What information is hidden in Factorio? I can't think of any stat that isn't shown to the player in some way.

He is not talking about stats.

When you start a new game in Factorio, if you never played it, you can’t know how much of each resource you’ll have to extract and neither how much of an item you’ll need to produce.

I know it’s easy to forgot after thousands hours of playtime, but the game starts with your character having to manually mine coal one by one.

> When you start a new game in Factorio, if you never played it, you can’t know how much of each resource you’ll have to extract and neither how much of an item you’ll need to produce.

Some of this information should be recoverable somewhere in the tech tree tooltips, if nowhere else.

More importantly, vanilla Factorio plays a nasty little trick on first-time players: The final sciences and launching the rocket both require scaling up. This means that either you refactor your factory, or you grind out that first launch super slowly using an inadequate production line.

Veteran players know ways to design some modularity into a factory, and when to yank out subsystems and rebuild them bigger somewhere else.

Factorio: Space Age is actually more forgiving about scalability. You don't need to scale up as much, and you have much more powerful tools for doing it. Instead, Space Age has lots of novel game mechanics to master, and higher total system complexity across the solar system.

Not true, every item shows its raw materials right there in its menu. The rest is just arithmetic.

Also the LLM probably has seen dozens of factorio-related websites and setups.

And also, player (artificial or natural intelligence) don't need to setup everything upfront, it's actually the main gameplay feature is to run between production areas to expand/optimize them.

Technically every item displays requirements and crafting time, but most human players will just eyeball production rates until they start trying to build larger scale factories that you can't easily jerry-rig fixes onto.

Possibly there is a lack of item-throughput figures for belts and stuff though.

Thats when you build a giant bus and select what you need out of it.

A bus doesn't solve this, because it still is contained by items/second. You can't just select copper, if there's no more copper on the belt. And you might not be able to jerry-rig another belt of copper onto your bus.

A bus doesn't solve the issue the person you replied to was talking about.

That information is certainly in the training data.

IME the models know some basic information about all the popular games, including some basic strategy, but they don't know/remember the details to be even a moderately familiar player. And usually if you ask a question they will google it.

The answer is all of it and yes.

I still don't get the point. The information is there right from the beginning. For humans itS just tedious to calculate it and why should one?

Then also, you can finish the game even when not planning ahead.

The game tells you how much of each resource you need for each recipe, and it tells you how to get them. It doesn't tell you how many of each recipe you may need up front but that information surfaces as the game progresses.

Yet, that's not how new players (human or AI) approach the game. If you look at AlphaZero, probably state of the art in learning e.g. chess (more information about rules than Factorio has in game) from scratch, using only rules, it just plays a lot of games with itself. It doesn't "just think a lot" to come up with a perfect strategy; it experiments.

How do you mean? (I have played 1 hour of Factorio)

I didnt think was possible to play for less than 1k hours.

We found the business guy.

Those are rookie numbers, you need to pump those numbers up…

I am not the OP but I have (many) hours in Factorio and I think what they might be talking about is things like how it’s not apparent at the start just how much copper infrastructure you will need by the time you get to rockets and space platforms because the early recipes are iron-heavy. Or how important green circuit scaling will become. Or how much oil cracking might change your layout.

If you know what’s coming you make different choices in how you build that heads off a fair bit of refactoring.

What do you mean? Factorio is an extremely calculable game and tends to show most of its information (ratios aside, those are in the wikis)

Unless I misunderstand, ratios are second-order and can be calculated; production rates are presented in-game.

If one provides it access to the wiki and reddit, if just from within game it's quite cryptic

The AI has trained on the entire factorio wiki along with every tutorial video ever made and who knows what else. I don’t see room for hidden anything in that scenario.

Models don't have perfect recall

If LLMs worked that way, you would never have to search for prior art again.