Hello, we have very unusual Friday facts for you. * * * * * * ### Journey to the physical world Pard It all started in the hot summer of 2024 when we worked really hard to finish the Space Age DLC. The game was almost ready, but we wanted some feedback from our players. A decision was made to organise a playtesting event (FFF-427), where teams of players could play the game from start to finish and provide us with in-person feedback and criticism to deliver the best product you all deserved. Since we are all geeks and love to tinker, we asked our friends at Prusa Research to join us and create some accompanying programmes and presentations for all attendees. Being fans of Factorio themselves, they agreed to join, and the plan was put into motion. When the event started, we realised that it would be cool to print some Factorio models right at the event, so Fearghall quickly created a simple model of the Wriggler from everyone's favourite Gleba. With the conclusion of our event, everyone returned to work on Factorio, but we all wanted to return to the idea of Factorio models in the real world. In the months following the release and subsequent bug-fixing and polishing period, we started working on some prototypes in our spare time. Several models were made, printed, and painted, but they lacked a concept. We let it sit for a while and brainstormed what would be the best direction. The answer was actually very simple: transport belts. Belts are the core of every factory from the early hours to the very late game. Jarosław started designing the concept of a grid system where you could place every entity closely following the game. The first version of inserters soon followed. During this phase, we were printing countless prototypes. It soon became clear that we needed two versions of almost every model. One set of models is created with high precision, allowing push-fit assembly, and the other is made with high clearance in mind for people who want to glue everything permanently or have clearance issues with their printers. While Jarosław was busy creating one player-built entity after the other, Fearghall started working on enemies. The first iteration of the biter spawner soon followed. Then came chests, followed by the player character, then a stone furnace… Our model set grew nicely, but we knew that we had to draw a line somewhere, because trying to release every Factorio entity would take too much time. With that in mind, we focused on the early game. We ended up with 15 model sets containing 65 individual models in 247 STL files. * * * 1/17 Testing how far we can push the limits of model size. 2/17 Painting of the first enemy prototype to ensure that models will look good both in plain plastic and fully painted... 3/17 ...Finished demolisher. The model was later scrapped because it wasn't really reflecting in-game visuals. 4/17 Several models in early stages of development. Belts were tested and fine-tuned for clearance issues. Enemies needed major updates. 5/17 Painting the biter spawner to determine whether the fully finished model adequately represents the original vision for the game... 6/17 ...The biter spawner is now fully finished. Unfortunately, we realized that substantial changes are still needed. 7/17 Most entities went through a series of iterations. Countless print runs were associated with this process. 8/16 First test print of the biter. It was later resized, and it received many improvements for a smooth printing experience. 9/17 Fine-tuning of printer limits regarding potential model details on the spitter. 10/17 The final version of the spitter, finding enemies outside the world of Factorio. 11/17 Test print of the late version of the electric mining drill with a coat of silver primer. 12/17 Our catalogue of models was starting to gain momentum. At this point, we were confident that a public release was possible. 13/17 The biter spawner finally received a model update. It still wasn't finished, but we were getting much closer to the finish line. 14/17 The belt lane balancer is painted with model grass added. It was clear that complete dioramas are possible. 15/17 One of the earlier tests of walls and their integration into the grid system. 16/17 Testing how far we can push the limits of model sizes in the opposite direction. Joint modification was needed. 17/17 Finally, all the models are finished. Time to take some glamour shots. * * * ### Why 3D Printing? Pard In the modern digital world, there is a decrease in physical memorabilia. Physical releases of games are now almost a relic of the past. We always thought about having something for fans and ourselves as a reminder of times that we spent with the game. We at Wube are a software company, not a toy manufacturer, and we have the best community in the world. Creating some expensive (limited) collector's items didn't sit right with us. We have decided to go with 3D models as a little "thank you for your support" gift so anyone can download them and print them for themselves. A second equally important reason is that we love your creativity, and we want to give you a chance to iterate on things we created and give them your own spin. We can't wait to see it. * * * ### Reimagining of Factorio Jarosław I will not lie, I slept on 3D printing for a while. It's probably for the best - I do have a passion for miniature-based board games and background as a 3D artist. So, when I finally took the risk and decided to look into it - well, let's say neither of my 3D printers has seen much downtime since then. Whether it's miniatures, card organizers, inserts or wall-high paint-stands, there is always something new to print. And of course, in case you are wondering, that does not make my "pile of shame" any smaller. With this premise, I know you can imagine why my ears perked up when the first hints of 3D printed models for Factorio started circulating in the office. Little did I know I was soon to partake in one of the most fascinating endeavours I ever… well, partook in. If you are a regular in these here parts, you will likely know all our entities start their life as 3D models. That might make it seem like translating them into prints would be an easy job - in all truth, I thought so, and I of all people should know better! The journey turned out to be a bit more complex than I originally imagined! The most obvious problem concerning FDM printing is the issue of supports. If you are not well versed in how these printers work, you can imagine building a roof with LEGO bricks. An angled roof is easy - you just offset each next brick by a single row, and there is your roof. If you wanted to make a perfectly flat one, though? The bricks do not connect on the sides, so each next one would need to float in the air… unless there was something to support them from underneath. For our models, we wanted to avoid extra supports wherever possible - they can be visually distracting when made to stay, otherwise they can be a bother to remove. As such, part of my work was to find ways to separate our models into pieces that can be printed without supports and then connected into full models. Considering I am a fan of scale models and gunplas, it was an incredible experience to create my own! Now, the other problem is a bit different in nature. How would I say it…? Factorio models tend to be really, really crazy (in the best possible way). Do you know the adage "what you see is what you get"? Well, yeah, no. Not at all applicable in this case! Factorio's isometric view gives a lot of space to experiment and play, and my fellow artists used that opportunity mercilessly. Sometimes what you see is, in fact, merely a collection of free-floating objects that just happen to look like a machine when looked at from the exact correct perspective. It rarely gets quite that bad, but the perspective is often a problem. There is a huge discrepancy between what the machines are and how they feel - all a function of the isometric view mixed with some creative light-and-shadow tricks. If you were to take a measuring tape to the mining drill for example, you might discover the North-South and the West-East variants are not quite identical - they do look like it, though! That problem goes double for height of the entities - in game, it is often restricted to fit in the grid-space of one tile, yet made to look much taller than that suggests. That created a unique and somewhat contradictory problem: designing 3D models that looked like Factorio models look, and not how they are. There is one more issue recreating models made for an isometric game - and that is the dark spaces. Just like the dark side of the Moon, the back-sides of our machines are filled with horrors and sleeping eldritch-gods. Do not worry, though - I did replace them with freshly imagined, safe machinery :) Partaking in this journey was surely one of the most interesting challenges in my career. I would love to thank Wube and Prusa for making it possible - as well as for the enthusiasm they shared! I honestly do hope more studios decide to share their work in such a way (looking at you, certain team of astronauts!) Special thanks go to my colleague, Pard, for his insatiable hunger to test my models. May thy filament never runeth dry, good sir! * * * ### Designing enemies Fearghall While Jarosław toiled away hand crafting belts and assemblers and failing his "lazy bastard" run in the process, I set about the task of bringing the "organic" entities to life. Thankfully for me, I was able to avoid the pain of the isometric perspective because most of the organic entities have fully rotating spritesheets, and so the models are complete from most angles without too many tricks of the camera. However, the models were still designed for pre-rendering only, and as such had some unique challenges. For example, the biter spawner was covered by an invisible skin, and almost all of the detail in the in-game images was confined to the texture data - something that cannot be transferred to a 3D printable file. However, after a week or so of cleaning up and baking out the model, it now prints very well with no support or issues. It also became immediately obvious that most of the organic prints could not be made support-free like Jarosław has done so well with all the machines. The geometry is simply too complex, and many of the parts would be far too small to print and attach together. I still endeavoured to make them easily printed, however. The idle engineer pose, for example, has printed without supports many times, and the worm poses (aside from the 90-degree attacking pose) print entirely without support. But alas, there are some things which are simply impossible to print without support, such as the running pose. One of the main issues with the character and biter family was the damage left by the support interface. The surface where the print and support meet can be quite ugly, so I was keen that none of the models should require so much support as to impact the visual quality. With the engineer it was quite simple, the backpack needed to be split off, and there needed to be a slot and pin added, but otherwise a slight angle was all that was needed for decent printing. With the biter family however, there was a little more work. There was the big issue of the legs: they would absolutely not have printed in the "correct" orientation, and splitting in the centre of the biter and leaving a large seam was an absolute non-option. So the only sensible solution was to print them upside down! Simply printing them like this as a single part would likely have worked, but would have left horrible scarring on the most visible surface of the model, so I decided the shell needed to become its own part so it could be correctly oriented. This also had the benefit of meaning the shells are easily printed in the correct colour for the biter size! With that in mind, I could arrange all the biter legs to require as little support as possible in the new orientation, and merged a few of the legs for added strength - bearing in mind that they would need to stand on their own legs in reality. In order to make the shells attach, I sculpted in some extra reliefs and ensured both surfaces had just the right level of clearance. The final result has almost no visible support interfacing, and a very satisfying "snap!" * * * ### Where to download? Pard All models are available to download right now from our Prusa Brands profile on Printables. Special thanks go to Štěpán Feik, who helped us make all of this happen. From joining us at our playtesting event to helping us cross the finish line this morning, he has been part of the journey throughout. You can read his take on our collaboration here. * * * As always, let us know what you print at the usual places.

Hello, Join the huddle, while I regale you with more tales of the Penguin... * * * ### Factorio on the Steam Frame raiguard When Valve originally announced their next-gen hardware, I was _very_ excited for the Steam Controller and marginally excited for the Steam Machine, but I wasn't very excited about the Steam Frame. I have had the opportunity to play VR on my friend's HTC Vive; and on the occasions where I visit the Wube office in Prague, I have played on the company's Valve Index that we keep upstairs. These experiences were very neat, but the amount of setup involved in clearing a playspace, connecting the headset to a PC, and setting up lighthouses for spatial tracking elevated the activation energy of enjoying a VR game beyond what I was willing to deal with. I had relegated VR to a gimmick that simply wasn't for me. VR engineers and developers knew about the activation energy problem, so in recent years, headsets have been evolving to support "inside-out" tracking. Instead of setting up dedicated stationary sensors (lighthouses) to track where you are in the VR space, inside-out headsets use on-board cameras to track where you are in the room, and use that to translate your real-world location into a VR space. This eliminates the required lighthouse setup, and if you then shove all of the compute and a battery into the headset, you can achieve an untethered, console-like VR experience, free of wires and hassle. Simply put on the headset and play. Standalone VR is a large improvement on activation energy, but I have not been interested until now because the best options were tied to companies whose ultimate motivations and privacy standards are not acceptable to me. But the Steam Frame changes things - in addition to Valve being more privacy-friendly, it's a Linux PC in disguise. If you want to install your own software on the headset, or entirely replace the operating system, that is up to you! All of these things were very appealing to me, and I quickly began to make plans to purchase one. The Steam Frame represents an opportunity for ARM64 Linux computing to become more mainstream. Until now, the best options for ARM64 Linux have been limited to the Raspberry Pi (a relatively weak single-board computer), Ampere servers (which are inaccessible for the average person), and Asahi Linux on Apple Silicon MacBooks (which is still in a very early alpha stage). The Steam Frame joins a very small list of viable ARM64 Linux use-cases, and with Valve's emphasis on traditional 2D gaming on the Frame alongside VR titles, I finally had the excuse I needed to port Factorio to ARM64 Linux. #### Porting to ARM64 The most involved part of the porting process didn't actually involve the Frame at all: setting up x86 -> ARM64 cross compilation. Because I had no idea what I was doing, the first several hours were spent researching the process. Fortunately, our Linux compiler of choice (Clang) has pretty good cross-compilation support, and at the end of the day you only need three things: * Pass the correct "target triple" to the compiler and linker. * Pass the path to a sysroot of the target architecture. * Use a linker which natively supports cross-compilation. We already use the Mold linker, which supports cross compilation, so no special effort was required to make it work. The most helpful resource by far was this blog post by mcillioni, which succinctly described the requirements and the process. Thank you! My initial solution for obtaining the sysroot was to modify mcillioni's script to extract the system files from my Raspberry Pi. This worked for a short while, but was not a sustainable solution. Sanqui then pointed me to a wonderful tool called deboostrap, which can be used to install ARM64 Debian system files in a directory of your choice. This turned out to be a very good solution, both for ease of local development and for our build servers. We prefer to statically link our dependencies, and we use a rather niche build system called FASTBuild, so sometimes building dependencies for a new platform can be challenging. Almost everything worked without much trouble, but there is one dependency which we use on Linux which is not used anywhere else: OpenSSL. OpenSSL is a very configurable library, and has a pretty complicated build system. Rather than translating it to FASTBuild directly, we build OpenSSL by using FASTBuild to call its metabuild system (a Perl script) and then execute the generated Makefile. Building OpenSSL for ARM64 was a bit of a challenge due to OpenSSL's somewhat arcane documentation and my being unfamiliar with Perl, but I eventually figured out the correct combination of flags and arguments to pass, and got all of the game's static dependencies built! I managed to get Factorio Linux cross-compilation down to just two steps: run `just create-sysroot arm64` to generate the sysroot with debootstrap, then run `just arch=arm64 build` to compile! #### The development kit Valve graciously sent us not just one, but _two_ development kits - one to the office in Prague, and another directly to my house in the USA! My immediate impressions of the hardware were very positive - it is extraordinarily lightweight (2/3rds the weight of the Steam Deck!) and is very comfortable to wear for long periods of time, particularly with the top strap attached. It is the most comfortable VR headset I have ever worn. Getting Factorio to run on the Frame was relatively straightforward, but there were a few hoops to jump through. Valve supplies a tool called the "Steam Linux Runtime" (steamrt), which provides a stable base of dynamic libraries for native Linux game to target, bypassing many of the issues involved with dynamic dependency hell. Because we statically link our dependencies, we don't require steamrt in order for the game to run, but Steam does not allow games to opt out, so we have been targeting steamrt 1.0. However, steamrt 1.0 does not have an ARM64 version - in fact, only steamrt 4.0 received an update to support ARM64 - so it was time to upgrade. The steamrt version is a global switch which affects all players, so when we were ready to begin distributing the ARM64 build through Steam, we had to bite the bullet and change Factorio's steamrt version to 4.0 for everyone. Fortunately, we did not notice any issues as a result of this. I also had to update our version of the Steamworks SDK so I could link against the ARM64 Steamworks shared library. This update went live in 2.1.15, and there was one major bug which necessitated a hotfix. Fortunately, that was the worst of it, with only one other issue being reported. The Steam Frame uses the same SteamOS Devkit Client software that is used on the Steam Deck and Steam Machine, so it was just a matter of enabling developer mode on the Frame, connecting it to the devkit client on my laptop, and uploading the build there. After a few failed attempts having to do with incompatible glibc versions (which is a dynamic dependency that we, unfortunately, cannot avoid), I successfully booted Factorio on the Steam Frame for the first time in February 2026! _This image was captured on an early development build of SteamOS, and does not represent the final experience._ There were a few issues which I worked with Valve to resolve, but overall it ran very smoothly! During the May 2026 Wube LAN party prior to the 2.1 release, I connected the office devkit to the game for the majority of the time, and largely thanks to prior efforts on the Nintendo Switch and Apple Silicon ports, we never experienced an ARM64 vs. x86 related desync. The Frame was able to keep up with the game without trouble, and I was playing on the Frame when we finished the playthrough. _Am I playing Factorio? You never know..._ #### Performance When running on the Frame, Factorio uses graphics settings identical to the Steam Deck and runs at 720p. The game easily maintains 60 FPS in the majority of cases, but will dip slightly in busy scenes. Lowering graphics settings did not help the performance, which suggests a more fundamental limitation in how Factorio's OpenGL renderer is interacting with the Frame's software stack. On the CPU side, performance of the native ARM64 build is about 11% faster than the x86 build running via FEX: _Map: Klonan | 4k trains Megagrid | 10k SPM | Base game + Elevated rails_ _The performance of the FEX translation layer is very impressive!_ #### Experience 2D games running on the Frame do not have access to VR features, so Factorio largely plays the same as it does on the Steam Deck or Nintendo Switch. However, even when in gamepad mode, Factorio will still respond to mouse movements and clicks, which happens to synergize well with the Frame's laser mouse. I have found it very convenient to toggle the laser mouse when using selection tools or clicking rapidly through GUI elements. And, of course, you can connect your Steam Controller to get a very Steam Deck-esque trackpad experience, or even connect a mouse and keyboard to play traditionally! Mp4 playback not supported on your device. #### Release Valve has (correctly) prioritized support for Windows games running via Proton+FEX and Android games running via Lepton, so the infrastructure for native ARM64 Linux games isn't as well-defined. We had to work with Valve to implement a workaround which involves shipping both binaries to all players and using a shell script to launch the correct binary based on the host architecture. As some community members have already noticed, the ARM64 Linux Steam build has already been distributed to all Linux Steam experimental players! Getting this working involved some trial-and-error in production, which resulted in humorous misunderstandings and issues launching the game. Factorio is officially Steam Frame Certified! This certification is a guarantee from Valve and Wube that the game works great on the Frame. We were delighted to spot brief Factorio cameos on the "Great on Frame" page in Steam Frame reviews by Gamers Nexus and Dave2D. I would like to thank Valve for sending us development kits and promptly responding to our emails when we had trouble. I would also like to thank my Wube pals Sanqui and Klonan, who worked with me for many hours, often long into the night due to time zone differences, to get everything ready in time for the Steam Frame's launch. As Klonan so eloquently put it, "We all shared this moment together, on that rainy night at the end of summer." But the Steam Frame is not the only new device which can run Factorio... * * * ### Factorio on the Raspberry Pi Of course we are going to support the Raspberry Pi, especially considering that I used mine to obtain the initial sysroots used in development! Unfortunately, the Pi's OpenGL support is rather limited, so while you can easily host servers from a Pi, you cannot play the game with graphics. I secretly hosted a server from my pi a few weeks ago and joined from my Steam Frame, asking my friend _CodeGreen and my brother Doomquill to help me test for desyncs. A few random players also joined, and we did not encounter any desyncs or other issues. Thank you to darklich14 and Erielhonan for being unaware test subjects! CPU performance on native ARM64 is about 28% faster than x86 running via box64: _Map: Klonan | 4k trains Megagrid | 10k SPM | Base game + Elevated rails_ _Hardware: Raspberry Pi 5 8GB_ But wait, there's more! * * * ### Factorio on Asahi Linux That's right, Factorio also works on Asahi Linux, the Linux distribution for MacBooks featuring ARM processors! Sanqui's friend graciously tested a few builds for us and everything appears to work great. This is a happy accident more than anything else, as we didn't put any special effort into making it work. Unfortunately, nobody at Wube has a MacBook with Asahi Linux installed, so there will almost undoubtedly be issues which we are unaware of. Play at your own risk! Benchmark results were the most dramatic of the lot: the native ARM64 version is a whopping 35% faster than the x86 version running through FEX: _Map: Klonan | 4k trains Megagrid | 10k SPM | Base game + Elevated rails_ _Hardware: Macbook Pro M1 Pro (Model A2442, 8-Core, 16GB, 512GB)_ * * * Porting Factorio to ARM64 Linux was a very fun and educational process, and I am very grateful that I was able to work on this. I hope you will enjoy playing Factorio in VR and on your other ARM64 Linux machines! * * * ### Finally, the ARM64 Linux port Sanqui Our playerbase has been asking for a Linux ARM port of Factorio for at least eleven years. We listen and we also get excited about new hardware avenues, but supporting each new platform doesn't come for free in terms of development time, testing, and long term support. Over the years, we regularly re-evaluated the viability of this port, but most recently we've been hitting a wall in terms of hardware. It seems like ARM servers are simply unobtanium: our hardware provider failed to source us an Ampere Altra server, and the German VPS provider Hetzner has ARM64 virtual servers constantly out of stock. In the end we settled for cross-compilation from x86-64 and now have a Raspberry Pi 5 as the dedicated test runner. The Steam Frame running native ARM64 Linux proved to be a catalyst that pushed these efforts over the edge and we are pleased to make this port available to all ARM64 Linux users today! * Standalone Factorio for ARM64 Linux is available on our website, including the headless version. * For Steam users, Factorio for ARM64 Linux is available on the experimental branch (version 2.1), so please opt into experimental if you are playing Factorio on the Steam Frame or other ARM64 Linux devices. * * * As always, submit a patch signed with your GPG key containing a diff of your thoughts to the usual places. See you next week!

Hello, We have another dose of human generated facts for you. I was planning to write about these biter and enemy behavior changes before the 2.1 release, but an unfortunately timed neck injury led to it being postponed. The silver lining here is that now I can write about all the player reactions and funny bugs we've found along the way. * * * We might be getting into controversial territory here, but I like the biters and I like fighting them. I like clearing nests when expanding. I especially like defending against them when they smell my success. However I never had fun with the expansion groups. The whole feature just didn't seem to land right, and I would like to know if many other players agree — so let's delve right in. * * * ### Enemy expansion planner The enemy expansion planner is one of those systems that has been around for a very long time (2013), and while it has had its improvements and fixes over time, it never really received a holistic review of how it was working in the modern context of the game. #### Expansion groups were too small, making for weak, ineffective expansions While we tuned and balanced map generation to make the nests a challenge, the expansion planner only ever sent small sorties to expand. Small expansion nests do not really create a challenge, they just annoy the player and create busywork. It would feel much more compelling and meaningful to have one large expansion nest rather than 10 tiny ones, so I decided to move in that direction: 1. Increase group size with evolution factor. 2. Modify group size dependent on the map generator biter base size. The goal with the changes, is that at any point in the game, an expansion party would be sized to present a good challenge at your current technology level. Another guiding principle was to try to get the expansion nests to match existing ones, so that you can't tell which were from the map generation and which were from the expansions. The numbers in the initial 2.1.0 release seemed a bit too strong (Experimental Biter expansion too strong), so in 2.1.13 I have tuned back the numbers: 2.1.0 expansion size vs Evolution factor 2.1.13 expansion size vs Evolution factor (For those wondering, a graph for 2.0 would be a straight line from 5 to 20) In short, the bases will start smaller (from 20 down to 10), but scale to the same max size of 80. The game picks a random number between the min and max when dispatching an expansion group. You can also notice the variance between min and max was reduced in 2.1.13. There was also a bug causing the groups to settle a little bit too close to the factory walls (Expansion party worms spawn too close to wall and destroy defenses) which I fixed for 2.1.13, so there should be less pressure in this regard. #### Exploring early would nerf expansions The expansion planner time between expansions didn't scale with the number of candidates. So if you had a lot of candidates somewhere far away, then you wouldn't get any expansions near your base. This led to an unfortunate inverse difficulty relationship: * Players who explored around the map early would experience fewer expansions near their factory. * Biter nests in explored territory would 'thicken' and become much denser than intended. To solve this, I did a mostly fresh rewrite of the heuristic and penalties for the candidate chunks, trying to ensure that areas explored but otherwise untouched by the player wouldn't have an effect on the expansion behavior. You can see the difference below: _Expansion candidates before (left) vs. after (right) Greener = Higher probability. _ The result is that not only do we have significantly fewer candidate chunks, but that they are more relevantly placed close to open areas or areas the player has cleared before. Expansions should now feel more predictable as well, the timing and pressure should be more consistent. Another part of the rewrite was to untangle some subtle biter related assumptions, which were causing problems with the Pentapods on Gleba (Pentapod Expansion Broken). * * * ### Build base behavior The expansion planner tells a group of biters when and where to go and build a base, but the actual building was carried out by a unit group with a 'Build base' command. Similar to the expansion planner, there were many subtle assumptions and hardcoded numbers throughout the logic, and the functional difference before and after is hard to explain. The most noticeable change is to the cooldown between building the entities. Beforehand this was calculated as 5 ticks per hitpoint of built entity, which sounds nice but effectively made the biters act inconsistently and idle for a huge amount of time (building a few worms could take over 20 minutes). It also again had an inverse difficulty curve, where late game nests would build significantly slower than weaker early game nests. Now the cooldown is static, and is a number we can easily tune and adjust. For the initial 2.1 release, I had it set to 5 seconds, you can see its relevance below: Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _No cooldown_ Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _5s cooldown - Default 2.1.0_ 5 seconds between entities initially seemed fine, but after more playtesting and player feedback, I realized it was probably a bit on the quick side. It's also nice to be able to 'catch' the biters in the act of expanding, which a longer cooldown would give further opportunity for. So for 2.1.13 we have increased the cooldowns: 30 seconds by default, and 10 seconds for Deathworld. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _10s cooldown - 2.1.13 Deathworld_ Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _30s cooldown - 2.1.13 Default settings_ As with many tasks, the idea that "If you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all" definitely applies here... The biter expansion groups should just act like you would have always thought they acted (a lot of the weirder implementation details were not immediately apparent). #### Units define built entity Modders may notice that now the entity being built by the unit is now defined by the unit itself (2.1 API doc). This allows much greater control and actual use of the build base behavior outside the specific base game context, and generally makes more sense than the prior system. As a 'celebration' of this possibility, I used it to add a 'Biological caste' system to the biters: * Biters become Biter/Spitter spawners. * Spitters become Worms. I thought it was clever and great from some lore or naturalistic perspective... and soon a bug report came in: Oops! All worms! _Oops! All worms!_ It turns out, by chance and RNG of map generation, the groups can send just spitters or biters, which means the resultant expansion base would be exclusively worms or spawners respectively. Also in the early game, we don't even spawn spitters, so all groups would always be 100% biters (Early game expansions not spawning any worms). I mean... it could be a nice feature, some expansions are more spawners, some are more worms... but when the map generation is a pretty consistent 50/50 split, I don't think it's worth the inconsistency, and it clashes with the prior goal of "you can't tell which nests are from the map generation and which are from expansions". So with 2.1.14, I tweaked the definitions so it acts like 2.0: Biters and Spitters can both become Spawners and Worms. * * * ### Expansion base built alert Even with the increased base building cooldown, it can still happen that you look away for what feels like only a moment, only to be met with an unexpected collection of pals frolicking on your doorstep. _An inconvenient surprise in my 2.1.13 playtesting._ We could espouse the virtue of being vigilant with checking the map... but we have machines to do that for us. So we've added a new alert: if an expansion base (worm or spawner) is built in a chunk with active radar coverage, you'll receive the 'expansion base built' alert. _Now we know_ The alert only applies to chunks with active coverage, and a radar's 'far scan' might catch them at the right time if you're lucky. * * * So to wrap up, I just want to restate what we've changed to accomplish the goal of "make enemy expansion nests more fun": * Expansion groups are generally bigger but less frequent. * Enemy expansions are directed more toward open areas instead of thickening infested areas. * Biter base building is more robust and its speed is tuneable. * If a biter nest is being built in your radar coverage, you will be alerted about it. * We've been fixing bugs and tweaking things based on your feedback. * * * As always, let us know what you bite at the usual places.

Hello, we hope your week has been pleasant. * * * ### 2.1 Experimental This week we released the 2.1 experimental. You can read the full changelog on our Forum. Funnily enough, the changelog was too long to post on Reddit, as the limit is 40,000 characters... oops :). Click to view full resolution You can opt in to experimental now, and there are some things to bear in mind: * You get all the 2.1 changes today. * 2.0 save games will load, but there may be changes that break your factory designs. * We recommend backing up any saves and blueprints you care about before switching. * Once updated, blueprints and save games cannot be downgraded to 2.0. * There may be further gameplay changes and tweaks. * Mods you rely on may not be updated yet. By playing the experimental releases, you can help us improve the game: * You are our QA, so please report any bugs on our Bugs forum. * Any gameplay feedback or suggestions go to Ideas and suggestions. * Give your thoughts on any of the discussions in Active topics. * You can help us translate the 2.1 update on our Crowdin project. How to opt in to the Factorio 2.1 experimental: * Clean download: Download the full experimental package on our Download page. * Website version update: Settings → Other → Enable experimental updates. * Steam: Right-click Factorio in the library → Properties... → Game Versions & Betas → Experimental. #### Other details As a part of the update of our graphics and audio systems, we have raised the minimum operating system requirement on Linux. The minimum version of the system's GLIBC is now 2.36 (released in 2022). If Factorio doesn't launch on your system, you may need to update. Headless and Steam versions are not affected. We have also raised the minimum requirement for macOS to 10.13 (High Sierra), which officially reached end of support and end-of-life back in 2020, and hasn't been supported on Steam since 2024. #### Cracking on We are going to be fixing bugs, polishing remaining areas, and listening to your feedback. 2.1 is not finished and we are actively digesting all of your input. For now it has been quite a few months of focused work getting the initial experimental releases into a good shape, and we have some vacations planned, so the pace might not be absolutely turbo 100% full throttle. That is to say, please don't expect us to be changing things in too much of a rush, we still have plenty of time before we plan to mark it stable, and we will make any decisions and tweaks thoughtfully. Our team isn't done with the project, we aren't all immediately jumping ship and washing our hands of the game. 2.1 may be the last major Factorio update, but that doesn't mean we have lost our passion and love for the game. * * * ### Friday Facts Furlough With the experimental out, we are going to reduce the pace with the Friday Facts, and not keep to any specific schedule. It is quite fun to do these blog posts, and we have a few more things to share in the future, so these definitely aren't the final facts we will post. * * * As always, let us know what you think at the usual places.

