Hacking the Factory

Key Takeaways

the the way you mod factorio traditionally is you you know you write some L scripts you hook that into the game and then when events happen your script runs but this doesn't really work for doing what we were interested in which was kind of running this at scale and getting you know a cluster of servers running so we had to develop a an entirely different uh way to mod the game by exploiting the Admin console of multiplayer factorio servers so you know you want to run a factorio server with your friends one of youed the admin and as an admin you have a little console where you can ban players you can you can change the permissions of different players and just basically modify the state and what we realized is we could hook into this admin console over the network using uh a protocol called Aron um you know carried by TCP and this basically enables us to execute actions in the game remotely um and and and kind of Shard them across dozens or hundreds of factorio servers which is necessary if you want to do training or any of the other um workloads you might need at scale