Arcana

So if you follow me over on Bluesky, you’ll already have seen a little bit of this over the past couple weeks, but I think it’s time to properly introduce the blog to my secondary project, a Factorio mod called Arcana.

If you read my New Year’s post, you’ll have seen the very very early rough brainstorming file I had been working on for maybe a day or two at that point. While the basic idea is still in tact, the scope of the mod has changed drastically. Originally I was planning for the mod to be less of a full overhaul and more a supplement to Factorio’s base game, utilizing the base game resources and technology tree, making small tweaks to the vanilla game here and there to accommodate my mod and the changes it’d make. At this point in time, I’m taking more of a full overhaul approach to the mod — I’ve removed all the base game technologies, starting recipes, and all but one resource. This has some implications for compatibility with other mods, at least out of the box, but that’s not exactly a unique problem when it comes to overhauls. Essentially this means that if I (or another mod maker) wanted compatibility between two mods, one (or both, potentially) of us would need to add extra code to our mods to make that happen. This is because other mods may be built on assumptions of certain things from the base game existing, and need to pivot if their mod sees mine installed alongside it. Regardless though, that’s a problem for pretty far in the future. While I have already uploaded my mod to Factorio’s modding portal, I’ve made it fairly clear on the page that this mod is extremely early in development and isn’t worth playing yet. Despite this, at the time of writing, 39 people have apparently downloaded my mod, which is pretty fun to see.

So the rest of this post is going to be me showing off what I’ve made so far and sort of rambling my thoughts about the mod into the void, since I’m still trying to figure out what exactly what I want to do with it. Of course if you have any questions or suggestions for the mod, feel free to reach out to me either through comments here (though I realize it’s a little cumbersome to leave a comment here) or by messaging me on Bluesky.

So, the first idea I came up with for the mod is the idea of mana. If you’ve ever played an RPG or any video game with a fantasy theme really, you’ll be familiar with the idea — essentially magical power in its purest form. In this mod, the idea is that it’d be a fluid that some recipes would call for. The catch here is that any recipe that uses it would also have a byproduct of “spent mana”, at a 1:1 ratio; e.g. if the recipe uses 100 mana, it would also have a byproduct of 100 spent mana.

You can see an example of what this kind of production chain might look like here:

The first production chain I modded into the game

Lets walk through this production chain step by step. At the top left, you can see a chest with a blue crystal. This is one of the new resources I’ve added called “manite”. These crystals are loaded into the machine on the right in order to create “potent mana”. That potent mana is then used in both of the machines on the bottom. The left of these is taking in both the potent mana and steel from the chest on its left to create “mana steel”, while also outputting spent mana. This mana steel is then combined again with the potent mana in order to create the mod’s first new science pack (for those unfamiliar with the game, science packs are big milestones). This recipe naturally also has the spent mana byproduct. Now, if you’re not familiar with Factorio, I understand that this can seem overwhelming and confusing, but rest assured that compared to even some base game production chains and definitely modded production chains, this is relatively simple. However, the obvious next question is “what do you do with spent mana?”. We’re stepping into speculative territory now, but the idea is initially you’d have to deal with storing (or destroying) spent mana. Later on you’d either get some way to reprocess the spent mana back into potent mana, something else to do with spent mana that’s unrelated to potent mana, or maybe both.

When I was initially looking into making this mod, this was intended to be the very first thing you did that was related to my mod, since at the time I was working with the base game’s technology tree. The base game has 7 different science packs (automation, logistics, chemical, military, production, utility, and space), and this production chain required a technology in logistics science in order to get going. For now, as I’m going back to the very beginning and overhauling from scratch, I’ve sort of shelved this idea, but I still plan to make mana handling a core pillar of my mod.

Editing note: From this point on a lot of what I’m talking about is not something that exists in the mod yet, so apologies to any visual learners for the lack of pictures

Post-full-overhaul-decision however, I’ve messed around with a couple other ideas for things that could be in the mod, to varying levels of success. One of these is the idea of having to create portals to visit other dimensions. The idea is that these dimensions would have unique resources, world generation, limitations, and threats. I did manage to create a new surface (Factorio’s name for a different dimension/planet/whatever you want it to be) that has different generation from the main one and visit it. This proved to be the easy part though. Creating unique map generation for other dimensions was always going to be a whole other can of worms to get into. Additionally, I found out one of the features I wanted to use for this part of the mod is locked behind the Factorio: Space Age DLC, which I do own, but it means that anyone who wanted to play my mod would also have to own it. This isn’t necessarily a big deal, but it does reduce the pool of potential players. As of right now, I haven’t made my mod depend on Space Age yet, but I’m still debating it. The other feature I’ve been working on with somewhat mixed success is the idea of transmutations. In fantasy media, transmutations are a type of magic that specializes in turning one thing into another. The idea comes from alchemy, with the popular idea of turning lead into gold, but has been used in games such as Dungeons & Dragons as well as TV shows such as Fullmetal Alchemist.