Hello, Good news today * * * ### Circuit network Klonan We have several more circuit network improvements to share with you today. #### Boiler/Heat exchanger circuit connection The Boiler type entities can now be connected to the circuit network, which makes it super easy to set up backup or emergency power conditions. You will also notice the beautiful new Heat exchanger graphics and working animation by Zsolti. #### Land mine Land mine was less of a "Why?" and more of a "Why not?"... but it makes itself quite useful as a tripwire or enemy detector. Since the Land mine doesn't do any friendly fire, you can't quite use it to troll your friends unfortunately (though I admit it would be pretty cool to wire up a whole factory self-destruct switch). #### Input/Output split In a previous post (FFF-441), we showcased the new Space platform set requests. In that we said: "_It is also possible to use 'Set requests' at the same time as 'Read contents', due to a little bit of magic self-subtraction."_. This topic generated some discussion about the problems of the magic self-subtraction, and possible solutions. And we are happy to say, we did figure out a solution that should make the circuit network a bit more understandable and also mean we can remove the magic logic: Circuit Inputs and Outputs can be directed to different wire colors. In the Circuit connection frame you can see the 'Input' and 'Output' frames with the checkboxes, these control which wire is used for all the connections in that frame. Hopefully it also makes it more apparent which connections are 'Reads' from the entity, and which are 'Writes' which affect the entity behavior. With this change we decided it is acceptable to remove the signal self-subtraction after all, which unfortunately will break some 2.0 circuit setups (with assembling machines and asteroid collectors). Technically it is also an optimization, as the entities no longer need to update the network counts in the expensive way when their contents change, which furthermore allows us to give Requester chests the ability to 'Set requests' at the same time as 'Read contents'. #### Lab control behavior We had many requests to make some way to set research automatically. With Space Age it became a bit more useful when planetary deliveries of different packs would necessitate manual switching to optimize usage (especially with the Gleba juice). We went through a few different iterations of the idea, feeling out the usage and feasibility, and I think we settled on a reasonable design. The way it works is similar to the display panel: * The 'Research conditions' frame is shown when 'Set research' is enabled. * The player adds a 'Research condition', choose a technology and set a circuit condition. * The list of research conditions is evaluated top to bottom, the first one that passes will set the current research for the force. * Technologies that are already researched are skipped. * Technologies with levels/infinite techs, are automatically requeued. If you have a Lab setting the research, players will be blocked from using the research queue, with a notice about why it isn't possible: The label will show the camera tooltip on hover, and clicking it will open remote view at the location so you can quickly find the lab and adjust things. Other than that you can still browse and use the Technology GUI in the same usual way. * * * ### Landing pad unloading bay V453000 When items arrive on a planet into a landing pad, there are a few categoric ways to unload them. When the traffic increases to the point you want to unload into trains, you eventually get to a state where you're placing roboports everywhere you can to meet the charging demands. At that moment you probably think there should be a more straightforward way. Initially we thought we would specifically make a train loader, which is what Earendel prepared concept art for. However, when Jaroslaw was in the process of making the graphics, we hit some severe issues and luckily this made us re-evaluate. We realized simply allowing inserters take items out of it bypasses all of the weirdness, and instead feels much more Factorio-like as you can then use it to unload into any kind of entity inserters can interact with (train, chest, belt, ...). We took inspiration in Earendel's concept art of the initial idea of the train loader, and adapted it to something quite different. _The Landing pad unloading bay is a special form of cargo bay which allows inserters to take items out of it._ While I was trying to help, Jaroslaw still had to figure out a lot more of the design than usual, given the deadline was getting crazy close considering the complexity of this entity, he's done great! _A sneak peek into the postprocess that we rarely have space in the blogs to show. Jaroslaw says hello. :)_ The entity size is strangely enough 4x5 tiles, specifically for a 1-tile gap between the cargo bay 2x2 grid and the rail 2x2 grid. We didn't want to allow unloading just anywhere, so there are limitations. It can't be constructed on space platforms, and on planets there is a limited area around the landing pad where the unloading bays can be placed. We view the logistic belt puzzle as integral part of space platform construction. The hub can be used to input/output items from it and for example sort asteroid chunks and their products that way. It's great this option exists, but it's under the condition that it doesn't scale and larger platforms need to simply use belts. Allowing the unloading bay on space platforms would change this too much so we prefer to keep it away from platforms. On the planet side, there is no limit to how far you can walk cargo bays. Without the area limitation, you could just make a suuuper long chain of cargo bays, and put an unloading bay at the end to just "transport" items all the way from landing pad to a lab cluster, for example. As a semi-related change, we are allowing players to build elevated rails over cargo bays. We didn't do it before because it seemed like the cargo pods would collide with the rail so we treated it as a "tall" entity, but allowing to cross the cargo bay chain is so convenient that we decided the cargo bay will turn off its cargo pod receiver instead - which will be barely noticeable with how many cargo bays you typically need to build. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _This is using about half the allowed range._ The biggest resulting caveat is that the allowed range is a flat number of 59 tiles. It doesn't scale with technologies or quality. Factories can vary in size massively so it's difficult to find a value that would fit everybody, but we can always tweak it in the future or add some kind of scaling. * * * ### Planets in background Hrusa, Fearghall Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _That's no moon. It's a planet!_ Having planets appear in the backdrop of space platforms is something that has been on my task list since way before 2.0. In the end, the development of the cargo pod animations took up all my time in the weeks leading up to release. We didn't want to release a half measure solution, so as a relatively speaking _nice-to-have_ feature, it took a back seat. Quickly though, modders stepped in to fill the planet-shaped hole in our shared craving for fancy visuals and released Visible Planets in Space Mod. I was secretly hoping I could _borrow_ some ideas from their implementation, but in the end I wrote the arrival and departure code in my own way anyway. Since the bar was set and, judging by screenshots, plenty of people had enjoyed the modded planets, I wanted to do a bit more than just _"put the mod into the game"_. At the same time I was aware of the numerous custom planet mods which will probably be eager to use the feature too, so asset authoring couldn't be made too complicated either. I set about working with Fearghall to find a solution, who will explain what we settled upon. #### Planet texture details Fearghall Like with the asteroids (FFF-411), using sprite animations for this was out of the question because the slow rotation would require thousands of frames. Hrusa very smartly implemented some code to make a simple square into a 3D ball, and implemented some real-time lighting. He then passed this to me to take a pass over the shader and texturing. I tweaked the lighting slightly to include some atmospheric effects, and started working on a method to have animated clouds that wouldn't be too resource expensive. I settled on running a flow-map, so all the clouds on the planet are a single texture which is distorted according to another texture, rather than an expensive spritesheet. Now for the textures! Technically any texture can be mapped to this "sphere", but they pinch around the poles because that's the nature of mapping a flat image onto a round object. This was a headache for a while, but we ended up figuring a way around this by re-projecting uvs of one sphere to another, and baking the textures at the poles to hide the distortion. It makes authoring textures slightly more challenging, but we think the effect is worthwhile! Finally, there was the issue of the Fulgora lightning. Once again, a big animation here is far too costly, so Hrusa and I came up with a system of scattering quads around the sphere which run a short animation, then re-spawn at another location. The final product of all of this is a real-time lit sphere with capacity for PBR maps, animated clouds, and a lot of tunable parameters for mods to do crazy things with! Quite a feat! * * * ### Pump connection to trainV453000 In order to implement the pump to fluid wagon connection we added in 0.15, the pump got super complicated. It already had many animations for many different combinations where the fluid wagon could stop (6 tiles, 2 sides, 2 directions, many frames, several layers). But still, after all that effort that Albert went through, the logic was limited to only connect pumps to fluid wagons which are aligned Just Right. And as the FFF mentions, some aspects of our trains are cursed, so if you do anything out of the ordinary, the fluid wagons are not aligned right at all. _As you can see, only the first fluid wagon can be unloaded, even the last one is treated as misaligned._ We have been aware of this problem for years, but you could avoid it just by "building proper straight stations like a good citizen". And the dread from just thinking about reworking the crazy amount of animations, or throwing away the existing ones, was ... truly dreadful. However, over time we have added entities which required better and better ways to manipulate sprites, like Spidertron, their technical siblings Pentapods or the Agricultural tower. With technology like that, perhaps the pump could be approached in a different way... _The new pump is using a new stretching arm which is much more flexible._ Earendel took the existing pump and tried to adapt its concept to split it into a classic and stretchable part. Jerzy then took the idea and implemented it with a level of camera hacks only seen in pentapods and agricultural crane. This allows the pump to connect to a fluid wagon ~~no matter how cursed your station design is~~ always. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _All of the pumps happily latch now._ When Lou was refactoring the code for pump connecting to a fluid wagon, we couldn't help ourselves but observe that perhaps one new situation could be made possible: What you are about to witness may not seem entirely legal, scroll any further at your own peril. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. While we of course didn't have time for reworking the pump before 2.0, this was one of the topics we knew 2.1 has to include for sure. From now on, fluid wagons and spaghet should get along better than ever before... and hopefully our bug forum should be free of wagon to pump connectivity issues. * * * ### Oil refineryV453000 In the Space Age, crafting machines' graphics have been getting more intricate and have more moving parts than ever. On the other hand... the oil refinery is almost completely static. To add to the woes, some of the rotations could be improved and the texturing already barely survived the last attempts to update it to high resolution back in 0.15. With 2.0 out the door, it felt like a good time to bring it up to par with the rest of the Space Age machines, so Earendel and Jerzy embarked on a journey. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. The design is a faithful evolution of the original, the refinery is still a tower with a ring surrounded by secondary towers, pipes and tanks. Just now all of the elements are following the level of detail that other Space Age entities have. As a bonus, there's now pipe windows with fluids which adapt color based on the recipe. * * * ### Assembling machineV453000 Over the years, we have updated and reworked many of the entity graphics. The vast majority of them were straightforward, but the assembling machines were the most elusive. Several times Albert entered the same river figuring out the new concept, and I'm pretty sure they were in the back of his mind even when we were working on other topics. The assembling machine is one of the visually most representative entities of what Factorio is, so the stakes feel like they can't be any higher. The concept represents stages of technology, crafting / production, engineer's ingenuity to put stuff together, and much more. In the end, the assembling machines are so important and so all-encompassing that we never quite finished them even if we started multiple times. Given that 2.1 is a version where we try to catch up on things we wanted to do but didn't have time for, assembling machines were high up on our list. We went with somewhat conflicting goals - we wanted to be very conservative with the original design, yet emphasize the progression between tiers. Earendel made concept art for all of the tiers, while carrying over the spirit from earlier Albert's designs. _The concept art for the assembling machines is the last task I had the pleasure to ask Earendel to make._ Based on the concept, Jerzy then created the final graphics. As you can see, the concept has differences in many areas. A lot of the elements had to be moved around for them to fit in the 3D space. While Albert's initial concepts and designs, Earendel's concept art and all the aspects of Jerzy's graphics production were doing the heavy lifting, the assembling machines also became a topic of all of us artists weighing in and discussing them for many hours. We believe the results speak for themselves, may you enjoy looking at them in the years to come! Mp4 playback not supported on your device. * * * We are really happy to have you all on this journey with us, and we hope you will all enjoy playing 2.1 next week.

Hello, It's Friday again * * * ### Flipping more things Klonan After we introduced the concept of flipping back in 1.1 (FFF-364), it became more and more annoying to have certain entities prevent flipping. While some things will always be impossible (Train stops, Rail signals, etc.), we do what we can. #### Pumpjack The Pumpjack was always a touch strange with the rotations, maybe it was adding to the puzzle, but these days we are more of the opinion it is just making things more awkward. Now it will be a little easier (or at least somewhat less frustrating) to get your pumpjacks and pipes all connected just how you like. #### Burner miner We also added it for the burner miner, so you can make your early burner empire more optimized than ever. #### Drop lane indication on perpendicular belts If you pay close attention, you might also notice that the drop arrow shifts subtly to the side, so that you know which side of the belt the machine will drop to. It applies to all the entities which have a drop arrow mechanic. Just knowing which side of the belt a machine will drop to is nice, but we also don't want to have any build inconsistencies when you flip an entity or blueprint. So using the flip hotkey it is possible to adjust which side of the belt a machine will drop to. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. And this works implicitly when you flip a blueprint, so a setup you copy and place down flipped, should work just the same. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. Adjusting the drop lane of inserters also opens up more opportunities. _Lane flipping is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural._ There was some idea that the ambiguity of the drop was adding to the puzzle, you'd need to design builds to not rely on it, but we think the new builds and player expression the lane flipping allows outweighs this. A semi-related change, related in the way of drop consistency, is that inserters will now always drop to the input sides of splitters. * * * ### New graphics V453000 With the rush before the release of 2.0 and Space Age we've naturally had to omit some projects, but very soon after the release of 2.0 we've started working on these so that they could be included some day. #### Diagonal flamethrower turret Continuing from the flippable entities, it has always felt clunky to combine flamethrower turret arcs so they would compliment each other, especially on wall corners. Since we already have a diagonal turret in the railgun, we found it very natural to make the flamethrower turret match that. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. Since we already had the main parts of the 3D model, the biggest challenges Zsolti had to face were around positioning all of the models so that the pipes fit nicely, and it occupies the diagonal collision box well, which is always easier said than done. #### Planet improvements A lot of work went into creating the graphics for all of the things you get to see on the planets, and while we were quite satisfied with their state on release, there were a few things that we couldn't prevent ourselves from doing. #### Fulgora ruins It's always been planned that the oily ocean wouldn't be completely empty, but instead there would be more ruins sticking out of it. The now dead civilization was at one point all over the planet, and these sunken ruins poking out of the oil could suggest that the islands of scrap are just a tip of the iceberg we're seeing, with much more hidden deep under the thick oily sea. #### Gleba stromatolites As we've shown in one of the past FFFs (FFF-431), Gleba received some significant last-minute changes, and one of the added things were stromatolites - rock-like formations of bacteria from which you can harvest iron/copper. We didn't have much time to focus on their graphics because Fearghall had his hands full with finishing Aquilo, so the stromatolites ended up being just paint-overs of existing rocks. _Thankfully you can't smell them through the rest of Gleba._ With release done, Fearghall had some time to improve them and make them more visible in the environment. We didn't want to alter the look too much so the new design is basically the same, but now they integrate with the environment better and form nice clumps. #### Vulcanus rocks Vulcanus was the first planet we worked on graphically, and at the time we were satisfied enough with the recoloured Nauvis rocks never became a priority before Space Age release. _You may notice that in the hotter areas, the rocks are not yet fully cooled._ Fearghall couldn't let them remain simple recolours forever, especially since they look so much softer than all the other vulcanus stones. So he made some new, more aggressive versions based on volcanic tephra and "Aa" lava flows. At this point, Fearghall has made so many rocks this was a walk in the park. "Aa" quality work! #### Demolisher update We knew that there were some issues with the design of the Demolisher - a lot of the "flow lines" we included on the surface didn't really make sense, and didn't help sell the volume as much as we had hoped. However, it was a behemoth undertaking, and so we couldn't afford to spend the time reworking them before release. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. So Fearghall took to making a new version. After some experiments with different surfaces, we landed on one which retains the volume and has some extra-stony plating. The new demolishers should feel much better integrated into their environment, and their shapes should generally feel more sensible. _As if you needed more reason to fear them._ We also always wanted to have proper corpses for the demolishers, but having directional entities with directional corpses would be technically difficult and expensive on VRAM, so we stuck with the placeholder rocks. With the rocks changing, these also had to go, which left Fearghall the difficult task of creating direction-agnostic corpse sprites. He settled on this part-exploded shell rock, which shows off some of the pumice like internals of the beast for all of you who keep them around as memorials of conquered lands from neighbours. _A fitting end to a worthy foe._ * * * ### Quality updates Klonan Quality has been a divisive part of the Space Age experience. Some players love it, and some don't. Nonetheless we do our best to make the features and gameplay of Quality as good as possible, so we have some upcoming changes to present. #### Space age without Quality In 2.0, Quality is a hard dependency on Space Age, which means you have to enable Quality to play Space Age. This was somewhat intentional, when designing 2.0 and feeling out the balancing, we knew some things would be tougher if you didn't have quality items, such as Space platform design. Having a few high quality solar panels, accumulators, or such, made a big impact on the effectivity of Platforms. The other main sticking point was that you need the Recycler from Quality, on Fulgora, so not having Quality mod enabled means you couldn't progress on Fulgora. But due to various reasons, a large one being mod compatibility, we have decided to make it possible to play Space Age without Quality, with the primary change being splitting the Recycler to its own tiny separate mod. However we still believe its best that players who play Space Age have Quality enabled so we added a new type of mod dependency: "Recommended". Quality is enabled by default and it is possible to turn it off and play without quality. #### Space Casino There is a confluence of mechanics present in Space Age, which leads to a strategy with an outsized benefit for crafting higher quality items: * Asteroid reprocessing recipe returning asteroid chunks. * Research for increasing the reprocessing yield. * Being able to put Quality modules in the reprocessing recipes. Together, they mean once you have everything in place, you can essentially reprocess asteroids chunks all the way up to Legendary quality, and from there produce Legendary raw materials. And we are very sorry but it is too strong to leave it alone. We don't want to be fun killers, but it just makes any other approach to quality obsolete. So in 2.1 placing Quality modules in the asteroid reprocessing recipes is disallowed. There are other recipes we were considering tweaking, such as Low Density Structure in Foundries or such, but we are leaving those alone. #### Quality trains There is not too much to say, other than, Quality Locomotives and wagons! * Locomotives - Accelerate with more power and have a higher top speed * Cargo wagon - Carry more item stacks, up to 100 with Legendary * Fluid wagon - Increased storage tank volume, up to 125K with Legendary * Artillery wagon - Increased shooting range (similar to turrets) We didn't not want Quality to affect the rolling stock, but we had the small technical detail of how you would actually progress with using them. The main issue being, if you have a fleet of hundreds of trains, you would have to upgrade them all by hand or such. So with some effort, time, and a detailed approach, Rseding was able to make using the Upgrade planner on trains work. If a train is marked for upgrade and a robot is assigned to upgrade it, the train will wait at its current stop. This means once you have production of the higher quality train items, you can just go crazy wild upgrading all the trains, and they should all eventually be upgraded without any schedule mishaps or manual work. * * * ### Fluid system updates raiguard The 2.0 fluid rewrite was rushed, and as such, there were a few holes left in the process, which I set out to fill. One of the most obvious chasms was that passthrough ports with filters would not prevent unrelated fluids from passing through them: Mp4 playback not supported on your device. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. This is obviously incorrect! The root of the issue is that passthrough ports, such as the boiler's water input, have two fluid buffers: the buffer which is a member of the pipeline, and the internal buffer which the boiler uses for its operations. This internal buffer is what the water filter is set on and is what is shown in the GUI. On the other hand, the pipeline buffer has no filter set, and the portion inside the boiler is entirely hidden! The solution seemed obvious: remove the hidden double-buffer and set the filter directly on the pipeline: However, this introduces a rather large issue: setting a fluid filter on a pipeline. Pipelines are made up of multiple fluid boxes which are added at different times, so the pipeline must keep track of the filters of member fluid boxes and set its own filter accordingly as the topology changes. Furthermore, what happens if you add a fluid box with a conflicting filter or conflicting fluid contents? The game needs to somehow reconcile them. Introducing... #### Fluid mixing prevention That's right, fluid mixing prevention is making a grand return! Rather than attempting to completely prevent the building of a mixed setup (FFF-312), this system prevents mixing in the simple case, and when mixing occurs through other means (rotation, robot construction, etc.), it produces a mixing warning. The pipelines will not be merged until the mixing condition is cleared: Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _A pipeline filtered to water cannot merge with a pipeline full of lubricant until the lubricant is cleared._ Notably, fluid mixing only occurs on bidirectional connections; you can still create smoothie pipes by connecting pumps or unidirectional machine outputs with different fluids in them, and the game will not get in your way. With mixing prevention in place, I was able to remove the hidden double-buffer, solving a lot of confusing bugs and simplifying the system architecture! #### Fluid flow scaling The fluid algorithm will scale the throughput of a given connection based on the fullness ratios of the source and sink. To facilitate this, you need some baseline number to scale, and in 2.0, this is hardcoded at 100/tick, or 6000/second. This works fine for the vast majority of players, but when you introduce quality into the mix, you very quickly run into situations where setups need more than 6000/second (or, more realistically, 3000/second on average) of throughput, and things begin to break down: Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _The green columns represent the fluid contents of each fluid box._ _Colored indicators are from the Bottleneck Lite mod._ This bug sat around unfixed for over a year, until just recently an embarrassingly obvious and simple solution came to me in a dream: simply derive the max flow from the fluid buffer volume and fix crafting machines to properly scale their output volumes based on the effective recipe speed and productivity. These changes, implemented in less than four hours, completely resolved the issue! Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _It just works.™_ #### New pipe GUI and pipe circuit connection The pipe GUI has received an overhaul to show fluid contents in more detail and in real-time. You may be able to spot a few new features as well! Mp4 playback not supported on your device. * * * As always, flip your thoughts to us at the usual places.

Hello, You may have noticed we launched Space Age earlier this week :) * * * ### Space Age reception The reaction to the Space Age launch has rocketed past our wildest expectations. We had almost 100,000 concurrent players, and as of writing this post, we have passed 400,000 copies sold! Needless to say, from all of us here, thank you. Factorio would not be possible without the support of our fans and players. We are working hard to address all the feedback and issues you've reported to us on the forums, Reddit, and Discord. * * * ### Galaxy of Fame This week, kovarex, Lucas and Vinzenz finished off our last little surprise for Space Age, the **Galaxy of Fame**. When players finish Space Age and reach interstellar space, they will be invited to upload a snapshot of their game to the Galaxy of Fame. Once uploaded you can find your star in the Galaxy of Fame, where you can see details such as: * General map info - Title, comment, time played, etc. * Chart view of planets and platforms. * Item, Energy and Kill statistics. You can browse around and see other peoples factories and see how they work. You might notice that some of the maps look a bit suspicious, well at this time we aren't blocking saves that use cheats/commands/editor, as we don't want to be overly restrictive, but we will add some filtering options soon. There is only a single Galaxy of Fame entry per player account, uploading a new one will overwrite the previous one, and the option will be in the in-game menu after completing Space Age. Since the feature is quite new there are some other details worth sharing: * The location, size, color and shape of each star is random and assigned at the first upload. * Zooming issues on mobile are known and will be fixed soon. * Error 100 when uploading is known, in most cases the upload actually succeeded. * We support uploading modded saves. * Galaxy of Fame will receive more updates in the future. As you can see, there aren't that many stars lighting up the Galaxy of Fame at the moment, but as more people play and finish, we hope to see it fill out to a full bright sparkling Galaxy. * * * ### Factorio 2.0 and Nintendo SwitchTwinsen Since the Space Age launch on Monday, we've had a few questions about our plans regarding support for the Nintendo Switch Platform. #### Factorio Space Age is not coming to Nintendo Switch. Space Age factories are much bigger compared to vanilla, as they span 5 planets. There's simply not enough RAM to fit them and not enough CPU power to run all of it at 60 UPS. Not to mention all the new sprites that were added that will not fit in VRAM. #### Factorio 2.0 is coming to Nintendo Switch. I am currently working on bringing the 2.0 free update to Switch and making sure it's optimized well enough. Since the release process on consoles takes a long time, I prefer to not to give you a conservative release date, and instead just release it as soon as possible, when it's ready. My estimate is that the update will come to Nintendo Switch in 1-2 months. Meanwhile I recommend you finish your current playthrough if you are almost finishing your save game, as the 2.0 update comes with some updates to rails, fluids, recipes and technologies that might break parts of your base and on Switch you will not be able to downgrade once you update. * * * As always, let us know what you think at the usual places.

Hello, We are still diligently working away at the Space Age bug reports. * * * ### Trouble with languages While fixing an IME keyboard (Asian language) bug introduced by the 2.0 update, I got curious and started exploring localisation for various languages. Even though my native language is Czech, all of our development on the game happens in English, so I essentially never run the game in this mode. As I was twiddling about in the Czech crafting menu, it quickly came to light that the user experience wasn't as smooth as I would expect. Any capital non-English letter would cause trouble. Looking up "**čerpadlo** " (pump) yields "Ropné **čerpadlo** " (Pump jack) and "Pobřežní **čerpadlo** " (Offshore pump), but not "**Čerpadlo** " (Pump) due to the capital Č not being matched to lower case č. Players have already developed a habit of typing stuff like "erpadlo"(ump) in order to avoid the troublesome letters altogether. #### Non-English search finally supported! Obviously, this has been terrible user experience for years and I took it upon myself to address it as quickly as possible. The root of the issue was that until now we searched by casting each "code letter" to lower case via a standard function. However, internally (in the Unicode representation) any letter with accents or outside the latin alphabet takes up multiple "code letters" and therefore wasn't recognized or converted at all. Furthermore, Unicode letters are quite a mess, since the table has grown gradually over the years. Many letters are scattered all over. Out-of-the-box solutions are usually bloated to accommodate edge cases for many scripts and languages we can't even render in Factorio (Hieroglyphs, Sumerian Cuneiform, Emoji...). My solution was to write my own custom mapping focusing on languages we officially support. And since I was already at it with a custom solution, it allowed me to further tailor search hits to how people type in everyday life: * Accented letters are equivalent to non-accented ones. "zelezny plat"(iron plate) = "železný plát"(iron plate) = "ŽELEZNÝ PLÁT"(IRON PLATE) * The two Japanese kana alphabets are now equvalent in search. 「べると」(belt) =「ベルト」(BELT). * The two lower case sigmas in Greek both match the capital sigma. Σ = σ = ς The new localised search improvements will be released with the upcoming 2.0.16 experimental release. Here is where I would like to hear from you. **If there is some other useful search feature that you find missing from a supported language, please let me know on the forums or as a response to this article.** I have tried to consult these features with our translators ahead of time, but I can only reach so many native speakers myself. It is also possible that some visually similar accents got omitted by accident. #### Mod portal search Besides the in-game search, our mod portal search has also been improved this week. In the past it wouldn't always yield proper matches with asian languages. We have updated our search provider to a newer version and now it should be working better. * * * ### Contribute to Translations With 2.0 and Space Age, we have added a lot of new items, descriptions, tips and such to the game. Each of these needs translating into foreign languages, and we rely on our community to contribute these for us. If you are interested in getting involved in the localisation of the game, please join the effort over on our Crowdin Project. To those already helping out, thank you very much for all your help. We know there are quite a few Crowdin issues and base game locale problems being reported, and we hope to address all of them in time. * * * As always, type your thoughts in the usual places.

