So you want to speedrun, but your crippling separation anxiety prevents you from playing alone? Great! Multiplayer speedrunning and other competitive team formats are some of the best fun you can have in Factorio.
Now, you have an idea of how to plan a build, how to design the base, and how to build it more quickly than slowly. You’re aware, then, that every move you make in a run is interacts with a great host of other things in a complex, dynamic network – and adding more players multiplies that complexity at every turn. In a MP run with bad teamwork, one player may grab a bunch of circuits to build a mall, only for player 2 to then arrive at an empty circuit chest and being unable to build miners. The mall starves of resources and the team, weeping, starts playing the blame game instead, fighting over people being greedy, slow, or what have you. These are not issues that can be resolved during a run, because all players’ tasks are necessary for the others to progress with theirs, but they must simultaneously all be financed with resources that everyone else needs as well. You must plan who does what with what resources before the run. And you must work together and communicate in a productive way during the run.
- Basic assignment sheets
Player assignment refers to a plan that says who does what task. That’s it at the most fundamental level. But you can also expand the assignments to include when the tasks are supposed to be performed, why, how they interact with other tasks or milestones, and much more. Usually, such a plan is written down and developed in a spreadsheet, called the player assignment sheet.
Here’s the simplest version of such a sheet I could come up with that I can still recommend using:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1yYLIOjwIPj-rG8iBtNu462WGPnKeEEmBzryI4_lOwY0/edit?usp=sharing
Simply fill in each player’s tasks from top to bottom. The only structure provided in this barebones version is sections for different phases of the run. Those you make up yourself, depending on what you feel are your milestones. Some usual labels would be “burner phase” (which ends when you get electricity), “outposting” (when some players go claim new ore fields and others expand the base for higher input), “blue science done” (when some players go acquire oil and others build bot production), and so on. Whatever makes sense to you, helps you memorize the steps and stay in harmony better.
How you fill in the tasks is, of course, a matter of deliberation all on its own. Pick entries and wordings for those entries that satisfy these criteria:
- Everyone understands the entries.
- They’re short and concise enough that you can very quickly glance at them while running without missing anything
- They’re still detailed enough that you don’t have to stop and think about what they actually entail.
So for a beginner, the task “Build a standard smelting line for one full belt of iron ore input” may be entered as “Iron smelting: 48 stone furnaces”. A more experienced player may prefer to just write: “Iron 2”, if it’s the second iron smelting line.
Here’s an actual real-life example of a pretty simple player assignment sheet that Nefrums, AwesomePatrol and I used in the Biter Battles world championship in winter 2019/20. We finished fourth, which, if you think about it, is really better than 1st place.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/11_l0L346_wIL4m2yhWhB0lsTx_DtwDoPloEjnZDaI6c/edit?usp=sharing
As you can see, our respective columns differ a bit. Nefrums used minimalistic entries like “Blue sci”, since he already knew those builds by heart. Patrol and I both color-coded our cells in different ways for easier at-glance orientation. As the least experienced player at the time, I included the most precise numbers and even a link to a screenshot since I had trouble remembering how a build looked exactly. I also came up with my own code names for certain strategic moves, which the team graciously accepted. In moderation, such little jokes can really help your memory.
- Detailed assignment sheets
Depending on how precise your build is, you may want to add other kinds of tasks other than building. In the following template, I’ve added some copy/paste fields for entries like “Get 100 miners from the mall” and other personal handcrafting items and reminders:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LWQjtnR7t9yL7IuTvw_bAiEYsBru9y6wBPPdQsoQdaY/edit?usp=sharing
The hand symbols are for picking up things. The steel pickaxes are for harvesting resources from the map. The chests double as items to be produced and for the action of putting items inside them. These functions you can put in the “Notes” column. This column also provides you with a convenient box to add comments or notes using those google docs functions. Simply right-click on the cell and select the one you want to use. Such notes may include important reminders too large for a cell, personal timings or locations, or convey messages between players outside of runs.
Furthermore, this sheet adds the “Time” column, to set more clear expectations and help get a better feeling for how well you’re sticking to your build’s timetable. This is especially important for the redistribution of tasks between players.
From here, the sky is the limit. Remember that you can color in cells in any color code you want, add more columns, mix and match systems, and use multiple spreadsheets at once. It may be a good idea to add sheets for resource production graphs, science requirements, power consumption, and whatever else helps you better understand where you need to speed some tasks up and slow others down.
Here’s another example. This time of the Steelaxe Any% MP that beat the 1 hour mark to launch a rocket in June 2020 (so don’t be intimidated):
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1rAWpPgokTEiOkkxX5Rayr3tVOguhCrDU2__ZoHwV2jw/edit?usp=sharing
This sheet uses most of what we’ve been speaking about. It also includes old versions of certain sheets, which helps keep an overview of past discussions and how ideas have developed. It inserts screenshots directly into the sheet, and those screenshots feature big, bright numbers on them for locations which the tasks reference to. One player opened his personal handcrafting list as a sheet. Many different graphs allow the players to see how they need to keep pace, and, most importantly, how many resources have to be harvested and how many are available to be picked up by whom and when. Even within Steelaxe, the most experienced and successful Factorio speedrunning team in the world, this was the most frequent topic of discussion. What you’re seeing is the end stadium of a plan that was iterated upon daily, racking up more versions than Anti has ever eaten bananas. A run is never planned and done, it keeps evolving as you play. That’s what makes it so fun.
But never forget: The game is played in Factorio. This is all just a help. A huge help – but help. Keep (mental) notes of your experience during a run and discuss them with your teammates. Only together can you figure out what workflow works best.
Streamobert, August 2020
