ahead, often requiring investments into things that won't pay off until much later and which might even significantly hamper initial development. Building a main bus vs spaghetti belts is one of the obvious examples here. Humans with a little bit of experience playing factorio know that whil…
> It is kind of amazing that these models manage to figure out a strategy at all, considering the game is not in their training set.
I'm not sure we can conclude the game's not in their training set - a lot has been written about Factorio on the internet, and a lot has been recorded; the newer multimodal LLMs have trained on YouTube, especially Gemini.
Re: Show HN: Factorio Learning Environment – Agents Build Factories
#89Very cool and also pretty expected results tbh. Some thoughts: Factorio is a game that requires SIGNIFICANT amounts of thinking ahead, often requiring investments into things that won't pay off until much later and which might even significantly hamper initial development. Building a main bus vs spaghetti belts is one of the obvious examples here. Humans with a little bit of experience playing factorio know that whil…
> the game is about eventually building thousands of the new item. I disagree that you need significant amount of thinking ahead. At the beginning spaghetti belt is fine, as you have little resources and you don't have the luxury of overbuilding. Once you start getting "bigger" and into more complex designs you can just leave what you already built how it is and build the new stuff somewhere else. By the time you nee…
You can certainly build with a main bus, and segmented factories doing what they do in perfect Nilaus city blocks. It's quite like perfectly designed and planned code; though you run the risk of it becoming just a blueprint plopping game.
But it (for me at least) is so much more fun building the spaghetti and making things work, refactoring as you go, and expanding organically.
Re: Show HN: Factorio Learning Environment – Agents Build Factories
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Someone below mentioned the ASCII interface for dwarf fortress as being ideal for this, and I wonder if that kind of representation with a legend might produce spatially better results. The drawback I see is that elements can be layered on a tile in Factorio, or have properties that are not visually obvious in ASCII, so the llm would need to be able to introspect on the map.
I think your intuition is correct about the amount of information that needs to be encoded into an ASCII char. You could potentially use unicode to pack more more into each char, e.g direction, type, status etc. Or make each representation available on-demand, i.e 'show me the direction of all inserters in a 10 tile radius'.
Well we learned last month on HN that you can encode arbitrary data into Unicode; anecdotally, o3-mini-high at least could decode it if given instructions.
I wonder what a quick way to calculate how many Unicode characters you’d need is.. I guess every entity + four orientations. Underground belts and pipes seem tough. But I guess you could just add an encoding showing if the square has an underground pipe or encoding.
I propose this would work. I think I’ll give it a try today.. I’d love dwarf fortress factorio. That said, the encode/decode phase seems like a lot of tokens for a model that’s not trained to understand the Unicode ‘map’. Seems like you’d want to fine tune something at least. Maybe a layout model.