Howdy, this week we will be diving deep into the workings of cargo pods and their seamless flight animations. Most of you playing the expansion have probably already seen them in game. The positive reception makes us very happy. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _Ascending to platform in orbit above Nauvis._ * * * ### Visual design The initial draft of a pod being released from a set of claws came from Earendel. You can see that the essence of it has remained relatively unchanged throughout development. In the very first version, the player needed to insert a capsule item into the rocket to travel. It got scrapped, because it was just pointless busywork. However that item was one of the ingredients of mech armor, hence the visual similarity. Following the draft, Jerzy modeled a 3D version of the claw rocket and pod. Then the branch lay dormant for a long time until core gameplay coding was finished and work resumed on less critical features such as fancy flight animations. I recruited the help of Jaroslaw, who had just finished his modeling work on hub, pad and landing hatches. Together with his modeling and volumetric cloud simulation and my coding and shader work and Ian's audio, we polished everything for the main release. _Earendel's concept art of the pod and rocket separation._ ### Where are those pods headed? Before any graphic work could begin, it was necessary to develop a backbone of how the items would move from one surface to another. At that point in time, the logistic requests functioned fine, but they just teleported the items instantly. Taking inspiration from the rocket, which had an inventory and could carry items, I decided to make the CargoPod its own new entity. While the rocket would take care of flying out of a silo, it would be shed on the original surface and the pod would have the functionality of going to another surface. The second (and trickier) part of the equation were destinations. Even in the _"vanilla?"/"stracciatella?"_ Space Age the pods travel from silos to hubs and from hubs to landing pads. Two of those may be further extended with cargo bays which add more hatches, but aren't destinations themselves. ### To the stations! The solution was to introduce stations, a layer of abstraction where all the buildings involved in orbital logistics register with their force and receive a unique ID. Any hatch on a cargo bay just joins the existing station. Then, to address items to another surface all we need is: Surface, Force, Station and Hatch. Depending on the usage some of these are optional. A starter pack rocket does not need any destination. Traveling player can launch towards a planet and only resolve whether the target is ground or pad at the apex. A logistic order will know its station beforehands. The nice effect of having generic logic is that technically the shipment can go between any two surfaces in the game and with any amount of stations. It even became useful in base game when rocket silos could target their own landing pad with space science and it would just work out of the box. I didn't want to restrict the potential by hardcoding everything to just planets and platforms. _My notes from when I was trying to carry the station concept one step further and combine the GUI for silo, hub and pad into one. The needs ended up being too different though._ * * * ### Assembling the cutscene puzzle Just like with the station system, I did not want to hardcode animations either. Custom planets would be one of the first things to mod in, so my priority has been to allow as much customization as possible. Every detail of the flight animation is provided by the fully moddable procession system. Each space location provides its own set of departure and arrival animations to planet itself and to any space platform in orbit. For instance, when a pod gets issued to fly from platform around Vulcanus down to the surface of Vulcanus, it would take the "vulcanus-platform-departure" and "vulcanus-planet-arrival" animations that match in style and stitch them together. Sometimes the pod has to wait in transit for a hatch to open up. In those cases "vulcanus-style-intermezzo" looping animation can be inserted in between to pass time. ### Building blocks Zooming in further, each procession has a timeline comprised of a variable number of layers. These layers control various aspects of the animation or draw graphics. Many aspects of them are driven by 1D, 2D and 4D Bézier curves and their normalized variants. _Planet landing curve open in the Factorio Spline Editor._ For modder convenience, I have published my custom Factorio Spline Editor online. It is fairly difficult to get the shapes right without it. As a bonus it also exports the curves directly in the desired format. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _Descending to Nauvis from a platform in orbit._ _A simplified timeline of flying down from a platform to surface highlighting when each procession layer is active to make up the final look._ ### Cloud technology Now, what allows the animation to appear seamless is the cover layer. At some point, the whole screen needs to be covered up to maintain the illusion when the pod teleports from one surface to another. Just swiping a flat image across the screen would have been serviceable. In fact, Albert favored leaning into a more stylized aesthetic. My opinion was that we could get a very impressive looking animated edge with very little work. All I did was ask Jaroslaw to generate a depth texture for the clouds. When the edge fades, instead of being multiplied by a flat value, it cuts the clouds off at a certain depth. This way they come onto the screen in clumps and bleed naturally instead of forming a thick wall. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _Manually demonstrating the soft masking shader of cover layers._ ### Clash of Mods While all this functionality sounds extremely powerful already, as I started making the final cutscene for Space Age, it became evident to me, that mods wouldn't be able to live in harmony like this. If every aspect of the animation lives inside these timelines then any new pod, planet or station would have to do unbearable amounts of work to integrate itself into all existing processions, creating countless duplicates that only differ in several sprites. Thankfully, we have one more trick up our sleeve. In the current version the planets in fact all use the same flight animation prototype. The way we introduce appropriate variants is through the use of catalogues. A catalogue is basically a list of images or sounds that the procession animation can refer to. Instead of having a predefined asset, the procession will refer to a CatalogueID and specify where to look for it. * Space Location catalogue can tell you how the local clouds or fog look like. * Pod catalogue can provide special animations to play such as opening solar panels or even textures for overlays like the reentry flames and the thruster sounds. * Hatch catalogue can provide the graphic for illumination when the pod thruster gets close. Any missing graphic or sound will just be skipped. New planets will play at least some animation even if they forget to define clouds. New pods can provide their own flame sprites that still play at the right times. New cargo bays or hubs can just say their illumination looks different and not touch any of the procession data. And if you are feeling fancy, you can give your planet an entirely new timeline, but still utilize pod animations and planet sprites from the default Space Age catalogue IDs. For a simple example, a parachute sprite could be added to pod catalogue and the flight speed slowed down significantly. Any third party mod adding a new pod type would have the option to support your planet by just defining a parachute graphic and nothing else. * * * As always, orbitally deliver your thoughts to the usual places.

Hello, Nice to see you all again so soon. * * * ### Mixed rockets Genhis Imagine you are setting up your first space platform. You start building tiles, a full rocket-load is sent. When you need belts, assembling machines or furnaces, again, a full stack is sent. A small platform could request 10-20 automated rockets and leave plenty of unused items in the inventory. The advantage is that you don't have to wait for more when you decide to rebuild it or add machines. This is how we envisioned space platform building - as making incremental progress. But not all players do it this way, some like to plan more in advance. These players view sending full stacks of items as a waste of rockets, especially in the early game. We noticed the discussions on our forums, on Reddit, and on the community Discord. We didn't attempt it during 2.0 development because mixing multiple item types in one rocket seemed too complicated, it had lots of edge cases which we didn't have a good answer for. However, it was also something I missed in my own playthrough, so much so that I started working on a proof-of-concept mod abusing our Lua API. It was functional but wasn't polished enough to make it available, and no, none of my co-workers ever saw it. Then the feature popped up independently on our internal 2.1 wishlist, and I volunteered to implement it. Handling the edge cases, thinking about our options and discussing what we wanted to achieve took quite some time and wasn't without compromises. In the end, I think we reached a good place, so let me present our results: _A typical 'full build' platform construction request._ _One of the mixed rocket payloads to build the platform._ The important part of supporting mixed payloads was to make it fully automatic. That is, you request something on your space platform and if you have automatic requests turned on in your rocket silo, the logic should pick the right batch of items and have robots deliver them to the silo. At the same time we had to keep performance in mind and not try to find the most optimal solution, just something good enough. We process requests sequentially and start with the lowest request count. These represent one-off construction requests or important items, so we want to deliver them before bulk goods which platforms normally transport, like calcite from Vulcanus or planetary science packs. Things get tricky if you have too few unsatisfied requests to fill a rocket. Sending the rocket half-empty would be wasteful, but we didn't know how to solve it nicely when making 2.0. In 2.1 we decided that we should select the most requested items and overdeliver them because you likely want more. Delaying the rocket until players request more items wouldn't be intuitive and wouldn't really work with the "all requests satisfied" condition. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _Step-by-step demonstration of the logic._ Even when overdelivering some items, the algorithm can still fail to find a complete batch due to our sorting constraints. It usually happens when you don't have enough supply in your logistic network. The logic hopes that missing items will be produced eventually and wants to wait. Some co-workers were confused about it during our playtesting, so I opted to fall back to single-item rockets to keep things flowing. I also made various other tweaks, so the fallback should be very rare and we can change it more based on players' feedback. #### Platform construction deadlocks Another difficult case was dealing with space platform deadlocks. A few weeks after 2.0 release we got a bug report on our forum, the player pasted a large platform blueprint and their hub didn't have enough inventory space to fit all the requests. Before they could get enough tiles and cargo bays built, other items managed to fill the hub completely. The workaround required sending some items back down and making sure cargo bays would be able to get in this time. Of course we had to fix it, so Rseding changed the code to not put unbuildable stuff into construction requests. This fix was fine when rockets sent full stacks but led to inefficient utilization of the new mixed payloads. Reintroducing this bug was not an option, so we had to find a different way to fix it. The thread had suggested to prioritize space platform foundations, which became doable since item requests were sorted for batching logic anyway. Therefore I added a request priority API to item prototypes and enabled it for platform foundations and cargo bays. Cargo bays are prioritized to speed up the building of large platforms by adding more input hatches and increasing inventory size, but it means they can still deadlock the platform in an extremely rare case. We thought this was an acceptable tradeoff. This change adds all ghosts to construction requests again, even if the platform has enough supply, and also includes item requests of unbuilt entities. During my rework I also found time to fix related long-standing bugs like the one with custom minimum payload. Using custom minimum payload shouldn't be as necessary anymore but now it works more as you would expect. The rocket will request as many items as possible, capped at the requested amount or the amount in your logistic network, whichever is lower. It will try to launch as soon as the minimum payload is satisfied and no robots are on the way to bring more items. I even fixed modded cases like auto-launching items to orbit if a mod enables it in Space age, which brings me to our next topic. #### Expanding modding support for rockets Since I was rewriting rocket delivery logic anyway, I wanted to consider modding interface requests on this subject. Quite a few modders were displeased that the rocket lift weight was a global utility constant but their request was marked as "won't implement" because it required a significant rework of the system. This was the perfect time to revisit it. It surprised me how much moddable lift weight complicated the implementation and I believe Rseding was right about rejecting it. I am not really sure if difficulty increased with mixed rockets or not, but it adds another payload optimization parameter to automatic rocket deliveries, so it makes sense that things aren't easy. Nevertheless, I was determined to implement it. Finding the optimal packing gets exponentially harder because now you not only have to pack items optimally into a rocket but also pick the right size to overdeliver as few items as possible. I started working towards the optimal solution hoping the code would stay simple enough but as soon as I solved one problem I found another edge case. I was worried about the performance impact of more complex approaches, so in the end I scrapped most of it and chose the simplest way. The logic now picks the smallest available rocket which can fit all requested items, whereas a better approach could involve splitting the load across multiple smaller rockets. It is a reasonable compromise and we can tweak it later if someone comes up with something smarter. As for the rocket capacity mentioned in the item tooltip, which was another blocker for this feature, I decided to keep it referring to the default capacity in utility constants. Changing it to item weight and letting players calculate rocket capacity in their heads might have been better for mods with many custom rocket silos but not so much for Space Age. This way, Space Age is unaffected and mods can treat their custom lift weights as multipliers of this default value. _A tooltip of a modded rocket silo with increased lift weight._ As a last thing to make the automated delivery logic work nicely with mixed rockets, I changed the rocket silo inventory size to be dynamic. Inventory slots will automatically grow and shrink when new items are added or removed, either physically or through remote interaction. The old mode didn't go away. Modders can choose between a weight-restricted slot-unlimited inventory and a weight-unrestricted slot-limited inventory. This selection is tied to launch_to_space_platforms prototype parameter because automatic rocket delivery can only work with dynamic-size inventories. * * * ### Space Platform improvements Klonan Space platforms are the logistic back bone of the Space Age gameplay, and while they work okay, there are a few improvements we've made during 2.1 development. #### Import from: Any Orbital requests can set a specific planet to import the items from. This is necessary for the platforms to actually move items between planets (E.G, pick up Tungsten from Vulcanus, drop it to Nauvis). If there was no filter on the pickup planet then the game would have no way to know where dropping the item makes sense. But it turns out, there are some cases where we want to import items from basically all locations, or at the very least prevent dropping items at any planet. The main example is items that the platforms themselves need (like Fuel cells, Repair packs, etc). It is somewhat possible to achieve it with multiple logistic sections (each importing from a different location), but that is just tedious, instead we just implemented the common suggestion of "Leaving the [Import from] blank", which now means "Import from all locations": #### No leaving with trash A related problem, is that if you have a filter set to trash on a specific planet (E.G, dump Depleted uranium fuel cells at Nauvis), it was possible the platform would leave with the items still in the trash slots. This causes a little bit of an unwanted problem in some situations, essentially randomly deciding where the items would end up. So we amended the platform logic, so that it will wait to clear its trash slots before leaving the current location (if there is a surface to trash to). This also applies to any items manually trashed of course, so your expedition ships don't leave while you're waiting for your construction robots and such. You can also notice in the screenshot the new Diode next to the 'Orbital drop slots' panel, hovering this will show the status of the drop logic, such as "Waiting for item drop cooldown" or "All surface stations are busy". #### Platform to platform transfers You might notice something a little bit suspicious in the last screenshot: "Why is the platform importing Ice/Carbon/Sulfur? Isn't that super inefficient and illegal?". And yes! You would be absolutely right if we were playing 2.0. However with 2.1 we are adding the ability to let platforms send and receive items from other platforms: In the orbital request, you can specify from which place the filter will request from: * Planet - Deliveries will be requested from rocket silos on the planet. * Platforms - Deliveries will be requested from space platforms in orbit over the planet. * All - Deliveries will be requested from both the planet and space platforms. To prevent unexpected item transfers and also help with the feature discoverability, platforms have a checkbox to specify if they provide to other platforms or not: This of course opens up a whole new can of possibilities such as: * Buffer platforms in orbit for quicker transport turn around. * Quicker bootstrapping of larger platforms by seeding some Ice/Carbon/Iron ore. * Orbital assembling of space materials (such as Space platform foundation) to save on surface rockets. * And many more... #### Hub set requests No Factorio feature is complete without the true automation with the circuit network. One reason we didn't add the circuit requests before, is that we did not have a way to specify which planet they would import from, and it seemed like an awkward system to implement. But now, we have the 'Import from Any', so we can keep the design clean and intuitive by saying "Circuit requests import from all locations", and they also request from 'All' sources (from the planet and platforms). It is also possible to use 'Set requests' at the same time as 'Read contents', due to a little bit of magic self-subtraction of the circuit network signals. #### Radar Universe mode To make all the pieces come together, we need a way to transmit signals between platforms and planets, and it is only natural to have this feature as an extension of the Radar circuit connection: You can specify a channel (SignalID), and all radars with the same Universe channel will send/receive from each other. On a platform you can filter the channels by current location to get missing planet materials or available cargo, and implement whatever logic you might like to control and command your fleet. All these features combine to make the Space logistics in 2.1 much more capable, oh and there is one more thing... * * * ### New rocket silo animation As a part of 2.1 we are making our last pass over the graphics, so prepare your eyes for this treat and many more to come. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _Graphics by Zsolti, Sounds by Ian._ It is now much more clear when the silo is crafting, and we added the little hatch in the top right for the robots to pickup/drop items. * * * As always, mix a payload of your thoughts at the usual places

Hello, It has been some time, and we're happy to share some news with you today. * * * ### 2.1 plan We have been working on the major 2.1 update for Factorio and Space age for the last 8 months, and it has been shaping up quite well. #### Scope and expectations Generally, we are happy with the game design of Factorio and Space age. The progression is good, things are mostly well balanced (one or two exceptions), and there isn't anything we feel is majorly missing. That is to say, we didn't go into 2.1 development with grand designs of large new pieces of content or huge features. It will be mostly: * Quality of life * Some small features * Fixes and game polish * Modding improvements And to state it clearly: * No new planets * No new enemies * No new research trees or resource chains #### Current state We had one of our traditional office LAN playtestings 2 weeks ago, our last chance to catch anything missing or feel some larger things to change about the game. For a little bit of a challenge we decided to play a deathworld, and also attempt the "Keeping your hands clean" achievement, which means we couldn't kill any biter bases until we researched artillery. _How our factory looked at the end of day one._ After the somewhat brutal first day, our expeditionary engineers returned from Vulcanus with the big guns, so we could get the achievement and breathe a little easier. Overall, the playtesting went super smoothly, we played our way through all the planets and finished with a respectable time of 53 hours 15 minutes. We didn't find any big bugs, no desyncs or save corruptions, and really no impediment to the next step of our plan. #### The next step For the next few weeks we will do some closed beta testing, and if all goes well we hope to release 2.1 as experimental by the end of June. Experimental means the update is public, but you will need to opt-in to receive it (through Steam or the in-game updater), or specifically download the experimental release from our website. Once released, we will have the usual bugfixing, before our summer vacations start in July. Importantly, we plan to keep 2.1 as experimental over the whole summer (I.E, not mark it stable), so that mod authors will have plenty of time to update. #### And in the long term? We envision 2.1 as our last major update of Factorio, and we will shift the focus onto long term support. So things like bug fixes, platform support/compatibility, modding features, etc. Other than that we feel we've reached a good place to conclude the active gameplay development. * * * ### What else has been going on? In a previous post (FFF-439) we mentioned that we have been starting work on projects other than Factorio. Honestly there will not be anything to share for a long time, but you might notice some of our team members less active fixing bugs and working on Factorio as they spend their time on other game prototypes/experiments. We have hired a few new humans to help with development of Factorio and the new projects: * Adam - Programmer and GUI/UX * Simon - Technical lead * Mishka - Creative assistant It is also a natural time for some of our team to spread their wings and rocket off to new challenges. Such as our long time rendering expert Posila. Posila worked with us for 10 years in the deepest parts of the game engine and rendering systems, and helped make sure the game is playable for as many players as possible. He took the noble sacrifice in the office to use only old outdated Nvidia and AMD graphics cards to make sure we don't lose touch with low-end performance, and performed several miracles around the new rendering/VRAM demands over the years. As he takes his very well deserved time of peace and relaxation; his legacy and impact in the code, company, and community, will never go without thanks. Programming wizard Tobias. Tobias helped us through the thick of Space age development, tracking down the trickiest and most painful bugs and weird crashes, and coming out the other side with a beautiful and magical fix. Other than that he was responsible for a lot of the circuit connections for new entities, polishing and logic fixes for many of the new systems (Aquilo freezing, Space platforms, etc.), as well as general touch-ups here and there (even being brave enough to delve into the GUI). As well as... #### Dawn of the rising star Earendel Over 5 years ago I was approached by Wube to join the Factorio team. At the time I was the co-owner and Art Director of a games development company and deep into the early phases of a new game project. Factorio was my favourite game though, and Wube is one of the most well respected development studios in the world, so it was an opportunity that I just couldn't pass up. Not only did I know that I enjoyed working on Factorio content because of my mods, but I also knew that I had a lot to offer. In fact I might dare to say that I could offer skills and experience that nobody else in the world could. I joined the team, helped produce Space Age, and improved the base game along the way too. Although my title was officially "Concept Artist", my actual role has been far more diverse, branching into other areas including terrain generation systems, game design, art direction alongside Albert, game engine code, and much more. It's been a great experience and I'm very grateful to the team and the friends I've made along the way. Now, it's time for me to move on. My own creative inspirations are calling to me so I'm leaving to make my own games. As for what I'm making, well I'm not ready to announce that fully. I have two prototypes that I'm working on and I don't have a clear winner yet. It will either be: * A deep turn-based tactical game with rich lore, a lot of secrets and a few puzzle elements. * An exploration focused puzzle-platformer with a lot of secrets and climbing-based combat. In the long run I intend to make both of these games (and more after), so the question is which one to make first. If either of these sound interesting to you, then please follow me in one of these locations: * Discord - A friendly community where you can say hi. My existing devlog is posted here for free but 1 month behind the Patreon content. * Patreon - You can support me here, or you can join as a free member to just get the big announcements. * YouTube - I'm releasing a video explaining a bit more about how I'm thinking about my next projects. * Mailing list signup form - If like me you don't really like social media, then this mailing list will be used only to announce when the game is available. Thanks again to Wube. I wish you all the best for your future endeavours. #### Merch shipping and plans We also recently welcomed a new member of the office team, Patty, whose role is to help optimize and expand our merchandise operations (Factorio Merch Store). After some trouble with Czech post, we have been able to resume E-shop deliveries to the USA with a new shipping company Paketa/Zasilkovna. We also have some plans for new merch, but it is quite early in the pipeline. * * * As always, plan your thoughts at the usual places.

Factorio and Factorio: Space Age are out now for the Nintendo Switch 2! * * * ### Factorio - Nintendo Switch™ 2 Edition Factorio - Nintendo Switch™ 2 Edition is a free upgrade that has the following features: * Mouse mode: Using the Joy-Con™ 2 Mouse Sensor, the left or right Joy-Con 2 can be used as a mouse. * Enhanced resolution: The game will run on the screen's native 1080p resolution instead of 720p. In TV mode, it supports all resolutions, including 2160p (4K). * Variable refresh rate support for the console's screen. * Some higher quality sprites and animations. * Other visual improvements. * Faster loading times. * Ability to build much larger bases. Get it on the Nintendo eShop. * * * ### Factorio: Space Age on Nintendo Switch™ 2 Factorio: Space Age is a large expansion with many new mechanics and challenges, and it is now available on the Nintendo Switch 2: * Requires the free Nintendo Switch™ 2 Edition upgrade. * Not available on Switch 1. * The full and unabridged Space Age content. * Explore new worlds and build your interplanetary factory at home or on the go. * Full compatibility with the PC version and cross-play multiplayer is fully supported. Check it out on the Nintendo eShop. * * * As always, let us know what you think at the usual places.

Hello, It's time to speak about more Gleba. Some changes, and also something new... * * * ### The Gleba problems In the last few months we have been thinking about how to improve Gleba. There has always been this fundamental problem with a biological-oriented planet - other things you produce in the game tend to not be organic so it doesn't quite fit as easily as a planet based on making more Iron or more electronic circuits. * It's difficult to integrate the biological production chains into the rest of the traditional factory, as it's mostly metals there. * Finding useful things to unlock is difficult, especially compared to the metal and electronics based producers like Foundry and Electromagnetic plant. And during the LAN party we had about a month ago, these problems were only confirmed plus we've realized many more issues in other areas. And seeing people interact with Gleba put a lot more urgency on finding solutions. There is one change in particular which is significant and outlines our approach fairly well: * * * ### Bacteria cultivation One of the key issues on Gleba was that you'd be building two factories - one for agriculture which would eventually output the science pack, and the usual Iron/Copper one which craft the factory and rocket parts. _The normal crafting tree was completely severed from the organic one._ This was especially problematic as the agriculture factory didn't contribute in any way until you'd have delivered the science packs to your labs. And as we've learned, it is preferable to attempt to have each step you take feel rewarding and immediately useful. For a very long time we had wanted to add a way to create Iron and Copper ore via agriculture but we weren't quite sure how. Getting factory-grade amounts of minerals from plants felt just too unbelievable. _Stromatolites waiting to be mined._ The idea we've implemented is that some bacteria can be found in the swamps where agricultural plants grow. * Stromatolites are rock-like objects which have formed there over many years, acting as accumulated bacteria and ore for you to quickly obtain at the start. * Yumako/Jellynut can be processed with a small chance to obtain Copper/Iron bacteria respectively, reinforcing the feeling that there really isn't much in it. * Soon enough you unlock the Biochamber, and as you are the ingenuous engineer, you replicate and grow the bacteria in it to truly industrial amounts. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _Cultivating bacteria which turn into iron and copper ore._ This results in the agriculture chain being immediately useful for creating Iron and Copper ore which you can use for building more of the Gleba factory, and once you've got enough of that you can "just" switch it for full-on agricultural science production. As a result the steps you're taking are much more useful and less tedious. A beautiful little detail is that the bacteria spoils directly into ore, so it's a place where spoiling is helping you, for once. * * * ### The reward It's nice when an activity is fun, but it's much better when it's also meaningful and leads somewhere. Obtaining powerful factory improvements is how we like to be motivated in Factorio. There's a handful of improvements to be unlocked by the agricultural science pack like the stack inserter, spidertron with rocket turret, or more efficient recipes for space platforms, but there is one specific new technology... #### Biter captivity Bioflux is a combination of processed Yumako and Jellynut. It's crafted on Gleba and it can be used to capture biter spawners on Nauvis. A capture robot loaded with doses of Bioflux solution and is shot from a rocket launcher. The capture robot latches onto a spawner and soon enough the spawner is rendered harmless and docile. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _(Capture time reduced for demonstration)_ Once captured, the spawner no longer hatches biters, and biter eggs can be collected with inserters for further processing or disposal. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. As long as you keep feeding it Bioflux in frequent intervals, the spawner will remain that way. Otherwise it 'goes rogue' and returns back to its natural form, spawning hostile biters again. Biter eggs can be immediately used for improvements to agriculture, crafting Productivity module 3, or because we felt like the Gleba unlocks aren't motivating us enough... #### A new laboratory Combined with some other items, the egg can be grown and hatched into a mutated laboratory. As you will be able to read down below, the work on the graphics has only just started, but here you can see a work in progress version of it from Earendel and Jerzy: Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _Work in progress graphics of the new Biolab. Subject to change._ The Biolab can be used only on Nauvis as the organism inside would die on other planets, but in turn it only consumes **half** the amount of science packs for any given research. It can process all science packs just like the normal lab. It also has 4 slots for modules. This means it's a powerful unlock and obtaining it early on should feel quite rewarding. Whether we finally broke the imbalance of Vulcanus and Fulgora being clearly superior to Gleba, we will see - but at least the difference is much, much less stark now. * * * ### A bit of backstory You may notice that the Biolab above looks awfully similar like the captive biter spawner. Until very recently, that's pretty much what it was. _Concept art from Earendel._ We had an entity in the game called Synthetic biter spawner. We added it because we felt like it would be nice to be able to just place your own spawners anywhere in order to scale up biter egg production in the typical Factorio fashion of rows on rows of machines. As we were trying to simplify some things and find rewards for Gleba, the Synthetic biter spawner started to lose its significance - and at the same time we felt like some powerful Gleba unlock is missing. At first we changed it to be a more universal crafter, giving it the ability to craft Nauvis science packs, solid fuel and rocket fuel, all with a productivity bonus similar to the foundry and electromagnetic plant. The recipes felt a bit forced and the bonus wasn't that great compared to its rivals, but it was something. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _The discarded synthetic biter spawner in its science pack crafter form._ Along the way we started dreaming about turning it into a full-on laboratory... The graphics however would be far from a proper visual solution so we've put our heads together with Albert and Earendel and we decided to make a last minute adjustment making a proper semi-organic Biolab which would include more of the typical lab structure. The finished version will be in Space Age on release day. :) Because this means we've discarded the synthetic biter spawner, we have added a way to craft the captive biter spawners which you could then place anywhere on Nauvis you like, so you can still scale their production up conveniently. This technology is unlocked at the last planet so it won't get trivialized too early, and the captive spawners you make will have their own quirks... * * * ### Conclusion The idea of capturing biters has been in our heads for a long time, and in Space Age since the very first serious brainstorming going into the initial prototype. Biter eggs also make use of the spoiling mechanic as they spoil into live biters. The biter based lab has had many uses before and we believe now it has found its true form. Over the last month we've improved the experience on Gleba in many other ways. Changing map generation, cleaning up some graphics, tweaking many if not all recipes, making the enemies less crazy, adding new ways to obtain resources and making the rewards a lot more appealing. A lot of the changes are too detailed for the context of FFFs, but we'd like to express our deep gratitude for the feedback from our testers, which has been immensely helpful. Speaking of testers, please be aware that the content/press embargo ends on the 14th October, so if you want to avoid spoilers please keep it in mind as there are no restrictions on what they can show. * * * Captivate us with your least spoiled ideas in the usual places, and don't argue whether Bioflux is drugs or food, it's obviously...

