A local AI companion for Factorio 2.1
Ask about your factory in plain words. Second Shift answers from your own game, draws its charts from the real production statistics, and only does what you could do yourself.
His name is Ballast — the pilot AI off the ship that brought you here, now riding in your helmet with no body, no ship, and a gift for manifests.
Runs on your Mac with a local model. Online voices are opt-in.
What it does on shift
Recipes, machine speeds and research are read from the game you're playing, mods and all, so modded recipes are right. The numbers are worked out in code, and the model explains them.
Ask for a rate and it lays out the machines, inserters, belts and poles for your research. Say “paste it here” and you get a card first. Nothing changes until you confirm, and your construction robots do the building.
Click Show the companion a build on your shortcut bar and drag over part of the factory. It counts what's there, checks whether belts and inserters keep up, and says what looks wrong.
Click Talk or press Alt+V, even from inside the game, and ask out loud. It stays on like a radio channel until you click Talk again.
Answers are read in a voice generated on your Mac, or in an ElevenLabs voice if you add a key — and then he acts his lines: a sigh, a dry aside, a sharp breath when the wall’s under attack. Read aloud, answers stay short. Talk over him and he stops; his own voice is cancelled out of the mic, the way voice chat does it. Voice input uses Chrome’s speech recognition, on your Mac after a one-time download.
Say what you’re about to build, in your own words: “a new smelting outpost — about 20 ovens, a couple hundred belt, enough arms to feed them and chests for storage.”
Press Alt+L for the same list on a panel in the game. It’s read-only on purpose: you show and hide it, and you change the list by asking. In range of your bots, “can the bots bring the rest?” puts the shortfall in a request section of its own — your own requests are never touched.
Hover something and ask. It answers from your game: what the thing is, how much it holds, which logistic job a chest does, how fast a belt runs, how far a pole reaches. Ask what’s inside and it reads the contents — chest, wagon, tank or a machine’s input.
If your mouse has moved on by the time you finish the sentence, it uses what you last hovered and says how long ago. And it sticks to what your game’s data says, telling you when the rest is base-game behaviour a mod could change.
“How many express belts are near me?” It counts them and highlights them in-game.
“Where are my 200 steel?” It adds up what you carry and the chests you can see, and says which is nearest.
“What rate is this really hitting?” reads the machines’ own craft counts and reports the real number.
“Walk my spidertron over to me.” Confirm the card; Alt+X or “stop” takes it back at once.
“Take a screenshot of this spot.” The picture shows up in the console.
Attacks, destroyed buildings and finished research arrive the moment they happen.
The helmet rule
It uses your tools, your reach and your map coverage, at the same cost in time and items. The mod checks every action when it runs. The companion never gets raw Lua or console commands.
Looking, counting, reviewing, screenshots, and small jobs you asked for.
Map changes: ghosts, deconstruction and upgrade marks, recipe changes. Anything it suggests on its own.
Real buildings from nothing, deleting, teleporting, spawning items, finishing research, seeing through fog of war.
How it works
One optional exception. Two judgement calls are ones code is bad at: which item in your save you meant when you wrote “ovens” on a list, and whether a hiccup in your factory is worth interrupting you for. Add a Jev key and those two are asked of it — typed questions, calibrated answers, about 150 ms — with the code that did the job before still sitting behind it, so no key or no network changes nothing. What leaves your Mac is narrow and stated: the words on your list, and the companion’s own findings. Never your questions, your microphone, your save or your game state.
Get started
Host the game. The companion connects to multiplayer-hosted games only: start a new one from Multiplayer → Host new game, or host a save with the launcher. Back up existing saves first; hosted games autosave.
# 1. get the code
git clone https://github.com/WilyToad/second-shift.git
cd second-shift && bun install
# 2. with Factorio closed
bun run setup-rcon
bun run link-mod
# 3. start oMLX with your model
# 4. host a game: Multiplayer → Host new game,
# or an existing save:
bun run launch -- "path/to/your-save.zip"
# 5. open http://127.0.0.1:5170
bun run startThe README has every detail, troubleshooting and the development guide.