factorio

3 Articles

A 3D-printed, hand-cranked, toy conveyor belt designed after the transporter belts in Factorio.

Designing A Toy Conveyor Belt For Fun And Profit

March 5, 2025 by 5 Comments

[Hope This Works] wants to someday build a tiny factory line in the garage, with the intent of producing some simple widget down the line. But what is a tiny factory without tiny conveyor belts? Not a very productive one, that’s for sure.

As you may have noticed, this is designed after the transporter belts from the game Factorio. [Hope This Works] ultimately wants something functional that’s small enough to fit in one hand and has that transporter belt aesthetic going. He also saw this as a way to level up his CAD skills from approximately 1, and as you’ll see in the comprehensive video after the break, that definitely happened.

And so [Hope This Works] started by designing the all-important sprockets. He found a little eight-toothed number on McMaster-Carr and used the drawing for reference. From there, he designed the rest of the parts around the sprockets, adding a base so that it can sit on the desk or be held in the hand.

For now, this proof-of-concept is hand-cranked. We especially love that [Hope This Works] included a square hole for the crank handle to stand in when not in use. Be sure to check out the design/build video after the break to see it in action.

How happy would you be to see Factorio come up in a job interview?

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Researching Factorio…For Science

October 19, 2022 by 15 Comments

Science has affirmatively answered a lot of questions that, looking back, could be seen as bizarre to have asked in the first place. Questions like “can this moldy cheese cure disease” or “can this rock perform math if we give it some electricity.”  Among the more recent of this list is the question of whether or not the video game Factorio, in which the player constructs an elaborate factory, can be used as the basis for other academic work. As [Kenneth Reid] discusses in this talk, it most certainly can.

If you haven’t played the game, it’s a sort of real-time strategy (RTS) game where the player gathers materials to construct a factory while defending it from enemies. On the surface it might seem similar to Age of Empires or Starcraft, but its complexity is taken to extremes not found in other RTS games. The complexity hides nuance, and [Kenneth] points out that it’s an excellent simulator to study real-world problems such as vehicle routing problems, decision making, artificial intelligence, bin packing problems, and production planning, among a whole slew of other interesting areas of potential research.

[Kenneth] and his partners on this project also developed some software tools with interacting with a Factorio game without having to actually play it directly. The game includes an API which the team used to develop tools so that other researchers can use it as a basis for simulations and studies. There was a research paper published as well for more in-depth reading on the topic. We shouldn’t be too surprised that a game can be used in incredibly productive ways like this, either. Here’s another example of a toy being used to train engineers working in industrial automation.

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Playing The Interview Game

April 12, 2021 by 37 Comments

Technical interviews are generally dreaded, just like every other interview. However, technical interviews include many elements that non-technical folks might find mystifying or even pointless, such as whiteboard problem solving, take-home assignments, design sessions, or even just straight brain teasers. [Erik McClure] went a bit off the beaten path and started using the factory builder game Factorio as a technical interview.

Many point to the intent behind the problems and tricky questions inherent in whiteboard coding exercises and assert that the focus is not to complete the problem, but rather to expose how a candidate thinks and problem solves. Factorio is all problem-solving as you work as a team to slowly scale up a humble production line to a massive factory, which makes it a good candidate for assessing these sorts of skills. We doubt that the fine developers who wrote the game ever imagined it being used as an interview.

In all likelihood, you probably won’t have a Factorio interview anytime soon as [Erik] estimated each interview would take between eight and twenty hours. But we love the idea of reimagining the interview from a tedious set of problems to solve to an evolving cooperative game. Of course, you can also read more about getting the experience necessary for a job and what companies are looking for in an interview.

A trailer for Factorio is after the break.

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