Factorio's God Factory was born on Sunday. Using more than 160 copies of the game running simultaneously, a group of players created a monster so large that it more than tripled the previous world record for most science produced per minute.
Eternity Cluster, the name of the project run by over 400 players from around the world, surpassed 1,000,000 science per minute (SPM), and they will keep pushing this until something breaks.
Normal players of the factory building automation game only need about 30 SPM to reach the game's ultimate goal: sending a rocket into space. But for the Factorio players who really get satisfaction from efficient mass production, one rocket is not enough.
Enter 'Megabase Builders'. Instead of building rockets, mega base builders try to create as many science packs as possible (items usually used to unlock base upgrades). For these titans of automation, who produce more science kits than they have any use for, Factorio seems much more like a job than a game.
"The most difficult obstacle was not burning out on the project," Hornwitser, one of the organizers, told PC Gamer. Hornwitser has spent the past month working on Clusterio, the Factorio mod that holds all this together. Without this, the God Factory would not exist.
A war against the game itself
"Factorio is a very well-optimized game and most players will never reach the limits of the game," says GreatSymphonia, one of the people who contributed a physical server to the project. "We are."
Factorio has a single, persistent villain that prevents normal megabases from reaching anything close to 1 million SPM. The game has a maximum number of updates per second (UPS) that limits how many Factorio machines can run simultaneously. If you exceed the UPS limit, your SPM values will be broken as the game simply cannot handle any more calculations. This isn't a problem for regular players, but it's a constant threat for mega base builders aiming for big numbers.
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The solution is Clusterio. This allows you to run multiple instances of Factorio as if they were one giant base. Each version of the game must still adhere to the UPS limit, but all bases working together come together to form one giant machine. This weekend's achievement is both a victory for the people of Eternity Cluster and for Clusterio's ability to deliver on such a massive scale.
The road to 1,000,000
"The most important part of such a big event is the community sharing ideas."
More than 400 players have joined at least one of Eternity Cluster's Factorio servers, which remains free to access for anyone who wants to support this massive undertaking. Half of those contributed more than an hour to the total 3,900 hours of play recorded, Hornwitser said. The rest of the time was spent monitoring the servers and discussing strategy on the Eternity Cluster Discord server.
"The most important part of such a big event is the community sharing ideas," GreatSymphonia said. "Most of the people behind the organization of that event have a career in IT system administration or programming. A large part of the Factorio players are people who like to think through logistics problems and optimize designs. It's very nice to see that the community is sharing its designs shares, his ideas, to always find more efficient solutions to the same simple problem: making more science."
Over the past month, Eternity Cluster members have been tracking their production metrics using the wall of graphs and numbers on their dedicated Grafana page: an open source server data tracking service. A Clusterio plugin can track the exchange of resources and report them to Grafana, translating every raster of Factorio's pixel art conveyors and factories into raw numbers. You can view graphs of the more than 50 million iron ores the cluster creates and consumes every minute, or of all the 554 GB of memory it uses. All of this information helped drive the project toward the weekly SPM milestones.
If the cluster was low on resources or encountered UPS issues, an organizer would make a call to find out what needed to be done. Most issues can be resolved with minor redesigns, more bases, or server-side bug fixes. But some issues, such as Tropical Cyclone Kirrily which recently caused power outages on the northeastern coast of Australia, where some physical servers are located, were completely beyond their control. Fortunately, luck and backup power protected the Eternity Cluster from power outages.
Gaming at its best
Scrolling through the general chat of the Discord server as The God Factory reached 1M SPM is like eavesdropping on chatter in the strangest NASA control room you've ever seen. You'll see messages like: "Accelerated expansion of Solar 5 by enabling path cache", "Blue circuit 01 is basically at maximum capacity", "Acid is a bottleneck for yellow it seems", and "We have too much purple in storage."
Finally, the crew managed to control all the colors of the science pack and broke 1M SPM. You'd think it was time to celebrate and cherish the historic achievement, but the conversation immediately returned to the optimizations needed to become even bigger. For Factorio players at this level, a world record SPM is just proof that you can go even faster.
"The Eternity Cluster must grow."
Every Eternity Cluster member I spoke to told me it doesn't stop there. They all repeated the motto that every Factorio player learns sooner or later, no matter how ambitious their goals are: the factory must grow.
"The factory Eternity Cluster needs to grow," says Cooldude2606, one of the developers of Clusterio mods. Clusterio is still in alpha stages and the team had to make "a lot of compromises" to make it work, they said. "The ultimate goal will be to have Clusterio released with a wide range of plugins that will allow people to seamlessly host more events like Eternity Cluster, at any scale and with any customization they want."
The Eternity Cluster Discord server contains about 177 people, with more joining every day to ask how they can help. "Everyone is welcome," says the information channel. And given the dedication and teamwork I saw there, I expect two million won't be that far away.
"I don't consider myself an experienced player and feel like I'm among those with the least expertise," said Bubba-yo, one of the other members. "It was quite difficult to resist the temptation to get involved in this project for that reason. But everything was great. Factorio is normally a pretty great community, and this group was a real pleasure to be around. This is gaming at its best. best, in my opinion."
Thanks to long-time PC Gamer reader Jim, aka Zee, who tipped us off to this story. If you notice something interesting happening in a game you're playing, reach us at tips@pcgamer.com.