CUUUUUUUUUUUUUUBE! (The Ultracube: Age of Cube Factorio Mod)

[Purple]

So, Factorio is a pretty rad game. Some of you maybe play it. Some of you might also have been waiting for it to go on sale to play it, which is apparently never going to happen because the devs just don't do sales. I enjoy it, and I'm looking forward to the big expansion coming down the pipe for it, because I'm kinda done with the base game. Now, as it happens, Factorio has a huge modding scene and really good in-built support for loading/unloading/browsing mods and keeping track of their dependencies and all that. The only problem there, for me, is that I kinda just... fundamentally do not jive with the vast majority of the Factorio mod scene. There are of course exceptions to this, but I swear 99% of Factorio mods are all about stretching the tech tree way way out while making sure every practical thing in the game has a chain of like 7 upgraded versions that all take the previous version as an ingredient to keep everything all Neat and Orderly, with infinitely renewable resources and no hazards to worry about, and that's... just not what I come to this game for.

But I just discovered this mod here- The Ultracube: Age of the Cube, which DOES jive with what I'm here for! Constantly ramping up logistical challenges where I make confusing conveyor belt spaghetti as I first muddle my way through, and then get my head around to make all slick and cool looking!

Specifically, the way it does this is by throwing out the entire tech tree, and cutting way down on the variety of natural resources to replace all this with its own bonkers nonsense all based around this ominous all-powerful mystery cube. The simplest thing you can do with the cube is a hand-crafted recipe that finishes in only 1 second, taking in the cube, and outputting something like 200 Basic Matter Units and the cube. All the real basic stuff like belts/pipes/inserters pretty much just get made from those or some simple intermediary things, so yeah, no having to do a bunch of mining and processing to get started, just shake up your cube and get free stuff. And hey, you need power? Just make one single boiler, and make sure to hook up a big ol' pile of water pumps and steam storage to it, because you toss the cube in there and voom, instantly you've got 1000 units of steam and a dormant cube (it'll revert back to normal with another hand-crafting action that takes a bit, or quickly popping it into a special machine). Smelting the one consolidated metal type for circuits and such? Yeah you just build a giant super furnace, load in 500 ore, toss in the cube as fuel, instantly it's all smelted.

The problem that quickly becomes apparent with all of this is... there is only the one cube, ever, and you need it for basically everything. It does do stuff in huge batches so you can basically just do one or a few little operations and get an absurdly huge pile of whatever that'll take a while to even unload, but ultimately you need to work out some sort of system to efficiently transport the cube around to every structure in your base as needed sometimes needing to remove some status effect from it along the way, or maybe add one. It's not an entirely unprecendented sort of thing in Factorio. It's a bit like the sort of thing you have to deal with to make properly efficient nuclear power... except you have to work out how to rig up your ENTIRE base around sharing this one item.

Aside form the change of pace, what I'm really digging about it with as little time as I've put in is that pretty much IMMEDIATELY, I felt compelled to start rigging up a bunch of logical condition stuff, of the "this inserter is only active when there are less than 500 dealieboppers in this storage chest" variety. That's one of the cooler options in vanilla Factorio, but I've personally never really messed with it, because normally it's not worth the effort. I'm not the sort to keep playing after winning the game and building some world-eating mega-base, so I never reach a scale where I need to worry about stockpiling or rapidly draining ore patches or whatever. Hell I don't usually even hit a point where I feel compelled to build a train or a logistics network. This mod though? This is making me learn about all these tools I keep ignoring, and that's just cool.

It also does a nice job of selling the cube. You move super slowly when carrying it, it's all glowing and throbbing and releasing big ominous clouds so you always know where it is, various states have goofy flavor text, the whole tech tree is about pondering its mysteries, etc.

 

[Purple]

So here's my base in this as I am... a third of the way through the second science flavor or so:

First, we've got power. As many water pumps as felt practical at the time (I really should add more, or a tank or something) feeding my one boiler, which pumps out into my modest steam bank (I should add more to that too now that I'm using it elsewhere) and then my humble array of 20 steam engines. Above the boiler is one of two recovery bays, so I can burn the cube a good half dozen times or so every time it's over here before sending it off on its magical journey. Next up on the circuit is some new tech I'm dealing with to get some basic matter going. I COULD have a simple setup here that just jiggles the cube into and out of a single synthesizer and just create matter out of nothing, but I'm pretty sure it's more efficient for me at the moment to circulate steam and water through here to create matter replication gel and condense that down. Super super weird recipe there because it takes in water, steam, and matter blocks, and outputs... water steam and (after an extra step) matter blocks. Functionally, it makes stuff out of steam, and actually generates a net water profit, so, that's odd. It also both tires the cube at this step and just needs to hold onto it for a moment at the second step (which comes at the end of the circuit as things stand.

