On Sunday, Factorio's God Factory was born. Using over 160 copies of the game running simultaneously, a group of players created a monster so big it more than tripled the previous world record for the most science produced per minute.
Eternity Cluster, the name of the project run by over 400 players from around the world, surpassed 1,000,000 science per minute (SPM), and they're going to keep pushing it until something breaks.
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, one rocket is not enough.
Enter "Megabase builders". Instead of building rockets, megabase builders try to create as many science packs—items usually used to unlock base upgrades—as they can. For these titans of automation, who are producing more science packs than they have any use for—Factorio seems a lot more like a job than a game.
"The most difficult obstacle has been not burning out working on the project," Hornwitser, one of the organizers, told PC Gamer. Hornwitser spent the last month working on Clusterio, the Factorio mod holding all of this together. Without it, the God Factory wouldn't exist.
A war against the game itself
"Factorio is a very well optimized game and most players will never find themselves hitting the limits of the game," said GreatSymphonia, one of the people contributing a 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 simply can't handle any more calculations. This isn't a problem for normal players, but it's a constant threat for megabase builders shooting for the big numbers.
The solution is Clusterio. It 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. This weekend's 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.
The road to 1,000,000
"The key part of such a big event is seeing the community share ideas."
GreatSymphonia
Over 400 players joined at least one of Eternity Cluster's Factorio servers, which remain free to join for anyone who wants to support this Herculean endeavor. Half of them contributed over an hour to the 3,900 total hours of playtime recorded, Hornwitser said. The rest of the time was spent monitoring the servers and discussing strategy on the Eternity Cluster Discord server.
"The key part of such a big event is seeing the community share ideas," GreatSymphonia said. "Most of the people behind the organization 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 optimize 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."
Over the last month, members of Eternity Cluster monitored their production stats using the wall of graphs and numbers on their dedicated Grafana page—an open source service for tracking server data. A Clusterio plugin is able to track the exchange of resources and feed them to Grafana, translating every grid of Factorio's pixel art conveyor belts and factories into raw numbers. You can see graphs for the over 50 million iron ore the cluster is creating and consuming every minute, or all 554 GBs of memory it uses. All this information helped steer the project toward its weekly SPM milestones.
If the cluster was running low on resources or running into UPS issues, an organizer would make the call on what needed to be done. Most problems could be fixed with minor redesigns, more bases, or server-side bug fixes. But some problems, like Tropical Cyclone Kirrily that recently caused power outages on the northeast coast of Australia, where some of the physical servers are located, were completely out of their hands. Thankfully, luck and backup power kept the Eternity Cluster safe from the power outages.
Gaming at its finest
Scrolling through the Discord server's general chat as The God Factory hit 1M SPM is like overhearing chatter in the weirdest NASA control room you've ever seen. You see messages like, "sped up Solar 5 expansion by enabling path cache," "blue circuit 01 is basically at max capacity," "acid is bottlenecking yellow it seems," and, "we have too much purple in storage."
Eventually, the crew got all the science pack colors under control and broke 1M SPM. You'd think it would've been time to celebrate and bask in the historic achievement, but the conversation slipped right back into the optimizations needed to go even bigger. To Factorio players at this level, a world record SPM is merely evidence that you can go even harder.
"The Eternity Cluster must grow."
Cooldude2606
Every Eternity Cluster member I spoke to told me it doesn't stop here. All of them repeated the motto that every Factorio player learns sooner or later, no matter how ambitious their goals are: the factory must grow.
"The factory Eternity Cluster must grow," Cooldude2606, one of the Clusterio mod developers, said. Clusterio is still in alpha and the team had to make "a lot of compromises" for it to work, they said. "The ultimate goal will be to have Clusterio released with a wide range of plugins to allow people to host more events like Eternity cluster seamlessly and at any scale or customisations they want."
The Eternity Cluster Discord server has around 177 people in it and more continue to join every day to ask how they can help. "All are welcome," the information channel says. And given the dedication and teamwork I've seen there, I expect two million won't be that far off.
"I don't consider myself an expert player, and feel like I'm among those with the least expertise," Bubba-yo, another one of the members, said. "It was pretty hard to resist getting involved in this project for that reason. But everything about it has been great. Factorio is normally a pretty wonderful community, and this group has been a real delight to hang around with. This is gaming at its finest, in my opinion."
Thanks to longtime PC Gamer reader Jim, aka Zee, who tipped us off to this story. If you're aware of something interesting happening within a game you're playing, you can reach us at tips@pcgamer.com.
