[imtringued]

There are no good solutions for something like factorio. There are solutions that work but they aren't worth the trouble. My personal recommendation is that you split the world into independent chunks. A big interconnected factorio map is a nightmare scenario because there is hardly anywhere where you can neatly split things up. Just one conveyor belt and you lose. Aka parallelize disconnected subgraphs.

So the game would have to be programmed so that conveyor belts and train tracks can be placed at region boundaries and that there is a hidden buffer to teleport things between regions. Now you need an algorithm to divide your graph to both minimize the imbalance between the number of nodes in the subgraph but also to minimize the edges between subgraphs.

[pshc]

Just dreaming over here, but if someone had the opportunity to rebuild a Factorio from the ground up, I bet they could design something massively scalable. Something based in cell automata, like how water flow works in Minecraft. Current cell state = f(prev cell state, neighboring cell states).

It would take some careful work to ensure that items didn't get duplicated or lost at junctions, and a back-pressure system for conveyor belt queues. Electrical signals would be transmitted at some speed limit.