Arcana

Well! I haven’t exactly kept up with the once per week idea on these blog posts, but here I am! I have a lot to talk about for Arcana, my Factorio mod. High-level planning for everything up to reaching space has been planned out and I’m starting to get into the details and actually implementing some of the ideas into the mod.

So I’ve started using Obsidian as my primary application for taking notes and planning out projects. I have to say, I can’t believe I didn’t start using it earlier — it really is the best. Not only does it do all the markdown I like to have in my notes very well, but I can create links between pages to make a sort of pseudo-wikipedia style to my notes. All that on top of the sync (that I had to pay for, but was worth it) means I have a great place to jot down ideas and take notes, no matter if I’m at home, at work, or anywhere else. Anyways, enough glazing Obsidian, here’s the top level plan so far:

My top level plan for my Factorio mod

The resolution at this scale is a little bit rough, but you can see the titles and I’m gonna get into the details of each of these phases here, starting with pre-research.

Factorio 2.0 added a new type of technology unlock state called a trigger. This allows you to unlock a technology not through research but instead by doing something such as mining a resource or crafting an item. This is used at the very beginning of the game to ease the player into the initial crafting recipes as well as in various areas along the way, both in vanilla and in Space Age. The idea behind the pre-research phase of my mod is to do something similar to that — have the player mine the new resources, unlock a recipe associated with it, craft that item a few times, unlock a new recipe, etc. until they get to the first arcana (my stand-in for science packs) and the lab to use it. Ultimately this is pretty similar to how it works in vanilla, but I have the added stipulation that you get no automation in this phase. No miners, no assemblers, no belts, no inserters. The idea here is to have the player craft everything by hand at the beginning to try and establish them in the world of magic, crafting wands and bottling mana.

Once the player has their first arcana and can start doing research, the name of the game is unlocking all the basic Factorio stuff, starting with electricity. The very first generator the player will get is a very inefficient but easy to use one I’ve called the mana burner. This generator simply takes in mana vials and converts it directly into electricity. This might seem simple, but there is a processing step before you can get mana vials, so if you run out of them, it’s not as easy as just mining some up real quick to drop in. Players will have to make sure their mana vial production is sufficient for the number of mana burners they’re running. These generators will also only generate a small amount of electricity due to how simple they are, so I’m imagining that early factories will have quite a lot of their footprint dedicated to just mana production and these mana burners. Once the player has electricity, we can really start unlocking all the normal Factorio stuff in earnest — belts, inserters, and any automation machines I decide to make (and include in this phase). I have been toying around with the idea of lots of machine types with different sizes, since I do like the visual variety that creates, and it forces a bit more complexity. Each of these machines would obviously have their own crafting recipes that they’re able to do, which is facilitated by crafting types in the code. Basically I can create an arbitrary list of strings that act as the crafting types, assign each recipe one of these strings, then assign each machine a set of crafting types it’s able to do. For example, the first machine I’ve created to be the assembler-stand-in is the autowand, which can do “enchanting” recipes. I’m also thinking of making a machine, maybe called a crafting golem or something of the sort, to do the “crafting” type recipes. The idea by the end of this phase is to have the player able to automate production of the unstable arcana they got in the pre-research phase as well as create the fundamentium arcana, which I’m planning for the recipe to be similar to that of logistics science in vanilla, which uses inserters and transport belts.

Now that we’ve established a foothold on all the basic factorio systems, now we can start being a little bit funky. The crystology phase has 2 goals. Firstly, make the crystalis arcana obviously. Players at this point may realize that their arcane interface (the machine they use to do research) only has slots for the unstable and fundamentium arcanas. This is because in the crystology phase, they will not only be handling crystals, but using those crystals to make a new upgraded arcane interface that can use all of the arcanas they will create for the duration of the game. This upgraded interface needs a new fuel, however: liquid mana. Finally, the player will use their crystals to liquify mana for use in the newly upgraded arcane interface in order to continue researching. That’s the general idea for this phase, but lets get a little more into detail. Up until this point, the player has used 3 main materials: manite, to make mana vials, soulstone, and wood, which can be enchanted into ironwood. This phase introduces a new material called assorted crystals. It’s named this because the assorted crystals item itself is not useful for anything. The crystals must be fed into a machine to “sort” them into types.

