Special Report
PCG INVESTIGATES
A group of players built a record-breaking plant
Over 160 copies of Factorio, a base building game from four years ago, ran simultaneously on servers around the world to make history. Factorio’s first ‘God Factory’ was born through the efforts of a Discord server full of people who refuse to stop building.
The over 400 players behind Eternity Cluster, a project that had only existed for a month at the time, broke 1,000,000 science per minute (SPM) in February. Normal players of the factory-building automation game only need around 30 SPM to achieve the game’s ultimate goal: sending a rocket into space. But for the Factorio players who really get a thrill from efficient mass production – a drive that has kept the game relevant since its 2018 Steam early access launch – one rocket is not enough.
“The most difficult obstacle has been not burning out working on the project,” said Hornwitser, one of the organisers. Hornwitser spent all of February working on Clusterio, the Factorio mod holding all of this together. Without it, the God Factory wouldn’t exist.
“Factorio is a very well optimised game and most players will never find themselves hitting the limits,” said GreatSymphonia, who’s contributed an actual physical server to the project. “We are.”
Factorio has a single, persistent villain that prevents normal megabases from reaching anything close to 1M SPM. The game has an updates per second (UPS) maximum that limits how many Factorio machines can run at once. Exceed the UPS limit and your SPM readings break because the game can’t handle more calculations. This isn’t a problem for normal players, but it’s a threat for megabase builders shooting for big numbers.
Clusterio lets you run multiple instances of Factorio as if they were one gigantic base. Each instance of the game still has to abide by the UPS limit, but all the bases working in tandem come together to form one giant machine. The achievement is as much a win for the folks with Eternity Cluster as it is for Clusterio’s ability to perform at such a massive scale.
Over 400 players joined at least one of Eternity Cluster’s Factorio servers. “The key part of such a big event is seeing the community share ideas,” GreatSymphonia said. “Most of the people behind the organisation of that event have a career in IT system administration or programming. A huge proportion of Factorio players are people that love to think through logistics problems and optimise designs. It’s very nice to see the community share its designs, its ideas, to always make more efficient solutions to the same simple problem: making more science.”
Rocket science
Factorioplayers chase high amounts of science per minute (SPM) for the challenge. It’s a metric for measuring the total output of a base built purely to
