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I Brought Factorio To Life

September 5, 2026 · 2 min · 25k views

I built a working Factorio factory, in real life, and it lives on my desk. The inserters move, the belts run, and the display on top shows my actual YouTube subscriber count. Every time someone subscribes, the whole thing wakes up. A tiny play button gets picked up, rides the belts around the loop and gets dropped off, while the laser turrets keep watch for biters that never show up.

This is the short, no-talking version of the project. It's two minutes of the diorama doing its thing, with no voiceover. I built it a few months ago to teach myself electronics. The full build video (linked below) is 28 minutes of me frying servos, missing a solder jumper on the motor controllers and hunting a loose ground wire, and it has every mistake I made along the way.

The electronics

This build taught me the basics I was missing: how to drive motors from a microcontroller without cooking them when they stall, why 360 degree servos belong on belts and 180 degree servos on inserters, and how to switch an electromagnet on and off so an inserter can actually let go of what it picked up. The display dimmed every time the motors moved. A capacitor across the power rail settled it, straight out of the book.

The paint

3D-printed parts look printed until you paint them. Everything got black paint, fifty shades of sponged gray, green grime and the signature dirty Factorio yellow on the turrets and inserters. A gritty factory is supposed to be covered in dust and oil, which conveniently hides a questionable paint job. Static grass and dirt went on last, and that's when it stopped looking like a pile of printed parts.

It still runs

What I like most is that it still runs on its own. The ESP32 inside watches my subscriber count through the YouTube API. The first time a real person subscribed while it was running, it came to life and scared the crap out of me.

Watch it

Watch it on YouTube.

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