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Factorio Access Features
This page has an overview of the features of the Factorio Access Mod.
- Core Philosophy
- 1. General
- 2. Navigation
- 3. Cursor Features
- 4. Audio Menus
- 5. Rails and Trains
- 6. Roads and Cars
- 7. Combat
The overall intent of Factorio Access is preserving the original experience as much as possible, while making changes and adding extra audio features where appropriate for the audio game experience without changing the game balance.
Some features offer direct translation from visual info to audio info, such as audio menus that directly correlate with graphical menus. Example: Building inventory menus.
Some features are indirect translations, meant to serve the same utility as graphical features while organizing information differently. Example: The scanner tool.
Some features are simply useful support features for improving the audio game experience. Example: Audio rulers.
Some features do alter the balance of the gameplay for the sake of improving the experience. Their balancing logic is discussed in the relevant sections.
For a vanilla Factorio player, some of the mod features might be unfamiliar or even confusing when first encountered. We try to add visualization to make audio features clearer in visual language.
Factorio Access has its own Factorio launcher that uses a text-based multiple choice menu system. The launcher replaces all the graphical main menus of the game, taking on tasks such as save file management or map settings. This is important because the original menus are not directly reachable and also use a lot of visual forms. The launcher is also the key component for relaying game data for custom sound engines and screen readers. Read more about the launcher on its own page here.
Some of the game configuration settings need to be overwritten for the mod to work successfully. This mainly includes keybind changes and some logical settings. Additional changes include optionally reducing graphics settings to improve the mod and game performance.
Several keybinds are changed to make room for mod features and to remove shortcuts for inaccessible graphical menus. Most significantly, character movement is done with arrow keys, while WASD are allocated to moving the mod cursor and the mouse hardware is unused. Note that for sighted players of the mod, graphical menus can still be opened from the graphical buttons on the top right corner of the screen, above the mini-map.
The mod uses its own keyboard-based cursor, which can move to any tile including off-screen tiles. It substitutes every mouse-based action including entity selection in the world and creating building previews. It gets visualized with a small square that is drawn at ground level.
The cursor represents the player's attention on the physical map. Accordingly, when you select an object from a menu list, the cursor moves over to it on the map. Similarly, an item held in hand is held at the cursor, just like with the graphical mouse pointer.
In many cases the graphical mouse pointer on the screen gets bound to the mod cursor. This allows for graphics such as building previews are accurately depicted by the mod. If needed, you can middle click the mouse to unbind the mouse pointer.
The mod has its own in-game tutorial system, which gradually introduces the game from the mod's context, explaining both mod features and vanilla features in coherence. The tutorial is opened in game by pressing "CONTROL + T". It is a full learning resource of its own and its transcript can be found here.
The mod includes extended written descriptions for nearly all in-game items and entities. The feature is meant to provide the kind of information that is normally obtained through visual observation of the item and its behavior. By default you can check this info by pressing "y".
Example: Info for a boiler unit: 3x2, Consumes burner fuels to boil water. Accepts water at either of the pipe interfaces that are located at its back corners and are facing its shorter sides. Excess water passes through it. When it has fuel, it audibly produces steam into a pipe interface amid its front side, fast enough for running two steam engines.
This mode exists for sighted players who want to use the mod to play multiplayer with friends, but also want to keep more of the Vanilla Factorio experience. Several mod features are disabled, such as the narrator and the mod cursor. Accordingly, you can use the mouse easily.
Kruise Kontrol is originally a mod by Factorio developer Klonan that allows you to let the character do some basic tasks autonomously, such as walking or driving to a specific location, or placing buildings into locations that were already marked via blueprints. Factorio Access has integrated a heavily customized version of KK as an optional feature. It offers meaningful convenience across the board.
The coordinate grid in Factorio is usually not explained to the player, and vanilla players typically use the map tool instead. Factorio Access uses the coordinate system extensively, for purposes like giving the absolute or relative positions of objects. The origin point of the coordinate grid is the spot where you first land on the planet.
The scanner tool is a unique device that scans entities around the player and keeps entries of them in a navigable audio list. The scanner list (by default) sorts entities by their distance from the player character. The list can also be filtered to include only entities from a specific category, e.g. resource patches.
The scanner uses an extensive caching system such that you do not need to run it repeatedly. It also does not run out of battery.
The scanner tool is meant as an alternative to viewing surrounding areas by zooming out in the map or using the abstract world map. Similarly, the scanner can cover about as much area as has been charted in the abstract world map.