Hello, It's time to reveal the last planet. So. Warning: Spoilers ahead. * * * ### Welcome to Aquilo It's day, but stars still twinkle in the dark sky. You count the planet's sun among the stars, larger and brighter than the others, but still so dim you can barely feel its warmth at all. A howling wind chills you to the bone and gently rocks the iceberg you are sitting on. This planet has no land. It's an ocean world of liquid ammonia. One continuous ocean covers the entire planet and it's at least 200km deep. The best landing spot you could find was this large iceberg. The sheet of ice is only a few meters thick and seems to contain a lot of trapped air, but frozen water is a very solid material as long as it stays cold. It's able to support a landing pad, so that's good enough. You sit on the edge of the ice watching the snow fall. It gracefully deposits itself on your frozen machines. Assembling machines, chemical plants, transport belts, and inserters, all frozen in place unable to move. In the distance you spot columns of teal gas, fluorine bubbling up from the depths. It's one of the resources you're here for, but out of reach for now. There seems to be plenty of oil, most likely from microorganisms in the core. Making fuel on site shouldn't be a problem as soon as the refinery is unfrozen. You take the time to plan your next moves: collecting ice from the surrounding ocean to extend the platform, heating towers to warm your buildings, heat pipes to move the heat around, and concrete to make sure that the heat doesn't melt the ice. The thought of running heat pipes through all your designs is starting to make your head spin. But it's okay, don't panic. The one thing you do have on this planet... is time. A flurry of shooting stars distracts you for a moment. You can't help but wonder if they are little meteorites burning up in the atmosphere, or the remaining parts of the space platform that dropped you here. The space platform barely made it to this planet and never made it out of orbit. You got out just in time. Hopefully a replacement platform will be here soon... if it survives. There's a clunking sound behind you as the landing pad opens its hatch. You turn to see a formation of cargo pods descend through the atmosphere. It's time to build. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _Terrain graphics by Fearghall and Earendel._ * * * ### A liquid planet Aquilo doesn't have any land. It has a few icebergs floating around, but the building space is very restricted. If you use an offshore pump in the ammoniacal ocean you don't get water, you get mostly liquid ammonia but with some ice particles floating in it. You can separate these in a chemical plant. These substances have a variety of uses, but among them is the ability to make Ice platform. Ice platform allows you to extend the iceberg and extend your build area. Making ice platform can be a slow process so it's good to scale this process while you have spare energy and heat. * * * ### Freezing and heating Heat is the next big mechanic and it's a wonderful twist to the way that you build. Most things on Aquilo freeze if they are not heated. _A collection of frozen machines. Frozen effects are all hand painted by me (Earendel). It's better and faster to paint snow in 2D than to add a snow layer in 3D, especially considering most of the original graphics have a lot of hand-painted post-production._ Heat is generated by a heating tower, which burns chemical fuels that can be made locally, or the nuclear reactor that requires imports from Nauvis. The heating tower is interesting as a burner because it's more like the reactor, it continues to consume fuel even at max temperature. As well as heating, this can be a good way to get rid of anything burnable, which means it can also be very useful on Gleba. _Heating tower from line art to concept art (inactive and active) by Earendel, to the final graphics by Jerzy._ Both the heating tower and nuclear reactor are heat sources. They spread heat to adjacent entities, but they only need to get the entity up to 30°C for the entity to thaw. This means that in some places like outposts, going for higher temperatures is a waste, so that is one of the reasons we added the ability to read the temperature of heat sources and control them with circuits (FFF-428). Heat sources only being able to warm adjacent things that touch them is very limiting. Instead you use heat pipes to move the heat around to all the entities adjacent to connected heat pipes (including diagonally). Every entity that needs heat also consumes heat. The effect is minor per entity but can result in a lot of heat loss over long distances, so sometimes you want a hotter heat source so that the heat can travel further. Heat pipes and heated buildings would melt the ice, so to protect the ice that keeps you floating you can place concrete (or refined concrete) as an insulator. In practice this just means that most entities can't be placed directly on to ice, we don't actually turn the ice tiles into ocean... anymore. That used to be a mechanic, but it was too annoying to deal with when you try to build in an already heated area. Heat pipes can't go underground (or under ice) so you'll need to route the belts and pipes around them while building. Often this means a machine will need access to belts, pipes and heat, but all the belts and pipes also need access to heat, and this can lead to some nice little puzzles and some very interesting builds. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. * * * ### Resources Aquilo is notably lacking in basic resources. On the other planets you can land with nothing and build your way to another rocket. On Aquilo if you land with nothing then you can do nothing. Ok, but what _DO_ you have? Your resources are: * Solar (1%). * Ammoniacal solution from the ocean directly. * Crude oil from resource nodes. * Lithium brine from resource nodes * Fluorine gas from resource nodes. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _New resource graphics by Jerzy._ Solar output is truly pathetic, only 1% of Nauvis. You need some solar panels to kickstart your first few machines so efficiency modules go a long way to speeding up that process. Ammoniacal solution can be gained via an offshore pump. With a powered heated chemical plant you can split it to ice and ammonia. Ice can be melted for water which is needed for any power beyond the pathetic solar. It's also useful to extend your iceberg. Ammonia can be used with crude oil to make solid fuel, or combined with solid fuel to make rocket fuel. Crude oil can be collected with a pumpjack in a few places where it floats up from the ocean depths. It can be combined with ammonia to make fuel, or refined the usual way which can be a useful sink for excess ice and water while also making fuel. Also, note that it's an animated resource now, even on Nauvis. Lithium brine floats up to the surface in some spots and requires a pumpjack. It's used to make lithium, which you'll need for a variety of things including the planet's science pack. Fluorine gas bubbles up in some places and this also requires a pumpjack. Fluorine is used to make coolant which is an essential part of this planet's industry: Cryogenics. Coolant is used in a few things but initially it's only used for Aquilo's science pack, the Cryogenic science pack, which is made in a... * * * ### Cryogenic plant Mp4 playback not supported on your device. The Cryogenic plant is a powerful 5x5 structure with a base crafting speed of 2. It doesn't have base productivity because it deals with a lot of looping recipes, but it does have **8** module slots, so extra productivity modules can be used for the recipes that support it. _Early Cryogenic plant sketches by Earendel. Albert liked the bottom 2 designs so I made something based on those. Some elements of the top 3 got reused in other designs._ _Cryogenic plant line art and concept before final pale turquoise paint colour was chosen._ While the structure can use some chemical plant recipes, it is mainly focussed on recipes that need cold temperatures and a lot of precision. Some examples are: coolant, coolant cooling, the cryogenic science pack, fusion power cells, quantum processors, and some other late-game items. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _Final graphics by Jerzy, sounds by Ian._ Quantum processors are like the final tier of circuit, they need something from each of the new planets. They are needed to make the fusion reactors that you saw in FFF-420 (Cryogenic plants are the hidden structures in that post). Quantum processors are also needed to make the final turret in the game which is also unlocked on Aquilo: The Railgun. * * * ### Railgun turret Mp4 playback not supported on your device. The railgun turret requires both ammo and electricity to function. It has a range of 40 and the damage... well it starts at 10k. It damages everything in a continuous line, so be careful not to stand on the wrong side of it. _Railgun line art and concept by Earendel. There are pipe connections in the design because it was intended to a be a turret that requires cooling to function._ This turret has a 3x5 base. It has a fixed direction like a flamethrower turret but the attack cone is narrower than 90 degrees. If you could only build in 4 directions this would create blind spots, so you can build railgun turrets in 8 directions. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _Graphics by Jarosław, sounds by Ian._ There's also a handheld version that is very effective against Demolishers (FFF-429), but that's not the main use for the turret version. What do you need the turret for? I'll let you speculate. * * * ### Conclusion Aquilo is a challenging but very unique planet. After spending a few hours getting absorbed into Aquilo's unique building patterns, it feels really weird going back to any of the other planets. By comparison everything else suddenly looks so simple. It's a feeling that struck me after playing on my very first Aquilo gameplay prototype, but the same feeling hits me after every playtesting LAN we've done too. It's quite easy to accidentally under power your base, which can lead to a lack of heat, and subsequently freeze half your base. When this happens to you, I invite you to turn off Alt mode and appreciate the view. The frozen factory isn't a sight you get often, so enjoy the moment. * * * I know you're getting unreasonably excited for the release of Space Age, but as always, keep your cool and comment in the usual places.

**Factorio: Space Age** continues the player's journey after launching rockets into space. Discover new worlds with unique challenges, exploit their novel resources for advanced technological gains, and manage your fleet of interplanetary space platforms. For more information about what comes with the expansion, check out our **Space Age content** page. * * * ### Space Age now available Factorio: Space Age is now available for purchase, you can buy it at any of the following official places: * Our website * Steam * GOG.com * Humble Store Purchases from our website or GOG can redeem a free expansion Steam key. If you purchase on Steam, you can link your Steam ID to our website to access the non-Steam downloads. The Factorio: Space age expansion has changed the game progression and pacing. If you plan to play Space Age, it is recommended to start playing with Space Age directly, even when its your first time, instead of playing the base game and adding Space age later. * * * ### 2.0 release The release of the Space Age expansion also coincides with the release of the free Factorio 2.0 update. Version 2.0 has a wide range of game changes, optimizations and improvements, which we detailed here. * * * ### Feedback welcome This is a very large and fresh release, so if you have any suggestions or encounter any issues please report them on our forum: * Ideas and suggestions * Technical help * Bug reports * * * We sincerely hope you will enjoy the result of our work for the last 4 years. Factorio: Space Age and 2.0 are the biggest projects we've undertaken so far, and it wouldn't be possible without the support of our fans and players. From all of us, thank you. As always, let us know what you think at the usual places.

Hello, You may have noticed we launched Space Age earlier this week :) * * * ### Space Age reception The reaction to the Space Age launch has rocketed past our wildest expectations. We had almost 100,000 concurrent players, and as of writing this post, we have passed 400,000 copies sold! Needless to say, from all of us here, thank you. Factorio would not be possible without the support of our fans and players. We are working hard to address all the feedback and issues you've reported to us on the forums, Reddit, and Discord. * * * ### Galaxy of Fame This week, kovarex, Lucas and Vinzenz finished off our last little surprise for Space Age, the **Galaxy of Fame**. When players finish Space Age and reach interstellar space, they will be invited to upload a snapshot of their game to the Galaxy of Fame. Once uploaded you can find your star in the Galaxy of Fame, where you can see details such as: * General map info - Title, comment, time played, etc. * Chart view of planets and platforms. * Item, Energy and Kill statistics. You can browse around and see other peoples factories and see how they work. You might notice that some of the maps look a bit suspicious, well at this time we aren't blocking saves that use cheats/commands/editor, as we don't want to be overly restrictive, but we will add some filtering options soon. There is only a single Galaxy of Fame entry per player account, uploading a new one will overwrite the previous one, and the option will be in the in-game menu after completing Space Age. Since the feature is quite new there are some other details worth sharing: * The location, size, color and shape of each star is random and assigned at the first upload. * Zooming issues on mobile are known and will be fixed soon. * Error 100 when uploading is known, in most cases the upload actually succeeded. * We support uploading modded saves. * Galaxy of Fame will receive more updates in the future. As you can see, there aren't that many stars lighting up the Galaxy of Fame at the moment, but as more people play and finish, we hope to see it fill out to a full bright sparkling Galaxy. * * * ### Factorio 2.0 and Nintendo SwitchTwinsen Since the Space Age launch on Monday, we've had a few questions about our plans regarding support for the Nintendo Switch Platform. #### Factorio Space Age is not coming to Nintendo Switch. Space Age factories are much bigger compared to vanilla, as they span 5 planets. There's simply not enough RAM to fit them and not enough CPU power to run all of it at 60 UPS. Not to mention all the new sprites that were added that will not fit in VRAM. #### Factorio 2.0 is coming to Nintendo Switch. I am currently working on bringing the 2.0 free update to Switch and making sure it's optimized well enough. Since the release process on consoles takes a long time, I prefer to not to give you a conservative release date, and instead just release it as soon as possible, when it's ready. My estimate is that the update will come to Nintendo Switch in 1-2 months. Meanwhile I recommend you finish your current playthrough if you are almost finishing your save game, as the 2.0 update comes with some updates to rails, fluids, recipes and technologies that might break parts of your base and on Switch you will not be able to downgrade once you update. * * * As always, let us know what you think at the usual places.

Hello, 3 days to go! * * * ### Factorio: Space Age Trailer With a new Expansion of course comes a new trailer. After many weeks of work, fine-tuning, and polishing, Albert (with help from Vaclav, and the script written by Earendel) has finished the launch trailer for the Space Age expansion: The result speaks for itself, and there are some details you might notice. For instance the rockets now have fixtures carrying the cargo pods, and we have animations for cargo pods landing on a planets and at landing pads. Or perhaps you noticed the player running around with some of the new late game technologies... * * * ### Mech armorv453000 From the very first prototype of Space Age, we had a new tier of armor in it. The only difference was a 20% larger equipment grid over Power armor Mk2, but along with quality this felt well above adequate already. As Earendel and Albert were developing the concept, the design settled on the idea that the player is locking themselves in a metal sarcophagus, transcending humanity to become the perfect Factorio machine. We have been thinking what kind of special features could the new piece of armor have and the most obvious and convenient one seemed to be the ability to fly, especially as the Jetpack from Space Exploration is quite convenient, though we'd want to do it a bit differently... Some ideas would be: * We didn't want to add a button to toggle flying. * We would prefer precise movements unlike the spidertron bobbing and rubberbanding. Therefore, the flying would just happen automatically whenever you would be about to hit any obstacle. This raises some immediate questions, like do we have separate speeds for walking and flying and with it exoskeleton equipment and jetpack equipment? We decided against adding jetpack equipment, have just one movement speed value, and have exoskeleton equipment effectively make you fly faster. Which may sound strange, but as the flying happens automatically, it would be very annoying to have one of the speeds slower. Being part of the armor also means that we can show the flying capability in the armor graphics. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _Graphics by Jerzy_ As you can see, you not only take flight if you were to hit an obstacle, but also when an obstacle is about to hit you. The mech armor went from a minor upgrade to a game-changer. Being able to move freely makes basic navigation in the game feel incredible, and as a secondary effect it means you feel much better about stacking many legendary exoskeletons in your armor because it doesn't make you run into obstacles all the time. It doesn't require fuel, or electricity from your equipment grid, it just works whenever it would be useful... almost. The combat abilities were in fact so powerful that we had to give the Demolishers a smoke cloud which prevents you from flying, as otherwise fighting them felt like a joke. If you ever feel like missing construction robots when starting a new game, this feeling just got a lot worse. The mech armor also makes you forget to fear walking over rails, which can be a hazardous habit. From the perspective of visuals and concept, we wanted the mech armor to be the player becoming one with the machine and in part one of the stronger symbols of Space Age, and now the mechanics match that. _Line art version of the concept by Earendel._ * * * ### Conclusion Factorio: Space Age has been almost 4 years in development, and now the finish line is just ahead of us. We look forward to seeing you all enjoying Space Age on Monday, and don't forget to put shield equipment in your mech suit, trains aren't the only enemy! Let us know if you are ready to become one with the machine at the usual places.

Hello, We are still diligently working away at the Space Age bug reports. * * * ### Trouble with languages While fixing an IME keyboard (Asian language) bug introduced by the 2.0 update, I got curious and started exploring localisation for various languages. Even though my native language is Czech, all of our development on the game happens in English, so I essentially never run the game in this mode. As I was twiddling about in the Czech crafting menu, it quickly came to light that the user experience wasn't as smooth as I would expect. Any capital non-English letter would cause trouble. Looking up "**čerpadlo** " (pump) yields "Ropné **čerpadlo** " (Pump jack) and "Pobřežní **čerpadlo** " (Offshore pump), but not "**Čerpadlo** " (Pump) due to the capital Č not being matched to lower case č. Players have already developed a habit of typing stuff like "erpadlo"(ump) in order to avoid the troublesome letters altogether. #### Non-English search finally supported! Obviously, this has been terrible user experience for years and I took it upon myself to address it as quickly as possible. The root of the issue was that until now we searched by casting each "code letter" to lower case via a standard function. However, internally (in the Unicode representation) any letter with accents or outside the latin alphabet takes up multiple "code letters" and therefore wasn't recognized or converted at all. Furthermore, Unicode letters are quite a mess, since the table has grown gradually over the years. Many letters are scattered all over. Out-of-the-box solutions are usually bloated to accommodate edge cases for many scripts and languages we can't even render in Factorio (Hieroglyphs, Sumerian Cuneiform, Emoji...). My solution was to write my own custom mapping focusing on languages we officially support. And since I was already at it with a custom solution, it allowed me to further tailor search hits to how people type in everyday life: * Accented letters are equivalent to non-accented ones. "zelezny plat"(iron plate) = "železný plát"(iron plate) = "ŽELEZNÝ PLÁT"(IRON PLATE) * The two Japanese kana alphabets are now equvalent in search. 「べると」(belt) =「ベルト」(BELT). * The two lower case sigmas in Greek both match the capital sigma. Σ = σ = ς The new localised search improvements will be released with the upcoming 2.0.16 experimental release. Here is where I would like to hear from you. **If there is some other useful search feature that you find missing from a supported language, please let me know on the forums or as a response to this article.** I have tried to consult these features with our translators ahead of time, but I can only reach so many native speakers myself. It is also possible that some visually similar accents got omitted by accident. #### Mod portal search Besides the in-game search, our mod portal search has also been improved this week. In the past it wouldn't always yield proper matches with asian languages. We have updated our search provider to a newer version and now it should be working better. * * * ### Contribute to Translations With 2.0 and Space Age, we have added a lot of new items, descriptions, tips and such to the game. Each of these needs translating into foreign languages, and we rely on our community to contribute these for us. If you are interested in getting involved in the localisation of the game, please join the effort over on our Crowdin Project. To those already helping out, thank you very much for all your help. We know there are quite a few Crowdin issues and base game locale problems being reported, and we hope to address all of them in time. * * * As always, type your thoughts in the usual places.

Hello, it has been a while since we've talked. * * * ### Switch 2 and FactorioTwinsen I saw there was good interest in Factorio and Factorio: Space Age for the new Nintendo Switch 2. Some players were asking about it even before the console itself was officially announced. We know you will scroll to the conclusion, so here's the announcement first: #### Factorio - Nintendo Switch 2 Edition Similar to other games, we decided to release a **Nintendo Switch 2 Edition** , an upgrade you can get if you own the game for the original Switch. If you don't have the game you can get it as part of a 'bundle' which is the game with the Switch 2 edition upgrade. Nintendo has some more information/clarification about Switch 2 editions here. The upgraded version will feature: * Better resolution. The game will run on the screen's native 1080p resolution instead of 720p. When docked, it supports all resolutions, including 2160p (4K). * Variable refresh rate support for the console's screen. * Some higher quality animations. * Some higher resolution sprites. * Other visual improvements. * Faster loading times. * Ability to build much larger bases. * Mouse mode support. Using the Joy-Con Mouse Sensor, the left or right Joy-Con can be used as a mouse. The price for this upgrade will be... free. We don't believe paying for a technical upgrade is reasonable. For players who want to support us, and want more content, they can get the Space Age expansion. #### Factorio: Space Age We are happy to announce that **Factorio: Space Age** will be coming soon to the Switch 2, as a DLC priced at $35. It will feature the same content as the PC version, nothing was removed or trimmed down. For full details on the Space age expansion, check out the Space Age content page. #### Release date Both the **Factorio - Nintendo Switch 2 Edition** and the **Space Age** DLC for Switch 2 will release at the same time. The release date is... as soon as possible. Like with the release for the original Nintendo Switch, the certification and store setup can take a long time. I don't want to delay the release by setting a conservative release date, but I also don't want to promise a release date that we might miss. We are aiming for a December release, so you can get a nice gift before Christmas. Not an official release date, just something we are aiming for. * * * ### The journey to Switch 2Twinsen Ever since rumors about the console appeared, I was interested on working on it, it would be a shame not to take advantage of the new features and processing power. I asked for access to the development environment shortly after the announcement but didn't receive a positive answer. I was hoping we could get access at the console's release. We did get access shortly after, in July. So I got to work. The first step was to make everything compile and run on the new platform. After setting up everything, this was surprisingly easy as most of the things are compatible between the platforms. I even used the same version of SDL2 with a few fixes and modifications. The original Nintendo Switch did not have enough RAM and CPU power to run Space Age, 5 planets worth of bases was too much. So the next important question was if the Switch 2 can run it. Some quick tests showed that yes, everything was good enough and you can finish Space Age while maintaining 60 UPS and 60 FPS, if you build reasonably. Mouse mode is an interesting feature but it has to be integrated right. The ability to use a mouse doesn't mean you can now play the same way as on PC since you are, well, missing a keyboard. You will still play as you would normally with a controller, but mouse mode will allow you to use a cursor when needed (placing buildings, navigating the UI). The feature needs to be enabled in the controls settings menu. Trying to automatically switch to mouse mode based on controller orientation and when the sensor detects something was unreliable. I found the mouse cursor would activate randomly if I held my hand and fingers in some positions. There's also an option to swap the R and A (or L and A) buttons. This makes "clicking" with the Joy-Con feel natural. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. Then I went to work putting everything together, figuring out how to distribute the upgrade and the DLC and fixing many smaller issues. Everything was falling into place. But quite late I decided to test the performance on 4k (2160p) TVs and unfortunately, performance was terrible across the entire game. It looked like we wouldn't support 2160p resolution. Luckily Genhis suggested disabling light occlusion. This improved performance across the board, but Vulcanus, Gleba and space were still problematic. I integrated Tracy profiler which helped me find the problematic code and shaders. Genhis improved the fog and space dust shader performance significantly without making them looking much different. This optimization, and maybe more, will be available on PC too, so players with modest video cards will see better frame-rates and will be better able to play in 2160p. Some graphical features (like light occlusion and animated water) will be disabled when connecting the console to a 4K TV, but now it keeps 60FPS in most scenes, including busy bases. The game is now ready from my side, but still has to go though certification where new issues are likely to be found. * * * ### Space Age anniversaryKlonan Happy one year anniversary since the release of Space Age! It feels like just a few weeks ago we were deep in the heart of the launch preparations, the excitement of those final weeks and days before release are fondly remembered. The reaction to Space Age has been incredible and we're so thankful to report that we recently crossed the 1 million sales mark, and over fifty thousand engineers have claimed their stars in the Galaxy of Fame. The initial wave of bug squashing and intense fixing lasted until the Christmas vacations. Once we were back we decided to take a more relaxed approach, slowly working through the issues on the forum and not putting too much pressure on ourselves. Over the summer we had a few team get togethers here in Prague, where we had long discussions about Factorio, Space Age, and games in general; brainstorming ideas, thinking about our long term plans, as well as laying some groundwork for what our next project could look like. Now, after our summer 'Brainjams', we've starting work properly on 2.1. We don't want to promise too much (as always), and we're trying to keep the scope not too big and not too small... We really want to make sure Factorio will be in a good place for long term support, and 2.1 might be the last chance for us to make some bigger/breaking changes. In short, its going to be quite a while, I can promise it won't be ready this year... and I don't promise that we won't start writing juicy and entertaining Friday Facts when we have something more to show :). * * * As always, let us know what you think at the usual places.

Hello, It is a busy time fixing bugs and cleaning up after the Space Age release. * * * ### Factorio: Space Age - Soundtrack releaseAlbert During the last weeks, our dear Petr - Music composer of the Factorio: Space Age (FFF-406) has been working on selecting, remixing and mastering the very best tracks of the entire expansion in order to prepare an album with the best possible quality to represent the soundtrack of the DLC. The selected tracks have been remixed to enhance and intensify its dynamics to give them a proper album format experience. All the recording sessions with the musicians and the electronic compositions are paying off here. Many sections of tracks that were originally composed but cut from the final game tracks have been released in this album. The album length is 02:04:27, and includes the ambience of the new 4 planets and the space area. You will find the released album on Steam. We hope you enjoy it. * * * ### Just fixing bugsKlonan We are all quite busy fixing bugs these weeks, so work on features and quality of life improvements that we could typically exposit about in FFF is on the back burner. We do have a nice graph of automated crash reports since the release: For a bit of a release retrospective, given how 2.0 and Space Age was the biggest launch we've ever done, things went way smoother than we anticipated. This could be due to many factors: * Cleaner code and higher development standards. * Better PR review and QA process. * The LAN party and subsequent closed beta testing. That is not to say there were zero bugs and crashes, but generally it seems like most players could load the game and get right to having fun and not encounter any show stoppers. Still, with over 300 open bugs sitting in our forum, we have our work cut out for us... #### Experimentalists Assemble At this time we have been pushing releases as Stable quite quickly after release, but as we start fixing lower priority bugs, the chances of a bigger issue sneaking through increase. That is why we would like to slowly transition to having experimental releases stay experimental for longer. For this we need more people to opt-in to the experimental releases, which can be done in 2 ways: * Website version: Settings -> Other -> Enable experimental updates. * Steam: Right click Factorio in the library -> Properties -> Betas -> Beta participation dropdown -> Latest 2.0 experimental. By joining the experimental releases, it will give us a better ability to test the game before wider distribution. You will also be first in line when it comes to encountering new bugs, which we would very much appreciate being reported on our forum. * * * As always, experiment on your thoughts in the usual places.

Howdy, this week we will be diving deep into the workings of cargo pods and their seamless flight animations. Most of you playing the expansion have probably already seen them in game. The positive reception makes us very happy. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _Ascending to platform in orbit above Nauvis._ * * * ### Visual design The initial draft of a pod being released from a set of claws came from Earendel. You can see that the essence of it has remained relatively unchanged throughout development. In the very first version, the player needed to insert a capsule item into the rocket to travel. It got scrapped, because it was just pointless busywork. However that item was one of the ingredients of mech armor, hence the visual similarity. Following the draft, Jerzy modeled a 3D version of the claw rocket and pod. Then the branch lay dormant for a long time until core gameplay coding was finished and work resumed on less critical features such as fancy flight animations. I recruited the help of Jaroslaw, who had just finished his modeling work on hub, pad and landing hatches. Together with his modeling and volumetric cloud simulation and my coding and shader work and Ian's audio, we polished everything for the main release. _Earendel's concept art of the pod and rocket separation._ ### Where are those pods headed? Before any graphic work could begin, it was necessary to develop a backbone of how the items would move from one surface to another. At that point in time, the logistic requests functioned fine, but they just teleported the items instantly. Taking inspiration from the rocket, which had an inventory and could carry items, I decided to make the CargoPod its own new entity. While the rocket would take care of flying out of a silo, it would be shed on the original surface and the pod would have the functionality of going to another surface. The second (and trickier) part of the equation were destinations. Even in the _"vanilla?"/"stracciatella?"_ Space Age the pods travel from silos to hubs and from hubs to landing pads. Two of those may be further extended with cargo bays which add more hatches, but aren't destinations themselves. ### To the stations! The solution was to introduce stations, a layer of abstraction where all the buildings involved in orbital logistics register with their force and receive a unique ID. Any hatch on a cargo bay just joins the existing station. Then, to address items to another surface all we need is: Surface, Force, Station and Hatch. Depending on the usage some of these are optional. A starter pack rocket does not need any destination. Traveling player can launch towards a planet and only resolve whether the target is ground or pad at the apex. A logistic order will know its station beforehands. The nice effect of having generic logic is that technically the shipment can go between any two surfaces in the game and with any amount of stations. It even became useful in base game when rocket silos could target their own landing pad with space science and it would just work out of the box. I didn't want to restrict the potential by hardcoding everything to just planets and platforms. _My notes from when I was trying to carry the station concept one step further and combine the GUI for silo, hub and pad into one. The needs ended up being too different though._ * * * ### Assembling the cutscene puzzle Just like with the station system, I did not want to hardcode animations either. Custom planets would be one of the first things to mod in, so my priority has been to allow as much customization as possible. Every detail of the flight animation is provided by the fully moddable procession system. Each space location provides its own set of departure and arrival animations to planet itself and to any space platform in orbit. For instance, when a pod gets issued to fly from platform around Vulcanus down to the surface of Vulcanus, it would take the "vulcanus-platform-departure" and "vulcanus-planet-arrival" animations that match in style and stitch them together. Sometimes the pod has to wait in transit for a hatch to open up. In those cases "vulcanus-style-intermezzo" looping animation can be inserted in between to pass time. ### Building blocks Zooming in further, each procession has a timeline comprised of a variable number of layers. These layers control various aspects of the animation or draw graphics. Many aspects of them are driven by 1D, 2D and 4D Bézier curves and their normalized variants. _Planet landing curve open in the Factorio Spline Editor._ For modder convenience, I have published my custom Factorio Spline Editor online. It is fairly difficult to get the shapes right without it. As a bonus it also exports the curves directly in the desired format. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _Descending to Nauvis from a platform in orbit._ _A simplified timeline of flying down from a platform to surface highlighting when each procession layer is active to make up the final look._ ### Cloud technology Now, what allows the animation to appear seamless is the cover layer. At some point, the whole screen needs to be covered up to maintain the illusion when the pod teleports from one surface to another. Just swiping a flat image across the screen would have been serviceable. In fact, Albert favored leaning into a more stylized aesthetic. My opinion was that we could get a very impressive looking animated edge with very little work. All I did was ask Jaroslaw to generate a depth texture for the clouds. When the edge fades, instead of being multiplied by a flat value, it cuts the clouds off at a certain depth. This way they come onto the screen in clumps and bleed naturally instead of forming a thick wall. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _Manually demonstrating the soft masking shader of cover layers._ ### Clash of Mods While all this functionality sounds extremely powerful already, as I started making the final cutscene for Space Age, it became evident to me, that mods wouldn't be able to live in harmony like this. If every aspect of the animation lives inside these timelines then any new pod, planet or station would have to do unbearable amounts of work to integrate itself into all existing processions, creating countless duplicates that only differ in several sprites. Thankfully, we have one more trick up our sleeve. In the current version the planets in fact all use the same flight animation prototype. The way we introduce appropriate variants is through the use of catalogues. A catalogue is basically a list of images or sounds that the procession animation can refer to. Instead of having a predefined asset, the procession will refer to a CatalogueID and specify where to look for it. * Space Location catalogue can tell you how the local clouds or fog look like. * Pod catalogue can provide special animations to play such as opening solar panels or even textures for overlays like the reentry flames and the thruster sounds. * Hatch catalogue can provide the graphic for illumination when the pod thruster gets close. Any missing graphic or sound will just be skipped. New planets will play at least some animation even if they forget to define clouds. New pods can provide their own flame sprites that still play at the right times. New cargo bays or hubs can just say their illumination looks different and not touch any of the procession data. And if you are feeling fancy, you can give your planet an entirely new timeline, but still utilize pod animations and planet sprites from the default Space Age catalogue IDs. For a simple example, a parachute sprite could be added to pod catalogue and the flight speed slowed down significantly. Any third party mod adding a new pod type would have the option to support your planet by just defining a parachute graphic and nothing else. * * * As always, orbitally deliver your thoughts to the usual places.

