🏭 Multi-Team Support

Same start. Different finish.

A Factorio 2.0 mod for cooperative and competitive multiplayer where each team races on their own copy of the world. Research independently, compare progress, watch your rivals, form alliances — all from one server.

Note on tooling: This mod is developed with AI coding assistants alongside human review and in-game testing. Bug reports, feature requests, and contributions are welcome from everyone. If AI-assisted development isn't your thing, that's fine — but please keep the hate off this mod's threads. And a gentle request: please don't be rude or disrespectful to the author on other platforms either. There's a human on the other side, don't be anti-human by being rude to them.

💬 Community

Join the Discord: **https://discord.gg/tWz4FT74pH**

✨ Features

Teams

🧑‍🚀 Numbered team pool — Forces pre-created as team-1 through team-N (configurable via startup setting, default 20). Team names are display-only and can be renamed via /mts-rename or the Teams panel.
👥 Multi-player teams — Buddy join lets multiple players share a team. Leader can kick and accept join requests; any member can leave.
🎨 Force colors — Always derived from the current team leader's player color.
🤝 Friendship — Two-sided requests between teams; mutual friendship shares chart and grants friend-view spectation.

🌌 Space Age Integration (auto-detected)

🪐 Per-team planet variants — When Space Age is active, each team gets their own full solar system. The vanilla 5 (Nauvis, Vulcanus, Gleba, Fulgora, Aquilo) plus any modded planets registered via data:extend or planet libraries like PlanetsLib (Maraxsis, Lignumis, Muluna, etc.) all get per-team variants automatically. No collisions on shared planets.
🛸 Per-team space connections — Whatever topology exists in the loaded mod stack is mirrored per team, so rocket launches and space platforms work per-team across vanilla and modded planets alike.
🔒 Base planets locked — Team forces only see/reach their own variants. Discovery techs unlock the team's variant, not the base. Detection scans for unlock-space-location effects on every loaded technology, so modded discovery techs route correctly regardless of naming convention.
📦 Falls back to surface-cloning when Space Age isn't installed — same experience, just no orbits.

🏆 Records & Announcements

🥇 Tech records — First team to research any tech gets an announcement. Subsequent faster researches (measured from each team's clock) broadcast new speed records.
📈 Milestone engine — Configurable production thresholds per category (science packs, landfill, space platform tiles). Edit milestones/config.lua to add more. Dynamic item discovery handles any mod combo.
⏱️ Team clock — Starts when the first member spawns; never resets. Makes speed comparisons fair regardless of when a team joined.
📢 Server announcements — New players receive a welcome with the Discord invite link; returning players get a welcome-back that includes their team name. A server-wide Discord reminder broadcasts every 6 hours. The URL is configured via Settings → Map → Discord URL (defaults to the community Discord; leave blank to disable).

🖥️ GUI Panels (top-left toolbar)

🗂️ Teams — Card per team showing the active research queue (up to 7 icons with live progress bars), a colour-coded last-active indicator with per-player playtime on hover, members (★ leader, online/offline, 🤝 friendship, 📡 Follow Cam per player) and surfaces (👁 Spectate).
📡 Follow Cam — Grid of live mini-cameras tracking individual players across planets. Click the 🔍 on any cell to expand into full spectator view; Esc returns with the grid intact.
🔬 Research — Tech icon grid ordered by research time. Click any team for a 1-on-1 diff.
📊 Production Stats — Per-team item production comparison with per-player item tracking and sortable columns.
🛠️ Admin Panel — Runtime feature flags, starter items editor, and team size limit. Toolbar button is admin-only.
👋 Welcome / Discord — Mod intro + Discord invite with scannable QR code.

🛬 Landing Pen

New players wait in a shared pre-game lobby until ready to spawn.
"Start a new team" or "Request to join" an existing team — other actions disable while a join request is pending.
Request flow and join/leave events announce to all connected players (only the leader can accept).
Withdraw a request at any time with the Cancel button.

⚡ Commands

/mts-teams — List all teams with leader and member counts, colored by team color.
/mts-players — List all players and their surfaces with GPS pings.
/mts-leave — Leave your team (confirmation dialog explains consequences).
/mts-kick <player> — Kick a player from your team (leader only, with confirmation).
/mts-rename <name> — Rename your team (leader only, 32 char limit, no duplicates).

⚙️ Compatibility

Requires Factorio 2.0 (base >= 2.0)
Space Age — optional; auto-detected and enables per-team planets + space connections when present
Compatible with Platformer
Generic terrain mirror — any third-party mod that decorates Nauvis via on_chunk_generated (and filters by hardcoded surface name) is automatically mirrored onto every team surface. The mod's handler runs once on the real Nauvis; MTS clones the resulting tiles, entities, and decoratives to each team's nauvis variant. Verified working with dangOreus, VoidBlock, Alien Biomes, and content mods like Periodic Madness. Trade-off: every team gets the same map (per-team randomization is sacrificed for zero-cooperation compat). See docs/COMPAT.md for details.
dangOreus — beyond the terrain mirror, MTS also reproduces dangOreus's runtime gameplay rules (block non-miners on ore tiles, spill containers on death, floor-is-lava damage) on team surfaces.
Factorio supports up to 64 forces. Without Space Age: up to 60 teams (64 minus 4 reserved built-in forces). With Space Age: capped at 20 due to per-team planet variant pre-creation.

🔌 For Mod Authors

Multi-Team Support exposes a public remote interface (mts-v1) and custom events so other mods can integrate cleanly without per-mod compatibility shims.

-- Subscribe to a custom event
if remote.interfaces["mts-v1"] then
    local id = remote.call("mts-v1", "get_event_id", "on_team_surface_created")
    script.on_event(id, function(event)
        -- event.surface_name, event.force_name
    end)
end

-- Query state
local owner = remote.call("mts-v1", "get_surface_owner", "team-3-nauvis")
-- → "team-3" or nil

Events: on_team_created, on_team_released, on_player_joined_team, on_player_left_team, on_team_surface_created.

Queries: get_team_list, get_team_info, is_team_surface, get_surface_owner, list_team_surfaces.

The interface name is versioned (mts-v1); breaking changes will ship as a parallel mts-v2 rather than mutating v1. See scripts/remote_api.lua for the full contract and payload shapes, and docs/COMPAT.md for the broader compatibility strategy (zero-cooperation event replay, the surface.planet.name upstream pitch, and when each layer is the right tool). If you maintain a chunk-gen or surface-modifying mod and need an extension point, open an issue.

📄 License

MIT