When will an AI figure out how to beat Factorio?

Question

"Beat Factorio" means constructing a rocket.

"Figure out how" means roughly that it wasn't hand-held through the process. Roughly, the supervised part of the AI's training process must have been plausible in a world where Factorio didn't exist. (But it's allowed unlimited unsupervised play of Factorio.)

Details:

Examples of things that are okay:

a human can choose a favorable map seed

the AI can play Factorio unsupervised for any length of time

the AI can access the wiki (or other online resources) during its unsupervised play

Examples of things that aren't okay:

no knowledge of Factorio-in-particular (e.g. recipes, blueprints, "muscle memory") can have been programmed into the AI

the AI must not have had any supervised training on Factorio specifically (e.g. watching videos of people playing)

the AI's reward function must not encode any deep knowledge about Factorio specifically (rewarding novelty is fine; rewarding it each time it constructs a new kind of item is... kinda borderline, but I lean not-fine?; rewarding it each time it constructs a new kind of item along the critical path is not fine)

Every January, I'll check whether there's any credible claim  that somebody's done anything-like-this; if so, I'll dig in to see if it meets my "figuring out" criteria; if so, I'll resolve this market YES. Otherwise, on 2030-01-01, I'll resolve it NO.

Update 2025-03-05 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): Factorio Version Update

Any version is acceptable: The experiment may be conducted using any version of Factorio.

Update 2025-05-05 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): * Factorio-related data included in the AI's training set due to broad web scraping is acceptable.

Specialized post-training or fine-tuning specifically for Factorio is not acceptable.

The guiding principle is that the AI was not intentionally designed or fine-tuned to be proficient at Factorio.

Manifold Markets · Answer

Per Manifold Markets prediction market, 2025 Jan - 2027 Jan, followed by 2027 Jan - 2030 Jan and 2030 Jan or later are most likely. See the market for live updates (84 traders, as of Dec 10, 2025).