Hello, It has been a month since the Space Age release and things are settling into a steady state. It is a good time to wrap things up, and discuss our future plans. * * * ### Space Age soundtrack updateAlbert, Donione The **Factorio: Space Age - Original Soundtrack** Album has been greatly updated on Steam. Soon it will be in the game also. The addition consists of a second Disk, labelled **Original Game Soundtrack** , and it contains all the soundtrack found in the game properly mastered. 50 tracks in total. Finally you will find your favourite track in the album, for sure : ) The interludes are not included, these are composed just for the game to properly jump from a track to another without breaking anything. Not convenient for the album. When starting the project we had a deal with Petr of covering 1h of music per planet. 5h in total seemed, at that time, like a lot of music. Now that the soundtrack is completed we can proudly say that each planet length is finally: * Space 1h:15m * Vulcanus 1h:33m * Gleba 1h:55m * Fulgora 1h:42m * Aquilo 2h:01m In total we have **08h:27m** of ultra-fine-Factorio-music, perfectly mastered to enjoy it in the game and outside also. Have in mind that 10 of the tracks are mixed procedurally in the engine, making the composition variable each time that plays in the game. For the album we have rendered an average version of each variable track in order to complete the album experience. The time length in the game can easily surpass by far the total time of the album. Especially if we count the interludes also mixed directly in the game. If we count the first Disk labelled **Factorio: Space Age - Soundtrack - Composer's Mixes** , which consists of Petr's selection of his 17 favourite tracks, and remixed by himself in an album format with a total length of **02h:04m** and we add the total length of the second folder, we have **10h:31m:49s** of Factorio music. Such a piece of an album isn't it? * * * ### Space Age wrap up kovarex #### The current state I still remember us saying something about 150 bugs in the forums in FFF-360, and some media taking it as "Factorio 1.0 is still a bit on the buggy side". While obviously, when we allowed the release, it was because almost all of the bugs were tiny corner case inconsistencies, or something that almost never happens, which we take a look at anyway, but doesn't make the game really bad. This experience doesn't stop us from being transparent, at this moment have 800+ bug reports on the forums, but again, not many are serious bugs, there are a lot of duplicates, many are even features... When looking at our resolved bugs forum, we fixed more than 625 bug reports since release, and since we prioritize the more critical ones, the game should be pretty okay for the vast majority of people. #### Next steps We will continue clearing the bug reports until even the smallest things are sorted out, or tiny things discarded, which will take around 2 months at least. Once this phase is done, we want to start preparing the last major release (for the foreseeable future at least) for Factorio: 2.1 We don't know exactly what it will be, but some of the more risky changes related to mod interface, quality of life, graphical tweaks... basically changes too big for putting into 2.0 stable. But don't expect anything too huge like a big content additions, it will be mainly just finishing touches and/or cool little widgets allowing more contraptions. #### Friday facts schedule After more than a year of continual weekly FFFs, we feel that it is a good time to stop now. Fixing bugs doesn't really emit that interesting topics, and we prefer to focus on the work now. I can imagine publishing some FFFs once 2.1 development is underway, if we have some interesting things to show, or whenever we have something important to say. #### Statistics Factorio players collectively played over 88 000 years (on Steam only), which is more than double since the last time we checked in (FFF-365). I wont bother with all the statistics this time, but we moved from 0.34 lines of code per one buyer, to 0.24 lines of code per one buyer, so we are getting more efficient I guess :) #### Tests I want to restate, that without our almost 6,000 automated tests, we would never be able to avoid reintroducing old bugs by fixing new bugs, and we hope, that it gets more recognized, and gaming companies, will recognize this approach as the gold standard. Here is our updated video showing all the current tests we have in 4x4 parallel grid, enjoy: #### What after? This is one of the most frequent questions I'm getting. Well, I'm not really sure, but we are playing with different kinds of ideas for the next game. Will we figure out something worth doing? Maybe. To clear my head, and gather a little bit of inspiration, I decided to experience the Fresh World of Warcraft world for a while, you can find me in the Fresh server in the guild called _Factory must grow_ (discord). The game I'm thinking about is related to WoW in a similar way as to how Factorio is related to Minecraft. * * * As always, let us know what you think at the usual places.

Hello, We are still diligently working away at the Space Age bug reports. * * * ### Trouble with languages While fixing an IME keyboard (Asian language) bug introduced by the 2.0 update, I got curious and started exploring localisation for various languages. Even though my native language is Czech, all of our development on the game happens in English, so I essentially never run the game in this mode. As I was twiddling about in the Czech crafting menu, it quickly came to light that the user experience wasn't as smooth as I would expect. Any capital non-English letter would cause trouble. Looking up "**čerpadlo** " (pump) yields "Ropné **čerpadlo** " (Pump jack) and "Pobřežní **čerpadlo** " (Offshore pump), but not "**Čerpadlo** " (Pump) due to the capital Č not being matched to lower case č. Players have already developed a habit of typing stuff like "erpadlo"(ump) in order to avoid the troublesome letters altogether. #### Non-English search finally supported! Obviously, this has been terrible user experience for years and I took it upon myself to address it as quickly as possible. The root of the issue was that until now we searched by casting each "code letter" to lower case via a standard function. However, internally (in the Unicode representation) any letter with accents or outside the latin alphabet takes up multiple "code letters" and therefore wasn't recognized or converted at all. Furthermore, Unicode letters are quite a mess, since the table has grown gradually over the years. Many letters are scattered all over. Out-of-the-box solutions are usually bloated to accommodate edge cases for many scripts and languages we can't even render in Factorio (Hieroglyphs, Sumerian Cuneiform, Emoji...). My solution was to write my own custom mapping focusing on languages we officially support. And since I was already at it with a custom solution, it allowed me to further tailor search hits to how people type in everyday life: * Accented letters are equivalent to non-accented ones. "zelezny plat"(iron plate) = "železný plát"(iron plate) = "ŽELEZNÝ PLÁT"(IRON PLATE) * The two Japanese kana alphabets are now equvalent in search. 「べると」(belt) =「ベルト」(BELT). * The two lower case sigmas in Greek both match the capital sigma. Σ = σ = ς The new localised search improvements will be released with the upcoming 2.0.16 experimental release. Here is where I would like to hear from you. **If there is some other useful search feature that you find missing from a supported language, please let me know on the forums or as a response to this article.** I have tried to consult these features with our translators ahead of time, but I can only reach so many native speakers myself. It is also possible that some visually similar accents got omitted by accident. #### Mod portal search Besides the in-game search, our mod portal search has also been improved this week. In the past it wouldn't always yield proper matches with asian languages. We have updated our search provider to a newer version and now it should be working better. * * * ### Contribute to Translations With 2.0 and Space Age, we have added a lot of new items, descriptions, tips and such to the game. Each of these needs translating into foreign languages, and we rely on our community to contribute these for us. If you are interested in getting involved in the localisation of the game, please join the effort over on our Crowdin Project. To those already helping out, thank you very much for all your help. We know there are quite a few Crowdin issues and base game locale problems being reported, and we hope to address all of them in time. * * * As always, type your thoughts in the usual places.

Hello, 3 days to go! * * * ### Factorio: Space Age Trailer With a new Expansion of course comes a new trailer. After many weeks of work, fine-tuning, and polishing, Albert (with help from Vaclav, and the script written by Earendel) has finished the launch trailer for the Space Age expansion: The result speaks for itself, and there are some details you might notice. For instance the rockets now have fixtures carrying the cargo pods, and we have animations for cargo pods landing on a planets and at landing pads. Or perhaps you noticed the player running around with some of the new late game technologies... * * * ### Mech armorv453000 From the very first prototype of Space Age, we had a new tier of armor in it. The only difference was a 20% larger equipment grid over Power armor Mk2, but along with quality this felt well above adequate already. As Earendel and Albert were developing the concept, the design settled on the idea that the player is locking themselves in a metal sarcophagus, transcending humanity to become the perfect Factorio machine. We have been thinking what kind of special features could the new piece of armor have and the most obvious and convenient one seemed to be the ability to fly, especially as the Jetpack from Space Exploration is quite convenient, though we'd want to do it a bit differently... Some ideas would be: * We didn't want to add a button to toggle flying. * We would prefer precise movements unlike the spidertron bobbing and rubberbanding. Therefore, the flying would just happen automatically whenever you would be about to hit any obstacle. This raises some immediate questions, like do we have separate speeds for walking and flying and with it exoskeleton equipment and jetpack equipment? We decided against adding jetpack equipment, have just one movement speed value, and have exoskeleton equipment effectively make you fly faster. Which may sound strange, but as the flying happens automatically, it would be very annoying to have one of the speeds slower. Being part of the armor also means that we can show the flying capability in the armor graphics. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _Graphics by Jerzy_ As you can see, you not only take flight if you were to hit an obstacle, but also when an obstacle is about to hit you. The mech armor went from a minor upgrade to a game-changer. Being able to move freely makes basic navigation in the game feel incredible, and as a secondary effect it means you feel much better about stacking many legendary exoskeletons in your armor because it doesn't make you run into obstacles all the time. It doesn't require fuel, or electricity from your equipment grid, it just works whenever it would be useful... almost. The combat abilities were in fact so powerful that we had to give the Demolishers a smoke cloud which prevents you from flying, as otherwise fighting them felt like a joke. If you ever feel like missing construction robots when starting a new game, this feeling just got a lot worse. The mech armor also makes you forget to fear walking over rails, which can be a hazardous habit. From the perspective of visuals and concept, we wanted the mech armor to be the player becoming one with the machine and in part one of the stronger symbols of Space Age, and now the mechanics match that. _Line art version of the concept by Earendel._ * * * ### Conclusion Factorio: Space Age has been almost 4 years in development, and now the finish line is just ahead of us. We look forward to seeing you all enjoying Space Age on Monday, and don't forget to put shield equipment in your mech suit, trains aren't the only enemy! Let us know if you are ready to become one with the machine at the usual places.

**Factorio: Space Age** continues the player's journey after launching rockets into space. Discover new worlds with unique challenges, exploit their novel resources for advanced technological gains, and manage your fleet of interplanetary space platforms. For more information about what comes with the expansion, check out our **Space Age content** page. * * * ### Space Age now available Factorio: Space Age is now available for purchase, you can buy it at any of the following official places: * Our website * Steam * GOG.com * Humble Store Purchases from our website or GOG can redeem a free expansion Steam key. If you purchase on Steam, you can link your Steam ID to our website to access the non-Steam downloads. The Factorio: Space age expansion has changed the game progression and pacing. If you plan to play Space Age, it is recommended to start playing with Space Age directly, even when its your first time, instead of playing the base game and adding Space age later. * * * ### 2.0 release The release of the Space Age expansion also coincides with the release of the free Factorio 2.0 update. Version 2.0 has a wide range of game changes, optimizations and improvements, which we detailed here. * * * ### Feedback welcome This is a very large and fresh release, so if you have any suggestions or encounter any issues please report them on our forum: * Ideas and suggestions * Technical help * Bug reports * * * We sincerely hope you will enjoy the result of our work for the last 4 years. Factorio: Space Age and 2.0 are the biggest projects we've undertaken so far, and it wouldn't be possible without the support of our fans and players. From all of us, thank you. As always, let us know what you think at the usual places.

Hello, It's time to speak about more Gleba. Some changes, and also something new... * * * ### The Gleba problems In the last few months we have been thinking about how to improve Gleba. There has always been this fundamental problem with a biological-oriented planet - other things you produce in the game tend to not be organic so it doesn't quite fit as easily as a planet based on making more Iron or more electronic circuits. * It's difficult to integrate the biological production chains into the rest of the traditional factory, as it's mostly metals there. * Finding useful things to unlock is difficult, especially compared to the metal and electronics based producers like Foundry and Electromagnetic plant. And during the LAN party we had about a month ago, these problems were only confirmed plus we've realized many more issues in other areas. And seeing people interact with Gleba put a lot more urgency on finding solutions. There is one change in particular which is significant and outlines our approach fairly well: * * * ### Bacteria cultivation One of the key issues on Gleba was that you'd be building two factories - one for agriculture which would eventually output the science pack, and the usual Iron/Copper one which craft the factory and rocket parts. _The normal crafting tree was completely severed from the organic one._ This was especially problematic as the agriculture factory didn't contribute in any way until you'd have delivered the science packs to your labs. And as we've learned, it is preferable to attempt to have each step you take feel rewarding and immediately useful. For a very long time we had wanted to add a way to create Iron and Copper ore via agriculture but we weren't quite sure how. Getting factory-grade amounts of minerals from plants felt just too unbelievable. _Stromatolites waiting to be mined._ The idea we've implemented is that some bacteria can be found in the swamps where agricultural plants grow. * Stromatolites are rock-like objects which have formed there over many years, acting as accumulated bacteria and ore for you to quickly obtain at the start. * Yumako/Jellynut can be processed with a small chance to obtain Copper/Iron bacteria respectively, reinforcing the feeling that there really isn't much in it. * Soon enough you unlock the Biochamber, and as you are the ingenuous engineer, you replicate and grow the bacteria in it to truly industrial amounts. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _Cultivating bacteria which turn into iron and copper ore._ This results in the agriculture chain being immediately useful for creating Iron and Copper ore which you can use for building more of the Gleba factory, and once you've got enough of that you can "just" switch it for full-on agricultural science production. As a result the steps you're taking are much more useful and less tedious. A beautiful little detail is that the bacteria spoils directly into ore, so it's a place where spoiling is helping you, for once. * * * ### The reward It's nice when an activity is fun, but it's much better when it's also meaningful and leads somewhere. Obtaining powerful factory improvements is how we like to be motivated in Factorio. There's a handful of improvements to be unlocked by the agricultural science pack like the stack inserter, spidertron with rocket turret, or more efficient recipes for space platforms, but there is one specific new technology... #### Biter captivity Bioflux is a combination of processed Yumako and Jellynut. It's crafted on Gleba and it can be used to capture biter spawners on Nauvis. A capture robot loaded with doses of Bioflux solution and is shot from a rocket launcher. The capture robot latches onto a spawner and soon enough the spawner is rendered harmless and docile. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _(Capture time reduced for demonstration)_ Once captured, the spawner no longer hatches biters, and biter eggs can be collected with inserters for further processing or disposal. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. As long as you keep feeding it Bioflux in frequent intervals, the spawner will remain that way. Otherwise it 'goes rogue' and returns back to its natural form, spawning hostile biters again. Biter eggs can be immediately used for improvements to agriculture, crafting Productivity module 3, or because we felt like the Gleba unlocks aren't motivating us enough... #### A new laboratory Combined with some other items, the egg can be grown and hatched into a mutated laboratory. As you will be able to read down below, the work on the graphics has only just started, but here you can see a work in progress version of it from Earendel and Jerzy: Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _Work in progress graphics of the new Biolab. Subject to change._ The Biolab can be used only on Nauvis as the organism inside would die on other planets, but in turn it only consumes **half** the amount of science packs for any given research. It can process all science packs just like the normal lab. It also has 4 slots for modules. This means it's a powerful unlock and obtaining it early on should feel quite rewarding. Whether we finally broke the imbalance of Vulcanus and Fulgora being clearly superior to Gleba, we will see - but at least the difference is much, much less stark now. * * * ### A bit of backstory You may notice that the Biolab above looks awfully similar like the captive biter spawner. Until very recently, that's pretty much what it was. _Concept art from Earendel._ We had an entity in the game called Synthetic biter spawner. We added it because we felt like it would be nice to be able to just place your own spawners anywhere in order to scale up biter egg production in the typical Factorio fashion of rows on rows of machines. As we were trying to simplify some things and find rewards for Gleba, the Synthetic biter spawner started to lose its significance - and at the same time we felt like some powerful Gleba unlock is missing. At first we changed it to be a more universal crafter, giving it the ability to craft Nauvis science packs, solid fuel and rocket fuel, all with a productivity bonus similar to the foundry and electromagnetic plant. The recipes felt a bit forced and the bonus wasn't that great compared to its rivals, but it was something. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _The discarded synthetic biter spawner in its science pack crafter form._ Along the way we started dreaming about turning it into a full-on laboratory... The graphics however would be far from a proper visual solution so we've put our heads together with Albert and Earendel and we decided to make a last minute adjustment making a proper semi-organic Biolab which would include more of the typical lab structure. The finished version will be in Space Age on release day. :) Because this means we've discarded the synthetic biter spawner, we have added a way to craft the captive biter spawners which you could then place anywhere on Nauvis you like, so you can still scale their production up conveniently. This technology is unlocked at the last planet so it won't get trivialized too early, and the captive spawners you make will have their own quirks... * * * ### Conclusion The idea of capturing biters has been in our heads for a long time, and in Space Age since the very first serious brainstorming going into the initial prototype. Biter eggs also make use of the spoiling mechanic as they spoil into live biters. The biter based lab has had many uses before and we believe now it has found its true form. Over the last month we've improved the experience on Gleba in many other ways. Changing map generation, cleaning up some graphics, tweaking many if not all recipes, making the enemies less crazy, adding new ways to obtain resources and making the rewards a lot more appealing. A lot of the changes are too detailed for the context of FFFs, but we'd like to express our deep gratitude for the feedback from our testers, which has been immensely helpful. Speaking of testers, please be aware that the content/press embargo ends on the 14th October, so if you want to avoid spoilers please keep it in mind as there are no restrictions on what they can show. * * * Captivate us with your least spoiled ideas in the usual places, and don't argue whether Bioflux is drugs or food, it's obviously...

Hello, Today we once again dive head-first into the world of fluids. * * * ### Since last time Back in June, the very same week that we revealed Fluids 2.0 (FFF-416), we were undergoing an in-office LAN party to test the game. As we played, it became apparent that the new system was a little bit _too_ easy. Our Nauvis base had ridiculously huge pipelines that snaked all over the place with little to no thought or structure behind them. We did use some fluid trains to connect particularly distant outposts, but even this was mostly out of habit; a pipeline would have been superior. _Our infinite throughput continent spanning pipelines._ These "omni-pipes" created a situation where pumps never increased throughput, they only ever restricted it. This was counter-intuitive, but also meant that you just never used pumps in the network unless it was to disable a specific section with a circuit connection. Additionally, steering people towards using long pipes everywhere turned out to be a huge trap for fluid mixing, as the chances of accidentally connecting two different pipelines increased significantly. If this happened from bots constructing something while you were on a different planet, then good luck finding the single incorrectly placed pipe in such a huge search area. It was time to search for solutions. * * * ### The importance of visual feedback Transport belts are fun to play with because they are extremely visual and interactive. You can see exactly where items are coming in, where they are going, and where the bottlenecks are, all at a glance. By contrast, pipes are almost entirely opaque, and the tiny windows are not enough to give you sufficient visual feedback. This is part of the reason why we went for a "no-thought-required" solution to fluid flow. If we are to add a limitation to the fluid system, then that limitation needs to be extremely easy, obvious, and interactive. After butting heads for a while, this is what we came up with. * * * ### Pipeline extents Pipelines are constrained to a 250x250 tile area, and exceeding this limit will cause all flow through the pipeline to cease. You can split a pipeline using a pump. The game displays a visualization to show that the pipe is broken and will generate an alert at the location(s) where you need to place pumps. This makes the problem easy to diagnose and easy to fix. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. When holding a fluid-related entity, the game displays connection visualizations on visible pipelines that are tinted to match the fluid inside. You can also visualize an individual pipeline by hovering over it with your mouse, in which case you will also see arrows telling you how large the pipeline is. _This might look familiar to users of myPipe Visualizer mod._ As the final cherry on top, you can also enable a toggle to see pipelines on the map! When you are building an individual setup, you still don't have to worry that much about pipe throughput - you connect the pipes and it "just works". However, connecting your setups together requires slightly more thought, as now you actually have to worry about directionality and the throughput of your pumping stations. The pump-isolated sections also make it much less of a disaster if you accidentally mix fluids. * * * ### Balance tweaks In addition to the extents, we have made a few tweaks to the balance of the fluid components: * Pumps have been nerfed to 1200/s (10x decrease), but this can be increased with quality. * Fluid wagons have been buffed to 50,000 (2x increase). * 1 Water expands to 10 Steam in boilers and heat exchangers. With three pumps per wagon that is 3600/s per fluid wagon, or about 14 seconds to fully pump out a wagon's contents. This is much more reasonable than the previous _0.7 seconds_ you could get in 1.1. This is still plenty fast for vanilla megabases, and in Space Age you can increase pump quality if you need even more throughput to feed your legendary foundries. The Water to Steam ratio change makes it more possible to supply power or nuclear setups using fluid wagons or even water barrels. The change doesn't affect the power consumption/output of any machines, they just consume 10x less water to make the same amount of Steam. The extents, combined with these changes, have made the choice between fluid trains and large pipelines much more varied. Omni-pipes are no longer the one true solution to everything - you can still build them, but they require circuits and are far less magical. Will you choose the near-instant transportation of a pipeline, or the enhanced flexibility of a fluid train? * * * ### Algorithm tweaks There have been a few changes to the algorithm since it was first introduced: * Output rate used to be unlimited, but it is now inversely proportional to the fullness ratio of the sink. * The special exception for storage tank flow has been removed. * The input rate limit used to only apply when pulling from a pipeline, but now, it and the new output rate limit are applied to every fluid flow operation, with the exception of fluid wagons. Something that I failed to adequately explain before is that while there is no limitation on the total flow through a pipeline in a given tick, there _is_ a hardcoded limit of 100 fluid per flow operation (6000/s). This limit is multiplied with the fullness ratios of the source and sink to produce the actual flow value, and this proportionality is what allows machines to share fluid more evenly. Machines that update first will still get the greatest share of fluid, but the difference is much more subtle than it was in 1.1, where the order that you build each pipe entity would greatly affect the flow. The output rate limit is particularly interesting because it makes the fluids feel much more like fluids again. Before, a pump could just push fluid in at the max 6000/s rate until the pipeline was 100% full, but now it slows down as the pipeline fills. For each pipeline, there is a certain fullness ratio where the output and input rates equalize, and the level of fluid in the pipe oscillates around this point as the machines do their work. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _Pipe fullness shown using the debug view._ * * * ### Never quite done The pipeline extents system and balance tweaks were in place for the LAN party, and the reception to them was pretty positive! It has been a long, _long_ journey to get here, and there is still so much to do and so much to tell you about. What you see is the system as it will be when 2.0 launches, but I will continue tweaking and iterating on it in the future. I would also like to take a moment to thank everybody for their exhaustive feedback on the previous post. Rest assured, I read every single comment, even if I don't respond to most of them. Your passion is a huge part of what makes Factorio such a great game. * * * As always, pressurize your thoughts and pump them into the usual places.

Hello, It's time to reveal the last planet. So. Warning: Spoilers ahead. * * * ### Welcome to Aquilo It's day, but stars still twinkle in the dark sky. You count the planet's sun among the stars, larger and brighter than the others, but still so dim you can barely feel its warmth at all. A howling wind chills you to the bone and gently rocks the iceberg you are sitting on. This planet has no land. It's an ocean world of liquid ammonia. One continuous ocean covers the entire planet and it's at least 200km deep. The best landing spot you could find was this large iceberg. The sheet of ice is only a few meters thick and seems to contain a lot of trapped air, but frozen water is a very solid material as long as it stays cold. It's able to support a landing pad, so that's good enough. You sit on the edge of the ice watching the snow fall. It gracefully deposits itself on your frozen machines. Assembling machines, chemical plants, transport belts, and inserters, all frozen in place unable to move. In the distance you spot columns of teal gas, fluorine bubbling up from the depths. It's one of the resources you're here for, but out of reach for now. There seems to be plenty of oil, most likely from microorganisms in the core. Making fuel on site shouldn't be a problem as soon as the refinery is unfrozen. You take the time to plan your next moves: collecting ice from the surrounding ocean to extend the platform, heating towers to warm your buildings, heat pipes to move the heat around, and concrete to make sure that the heat doesn't melt the ice. The thought of running heat pipes through all your designs is starting to make your head spin. But it's okay, don't panic. The one thing you do have on this planet... is time. A flurry of shooting stars distracts you for a moment. You can't help but wonder if they are little meteorites burning up in the atmosphere, or the remaining parts of the space platform that dropped you here. The space platform barely made it to this planet and never made it out of orbit. You got out just in time. Hopefully a replacement platform will be here soon... if it survives. There's a clunking sound behind you as the landing pad opens its hatch. You turn to see a formation of cargo pods descend through the atmosphere. It's time to build. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _Terrain graphics by Fearghall and Earendel._ * * * ### A liquid planet Aquilo doesn't have any land. It has a few icebergs floating around, but the building space is very restricted. If you use an offshore pump in the ammoniacal ocean you don't get water, you get mostly liquid ammonia but with some ice particles floating in it. You can separate these in a chemical plant. These substances have a variety of uses, but among them is the ability to make Ice platform. Ice platform allows you to extend the iceberg and extend your build area. Making ice platform can be a slow process so it's good to scale this process while you have spare energy and heat. * * * ### Freezing and heating Heat is the next big mechanic and it's a wonderful twist to the way that you build. Most things on Aquilo freeze if they are not heated. _A collection of frozen machines. Frozen effects are all hand painted by me (Earendel). It's better and faster to paint snow in 2D than to add a snow layer in 3D, especially considering most of the original graphics have a lot of hand-painted post-production._ Heat is generated by a heating tower, which burns chemical fuels that can be made locally, or the nuclear reactor that requires imports from Nauvis. The heating tower is interesting as a burner because it's more like the reactor, it continues to consume fuel even at max temperature. As well as heating, this can be a good way to get rid of anything burnable, which means it can also be very useful on Gleba. _Heating tower from line art to concept art (inactive and active) by Earendel, to the final graphics by Jerzy._ Both the heating tower and nuclear reactor are heat sources. They spread heat to adjacent entities, but they only need to get the entity up to 30°C for the entity to thaw. This means that in some places like outposts, going for higher temperatures is a waste, so that is one of the reasons we added the ability to read the temperature of heat sources and control them with circuits (FFF-428). Heat sources only being able to warm adjacent things that touch them is very limiting. Instead you use heat pipes to move the heat around to all the entities adjacent to connected heat pipes (including diagonally). Every entity that needs heat also consumes heat. The effect is minor per entity but can result in a lot of heat loss over long distances, so sometimes you want a hotter heat source so that the heat can travel further. Heat pipes and heated buildings would melt the ice, so to protect the ice that keeps you floating you can place concrete (or refined concrete) as an insulator. In practice this just means that most entities can't be placed directly on to ice, we don't actually turn the ice tiles into ocean... anymore. That used to be a mechanic, but it was too annoying to deal with when you try to build in an already heated area. Heat pipes can't go underground (or under ice) so you'll need to route the belts and pipes around them while building. Often this means a machine will need access to belts, pipes and heat, but all the belts and pipes also need access to heat, and this can lead to some nice little puzzles and some very interesting builds. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. * * * ### Resources Aquilo is notably lacking in basic resources. On the other planets you can land with nothing and build your way to another rocket. On Aquilo if you land with nothing then you can do nothing. Ok, but what _DO_ you have? Your resources are: * Solar (1%). * Ammoniacal solution from the ocean directly. * Crude oil from resource nodes. * Lithium brine from resource nodes * Fluorine gas from resource nodes. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _New resource graphics by Jerzy._ Solar output is truly pathetic, only 1% of Nauvis. You need some solar panels to kickstart your first few machines so efficiency modules go a long way to speeding up that process. Ammoniacal solution can be gained via an offshore pump. With a powered heated chemical plant you can split it to ice and ammonia. Ice can be melted for water which is needed for any power beyond the pathetic solar. It's also useful to extend your iceberg. Ammonia can be used with crude oil to make solid fuel, or combined with solid fuel to make rocket fuel. Crude oil can be collected with a pumpjack in a few places where it floats up from the ocean depths. It can be combined with ammonia to make fuel, or refined the usual way which can be a useful sink for excess ice and water while also making fuel. Also, note that it's an animated resource now, even on Nauvis. Lithium brine floats up to the surface in some spots and requires a pumpjack. It's used to make lithium, which you'll need for a variety of things including the planet's science pack. Fluorine gas bubbles up in some places and this also requires a pumpjack. Fluorine is used to make coolant which is an essential part of this planet's industry: Cryogenics. Coolant is used in a few things but initially it's only used for Aquilo's science pack, the Cryogenic science pack, which is made in a... * * * ### Cryogenic plant Mp4 playback not supported on your device. The Cryogenic plant is a powerful 5x5 structure with a base crafting speed of 2. It doesn't have base productivity because it deals with a lot of looping recipes, but it does have **8** module slots, so extra productivity modules can be used for the recipes that support it. _Early Cryogenic plant sketches by Earendel. Albert liked the bottom 2 designs so I made something based on those. Some elements of the top 3 got reused in other designs._ _Cryogenic plant line art and concept before final pale turquoise paint colour was chosen._ While the structure can use some chemical plant recipes, it is mainly focussed on recipes that need cold temperatures and a lot of precision. Some examples are: coolant, coolant cooling, the cryogenic science pack, fusion power cells, quantum processors, and some other late-game items. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _Final graphics by Jerzy, sounds by Ian._ Quantum processors are like the final tier of circuit, they need something from each of the new planets. They are needed to make the fusion reactors that you saw in FFF-420 (Cryogenic plants are the hidden structures in that post). Quantum processors are also needed to make the final turret in the game which is also unlocked on Aquilo: The Railgun. * * * ### Railgun turret Mp4 playback not supported on your device. The railgun turret requires both ammo and electricity to function. It has a range of 40 and the damage... well it starts at 10k. It damages everything in a continuous line, so be careful not to stand on the wrong side of it. _Railgun line art and concept by Earendel. There are pipe connections in the design because it was intended to a be a turret that requires cooling to function._ This turret has a 3x5 base. It has a fixed direction like a flamethrower turret but the attack cone is narrower than 90 degrees. If you could only build in 4 directions this would create blind spots, so you can build railgun turrets in 8 directions. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _Graphics by Jarosław, sounds by Ian._ There's also a handheld version that is very effective against Demolishers (FFF-429), but that's not the main use for the turret version. What do you need the turret for? I'll let you speculate. * * * ### Conclusion Aquilo is a challenging but very unique planet. After spending a few hours getting absorbed into Aquilo's unique building patterns, it feels really weird going back to any of the other planets. By comparison everything else suddenly looks so simple. It's a feeling that struck me after playing on my very first Aquilo gameplay prototype, but the same feeling hits me after every playtesting LAN we've done too. It's quite easy to accidentally under power your base, which can lead to a lack of heat, and subsequently freeze half your base. When this happens to you, I invite you to turn off Alt mode and appreciate the view. The frozen factory isn't a sight you get often, so enjoy the moment. * * * I know you're getting unreasonably excited for the release of Space Age, but as always, keep your cool and comment in the usual places.

