Who needs automation anyway? Skip to the end - 27:42 TAS Speedrun - • Factorio 0.18 Any% Too... My other cool video - • How to play through mo... Code for the video - colab.research...
Its not actually truly possible, Blue circuits require sulfur. Anything with a liquid component can't be crafted by hand. Blue circuits are needed to make rocket control units. So you can't launch a rocket without automated crafting in at least one Tier II factory, as TI factories do not have liquid inputs.
@@bahamut256 Idea: mod oil rigs and water pumps to make barrels of liquid (you put empty barrels in them, they fill it, you take the liquid barrel out), then mod in handcrafting recipes that take barreled resources as ingredients. Boom, now you can handcraft everything with minimal changes to the game.
This assumes your pockets can store an infinite amount of product. There's a possibility especially at the higher levels where you might be bottlenecked by your inventory.
well u can probably box up stuff then use them as ur pockets, right? put stuff in one box for future crafting, then just exchange boxes when needed; or liek other person says, crafting queue itself stores infinite... just don't cancel any crafts
Here's a mod idea for anyone reading through comments: Make actions like hand mining, crafting, researching, and smelting take 0 seconds BUT the process adds the time it would normally take to complete directly into the game timer. This means Running and optimizing this would be a hell of a lot more fun, while theoretically still having the same end time and mechanics and everything.
Good idea! Maybe you mine 1 ore per tick, so you can mine about a stack per second? Maybe there could be keybindings to change your mining rate? The issue might still be wood then. But you would probably just sacrifice time efficiency to mine coal instead.
Thankfully Factorio is a multiplayer game. The game is however limited to only 65535 players. What would mean you could hand mine everything you need even before you have the steel axe unlocked.
The game may be limited to 65535 players, but when you factor in lag from having that many players connected, there'll become a point where the amount which every new player slows every other player down by overtakes the gains from adding a additional player. That is, of course, highly dependent on what server you're using but if you did it all in one big LAN party, the theoretical max bandwidth, assuming your server has a network port for each player, is entirely dependent on how fast the server can process all that's coming in. Of course, the real bandwidth limit is the fact that you're doing all this with 2 science machines, 2 furnaces and one generator to meet the "minimum amount of automation" requirement, so there's an amount of time that can be saved by having an army of people mining and pocketcrafting and an amount of time that'll still be throttled by the same limits as singleplayer.
Pairs of 2 players mine iron, copper, stone and coal(only 1 player mines wood), 1 player will smelt the ores, 1 player will fuel the furnaces, a coordinated group of 4 players do the crafting, 1 remaining player is support, he supplies the labs and the singular boiler or the chemical plants
@@RAFMnBgaming There's a way to run multiple Factorio instances on one computer by having multiple installations, if we did this then it's possible to have 512 players on one computer theoretically, this should help with some lag
Theres a quality of life mod called helmod that I highly recommend that would probably have made this easier to calculate. Its basically an in game calculator so you can like figure out the ratio of machines that is most efficient, how long it would take to make a certain amount of some material etc. But also super impressive that you did it all by hand! Great video!
Im so glad someone else had this question and even more excited that someone actually did the math. And at the end of the day... (Spoiler alert) 6 days isn't that unreasonable. I was expecting like years.
I had the same feeling, I guess doing the bare minimum to unlock the rocket keeps things really small. The time for unlocking all the techs in the game aligns somewhat better with our expectations though lol.
@@TheRicoboy22 The thing is, you'll be holding down the lmb for pretty much the entire time, which is objectively worse than most, if not all, mmorpg grind sessions, and those are already boring af
23:15 There's a tiny bit of efficiency available at this point: (shift+)clicking on an *_empty space_* in the inventory will in fact move all the three types of ingredients to the machine at the same time. :-B
Shouldn't the first stage time be addative, all the rest can be done at the same time sure, but in the first stage you first have to mine some things and only then can you start crafting.
