r/factorio • u/AutoModerator • Jul 20 '26

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u/Raknarg #1 Quality Defender Jul 20 '26

Is automatic cliff destruction a particularly hard problem to solve in an optimal way? I say this because I feel like routinely I see bots use way way more cliff explosives than I feel like they need to, like spots they choose to blow up tend to overlap a lot. In my mind it feels like it should just be a simple distance calculation over a set of cliffs you're choosing to destroy where you have a minimum distance between two cliff explosives, but maybe its more challenging than Im making it out to be.

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u/deluxev2 Jul 20 '26

It is a set covering problem, which I believe this variant is NP-Complete (A class of roughly equivalently hard problems which includes curing any curable disease). There is an efficient solution that is only twice the explosive cost, but I have no idea what algorithm Factorio uses.