This project arose because I constantly felt like I was making poor decisions with where I placed everything in my base. This is a pretty simple attempt to minimize belt distance between different parts of your base.
python main.py --fast # Render best answer in 15 seconds
python main.py # Render best answer after 4 minutes
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Download this project from Github
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Run the following
virtualenv venv
. venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
Then you can run python main.py to generate a base layout.
This library divides your base up into "blocks," where each block has a specific purpose - "red science," "iron smelting," or "rocket silo" for example. The connections between each block are defined, as well as the entry points - where belts enter and exit each block. So for example, iron smelting needs a connection to the coal mine and the copper mine.
Minimizing travel distance is a type of problem that is known to be "NP complete," which is a fancy way of saying, it's expensive to compute the answer. We put all of the blocks into a SAT solver, which can approximate a good solution for the problem. The SAT solver is part of Google's operations research tooling library.
A block has a width and height. You can customize the blocks in factorio.py
— we have two starter blocks, one which has the requirements to build 2
rocket parts per minute, and one which can get you all the sciences. A block has
a width and a height.
blocks = {
# You're responsible for getting belts from the mines to your base
"Copper Mine": (1, 1),
"Stone Mine": (1, 1),
"Red Science": (19, 12),
"Green Science": (18, 16),And then we define a series of "connections" between each of the blocks. Each connection has a start, an end, and then the point on the start at which you exit the block, and the point at the end at which you enter the block - which are shortened to "TL" (top left), "BM" (bottom middle), etc.
connections = [
("Coal Mine", "Copper Smelting", "MM", "LM"),
("Copper Mine", "Copper Smelting", "MM", "LM"),
("Coal Mine", "Iron Smelting", "MM", "BM"),
("Ore Mine", "Iron Smelting", "MM", "BM"),
# ...We plug these all into the SAT solver, and then get out a graph like one of the ones in the "graphs" directory.
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I used existing blueprints from factorio.school for almost all of the blocks.
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We don't chart the space needed to actually get the belts from one place to the other, so you need to allocate space for this in your factory.
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The blocks can't rotate, even though blueprints can. I tried to add rotation but it ended up blowing up the complexity, to the point where
The API can almost certainly be better, and could for example emit blueprints of the base for you, which would be pretty cool. I also don't have much interest in super bases, but I can see why you'd want to optimize these as well.
We could also almost certainly improve the rendering, and the method used to import data - for example you could just specify the items you want to produce and the rate, and we could generate a base for you, similar to how Kirk McDonald's website works.
I don't have time to work on any of this but if you do I'm happy to grant commit access or point people at a fork.