Note that selecting an entity with the scanner does not center the camera view onto it but instead the entity is visually highlighted and the mod cursor is moved over to it, even if off-screen.
Scanning distant map chunks with the scanner requires them to be charted. This can be achieved by physically venturing out to them to extend the map, or by using radar towers. Factorio has a default radar tower already but the mod adds a second, stronger radar known as the "access radar". It actively reveals less of the nearby areas but is much faster at charting distant areas and has a larger charting radius.
To assist with navigating the character across the terrain, the mod generates some sound hints.
For example, when a running player is laterally shifted due to bumping into an object, a tripping sound is played. This lets you know that your alignment has changed. If a similar shift occurs when running across a cliff edge, then a sliding gravel sound is played.
In addition to bumping sounds, there is the stuck warning. If a running player is running against a large object without moving forward, an alert beep begins playing.
The mod removes collisions between players and certain smaller objects such as small/medium electric poles and inserters. These structures already have tiny collision boxes but you use a lot of them and normally when you run near them you get a lot of tripping sounds. Being able to walk through them makes factory navigation much smoother. Note that other entities like vehicles can still crash into these objects.
The mod lets players walk over pipes on the ground. Pipes normally form long and snaky walls that are annoying to navigate around. This is a specific challenge that gets in the way of building pipe systems. The challenge is often not appreciated and some overhaul mods remove player and pipe collisions so that you can focus on weaving pipes. Factorio Access does the same.
In vanilla Factorio, standing on top of a transport belt make the character get moved by it. While there is utility to this, it can get annoying pretty fast. There is an in-game item known as belt-immunity equipment that lets you stand still on top of belts instead. The mod has the effect of this equipment universally applied.
This change is needed because the mod relies on the character's location being constant for some of its features. Also, the feature prevents the unnecessary confusion related to being moved by a belt that you did not notice.
One of the core features of Kruise Kontrol is autonomous walking or driving to a map location of your choice. KK applies some basic path-finding logic such that you go around large obstacles. Meanwhile, the feature also lets you navigate through certain obstacles: For example, trees and rocks that get in the way are often just mined and player-made walls can be temporarily picked up, passed through, and dropped back. If a location is not reachable due to obstacles like water bodies, the navigation stops.
As an optional navigation feature, the player is able to teleport to the cursor's location, which might be a couple tiles away, or far away off screen. Teleportation includes a sound effect and a basic animation of jumping through portals in the ground.
Teleportation was added primarily as a tool for bypassing complex navigation challenges. We recognize that it can be exploited to outrun enemies or reach unreachable areas. Nowadays Kruise Kontrol is the preferred alternative tool for this purpose but we still keep teleporting as an option for players who prefer to abstract away this particular challenge.
Note that automatic teleporting happens in this one special case: If you are placing down a large building and the player character is standing in the way, they are teleported a few tiles to the side to get out of the way.
The mod has a unique menu where any number of points on the map can be saved as travel points. You can add a name and a description to each point. This feature is an alternative to using map pins and various kinds of sign posts. By quickly navigating the travel points list, you can easily tell KK to walk the character to a travel point or you can teleport to it.
The cursor can be resized so that it covers not a single tile but a larger square, spanning up to dozens or hundreds of tiles. The enlarged cursor scans what it covers and reads out a summary of it. This is useful for getting a broader understanding of an area. The enlarged cursor is also used as a large brush when you are paving the ground with bricks or concrete.
While the cursor can be moved by a single tile, the mod also supports smart movement options via different types of cursor skipping.
The usual form of cursor skipping makes it continue along the same line until it finds something different from before. By this logic, it is used to skip over empty ground, water bodies, ore patches, and large buildings.
As a more specific example, when placing down large objects in hand, the skip-cursor-by-preview mode is used. It shifts the cursor by the exact length or width of the object in hand so that it can be quickly placed in a repeating pattern.
As another example, you can skip along a transport belt until you reach the next intersection.
You can bookmark the cursor's position as a quick way to get back to a point that is temporarily interesting.
As a recently added feature, the player is able to specify a point as the center of an audio ruler, which then extends out four ruler lines into the cardinal directions. Whenever the cursor is moved next to or on top of a ruler line, the game plays a note. The ruler lines are hit also during cursor skipping. This feature allows players to navigate with respect to points they defined without needing to count or check coordinates. They are alternatives to visual markers in the world or on the map.
