If you don't play Factorio, let me tell you this is absolutely freaking nuts. Even the 16-bit ALU in Minecraft from 10 years ago seems like child's play compared to this.
I only watched the trailer, but don't your structures get attacked randomly during the game? Curious how they were able to build so much if there were random attacks.
As others have mentioned, you can turn off enemies. But the 'true' factorio way is to _automate your defenses_. You can automatically build turrets, have robots place them, build bullets to go along with them and have them delivered to the turrets. Once you get it down it 'just works' and you dont really need to think about it.
They're probably playing with a "peaceful" map. It's quite possible to turn all of that off without a game mod. I think there are also some infinite resource modes as well for just trying things out and making schematics and so on.
(So far I've just played some of the tutorials and the standard game scenario with minor settings tweaks.)
The game is a sandbox and presents a menu where you can change a lot of parameters for your next game. You can turn off aliens, or make them peaceful and change their spawn rate. There is also a creative mode in console with unlimited everything.
That's insane. When he zoomed in to machine level and then out to show different functional units, I felt like I was looking at "the real world" from The Matrix.
In the three body problem, a computer is created out of 30 million uneducated soldiers that stand in a 6x6km square communicating mostly through flags. 3 soldiers form AND or OR gates. A memory bus is run by cavalry.
I am only half way through the book, so this might not be THE alien computer from the book, but still fitting.
What about higher level manipulation. Are these made by hand? What does the tooling look like? Can you modify the "maps" using editors, or code? I remember even early on there were Python libraries for manipulating Minecraft chunks.
It's closer to redstone, but it's a more complicated system. It's like ladder logic in industrial control but with a couple hundred integer-valued registers per circuit network that the "combinators" update every game tick. The combinators include arithmetic and boolean operations, and you can set them to be performed on two or all of the registers.
It was fun figuring out how to make an automated system that feeds nuclear reactors with fuel to supply my base with just the right amount of steam for the generators, signaling an alarm in case of over utilization.
I've not played around with command blocks, but it's a bit more than redstone components.
When Factorio items are wired together with signal cable they have a few different operating modes. You can specify what objects are requested from a delivery network and what items are taken from a chest, or if any are to be taken at all. So this solution involved chests being filled with various items that have a specific color on belts, and then staggering pulls from the chests to place on belts in such a manner as to make pixels.
Those commands were issued by combinations of the constant signal block, the comparison/decider block, and the arithmetic block. I would say those entities are between NAND gates and pre fabricated if/else or for loop constructs.
This is crazy. Is this a virtual machine within Factorio? Made me thinking. Would it be possible to build a computer within Factorio and to then break out of it?
Well it lacks the infinite size tape so technically it's not a "real" Turing machine. It has the basic boolean operators though, so you can compute anything you want as long as your computer has enough RAM.
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With this kind of weird experiment, you'd just go for the first option.
(So far I've just played some of the tutorials and the standard game scenario with minor settings tweaks.)
I am only half way through the book, so this might not be THE alien computer from the book, but still fitting.
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To make a Minecraft analogy that more people might understand, is it closer to redstone or command blocks?
There are three types of combinators: arithmetic, decider, and constant.
Signals have a channel name (one for each item type and a few dozen other options) and an integer value.
Arithmetic combinators can perform arithmetic operations on one or all signals with one signal and a constant integer, or two signals.
Decider combinators perform comparison operations.
Constant combinators emit constant signals on a given channel.
There are also abilities to detect state on some other items and cause behavior to change, the equivalent of observers, dispensers, pistons, etc.
https://wiki.factorio.com/Circuit_network#Logic_signals
It was fun figuring out how to make an automated system that feeds nuclear reactors with fuel to supply my base with just the right amount of steam for the generators, signaling an alarm in case of over utilization.
When Factorio items are wired together with signal cable they have a few different operating modes. You can specify what objects are requested from a delivery network and what items are taken from a chest, or if any are to be taken at all. So this solution involved chests being filled with various items that have a specific color on belts, and then staggering pulls from the chests to place on belts in such a manner as to make pixels.
Those commands were issued by combinations of the constant signal block, the comparison/decider block, and the arithmetic block. I would say those entities are between NAND gates and pre fabricated if/else or for loop constructs.
So something in-between.