I recently designed a ship that reaches the shattered planet at 1000km/s , i posted it on youtube and reedit, it got a lot of attention (22k and 170k views respectively), i also saw at least 3 people trying to make high speed space ships to reach it. In both places i posted the achievement, i mentioned that i wanted to create a speed running leaderboard for this type of achievement, i and i received a lot of suggestions for it, here's how i would implement it:

How to measure time:

The timer starts from Nauvis (or it could start from the solar system edge) and ends when you reach the shattered planet. The final time would have to measured using In game-time (that is, considering the game always run at 60UPS), however i don't have a solid idea on how to do that, since there's no mod or setting that counts the IGT (that i am aware of), my best idea is to add a small physical decider combinator in all ships competing in this category that acts as a clock, counting the ticks from start to finish. Although I'm not sure how reliable that would be moderation wise.

Rules:

-You must not bring anything on the ship, this means, if anything takes damage or breaks, it will stay that way. Making a ship that goes fast, then breaks, then stops, then gets repaired, then repeat, is not fun.

-You must include a blueprint string of you ship in your submission (with factorio bin).

-The ship must be theoretically build-able on vanilla space age (w/quality), without any modded or cheated buildings (e.g infinity accumulator).

-You can use the editor mode to build, test, record and do the final run, as long as you don't interact with the ship in that last one.

-Your ship can be "warmed up" before starting the run, that means, full of asteroids, fuel on the thrusters and ammo on the belts, however you must not abuse this rule by adding massive buffer of finished goods (e.g massive belt buffer/storage of ammo).

This is because most ships in this scale are designed to have hundreds of asteroids of input/sec, and quick starting them for the first time (until it can go at full-speed) can normally take hours.

-You must include a video of the entire trip that clearly shows the ship working (zoomed in), it can be a time-lapse.And in the end, you must prove you don't have any cheated buildings in your ship and show off your infinite tech levels.

I am not sure if that is a good rule, since while it would simplify moderation on the category, it would definitely raise the bar for entry, since not everybody has the storage, time or will to make a multiple hour video of their ship flying. Alternatively, the moderation could be done by manually testing if the blueprint attached can reach the shattered planet.

Adding a cap to infinite technology

This is the biggest variable to decide on. If we don't impose a cap in infinite technology, any ship with a single gun turret could reach the shattered planet with a high enough tech level (since I'm allowing building and testing in the editor), i received a lot of suggestions on this problem, many agreed that there must be a tech cap. One guy suggested a "infinite technology level point system", in witch you would spend a limited amount of "points/ levels" to research infinite techs, like a RPG.

In my opinion, the technology cap should be based on what levels of tech are achievable in different sizes of factory, this would need to be agreed on by the community,but i am thinking:

in number of science packs used for the last level of each relevant infinite research (the stronger explosives tech should be double the others tough, since its the most important): Small space age base: 200k science requirement max, Medium space age base (in my opinion this should be the most competed category)1M science requirement max, Mega-base, 1 billion science requirement max, Uncapped science level category, No infinite researches category.

Obviously these are just suggestions, there is no need to add categories for each of them.

This isn't a "real speedrun", but it should be added

If you consider a speedrun, a raw measure of player skill/swiftness, this isn't it. This category would be more of a Shattered planet ship designs leaderboard than an speedrun, but i don't think that designing such a ship would be less impressive than a speedrunning world record. If there's one speedrunning community that would embrace this "less raw player speed, and more of smart designing" leaderboard, it's definitely this one, since it would fit in with the 'iterating on designs" aspect of the factorio community.

And yes, i think a speedrun.com leaderboard is essential for this specific "category", just so any factorio player can quickly answer (without depending on unreliable internet searches) the question that we all had at some point: How fast can you travel to the shattered planet?

Hey CleitoDoKiwi, thanks for the suggestion.

Indeed I have seen the video being mentioned and its a great feature of work. Thanks for sharing. Important indeed is what rules are going to be imposed, and you have already put a lot of thought into it. Thank you for this. On the "this isn't a readl speedrun" topic, I would say, "why not". You give valid reasons and designing is a large part of most speedruns. This category will just have a lot of downtime.

As for making it a speedrun category, yes this is possible, but note that categories are usually added if there is enough interest. I can bring this topic up in the Factorio speedrun discord (team steelaxe) or you can do so yourself, to gauge the interest. Also the rules for the category can be discussed here.

