[galuvian]

Factorio only has very basic gates. slightly more advanced than plain redstone, but not anything close to command blocks.

There are three types of combinators: arithmetic, decider, and constant.

Signals have a channel name (one for each item type and a few dozen other options) and an integer value.

Arithmetic combinators can perform arithmetic operations on one or all signals with one signal and a constant integer, or two signals.

Decider combinators perform comparison operations.

Constant combinators emit constant signals on a given channel.

There are also abilities to detect state on some other items and cause behavior to change, the equivalent of observers, dispensers, pistons, etc.

https://wiki.factorio.com/Circuit_network#Logic_signals

[ehsankia]

What about higher level manipulation. Are these made by hand? What does the tooling look like? Can you modify the "maps" using editors, or code? I remember even early on there were Python libraries for manipulating Minecraft chunks.

[input_sh]

You usually have items in an inventory. If you have what's needed, you can craft plenty of things by hand (but not complicated things like engines or anything to do with oil or uranium). Otherwise, you build belts to assembly machines, they take things from the belt, and make whatever you tell them.

Mid to late game you also get construction and logistics bots. The former allows you to copy/paste groups of machines (bots will make them), and the latter of which just makes sure you have things that you need in your inventory. Bots speed the game up quite a bit.

[tlarkworthy]

You can create blueprints and have robots do the placement. It's aggressively anti micro, and scalable

[narrationbox]

There are sophisticated keybinding-friendly editors built-in. It is very different from vanilla Minecraft.