I love Minecraft, and have played waaaay many hours of that too. But I'm not up to date on the latest mods, so thanks for the recommendations!

Both Minecraft and Factorio use grids, which make automated building with blueprints a lot easier.

But I can't imagine a good way for Satisfactory to support reusable blueprints in an unconstrained 3D world, the way Factorio does in a gridded 2D world (or the way Minecraft could in a cubic 3D world), where a big part of Satisfactory is building around the landscape, natural artifacts, and threading tangled conveyor belts around your other machines and belts and architecture.

When you're working with a 2D grid, it's easy to make reusable blueprints that you can systematically stamp out and plug together. (It's a lot like GPU programming, parallelizing tasks by spreading out the data to multiple processors, processing it in efficient units, making tradeoffs about bandwidth and buffering and transports, and merging it all back together again).

But there is so much variation in Satisfactory's 3D world and degrees of freedom in construction, that everything you build is unique and not nearly as modular and replicable as Factorio's blueprints.

On the other hand, Satisfactory's 3D building tools are fantastic (and it would be frustrating and impossible to play if they weren't so good): they make it really easy to connect up machine inputs and outputs with conveyor belts and pipes, and route them around like spaghetti code.

Here's something I posted earlier, quoting Dave Ackley on why he didn't transform his Moveable Feast Machine from 2D to 3D, who said: "I need to actually preserve one dimension to build the thing and fix it. Imagine if you had a three-dimensional computer, how you can actually fix something in the middle of it? It's going to be a bit of a challenge. So fundamentally, I'm just keeping the third dimension in my back pocket, to do other engineering."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22304110

Dave Ackley, who developed the Moveable Feast Machine, had some interesting thoughts about moving from 2D to 3D grids of cells:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21131468

DonHopkins 4 months ago | parent | favorite | on: Wolfram Rule 30 Prizes

Very beautiful and artistically rendered! Those would make great fireworks and weapons in Minecraft! From a different engineering perspective, Dave Ackley had some interesting things to say about the difficulties of going from 2D to 3D, which I quoted in an earlier discussion about visual programming:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18497585

David Ackley, who developed the two-dimensional CA-like "Moveable Feast Machine" architecture for "Robust First Computing", touched on moving from 2D to 3D in his retirement talk:

https://youtu.be/YtzKgTxtVH8?t=3780

"Well 3D is the number one question. And my answer is, depending on what mood I'm in, we need to crawl before we fly."

"Or I say, I need to actually preserve one dimension to build the thing and fix it. Imagine if you had a three-dimensional computer, how you can actually fix something in the middle of it? It's going to be a bit of a challenge."

"So fundamentally, I'm just keeping the third dimension in my back pocket, to do other engineering. I think it would be relatively easy to imaging taking a 2D model like this, and having a finite number of layers of it, sort of a 2.1D model, where there would be a little local communication up and down, and then it was indefinitely scalable in two dimensions."

"And I think that might in fact be quite powerful. Beyond that you think about things like what about wrap-around torus connectivity rooowaaah, non-euclidian dwooraaah, aaah uuh, they say you can do that if you want, but you have to respect indefinite scalability. Our world is 3D, and you can make little tricks to make toruses embedded in a thing, but it has other consequences."

Here's more stuff about the Moveable Feast Machine:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15560845

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14236973

The most amazing mind blowing demo is Robust-first Computing: Distributed City Generation:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkSXERxucPc

And a paper about how that works:

https://www.cs.unm.edu/~ackley/papers/paper_tsmall1_11_24.pd...

Plus there's a lot more here:

https://movablefeastmachine.org/

Now he's working on a hardware implementation of indefinitely scalable robust first computing:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1M91QuLZfCzHjBMEKvIc-A