THE GOD FACTORY

A group of players built a record-breaking plant

- Tyler Colp

Over 160 copies of Factorio, a base building game from four years ago, ran simultaneously on servers around the world to make history. Factorio’s first ‘God Factory’ was born through the efforts of a Discord server full of people who refuse to stop building.

The over 400 players behind Eternity Cluster, a project that had only existed for a month at the time, broke 1,000,000 science per minute (SPM) in February. Normal players of the factory-building automation game only need around 30 SPM to achieve the game’s ultimate goal: sending a rocket into space. But for the Factorio players who really get a thrill from efficient mass production—a drive that has kept the game relevant since its 2018 Steam early access launch—one rocket is not enough.

“The most difficult obstacle has been not burning out working on the project,” said Hornwitser, one of the organizers. Hornwitser spent all of February working on Clusterio, the Factorio mod holding all of this together. Without it, the God Factory wouldn’t exist.

“Factorio is a very well-optimized game and most players will never find themselves hitting the limits,” said GreatSymphonia, who’s contributed an actual physical server to the project. “We are.”

Factorio has a single, persistent villain that prevents normal megabases from reaching anything close to 1M SPM. The game has an updates per second (UPS) maximum that limits how many Factorio machines can run at once. Exceed the UPS limit and your SPM readings break because the game can’t handle more calculations. This isn’t a problem for normal players, but it’s a threat for megabase builders shooting for big numbers.