Assorted crystals and their results from sorting

This will work similarly to how recycling works in Space Age; each product will have a chance to result from sorting a crystal, with rarer products having a smaller chance. Due to the nature of how Factorio’s random recipes work, some assorted crystals could provide all of the shards if you’re lucky or none of them if you’re unlucky. The idea here is that the player will start accumulating these vitium shards with nothing to do with them (for the moment) while trying to get the higher rarity shards. As a small side note, all of these shard names are inspired by the Minecraft mod Thaumcraft, with their names being derived from Latin words. Vitium means vice, defect, or flaw, Machina means machine or mechanics, Motus means movement or motion, Potentia means power, force, or strength, and Praecantatio means sorcery or magic. As an aside to the side note, I find it really interesting that the root of the Latin word for magic (cantatio) is related to music and singing, and I might make use of that down the line. Anyways, I haven’t quite nailed down exactly what the production chain will be from this point on with the crystals, but suffice to say, the player will use these crystals to make other types of crystals they couldn’t get from sorting, which they’ll then use to make liquid mana, the upgraded arcane interface, and the crystalis arcana.

From this point on, I don’t exactly have a solid idea of what the production chains are going to look like, so I’ll simply explain the general ideas for the next few phases. The sigilism phase is all about crafting runes and sigils to control magic more specifically. This will probably culminate in some kind of magical circuit and more complex machines in order to make use in the jump in technology. After sigilism, the tree splits in at least 4 ways, maybe more. The essential part is the 4 I have listed in my plan. these are the schools of elements, astronomy, occultism, and alchemy. While I might have other schools of magic that branch off from this point, these are the 4 that will be absolutely essential in order to get to space. Other schools may provide fun new weapons, new buildings that could be useful (or even essential further down the line), and upgrades such as the starts of infinite researches, but will not be mandatory to do in order to reach space. Each of the 4 essential schools has something in it that’s mandatory in order to continue. The school of elements is essentially material science, creating stronger or specialized materials to build rockets with. The school of astronomy is all about learning about space. In order to launch your rockets, you’re gonna have to know where you’re going. The school of occultism is all about protecting yourself from the hidden eldritch threats as well as creating special engines for faster than light travel. Finally, the school of alchemy is pretty much your chemical science, doing transmutation and “potion brewing” to create the rocket fuel and other chemicals to run the rockets.

There’s also a handful of ideas I have floating around in my head for various production chains and loops that I’m just not sure where they’re gonna go yet. For example, when I tried making this mod for the first time, I had “potent mana” which could be used in recipes that created a byproduct “depleted mana”, which could then be reprocessed back into liquid mana. I’d like to include that somewhere and have it be involved with some slightly more complicated electricity generators, but I haven’t gotten that far yet.

Now, eventually the idea is to get to space and actually do things up there — I did, after all, go through the effort of making the mod depend on the Space Age DLC to piggyback off those systems. For now though, I figured this much is enough to get me going and to have a temporary win condition for the mod, so the current goal is to build up to that point, then once it’s all implemented, take the time to play through it several times and make adjustments to the pre-space phase of the game before moving on to the next phase. In terms of actual implementation, I have all the resources I mentioned here spawning in the world and I have the whole pre-research phase implemented, though I can already tell it needs some tweaks. I’ve started some work on the fundamentals phase, but it’s not at a point worth showing off yet, so I’ll hold onto that for now.

Anyways, as you can see, there’s big plans for this mod and they’re starting to get their details hammered out. So far, this seems to be going a lot better than my first go around with it, where I pretty much had no plan at all and was just winging it. I’m very excited by this mod and hope to have more to show soon!