Howdy, this week we will be diving deep into the workings of cargo pods and their seamless flight animations. Most of you playing the expansion have probably already seen them in game. The positive reception makes us very happy. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _Ascending to platform in orbit above Nauvis._ * * * ### Visual design The initial draft of a pod being released from a set of claws came from Earendel. You can see that the essence of it has remained relatively unchanged throughout development. In the very first version, the player needed to insert a capsule item into the rocket to travel. It got scrapped, because it was just pointless busywork. However that item was one of the ingredients of mech armor, hence the visual similarity. Following the draft, Jerzy modeled a 3D version of the claw rocket and pod. Then the branch lay dormant for a long time until core gameplay coding was finished and work resumed on less critical features such as fancy flight animations. I recruited the help of Jaroslaw, who had just finished his modeling work on hub, pad and landing hatches. Together with his modeling and volumetric cloud simulation and my coding and shader work and Ian's audio, we polished everything for the main release. _Earendel's concept art of the pod and rocket separation._ ### Where are those pods headed? Before any graphic work could begin, it was necessary to develop a backbone of how the items would move from one surface to another. At that point in time, the logistic requests functioned fine, but they just teleported the items instantly. Taking inspiration from the rocket, which had an inventory and could carry items, I decided to make the CargoPod its own new entity. While the rocket would take care of flying out of a silo, it would be shed on the original surface and the pod would have the functionality of going to another surface. The second (and trickier) part of the equation were destinations. Even in the _"vanilla?"/"stracciatella?"_ Space Age the pods travel from silos to hubs and from hubs to landing pads. Two of those may be further extended with cargo bays which add more hatches, but aren't destinations themselves. ### To the stations! The solution was to introduce stations, a layer of abstraction where all the buildings involved in orbital logistics register with their force and receive a unique ID. Any hatch on a cargo bay just joins the existing station. Then, to address items to another surface all we need is: Surface, Force, Station and Hatch. Depending on the usage some of these are optional. A starter pack rocket does not need any destination. Traveling player can launch towards a planet and only resolve whether the target is ground or pad at the apex. A logistic order will know its station beforehands. The nice effect of having generic logic is that technically the shipment can go between any two surfaces in the game and with any amount of stations. It even became useful in base game when rocket silos could target their own landing pad with space science and it would just work out of the box. I didn't want to restrict the potential by hardcoding everything to just planets and platforms. _My notes from when I was trying to carry the station concept one step further and combine the GUI for silo, hub and pad into one. The needs ended up being too different though._ * * * ### Assembling the cutscene puzzle Just like with the station system, I did not want to hardcode animations either. Custom planets would be one of the first things to mod in, so my priority has been to allow as much customization as possible. Every detail of the flight animation is provided by the fully moddable procession system. Each space location provides its own set of departure and arrival animations to planet itself and to any space platform in orbit. For instance, when a pod gets issued to fly from platform around Vulcanus down to the surface of Vulcanus, it would take the "vulcanus-platform-departure" and "vulcanus-planet-arrival" animations that match in style and stitch them together. Sometimes the pod has to wait in transit for a hatch to open up. In those cases "vulcanus-style-intermezzo" looping animation can be inserted in between to pass time. ### Building blocks Zooming in further, each procession has a timeline comprised of a variable number of layers. These layers control various aspects of the animation or draw graphics. Many aspects of them are driven by 1D, 2D and 4D Bézier curves and their normalized variants. _Planet landing curve open in the Factorio Spline Editor._ For modder convenience, I have published my custom Factorio Spline Editor online. It is fairly difficult to get the shapes right without it. As a bonus it also exports the curves directly in the desired format. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _Descending to Nauvis from a platform in orbit._ _A simplified timeline of flying down from a platform to surface highlighting when each procession layer is active to make up the final look._ ### Cloud technology Now, what allows the animation to appear seamless is the cover layer. At some point, the whole screen needs to be covered up to maintain the illusion when the pod teleports from one surface to another. Just swiping a flat image across the screen would have been serviceable. In fact, Albert favored leaning into a more stylized aesthetic. My opinion was that we could get a very impressive looking animated edge with very little work. All I did was ask Jaroslaw to generate a depth texture for the clouds. When the edge fades, instead of being multiplied by a flat value, it cuts the clouds off at a certain depth. This way they come onto the screen in clumps and bleed naturally instead of forming a thick wall. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _Manually demonstrating the soft masking shader of cover layers._ ### Clash of Mods While all this functionality sounds extremely powerful already, as I started making the final cutscene for Space Age, it became evident to me, that mods wouldn't be able to live in harmony like this. If every aspect of the animation lives inside these timelines then any new pod, planet or station would have to do unbearable amounts of work to integrate itself into all existing processions, creating countless duplicates that only differ in several sprites. Thankfully, we have one more trick up our sleeve. In the current version the planets in fact all use the same flight animation prototype. The way we introduce appropriate variants is through the use of catalogues. A catalogue is basically a list of images or sounds that the procession animation can refer to. Instead of having a predefined asset, the procession will refer to a CatalogueID and specify where to look for it. * Space Location catalogue can tell you how the local clouds or fog look like. * Pod catalogue can provide special animations to play such as opening solar panels or even textures for overlays like the reentry flames and the thruster sounds. * Hatch catalogue can provide the graphic for illumination when the pod thruster gets close. Any missing graphic or sound will just be skipped. New planets will play at least some animation even if they forget to define clouds. New pods can provide their own flame sprites that still play at the right times. New cargo bays or hubs can just say their illumination looks different and not touch any of the procession data. And if you are feeling fancy, you can give your planet an entirely new timeline, but still utilize pod animations and planet sprites from the default Space Age catalogue IDs. For a simple example, a parachute sprite could be added to pod catalogue and the flight speed slowed down significantly. Any third party mod adding a new pod type would have the option to support your planet by just defining a parachute graphic and nothing else. * * * As always, orbitally deliver your thoughts to the usual places.

Hello, You may have noticed we launched Space Age earlier this week :) * * * ### Space Age reception The reaction to the Space Age launch has rocketed past our wildest expectations. We had almost 100,000 concurrent players, and as of writing this post, we have passed 400,000 copies sold! Needless to say, from all of us here, thank you. Factorio would not be possible without the support of our fans and players. We are working hard to address all the feedback and issues you've reported to us on the forums, Reddit, and Discord. * * * ### Galaxy of Fame This week, kovarex, Lucas and Vinzenz finished off our last little surprise for Space Age, the **Galaxy of Fame**. When players finish Space Age and reach interstellar space, they will be invited to upload a snapshot of their game to the Galaxy of Fame. Once uploaded you can find your star in the Galaxy of Fame, where you can see details such as: * General map info - Title, comment, time played, etc. * Chart view of planets and platforms. * Item, Energy and Kill statistics. You can browse around and see other peoples factories and see how they work. You might notice that some of the maps look a bit suspicious, well at this time we aren't blocking saves that use cheats/commands/editor, as we don't want to be overly restrictive, but we will add some filtering options soon. There is only a single Galaxy of Fame entry per player account, uploading a new one will overwrite the previous one, and the option will be in the in-game menu after completing Space Age. Since the feature is quite new there are some other details worth sharing: * The location, size, color and shape of each star is random and assigned at the first upload. * Zooming issues on mobile are known and will be fixed soon. * Error 100 when uploading is known, in most cases the upload actually succeeded. * We support uploading modded saves. * Galaxy of Fame will receive more updates in the future. As you can see, there aren't that many stars lighting up the Galaxy of Fame at the moment, but as more people play and finish, we hope to see it fill out to a full bright sparkling Galaxy. * * * ### Factorio 2.0 and Nintendo SwitchTwinsen Since the Space Age launch on Monday, we've had a few questions about our plans regarding support for the Nintendo Switch Platform. #### Factorio Space Age is not coming to Nintendo Switch. Space Age factories are much bigger compared to vanilla, as they span 5 planets. There's simply not enough RAM to fit them and not enough CPU power to run all of it at 60 UPS. Not to mention all the new sprites that were added that will not fit in VRAM. #### Factorio 2.0 is coming to Nintendo Switch. I am currently working on bringing the 2.0 free update to Switch and making sure it's optimized well enough. Since the release process on consoles takes a long time, I prefer to not to give you a conservative release date, and instead just release it as soon as possible, when it's ready. My estimate is that the update will come to Nintendo Switch in 1-2 months. Meanwhile I recommend you finish your current playthrough if you are almost finishing your save game, as the 2.0 update comes with some updates to rails, fluids, recipes and technologies that might break parts of your base and on Switch you will not be able to downgrade once you update. * * * As always, let us know what you think at the usual places.

Hello, It has been a month since the Space Age release and things are settling into a steady state. It is a good time to wrap things up, and discuss our future plans. * * * ### Space Age soundtrack updateAlbert, Donione The **Factorio: Space Age - Original Soundtrack** Album has been greatly updated on Steam. Soon it will be in the game also. The addition consists of a second Disk, labelled **Original Game Soundtrack** , and it contains all the soundtrack found in the game properly mastered. 50 tracks in total. Finally you will find your favourite track in the album, for sure : ) The interludes are not included, these are composed just for the game to properly jump from a track to another without breaking anything. Not convenient for the album. When starting the project we had a deal with Petr of covering 1h of music per planet. 5h in total seemed, at that time, like a lot of music. Now that the soundtrack is completed we can proudly say that each planet length is finally: * Space 1h:15m * Vulcanus 1h:33m * Gleba 1h:55m * Fulgora 1h:42m * Aquilo 2h:01m In total we have **08h:27m** of ultra-fine-Factorio-music, perfectly mastered to enjoy it in the game and outside also. Have in mind that 10 of the tracks are mixed procedurally in the engine, making the composition variable each time that plays in the game. For the album we have rendered an average version of each variable track in order to complete the album experience. The time length in the game can easily surpass by far the total time of the album. Especially if we count the interludes also mixed directly in the game. If we count the first Disk labelled **Factorio: Space Age - Soundtrack - Composer's Mixes** , which consists of Petr's selection of his 17 favourite tracks, and remixed by himself in an album format with a total length of **02h:04m** and we add the total length of the second folder, we have **10h:31m:49s** of Factorio music. Such a piece of an album isn't it? * * * ### Space Age wrap up kovarex #### The current state I still remember us saying something about 150 bugs in the forums in FFF-360, and some media taking it as "Factorio 1.0 is still a bit on the buggy side". While obviously, when we allowed the release, it was because almost all of the bugs were tiny corner case inconsistencies, or something that almost never happens, which we take a look at anyway, but doesn't make the game really bad. This experience doesn't stop us from being transparent, at this moment have 800+ bug reports on the forums, but again, not many are serious bugs, there are a lot of duplicates, many are even features... When looking at our resolved bugs forum, we fixed more than 625 bug reports since release, and since we prioritize the more critical ones, the game should be pretty okay for the vast majority of people. #### Next steps We will continue clearing the bug reports until even the smallest things are sorted out, or tiny things discarded, which will take around 2 months at least. Once this phase is done, we want to start preparing the last major release (for the forseeable future at least) for Factorio: 2.1 We don't know exactly what it will be, but some of the more risky changes related to mod interface, quality of life, graphical tweaks... basically changes too big for putting into 2.0 stable. But don't expect anything too huge like a big content additions, it will be mainly just finishing touches and/or cool little widgets allowing more contraptions. #### Friday facts schedule After more than a year of continual weekly FFFs, we feel that it is a good time to stop now. Fixing bugs doesn't really emit that interesting topics, and we prefer to focus on the work now. I can imagine publishing some FFFs once 2.1 development is underway, if we have some interesting things to show, or whenever we have something important to say. #### Statistics Factorio players collectively played over 88 000 years (on Steam only), which is more than double since the last time we checked in (FFF-365). I wont bother with all the statistics this time, but we moved from 0.34 lines of code per one buyer, to 0.24 lines of code per one buyer, so we are getting more efficient I guess :) #### Tests I want to restate, that without our almost 6,000 automated tests, we would never be able to avoid reintroducing old bugs by fixing new bugs, and we hope, that it gets more recognized, and gaming companies, will recognize this approach as the gold standard. Here is our updated video showing all the current tests we have in 4x4 parallel grid, enjoy: #### What after? This is one of the most frequent questions I'm getting. Well, I'm not really sure, but we are playing with different kinds of ideas for the next game. Will we figure out something worth doing? Maybe. To clear my head, and gather a little bit of inspiration, I decided to experience the Fresh World of Warcraft world for a while, you can find me in the Fresh server in the guild called _Factory must grow_ (discord). The game I'm thinking about is related to WoW in a similar way as to how Factorio is related to Minecraft. * * * As always, let us know what you think at the usual places.

Hello, It is a busy time fixing bugs and cleaning up after the Space Age release. * * * ### Factorio: Space Age - Soundtrack releaseAlbert During the last weeks, our dear Petr - Music composer of the Factorio: Space Age (FFF-406) has been working on selecting, remixing and mastering the very best tracks of the entire expansion in order to prepare an album with the best possible quality to represent the soundtrack of the DLC. The selected tracks have been remixed to enhance and intensify its dynamics to give them a proper album format experience. All the recording sessions with the musicians and the electronic compositions are paying off here. Many sections of tracks that were originally composed but cut from the final game tracks have been released in this album. The album length is 02:04:27, and includes the ambience of the new 4 planets and the space area. You will find the released album on Steam. We hope you enjoy it. * * * ### Just fixing bugsKlonan We are all quite busy fixing bugs these weeks, so work on features and quality of life improvements that we could typically exposit about in FFF is on the back burner. We do have a nice graph of automated crash reports since the release: For a bit of a release retrospective, given how 2.0 and Space Age was the biggest launch we've ever done, things went way smoother than we anticipated. This could be due to many factors: * Cleaner code and higher development standards. * Better PR review and QA process. * The LAN party and subsequent closed beta testing. That is not to say there were zero bugs and crashes, but generally it seems like most players could load the game and get right to having fun and not encounter any show stoppers. Still, with over 300 open bugs sitting in our forum, we have our work cut out for us... #### Experimentalists Assemble At this time we have been pushing releases as Stable quite quickly after release, but as we start fixing lower priority bugs, the chances of a bigger issue sneaking through increase. That is why we would like to slowly transition to having experimental releases stay experimental for longer. For this we need more people to opt-in to the experimental releases, which can be done in 2 ways: * Website version: Settings -> Other -> Enable experimental updates. * Steam: Right click Factorio in the library -> Properties -> Betas -> Beta participation dropdown -> Latest 2.0 experimental. By joining the experimental releases, it will give us a better ability to test the game before wider distribution. You will also be first in line when it comes to encountering new bugs, which we would very much appreciate being reported on our forum. * * * As always, experiment on your thoughts in the usual places.

Hello, It's time to reveal the last planet. So. Warning: Spoilers ahead. * * * ### Welcome to Aquilo It's day, but stars still twinkle in the dark sky. You count the planet's sun among the stars, larger and brighter than the others, but still so dim you can barely feel its warmth at all. A howling wind chills you to the bone and gently rocks the iceberg you are sitting on. This planet has no land. It's an ocean world of liquid ammonia. One continuous ocean covers the entire planet and it's at least 200km deep. The best landing spot you could find was this large iceberg. The sheet of ice is only a few meters thick and seems to contain a lot of trapped air, but frozen water is a very solid material as long as it stays cold. It's able to support a landing pad, so that's good enough. You sit on the edge of the ice watching the snow fall. It gracefully deposits itself on your frozen machines. Assembling machines, chemical plants, transport belts, and inserters, all frozen in place unable to move. In the distance you spot columns of teal gas, fluorine bubbling up from the depths. It's one of the resources you're here for, but out of reach for now. There seems to be plenty of oil, most likely from microorganisms in the core. Making fuel on site shouldn't be a problem as soon as the refinery is unfrozen. You take the time to plan your next moves: collecting ice from the surrounding ocean to extend the platform, heating towers to warm your buildings, heat pipes to move the heat around, and concrete to make sure that the heat doesn't melt the ice. The thought of running heat pipes through all your designs is starting to make your head spin. But it's okay, don't panic. The one thing you do have on this planet... is time. A flurry of shooting stars distracts you for a moment. You can't help but wonder if they are little meteorites burning up in the atmosphere, or the remaining parts of the space platform that dropped you here. The space platform barely made it to this planet and never made it out of orbit. You got out just in time. Hopefully a replacement platform will be here soon... if it survives. There's a clunking sound behind you as the landing pad opens its hatch. You turn to see a formation of cargo pods descend through the atmosphere. It's time to build. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _Terrain graphics by Fearghall and Earendel._ * * * ### A liquid planet Aquilo doesn't have any land. It has a few icebergs floating around, but the building space is very restricted. If you use an offshore pump in the ammoniacal ocean you don't get water, you get mostly liquid ammonia but with some ice particles floating in it. You can separate these in a chemical plant. These substances have a variety of uses, but among them is the ability to make Ice platform. Ice platform allows you to extend the iceberg and extend your build area. Making ice platform can be a slow process so it's good to scale this process while you have spare energy and heat. * * * ### Freezing and heating Heat is the next big mechanic and it's a wonderful twist to the way that you build. Most things on Aquilo freeze if they are not heated. _A collection of frozen machines. Frozen effects are all hand painted by me (Earendel). It's better and faster to paint snow in 2D than to add a snow layer in 3D, especially considering most of the original graphics have a lot of hand-painted post-production._ Heat is generated by a heating tower, which burns chemical fuels that can be made locally, or the nuclear reactor that requires imports from Nauvis. The heating tower is interesting as a burner because it's more like the reactor, it continues to consume fuel even at max temperature. As well as heating, this can be a good way to get rid of anything burnable, which means it can also be very useful on Gleba. _Heating tower from line art to concept art (inactive and active) by Earendel, to the final graphics by Jerzy._ Both the heating tower and nuclear reactor are heat sources. They spread heat to adjacent entities, but they only need to get the entity up to 30°C for the entity to thaw. This means that in some places like outposts, going for higher temperatures is a waste, so that is one of the reasons we added the ability to read the temperature of heat sources and control them with circuits (FFF-428). Heat sources only being able to warm adjacent things that touch them is very limiting. Instead you use heat pipes to move the heat around to all the entities adjacent to connected heat pipes (including diagonally). Every entity that needs heat also consumes heat. The effect is minor per entity but can result in a lot of heat loss over long distances, so sometimes you want a hotter heat source so that the heat can travel further. Heat pipes and heated buildings would melt the ice, so to protect the ice that keeps you floating you can place concrete (or refined concrete) as an insulator. In practice this just means that most entities can't be placed directly on to ice, we don't actually turn the ice tiles into ocean... anymore. That used to be a mechanic, but it was too annoying to deal with when you try to build in an already heated area. Heat pipes can't go underground (or under ice) so you'll need to route the belts and pipes around them while building. Often this means a machine will need access to belts, pipes and heat, but all the belts and pipes also need access to heat, and this can lead to some nice little puzzles and some very interesting builds. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. * * * ### Resources Aquilo is notably lacking in basic resources. On the other planets you can land with nothing and build your way to another rocket. On Aquilo if you land with nothing then you can do nothing. Ok, but what _DO_ you have? Your resources are: * Solar (1%). * Ammoniacal solution from the ocean directly. * Crude oil from resource nodes. * Lithium brine from resource nodes * Fluorine gas from resource nodes. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _New resource graphics by Jerzy._ Solar output is truly pathetic, only 1% of Nauvis. You need some solar panels to kickstart your first few machines so efficiency modules go a long way to speeding up that process. Ammoniacal solution can be gained via an offshore pump. With a powered heated chemical plant you can split it to ice and ammonia. Ice can be melted for water which is needed for any power beyond the pathetic solar. It's also useful to extend your iceberg. Ammonia can be used with crude oil to make solid fuel, or combined with solid fuel to make rocket fuel. Crude oil can be collected with a pumpjack in a few places where it floats up from the ocean depths. It can be combined with ammonia to make fuel, or refined the usual way which can be a useful sink for excess ice and water while also making fuel. Also, note that it's an animated resource now, even on Nauvis. Lithium brine floats up to the surface in some spots and requires a pumpjack. It's used to make lithium, which you'll need for a variety of things including the planet's science pack. Fluorine gas bubbles up in some places and this also requires a pumpjack. Fluorine is used to make coolant which is an essential part of this planet's industry: Cryogenics. Coolant is used in a few things but initially it's only used for Aquilo's science pack, the Cryogenic science pack, which is made in a... * * * ### Cryogenic plant Mp4 playback not supported on your device. The Cryogenic plant is a powerful 5x5 structure with a base crafting speed of 2. It doesn't have base productivity because it deals with a lot of looping recipes, but it does have **8** module slots, so extra productivity modules can be used for the recipes that support it. _Early Cryogenic plant sketches by Earendel. Albert liked the bottom 2 designs so I made something based on those. Some elements of the top 3 got reused in other designs._ _Cryogenic plant line art and concept before final pale turquoise paint colour was chosen._ While the structure can use some chemical plant recipes, it is mainly focussed on recipes that need cold temperatures and a lot of precision. Some examples are: coolant, coolant cooling, the cryogenic science pack, fusion power cells, quantum processors, and some other late-game items. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _Final graphics by Jerzy, sounds by Ian._ Quantum processors are like the final tier of circuit, they need something from each of the new planets. They are needed to make the fusion reactors that you saw in FFF-420 (Cryogenic plants are the hidden structures in that post). Quantum processors are also needed to make the final turret in the game which is also unlocked on Aquilo: The Railgun. * * * ### Railgun turret Mp4 playback not supported on your device. The railgun turret requires both ammo and electricity to function. It has a range of 40 and the damage... well it starts at 10k. It damages everything in a continuous line, so be careful not to stand on the wrong side of it. _Railgun line art and concept by Earendel. There are pipe connections in the design because it was intended to a be a turret that requires cooling to function._ This turret has a 3x5 base. It has a fixed direction like a flamethrower turret but the attack cone is narrower than 90 degrees. If you could only build in 4 directions this would create blind spots, so you can build railgun turrets in 8 directions. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _Graphics by Jarosław, sounds by Ian._ There's also a handheld version that is very effective against Demolishers (FFF-429), but that's not the main use for the turret version. What do you need the turret for? I'll let you speculate. * * * ### Conclusion Aquilo is a challenging but very unique planet. After spending a few hours getting absorbed into Aquilo's unique building patterns, it feels really weird going back to any of the other planets. By comparison everything else suddenly looks so simple. It's a feeling that struck me after playing on my very first Aquilo gameplay prototype, but the same feeling hits me after every playtesting LAN we've done too. It's quite easy to accidentally under power your base, which can lead to a lack of heat, and subsequently freeze half your base. When this happens to you, I invite you to turn off Alt mode and appreciate the view. The frozen factory isn't a sight you get often, so enjoy the moment. * * * I know you're getting unreasonably excited for the release of Space Age, but as always, keep your cool and comment in the usual places.

Hello, It's time to speak about more Gleba. Some changes, and also something new... * * * ### The Gleba problems In the last few months we have been thinking about how to improve Gleba. There has always been this fundamental problem with a biological-oriented planet - other things you produce in the game tend to not be organic so it doesn't quite fit as easily as a planet based on making more Iron or more electronic circuits. * It's difficult to integrate the biological production chains into the rest of the traditional factory, as it's mostly metals there. * Finding useful things to unlock is difficult, especially compared to the metal and electronics based producers like Foundry and Electromagnetic plant. And during the LAN party we had about a month ago, these problems were only confirmed plus we've realized many more issues in other areas. And seeing people interact with Gleba put a lot more urgency on finding solutions. There is one change in particular which is significant and outlines our approach fairly well: * * * ### Bacteria cultivation One of the key issues on Gleba was that you'd be building two factories - one for agriculture which would eventually output the science pack, and the usual Iron/Copper one which craft the factory and rocket parts. _The normal crafting tree was completely severed from the organic one._ This was especially problematic as the agriculture factory didn't contribute in any way until you'd have delivered the science packs to your labs. And as we've learned, it is preferable to attempt to have each step you take feel rewarding and immediately useful. For a very long time we had wanted to add a way to create Iron and Copper ore via agriculture but we weren't quite sure how. Getting factory-grade amounts of minerals from plants felt just too unbelievable. _Stromatolites waiting to be mined._ The idea we've implemented is that some bacteria can be found in the swamps where agricultural plants grow. * Stromatolites are rock-like objects which have formed there over many years, acting as accumulated bacteria and ore for you to quickly obtain at the start. * Yumako/Jellynut can be processed with a small chance to obtain Copper/Iron bacteria respectively, reinforcing the feeling that there really isn't much in it. * Soon enough you unlock the Biochamber, and as you are the ingenuous engineer, you replicate and grow the bacteria in it to truly industrial amounts. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _Cultivating bacteria which turn into iron and copper ore._ This results in the agriculture chain being immediately useful for creating Iron and Copper ore which you can use for building more of the Gleba factory, and once you've got enough of that you can "just" switch it for full-on agricultural science production. As a result the steps you're taking are much more useful and less tedious. A beautiful little detail is that the bacteria spoils directly into ore, so it's a place where spoiling is helping you, for once. * * * ### The reward It's nice when an activity is fun, but it's much better when it's also meaningful and leads somewhere. Obtaining powerful factory improvements is how we like to be motivated in Factorio. There's a handful of improvements to be unlocked by the agricultural science pack like the stack inserter, spidertron with rocket turret, or more efficient recipes for space platforms, but there is one specific new technology... #### Biter captivity Bioflux is a combination of processed Yumako and Jellynut. It's crafted on Gleba and it can be used to capture biter spawners on Nauvis. A capture robot loaded with doses of Bioflux solution and is shot from a rocket launcher. The capture robot latches onto a spawner and soon enough the spawner is rendered harmless and docile. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _(Capture time reduced for demonstration)_ Once captured, the spawner no longer hatches biters, and biter eggs can be collected with inserters for further processing or disposal. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. As long as you keep feeding it Bioflux in frequent intervals, the spawner will remain that way. Otherwise it 'goes rogue' and returns back to its natural form, spawning hostile biters again. Biter eggs can be immediately used for improvements to agriculture, crafting Productivity module 3, or because we felt like the Gleba unlocks aren't motivating us enough... #### A new laboratory Combined with some other items, the egg can be grown and hatched into a mutated laboratory. As you will be able to read down below, the work on the graphics has only just started, but here you can see a work in progress version of it from Earendel and Jerzy: Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _Work in progress graphics of the new Biolab. Subject to change._ The Biolab can be used only on Nauvis as the organism inside would die on other planets, but in turn it only consumes **half** the amount of science packs for any given research. It can process all science packs just like the normal lab. It also has 4 slots for modules. This means it's a powerful unlock and obtaining it early on should feel quite rewarding. Whether we finally broke the imbalance of Vulcanus and Fulgora being clearly superior to Gleba, we will see - but at least the difference is much, much less stark now. * * * ### A bit of backstory You may notice that the Biolab above looks awfully similar like the captive biter spawner. Until very recently, that's pretty much what it was. _Concept art from Earendel._ We had an entity in the game called Synthetic biter spawner. We added it because we felt like it would be nice to be able to just place your own spawners anywhere in order to scale up biter egg production in the typical Factorio fashion of rows on rows of machines. As we were trying to simplify some things and find rewards for Gleba, the Synthetic biter spawner started to lose its significance - and at the same time we felt like some powerful Gleba unlock is missing. At first we changed it to be a more universal crafter, giving it the ability to craft Nauvis science packs, solid fuel and rocket fuel, all with a productivity bonus similar to the foundry and electromagnetic plant. The recipes felt a bit forced and the bonus wasn't that great compared to its rivals, but it was something. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _The discarded synthetic biter spawner in its science pack crafter form._ Along the way we started dreaming about turning it into a full-on laboratory... The graphics however would be far from a proper visual solution so we've put our heads together with Albert and Earendel and we decided to make a last minute adjustment making a proper semi-organic Biolab which would include more of the typical lab structure. The finished version will be in Space Age on release day. :) Because this means we've discarded the synthetic biter spawner, we have added a way to craft the captive biter spawners which you could then place anywhere on Nauvis you like, so you can still scale their production up conveniently. This technology is unlocked at the last planet so it won't get trivialized too early, and the captive spawners you make will have their own quirks... * * * ### Conclusion The idea of capturing biters has been in our heads for a long time, and in Space Age since the very first serious brainstorming going into the initial prototype. Biter eggs also make use of the spoiling mechanic as they spoil into live biters. The biter based lab has had many uses before and we believe now it has found its true form. Over the last month we've improved the experience on Gleba in many other ways. Changing map generation, cleaning up some graphics, tweaking many if not all recipes, making the enemies less crazy, adding new ways to obtain resources and making the rewards a lot more appealing. A lot of the changes are too detailed for the context of FFFs, but we'd like to express our deep gratitude for the feedback from our testers, which has been immensely helpful. Speaking of testers, please be aware that the content/press embargo ends on the 14th October, so if you want to avoid spoilers please keep it in mind as there are no restrictions on what they can show. * * * Captivate us with your least spoiled ideas in the usual places, and don't argue whether Bioflux is drugs or food, it's obviously...

