Introduction#
Factorio is a sandbox automation and logistics game notable for, among other things, very good support for mods. The developers often go out of their way to support features and fix bugs that only affect mods.
I've only just started to dip my toes in the world of Factorio modding, so I'm definitely no authority on the topic. But this post will be about things that weren't obvious to me starting out.
Resources#
As I said, modding is very well supported, which includes comprehensive documentation and tutorials. One detail I'd call out is that I recommend installing FMTK, which provides IDE tooling for writing Factorio mods, including a VS Code extension (don't worry, there's a Vim mode for VS Code). Also you will probably spend a lot of time looking at the log file. Additionally, you can find lots of examples by looking at the many existing mods; a lot them have links to source code repositories from their mod pages, but even if they don't, you can just download them and unzip them.
If you have a question that can't be answered by those resources or a
web search, you can ask for help on the modding forum
or the #modding-help channel of the
official Factorio Discord.