There is support to limit the number of 'Hive players'. For now I have it just limited by the max number of forces the game can support

There is a button in the top left you can click to join the hive. (If it doesn't show up, let me know).

No... I would be lost for many moons if I were to try such a thing.

You can switch to and from a hive at any time. For this demo and for testing, I just loaded a save game and switched teams.

There is an intention that people will play PvP, where some players build a factory while others are controlling hives to try to destroy it.

Been working on this mod for a while, with thoughts of it for a long time.

With 0.17, I had all the ingredients to make it work, I hope you will enjoy: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Hive_Mind

Bugfixes

• Fixed a crash when hosting multiplayer games in some scenarios.

Use the automatic updater if you can (check experimental updates in other settings) or download full installation at http://www.factorio.com/download/experimental.

Minor Features

• Added ability to set a maximum number of map upload slots for multiplayer servers. Setting this is recommended to prevent the server from being flooded with map fragment requests from clients.

Optimisations

• Optimized alt-mode icon background rendering. more

Bugfixes

• Fixed that cut tool marked trees/rocks/cliffs for deconstruction when there was other valid entity in the selection. more
• Fi...

Changes

• Simplified rail building. Holding shift while rail building always activates the combination of ghost-rail-building + remove-obstacles, releasing shift returns back to normal manual mode. It doesn't matter anymore, whether the rail building started with shift or not. This removed the possibility to do ghost-rail-building without the remove-obstacles, but since it seems to be almost useless, we consider it to be worth the simplification.
• font/color rich text tags now have to be properly terminated. This means eg: "[color=red]Red circuits" will now need to be "[color=red]Red circuits[/color]". This fixes a number of issues with handling start/end tags. (https://forums.factorio.com/66263, ...

Bugfixes

• Fixed a crash when hovering over some inventory-like GUI elements.

Use the automatic updater if you can (check experimental updates in other settings) or download full installation at http://www.factorio.com/download/experimental.

Bugfixes

• Fixed that pollution statistic values from entities were reversed and didn't increase evolution. more
• Fixed a crash when mods would set special_signal = true for virtual-signal prototypes.
• Fixed a crash when a mining drill is destroyed during the resource-depleted event.
• Fixed a crash when loading modded saves related to recipe migrations and fluidboxes.
• Fixed a desync related to the blueprint library and keeping outdated blueprints between versions.
• Fixed crash when undoing manual removal of entity marked for deconstruction. ...

Changes

• Reverted fonts used for Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Russian localizations to pre-0.17.24 versions.

Bugfixes

• Fixed that circuit connection from ghost to entity wasn't preserved when it was upgraded or undone. more
• Fixed that it was possible to rotate entities whilst the technology GUI was open. more
• Fixed that the updates-available counter in the update-mods tab didn't update as mods woul...

Changes

• The Mods GUI will now always include a link to the mod portal for the selected mod.

Bugfixes

• Fixed roboport area rendering for players. more
• Fixed a crash when trying to print invalid values through the Lua API. more
• Fixed that the rail world preset didn't allow to get some achievements due to smaller base size. ...

Balancing

• Changed god controller inventory size to be the same as the character inventory size.

Bugfixes

• Fixed rendering of targeting range visualization for turrets with limited turn range. more
• Fixed parameters passed to LuaPlayer::zoom_to_world didn't have any effect. more
• Fixed that power poles would sometimes build automatically when they shouldn't. ...

Bugfixes

• Fixed that merging two electric networks didn't merge the statistics which was introduced by the power switch addition in 0.13. more
• Fixed light not turning off properly when using fluid energy source on an entity. more
• Fixed a crash when building large electric poles. ...

Nice

Bugfixes

• Fixed vertical squashing of listbox. more
• Fixed in-game updater would not work on Windows if Factorio path or write data path would contain non-ASCII characters. more
• Undoing action of building entity that removed ghosts also restores the ghosts. The same with removal of ghosts by cancelling deconstruction. ...