Hello, Today we once again dive head-first into the world of fluids. * * * ### Since last time Back in June, the very same week that we revealed Fluids 2.0 (FFF-416), we were undergoing an in-office LAN party to test the game. As we played, it became apparent that the new system was a little bit _too_ easy. Our Nauvis base had ridiculously huge pipelines that snaked all over the place with little to no thought or structure behind them. We did use some fluid trains to connect particularly distant outposts, but even this was mostly out of habit; a pipeline would have been superior. _Our infinite throughput continent spanning pipelines._ These "omni-pipes" created a situation where pumps never increased throughput, they only ever restricted it. This was counter-intuitive, but also meant that you just never used pumps in the network unless it was to disable a specific section with a circuit connection. Additionally, steering people towards using long pipes everywhere turned out to be a huge trap for fluid mixing, as the chances of accidentally connecting two different pipelines increased significantly. If this happened from bots constructing something while you were on a different planet, then good luck finding the single incorrectly placed pipe in such a huge search area. It was time to search for solutions. * * * ### The importance of visual feedback Transport belts are fun to play with because they are extremely visual and interactive. You can see exactly where items are coming in, where they are going, and where the bottlenecks are, all at a glance. By contrast, pipes are almost entirely opaque, and the tiny windows are not enough to give you sufficient visual feedback. This is part of the reason why we went for a "no-thought-required" solution to fluid flow. If we are to add a limitation to the fluid system, then that limitation needs to be extremely easy, obvious, and interactive. After butting heads for a while, this is what we came up with. * * * ### Pipeline extents Pipelines are constrained to a 250x250 tile area, and exceeding this limit will cause all flow through the pipeline to cease. You can split a pipeline using a pump. The game displays a visualization to show that the pipe is broken and will generate an alert at the location(s) where you need to place pumps. This makes the problem easy to diagnose and easy to fix. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. When holding a fluid-related entity, the game displays connection visualizations on visible pipelines that are tinted to match the fluid inside. You can also visualize an individual pipeline by hovering over it with your mouse, in which case you will also see arrows telling you how large the pipeline is. _This might look familiar to users of myPipe Visualizer mod._ As the final cherry on top, you can also enable a toggle to see pipelines on the map! When you are building an individual setup, you still don't have to worry that much about pipe throughput - you connect the pipes and it "just works". However, connecting your setups together requires slightly more thought, as now you actually have to worry about directionality and the throughput of your pumping stations. The pump-isolated sections also make it much less of a disaster if you accidentally mix fluids. * * * ### Balance tweaks In addition to the extents, we have made a few tweaks to the balance of the fluid components: * Pumps have been nerfed to 1200/s (10x decrease), but this can be increased with quality. * Fluid wagons have been buffed to 50,000 (2x increase). * 1 Water expands to 10 Steam in boilers and heat exchangers. With three pumps per wagon that is 3600/s per fluid wagon, or about 14 seconds to fully pump out a wagon's contents. This is much more reasonable than the previous _0.7 seconds_ you could get in 1.1. This is still plenty fast for vanilla megabases, and in Space Age you can increase pump quality if you need even more throughput to feed your legendary foundries. The Water to Steam ratio change makes it more possible to supply power or nuclear setups using fluid wagons or even water barrels. The change doesn't affect the power consumption/output of any machines, they just consume 10x less water to make the same amount of Steam. The extents, combined with these changes, have made the choice between fluid trains and large pipelines much more varied. Omni-pipes are no longer the one true solution to everything - you can still build them, but they require circuits and are far less magical. Will you choose the near-instant transportation of a pipeline, or the enhanced flexibility of a fluid train? * * * ### Algorithm tweaks There have been a few changes to the algorithm since it was first introduced: * Output rate used to be unlimited, but it is now inversely proportional to the fullness ratio of the sink. * The special exception for storage tank flow has been removed. * The input rate limit used to only apply when pulling from a pipeline, but now, it and the new output rate limit are applied to every fluid flow operation, with the exception of fluid wagons. Something that I failed to adequately explain before is that while there is no limitation on the total flow through a pipeline in a given tick, there _is_ a hardcoded limit of 100 fluid per flow operation (6000/s). This limit is multiplied with the fullness ratios of the source and sink to produce the actual flow value, and this proportionality is what allows machines to share fluid more evenly. Machines that update first will still get the greatest share of fluid, but the difference is much more subtle than it was in 1.1, where the order that you build each pipe entity would greatly affect the flow. The output rate limit is particularly interesting because it makes the fluids feel much more like fluids again. Before, a pump could just push fluid in at the max 6000/s rate until the pipeline was 100% full, but now it slows down as the pipeline fills. For each pipeline, there is a certain fullness ratio where the output and input rates equalize, and the level of fluid in the pipe oscillates around this point as the machines do their work. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _Pipe fullness shown using the debug view._ * * * ### Never quite done The pipeline extents system and balance tweaks were in place for the LAN party, and the reception to them was pretty positive! It has been a long, _long_ journey to get here, and there is still so much to do and so much to tell you about. What you see is the system as it will be when 2.0 launches, but I will continue tweaking and iterating on it in the future. I would also like to take a moment to thank everybody for their exhaustive feedback on the previous post. Rest assured, I read every single comment, even if I don't respond to most of them. Your passion is a huge part of what makes Factorio such a great game. * * * As always, pressurize your thoughts and pump them into the usual places.

Hello, It is a busy time fixing bugs and cleaning up after the Space Age release. * * * ### Factorio: Space Age - Soundtrack releaseAlbert During the last weeks, our dear Petr - Music composer of the Factorio: Space Age (FFF-406) has been working on selecting, remixing and mastering the very best tracks of the entire expansion in order to prepare an album with the best possible quality to represent the soundtrack of the DLC. The selected tracks have been remixed to enhance and intensify its dynamics to give them a proper album format experience. All the recording sessions with the musicians and the electronic compositions are paying off here. Many sections of tracks that were originally composed but cut from the final game tracks have been released in this album. The album length is 02:04:27, and includes the ambience of the new 4 planets and the space area. You will find the released album on Steam. We hope you enjoy it. * * * ### Just fixing bugsKlonan We are all quite busy fixing bugs these weeks, so work on features and quality of life improvements that we could typically exposit about in FFF is on the back burner. We do have a nice graph of automated crash reports since the release: For a bit of a release retrospective, given how 2.0 and Space Age was the biggest launch we've ever done, things went way smoother than we anticipated. This could be due to many factors: * Cleaner code and higher development standards. * Better PR review and QA process. * The LAN party and subsequent closed beta testing. That is not to say there were zero bugs and crashes, but generally it seems like most players could load the game and get right to having fun and not encounter any show stoppers. Still, with over 300 open bugs sitting in our forum, we have our work cut out for us... #### Experimentalists Assemble At this time we have been pushing releases as Stable quite quickly after release, but as we start fixing lower priority bugs, the chances of a bigger issue sneaking through increase. That is why we would like to slowly transition to having experimental releases stay experimental for longer. For this we need more people to opt-in to the experimental releases, which can be done in 2 ways: * Website version: Settings -> Other -> Enable experimental updates. * Steam: Right click Factorio in the library -> Properties -> Betas -> Beta participation dropdown -> Latest 2.0 experimental. By joining the experimental releases, it will give us a better ability to test the game before wider distribution. You will also be first in line when it comes to encountering new bugs, which we would very much appreciate being reported on our forum. * * * As always, experiment on your thoughts in the usual places.

Hello, Welcome back to Vulcanus. It's been a while. * * * You place your new prototype big mining drills, the pinnacle of resource extraction technology, on the closest tungsten deposit to your fledging Vulcanus factory. A few power poles later and they are happily mining away providing a new consistent source of valuable tungsten. A rail ramp and station just about fit in the area too, but without any rail supports in your inventory that line isn't going anywhere soon. Transport belt will have to do for now. As you're returning to the main factory, placing transport belt to connect this new resource to your base, you feel a trembling from the ground. Big mining drills make a lot of vibrations, but this is on a whole other level. Something else must be going on. You head back towards the mining site. Across a river of lava you see a truly gargantuan creature snake its way around a volcano. This formidable beast most closely resembles a centipede or millipede but is larger than a train. As it moves forwards the ground at its face is broken apart leaving a trail of torn up rock and patchy lava. Trees, rocks, even cliffs are torn apart by its passage. Ash is flung into the air making an abrasive cloud that blankets its body and lingers long after it has moved on. The creature roars and speeds up. As it does so it starts shaking the ground harder. Rhythmic vibrations agitate a wide area around it kicking up a huge cloud of ash and destabilising the terrain. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _Also available on YouTube in 4k._ The creature cruises over the lava river and demolishes your machines without even slowing. Your precious new mining drills that seemed so large and powerful just moments ago look like puny toys in the face of such an unfathomable beast. The Demolisher continues its path of destruction down the line of transport belt toward your base, but before getting there it slows to a crawl and turns back into the volcanic wastelands. This attack won't go unanswered. It's time for a fight. You pursue the Demolisher, an easy task given its thick glowing trail. Lava on either side of you forces you to cross through the trail to pursue the creature. The torn up terrain is hot, but there are enough cool rock sections to step across it. As you do, the lingering ash cloud around it obscures your vision and the abrasive particles interfere with your exoskeleton equipment. You catch sight of the body again, this time up close. The thickly armoured plates of each segment seem to give it good protection from heat, and probably many of your weapons. It hasn't reacted to you yet, perhaps it has not seen you, or perhaps it does not care. You move towards the Demolishers head and it still ignores you. The face appears to be a clear weak spot. It has no eyes and the skin still seems adapted for the heat, but the armour is much thinner around the jaws. Bracing yourself for a reaction, you shine your lasers at it's face, but nothing. It continues to patrol some path, as though you were nothing but a speck of dust on the wind. A rocket to the face would surely provoke it, but before testing that theory, you place a line of land mines to secure your retreat. There's an immediate reaction from the creature. It speeds up and turns towards you. Once again, rhythmic vibrations shake the terrain and generate a steadily expanding cloud of ash. The cloud quickly encompasses you. Obscured vision and snagged exoskeleton joints will limit your speed. You fire your submachine gun at the creature. Your piercing rounds cut into the Demolisher and do some damage, but by the time you reload a new magazine all the damage you dealt has healed back. You try again for a few moments inflicting some damage, but again, it seems to heal faster than you can deal damage. Vibrations coming from the creature seem to focus and amplify around you destabilising the ground even more. The crust is thin at the best of times and this isn't helping. A fissure starts to open up under your feet. You manage to dodge to the side as a volcanic eruption explodes in the area you stood a moment ago. Rock fragments, lava, and hot gases shred the area. You avoided the main blast, but just being close to the edge was enough to weaken your shields. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. New fissures start to open up around you. These are easier to dodge now that you know to look for the fissure signs in the ground. Standing far enough from the eruption is completely safe but you'll need to stay on your toes. The Demolisher ploughs through the line of land mines and does not slow as it does so. They do more significant damage, but to your horror the damage is gone in seconds. That was your escape plan, it's time to get moving. You try some more weapons as you move away, even throwing a few spare defender capsules into the mix. They're all somewhat effective but the damage doesn't stick. You'll need to deal damage much faster but you weren't prepared for that. While distracted you fail to dodge a new volcanic eruption. The fissure erupts directly beneath, shattering your shield and blanketing you in fire. The power armor stops you from getting too singed but another hit like that would be certain death. For now, this is not a fight you can win. You switch all your focus to dodging the eruptions and moving away. A few seconds after you stop firing the Demolisher slows down and turns back. That's two wins for the Demolisher, but you'll live another day. * * * ### A Segmented enemy The Demolisher is largely defined by our wish to have a very large enemy in the game. As explained in the Gleba enemies post, the larger a creature is the more problematic it is for sprite sheets. For a conventional enemy it is width * height * directions * animation frames. Width and height are automatically larger and generally a larger creature needs more directions and animation frames to look good so conventional enemies don't scale well. We identified early on that a "segmented enemy" as one of the ways that we could have a large enemy, because in theory we'd only need 1 animation frame. It would need more directions than normal to have smooth movement, but that's the same as a train. In the earliest most basic (text only) draft of enemy types we only had the basic category of animation method or movement. I won't list all the types we were considering, but it included "leggy enemy" and "segmented enemy". We didn't know which type would go where though. For a while the segmented enemy was going to go on Fulgora. This was because we knew the Fulgora landscape would have islands, so it made sense for a segmented enemy to be able to cruise the spaces between islands and give it an unbroken range. This would be another reason not to build in the quicksand. One of the problems with this is the Dune franchise. We ended up in the segmented-enemy-on-sand direction by following the natural progression of constraints, but most people wouldn't see that and assume it's based on Dune anyway. Also, it doesn't have that unique and exciting feeling if it's too close to something you've seen before, so we decided to move segmented enemies "anywhere else". * * * ### Prototyping After I'd finished the main prototype for Space Age I shifted my focus to enemies. I made a new branch of the game just for prototyping enemies, never to be merged into the main game, just to prove out concepts and get something tangible for further discussions. An "Enemies sandpit". Leggy enemies went to Gleba. We didn't know if we wanted it to be more of a stomper or a strafer so I added both options expecting one to be chosen. In the end both survived the cut, and we even got the little wrigglers too. The freezing planet had flying enemies and among them were the jelly-like enemy from FFF-367, however since then these enemies have been dropped from the game. The last planet has a delicate mix of challenges and although we found a way to add enemies to the mix in an interesting way, it would make progression much slower. It might be better as a mod. The segmented enemy went to the volcanic planet. We didn't know exactly what it would do so it was provisionally called things like forgewyrm, magmaworm, and lavaslug. The implementation for this in the prototype was basically a conga line of tanks with some clever code to make them follow-the-leader while adding some sinusoidal movement. The leader in this case was a unit (basically a giant biter) because that already has the necessary attack logic. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _The earliest prototype from years ago. This was testing the basic animation principal and the fire-blood splash back when it takes damage._ * * * ### Design Moving the segmented enemy to a planet that is mostly land had a lot of consequences for the graphics. If the creature was in deep water or sand, then it would be reasonable to have most of the creature hidden below the surface so you'd only see a few segments above the surface and gaps between them. E.g. Head, gap, back hump, gap, (repeat), tail. On the volcanic planet we'd need to show all of the body above the surface at some point and that removes the ability to have gaps between segments. To start with, I was leaning more towards the Demolisher being much more alien. A creature that's barely biological as far as we'd recognise it. Something potentially nuclear powered, that acts more like a force of nature as it scoops heavy isotopes from the soil. There were of course some more conventional options too. _Some early concepts for head shapes._ Albert wanted the enemies to be less alien and more earth-inspired so things progressed in a direction more inspired by a centipede or millipede. A segmented unit has problems with sprite layering. By default, if a segment is further south than another segment then it's sorted in front. When sections the body are rotating or turning a corner, then as segments face east or west the overlapping order changes so a segment "pops" in front of another one. A way to bypass this problem is by having every segment separated by a 45-degree slice, so that with Factorio's camera angle a tail segment can always be sorted under the segment before it. I made a Demolisher model with the 45 degree slices to prove that the overlapping theory would work, but also to prove that it's still possible to get an aesthetic design with this approach. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _Test footage straight from blender. Note that even when the creature is going north, the head can be drawn over other body parts._ This was a big hit so a final concept art version of the head was made to give a direction for the materials. The design was signed off and sent to Jerzy for extra details and texturing, then Lucas for some final adjustments. Thanks to StrangePan, the Demolisher was soon in the game. * * * ### A boring enemy The initial Demolisher in game was a basic implementation. The only weapon that was firmly decided was that the face would do impact damage. There were a lot of other ideas floating around too, but it was hard to get everyone to agree on a direction. For a while the "decreed" weapon was going to be that the Demolisher would have underground children which would pop up like worm turrets and shoot at things. We didn't go with that for various reasons. This left the Demolisher stranded in the following state: * It didn't have any weapons except for the face hitting you. * It was fast enough to catch you without exoskeletons, so if you don't have them and you attract attention you automatically die. If you have enough exoskeletons though it just can't catch you so there's no risk. * It had a staggering number of hitpoints when combined with resistances. It took about 3 minutes of continuous fire from an automatic shotgun firing at the face to die. Using rockets instead was about the same. * The main strategy to kill it was extremely boring, just run around in a circle for 3 minutes until it dies or you run out of ammo. If you do run out of ammo, collect more and continue. * There were other ways to kill it too, but they're either even slower but more resource efficient, or slightly faster but require way more preparation. * Overall very un-fun. I started a new combat branch to change the Demolisher balance and add some new weapons. * * * ### Defences To start I drastically reduced the health of the Demolisher from 80000 to 30000 and reduced the resistances, in particular the flat reduction to damage that makes most attacks barely have any effect. This took the expected time to kill (with a decent damage rate) from minutes to seconds. The main difficulty of killing it now is dealing with the very high regeneration rate of 1500 hp per second. This means that when you're fighting it, you can either beat its healing with your damage rate and it dies quickly, or you can't and you need to run away. Either way the fight is over quickly, it doesn't waste your time, and both situations are interesting. Assuming that you lose the first battle, you can (hopefully) retreat and plan a new method of attack. Factorio has a lot of weapons to choose from, so this is a nice opportunity to try some new options, and in particular, this fight rewards you from using different weapons in combination. Land mines on their own might not work, but land mines + turrets might. Defender capsules on their own might not work, but defender capsules plus a prepared poison cloud plus rockets might have a combined damage per second to do the trick. * * * ### Offences I came up with 11 ideas for weapons that had good potential to be both effective and fun. After talking to some other people for more, we managed to get the list of good options to 13. A lot of the ideas were designed to be used in conjunction so it included things ranging from flaming blood splashback, to flamethrower holes on the sides, to subterranean shockwave attacks. With a definitive list of options there was a meeting to decide on a set that would work together well. _Some thumbnail sketches to help with explaining potential weapon mechanics._ We decided on 2 main abilities: 1. The Demolisher would have a roar or shockwave attack. If the shockwave hit you, you could be stunned or slowed. This would kick up a cloud of ash as the shockwave travels. The cloud would have a small slow effect. The main intention for the cloud can't be disclosed yet, but if Vulcanus is your first planet then the additional effect won't affect you. 2. The Demolisher would seismically trigger volcanic eruptions around a chosen moving target nearby. This would mean that when you're in combat with the creature, there's still some amount of threat. You're not 100% safe just by avoiding the head. It seemed like a good starting point, but kovarex was away and not part of the discussion, so we just had to hope he'd be on board with the new plan when he got back. As I developed these 2 concepts, I extended them a little more to work better together. The eruptions changed to be more engaging by showing the place that they will explode ahead of time. This makes more sense graphically, but mainly it makes the whole battle a lot more interactive. The explosion damage can be far higher with the assumption that most explosions won't hit, but that's also great to make them a genuine threat. Now, instead of not caring about your position other than not getting flattened by the head, you actually need to move around as different parts of the ground become unstable. It feels a lot more like a boss fight. If you're under powered then every explosion counts and you need to dodge a lot. If you're overpowered then you mainly just need to make sure you don't take many direct hits in quick succession, and only a small amount of occasional movement is needed for that. The eruptions are only used against moving targets. The lore reasons for this is that it detects the vibrations in the ground made by moving targets so it's easy to aim eruptions at those, and also that it doesn't consider static things to be much of a threat. The real game balance reason is that player health with shields is so much higher than turret health, so if the turrets are targeted by explosions they die too quickly and it removes too many strategies from being viable. _This is my painted concept for the fissure progression. It's still used as a placeholder in the game but will be replaced with a final version at some point._ For the shockwave ash cloud effect, it being a stun was either too punishing if you got caught close to the head or near an eruption, or irrelevant in all other cases. I changed it to be more of a persistent slow, but not a slow in the way that other slows in the game work. Instead of being a flat % reduction, the effect is more like a max speed with a % of effectiveness. If you don't have any exoskeletons then you're barely affected, but if you have loads of exoskeletons it will take you most of the way back to your natural speed. Keeping the range of player speeds to a slower, more narrow range, is an important change for a few reasons. The Demolisher speed can be much lower too so that the player is always slightly faster and can escape, but the difference with many exoskeletons is not as extreme. Eruptions can form slower and still have a chance of hitting. Exoskeletons are still very relevant though because even a small movement speed bonus helps you dodge an eruption, especially if you've fired a weapon recently. As part of the branch I also added various visuals for the ash cloud, trail effects, and placeholder eruption effects. This branch was made while kovarex was away so we weren't sure what he'd think of it. The Demolisher combat was something that had… "resisted agreed consensus" for over a year at that point. Towards the end of the work on this branch, the work started to represent a large investment of hours which isn't ideal for something that wasn't at all signed off, but deadlines were looming and things just needed to be done. Fortunately when he got back it all got signed off shortly before the LAN playtesting event so it was playable for the playtesters. However, there wasn't time for all of my scripted Lua code to get ported to C++, meaning that we had 100+ people playing with code that was never meant to exist outside of an experimental branch. * * * ### Territories The territories system is a completely new mechanic. I designed a system that used voronoi noise to make distinct regions that demolishers can claim and protect. If you build in a Demolisher territory it will get annoyed and earn its name. The system was built by StrangePan and Genhis. Demolishers patrol near the edge of their territory and you can see these patrol paths from decoratives on the ground (work in progress). You can also see demolisher territories on the map. _Orthogonal lines mark territory edges and the demolisher patrol path is close to the edge. Areas with diagonal red lines are the danger zones._ The planet's starting coal, calcite, sulfuric acid, and most of the starting ashlands region are not covered by Demolisher territories. This gives you a safe area to make a factory and get the basics set up. The starting tungsten patch is in the territory of a small Demolisher, so to get the planet's science pack you'll either need to defeat it or engage in some guerilla mining operations. We're considering adjusting the rules for which buildings in a territory provoke an attack because we have some options, such as: all structures (the current rule), active structures, or only mining structures. Demolishers don't have spawners, the whole creature spawns directly on the map. If you kill one of these ancient creatures then their territory becomes yours, permanently. There's no pollution. Demolishers are only provoked by you building in their territory (or damaging them). There's no evolution. Demolisher size is only controlled by distance from the starting area. * * * ### Combat Testing I've found many ways to kill all sizes of Demolisher at all tech levels (within reason), but for every successful way I found there are many more unsuccessful ways. I was looking forward to people encountering Demolishers during the playtesting event so I joined different servers to watch the first encounters. I'd estimate that at least 60% of the players survived their first encounter just by panicking and immediately running away. For players that tried to fight, I didn't see anyone get a kill on their first try, and only 25% survived their first try. Every server killed at least one Demolisher, but the ways that this happened were wildly different. Players even found one way that I didn't think would work (but I don't want to spoil successful strategies). The big Demolishers are much more difficult to kill. There are ways to do it early game but it's not easy and it's a big investment. For many players I expect them to wait for tech from other planets before killing big Demolishers. _You can lure Demolishers to follow you and force them to destroy cliffs, but be careful about leading them back to your base._ * * * ### Combat Clarity Improvements We're continuing to update the balance but right now the biggest problem is not with the combat stats themselves but with transparency and feedback to the player. For example, at the moment if you alt-click a segment then Factoriopedia shows you the body resistances but you need to click on the head to see the head resistances. Ideally all body parts link to the same page which can show you both sets of resistances. Likewise we need to clarify somewhere that segments take damage individually but all damage is transferred to the creature as a whole (which is really the head). Demolishers have no resistance to poison capsules. It's not a hint to use poison capsules, it's just because poison damage is so weak compared to other damage types that adding a resistance doesn't make sense. The problem is that if you test 1 poison capsule on a Demolisher, it looks like no damage is dealt because the regeneration is higher than the damage of a few poison capsules (even if they hit multiple segments), so the damage is healed instantly and the health bar doesn't even appear. The reality is that they do offset some of the regeneration but that isn't communicated. If we make the health bar linger for a moment after any damage then it will make that situation clearer. These are the sort of small adjustments we will be making over the coming weeks. * * * ### Conclusion The demolishers aren't finished. Some graphics and other small details are still in progress, for example the eruption explosions are still the generic "huge explosion" but we're part way through a more appropriate lava-based animation that doesn't obscure the player so much. We're also intending for the Demolishers to have more sinusoidal motion but some other things need to be completed first. Unlike other planets where the expectation is that casual defences usually win, on Vulcanus casual defences will usually lose. That's fine though because generally they're not a threat to your base, only new expansions. Also on Vulcanus, most of what you're building in outposts is sort of free stuff from lava anyway so it being demolished is not a big loss. There's no need to build perimeter walls, and a typical line of turrets is one of the worst formations you can make because the Demolisher will cruise straight down it. From playtesting there's mixed sentiment on their difficulty level. Some players feel the Demolishers are overpowered and others think that they are in a good place. If Demolishers were a conventional enemy then they would be too strong at the current level, but the fact is that they are not a conventional enemy due to the territory system. They don't attack your base the way other enemies do. Maybe the eruptions are a bit too lethal but we can adjust that. Overall difficulty seems to be okay because you have a lot of options and you are given the space (and time) to find the option that's best for you. Without spoiling specific strategies the broader categories that you have are: * A good combination of personal weapons with well executed combat. * A static defence strategy that can be reused for multiple territories by luring in distant enemies. * Import special weapons from other planets. * Wait for more damage upgrade techs and quality to make all strategies better. Demolisher combat can be fun and strategic. Each one is a boss fight to unlock a new territory. Demolishers are definitely the toughest enemies in the game. When something which at first seemed impossible to kill, can later be killed quickly and efficiently due to a well-executed plan, it is very satisfying. * * * As always, face-tank every obstacle and leave your thoughts in the usual places.

