Changelog

2024-10-27

I've made some improvements to the Space Age dataset. Fulgora and Gleba mostly work now, though I still need to teach it about how biochambers eat nutrients; please ignore anything saying they eat coal. Space platforms and Aquilo still to come.

2024-10-26

I have added a very early, experimental dataset for Space Age to the calculator. Expect bugs, strange issues, missing data, broken URLs, and the like. Some known issues include, and are not limited to:

Recycling recipes are currently disabled, meaning calculations for Fulgora are not very useful.
I haven't implemented anything about spoilage yet, so calculations for Gleba are not very useful.
The calculator doesn't understand asteroids yet, so calculations for space platforms are not very useful.
I don't even know yet what's wrong with Aquilo.
All sorts of UI strangeness.

Nauvis and Vulcanus seem to work okay, though. Use the planet selector in the settings to give it a try.

In particular, I want to stress that any URLs you get out of the calculator while using the Spage Age data right now will not be guaranteed to keep working going forward. So don't go too crazy with bookmarks just yet.

2024-10-22

The visualizer's direction setting has been restored. Note that each visualizer type has its own default direction, and changing the type will set the direction to the default.

2024-10-21

The dataset has been updated from 2.0.6 to 2.0.7. There are literally no changes other than the version number.

2024-10-20

Update time again.

Added a dataset for vanilla Factorio version 2.0.6 and made it the default. There will probably be a newer version when the game actually releases tomorrow, so I'll probably push another update then.
Space Age support will need more time.
Existing 1.1.110 URLs will continue to use 1.1.110 data, at least for now. You should be able to switch to the 2.0 data in the settings, and your setup should carry over.
Support for 2.0 beacon math when using a 2.0 dataset. (This is why I changed the beacon UI in the first place.)
The old pipe numbers will not be displayed when using a 2.0 dataset, as they are no longer meaningful.

I've fixed several issues since the big release last week, and no doubt more will appear. If you have questions, comments, or bug reports, I am most easily reached on Discord.

2024-10-15

This represents a major update for the Factorio Calculator. It has been virtually rewritten from scratch, updating the nearly ten year old codebase to a more modern version of JavaScript, and paving the way to better supporting Factorio 2.0 and Space Age. Several things have changed along the way, and this document will walk through them.

Factory tab changes

The Factory tab has received a handful of subtle changes. The most obvious is the beacons column.

A new beacon UI.

The old behavior was by far the most common point of confusion with the Factorio Calculator. The new layout more closely matches the game: Each row now has two module slots for beacons, and the count is now the number of beacons. If you want to run the numbers on your 4, 8, or 12-beacon setup, you no longer need to remember to multiply by two.

A more subtle change has to do with the selection of modules. Selecting the first module in a row will now set the remainder of the modules in that row. (Likewise, selecting the module for the first slot in a beacon will set both slots.)

Change the first module to change all the modules.

This replaces the old "arrow" button. You can alter or remove the other modules in the row if you wish, but it has been my observation that setting all of a building's modules to the same thing is, by far, the most common operation, and so I have streamlined this operation. (If you only wish to set one module, you can always set one other than the first one.)

Between this and the default module options, all of the old arrow buttons have been rendered obsolete, and they have been removed.

This feature actually works now.

If you specify a number of buildings for an item which may be created with multiple recipes, there is a dropdown which allows you to select which recipe will be used when interpreting the building count. While this feature has been present in the calculator for a long time, it didn't really work like one might have expected. This has changed, and the calculator will now actually calculate how to make that number of buildings of that specific recipe.

The arrows now point the other way.

The item breakdowns (the per-item tables that pop up when you click the arrows on the left hand side) have received the minor change of reversing the order of the icons and the arrow. This places the numbers representing the rates of individual items next to the icons of the items they represent, which should make things more clear.

You can ignore this now.

The item ignoring feature has been improved as a side effect of the new solver (see below). Various items which could not previously be ignored no longer have this limitation.

Setting Changes

The Settings tab has undergone a visual overhaul, and several of the settings have changed.

Set the window title with this.

A Title setting has been added. This will change the window title, aiding in organization if you run the calculator in multiple tabs.

People have been asking for this for a while.

A secondary default module has been added. This is useful, for example, if you wish to set a primary default for a productivity module, and then use speed modules for anything which does not support productivity modules.

You can change the miner now.

The old "minimum assembler" and "furnace" settings have been combined into a single generalized "buildings" setting. Each row represents a different class of building. As a consequence, it is also now also possible to configure the miner you wish to use for ore.

This is much more flexible than before.

You can now toggle some individual recipes on and off. This replaces (and ought to work better than) the old oil and Kovarex settings. This ought to give much more fine-grained control over which solutions the calculator will generate.

Visualizer Changes

The visualizer UI has changed.

The visualizer UI has been generally overhauled. Visualizations may be panned and zoomed more easily, though the old behavior has been retained as an option if you find that more convenient.

The box & line diagram is less angular.

The visualizations themselves haven't changed much, but the look of the box-and-line diagrams has been slightly improved.

The old option to change the direction of the visualizations has been removed. The feature was always an afterthought, and the visualizations were always designed to look best in the orientations in which they are now given: Horizontal for the Sankey diagram, vertical for the box-and-line diagram.

Resources Tab

You can control the calculator's priorities.

This all-new tab comes along with a new solver in the guts of the calculator. It takes functionality which was previously hard-coded and hidden away and exposes it to the user to be configured as they wish. It defines the resource priority for different resources, controlling the solver's preferences when it has the option to pick one recipe over another.

(As an aside, crude oil and water default to a lower weight because fluids in Factorio generally operate on a scale that is an order of magnitude larger than ordinary items. Dividing their weights in this way makes the numbers work out in a more expected fashion.)

This is not terribly useful in vanilla Factorio, but it may be more important in Space Age, and it opens the door to supporting more complex mods in the future.