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Reversing Factorio's RNG

41 points jheitmann 4 days ago 4 comments

pema99 3 days ago | parent

Super cool

jvanderbot 38 minutes ago | parent

Yeah, no notes. It's remarkable.

TL;DR: Wired up an in-game predictor of RNG output and used it to only craft legendary items when RNG would line up to roll legendary.

From base to legendary at a suprisingly high rate. Look very closely at the video at the top of the post - what I was seeing didn't sink in until I had finished the article. Amazing.

lowbloodsugar 34 minutes ago | parent

Madman. Brilliant.

strstr 11 minutes ago | parent

I did an easier version of this in my college intro class. There was a class competition that involved rock paper scissors as a subcomponent, and ties were broken with randomness. You could rig Java’s prng so you would win all ties.

The prng was seeded with usec time at first call. I called the rng a bunch of times to harvest entropy, and scanned the plausible usec times to find the seed. Then I primed the prng so I would win ties.

Frankly, I assume I implemented this wrong, but the theory was there lol.