Note: Visual drawings of audio rulers is a planned feature.
In the mod, a building can either be dropped directly in front of the character, or it can be precisely placed using the mod cursor. When the building is held by the mod cursor, it is always held by its north west corner, for ease of use. This behavior may differ from the vanilla game and in any cases of visual mismatches the mod's cursor rules are the override.
Cursor rotation behavior cannot be directly read by the mod. Therefore the mod predicts the rotation behavior and acts accordingly. The mod is always consistent with the building rotation information that it reads out, but it can sometimes lose synchronization with the mouse pointer previews. This can be restored by using Factorio's own pipette tool, which guarantees synchronization.
When a previewed building is going to be placed, the mod automatically mines up expendable obstacles in the build preview area for you. These obstacles include trees, rocks, items on the ground, and remnants, but not built structures or structures that need to be removed using special tools.
The mod offers the option to nudge placed buildings to the side by 1 tile at a time, if the new spot is a valid building location. This is essentially the same as rapidly picking up and putting down a building one tile to the side.
In this mode, items are placed down behind the player as they walk or as they move the cursor. This is the alternative to rapid building by dragging the cursor using the mouse. The building previews are adjusted to match this.
Build lock mode can be combined with the large cursor to pave roads around the player as they run.
When you press SHIFT + X on an empty tile, this feature lets you instantly mine up obstacles like trees, rocks, and ground items within a 10 tile radius. It also clears away tree stumps and similar remnants. Hunting down the precise locations of these objects is time consuming without visual assistance and so this feature provides a shortcut for that.
This feature also exists for clearing away preview ghosts, with also a stronger version that clears ghosts in a 100 tiles radius.
The mod allows using planner tools such as the copy-paste tool and the blueprint planner using the mod cursor for area selection. This makes using the tools in the mod very similar to how they are in vanilla.
The mod allows building underground belt chutes without having to rotate the cursor. This clarifies the building process significantly because normally visual observation is used to build these structures easily.
In the mod, when you try to place an offshore pump near water, the game automatically find and lists valid locations, starting from those nearest to you. Upon selecting an option, the pump is automatically placed. This feature is an alternative to the visual overlay that shows which pump placements are valid.
Using Kruise Kontrol Mode, simple bulk actions such as building over ghost markers, removing marked buildings, chopping nearby trees, and mining ores by hand, can all be done autonomously. These are convenience actions. If the character does not have items on hand for filling in a ghost, they try to collect materials from nearby belts and craft the buildings autonomously.
The mod uses several audio menus as alternatives to the graphical menus. There are three broad types of audio menus:
- Some audio menus directly correspond to specific graphical menus and can be easily mapped. Example: Menus of buildings.
- Some audio menus cover a particular game feature but have a completely different way for it than the graphical menus. Example: Train schedule building.
- Some audio menus cover unique mod features and naturally they have no vanilla counterparts.
Audio menus have a limited amount of visualization that is intended for sighted players or sighted audiences. There is room for improvement here but it depends on having sufficient demand and maintainer availability.
In some cases, the corresponding graphical menu opens alongside an audio menu just for visualization purposes. In other cases, a simple menu icon is rendered on the screen to reflect the purpose of the audio menu. As another visualization feature, audio menus can have icons drawn onto the map, above the player's head.
Most audio menus support searching for single keywords to find matching items or menu entries.
Note: This section may contain inaccuracies. If you spot something wrong or out of date, please let us know on the Discord server.
The train menu of the mod gives information about the structure and contents and schedule of a train. In vanilla, this information can be obtained from visual observation and sidebar menus and the graphical train menu. Similarly, the train menu allows examining and editing train schedules like in the vanilla menu.
The mod currently allows you to build a basic train schedule in one click. It makes the train add all reachable train stations to its schedule with a predetermined waiting time. This is a simplified alternative to building complex train schedules with the vanilla graphical menu.
In vanilla mode, you can rename train stops from the graphical menu. The mod menu for them allows this tool.
In addition, the mod has advanced train schedule building features to the train stop menu. This is instead of the train schedule building options in the vanilla train menu. The idea is that you reach a train stop with a train and then at the stop you set its wait conditions.
This feature reads the next entity ahead along a rail. It is a simple alternative to visually observing what is ahead on the rail. The tool also gives precise distance information so that trains can be manually aligned with stations.
