[refulgentis]

Naively, I had the inverse question after reading that, how would this be illegal? Why must this be a labor of love? Use of Factorio IP seems limited to visual inspiration and file format parsing, and its clearly transformative (in the legal sense of the word)

[soneil]

Sometimes I think we're far too obsessed with legal. The developer is good to the community, the community is good to the developer. This seems like a much more productive relationship than arguing over what is legal.

[jdlshore]

"Visual inspiration" is generous. The models are a direct 1:1 copy of the in-game sprites, which sounds like a "derivative work" to me. IANAL.

[nness]

In this instance, it would be more than "look and feel" and more "would a person assume this project is done by the original Factorio developers" — are they misleading the audience. They copied much of the UI from the Factorio site for instance — so if they wanted you could make the argument the intent is to mislead.

[jdlshore]

I think you’re confusing trademark and copyright. Trademark is about confusing the public. Copyright is about derivative works. It seems pretty clear to me that this is a derivative work, due to its direct copying of Factorio sprites.

[BlueTemplar]

The website UI is by the Alt-F4 team, not the FUE5 team, it's like seeing this discussion and then complaining that FUE5 'copied' Factorio's colour scheme, thinking they are also behind hackernews, lol.

[jrm4]

I mean, nothing is clear in terms of "transformative" and never has been, but I absolutely agree with the overall point.