Happy Factorio mod for factorio 0.12.4+

I love factorio as factory building game, but I really hate two things about it:

• depressing graphics
• aliens

If it was up to me, factorio would be just factory builder with happy colors - or at least neutral colors, not vanilla's extreme bleakness - and without any combat whatsoever. 

Fortunately it is up to me, just as it is up to anyone who is not afraid of modding a bit.

Mods that get rid of aliens and replace them with some kind of alien ore that's processed into alien goo already exist, so the only thing I needed was fixing graphics.

And you can download it here.

The mod target 0.12.4 version, but it should work with future hotfixes on 0.12.x branch. If anything major changes, I'll release new version on this blog, probably pretty quickly as the whole process is mostly automated.

EDIT: Most recent version of the mod should be available from Factorio Forums.

After and Before

Here's an after/before screenshot.

Looking pretty good with some filter applied

Depressing vanilla

(As it's a bit messy to get pixel perfect alignment for easy comparison, after screenshot is actually result of applying same filter to original which would be applied to every component separately, interface elements like pollution map color are not actually affected)

Let's Play

As setting up Happy Factorio as a mod took a while, I already started recording Let's Play series in happy colors. If you're not sure if you like high saturation coloring or vanilla's, check some videos:

Source code

As usual with my modding, I did not do it manually, I got lua engine running inside ruby, loaded all data there, automatically generated code to patch the game, and generated high saturation imaged with imagemagick.

It wouldn't be terribly hard to extend it to similar automated conversion for other mods. Using Happy Factorio with unconverted mods might result in mismatched color levels, which is a bit annoying, but then again you get most benefit from simply backgrounds looking less bleak, and many mods already use significantly more saturated colors than vanilla's extreme bleakness, so it usually won't be a huge deal.

I guess the system would be easier if I went straight for lua instead of lua-in-ruby. If you want to run it on your machine it would require a bit of setup first:

• install imagemagick
• install lua
• install ruby
• install ruby-lua gem to bridge them
• checkout mod sources from github
• symlink factorio to point at your factorio installation
• run bin/build_happy_factorio_mod from root directory of soucce tree.
• mod will be created

If you use recent OSX with homebrew, ruby should be preinstalled, so just run brew install imagemagick lua; gem install ruby-lua to get the rest of dependencies.

Feel free to use the sources for whatever you feel like.

Happy factory building!