Technically *_all_* the stages (especially Stage 2) have additive sub-sections, but the overlap makes up for a high-enough of a percentage to allow the simplification of considering it 100%. And stage 2 is the best example, since its mining time is longer than its crafting time, so you can't even start the final craft until you finish mining and smelting the required resources.
I did this calculation a bit ago (though less thorough) and found that the easiest way to calculate this is to just throw the requirements into the factorio calculator and then take the ore and assembler numbers out (player craf time = assembler craft time/assembler speed). Doing this for each stage (and then adding in power requirements and such) should give the same results without having to create an entire program to calculate the costs.
I was shocked to see how small your channel is after watching this vid and seeing how good it was. Great presentation, and obviously a ton of work went into it. Awesome stuff, I look forward to more of your vids :)
In the early stages, research time is longer than mining time, so you'll be limited by that, won't you? Also I'd argue that you need a single research lab, and that labs are automation.
the no automation challenge limits in items not crafted by hand like most weird categories (like the infamous twilight princess item% where the world record is afk for 17hs but has one less item than everybody else) its by automated items then time that this would be classified so making more furnaces or labs isnt a problem
Just a few minutes into the video and I have already felt the tremendous effort you have had put into the making of this video. There are some well placed jokes in the video too. I liked that one you did with the old version Microsoft Paint. Kudos to it. I wish I could press the Like button a lot more to show my appreciation. Thanks for making this video!
I absolutely love this video, as I've run into problems like this before, and never really knew how to handle the process of solving them. So having this video lay it all out to me how you do the math and everything is just everything!❤
Wow! Perhaps it's cliché to say, but you are underrated as hell dude! I love your content, it really feels like nothing is being left out. You take so much time to consider the small details, and you're funny too. I remember when I watched your "one grass block" video, and I thought you were just going to say that you could spawn a sheep and get it's wool. But when you talked about how you wouldn't be able to kill it, that really intrigued me. Most people would either overlook it or leave it out for the sake of ease, but you kept it and your way of fixing it (skeleton bow) was infinitely more interesting than "just kill the sheep."
i haven't played the game for a long time now but it shows how consistent it is because i had absolutely no problems following even the higher stuff you explained. great video and very entertaining stuff.
While playing this game I wondered "how much time would I need to complete it without automation ?" and boom there is a video about that, thanks for making it.
This is such a cool type of video! Challenge runs so stupid that keeping them in the realm of the hypothetical is a good idea. I like it a lot. It makes for fun content.
My guess at the beginning of the video without reading any comments is: 200 hours After watching the video, one thing I’ll mention about the methodology: since you can’t craft before mining the required resources, a more accurate portrayal would have added the mining time of the first component (and every additional component until mining outpaces production) to the time of any stage that cannot be mined ahead of time, while also ensuring that mining-time gated phases aren’t beginning crafting before the necessary resources have been gathered. Despite guessing 200 hours at the beginning of the video, I actually think your estimates are a bit too generous, and the “expected” result should probably be around +50% of your calculated times, with the best-case scenario being about +25%. Of course, that’s just my opinion.
It's an interesting concept, but depending how far you want to push the non-automation, I am thinking you might be able to save some tree's by using a storage tank on the end of the steam engine. Also once you get the solid fuel technology, you can save on trees by using all that excess oil crafting time to use that solid fuel for the boiler, which can also go into the steel furnace. It's not a big deal per se, but it would save on the mining time and running time for the trees. It would probably be enough to save a couple of hours of your projected time for an optimum run. But does that contravene the rules? Furthermore, if it is a matter of saving trees, then automation by use of efficiency modules also comes into question because they only modify the energy requirement of pretty much everything apart from the steel furnace. Yes, it is resources to craft them, but is it cost-effective to save time crafting some efficiency mods earlier on to save time mining those trees? The counterargument I realise is that it's corner-cutting on not cutting trees, either by going solid fuel and or efficiency modules.
