Factorio run from 1,250 floppy disks using custom Fluster filesystem

Pcgamer reports that a creator known as DocJade ran Factorio from 1,250 physical floppy disks, using a custom file system to make the game load from removable media.

DocJade wrote the Fluster file system in Rust and divided each disk into 512-byte blocks (2,880 blocks per disk), a scheme he says would scale to about 65,000 disks (roughly 90 GB). The project addressed capacity and cost challenges—double-sided floppies hold about 1.5 MB each, Factorio installs to around 1–1.5 GB, and older stock floppies can be expensive—and involved sourcing 1,250 AOL trial disks from floppydisk.com, wiping them manually (about a 10% failure rate), and applying 2,000 custom stickers. He initially worked on Windows but moved to Linux/WSL to make Fluster a FUSE file system, and after tuning cache strategies reduced disk swaps for loading from nearly half a million to roughly 1,500; loading the game still takes over a week, worked "sunrise to sunset."

Fluster currently lacks support for locked files, so the setup is not fully functional for every scenario, but pre-saved games can be launched and a YouTube video shows DocJade "beat" Factorio in a little under nine hours of play time. The Fluster file system has been open-sourced on DocJade's GitHub, and DocJade is 21 years old.

Key Topics

Tech, Docjade, Fluster, Factorio, Floppy Disk, Rust