Now, there’s an argument that the game is already basically always doing transmutations anyways. You’re telling me I can put 3 circuit boards, 5 gears, and 9 iron plates into a machine and out pops another one of itself? Magic! This is what’s known as an abstraction point in games. Basically, having to go through all the steps you’d need to actually take in real life to create an assembling machine would be tedious, and more importantly, unfun, especially for a game where automation is practically in the name. Can’t very well do automation if your basic machines for the task take hours to make. With this in mind, the question is how can I make recipes that feel like transmutations. An obvious first idea on this front is to make the recipe inputs fail to match the outputs. The reason the abstraction point from the previous example works is because it’s fairly believable that an assembling machine could be constructed from a smattering of circuits, gears, and plates. If I do the opposite — have an input such as iron and an output like copper, for example — then wrap that in the explanation of “magic”, then that could feel like magic potentially. The main drawback here is that in the base game, all the machines are believably not magic, so by extension anything they would do feels less magic since you kind of just presume that what they’re doing is possible if they’re doing it. Due to this, an input/output mismatch alone isn’t enough to make these recipes feel magic, at least to me.

This sent me down a path of exploring a few other things that could potentially enhance the magic feeling of these recipes. The first idea I had was for these recipes to require specially carved magic sigils to focus the power. In theory this could be cool, but as it stands right now, these are just another item you need to do the transmutation. I’ve thought of maybe making these sigils reusable, implying that they’re not used up in the process of the transmutation, but that could get potentially very complicated if transmutation becomes a core mechanic of the mod. I’ve also thought of having, at least initially in the early game, wild transmutation recipes that randomly give you one of a handful of items. This could be potentially interesting I think, especially at scale, but it could also be very annoying. Firstly, the way Factorio recipes work doesn’t allow for only 1 product to be produced each time when you have probabilities like this. Each item on the results list for a recipe has its own probability of being produced independent of all the other results. This means that if you get very lucky (or unlucky) you could craft all or none of the results of the recipe. I’ve looked into whether or not having only 1 outcome of a recipe like this is possible, and it is, but with some pretty large caveats. Firstly, the only example I could find of something like this in another mod was from a mod called Space Exploration, which is gigantic and would take ages for me to find and parse the part of it I want to analyze. Additionally, it’s only used for a small scale puzzle-like production chain towards the end of the mod. This is due to the fact that the hack put together in order to achieve this result has a disproportionate performance hit associated with it. This means this wouldn’t be practical for something I want to be the very foundation of all production chains. Finally, I’ve thought about having a byproduct that either always or sometimes appears when doing these transmutation recipes. I do like this idea, and I think it has some potential as a hook for a “narrative” of some kind as well as just kicking off another part of the technology tree, but I do fear it could be too similar to my ideas for mana if I’m not careful.

Everything I’ve talked about in these past few paragraphs are extremely up in the air, so especially if you’ve played Factorio before, definitely be sure to reach out with ideas, comments, and questions. I always love hearing what people have to say about things like this.

So that’s pretty much where I’m at right now. Committed to a full overhaul and trying to figure out exactly what the overhaul will entail. So far I’ve been approaching it from the very beginning of the mod, since I figure at the very least I need to know what the foundation of someone’s factory is going to look like before moving on, but once I have that solidified, I’m thinking about jumping around between game phases to mess around with various ideas here and there. Again, do be sure to reach out if you have ideas and suggestions for the mod, and if you own the game and would like to poke around in it, you can find the mod portal page here. Do note that a decent amount of the stuff I’ve talked about today is not currently in the public version of the mod as of writing this, but I’ll probably be pushing an update soon-ish. For reference, as I write this the current public version of the mod is 0.0.2.

As always thank you for reading. Be sure to follow me on Bluesky or subscribe to the RSS feed on the main blog page so you’re always informed when I make a new post!