Solid fuel and modules are both great ideas to reduce the time. Calculating the optimised time using both of them would probably kill me though... The solid fuel section was already messy enough, plus having to possibly re-route the tech tree for modules might've been a pain. A baseless guess from me would be maybe a 1-6% time saving by doing this though. I don't think the storage tank on the end of the steam engine would improve things though. The steam engines have their own internal storage, and the boilers will only produce as much as is needed... (I think?)
@@Jokeypokey boilers produce until the fluid system they are connected to is full. So having a Fluid storage at the end could be beneficial in extending the time between the end of burning and the loss of power but the boiler would be burning the difference at the beginning so not much should change.
@@Jokeypokey I think feeding the solid fuel into the boiler would infringe on the non-automation aspect. I do wonder how much time it would add to craft 4 production modules. You can use them on refineries, the rocket, and most importantly LABS! At the third level each pack reduces speed by 15% but increases production by 10% and is additive. The speed impact is not significant since most of that is done by hand, concurrently while research and refining is being performed 20% more materially efficient. You only need to collect ~83% of the materials you would otherwise need to. It takes more power but that seems to be a non-issue in the overall. The rocket only needs ~66% of the materials. The material savings from the added rocket efficieny on it's own would more than pay for the modules, you're not required to craft ~350 of each (relatively expensive) component.
@@irrelevant_noob The difference, as I see it, is that burning solid fuel is a self-perpetuating cycle. One solid fuel will produce enough power to make more than one more. Cracking oils down never removes the player from the challenge, it just reduces some of the work.
I guessed 1000 hours before seeing the rest of the video. I'm actually astonished that you can finish in less time than that, though it wouldn't surprise me if an actual RTA run of this would actually get uncomfortably close to 1k hours due to all the walking, menuing, clicking, inventory management and planning that'd have to be done. EDIT: Ah! The number for researching *everything* is more like it indeed :D
I had a simple question: "how long would it take to beat factorio without automation". I typed the question into google, this video popped up. The description let me skip straight to the part I wanted to know. And then once I had my answer, it was nice to go back in the video and examine some of the details. This how using the internet should be. Thank you for respecting my time and for not burying the answer under a mountain of clickbait and/or other bullshit. And also, great job.
I think the final time is a gross underestimate. The way you handwaved away all the fluff like walking between locations or doing mining and crafting in parallel makes that quite unrealistic. Especially crafting, mining, fueling electricity and labs all simultaniously. Plus there's also the limit of your inventory space, you wouldn't be able to continously mine while crafting. You'd have to stop and offload your inventory. Considering you left out any sort of automation like belts or inserters. You wouldn't be able to do these in large batches either. Because the labs can only take so many packs. Meaning constantly going from mining a bit, crafting a few packs, putting them in the labs and managing electricty etc. If you add micromanaging cutting down forests into that, it'll turn into a nightmare. That's not even including the problems of your ore patches. Which will invitably run out too. Slowly but surely, with a perfect seed it might be easy to mine all the resources quickly and easy in the beginning of the run, but the more of the patch get's used up, the more you'd have to walk between the holes. All in all, an actual playthrough would be abysmally inefficient. +75% might even be generous all things considered...
I don't even play factorio, I just like listening to a fellow southern hemispherean calculate in-depth answers to stupid questions while I feed my cat through a tube (only temporarily thank goodness). Thanks for helping me pass the time. I can't offer much to this maths conversation, but I can provide a tip from my own scrappy store of knowledge, such as it is. If you learn to speak from your diaphragm, plus use the roof of your mouth rather than the back of your throat to reverberate your words (not sure what this process is actually called but its the best i could do to describe it, basically don't trap sound in the back of your throat), you can improve the sound of your mic quality without actually improving your mic quality :) these are both quite easy to do if you are interested and weirdly enough you'll find you enjoy the act of speaking a lot more. Really enjoyed the video, take care.
I wonder about the effect the mod "Doing Things By Hand" would have. With those mining and crafting times, the speed bonus would become quite insane...
I was guessing 7 to 14 days in the beginning, but more in a "and now let's see how wrong I am" type of way. Still a lot for sure, but I somehow thought crafting times would explode at some point. Thanks for doing all that math!
