Factorio Forums

Mod portal link

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/zAlsScienceShuffle

Description

This mod randomizes the ingredients of science and rocket (and possibly other) recipes to give a qualitatively different experience while maintaining the same gradual increase in difficulty and total raw resources of the base game. If you love Factorio, but have gotten bored because you've memorized how to make everything, then this mod is for you. Science Shuffle provides a new unique game on demand without dramatically increasing the difficulty.

The seed, items to be shuffled, and several other settings are configurable to get a new experience every time you play. It also (usually) works with (most) other mods, potentially shuffling their items into base recipes or even randomizing their recipes if configured to do so.

From mod description ''while keeping complexity and total resources balanced.'

How does it implement this claim?

There's a configuration setting that is a list of what items are being shuffled and how many are estimated to be made. By default it's the science packs and rocket parts with an estimate of amounts to launch a rocket I pulled from a follow friday post if I recall correctly. It optimizes over the squared error of each relative raw resource and recipe complexity with a random hill climbing method. So like, if you have 10% more iron ore required to make the total items then that's an 0.1 relative difference and a penalty of 0.01. Similarly, there's a penalty of 9 if like red science takes 3x as much stuff, and there are some constant weighting in there too. Items in the recipes are swapped (mostly) at random for some number of iterations (also configurable) and the best scoring recipe set is kept and used at the end. The random numbers are all seeded, so everyone with the same settings will get the same result and it works fine in multiplayer.

The complexity penalty is a bit weirder. Each raw resource is given a weight, and complexity of each optimized recipe is the weighted sum. However, the weights are hard-coded based on testing and my estimate of what constitutes difficult . Uranium is very high, iron and copper are low, coal and stone are in the middle. It's kind of arbitrary, but it seems to do a decent job of making sure too many resources don't get shifted into one thing. Red won't take hardly anything, yellow will take quite a bit, and the silo and satellite can get really crazy. The higher weighting on stone and coal means they're unlikely to be in early recipes that didn't already have them, which I think is good since you don't always start with a lot of those.

All of the potential ingredients are also stratified into levels based on what techs are required to unlock them and how many ingredients they take to make. That guarantees the recipes you get are reasonably possible. Although, right now it is possible to get 6 ingredient things in purple science, and then you have to hand craft a bunch to unlock assembly machine 3. I'm going to fix that when I update for 0.17. I have some other little improvements as well, but I don't push updates often because any tiny change breaks saves. If there's any suggestions for improvements I'd love to hear them. I'm already planning to add a whitelist setting for mods this mod will interact with, so you don't get locked into your mod settings. I'd like to do one big release shortly after 0.17 .

Very impressed with your reply. thanks for taking the time! Perhaps consider adding some of this info to the mod description on the portal.

Cheers

So glad this exists , I was going to ask for such a mod before finding it... after playing Factorio for 460 hours , this is exactly what I needed to start fresh new challenges !

A problem though is that changing the science seed apparently requires a restart every time , this makes it tiresome to find a seed you like (where science recipes share few intermediate products , oil is required for grey or blue sciences ect) so , could we have a recipe simulator tool out of game (or even in game , if possible) to avoid spending so much time loading the game ?

So, I think I found a bug in this mod - my science seed (I think it was just 123456789?) rolled up needing cliff explosives for the military science pack.

I assume this is because it ensures that packs don't require things that require the pack for that tech, but the cliff explosive tech is only red+green... but depends on explosives, which require military science.

That definitely sounds like a bug. I'll add to the list of things to fix when I update. Thanks.

Sounds like this needs an additional mod fixing vanilla issues like these !

Yess, I was looking for a mod like that, thank you !

Alrecenk wrote: ↑Mon Jan 21, 2019 9:04 pm Although, right now it is possible to get 6 ingredient things in purple science, and then you have to hand craft a bunch to unlock assembly machine 3. I'm going to fix that when I update for 0.17.

Assembler ingredient limits are being removed in 0.17, so you won't have to...

Not sure about Engine unit handcrafting / Fluids -
Did you have issues with those, like ingredients for Assembler 2 requiring water ?

Stakhanov wrote: ↑Tue Jan 22, 2019 9:41 am A problem though is that changing the science seed apparently requires a restart every time , this makes it tiresome to find a seed you like (where science recipes share few intermediate products , oil is required for grey or blue sciences ect) so , could we have a recipe simulator tool out of game (or even in game , if possible) to avoid spending so much time loading the game ?

I'm pretty sure this can't be done without reloading the game, since recipes, technologies etc are defined in the loading phase.
That means that every time you wanna get a different seed, which not only changes the map but also recipes, you need to reload.

That's why you have to reload after a mod change, to have an effect on the game.

Whatever you have aviable when you start/load a game stays as long as you don't reload with different mods and/or settings.

Or startup mod settings for that matter. Ever looked at mod settings while in game? There are different tabs, and options in the startup tab are greyed out, unless you are in the main menu. A change here will also force/require a reload, since it's those settings that, again, change reciepes/technology.

There only seems to be one exception. Science cost and recipe multiplier. Since this mod not just changes everything uniformly, but shuffles things in a rather unpredictable way, I think what you ask for is not possible. It's basicly tuning the mod's startup settings randomly

Either an external tool that lets you generate a random set, and tells you the seed, so you can refresh quickly.
Or else an in-game tool that lets you generate seeds and writes as text to screen the results, and writes the seed to log or something.

Auto-balanced recipe shuffling returns to add variety to your socially distanced Factorio binge playing. The mod has been updated to work on the latest experimental release [0.18.17]. And with the mod synchronization we have now, it's a lot easier to hop in a crazy configured game, so I'll be hosting public games with this mod under the name "recipe shuffle chaos" as I try out different configurations in full games.