Factorio Tools

A collection of command-line tools for debugging and inspecting Factorio related things, written in Python.

Installation

Factorio Tools is available on PyPi, you can install/update it using the pip module with the following command.

> py -m pip install --user --upgrade hornwitser.factorio_tools

desync tool

Automatically parse and diff Factorio desync reports, takes a single parameter path to the desync report to analyze. If the report is in a .zip file it will be exacted first. For example:

> py -m hornwitser.factorio_tools desync desync-report-2020-07-01_10-00-00.zip

The output shows differences found in the script.dat, level-heuristics and level_with_tags files between the reference and desynced level contained in the desync report.

This tool is rather slow and may take a long time to run.

dat2json tool

Decode some of Factorio's .dat files into pretty formatted JSON. The decoding is a work in progress and the meaning of fields ending with an underscore is not know. For example:

> py -m hornwitser.factorio_tools dat2json -i script.dat -o script.json

Takes 3 options, --input for setting the input .dat file, --output for setting the output file, both of which accept - for stdin/stdout (the default), and --input-format which is needed in case the format can not be deduced from name of the file. The format should be the name Factorio gives the .dat file without the .dat suffix.

Currently acheivements, mod-dettings and script data can be decoded using this tool.

ping tool

Ping Factorio servers via UDP. Takes a hostname and an optional port and sends Ping messages to the given address and listens for PingReply responses. For example:

> py -m hornwitser.factorio_tools ping example.com --count 4
PingReply from 203.0.113.51:34197: seq=0 time=43.0102ms
PingReply from 203.0.113.51:34197: seq=1 time=42.6973ms
PingReply from 203.0.113.51:34197: seq=2 time=42.6778ms
PingReply from 203.0.113.51:34197: seq=3 time=42.6496ms

--- example.com:34197 ping statistics ---
4 packets sent, 4 received, 0.0% loss, time 3537.53ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev 42.65/42.76/43.01/0.15

Will keep pinging until interrupted by Ctrl+C if --count is not provided. The --punch option will relay a Nat punch requests through the Factorio matchmaking servers in order to attempt to traverse through Nat and/or firewalls. See --help for all options.

multi tool

Automate spawning, arranging, and interacting with many Factorio clients at the same time. It works by arranging the client windows on a grid using the Windows API, and has a mode that clicks a specific location in every Factorio window on the desktop. To make it work you'll have to do the following steps:

1. Open a command propmt and navigate/create a new directory to store the write directories for all of the client instances. If you place this new directory inside the Factorio installation directory then the Factorio executable will be auto detected, otherwise you will need to pass it with the --factorio when spawning instances.

2. Generate a base write dir for the instances to be based on.

   > py -m hornwitser.factorio_tools multi generate-base
   

   This creates a new directory named base by default (can be changed with the --base option.)

3. Start the base instance

   > py -m hornwitser.factorio_tools multi spawn
   

   This should launch Factorio in windowed mode with music and updates disabled. You should consider changing the following settings in order to make the management of the instances less annoying and use less resources:

   • Disable minimap.
   • Disable show tips and tricks.
   • Disable show tutorial notifications.
   • Disable play sound for chat messages.
   • Disable entity tooltip on the side.
   • Set shortcut bar rows and active quickbars to 1.
   • Set a player name.
   • Disable all show ... graphics settings.
   • Set sprite resoultion to normal.
   • Disable high quality animations.
   • Set Video memory usage to low.
   • Set Texture compression to low quality.
   • Disable full color depth.

   After making the setting changes exit Factorio.

4. Generate instance write directories.

   > py -m hornwitser.factorio_tools multi generate-instances 8
   

   This generates 8 instance directories named instance1 to instance8 in the current directory based on the base instance. You can change the base instance, name of the output instances and where they are output with the --base, --output and --prefix options.

5. Spawn instances using the spawn-multi command

   > py -m hornwitser.factorio_tools multi spawn-multi --count 8
   

   This will spawn and arrange Factorio clients in a 5x4 grid starting from the top right and going down. There are numerous options to control the behaviour, including how many rows and columns to use and the delay between each spawn.

   You can add arguments that are passed to factorio with the --args option. This is useful to have the clients auto connect to a server by passing --args "--mp-connect example.com".

Once you've generated the instances you only need to perform step 5 to start instances. If you want to change the config for all of the instances perform step 3 followed step 4 again.

Finally there's a click tool that's invoked with

> py -m hornwitser.factorio_tools multi click 200 180

and clicks on the given x, y coordinate on every window who's title starts with "Factorio". Taking a screenshot of one of the Factorio windows with Alt+PrtScn and then pasting it into MS Paint is useful to figure out what coordinate a button is on.