Thoughts on beating Pyanadons

In March of 2026 I completed the Factorio game mod Pyanadons after 1953 hours, 50 minutes, and 8 seconds. Pyanadons is, for most people, a journey of several kilohours. Completing a run takes time, energy, will, and – of course, logistics strategy. What follows are some thoughts that I hope will improve your odds of a successful run.

What is Factorio?

Factorio is an evolving game about logistic planning and late-stage industry. It starts out with digging in the dirt to get ore that burns in a furnace to make plate that goes into an assembly machine that makes gears and so on. Pretty soon I have lines of furnaces feeding dozens of conveyor belts and the sky is red with fumes as the indigenous wildlife arrive to eat the factory.

Most other games are very linear – you do things, you might have a few choices, but the state of play doesn’t really change. Factorio is more like an RTS or Chess in that decisions I make in the first hour will come back to haunt me in the 10th, the 20th, or later. The mine source has been exhausted and the next ones are either under part of the existing factory or 20km away. Do I move the factory to clear the mine or do I build a train line? Do I smelt the ore at the mine and bring it in finished, or bring the ore here and use the existing machinery?

One of the best features is that, despite the attraction to a certain kind of male, the community is pretty chill and awesome. Maybe more so in the Py sub-group!

Quality Of Life Mods

For what it’s worth, I played Pyanadons + Alien Life + Elevated Rails. My QoL mods were

• Blueprint Shotgun – made by the original Py developer, this is a super fun tool.
• Blueprint Sandbox – a great way to test designs before launching the bot army
• Car Finder – just like your car remote, it goes “bleBLEEP” and marks your vehicle.
• ChangeInserterDropLane – drop to near or far lane.
• Cybersyn – one train manager to rule them all.
• Enhanced colors – more map info is more good
• FactorySearch – Find anything, anywhere.
• Helmod – Shows me what ingredients I need and in what ratios to meet my demand… and more!
• Loaders-moderenized – Directly insert to target at speed. Good for trains and buildings.
• Milestones – What you achieved and when. Also handy for guiding me forward.
• Playtime – Shows total hours played
• RateCalculator – Select part of the factory, see how fast it is producing.
• TaskList – Vital for staying organized
• Trainsaver – Added near the end. If you AFK the camera will start following random trains around the factory.
• InserterCranes-for-pymods – Enormous inserters moving ~250 items at a time. I only used it for a few train stations.

I did NOT use early bots, quick adjustable inserters, or speed mods like jetpack or grappling hook.

Only new mistakes

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Making the same mistake twice is like paying to take the same school course twice. So when I realize I’ve made a mistake I find three things that caused it and I try to fix at least one of them permanently.

One such choice is to nearly always build each recipe in adjacent, parallel rows. It’s easy to build, easy to debug, easy to extend if I need a little more, and the real estate is cheap. Because they’re all in rows it’s easy to run parallel train stations that feed in where needed.

I like to think that I was creating an aesthetic by making design choices that limited errors. Spaghetti is fine if you’re some kind of young savant. I’m getting older and dumber every day so I can’t afford that any more.

Lamps

I love lamp. Firstly because working in the dark is for children and masochists. Second because they saved my ass a few times. I notice the lights flickering or dimming long before I notice the factory is slowing down. Lamps prevented brown outs more than a handful of times.

Speakers

I didn’t use enough speakers. Before speakers were unlocked I used lamps that could turn on when a tank was too full or a belt was too empty. Later speakers were very handy for the same reason. They helped catch mines running dry, tailing ponds overflowing, steam power buffer issues and more. I didn’t put them on some things that I thought would last all game so late late LATE in the 1900s things like Oil derricks ran dry and I was unaware for some time. They really saved me some headache when the original coal patches started to run out.

Trains

Unloading spent fuel from a train often takes longer than loading in new fuel. Because I was not careful enough, sometimes trains would leave with a full load of fresh fuel AND a nearly full load of ash. When the train can no longer put ash in the garbage slot it will come to a stop and report that it is “out of fuel”.

I used blueprints a lot. Here are some of mine. I made train blueprints for blocks, corners, C-shape, S-shape (depending which side is closwer), dry load, dry unload, wet load, wet unload main, and wet+.

Wet+ adds a tank, a pump, and a constant combinator to add the item request all in one step. The key is to place the left tank over the last tank at the station so the green wires are connected. After that Wet unload stations worked perfect until biofluid.

Other blueprints

I also set up a nexelit power pole+lamp blueprint in a relative pattern the size of the pole’s connective reach. the pole bp lived in my quickbar so I could wipe lamps in a line to quickly, painlessly completely cover an area.

Speaking of blueprints, I made a script that turns pictures into blueprints that can be imported to pyanadons.

I think this deposit of ancient remains is going to get me through the game.

Missed recipes

I missed several recipes that made other runs much easier. I was not aware of Tar Extractor machines until Utility science. Never even built them! I survived most of the game on Drilling fluid 2 from Guar gum.

