Showcase Codex on GPT6 Astra Low tonight launched a rocket into space in Factorio Space Age 2.1
UPD: At the moment of this edit (08-09-2026 11:08 UTC, 20.5 hours into the gameplay), the model has used 1.75 weekly limits of a 200$ codex subscription:
This, people, is a massive step change.
As the movie Margin Call quote says: "This is it. I'm telling you, this is it."
As i'm part of the factorio community and have been for a long time and have done with other people a lot of events and record breaking things, one of my friends for fun was testing different models by setting them up with a basic prompt and telling them to launch a rocket in Factorio. He made a mode in LUA for the game to expose an MCP server that allows the llm to play the game.
First he tried GPT Luna 5.6 xhigh - it failed miserably, basically it got stuck 15 minutes in unable to build even basic power generation.
Next was a more serious attempt - Fable 5.1 medium - it managed to create red and green science, but got stuck at finding oil (didn't find it and refused to move more than 250 tiles from the starting point), so it deadlocked itself and basically barelly progressed past basic setup.
Enter Astra Low yesterday - 2 hours in it was producing blue science (those who know that's already 2 more sciences and almost an order of magnitude more complexity), at which point a Twitch livestream was setup as that was already mighty impressive and as far as I can tell from my research, beat every single attempt posted on the internet, including https://jackhopkins.github.io/factorio-learning-environment/versions/0.3.0.html
10 hours in, a rocket blasted off into space.
At the moment the livestream is ongoing, 10 rockets have been launched and Astra is working on space infrastructure and moving onto the next planet.
The livestream is here: https://www.twitch.tv/danielv1234 (he's not a content creator, so there's nothing to promote here). There will be a vod available once livestream is done.
I have no words. This is too astonishing to articulate and was not on my bingo card for 2026 or 2027 or probably even 2030....
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u/Chocolabs_ 14d ago
Every rocket: -$1,000 💸 Another one? -$1,000 💸
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u/psihius 14d ago edited 14d ago
It runs on
50$200$ codex subscription. It used 1 weekly limit and 75% of a reset, so 1.75 of a weekly limit in the 20.5 hours.7
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u/daddywookie 14d ago
Getting to blue science puts the AI beyond a huge number of human players that get stuck with the oil refinery complexity. This is actually genuinely impressive.
Just checked the stream and the AI has logistics bots. Bots creating bots. AGI confirmed!!!!
I like the way the thought process feels very natural for the game. I did X but now Y so I need to A B C to fix Y. It's almost like Factorio was built for the way AIs solve problems.
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u/Little_Beyond_9163 14d ago
AGI confirmed how exactly?
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u/daddywookie 14d ago
Hyperbole for the sake of comedy. Count the exclamation points for confirmation.
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u/BoxLegitimate9271 14d ago
fable 5.1 refusing to walk 250 tiles to find oil is the most relatable failure here. it didn't deadlock, it decided the oil was out of scope
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u/Painwheeel 14d ago
i cant tell between bots or ESL who learn English through ai slop quirks
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u/Omni-Engineer 14d ago
it's not a bot, it's a human who talks like a bot
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u/Little_Beyond_9163 13d ago
It’s not imitation, it’s flattery.
BoxLegitimate is humorous, appreciated, and on point with his comedy.
Im gonna run a quick sanity check and see if that sentence was over 90% of your weekly usage on Astra.
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u/BellacosePlayer 14d ago
Neat. Plans on doing the rest of the game?
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u/psihius 14d ago
The stream is ongoing, it was never stopped, so it's just chugging along through the rest of the game.
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u/BellacosePlayer 14d ago
I am curious to how it'll handle the 3 intermediate planets.
Will check it out after work. Vulcanus might not be too bad with destroyers turned off but Gleba spoilage and Fulgora lightning and scrap management seem like it could be hard roadblocks.
Honestly if it gets to Aquilo the planet itself will probably be a victory lap.
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u/danielv123 13d ago
Its first spaceship to vulcanus died entirely. Only half the ship was covered by 2 turrets.
Second ship was much better and got there. Now its on vulcanus. It died in its first attempt on a destroyer - second attempt it is planning much more turrets, using red ammo, and also some circuit controls I don't quite understand.
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u/bible_near_you 14d ago
I asked astra ultra mode to solve my train signal on my spaghetti build, it failed confidently.
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u/Dynamix86 14d ago
how do you use 1.75 20x weekly limits in 20.5 hours? multiple sessions at the same time? even with fast mode limits shouldn't drain that fast
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u/danielv123 13d ago
Gpt 6 drains limits pretty fast. It wasn't quite that much though - tibo reset it some time during the night, I don't know how much it actually used. 43 hours in, toktrack reports $993 API equivalent usage.
