If you are still here after that unimaginative entrance, I’m sorry – nothing I tried sounded right. I’m a developer by trait – writing entertaining stuff is not my strong suit. By the way, I’m @psihius on Reddit and @psihius#7863 on Discord.

The idea came to do this post came suddenly - I blame circumstances and hence you must suffer for it. A few things happened today:

I read how all the Discord messages through the weekend and how people craved more Factorio when server crashed.

I checked how much money did we spend running the server through the weekend.

I checked our Patreon page

I wrote a lengthy reply to a member on Discord explaining a few things about running the server and what it costs

We got a big Patreon pledge of 10$ because of the above from a different member.

And to be truthful – I like to share stuff I do and would also shed some light what Is happening behind the scenes. Every member of the team, who cared, has proofread this text and gave his consent for publishing – just covering my you know what.

So, “Get to the freaking point already!” you would say, and I, for one, agree.

There are a few technical things about Factorio that turn make the selection of a suitable server a bit harder than usual, especially when you are not into server, programming and reading FFF’s like a sponge. You see, Factorio simulation, in a very crude analogy, is a very complex calculator. And calculators like MHz’s (the amount of calculations per second) a lot – the more, the better. What stands Factorio apart for the calculator analogy is that it also requires quite a bit more memory to store data than a calculator, although by today’s game standards Factorio is very gentle on it – even a very big factory can take only 2-2.5GB of memory. And all that makes choosing a proper server for Factorio a bit tricky.

You see, servers have always been moving in the direction of having more cores with lower speeds, more parallel processing, more RAM. And this is not what Factorio actually wants – it wants high-clock processors, a dual-core at this moment would be best (subject to change, as 0.15 marks the multithreading support implementation attempts, but I would say in near future we probably would not need more than a quad-core). Some RAM – 3-4GB is enough for anything except the outrageous megabases or very heavily modded games. Because Factorio pauses the game when it makes an autosave it is very useful to have a fast SSD.

All that means that the more accessible offers hosting wise are not really geared to what Factorio needs, but if you play with a few friends, you probably are going to be okay. Not so much for us – our games tend to have 10 to 30 people when we don’t announce and just play in the evening to 50-100 people when we do the events with proper announcing and planning. That means that Factory grows very fast and you can’t stay small and compact – no chance! Here are a few realities of what have to deal with:

We pegged the Digital Ocean VPS server with a 2.4GHz CPU in just 1 hour and 43 minutes. At that point we had to start lowering the game speed.

Biters are a real problem to the performance – as soon as someone start to go kill them – we get a lot of lag spikes starting at the mid game.

Our pollution is always enormous, hence a lot of biter attacks even with mild biter settings.

People have truly amazing potato computers. One guy could not keep up with the game 30 minutes in. I think he missed the whole point of Factorio as a game…

People rarely listen and build a lot of miscellaneous stuff, don’t limit chests, make elaborate contraptions. The only thing you can do is keep a general direction where things are going.

Hoovering* the belts. We even tried kicking people. Nothing works.

All that results in one thing – we need damn fast server to keep everything running. And finding those with high-clock CPU’s and not overkill RAM and storage stats turned out not being easy – not only it’s not that common to see servers with clock speeds over 3GHz, but most of the time those options are quite expensive.

Amazon AWS, you would say! OVH! CLOUD!

The reality is, cloud is not ideal for a game. The overhead of virtualization in a general type of cloud like Amazon AWS or OVH has a cost. And a price. Right now, we are using an OVH cloud instance HG-7 that has 3.1GHz CPU, 7GB of RAM and 200GB SSD storage. And it costs around 80$/month (with a 50% discount) if you pay upfront or € 0.083 per hour. And those hours stack up quick – in March we already have spent 10.43 EUR on the server resources – 5+ EUR of them was just the “Bug Planet Survival” that run through one weekend. As you could imagine if we start to run more stuff, the costs are going to go up quite a bit.

And there’s also the question that it’s “just” a 3.1 GHz CPU. It has way too much RAM and SSD that we overpay for. And it has only 2 cores, so we can’t run 2 servers in parallel on a single WM – the 4 core one costs double, has 14GB of RAM and 400GB of SSD – things we really don’t need.

We also must tear down and create the server instances each time we want to make a game. This means that a server-savvy person has to do that – me. And although I can write an instruction for the team, I should say that dealing with SSH key authorization and having the right tools is not something I would like to thrust upon them (and dealing with constant IP changes due to re-creation of the server instances).

Not to mention that they need access to the OVH account, and that account has a credit card attached, because it must.

But not to despair - I happened to know people at a hosting company that specialize in high-performance hosting solutions and they sell their resources via a configurator where you can configure how many cores, RAM, disk space or internet bandwidth you want. And you have been all playing on that hosting companies servers on New Year’s event and till the end of January as I managed to get a test run for a month. They have Xeon E5-1650V4 @ 3.6GHz (Turbo Boost up to 4.0GHz) CPU’s - we had 3 cores, 6GB of RAM, 40GB of very fast SSD’s storage and 1Gbit/sec connection - we never hit that servers limits. In addition their VM infrastructure is highly optimized for performance and iops, meaning it’s as close to a direct hardware install as it can get - exactly what you need for games. The only thing that stopped us from using it further was cost – it’s is flat monthly fee of 44 EUR + taxes for that particular configuration. That was just too much money for the team at the time (and still is a bit too much, as team pitches in through Patreon too). That’s why we set up Patreon and are trying to gather enough to have a permanent server we can keep running 24/7, create some tools and make the dependency on a single person running the server as minimal as it can be.

