The factory factory

I was really into Minecraft when it first came out, as were most people I knew. These days it seems to be mostly popular among kids, but back then everyone played it. The game had no goals, no achievements, no storyline, and in that it was particularly elegant, but it did mean you were kind of limited by whatever you could come up with. I enjoyed that for a while, but eventually the end of Minecraft, like the end of all open world games, was just getting bored and finding something else to do.

Much later a friend showed me his heavily modded Minecraft server. "Hey, check it out", he said, "this is way better than the vanilla game". Indeed, the mods added some kind of alchemy system, lots of new materials and, most importantly, factories. The factories allowed you to craft things automatically which, along with the rest of the features, made it altogether possible to build an entire supply chain. Materials could be automatically extracted, farmed, or mined, then sorted, conveyed to the appropriate machinery, crafted into other materials, and so on.

The problem with all of this was that all this equipment took a lot of materials to produce. All the machinery had to be made from parts, which were themselves made from resources that needed mining. So the first order of business was to make the machinery to make more machinery. But that needed resources, so I made machinery to extract the resources, which required more machinery to make that machinery. And then I kept running out of electricity, so I built machines to make more solar panels, which meant more machinery, which meant more solar panels...

I never really did finish my factory factory. I mean, it certainly produced a lot of parts to make itself bigger and better, and it did get incredibly large and sophisticated, but it didn't ever do anything beyond perpetuating its own existence. It was a machine optimised for optimising itself, and little else.