Factoonio – A cartoon art mod for Factorio
Factoonio – a cartoon graphics overhaul mod
Factoonio turns the normally dirty and grimy factories into vibrant and colourful cartoons, reminiscient of popular Saturday morning shows. The mod is currently a work-in-progress and not yet available to download.
The goal has always been brightening the vanilla experience with a cartoonish artstyle focused on simplifying details, adding colour and distinguished palettes, and adding fun into your factory-building experience. Factoonio is purely an art overhaul mod for Factorio with no changes to gameplay.
Coordinating a messy factory with colour and shape
While making everything colourful and saturated is the primary goal, half the reason why I started Factoonio was to help improve Factorio’s visual accessibility. Many vanilla items and structures are a simple recolour of something else and can make it more difficult to recognize machinery.
When revisiting many items, the idea was to make everything more unique by adding new parts or change the shape. The benefits are not just for those with colourblindness or other visual impairment, you may notice more even when zooming the camera out. You can read more about it in a Factorio Forums post.
You will also notice more colour-coordination between structures of a similar nature, helping distinguish orange mining equipment from assembling machines with purple-highlights from blue power generators. A factory has multiple different components, and it helps to be able to identify each part easier. Especially in a spaghetti build.
A factory looks like a whole while also letting you identify similar parts.
Factoonio versus vanilla comparisons
All art in Factoonio is handmade without the use of AI. Either by me or HideBoar, who helped with their chibi engineer artwork and some research icons.
What is included in the mod?
The goal was to repaint all of base Factorio in a new coat of paint. Everything in the world, all the items, and your enemies are planned to be given a new cartoonish appearance. This does not include Space Age or any mods. There are two reasons for this.
First, I don’t want to think about how much work it would take to handle Space Age. Factorio had yet to launch when I started on Factoonio. I knew it would be a massive endeavour rethinking every machine and creature, let alone handling many thousands of images, some with dozens of individual animation frames. I’m not eager to multiply the work across multiple planets.
Second, Space Age takes many sprite-based graphics to a different technical level, piecing together one machine with many smaller animated sprites. What they have achieved is impressive, but this baked in mechanical behaviours and makes it less fun to rethink how something would work as a wacky cartoon imagination and more difficult to work around.
How does Factoonio work?
Factorio’s art is a collection of images, not models. With the help of a modified version of the TextureBase mod, these images are being replaced with new images with the cartoon look. There are no gameplay changes in the mod and it should not affect the performance of any factory.
A number of people have helped with the mod in many ways from artwork to setting up workflows to working with TextureBase. Without their help, the mod would not have been able to get this far.
When will it come out?
The mod is not currently available for download. A first release is being worked on for 2027.
Factoonio has been worked on since 2019 and has a lot of coverage of the base game. Yet, there are still thousands of images that need to be addressed.
Plus, the Factorio mod portal’s size limits are not accommodating to art overhaul mods, so the assets will need to be optimized before uploading.
Progress has been steady over the years, but there is still lots to do. You can find the occasional progress update on social media.
