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Comment by VoidWhisperer | Hacker News Reader

Factorio is a much easier game without the bugs being a pain in the arse as you expand - i wonder how Sol would handle the bugs

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The biggest thing the bugs introduce from an LLMs perspective is a necessity for realtime response. Without them, the LLM can take as long as it wants to decide and do its next operation on the factory. With them, not responding fast enough results in death (particularly early game where a lot of biter combat is player driven). I presume it doesn't do great at this.

Glad to hear we've got LLMs controlling military drones in real life :(

I don't think we do.

You should look deeper into this! You'll find some interest albeit dark topics.

Someone got chatgpt to drive a car through a mock driving course.

It took about 5 minutes for it to drive 50ft.

We're not quite there yet

you could pause the game between actions, while the model reasons about what to do next.

That was exactly my thought when reading the headline, before even looking into the article. Sure it's still somewhat complex to get to a rocket launch, but without the biters where is the challenge, other than complexity? It's like a big excel sheet with conveyor belts, pipes and electricity poles at that point only.

> where is the challenge, other than complexity

Patience, for one. I reach a point where I'm looking at a mess of coal-fed sorters that need a complete rip-and-replace with electric ones, and that's usually the point where I close the game and go back to something easier like Kenshi.

I know it's a pipe dream, but these kinds of games (Factorio, Satisfactory, etc) would all benefit from sort of brain-game interface where I could just think about what I wanted to do.

The tedium and repetition is really what kills the enjoyment for me. The problem solving, planning, forethought, etc are super fun but it's killed by the former.

It's basically programming with really bad ergonomics. I'm a programmer by profession and I was immediately frustrated by Factorio because I realized I'd rather just write code and build a project because it would scratch the exact same itch while actually being useful.

I tried really hard to like Factorio, and I bounce off of it each time after playing a save for 4-8 hours for exactly this reason. I know a lot of programmers who love it, so I almost wish I could get into it.

Now I'm tempted to try again, because it feels like the kind of game I should really enjoy.

Factorio rewards the players progression through the game by taking away points of pain. The helper bots being a key transition. Without that pain there would be no reward. The fact that refactoring is expensive in time and complexity is what makes it realistic - it makes the earlier decisions important and consequential.

You can always enter creative mode and make whatever changes you want in the game instantly, but in my experience that does make it less fun.

Blueprints and construction bots, plus the well-thought-out and extensively battle-tested set of keyboard commands for them, are basically a brain-game interface for Factorio on the level that Vim is for text. For the grandparent’s “rip and replace coal burners” I am hitting mod-D and dragging a selection box over the offending area, then hover-Q on a nearby element I want to use and shift-click to plan it, once I have planned one instance of a subpattern its mod-C select, click hold and walk in a direction to tile it in one dimension, mod-C select, click hold walk to extend this over the other direction. It is now done, the bots will handle everything else - because Wube are an incredible bunch of UX engineers, I can place the new building before the old buildings are even removed, leave, and trust that everything will be done correctly. Highly recommend getting a “Starter Bots” mod that feels appropriately balanced.

> I am hitting mod-D and dragging a selection box over the offending area, then hover-Q on a nearby element I want to use and shift-click to plan it, once I have planned one instance of a subpattern its mod-C select, click hold and walk in a direction to tile it in one dimension, mod-C select, click hold walk to extend this over the other direction.

This just sounds exhausting.

I'd rather try to sneak into a hyper-religious xenophobic town and get captured and turned into servant labor at a mining camp. And I'm not even taking about visiting Texas!

Much like Vim, it is exhausting to read a description. But it’s like a second of muscle memory that happens instinctively.

It's basically just Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V in terms of complexity and ease of use. Factorio is very ergonomic and the only way I can interpret the abovementioned "tedium and repetition" is that they never played long enough to get to the bots stage.

The more interesting challenge is the one you eliminated, complexity, in getting efficient logistics and arrangements. Dyson Sphere Program (until late in its existence) and Satisfactory don't have waves of enemies attacking your bases but remain challenging and a satisfying puzzle. I remember I used a constraint solver to help me optimize some late game recipes for Satisfactory.

Its puzzle solving. For a lot of people, that _is_ the fun part.

The biters are just a line item in the spreadsheet. Early players might build a wall with an ammo belt, for example. There's lots of options that don't involve responding in real-time.

Though these days I just manually clear the pollution cloud with a pocket full of turrets. The forward deployed engineer model, if you will.

I've been watching streams of 9 different models playing Factorio together [1] and it seems the answer is — not very well at all. They run into the same issue they have elsewhere in the game as well as in coding tasks: inability to create structured plans for the future.

So they get into a cycle of: 1. Get attacked 2. Build a few turrets 3. Get attacked. They don't consider buffing up their defenses or going out to deal with the threats or preemptively placing turrets when they expand. Not without human probing.

Also, they had the same issue with hand carrying resources around as some other comments here mentioned Sol did.

[1]: https://factorio.nickwinter.net/

The nests stop being a concern once you have significant production and a few hundred logistics bots. Then you just build walls beyond the pollution range and place a gun turret every other square (or lasers at level 10 or above). I only use nauvis for uranium now because my Aquino production is weak (fusion). Late game you rarely go back to nauvis, just send your fleet of platforms to resupply reactor fuel autonomously.

The issue is most of these play-throughs happen on “normal” response speed. Way too slow for these LLMs to send back and forth and process this many tokens in a quick enough reaction time.

I’ve yet to see running these LLMs on Ultra-fast (8x speed on Sol). Wondering if that’s fast enough to do real time

"AI found decompiling game to fix a bug after being instrcuted to beat it" sounds like an IPO friendly headline.

I've been giving my little games to text to both Qwen 27B and Qwen-Next, and they both try to debug bugs they encounter unprompted. So I have to specifically mention to them to not try and ghidra my game and just play it as intended or report a bug in BUGS.md file and carry on.

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