Seven rendered factories you can pan and zoom at full resolution, four mods that turn the game into something else, and one experiment whose README is an apology. Every number about the maps was read out of the save's own metadata, not estimated.
292h
In-game time
7
Renders
5
Distinct worlds
4
Mods built
2.0.66
Engine
01
The maps
Rendered with the mapshot mod, which walks a save and writes out a Leaflet tile pyramid — up to seven zoom levels of 1024px JPEGs per factory. They have been served from the dested.com CDN for years and still are; these cards are only the front door. Each preview is the real map at its most zoomed-out level, uncropped, so a tall save looks tall.
Factorio ships a Lua API good enough to build a different game on top of it. Four attempts in two lineages — a tower defense and a Bed Wars — each built once, then rebuilt from scratch when the first version made it obvious what the design was actually about.
Bulwark
July 2026
Tower defense for people who like belts
Thirty waves walk down four fixed lanes at a crashed ship. The towers are Factorio’s own turrets, which are cheap — so the difficulty curve is not what you can afford, it is whether you can keep four killboxes fed at once.
The idea
Ammunition is the health bar. Every wave announces its archetype, unit count and lanes before it lands, so you never lose to information you did not have.
Factorio 2.1
30 waves
4 lanes
Lua
Second pass at the tower-defense idea, after Gauntlet TD.
Minecraft Bed Wars, with a void that actually kills you
Two islands float in a black starfield. Protect your bed, break theirs, and once a bed is gone that player stops respawning. Factorio’s water is impassable, so a normal water gap makes bridging a formality and falling impossible — which removes the two verbs the mode is built on.
The idea
The entire mod is one omission: take water’s collision mask and drop the `player` layer. Now you can walk into it, and knockback, bridging and falling all follow from the engine’s own rules.
Biters pour out of a purple portal and march a serpentine stone path toward your rocket silo. They never fight back — every one that gets through costs the team a life. Seven tower families across three tiers, no ammo and no power, bought from a shared coin bank.
The idea
Eight enemy types with hard counters, so no single tower line wins: armored Tanks shrug off bullets, shielded Shades ignore lasers, and the Broodmother bursts into eight Broodlings when she dies.
The same mode, with a computer opponent that actually plays it
A complete Bed Wars scenario: generators rain resources, shops sell everything, crafting is disabled, and gold and emerald islands sit between you and the other bed. Built for a dad and his son to play together.
The idea
Single-player is not a bot on rails. Rivet takes the empty island as a real character — it collects drops, shops at the prices you pay, bridges tile by tile, contests mid, retreats to resupply, and stops respawning when its bed falls.
Every save above was running the same nine mods on the same engine build. All of them are quality-of-life or tooling — none change a recipe, so the factories are vanilla in every way that counts.
Engine
2.0.66
mapshot
Bottleneck
AutoGhostBuilder
factoryplanner
factory_organizer
even-pickier-dollies
TimeTools
EditorExtensions
flib
04
Scrap heap
Not everything survives contact with the idea. This one gets a card because the README is the most honest thing in the whole inventory.
factorio-mcp-server
March 2025
An attempt at driving Factorio from an LLM over the Model Context Protocol. The README is two words long and completely accurate about how it went.
