Factorio Space Exploration Foenestra Anomaly
Ladies and gentlemen of my blog...
I have discovered an anomaly within the very internet itself.
I simply can't find the answer to this extremely difficult puzzle.
Is it actually possible that nobody has spoiled it yet?
Perhaps I will be the first turd in the punch bowl.
But first: I need your help, fam.
I can't solve this on my own.
It's too difficult and I have no patience.
Let us crowdsource and cheat this one a bit.
The Precursor
Skip this section and head directly to "THE PUZZLE" if you don't care about what it takes to get here and just want to help with the solve. This will undoubtedly take a while to explain. 1500 words in fact.
In the game of Factorio there is an extremely difficult and challenging mod called Space Exploration. Within this mod one MIGHT come across the anomaly. Maybe. The condition for finding it involves researching Deep space zone discovery enough times, which normally will just reveal another asteroid field on the interstellar map, but at a certain point will reveal the Foenestra Anomaly. Many players never even discover the anomaly because the game can easily be completed without doing that much scrying. Those who do find it don't necessarily have to travel there or attempt to solve it. That outcome is quite common.
Insane requirements
By the time the player even gets to this point hundreds of hours have already been allocated to a single save file. The anomaly is extremely extra, and I'd like to solve it because it's a fun little Easter egg (and potentially even an alternate ending if the portal takes you back home... which I believe it does).
For context my current save file is up to 637 hours played, which is obviously insane. Did I walk away from the game and let the simulation run on its own? Sure, many times. Still, that strategy isn't helpful if the base needs infrastructure or an error occurs that needs to be fixed manually. I can pretty much guarantee that at least 400 of those hours involved me actively playing the game.
Probably more.
It's an insane time commitment to say the least; longest single-player experience I've ever played by far. At this point I've done all the things and completed the win condition, and the only thing I never got around to was Space Elevators and implementing trainyard logistics in space. Considering dabbling with that later if I ever find time for the end-end game stuff. No promises.
Anomaly: first look.
Getting to the anomaly is weird. The player sets a course in the spaceship console as usual and everything looks good. The console reads the ship will arrive there in x minutes, with x usually being something like 5-7 min. However, the anomaly doesn't appear on the interstellar map, and the second the ship in question leaves the current star system it disappears and the ship's sensors go haywire. Every few seconds the console will change the estimated time it will take ranging from 2 minutes to potentially hours. It doesn't take long to actually get there but is a jarring experience.
Rift in spacetime.
Even if the player doesn't want to solve the riddle, the anomaly does have one extremely important practical attribute. Visiting the anomaly always takes the same amount of time no matter where you are. This makes it possible to automate long distance voyages that would normally take 1-2 hours and cut that down to something like 10 minutes by using Foenestra as a shortcut.
This ship has seen better days.
Upon entering the anomaly the player stumbles upon a destroyed Goliath sized mega ship; a ship so big and impractical it would be silly to even consider repairing and using (assuming one even has the technology to allow functionality at that time, which they don't). There are a couple of useful items on the derelict vessel, and stripping it for parts can be highly valuable depending on when it's found. For the most part we can see that I left mine to sit as a relic, although I did remove many advanced accumulators and solar panels. That being said a ship this big could be used to build at least 4 actually useful vessels and then some if the situation warranted it.
The other thing the player finds are the remains of something else entirely.
Clearly circular in nature and completely alien looking compared to everything else in the game, the player can pick up the pieces and put the stargate back together.
The fully completed gate looks something like this:
Simply getting to this point is a massive pain in the ass.
First, a couple of rare items must be deposited into the console to repair it.
This is a one-time fee (which I wish I had known in advance).Then you find out the console needs power; a lot of power; 10 Gigawatts of power in fact. For a frame of reference a mining outpost on a moon might draw 0.4 GW (400 MW) of power. My inefficient main base draws less than 2 GW, and my extremely inefficient orbital research center draws less than 6 GW. To make things worse the anomaly sucks up light an energy, so the 10 GW requirement can't be reasonably fulfilled with with solar panels or advanced energy beam emitters (basically lasers in orbit around a star).
The grind continues
- Once the 10 gigawatts of power are provided with a local anti-matter powerplant the gate turns on for the first time. Runes light up the gate and the player finally feels like they're getting somewhere. That's when the realization kicks in that there are still THREE MORE prerequisites to achieve before the gate becomes fully operational.
This thing doesn't come with instructions.
The only clues are these 3 tiny symbols.
The middle one is the easiest to figure out. The gate itself has eight inputs for supercooled thermal fluid and eight outputs for room-temperature fluid. The first and easiest step is to import some fluid and then set up a cooling station to keep the device from overheating.
The anchor symbol at the top isn't too difficult to figure out either because a new research option is unlocked at this point. It's aptly named "Dimensional anchor".
These anchors need to be built in orbit around a star. It seems like no problem at first until it's revealed that powering one of these things requires 60 GW of energy. Hot damn, and we thought the 10 GW powering the console was a lot! Luckily this device is in orbit around a star which means that powering it with solar is the favored option, as a solar farm that close to the source gets an x15 bonus. Our very own Dyson Sphere.
60GW solar farm blueprint
Turns out that it requires 40000 scaffolding and 2500 level 3 solar panels to generate 60GW of power at any given star. This is pretty damn expensive but also this late in the game when there isn't much else to do it works out fine. Level 2 panels are half as effective but would almost certainly be cheaper in a pinch, especially if the player is short on the end-game resource [naquium].
So what happens when the player finally turns on the dimensional anchor? Only one of the eight notches in the console turns green (yellow if it's underpowered). Soon after this they come to the realization that not only are eight dimensional anchors required to power the alien stargate, but also all eight must be anchored to different stars. Woof!
