An interesting thing about Factorio to me (beyond what’s stated in the linked article), is that it contains a nearly a perfect 1:1 analogy to software concurrency.

• Belts are blocking CSP channels, as seen in e.g. Golang (where N producers have to share — or eventually “merge onto” — one channel representing the blocking-receive point of the consumer; which are best only used to transport messages of a single type, or if not, then the sum-typed channel must be demultiplexed at the end, with this tending to lower throughput; where messages of a given type “queue up” until the channel is full, and then all producers block when attempting to write to the channel; where if you’ve got producers producing at different rates, then the fastest ones can hog the capacity of the channel, decreasing throughput and unevenly spending input resources such that some components fail long before others; where the solution to this is to give each producer its own bounded outbox channel that multiplexes onto the consumer’s channel, such that the producer will block itself rather than blocking its siblings; etc.)

• Logistics robots are message-queue topics (where N producers can publish messages of a given type, without worrying about how they’ll get to a consumer; where consumers [demand chests] subscribe to specific event message types; where the bus itself can get overloaded, causing delivery failures of unrelated topics as delivery-threads sit around holding a message unable to deliver it; where the solution to this is to add reliable MQ-internal storage [network-linked storage chests] for the agents to offload produced messages to until demand comes for them.)

(Sadly there’s no exact equivalent to Erlang-style message-passing, where producers target messages of arbitrary type at a specific consumer, which all go to the consumer’s single inbox; and where, if that inbox is full, then the message just “evaporates” en route, since the passed message has async semantics where the producer isn’t linked to its delivery. But, interestingly, that type of concurrency totally could be added, with a not-even-very-complex mod — just add a “outbox” chest object that can be configured to “target” a specific “inbox” chest somewhere else; and a second type of logistics robot that only moves stuff from outbox chests to inbox chests, not according to “demand” but just because anything currently sitting in an outbox chest is “intended to be” in the corresponding targeted inbox chest; and then ensure that this alternate type of logistics robots have non-reliable delivery semantics, where if the “inbox” chest signals to the network that it’s full, then all active delivery-threads targeting that inbox will literally “drop their messages on the ground”.)

IMHO it’s actually possible to learn how to be an effective distributed-systems engineer, just by playing Factorio and trying to scale the throughput of a resource-constrained system. In the process, you’ll likely re-invent many real-world concurrent software design patterns. Doing this first, and then reading a Distributed Systems textbook, will have a much more visceral impact on you, because you’ll have already faced these problems, struggled with them, and now you’re being handed all the techniques for solving them on a silver platter.