Dodge Challenger (Factorio)
History
Beginnings
Factorio has a long and entwined history with the EXPANSION group;
The first joint Factorio save started by the EXPANSION group mainly revolved around the Space Exploration mod.[1] It also featured a few additional mods, including the Dodge Challenger mod from Pankeko.
The Dodge Challenger is, at its heart, a reskinned tank with half the health, 4x the acceleration, and nearly 10x the max speed. It can plow through biter nests at over 400km/h with some fuels and even has a small equipment grid. It's insanely costly to craft, requiring 100 iron plates, 5 engines (in total requiring 37 iron plates as raw ingredients), and 5 steel plates (requiring 25 iron plates to produce).
At some point during the playthrough, somebody suggested automating Dodge Challenger production. It was then discovered that one tier 1 assembler can produce exactly 1 Dodge Challenger per second. It was in this moment that EXPANSION members Aiden and Quincy swore that they would build a Dodge Challenger factory that could produce exactly one per second.
Challenges Faced
Producing 100 iron a second was trivial with enough furnaces. The issue, however, lies in getting the raw iron into the smelters. Complex machines had to be developed, such as 8->16 belt balancers, extensive two-way train networks with complex junctions, and adequate belt speeds. For Aiden and Quincy, who both had very limited Factorio knowledge at the time, these posed major challenges.
By far the most interesting challenge they faced was: how do you get these materials into the assembler fast enough? They determined through experimentation that it would require nine bulk inserters with a stack size of twelve or greater. It's possible with lower inserter stack size with up to eleven bulk inserters mixed with long handed inserters. It's important to only use a maximum of eleven, as there must always be one slot for emptying the Dodge Challengers.
Execution
Aiden and Quincy decided to commandeer a large swath of land to the West for their factory. Once local inhabitants had been cleared, they began rapidly constructing the factory. Here it quickly outgrew the base factory in terms of surface area occupied.[2] The Dodge Challenger factory was less complex than a regular factory. The majority of it was a series of ~350 furnaces which were necessary in order to supply the single Dodge Challenger assembler with enough iron and steel to produce the desired amount.
This involved the development of a complex train network. Initially, it was hooked up to one iron patch, but as the demand for iron grew, plans were made to link up to an iron patch to the North, and another to the North-West.
These plans would eventually be disrupted before they could be carried out, as the save was abandoned before the factory could see completion.
Modern Day
Despite previous failures, the dream of the 1 Dodge Challenger per second lived on within Aiden and Quincy, and they vowed to one day achieve such a factory.
This dream lied dormant, until the Factorio Space Age DLC released on October 21, 2024. Aiden and Quincy were excited for the new update, and were ready to attempt a second Dodge Challenger factory. Unfortunately, they ran into an immediate roadblock: Pankeko had not updated the mod, and had no intention to do so.
Aiden and Quincy sat with this for about a week, before one night, Quincy got tired of waiting around and updated the mod herself. Luckily, it was written mostly in Lua and C#, two languages she had experience with. It was only a few hours before it was working once more. She also increased the stack size from 1->50.
That night, Quincy and Elliott experimented with the new tools the Space Age DLC had brought, such as quality modules which increase the effectiveness of fuel. They were able to get the Dodge Challenger up to 1,000 km/h. In terms of the productivity of the Dodge Challenger itself, many logistical challenges could be solved using the new stack inserters, and a lot of robots. With the addition of beacons, as well as a tier 3 assembler, they could produce ~78 DC/sec.
sometime in the following days, Aiden and Quincy would create a new save and begin working towards the new Dodge Challenger factory. This save is still in operation today, with plans for an extensive Dodge Challenger factory to be built on Volcanus.
- ↑ Not to be confused with the Space Age DLC, which would not come out for yet another year.
- ↑ The base factory was maintained by Elliott Witort during the construction of the Dodge Challenger factory.