I didn’t use most of the TURDS and a few of the ones I picked I later regretted. I should have used Wöhler systhesis. I should have used Fawogae acid gas earlier but I went with activated carbon instead.

For the first half of the game I missed that hydrogen is a burnable fuel. Instead of venting, it could have made steam for a turbine to recoup some energy.

Animal upgrades

It’s much easier to upgrade recipes and buildings than to upgrade the plants and animals. To that end, design your plants and animals with a single sushi belt each. When the recipes change it’s much easier to tweak the belt contents than redesign many belts.

Sushi belts

I regret putting barrels on a sushi belt. I can’t count the number of times barrels jammed a sushi belt (I did this with Arqads and Auogs). Direct Insert (DI) them every time. Don’t even share barreling machines between two buildings (I tried this with Korlex). Saving 5 barrels is not worth the cost of fixing a broken system, which will end up costing the same number of barrels + time + energy.

Until logistics network was unlocked, my mall was a sushi belt. Every machine stored some units locally and could also contribute on demand to the belt when down-stream machines needed parts. Mostly I only fed it from outside with raw ingredients and small parts.

Undergrounds

I’m not a big fan of going under buildings with a belt BUT sometimes it really was the cleanest design. When there are pipes on both sides of a building AND I need 6+ dry goods to go in at speed, four adjacent parallel underground belts can often go under two assemblers. That makes it underground, inserter, assembler, assembler, inserter, underground. A nice repeating pattern that worked everywhere from samples made of animal parts all the way to PKS.

Liquid fuels

For a long time I used mixed liquid fuel drop off stations to power smelters with any burnable fuel that was available. Later I moved to acetylene/gasoline only. That was a much cleaner solution that scaled well and saved all those precious other fluids for their respective specialties.

Bots

Pynobots 1 was limited to X<50 (X is available bots). I forgot to limit Pynobots 2. At the end of the game I still had a full yellow chest of construction bots I didn’t need, plus another 400 too much in active duty. I had 4k logistics bots when I only needed half that at the worst of times. Save your parts! Don’t make my oops.

Also a trick I learned this game: you can set a roboport to demand, say, 10 pynobot 1s always be available. The roboport is next to an inserter that pulls them out and feeds them into pynobot 2 machine. This way my factory automatically replaces all 1s with 2s.

Power problems

After the second time trains ran out of fuel at random across the base, I got smarter. Wire a constant combinator to a train signal at the outgoing lane of all depots, with a shared named logistics group. The signal locks shut when the combinator group changes. This way all trains can be jailed in the depots while I run around refueling the ones that are starving and fixing whatever went wrong with the fuel supply. Trains ran out of fuel at least 6 times so this saved a lot of headache.

Near 1850h I left the game running overnight. After about 7 hours the fusion reactor filled the seven 100k tanks with Helium 3, jammed, and the MHD ran dry. To restart base power I had to wait for the sun to come up to run the LHF solar array, which restarted the four isolated 9.5GW dry Kicalk biomass plants, which was enough to slowly restart the fusion reactor and get the MHD going again. I’m glad I built the power plants on circuits that could be isolated. I wish I’d built them closer together so they could be turned on in stages WITHOUT the rest of the factory getting involved. I’m also really glad I invested in renewables. I set up the solar as fun-but-not-required and wow, was I glad when it came in handy. Also I had 6GW of tidal power before nuclear, but that’s neither here nor there.

Location, Location, Location

If I were to do it again I would have placed glass production right next to hot air from molten salt. Nothing in the game needed hot air more than glass and it was a constant pain. I might even go further by placing all the smelting and advanced recipes (small parts, casting, etc) near enough that they could be plumbed directly. The idea of trains full of hot air moving around is ridiculous. I ridicule it. Ha! Ha!

Pacing

The factory will not grow efficiently if you mistreat your resources, starting with your earth-born human monkey meat body. I almost never gave up on exercise or meals or sleep to stay in the factory. Sure, there were dark moments and sometimes I was just having too much fun to watch the clock. But on the whole I tried to remember that Factorio is a thing I do between the other passions.

I want to give a special shout out to brockHOUSn, Mistaeks, Burrito Loading Zone, EzPz, and all the fine people of the Py discord who helped me along the ride. Making some friends along the way has really helped.

Final thoughts

If someone says “You should do this” it feels like I’m being ordered around. “Why don’t/didn’t you do this?” sounds to me like “why are you stupid?” My way is to share how I solved a problem and leave it up to you, the listener, to decide if that’s useful.

Getting to Space Science – the final science – is not the end. Optimizing your factory to churn through the last technologies while dealing with the seven stages of grief is part of the end. I am a little melancholy about leaving the factory. I’ve played every major mod now. I’ve put in over 8k hours. But I also know life is more than the factory. I’m looking around the beautiful base I built knowing I won’t be coming back. I think of the house I moved out of after 10 years and the dog I lost after 15. Factorio got me through a lot and I’m sure I’ll play other factories in the future… but this was a special one. Ah, I’m getting verklempt over this silly shit. It’s all just a game, right?