State of run: 20 minutes deep, starter iron covered, expanding north

Speedrun planning can be incredibly complicated and Factorio doubles down on this by making every previous decision continually impactful for the duration of the run. Tool assisted speedruns (TAS) become even more specific & precise. Theis maintains a Factorio TAS helper mod, already helpful in building Zaspar's Any% TAS and Ameateye's Steelaxe TAS.

Now Omni has undertaken a TAS project for the significantly more complicated Factorio speedrun category of Default Settings. (Not a completely random map seed, but hey.) My goal here is to centralise planning & speculate on high level milestones, timings, build sizes, etc, to help determine in wide vague terms what this DS TAS might develop into.

At best this is a collection of descriptions so we don't have to continually scroll up through Discord. The most up to date information on the actual gameplay of the Factorio DS TAS will be either the TAS channel on the Factorio speedrun Discord, or Omni's Twitch channel.

What this post is not

This is not a specification of/for the DS TAS build, nor is it an immutable reference, nor is it necessarily up to date. It's also not community agreement of any preferred plan, though I will try make updates where/if such convergence appears.

It's also not really about TAS-specific tech or tricks like belt manipulation for boosting movement speed. That stuff is cool and important and maybe turns up in replies, but I'm intending here to summarise size, speed, layout & timings of the constructed base. Wide routing concerns like what order to visit which mining patches.

So I've tinkered with Rocket Rush, and on Default Settings it doesn't seem that far from a Wave Defense run. There's a bit more steel for a silo, fine, otherwise the same three-copper-lanes Wave Defense base does about enough.

So there might be at least two interesting directions to take a Rocket Rush speedrun. Firstly, an open map settings / chosen seed deal like Any%. It'd be another race of execution & detail, but with a completely different base design. Also personal roboport mechanics.

I've gone the other way: further into resource constraints & combat, with Rocket Rush Death World Marathon. There's the novelty of speedrunning expensive recipes, the dramatic risk of Deathworlds immediately sending you big spitters, both pleasantly offset by the shortcuts & generosity of Rocket Rush.

With a few ideas but no real plan I first got 2h 49m 32s. I now have a plan, but not a design, and my most recent 2h 19m 54s is still deeply suboptimal. There's a lot of improvement left to enjoy, it's still early. But it's a viable thing to do, which is still speedrunning Factorio, but again different.

Conclusion: Rocket Rush Death World Marathon is a pretty accessible (or race-able) three hours, people play three hours of Factorio all the time.

So I see this has turned up before. Once again a new user with no existing runs appears to discuss new categories, specifically Wave Defense and Rocket Rush. Perhaps this time it goes differently, since I can already show runs of WD - my best so far is just under 90 minutes - these scenarios do some pretty weird stuff, links at the end. I was expecting RR to be fast, but I wasn't really expecting WD to end up a faster rocket than Any%. These are the sorts of surprises I enjoy.

Reading the previous threads, it does seem that WD & RR are already appreciated for their strangeness & strategic variety, just, not actively run. Disadvantages of Wave Defense and Rocket Rush as introductory / gateway categories vs Steelaxe and Gotlap:

• Not doing research isn't very Factorio
• No achievements granted in scenarios
• Freeplay is "the intended way of playing Factorio"
• Starting with a bunch of free stuff is crazy, the bases end up weird

But also, things that WD and RR do as introductory / gateway categories better than Steelaxe and/or Gotlap:

• Steelaxe and Gotlap don't teach you to kickstart a base, just burner city (though WD and RR aren't "normal" base kickstarts either)
• Burner city is necessary but not fun, WD and RR start with the fun (subjective, yes)
• WD and RR still get a rocket up, teaches buffers & mixed builds, still build petrochem, very Factorio
• Starting with a bunch of free stuff means wide strategic landscape
• Wube called it Rocket Rush so probably they want it done fast

So, I reckon they're pretty interesting & accessible, and worthwhile having alongside Steelaxe and Gotlap. All that said, the real question is a/ whether anyone cares enough to run WD or RR, and b/ whether the resulting runs do anything interesting worth watching. For (b) I offer runs of Wave Defense on Normal:

• in 1h 41m 44s
• in 1h 36m 13s
• in 1h 32m 45s
• in 1h 29m 42s

(I'm not currently recording game sound, the 1h 32m run includes some includes retrospective diagnostic narration.) I'm looking at these with a ruleset closely aligned to DS - only 1 player, random seed, no imported blueprints, timer goes from map preview to rocket launch victory message. Normal difficulty for WD, Default Settings for RR, but maybe we loop back to RR in a bit once I (or anyone else) has rockets going up.

These are certainly different to "normal" categories of Factorio runs, maybe they're even interesting.

(With appologies to Bilka and others who might be getting multiple notifications as I read the markdown docs and figure out formatting my lists correctly and making links link instead of embed.)