Factorio Forums

Is anybody out there attempting, or thought of making a Factorio map in the shape of a map of Earth?

I would really like to play one. I would probably make one myself but my computer is too slow to make a large scale project like that.

There are a few problems with this idea.

First and foremost - AFAIK Factorio maps are always flat, with no option to make them round (fair enough), or even cylindrical. This means any map that doesn't go on forever in one direction will simply end at some point, and not wrap around to the other side. So Earth-like maps are topologically impossible in Factorio.

Second hurdle is the sheer size you are speaking of - let's take the UK for example. According to Google the area of the UK is about 243*10^9 squared meters. That meant a map of 243*10^9 tiles (assuming the well-accepted lore that one Factorio tile is one squared meter). Now, there is no direct mapping between tile to bytes in memory (because a tile may or may not contain one or more entities, and some tiles are saved as 2x2 or 4x4 tiles so as to save space), but let's take a reasonable assumption (albeit, I believe, on the lower side) of 2 bytes per tile. That gives a map of about 226 gigabytes!
Of course, the map file itself may be smaller, as it is compressed, but (again, as far as I understand it) the game must still hold all of this information in memory. So until we have computers with hundreds of GB of RAM we will probably have to do with maps of humbler sizes (by about a factor of 1000).

The third and last problem I see with this idea is, for all I have tried, the map editor in Factorio is... well, clunky and hard to work with. It's fine if you want to make minor changes to existing maps, or make small (500x500 or so) maps, but for anything larger than that I found it quite a pain.

First one, well, you can't loop at the edge, but you can make the map a finite size, so that isn't a big deal.

Size wise, well, 99% of everything that uses world maps uses the wrong scale anyway, mainly because the scale required is in most all cases far, far too large for most games.
Hence, it might well be one tenth of that size, or one hundredth, or w.e.

Third one, well, yes, the editer is pretty primetive, but some mods, like landfill, show that you can use script to alter terrain. I know that at least one game (Railroad tycoon 3) has the ability to take a piece of the world map to make a base map. I imagine there are programs out there that support that. So via making your own script to load terrain, you could do that.


That said, I don't know that a world map would add much to the game.

Ranak said exactly what I was thinking.

And I guess I just like the thematics of the world map. I always play them on games like Civilisation.

I like the idea of setting up a huge oil base in the middle east, and discovering a large gold deposit in California (Bobs mods enabled).

or building a giant wall on the north side of china..... (or even on the south of USA and make the Mexican biters pay for it)

It would be even cooler if you started in a different part of the map each time you started the game.

Mr Sunol wrote:Ranak said exactly what I was thinking.

And I guess I just like the thematics of the world map. I always play them on games like Civilisation.

I like the idea of setting up a huge oil base in the middle east, and discovering a large gold deposit in California (Bobs mods enabled).

I would love a map where the only way to get resources of any sort of size would be to go far away. I might make me use train networks again

Mr Sunol wrote: or building a giant wall on the north side of china..... (or even on the south of USA and make the Mexican biters pay for it)

lol you got to love trump references

Mr Sunol wrote: It would be even cooler if you started in a different part of the map each time you started the game.

Yes. I would like that but I dont think that there is a way to do that currently.

TuckJohn wrote:

Mr Sunol wrote:Ranak said exactly what I was thinking.

And I guess I just like the thematics of the world map. I always play them on games like Civilisation.

I like the idea of setting up a huge oil base in the middle east, and discovering a large gold deposit in California (Bobs mods enabled).

I would love a map where the only way to get resources of any sort of size would be to go far away. I might make me use train networks again

Mr Sunol wrote: or building a giant wall on the north side of china..... (or even on the south of USA and make the Mexican biters pay for it)

lol you got to love trump references

Mr Sunol wrote: It would be even cooler if you started in a different part of the map each time you started the game.

Yes. I would like that but I dont think that there is a way to do that currently.

First part, that is what resource Spawner Overhaul is supposed to do. It sort of works as well. Minimizing the frequency of all the resources helps as well, since it makes resources larger but further apart. Ore expantion also helps by making resources richer further away from spawn, which if you reduce resource size or depth will make resources near base run out faster compared to those farther away.

As for the last one, it is probably possible to make a mod that alters your spawn point, and then as soon as your character is created the first time, move it to a location, using whatever pseudorandom method you want.

A little late, thread is dead? but I found the game recently, I love the game

I tried to recreate my island, Mallorca, I made in an infinite map, emptying the sea and shaping the coast, with time and patience.
http://i.imgur.com/Yuq5fNL.jpg
I have something quite playable, but limited because I put resources at hand (error? with no resources, in infinite map?), and when you go out of the island (with mods, bridges or plane), no more resources founded.

but before making changes, I will try to make the world
http://i.imgur.com/VbXJBsS.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/5SabhEC.jpg

It is a big job, but look good
its a infinite map, it is better to make a limited map?
the scale can be 432x243 chunks, considering that 2/3 of the map is water
how many resources should have to send several rockets?

I can't wait to play that World map.


Keep it up.

skorpio0876 wrote:A little late, thread is dead? but I found the game recently, I love the game

- what is dead may never die. -

Hey there Skorpio, are you still going ahead with your world map?
I had a similar idea to recreate an existing map. Could use some pointers..

First of all, I'm struggling to decide the scale. How did you choose how large to start with?
I know you are using an infinite map. What I mean is that I started drawing a coastline and soon realised that the map could become too big. But I don't want to make it too small either. I want eventually to share it and have people discover the world by themselves, not noticing right away "where" they are.
It seems the starting area is in northwestern France. What setting did you use? so I can make a quick estimation and get a rough idea.

What is the file size once you got to complete western Europe?

And maybe the question that is what I mostly need help with. How did you keep the proportions right?
I am planning to make a grid on the original map to copy. But I didn't find yet a function to set a grid as guidance in the Map Editor.
Is there any or you just went by instinct?

I see some black squares here and there on the small Mallorca map (small Mallorca LOL.. as if there wasn't one next to it already), did you use a manually made grid of "outside of map" to get your measurements?

Whatever help you can give I'll appreciate. And if I can get it done you can have early-access to it

Thanks

I think it woud be fun if you cud also make cities Like biters and earth is us and arivals are aliens steeling our resourses, and kiling?...

If you know the format of the scenario files, you should be able to make a program that would input an image of a real (or imagined) map of anything and output a scale representation of it in the form of a Factorio scenario, to which you could then apply a little elbow grease in the map editor to add resources and such.

Ranakastrasz wrote:https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comme ... _v121_wip/

Seems not to be much activity recently.

I found this mod: https://mods.factorio.com/mods/TheOddler/factorio-world

It would be very interesting to combine this fashion with AlienBiomes.
However, the author has no time to do so, although he says how one can create his own worlds.

Maybe some modder would combine these two mods?

TheOddler wrote:I was not aware of that mod, and damn it looks cool. But sadly I'm not really playing factorio anymore lately (lost a week to it a month ago, so trying to spend some time on other stuff ). So for now this mod will stay as is. You are welcome to use my code though Just make sure you open-source your own code aswell.

Here is how generate own world: https://github.com/TheOddler/FactorioWo ... /README.md