terraform-provider-factorio VS factorioClusterio

Force your friends to make commits to a github repo and publish your factory with terraform.

Clusterio

If you want more, you could use rcon to get a remote console interface and call your lua from there. Or maybe get some inspiration from clusterio.

This fits too well here: https://github.com/clusterio/clusterio

You would need to use server plugins such as Clusterio, which are more powerful than mods.

Not sure. There is https://github.com/clusterio/clusterio but apparently the version 1 is discontinued and version 2 is in alpha

Clusterio allows you to run multiple games that can share items between them. It also lets you share chat, research, and player inventory. And aggregates the statistics from all the games. This, I believe, is the closest you'll be able to achieve to your goal.

Cut back? You mean expand

There are some alternatives available for scaling past single core performance.

This is a plugin for clusterio to make it easier to generate a large cluster of interconnected worlds. You select the size of each world and the number of worlds in the grid through the web interface and press go. The servers are automatically generated and configured according to your map exchange string. You can run between servers by walking on the edge area and pressing E to accept the reconnect. Inventory is carried over between servers as well. It remembers what point along the border you were at when you crossed over which is nice when building factories right at a border. The belt transfer system has been tested for a few months now and should be fairly stable with hundreds of belts not causing any issues. For more information, see https://github.com/clusterio/clusterio and https://github.com/danielv123/gridworld , the latter of which is still very much WIP.

What if you could spend even more electricity on growing the factory?