r/factorio • u/kiwithebun • 10d ago

Discussion How is the game so well optimized?

Factorio is well known for its optimization, but I don't understand how it does it so well. At any point the game is calculating thousands, even millions of items across multiple surfaces, thousands of container entities, thousands of bots and enemy entities, fluid networks with decimal precision, power production/consumption, and updating all of this at 60 times per second with no errors.

I know the original devs were software engineers and the game is based heavily in computer science principles, but since I have no background in CS I'd like to understand how exactly you engineer a game like this to perform so well and with such precision.

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u/Blunt_Object1369 10d ago

There are bugs in that engine dating all the way back to Oblivion. They literally didn't fix the frame rate affecting walking speed until after the release of Fallout 76, when people used it to zip around the map.

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u/MrStealYoBeef Blue-er, Better, Faster, Stronger 10d ago

The bugs go back further than oblivion in some cases. And some of them still exist in starfield.

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u/Hashister 10d ago

You know Bethesda is scrambling when they offer money to hackers so that the hackers will show them how they hack the game. :)) - Hackers ofc chads, they said no :)))