XOR laser/anchor latch
60GW x 8 is a lot of power, and I figured it would be a waste to constantly power the dimensional anchors when I wasn't working on the puzzle. I'm particularly proud of this blueprint I made due to its simplicity and simultaneous utility. With the flip of a switch (on site at the anomaly itself) one can turn off all 8 dimensional anchors at the same time.
This in turn flips on 8 space lasers (energy beams) at eight different locations throughout the quadrant, each with 60GW worth of raw power. These emitters can be used for two things: beaming energy to remote locations (or even high-tech ships) and as a weapon to kill literal bugs (that represent metaphorical programming bugs) on the surfaces of hostile planets. Entire planets can be completely purged of biters using this automated arsenal.
The third and final requirement
After all that setup there is still one more thing to do. What could it be? The icon looks like a... target?
Personally it took me a while to realize that the eight selectors on the stargate can be manually pushed. This does three things.
- Lock in the current rune into the selected socket.
- Turn 1 of the red dashes on the meter to green.
- Costs another 10 GW of power per socket.
So now, after all that, the stargate needs yet an additional 80 GW of non-solar antimatter power so that all 8 selectors can be active and the entire console will finally display all green. Only after all this is completed can we even begin to guess the correct order of symbols to input into the gate.
1500 words later...
Your mission, should you choose to accept it...
THE PUZZLE
Entering random coordinates into the stargate most often results in a portal being opened and bugs spewing forth from it. Every once and a while it throws an error and does nothing. I have no idea why it throws the error sometimes but not others, but it might be significant.
Portal statistics
There are 64 symbols total and eight get picked during any given trial. Assuming the answer doesn't use the same symbol twice, that would be 64-choose-8 combinations, which equates to 4.4 billion different arrangements. Allowing repeat runes is even worse, with 64!/56! evaluating to over 178 trillion permutations. Either way guess and check is certainly not an option. Although it should be noted that the order in which the symbols are chosen does affect the outcome, which eliminates combinatorial math. There are almost certainly trillions of options for this lockbox.
One of the first and most obvious clues given for how to solve this thing involves a new research ability that allows the player to find the "Standard Vector" coordinates of various constellations that exist within other galaxies. Lo and behold the symbols in the stargate aren't random at all but rather translate to the locations of very far away and hard to reach places.
The "Standard Vector" format being referenced and cataloged appears to be unit vectors. Each of these vectors have a length of one, and based on the language of them being derived by "background radiation" I tend to assume that these coordinates can pinpoint the location of any galaxy within the universe based on a globe model, just like Earth.
This means that even though the universe is three dimensional in nature, we can think about it as two dimensional surface just like Earth. Just ask Google Maps. We can't get to the center of the universe just like we can't get to the center of Earth. The difference is that the center of Earth is an iron core whereas the center of the universe is the Big Bang.
Everything inside the globe of the universe exists within a previous point in history as the universe continues expansion. Only the surface exists as a place we can get to and actually exists. Seeing as the universe has been expanding for over 13 billion years it's safe to say that the size of it doesn't really change much over the course of small time periods (like the lifespan of living things). Thus it somewhat makes sense to represent the present time with a unit of one.
Unfortunately this information isn't very useful without both knowing where we want to go and what kind of mathematical function the eight data points actually perform.
Reading the corrupted log of the derelict ship.
In the vanilla version of the game there is zero explanation as to where the stranded shipwrecked engineer comes from. This log heavily implies that the entire purpose of being in this distant galaxy was to study the anomaly in the first place. In fact the log even seems to make a couple of "jokes".
First, it talks about needing to immediately provide "Level 90 or above" authentication or be "immediately destroyed". Yikes, sounds serious. Then, it notes the need to manual override and force the ship to jump into an area that doesn't have a return hypergate, implying that the journey was always supposed to be one-way.
The anomaly also exists within the "Wube Galaxy" which is a reference to the creators of the game (Wube Software). To top it off the computer throws a warning to the user about there being no insurance contracts available for "gateless materialization". After this the log describes the collision with the Stargate and subsequently the users employing a prospecting vessel as an escape pod to reach the nearby planet of Nauvis, which is where the game begins as a crash-landing. Thus it is heavily implied that the derelict ship was also controlled by the engineer (amnesia be damned).
The one noteworthy thing within the log as it pertains to the puzzle is that the coords of the anomaly itself are [0.4468, 0.8920, 0.0678]. Whether or not this will end up being useful is unclear but surely knowing where we are in the first place may end up being a requirement. It all depends on how the stargate actually works.
Testing out the stargate to compare the inputs against the outputs hasn't yielded many results yet, but also I haven't been trying terribly hard considering the difficulty of this problem. At first I was thinking it was simple vector addition but that doesn't seem to be the case.
I spent like 15 minutes yesterday Googling for the answer to this thing and I was absolutely floored that I couldn't find it in that time. What I did learn is that several pyramids/temples I found scattered on random planets (not moons) contain clues for how to solve it. I had no idea it was possible to walk inside them until finding this hint on Reddit. Oops.
Inside the temples
So yep...
I suspect there are a couple dozen more temples out there that I haven't screenshotted yet but it doesn't matter much when I have no idea what to do with the ones I've got. It's very unclear as to why there are 11 galaxies around a single focal point, and the weird triforce number system is even more convoluted. Anyone got an idea?
Conclusion
Considering it takes 500 hours playing Factorio SE to even get to this point, I have to conclude that this is one of the most involved and complicated puzzles of all time. I'm definitely not looking to solve it on my own by deciphering a secret number system, so if anyone has any insight feel free to leave it down in the comments. Otherwise I'll keep a lookout online for a spoiler or ask for help in the SE Discord. Maybe AI knows the answer.