Factorio

(DISCLAIMER: this part is from my not very good memory) i got the demo of factorio (the single big world before the current campaign) and really liked it and explored the whole map, but i (of course) eventually got bored at the end and kind of forgot about it for a while. a year or two later, i found it again and downloaded a version (1.1.19 i think) that had the current demo maps. i played through that demo as well and got to the end.
it was then when i started to do dubiously legal things.
i inspected the campaign world zip file and found the lua files that control the allowed researches but didn't know what the names of the other researches were. i eventually found the various lua files in data/base/ and somehow figured out how to get the names of all the researches. (i think i was like 11 and i didn't know how to program very well so i just copied the names from one file into another)
i played until where the end of the demo would be and realized there was no oil. so i went "i know! i'll use coal liquefaction and supply a bunch of heavy oil at the start!" i don't remember how far i got but i don't think i launched a rocket. i got bored again and found mods. i didn't know how the mods were supposed to be loaded, but i found a page somewhere (probably the factorio wiki) that had info about the data lifecycle, so i manually resolved dependencies and requires and had my first "modded" factorio.
i ran into several problems though, like absolute requires (the __mod__ kind and the ones that are absolute from the mod root) and later, events. i had to go through every occurrence of require and script.on_* and fix them. the requires were simple, just write the correct path, but the script.on_*s were harder. i eventually found a file in core that can do all the work (except for event filters) and used "hacks" to make it work. after all that, i had a working "modded" demo of factorio. i don't remember the mod / modpack it was though. :(
then after a few months of making modded demos with different mods, i forgot about it again (i think). i eventually found it yet again and made a python script to do some of the processing for me (fixing requires and script.on_*).
and i got more mods and factorio 1.1.72. around this time, i got space exploration and really liked it. the wiki was kind of empty though, so i decided to write a script to fix that!
(this is the part where i have actual info about the dates)
i first uploaded it to github in jan 2023, and worked on it up until aug/sep 2023. it was called SEAutoUpdate and it could handle recipes and basic items (like iron plate and energy science, but not gun or boiler).
i ran it on several batches of items and recipes in april 2023 (it seems so long ago from sep 2024). it eventually got the attention of the space exploration people and i got a wiki role on their discord.
i then immediately converted it to js, renamed it SEJS, fixed a bunch of bugs, refactored the code, and tried to make it a web app but got foiled by cross origin stuff. i realized the wiki editor would have to be either a embedded page or somehow a js gui application (which is really hard to make with just node js for some reason), so i dropped the wiki editor project and made it just a general factorio info site.
i also made a set of node js and lua scripts to simulate the whole factorio data lifecycle instead of extracting the data table from factorio like a "normal person", so i don't have to deal with running factorio. (i just realized, while writing this, that because the process is now hosted on github actions, i can extract the data table from factorio as many times as i want and it won't kill my computer) currently SEJS has a minimal item / recipe browser and some (not working properly) recipe calculator functionality. i am planning to add more stuff "soon", like custom modpack support, a mod data generator/extractor, and a blueprint editor.