A small change in 2.1.7 had a big impact: The Humble Sensor Mine!
Posted: Wed Jul 15, 2026 3:25 am
Hey folks, I'm TalShar783, and I've been modding Factorio for... checks watch ... a couple of weeks, so you could basically say I'm a master at it.
Kidding, of course. But I did find something interesting that I think modders smarter and more ambitious than me could make good use of, and I bundled it up into a mini-mod to demonstrate. I present to you: The Humble Sensor Mine.
To give you a TL;DR: Changes to Factorio 2.1.7, specifically the ability to connect mines to circuits and detonate them via signals, have exposed the ability to push triggers via circuit events, which is something that, to my knowledge, was impossible before now. Using this hook should enable modders to save loads of UPS on triggers that don't have to run frequently by sidestepping the need for nth_tick state peeks by their Lua scripts.
I'm happy to discuss my findings further, but I think the Readme in the mod does a pretty good job of explaining the mechanism and the applications I've dreamed up.
Happy modding!
Kidding, of course. But I did find something interesting that I think modders smarter and more ambitious than me could make good use of, and I bundled it up into a mini-mod to demonstrate. I present to you: The Humble Sensor Mine.
To give you a TL;DR: Changes to Factorio 2.1.7, specifically the ability to connect mines to circuits and detonate them via signals, have exposed the ability to push triggers via circuit events, which is something that, to my knowledge, was impossible before now. Using this hook should enable modders to save loads of UPS on triggers that don't have to run frequently by sidestepping the need for nth_tick state peeks by their Lua scripts.
I'm happy to discuss my findings further, but I think the Readme in the mod does a pretty good job of explaining the mechanism and the applications I've dreamed up.
Happy modding!