Let me know what you prefer (me or you suggesting the category), and if you are not in yet feel free to join the team steelaxe discord :-)

Hope this helps. Kind regards,

Frabj

Hey Frabj, Thanks for the reply

I didn't know i needed to post this on discord, i have now entered it, but i would rather let you bring it up, since i am not super into Factorio speedrunning (as i mentioned, this ain't a traditional "speedrun") and i don't know how would i bring it up , however, i will keep an eye for any questions or problems in the discord regarding this category.

As for the interest, i honestly think a lot of people would like to see the world record ships, and a few might even try to design them, in my record i am definitely not pushing the limits, there's a lot to be improved upon (and you bet that if someone tries to take my record, I will keep competing). However, i don't know if a lot of people will know about this category, since it's not intuitive for it to be in speedrun.com. If it turns into a real speedrunning category, I will definitely make a reedit thread, to raise awareness.

Allright, I will bring up the topic, however I will need to make you a speedrunner in order to have you follow the discussion ;-) Please DM me via discord then we can arrange it whilst I chat with the other moderators

Very interesting idea CleitoDoKiwi. I agree with you that the appropriate description should be something like "design challenge", instead of "speedrun". You design a very fast ship and pretty much let the game run it. All current runs are heavily pre-designed too, but they still have an actual "run" element that needs to be executed fast. In your idea there is (as far as I understood it) not really a real player part during the actual running of the ship. Meaning that you should be able to reproduce the same time by just loading the ship and letting the game run it.

Maybe there could be a case to make an addition of "design challenges" similar to the "category extensions" that harbour all the design challenges that the community wants to compete in. That would make it clear, that they are a totally different subset of categories we are talking about. Especially because Factorio is a game where you can create crazy optimized designs to achieve pretty much any goal under certain imposed restraints.

This is a really cool achievement and blows my ~4h40m time out of the water!! I've thought about this as a speedrun, too, but it's really hard to come up with good rules because what if I spend 1000 hours farming really advanced tech before starting "the run" to the shattered planet? My platform like yours must be, is almost entirely built of legendary quality. Surely the time to research and build the platform should count. And so it makes sense to make this a design challenge with /editor (which I think is still an interesting idea), but the tech levels (in terms of science and perhaps entity) need to be constrained to some level.

There are some other ideas as well, such as "weight class," having divisions for stacked vs non-stacked thrusters, asteroid density, and so on. Max asteroid density could be this challenge's equivalent to deathworld, how fun. :)

Personally, I would love to take part in this and think it's a very cool challenge.

@InSomnia_DrEvil

In your idea there is (as far as I understood it) not really a real player part during the actual running of the ship. Meaning that you should be able to reproduce the same time by just loading the ship and letting the game run it.

Yes, you understood the ideia perfectly!

Maybe there could be a case to make an addition of "design challenges" similar to the "category extensions" that harbour all the design challenges that the community wants to compete in.

Yes, now that i think about it, that's a wonderful idea to differentiate this category from the normal speedrunning categorys, however, i can't think of another "production/design category that can be measured by time"(if you get what i'm saying) for the category you mentioned. So if there's only going to be this category on your "drop-down categorys", i don't think it's worth the trouble to add it, so maybe it's better to just put it in the name, so the name o fthis category could be:

"Design Challenge: Fastest space ships to reach the shattered planet"

@thedoh

There are some other ideas as well, such as "weight class," having divisions for stacked vs non-stacked thrusters, asteroid density, and so on.

Yea, i think "weight classes" and "max asteroid density" subcategorys would be a good ideia, i also tought of a "no quality/ common quality" subcategory, in the end, the moderators will decide if it will happen or not. (i don't think a non stacked thrusthers category should be a thing, since that just adds a cap to the max velocity of the space ships, since the speed calculations cancel out the amount of thrusthers with the width of the ship)

Personally, I would love to take part in this and think it's a very cool challenge.

Thanks, we really need more people to be interested in this so this category becomes a reality!

Hey guys, the moderators said this category can't be classified as a real speed-run, not because it's a bad idea, but because it's just not a raw test of player speed! I am fine with that, and from the start i knew that could happen, so they gave me an idea to make a tournament about this! And i will do exactly that, stay tuned!