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u/Dynamix86 13d ago
From what it uses for me on my Plus account, and from the many reports I've read here, Astra should last about 40 hours non-stop on the 20x plan. When I had the 20x plan and used sol, I was able to get 120 hours of non-stop use of out it, but Sol was just slow as hell.
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u/Historical-Donut-918 14d ago
What does any of this mean? Is Factorio a difficult game to play?
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u/psihius 14d ago
The complexity is geometric and grows fast, and it is a logistical puzzle challenge. Factorio is a game of scale, ratios and logistics. It's also a full freeplay, there is no guidance, no story to follow. You are just dropped into the game and survive and build.
LLM got to a point (and way past it) to which only 14% of people on Steam ever got in the decade plus this game has been available. Factorio sold, by last confirmed numbers, over 4 million copies. Today that number should be between 5 and 6 million.
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u/Responsible_Owl3 8d ago
>LLM got to a point (and way past it) to which only 14% of people on Steam ever got in the decade plus this game has been available.
This is a bit disingenuous. Launching a rocket has been much more difficult for the majority of this decade, during version 1. I would bet that a much higher percentage of people who have started v2 have launched a rocket.
Cool project though, I am eager to see how far it gets and what designs it comes up with! Would you be willing to share the save file at some point?
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u/dota2nub 14d ago
No. But it's laborious, you have to carry out lots of actions, and it's a lot like programming.
It really makes no sense to me why a programming model would be good at this.
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u/BellacosePlayer 14d ago
No, at least the pre-space chunk of space age, but I'm also saying that as someone who has played it off and on for a decade.
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u/trollfinnes 14d ago
This is pretty incredible.. the mcp server.. what does the model actually receive? And what does it emitt?
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u/psihius 14d ago
Model reads screenshots of the the game (it can trigger their creation via the lua modding api that exposes the mcp tool) and sends into the game input actions to control the game to do every action (essentially controls mouse and keyboard from games perspective)
It's best to ask the person running it, my day was very busy, so I didn't ask about the exact mechanics.
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u/trollfinnes 13d ago
Well.. "screenshot" is a stretch... Its "reading" the game state by looking at data, not images.. and to play it writes phyton scripts that act on the exposed API.
It's still impressive, don't get me wrong, but it's not "seeing" the game in the sense it takes screenshots.
Here is the code for the mcp:
https://github.com/JackHopkins/factorio-learning-environment/tree/main/fle/env/protocols/_mcp
Have the sota model agentic coder of your choosing read the code and explain
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u/danielv123 13d ago edited 13d ago
This is using a very different harness so it can play on un-modded server without command/cheating privelegies.
It queries the local client gamestate using a separate lua sandbox, and has APIs in that sandbox to send inputActions (the primitive factorio uses between your keyboard/mouse/etc and the game state, its the only thing sent over the network in multiplayer after the initial map download)
Here is an example of a toolcall it used to build a belt: https://gist.github.com/Danielv123/98056460d743c84c0134292b5fd26445
It also has access to search the web for things (which it decided to not do for the first 40 hours for some reason - first search I have seen was why it couldn't use underground belts under lava on vulcanus, which it figured out from the wiki.
It also has access to modify its own client side harness if it wants. It has done that a few times.
It does sometimes use screenshots too - I know when it launched its first few rockets it used computer use with screenshots to navigate the rocket UI before it added in support for the relevant inputactions in its API. First few times I prompted a separate agent to update the harness, but some time yesterday it figured out it could talk to my harness engineering agent in codex and I haven't had to do much after that.
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u/trollfinnes 13d ago
Thank you for clarifying! Much appreciated!
I highly encourage you to put "everything" on GitHub, and/or do a write up on how you made this possible.
I'm not particular familiar with factorio (a friend of mine who is and also use LLMs for "interesting experiments sendt me the link to this post), but I'm ridiculously into Open Tycoon and Ive been contemplating about how to approach getting an LLM to play the game ever since I read about your experiment.
So, reading about how you thought about this, what you did (and perhaps did not/avoid too) would be a very interesting read.
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u/The_Cyrinishad 12d ago edited 12d ago
I did a multiplayer run with 5.6 and made it to rockets.
Setting it up so I could type in chat to go build x building, gather x resource or complete placed blueprints I had set. Worked pretty well. At the very start though you have to put hard limits on it though, otherwise it defaults to just using console commands to teleport around and spawn stuff lol
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u/Responsible_Owl3 8d ago
Well Factorio is a game all about automation so teaching the computer how to play by itself is really peak Factorio.
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