Now, let’s talk about the team a bit.

The current most active part consists of me - @psihius (@psihius#7863), @I_IBlackI_I (@Blackstone#4953), @CubityFirst (@Cubity_First#7694) and @Molter (@Molter#2225). There are also founding fathers of the community like @Sikian (@Sikian#4077) and @Sabbie (@Sabbie#3129), but due to time constraints their involvement in recent months was fairly limited, except @Sikian - he really likes to chat :) There are also @Maru (@Maru#5802), but I have no idea about his history and he was not really available to ask :)

As far as roles go, we kind’a have our own “specialities”

@psihius (@psihius#7863) - server management, ideas for events, game administration to a lesser degree

(@psihius#7863) - server management, ideas for events, game administration to a lesser degree @I_IBlackI_I (@Blackstone#4953) - our main modding guru who drives our admin tooling and cool things, ideas person and main game policing force - banned the most people of us all :D Keeps my sarcastic and overly-outspoken side at bay :)

(@Blackstone#4953) - our main modding guru who drives our admin tooling and cool things, ideas person and main game policing force - banned the most people of us all :D Keeps my sarcastic and overly-outspoken side at bay :) @Sergeant Steve (@Sergeant Steve#2743) - Hates biters with a passion, chat-filler, does some game administration, gives some ideas - to be truthful - I have no idea, but he’s one the team ^-^

(@Sergeant Steve#2743) - Hates biters with a passion, chat-filler, does some game administration, gives some ideas - to be truthful - I have no idea, but he’s one the team ^-^ @Cubity_First (@Cubity_First#7694) - mainly fills in game administration role, overly enthusiastic at times, has lot’s of ideas.

(@Cubity_First#7694) - mainly fills in game administration role, overly enthusiastic at times, has lot’s of ideas. @Molter (@Molter#2225) - sticks to game administration mostly.

(@Molter#2225) - sticks to game administration mostly. @Mylon (@Mylon#3399) - the guy behind the SOBS scenario, modding guru - by his own admission “I didn’t do much”, but I still consider him a @hands team member and hope he will do some other interesting modding stuff in the future.

Everyone on this list is living somewhere in the EU, and that’s a problem - we can’t cover the US time zones and that leads to griefers having a free rein if we leave the game running for the night so the West side of the Atlantic can enjoy it. We would like a few people from US to eventually join our moderator team. I don’t know if we have many people from Australia or Asia, but if we do have active members who play - probably a good idea to have a person or two from those parts of the world.

Have you been a active member of our community and live in (North) America? Think you can be a valuable addition to our team? Contact the crew and we will see if you can be an addition to our team.

The Work In Progress stuff

So we have a few things going on right now - some stuff you saw on the stream or maybe noticed in game, but some things are at R&D state and may not work, but @I_IBlackI_I is putting some serious time into it, and some other things, in no particular order:

Ability to spectate the game for Patreons

Patreon-only in-game tags

Patreon participation in the live streams (although is it valuable - we don’t know and might just allow everyone who is in the Discord - let us know what you think)

Anti-griefer Rocket Silo (already in use)

Further polishing of the 3RA admin tools

Item deconstruction history - yes, we see everything that was deconstructed/killed by people :)

Multiple spawn type of map. There are quite a few ideas how we can use it, including a Aliens vs Trees type of a challenge.

Added a few live streaming and youtube related goals to the Patreon.

Live streaming - although we have the basic stuff going, there is a lot more work to be done on that front, and, personally my rig does require some hardware additions to make it work - decent mike, something besides a stock cooler and additional cooling as a whole - it get’s very toasty and once it went into a thermal protection shutdown - yaiks!. And that does require some community support.

Recording 1080p for youtube - a bit of a stretch goal, as right now there is no way I can record a 4-5 hour long session in good quality - I just don’t have any storage - a developers machine - 256GB SSD drive is all you really need. Yeah, reminds me about the “640KB should be enough for everyone” phrase...

Factorio install web based management tools - my personal pet project, as I find some things missing or not really being that easy to use with what’s available at the moment. I’m lazy, and laziness is the driving force of software development ;)

Plans are being contemplated for a 0.15 release event, top secret :)

That’s all what I can think about at the moment.

But we also encourage you to pitch us your ideas or contribute maps, scenarios, interesting mods or otherwise participate in the community.

It was a long post, but I hope worth a read. Also, if you have additional questions - don’t hesitate to pose them - maybe there will be enough even for an additional post :)

The last few things

If you like what we are doing - consider supporting us through Patreon. That will allow to do us more and work on improving the community and events. Below you will find all our pages and services we use.

Discord: https://discord.me/factoriommo

Patreon: https://patreon.com/factoriommo

Subreddit: https://reddit.com/r/FactorioMMO

Twitter: https://twitter.com/factoriommo

Twitch: https://twitch.tv/factoriommo

@psihius signing off