None of the rules state that it must be done as Singleplayer. So you could heavily optimize this by having people who enjoy mining resources manually as much as you do.
Bretty good video, man. Thanks for cracking all those numbers, fun stuff. The only part I disagree with is that, from my interpretation of "everything has to be done by hand when possible", it seems to me that cracking, not being absolutely necessary, shouldn't be regarded as a possibility. Instead, you should just count what fraction you need the most of by the end, voiding anything extra from the other fractions.
Heyo! I'm really impressed with your content! It's only three videos but they're very unique and calculated and it's hard to find youtubers that put THIS amount of effort into their content! Really nice!
You really should have included the logic for the Blue Science calculation, because that is the point where mandatory automation comes into effect. That bit of automation doesn't add to the total crafting time because it runs in parallel, but does need to be compared to the total manual crafting time to see whether it bottlenecks your manual crafting.
Love this video and looking forward to potentially more math-heavy videos on your channel, I think it's a niche that most youtubers aren't willing to fill due to the work involved
ok, i have a Friend, and he seems to find Automation as Unfair Advantage, so yeah, that would estimate total time he'd have spec beating the game "the right way", nice video btw
Thank you so much for giving the timestamp to jump straight to the answer. Your content is amazing. I love your profile picture and name too. Holy cow.
This was quite a bit less than I thought it would be when the video started. I was expecting something like 100 years. I was way off. Great video, thanks!
I have played factorio for 153.7 hours as of now. I'm still to automate and send my first rocket, so I guess playing manually would have been much better for me. Best case scenario.
This video was fascinating, and I don't even play Factorio! Thank you almighty algorithm! Now, time to see if I can check out your other vid before I have to sleep...
In regards to the lag time mentioned on-screen at 29:14, I think the maximum delay it could add for each stage, assuming perfectly optimal play, is essentially the mining time of the stage-final item (assuming that item takes longer to mine than craft). We start with the general process of mining the necessary resources, subtract the crafting duration for the recipe of the item we crafted with the previous batch of resources (since that was happening during our mining), then add back the same amount in the form of crafting the final item *after* the resources are collected. Like I said, though, this is a rough maximum; I have no idea what the minimum is. Depending on the longest mining time for the quickest stage-final item in each stage, you might be able to estimate what the upper bound of this lag would be across the whole playthrough. That said, given that these stage-final items might be science, for example, which then also needs to be processed, you might also need to add on the research time for that item.
The irony is I use this video as a way to track how much science I need to craft in total and how much materials I’ll need to gather before trying to all that research. Only to automate all of it.
I haven't played Factorio, but I have heard great things and I know it is right up my alley, so rather than playing it the "normal" way, I am going to play your way, and test out the demo. Wish me good luck (I need it).
This was a fascinating thought experiment. I loved the breakdown of the math that you showed, you clearly spent a long time figuring out how to do which calculations. (cause the actual calculations probably took less than 1 second for the code to spit the numbers out). Anyway, yeah, very interesting stuff here.
At 19:50 you make a large oversight in your calculations. You can't simply exclude light and heavy oil from the calculation. When you run out of storage for these two oil, ALL oil production stops. You have to store all of the excess oil. So your calculations therefor need to include the storage containers for these, and it will constantly increase as you produce petrol.
With those last numbers given for completing the science tree, that'd be 46 weeks of a 8 hour work day, 5 days a week. :D Spending a YEAR JUST PLAYING.
I would have done this with a hypothetical mod where all processing and mining could be done by hand, including furnaces, pumpjacks, oil refineries, chemical plants etc.
technically, since stuff like engines cannot be crafted manually, that means that it is completely legal for you to use assembly machines as long as everything you feed into them is placed there manually so basically this is a beltless, botless, inserterless run
man what a cool video, can't wait to binge through your channel.... oh wait... Man what's up with all these insane videos poping up lately from completely unknown channels. I'm pogging out of my gourd