Anyway we then enter some horrible belt spaghetti, because this is how I play Factorio, deal with it, especially when I don't know what I'm doing, and head up into serious production land. Step 1 (which should REALLY not be step 1, gonna redo all this soon anyway) takes in ingots and the cube to make widgets, one of the things level 2 science needs. Then the cube rides around this conveyor loop to get recharged, and (after possibly going back to power/matter land and another pass through widget-making) goes to my giant screw-off furnace to flash-forge a new stupidly huge pile of ingots, also tiring, and if the cube is still awake after all this, it hops in and whips out enough level 1 science to give me a nice buffer.

In addition to the widgets, level 2 science needs green circuits, which for now anyway are being made almost like this was normal Factorio. I'm mining some metal outside this screenshot, basic matter is filling the role of iron plates here kinda. Ultimately I'm probably going to demolish all of this, but for now I think this is actually fully stable and kept in balance through a rat's nest of logic wires between inserters on the weird double loop cube spine and various stockpiles. Point is, it's a neat weird brain bendy mod. Hardest part to internalize is that scaling up really just isn't a thing. All production is hard-capped by the cube's availability, so efficiency is really just about not wasting the cube's precious time commuting.

 

[DFalcon]

Looks interesting.

The description reminded me a bit of arcospheres in Space Exploration (a late-game resource that are soft-capped; recipes don't consume them, but output semirandomly in different flavors, and the main challenge is keeping the distribution sufficiently balanced). But it's clearly not all that similar.

Anyway, SE is popular enough in the Factorio scene that, though I'm not sure I'd describe it as matching your initial description exactly, I expect it was in that pool for you, and arcospheres are a long way in.

 

[Purple]

I appreciate both that the developer of the Space Exploration mod was recruited by the developers to make the actual multi-planet expansion that's coming up, but also immediately made a post reassuring everyone that said expansion IS in fact going to be designed for the enjoyment of vanilla Factorio players and not the sort of person willing to commit the 2000 hours or so THAT mod involves. Side note, said expansion looks freaking rad so far.

This one though is, like I said, pretty different from how the Factorio mod scene generally rolls. Since I last checked in with it, I bit the bullet and de-tangled that base, laying everything out in, generally, an orderly line and even making a vague attempt at the whole "bus" thing everyone but me who plays this game seems totally obsessed with... and then kinda started spaghettifying it again as I got into this mod's oil equivalent. It's still mostly tidy until you look close and catch stuff like me sneaking a metal line over to make batteries.

Something I kind of appreciate is that even though this totally throws out the normal tech tree and has its own recipes for everything, the whole mod still follows the same basic shape as the main game. You start off doing a lot of crafting and "mining" by hand (the red science equivalent is just made from basic matter units, whose basic recipe is cube+nothing=cube+100 of'em), then green science kinda makes life real hard for you if you don't properly automate some basic supply chains, and blue needs you to get into oil processing. It's just kind of logistical hard mode is all. Hell, the actual resource requirements really aren't bad. You'll notice my green and red circuit setups are actually pretty tiny here, and neither has become a bottleneck yet. What IS becoming a bottleneck is steam production and maybe metal (and its actually really important byproduct of calcium). Especially now that I have access to stack inserters I shouldn't actually need a second mega-furnace for it, but that crusher pre-processing things needs a friend, certainly. And heck, oil (technically tar) comes from wood, which I just make in a greenhouse from water, so, that's nice and infinite.

And of course, like vanilla Factorio, this mod unlocks its 4th and 5th science flavors more or less simultaneously, which each having its own little headache to it, but wow, these are doozies.

Down one road, I have the deep core drill. This unlocks a third mineable resource for me (all there's been up to here is metal and stone, see), and I guess a 4th since nuclear power is gated behind it and at a glance that actually looks similar to how it does in vanilla with just the slight hiccup of a super rare I think pure junk extra type of uranium to have to sift out and stick in a crate somewhere), and process a bit, unlocking some fancier bigger scale... storage crates and tanks mainly? And I think modules. The catch there is that deep core minerals are rare. Like, there's these oil patch type things, and I had to spend a frankly absurd amount of time spiralling out from my base to finally find any. So I'm pretty much required to build a super long train line down to it (... or relocate my whole base) and I might need to take advantage of trains going turbo mode with the cube in them.

Then down the other road, there is... a process by which the cube is broken into 64 phantom cubes which I can distribute around to aid in the generation of various spooky/haunted materials like "joy" and "despair" and "ghost circuits," one sub-branch of which I think involves an alternate form of power generation too, and after handling all that metaphysical weirdness for a while I'll have to gather all those phantom cubes back up without any stuck in some machine waiting for other materials to recombine back into its original form. Also if I'm reading these tech descriptions correctly some part of this leaves me with just this giant pile of writhing tentacles as a byproduct that need to be sent back to their home dimension or whatever.

This mod also doesn't let you see technologies that require science flavors you haven't accessed yet, so I don't know what's actually at the end of either of those roads, but presumably something from each is needed for the final flavor of tech, and I caught some brief talk about a late game organizational challenge involving blind randomizing recipes where you need to just try various combinations of things until one works, somehow.