Getting Started
My start with Factorio was actually rather interesting. I first heard it being mentioned by others in my social circle around April of 2015, but was left with a negative impression due to the fact that they were pretty much always talking about factory defence (I still remember all that talk about "biters" that made it sound like some RTS game). In a twist that I have talked about on several occasions, the trailer from that era (the one that was remade upon full release in 2020) actually dissuaded me from the game even further; the feature of biters at 1:05 is the only part that really jumped out at me, and combined with the earlier impressions to leave me completely misled as to the real nature of the game. As a result, I was in fact turning down people's offers to buy it for me for over a month.Eventually, someone did in fact buy it for me, and I started a MP world with a friend of mine (the same one who often featured in silly MC videos, and who shared my first Starbound playthrough. We were on peaceful mode to satisfy the lingering concerns I had, which almost certainly helped ease me into the game. Neither of us really knew the game well at that point, of course, so our base ended up as a case study in what the community usually calls "spaghetti". Nothing was planned in advance, and I quite clearly remember all those hours spent weaving belts around each other and machinery to jury-rig expansions upon expansions to now-overloaded production lines.
Remember when the game looked like this?
That world ended once we both got bored after automating most of the techtree, so I moved onto a modded world, including the BobMods suite, Natural Evolution, and a number more (though none of the other major overhauls of the era like DyTech and Yuoki's mods). It too actually started as MP, with another acquaintance of mine, but they turned out to not really like the game.
As a result, I ended up playing that save alone, but this allowed me to familiarize myself with several of the mods (falling in love with Bob's mods in the process), and it left many of the "imprints" of what modded Factorio was like that I would continually mentally refer to for the following years.
Diving Into Modding
I started modding Factorio in early summer, during the tail end of my that playthrough. I had largely completed progressing through both the vanilla and modded tech trees - including all of Bob's, UraniumPower, and more - and was largely just spending time fighting off biters and collecting the alien artifacts from their nests.
Rather unsatisfied with the vanilla tank's performance, I ended up making a better version - using many BobPlates materials like titanium, of course - with significantly improved damage, speed, weapons range, and more.
I ended up getting bored of Factorio completely very soon after, but started playing it again that November, this time with a light modpack (including a couple Bob mods and UraniumPower, but no overhaul content). That tank mod ended up gaining some new turret types - Concussion, Plasma, and Cannon, in that order - and became the beginnings of EndgameCombat, as it gained more defensive-based content to deal with the behemoth biters (such as the robot and power pole defence technologies), as well as the first few "mass area clearing" shells, predating the vanilla nuclear bomb by more than 18 months.
My late-game pollution cloud, and the insane amount of attacks.
Without Bob's upper tiers of machinery, I also ended up creating a similar mod, which became FastFurnaces (so named after the first machine added).
That world also had the generation that would ultimately inspire ChokePoint; my base happened to be situated somewhat surrounded by lakes, such that the biter pathing would always converge to a few narrow bridges, which became defensive strongholds.
An early image of the save, showing the eastern defence wall (under right hand info panel), and an early version of the Accelerated Electric furnace.
As this was before the implementation of the rocket silo as a meaningful goal, (it had just recently been added in place of the grey "rocket defense" box that triggered endless enemy attacks, but did nothing except increase a "launches" counter), I created a new mod to add reason to continue. This mod added (functionally) infinite levels of "upgrade" researches, and became InfiTech.
An early and glitchy implementation.
Starting With Scripting
Fast forward to October of 2016, and I was getting back into Factorio, this time with a scenario called "Frontier", whose premise was an infinite wall dividing the map, with your half being free of enemies, but with low-richness ore, and the other half being rich with ore but packed with enemy nests.
I ended up greatly customizing the scripting for that scenario's ore placement - though keeping the same general idea - and this ultimately led to the creation of Oreverhaul, with its ability to do distance-gated ore richness and increasing ore tiers.
Frontier custom scripting becomes Oreverhaul.
This was given a full test in November, where I played another BobMods playthrough with Oreverhaul, getting a good feel for the various ore tiers and even more of the modded ecosystem.
Still spaghetti.
Major Expansion And First Release
Six months later, in the summer of 2017, I revisited the game again, this time with a new modpack and new settings, and began work on another mod, one that expanded upon the pollution mechanic and added more incentive not to simply ignore your effects on the environment ingame. This of course became NauvisDay, and the much harder gameplay it ended up creating - massive waves of hundreds of biters at a time when both gun turrets and ammo were in short supply - led to significant expansion in EndgameCombat, including the turret range and healing upgrades, defence trap, shockwave turrets - perfect for dealing with those massive waves of weak enemies - and, about a month later, the Shield Domes and orbital weaponry.
Incessant attacks, and dead forests for miles.
That also led to the desire to create a new way of generating power for the midgame, at a point where boilers were simply too polluting to use in mass quantity; such was the origin of Geothermal (power).
A very early geothermal power plant.
Finally, DirtyMining was created during this playthrough, as I was getting increasingly tired of constantly having to move my ore harvesting outposts.
The very first dirty ore field and ore washing facility ever built.
This was around the time the official mod portal launched, so it is also when I finally made the first public releases of my mods. Some of these, like Geothermal, NauvisDay, and DirtyMining, were brand new; others, like EndgameCombat, InfiTech, and Oreverhaul, were years old but had remained private. This is also why the original changelogs for these mods do not go before this version.
Overhauls
Skipping yet another year, to September 2018, and I once again decided to try a major overhaul Bob playthrough, this time using a train-based plan (due to a main bus model being far too unwieldly given the sheer number of ingredients in that pack). I wanted to avoid the standard bot-based solutions for this - I always have sided with the common idea that logistics bots vastly simplify item logistics, often to the point of making it boring - and so invented AutoTrainDepot, which allows for belt-based depots that do not risk gridlock or jamming if some kinds of items are in surplus or deficit.
An early version.
That save ended up getting abandoned early - it proved far too difficult and grindy with its mix of Natural Evolution, Nauvis Day, hard recipes, high distances to even midlevel ores, 5x tech cost, and more - but during the time it did last, I ended up creating several more mods, including EasyCreative, DewPointAggregator, RadioNetwork, Bioluminescence, ItemFinder, and LossPrevention: EasyCreative made it much easier to design "factory submodules" in a test world; DPA allowed for water-needing modules to be used far from water sources; RadioNetwork allowed for communication between the submodules without tons of wire; LossPrevention was solely focused on making that world survivable - which it did wonderfully, pulling the evolution factor back from the 0.7-at-green-science levels it had been. In preparation for it, I had also created ChokePoint, making this save its first real test. EndgameCombat and NauvisDay also got major rebalancing, with the former getting much of its content moved earlier, making it finally useful throughout the game.
An image near the end of that save's life.
Since then, there have been a few new minor mods, and new content in old ones. I spent much of the summer of 2020 playing the game, and with that and expanding the mods' content; this included finally converting the NVDay steam furnace and gas boiler to use proper fluid power, instead of hacky fake recipes or hidden control entities. Additionally, EGCombat got major visual and sound upgrades, ATD got both a GUI redesign and significant feature/tech expansion, and Geothermal got a rebalance, a new heat exchanger sprite, and the filtering and insulated cargo wagon systems. For all we know the origins of another major mod may not be far away.