I made an AI agent for Factorio

[tldkn]

Hi everyone,

I made a small project called WorldCore. It is basically an AI agent trying to play Factorio by planning, placing entities, checking what happened, and then trying to fix its own mistakes.

I made a short video here:

WorldCore: an AI agent trying to build in Factorio

The fun part is that it is not just generating a blueprint. It actually works step by step inside the game. It tries to build power, belts, inserters, assembling machines, and lamps, while keeping track of what it thinks the factory should look like.

Sometimes it works surprisingly well. Sometimes it makes very AI-looking mistakes and then has to recover from them, which is honestly part of the fun.

This is still just a prototype, not a finished mod or a serious gameplay tool. I mainly made it because Factorio feels like a great playground for testing AI agents: planning, layout, resources, debugging, and lots of ways to go wrong.

I thought people here might find it amusing or interesting.

Would be happy to hear any thoughts, ideas, or suggestions. Also, if you can think of funny Factorio tasks to throw at an AI agent, I would love to hear them.

Thanks for taking a look!

[BHakluyt]

Would be cool to have a competitive faction that is also trying to colonise the star system...

[tldkn]

Yeah, I think even Fable 5 is not quite mature enough for this kind of scenario yet, but maybe in four years, with stronger models and better tools, we could have a really nice demo of competing factions colonising a star system.

[worph]

I'm wondering what you scraped for that project, both in terms of how it works and in terms of ethics.

[pioruns]

Hi, thanks for sharing. Under your link I see videos only. Do you have blog or something where I can read about your experiment?

[tldkn]

I'm wondering what you scraped for that project, both in terms of how it works and in terms of ethics.

I actually didn't scrape the Factorio wiki or any community content for this project.
The agent isn't instructed to search the Factorio wiki during its runs. In particular, I didn't want to rely on externally documented recipes, because there is no record for the recipes of the specific Factorio version I use.
Instead, I built a set of tools for the agent based directly on Factorio's source code, so it can use them flexibly during the decision-making process.
I also don't use existing player-made blueprints as references. The layouts and construction decisions are made by the agent itself rather than retrieved from existing blueprints.
So in terms of scraped data, there really isn't any Factorio wiki, community, or blueprint data involved.

[tldkn]

Hi, thanks for sharing. Under your link I see videos only. Do you have blog or something where I can read about your experiment?

Thanks for asking.
At the moment, the computational cost of evaluating my system on existing benchmarks is simply too high for me to afford.
I’d like to open-source the project if I’m able to.

[mmmPI]

I suggest you use AI to make an english version of the video or make the original texts from the video available somewhere for easier translation than from the video if you want more feedback on the project or maybe explain how to translate the video faster than 1 image at a time because i didn't finished the whole video

In game it can look like it act the same as other agents , but work very differently to achieve the result. It made me curious, but i understood nothing from the video

[XT-248]

Sounds like a fun project. Subscribed to follow along.