The vanilla rail planner tool is mouse-based and not accessible via scripts. Therefore the mod has its own rail building tools. You can place vertical or horizontal rail pieces freely, and then there are building menus to add curved rails, rail signals, train stops, rail forks, and the like. There is also the rail appender tool to simply extend forward an end rail.
In the mod, pairs of rail chain signals can be placed on straight rails. Signal blocks can be designed accordingly. Single units of chain signals or any number of regular rail signals cannot be placed freely. This means that one-way rails cannot be set freely, but the systems designed in the mod have a minimal likelihood for deadlocks. This is desirable because sorting through deadlocks requires visual problem solving and we do not yet have tools that would be alternatives to this.
Meanwhile, we have recently added rail bypasses as structures that can be built. The bypasses include one-way regular rail signals, and so the benefits of one-way rails can be accessed in a limited but deadlock-free manner.
The mod allows you to name every train so that you can easily tell them apart. This is the alternative to changing the color of a train in vanilla gameplay. It works by renaming every locomotive of a train to save the train name.
When you stand on or by a rail tile, this feature gives audio cues when trains are moving around you, towards you, or towards the rail near you. The audio alerts let you know that you should get off the rails. They work as an alternative to checking the map or observing the surroundings in order to see if a rail is safe for crossing.
The mod makes trains honk when you are manually driving towards a closed rail signal or when you are on a train that has other trains in its rail signal block. This serves as audio warning about possible train collisions, as an alternative to visual observation of trains and signals.
The mod release packages now include the mod Stop on Red by DaveMcW. The mod makes manually driven trains brake when approaching closed rail signals. This serves as a safety feature, as an alternative to visual observation of signals.
Note: This section may contain inaccuracies. If you spot something wrong or out of date, please let us know on the Discord server.
The mod has a driving system where the object ahead of you beeps at a frequency that explains how close it is. You are able to press a key to read out its name and distance from you.
This mod by Zaflis comes packaged with Factorio Access GitHub releases. When manually driving and enabled, the mod helps by snapping the car rotation to a cardinal or diagonal direction with precision.
This mod by azaghal comes packaged with Factorio Access GitHub releases. When manually driving and enabled, this mod makes the vehicle steer itself to stay on paved roads. The mod also adds various paved traffic signs to allow autonomous road driving. It also includes a constant speed driving mode that works off road as well.
Selecting a point with Kruise Kontrol will make the player autonomously drive to the point. Warning: The initial turn the car makes does not avoid obstacles within 10 tiles, so it is important to engage this mode while in a relatively open area or while facing the correct exit from the start area.
This feature has been added for cars and tanks for an enhanced audio experience.
Note: This section may contain inaccuracies. If you spot something wrong or out of date, please let us know on the Discord server.
Depending on how close a player is to the nearest enemy, an alert sound plays. This is an alternative to visually tracking enemies.
Some guns in the game automatically aim at enemies for you. Others allowed only shooting freely at the cursor. We have added automatic aiming assistance for all guns, and we added a sound cue to indicate when the aim has locked.
When a grenade or similar thrown weapon is used in the mod, it is automatically aimed at enemies within range while also maintaining a minimum safe distance from the throwing player, but not other players.
Using the integrated Kruise Kontrol mod, the player is able to specify an enemy and the character fights enemies in that area by themselves. The autonomous fighting is fairly efficient.
These audio alerts read out damaged or destroyed building locations, as an alternative to the visually drawn arrows and icons used to show damaged or destroyed buildings in the vanilla game.
This is an optional feature that allows rapidly reaching alert locations. It is an alternative to running straight to a location shown by visual maps.
This tool allows repairing all damaged structures within a certain radius in one action. It is an alternative to walking around and individually checking every structure for whether it needs repairs. Repair packs are consumed as usual, except for tiny repairs being made for free.
See also:
- Planet Nauvis
- Natural Resources
- Mining
- Furnaces
- Chests
- Inserters
- Transport Belt Basics
- Fluid Handling Basics
- Steam Power and Electric Grids
- Electric Poles and Grids
- Early Game Combat
- Pollution
- Enemies
- Labs and Technologies
- Assembling Machines
- Transport Belt Systems
- Paved Paths
- Blueprints and Planners
- Walls and Turrets
- Radars and Charting
- Cars and Tanks
- Trains
- Fluid Handling Systems
- Oil Logistics and Basic Processing
- Solar Power and Accumulators
- Modules
- Circuit Networks
- Armor Equipment and Guns
- Combat Robots