With collision detection I would do fish in two phases: 1) decide where to move. 2) update position. First phase doesn't mutate anything but fish internal data no other fish may access so its trivially multithreaded. Phase 2 needs to lock the chunks involved when a fish moved from one chunk to anot...

Breaking the Monotony I've been thinking about some of these ideas as well. Don't get me wrong - I love Factorio for what it is, and the last thing I need is more reasons to stay addicted, but what I feel it's "missing" is some kind of event system with both random events and triggered ev...

TLDR; So, while the balance between belts, rails, and bots is definitely something that needs to be fixed, it's not what is really causing the end game to be less fun than early and mid game. The only way to really fix this issue, is to make bots as fun as belts and trains are, and the only way to ...

This is an interesting article about software bugs: https://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/whose-bug-is-this-anyway Some of it is about detecting bad memory and hardware faults. Thank you! I remember reading this a long time ago and wanted to find it to post it, but couldn't remember where it lived! This...

Another option is to change the tile graphics to be centered on the intersection between a 2x2 area of tiles. As demonstrated in this article: http://blog.project-retrograde.com/2013/05/marching-squares/ A single strip of land or water can be exactly one tile wide this way. This solves your issue a...

Oh god the block visualization is something I absolutely need, for whatever reason I've just never been able to really understand the block concept and make it work in my head. I've found it (the debug option) tremendously valuable for figuring out NO PATH errors when I had placed a signal somewher...

Mooncat wrote:How about tinting the rails instead?

I kind of like this idea! When placing a signal, just tint all of the rails that would be included in that block.

I posted this on /r/factorio, but thought I'd share here as well: Hash Collision Probabilities: preshing.com/20110504/hash-collision-probabilities/ Key takeaway: CRC32 has a 50% collision probability once you reach 77,163 unique values. The graph on that page shows you hit about 100% probability col...