Howdy, this week we will be diving deep into the workings of cargo pods and their seamless flight animations. Most of you playing the expansion have probably already seen them in game. The positive reception makes us very happy. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _Ascending to platform in orbit above Nauvis._ * * * ### Visual design The initial draft of a pod being released from a set of claws came from Earendel. You can see that the essence of it has remained relatively unchanged throughout development. In the very first version, the player needed to insert a capsule item into the rocket to travel. It got scrapped, because it was just pointless busywork. However that item was one of the ingredients of mech armor, hence the visual similarity. Following the draft, Jerzy modeled a 3D version of the claw rocket and pod. Then the branch lay dormant for a long time until core gameplay coding was finished and work resumed on less critical features such as fancy flight animations. I recruited the help of Jaroslaw, who had just finished his modeling work on hub, pad and landing hatches. Together with his modeling and volumetric cloud simulation and my coding and shader work and Ian's audio, we polished everything for the main release. _Earendel's concept art of the pod and rocket separation._ ### Where are those pods headed? Before any graphic work could begin, it was necessary to develop a backbone of how the items would move from one surface to another. At that point in time, the logistic requests functioned fine, but they just teleported the items instantly. Taking inspiration from the rocket, which had an inventory and could carry items, I decided to make the CargoPod its own new entity. While the rocket would take care of flying out of a silo, it would be shed on the original surface and the pod would have the functionality of going to another surface. The second (and trickier) part of the equation were destinations. Even in the _"vanilla?"/"stracciatella?"_ Space Age the pods travel from silos to hubs and from hubs to landing pads. Two of those may be further extended with cargo bays which add more hatches, but aren't destinations themselves. ### To the stations! The solution was to introduce stations, a layer of abstraction where all the buildings involved in orbital logistics register with their force and receive a unique ID. Any hatch on a cargo bay just joins the existing station. Then, to address items to another surface all we need is: Surface, Force, Station and Hatch. Depending on the usage some of these are optional. A starter pack rocket does not need any destination. Traveling player can launch towards a planet and only resolve whether the target is ground or pad at the apex. A logistic order will know its station beforehands. The nice effect of having generic logic is that technically the shipment can go between any two surfaces in the game and with any amount of stations. It even became useful in base game when rocket silos could target their own landing pad with space science and it would just work out of the box. I didn't want to restrict the potential by hardcoding everything to just planets and platforms. _My notes from when I was trying to carry the station concept one step further and combine the GUI for silo, hub and pad into one. The needs ended up being too different though._ * * * ### Assembling the cutscene puzzle Just like with the station system, I did not want to hardcode animations either. Custom planets would be one of the first things to mod in, so my priority has been to allow as much customization as possible. Every detail of the flight animation is provided by the fully moddable procession system. Each space location provides its own set of departure and arrival animations to planet itself and to any space platform in orbit. For instance, when a pod gets issued to fly from platform around Vulcanus down to the surface of Vulcanus, it would take the "vulcanus-platform-departure" and "vulcanus-planet-arrival" animations that match in style and stitch them together. Sometimes the pod has to wait in transit for a hatch to open up. In those cases "vulcanus-style-intermezzo" looping animation can be inserted in between to pass time. ### Building blocks Zooming in further, each procession has a timeline comprised of a variable number of layers. These layers control various aspects of the animation or draw graphics. Many aspects of them are driven by 1D, 2D and 4D Bézier curves and their normalized variants. _Planet landing curve open in the Factorio Spline Editor._ For modder convenience, I have published my custom Factorio Spline Editor online. It is fairly difficult to get the shapes right without it. As a bonus it also exports the curves directly in the desired format. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _Descending to Nauvis from a platform in orbit._ _A simplified timeline of flying down from a platform to surface highlighting when each procession layer is active to make up the final look._ ### Cloud technology Now, what allows the animation to appear seamless is the cover layer. At some point, the whole screen needs to be covered up to maintain the illusion when the pod teleports from one surface to another. Just swiping a flat image across the screen would have been serviceable. In fact, Albert favored leaning into a more stylized aesthetic. My opinion was that we could get a very impressive looking animated edge with very little work. All I did was ask Jaroslaw to generate a depth texture for the clouds. When the edge fades, instead of being multiplied by a flat value, it cuts the clouds off at a certain depth. This way they come onto the screen in clumps and bleed naturally instead of forming a thick wall. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _Manually demonstrating the soft masking shader of cover layers._ ### Clash of Mods While all this functionality sounds extremely powerful already, as I started making the final cutscene for Space Age, it became evident to me, that mods wouldn't be able to live in harmony like this. If every aspect of the animation lives inside these timelines then any new pod, planet or station would have to do unbearable amounts of work to integrate itself into all existing processions, creating countless duplicates that only differ in several sprites. Thankfully, we have one more trick up our sleeve. In the current version the planets in fact all use the same flight animation prototype. The way we introduce appropriate variants is through the use of catalogues. A catalogue is basically a list of images or sounds that the procession animation can refer to. Instead of having a predefined asset, the procession will refer to a CatalogueID and specify where to look for it. * Space Location catalogue can tell you how the local clouds or fog look like. * Pod catalogue can provide special animations to play such as opening solar panels or even textures for overlays like the reentry flames and the thruster sounds. * Hatch catalogue can provide the graphic for illumination when the pod thruster gets close. Any missing graphic or sound will just be skipped. New planets will play at least some animation even if they forget to define clouds. New pods can provide their own flame sprites that still play at the right times. New cargo bays or hubs can just say their illumination looks different and not touch any of the procession data. And if you are feeling fancy, you can give your planet an entirely new timeline, but still utilize pod animations and planet sprites from the default Space Age catalogue IDs. For a simple example, a parachute sprite could be added to pod catalogue and the flight speed slowed down significantly. Any third party mod adding a new pod type would have the option to support your planet by just defining a parachute graphic and nothing else. * * * As always, orbitally deliver your thoughts to the usual places.

Hello, You may have noticed we launched Space Age earlier this week :) * * * ### Space Age reception The reaction to the Space Age launch has rocketed past our wildest expectations. We had almost 100,000 concurrent players, and as of writing this post, we have passed 400,000 copies sold! Needless to say, from all of us here, thank you. Factorio would not be possible without the support of our fans and players. We are working hard to address all the feedback and issues you've reported to us on the forums, Reddit, and Discord. * * * ### Galaxy of Fame This week, kovarex, Lucas and Vinzenz finished off our last little surprise for Space Age, the **Galaxy of Fame**. When players finish Space Age and reach interstellar space, they will be invited to upload a snapshot of their game to the Galaxy of Fame. Once uploaded you can find your star in the Galaxy of Fame, where you can see details such as: * General map info - Title, comment, time played, etc. * Chart view of planets and platforms. * Item, Energy and Kill statistics. You can browse around and see other peoples factories and see how they work. You might notice that some of the maps look a bit suspicious, well at this time we aren't blocking saves that use cheats/commands/editor, as we don't want to be overly restrictive, but we will add some filtering options soon. There is only a single Galaxy of Fame entry per player account, uploading a new one will overwrite the previous one, and the option will be in the in-game menu after completing Space Age. Since the feature is quite new there are some other details worth sharing: * The location, size, color and shape of each star is random and assigned at the first upload. * Zooming issues on mobile are known and will be fixed soon. * Error 100 when uploading is known, in most cases the upload actually succeeded. * We support uploading modded saves. * Galaxy of Fame will receive more updates in the future. As you can see, there aren't that many stars lighting up the Galaxy of Fame at the moment, but as more people play and finish, we hope to see it fill out to a full bright sparkling Galaxy. * * * ### Factorio 2.0 and Nintendo SwitchTwinsen Since the Space Age launch on Monday, we've had a few questions about our plans regarding support for the Nintendo Switch Platform. #### Factorio Space Age is not coming to Nintendo Switch. Space Age factories are much bigger compared to vanilla, as they span 5 planets. There's simply not enough RAM to fit them and not enough CPU power to run all of it at 60 UPS. Not to mention all the new sprites that were added that will not fit in VRAM. #### Factorio 2.0 is coming to Nintendo Switch. I am currently working on bringing the 2.0 free update to Switch and making sure it's optimized well enough. Since the release process on consoles takes a long time, I prefer to not to give you a conservative release date, and instead just release it as soon as possible, when it's ready. My estimate is that the update will come to Nintendo Switch in 1-2 months. Meanwhile I recommend you finish your current playthrough if you are almost finishing your save game, as the 2.0 update comes with some updates to rails, fluids, recipes and technologies that might break parts of your base and on Switch you will not be able to downgrade once you update. * * * As always, let us know what you think at the usual places.

Hello, We are still diligently working away at the Space Age bug reports. * * * ### Trouble with languages While fixing an IME keyboard (Asian language) bug introduced by the 2.0 update, I got curious and started exploring localisation for various languages. Even though my native language is Czech, all of our development on the game happens in English, so I essentially never run the game in this mode. As I was twiddling about in the Czech crafting menu, it quickly came to light that the user experience wasn't as smooth as I would expect. Any capital non-English letter would cause trouble. Looking up "**čerpadlo** " (pump) yields "Ropné **čerpadlo** " (Pump jack) and "Pobřežní **čerpadlo** " (Offshore pump), but not "**Čerpadlo** " (Pump) due to the capital Č not being matched to lower case č. Players have already developed a habit of typing stuff like "erpadlo"(ump) in order to avoid the troublesome letters altogether. #### Non-English search finally supported! Obviously, this has been terrible user experience for years and I took it upon myself to address it as quickly as possible. The root of the issue was that until now we searched by casting each "code letter" to lower case via a standard function. However, internally (in the Unicode representation) any letter with accents or outside the latin alphabet takes up multiple "code letters" and therefore wasn't recognized or converted at all. Furthermore, Unicode letters are quite a mess, since the table has grown gradually over the years. Many letters are scattered all over. Out-of-the-box solutions are usually bloated to accommodate edge cases for many scripts and languages we can't even render in Factorio (Hieroglyphs, Sumerian Cuneiform, Emoji...). My solution was to write my own custom mapping focusing on languages we officially support. And since I was already at it with a custom solution, it allowed me to further tailor search hits to how people type in everyday life: * Accented letters are equivalent to non-accented ones. "zelezny plat"(iron plate) = "železný plát"(iron plate) = "ŽELEZNÝ PLÁT"(IRON PLATE) * The two Japanese kana alphabets are now equvalent in search. 「べると」(belt) =「ベルト」(BELT). * The two lower case sigmas in Greek both match the capital sigma. Σ = σ = ς The new localised search improvements will be released with the upcoming 2.0.16 experimental release. Here is where I would like to hear from you. **If there is some other useful search feature that you find missing from a supported language, please let me know on the forums or as a response to this article.** I have tried to consult these features with our translators ahead of time, but I can only reach so many native speakers myself. It is also possible that some visually similar accents got omitted by accident. #### Mod portal search Besides the in-game search, our mod portal search has also been improved this week. In the past it wouldn't always yield proper matches with asian languages. We have updated our search provider to a newer version and now it should be working better. * * * ### Contribute to Translations With 2.0 and Space Age, we have added a lot of new items, descriptions, tips and such to the game. Each of these needs translating into foreign languages, and we rely on our community to contribute these for us. If you are interested in getting involved in the localisation of the game, please join the effort over on our Crowdin Project. To those already helping out, thank you very much for all your help. We know there are quite a few Crowdin issues and base game locale problems being reported, and we hope to address all of them in time. * * * As always, type your thoughts in the usual places.

**Factorio: Space Age** continues the player's journey after launching rockets into space. Discover new worlds with unique challenges, exploit their novel resources for advanced technological gains, and manage your fleet of interplanetary space platforms. For more information about what comes with the expansion, check out our **Space Age content** page. * * * ### Space Age now available Factorio: Space Age is now available for purchase, you can buy it at any of the following official places: * Our website * Steam * GOG.com * Humble Store Purchases from our website or GOG can redeem a free expansion Steam key. If you purchase on Steam, you can link your Steam ID to our website to access the non-Steam downloads. The Factorio: Space age expansion has changed the game progression and pacing. If you plan to play Space Age, it is recommended to start playing with Space Age directly, even when its your first time, instead of playing the base game and adding Space age later. * * * ### 2.0 release The release of the Space Age expansion also coincides with the release of the free Factorio 2.0 update. Version 2.0 has a wide range of game changes, optimizations and improvements, which we detailed here. * * * ### Feedback welcome This is a very large and fresh release, so if you have any suggestions or encounter any issues please report them on our forum: * Ideas and suggestions * Technical help * Bug reports * * * We sincerely hope you will enjoy the result of our work for the last 4 years. Factorio: Space Age and 2.0 are the biggest projects we've undertaken so far, and it wouldn't be possible without the support of our fans and players. From all of us, thank you. As always, let us know what you think at the usual places.

Hello, 3 days to go! * * * ### Factorio: Space Age Trailer With a new Expansion of course comes a new trailer. After many weeks of work, fine-tuning, and polishing, Albert (with help from Vaclav, and the script written by Earendel) has finished the launch trailer for the Space Age expansion: The result speaks for itself, and there are some details you might notice. For instance the rockets now have fixtures carrying the cargo pods, and we have animations for cargo pods landing on a planets and at landing pads. Or perhaps you noticed the player running around with some of the new late game technologies... * * * ### Mech armorv453000 From the very first prototype of Space Age, we had a new tier of armor in it. The only difference was a 20% larger equipment grid over Power armor Mk2, but along with quality this felt well above adequate already. As Earendel and Albert were developing the concept, the design settled on the idea that the player is locking themselves in a metal sarcophagus, transcending humanity to become the perfect Factorio machine. We have been thinking what kind of special features could the new piece of armor have and the most obvious and convenient one seemed to be the ability to fly, especially as the Jetpack from Space Exploration is quite convenient, though we'd want to do it a bit differently... Some ideas would be: * We didn't want to add a button to toggle flying. * We would prefer precise movements unlike the spidertron bobbing and rubberbanding. Therefore, the flying would just happen automatically whenever you would be about to hit any obstacle. This raises some immediate questions, like do we have separate speeds for walking and flying and with it exoskeleton equipment and jetpack equipment? We decided against adding jetpack equipment, have just one movement speed value, and have exoskeleton equipment effectively make you fly faster. Which may sound strange, but as the flying happens automatically, it would be very annoying to have one of the speeds slower. Being part of the armor also means that we can show the flying capability in the armor graphics. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _Graphics by Jerzy_ As you can see, you not only take flight if you were to hit an obstacle, but also when an obstacle is about to hit you. The mech armor went from a minor upgrade to a game-changer. Being able to move freely makes basic navigation in the game feel incredible, and as a secondary effect it means you feel much better about stacking many legendary exoskeletons in your armor because it doesn't make you run into obstacles all the time. It doesn't require fuel, or electricity from your equipment grid, it just works whenever it would be useful... almost. The combat abilities were in fact so powerful that we had to give the Demolishers a smoke cloud which prevents you from flying, as otherwise fighting them felt like a joke. If you ever feel like missing construction robots when starting a new game, this feeling just got a lot worse. The mech armor also makes you forget to fear walking over rails, which can be a hazardous habit. From the perspective of visuals and concept, we wanted the mech armor to be the player becoming one with the machine and in part one of the stronger symbols of Space Age, and now the mechanics match that. _Line art version of the concept by Earendel._ * * * ### Conclusion Factorio: Space Age has been almost 4 years in development, and now the finish line is just ahead of us. We look forward to seeing you all enjoying Space Age on Monday, and don't forget to put shield equipment in your mech suit, trains aren't the only enemy! Let us know if you are ready to become one with the machine at the usual places.

**Factorio: Space Age** continues the player's journey after launching rockets into space. Discover new worlds with unique challenges, exploit their novel resources for advanced technological gains, and manage your fleet of interplanetary space platforms. For more information about what comes with the expansion, check out our **Space Age content** page. * * * ### Space Age now available Factorio: Space Age is now available for purchase, you can buy it at any of the following official places: * Our website * Steam * GOG.com * Humble Store Purchases from our website or GOG can redeem a free expansion Steam key. If you purchase on Steam, you can link your Steam ID to our website to access the non-Steam downloads. The Factorio: Space age expansion has changed the game progression and pacing. If you plan to play Space Age, it is recommended to start playing with Space Age directly, even when its your first time, instead of playing the base game and adding Space age later. * * * ### 2.0 release The release of the Space Age expansion also coincides with the release of the free Factorio 2.0 update. Version 2.0 has a wide range of game changes, optimizations and improvements, which we detailed here. * * * ### Feedback welcome This is a very large and fresh release, so if you have any suggestions or encounter any issues please report them on our forum: * Ideas and suggestions * Technical help * Bug reports * * * We sincerely hope you will enjoy the result of our work for the last 4 years. Factorio: Space Age and 2.0 are the biggest projects we've undertaken so far, and it wouldn't be possible without the support of our fans and players. From all of us, thank you. As always, let us know what you think at the usual places.

Hello, Welcome back to Vulcanus. It's been a while. * * * You place your new prototype big mining drills, the pinnacle of resource extraction technology, on the closest tungsten deposit to your fledging Vulcanus factory. A few power poles later and they are happily mining away providing a new consistent source of valuable tungsten. A rail ramp and station just about fit in the area too, but without any rail supports in your inventory that line isn't going anywhere soon. Transport belt will have to do for now. As you're returning to the main factory, placing transport belt to connect this new resource to your base, you feel a trembling from the ground. Big mining drills make a lot of vibrations, but this is on a whole other level. Something else must be going on. You head back towards the mining site. Across a river of lava you see a truly gargantuan creature snake its way around a volcano. This formidable beast most closely resembles a centipede or millipede but is larger than a train. As it moves forwards the ground at its face is broken apart leaving a trail of torn up rock and patchy lava. Trees, rocks, even cliffs are torn apart by its passage. Ash is flung into the air making an abrasive cloud that blankets its body and lingers long after it has moved on. The creature roars and speeds up. As it does so it starts shaking the ground harder. Rhythmic vibrations agitate a wide area around it kicking up a huge cloud of ash and destabilising the terrain. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _Also available on YouTube in 4k._ The creature cruises over the lava river and demolishes your machines without even slowing. Your precious new mining drills that seemed so large and powerful just moments ago look like puny toys in the face of such an unfathomable beast. The Demolisher continues its path of destruction down the line of transport belt toward your base, but before getting there it slows to a crawl and turns back into the volcanic wastelands. This attack won't go unanswered. It's time for a fight. You pursue the Demolisher, an easy task given its thick glowing trail. Lava on either side of you forces you to cross through the trail to pursue the creature. The torn up terrain is hot, but there are enough cool rock sections to step across it. As you do, the lingering ash cloud around it obscures your vision and the abrasive particles interfere with your exoskeleton equipment. You catch sight of the body again, this time up close. The thickly armoured plates of each segment seem to give it good protection from heat, and probably many of your weapons. It hasn't reacted to you yet, perhaps it has not seen you, or perhaps it does not care. You move towards the Demolishers head and it still ignores you. The face appears to be a clear weak spot. It has no eyes and the skin still seems adapted for the heat, but the armour is much thinner around the jaws. Bracing yourself for a reaction, you shine your lasers at it's face, but nothing. It continues to patrol some path, as though you were nothing but a speck of dust on the wind. A rocket to the face would surely provoke it, but before testing that theory, you place a line of land mines to secure your retreat. There's an immediate reaction from the creature. It speeds up and turns towards you. Once again, rhythmic vibrations shake the terrain and generate a steadily expanding cloud of ash. The cloud quickly encompasses you. Obscured vision and snagged exoskeleton joints will limit your speed. You fire your submachine gun at the creature. Your piercing rounds cut into the Demolisher and do some damage, but by the time you reload a new magazine all the damage you dealt has healed back. You try again for a few moments inflicting some damage, but again, it seems to heal faster than you can deal damage. Vibrations coming from the creature seem to focus and amplify around you destabilising the ground even more. The crust is thin at the best of times and this isn't helping. A fissure starts to open up under your feet. You manage to dodge to the side as a volcanic eruption explodes in the area you stood a moment ago. Rock fragments, lava, and hot gases shred the area. You avoided the main blast, but just being close to the edge was enough to weaken your shields. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. New fissures start to open up around you. These are easier to dodge now that you know to look for the fissure signs in the ground. Standing far enough from the eruption is completely safe but you'll need to stay on your toes. The Demolisher ploughs through the line of land mines and does not slow as it does so. They do more significant damage, but to your horror the damage is gone in seconds. That was your escape plan, it's time to get moving. You try some more weapons as you move away, even throwing a few spare defender capsules into the mix. They're all somewhat effective but the damage doesn't stick. You'll need to deal damage much faster but you weren't prepared for that. While distracted you fail to dodge a new volcanic eruption. The fissure erupts directly beneath, shattering your shield and blanketing you in fire. The power armor stops you from getting too singed but another hit like that would be certain death. For now, this is not a fight you can win. You switch all your focus to dodging the eruptions and moving away. A few seconds after you stop firing the Demolisher slows down and turns back. That's two wins for the Demolisher, but you'll live another day. * * * ### A Segmented enemy The Demolisher is largely defined by our wish to have a very large enemy in the game. As explained in the Gleba enemies post, the larger a creature is the more problematic it is for sprite sheets. For a conventional enemy it is width * height * directions * animation frames. Width and height are automatically larger and generally a larger creature needs more directions and animation frames to look good so conventional enemies don't scale well. We identified early on that a "segmented enemy" as one of the ways that we could have a large enemy, because in theory we'd only need 1 animation frame. It would need more directions than normal to have smooth movement, but that's the same as a train. In the earliest most basic (text only) draft of enemy types we only had the basic category of animation method or movement. I won't list all the types we were considering, but it included "leggy enemy" and "segmented enemy". We didn't know which type would go where though. For a while the segmented enemy was going to go on Fulgora. This was because we knew the Fulgora landscape would have islands, so it made sense for a segmented enemy to be able to cruise the spaces between islands and give it an unbroken range. This would be another reason not to build in the quicksand. One of the problems with this is the Dune franchise. We ended up in the segmented-enemy-on-sand direction by following the natural progression of constraints, but most people wouldn't see that and assume it's based on Dune anyway. Also, it doesn't have that unique and exciting feeling if it's too close to something you've seen before, so we decided to move segmented enemies "anywhere else". * * * ### Prototyping After I'd finished the main prototype for Space Age I shifted my focus to enemies. I made a new branch of the game just for prototyping enemies, never to be merged into the main game, just to prove out concepts and get something tangible for further discussions. An "Enemies sandpit". Leggy enemies went to Gleba. We didn't know if we wanted it to be more of a stomper or a strafer so I added both options expecting one to be chosen. In the end both survived the cut, and we even got the little wrigglers too. The freezing planet had flying enemies and among them were the jelly-like enemy from FFF-367, however since then these enemies have been dropped from the game. The last planet has a delicate mix of challenges and although we found a way to add enemies to the mix in an interesting way, it would make progression much slower. It might be better as a mod. The segmented enemy went to the volcanic planet. We didn't know exactly what it would do so it was provisionally called things like forgewyrm, magmaworm, and lavaslug. The implementation for this in the prototype was basically a conga line of tanks with some clever code to make them follow-the-leader while adding some sinusoidal movement. The leader in this case was a unit (basically a giant biter) because that already has the necessary attack logic. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _The earliest prototype from years ago. This was testing the basic animation principal and the fire-blood splash back when it takes damage._ * * * ### Design Moving the segmented enemy to a planet that is mostly land had a lot of consequences for the graphics. If the creature was in deep water or sand, then it would be reasonable to have most of the creature hidden below the surface so you'd only see a few segments above the surface and gaps between them. E.g. Head, gap, back hump, gap, (repeat), tail. On the volcanic planet we'd need to show all of the body above the surface at some point and that removes the ability to have gaps between segments. To start with, I was leaning more towards the Demolisher being much more alien. A creature that's barely biological as far as we'd recognise it. Something potentially nuclear powered, that acts more like a force of nature as it scoops heavy isotopes from the soil. There were of course some more conventional options too. _Some early concepts for head shapes._ Albert wanted the enemies to be less alien and more earth-inspired so things progressed in a direction more inspired by a centipede or millipede. A segmented unit has problems with sprite layering. By default, if a segment is further south than another segment then it's sorted in front. When sections the body are rotating or turning a corner, then as segments face east or west the overlapping order changes so a segment "pops" in front of another one. A way to bypass this problem is by having every segment separated by a 45-degree slice, so that with Factorio's camera angle a tail segment can always be sorted under the segment before it. I made a Demolisher model with the 45 degree slices to prove that the overlapping theory would work, but also to prove that it's still possible to get an aesthetic design with this approach. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _Test footage straight from blender. Note that even when the creature is going north, the head can be drawn over other body parts._ This was a big hit so a final concept art version of the head was made to give a direction for the materials. The design was signed off and sent to Jerzy for extra details and texturing, then Lucas for some final adjustments. Thanks to StrangePan, the Demolisher was soon in the game. * * * ### A boring enemy The initial Demolisher in game was a basic implementation. The only weapon that was firmly decided was that the face would do impact damage. There were a lot of other ideas floating around too, but it was hard to get everyone to agree on a direction. For a while the "decreed" weapon was going to be that the Demolisher would have underground children which would pop up like worm turrets and shoot at things. We didn't go with that for various reasons. This left the Demolisher stranded in the following state: * It didn't have any weapons except for the face hitting you. * It was fast enough to catch you without exoskeletons, so if you don't have them and you attract attention you automatically die. If you have enough exoskeletons though it just can't catch you so there's no risk. * It had a staggering number of hitpoints when combined with resistances. It took about 3 minutes of continuous fire from an automatic shotgun firing at the face to die. Using rockets instead was about the same. * The main strategy to kill it was extremely boring, just run around in a circle for 3 minutes until it dies or you run out of ammo. If you do run out of ammo, collect more and continue. * There were other ways to kill it too, but they're either even slower but more resource efficient, or slightly faster but require way more preparation. * Overall very un-fun. I started a new combat branch to change the Demolisher balance and add some new weapons. * * * ### Defences To start I drastically reduced the health of the Demolisher from 80000 to 30000 and reduced the resistances, in particular the flat reduction to damage that makes most attacks barely have any effect. This took the expected time to kill (with a decent damage rate) from minutes to seconds. The main difficulty of killing it now is dealing with the very high regeneration rate of 1500 hp per second. This means that when you're fighting it, you can either beat its healing with your damage rate and it dies quickly, or you can't and you need to run away. Either way the fight is over quickly, it doesn't waste your time, and both situations are interesting. Assuming that you lose the first battle, you can (hopefully) retreat and plan a new method of attack. Factorio has a lot of weapons to choose from, so this is a nice opportunity to try some new options, and in particular, this fight rewards you from using different weapons in combination. Land mines on their own might not work, but land mines + turrets might. Defender capsules on their own might not work, but defender capsules plus a prepared poison cloud plus rockets might have a combined damage per second to do the trick. * * * ### Offences I came up with 11 ideas for weapons that had good potential to be both effective and fun. After talking to some other people for more, we managed to get the list of good options to 13. A lot of the ideas were designed to be used in conjunction so it included things ranging from flaming blood splashback, to flamethrower holes on the sides, to subterranean shockwave attacks. With a definitive list of options there was a meeting to decide on a set that would work together well. _Some thumbnail sketches to help with explaining potential weapon mechanics._ We decided on 2 main abilities: 1. The Demolisher would have a roar or shockwave attack. If the shockwave hit you, you could be stunned or slowed. This would kick up a cloud of ash as the shockwave travels. The cloud would have a small slow effect. The main intention for the cloud can't be disclosed yet, but if Vulcanus is your first planet then the additional effect won't affect you. 2. The Demolisher would seismically trigger volcanic eruptions around a chosen moving target nearby. This would mean that when you're in combat with the creature, there's still some amount of threat. You're not 100% safe just by avoiding the head. It seemed like a good starting point, but kovarex was away and not part of the discussion, so we just had to hope he'd be on board with the new plan when he got back. As I developed these 2 concepts, I extended them a little more to work better together. The eruptions changed to be more engaging by showing the place that they will explode ahead of time. This makes more sense graphically, but mainly it makes the whole battle a lot more interactive. The explosion damage can be far higher with the assumption that most explosions won't hit, but that's also great to make them a genuine threat. Now, instead of not caring about your position other than not getting flattened by the head, you actually need to move around as different parts of the ground become unstable. It feels a lot more like a boss fight. If you're under powered then every explosion counts and you need to dodge a lot. If you're overpowered then you mainly just need to make sure you don't take many direct hits in quick succession, and only a small amount of occasional movement is needed for that. The eruptions are only used against moving targets. The lore reasons for this is that it detects the vibrations in the ground made by moving targets so it's easy to aim eruptions at those, and also that it doesn't consider static things to be much of a threat. The real game balance reason is that player health with shields is so much higher than turret health, so if the turrets are targeted by explosions they die too quickly and it removes too many strategies from being viable. _This is my painted concept for the fissure progression. It's still used as a placeholder in the game but will be replaced with a final version at some point._ For the shockwave ash cloud effect, it being a stun was either too punishing if you got caught close to the head or near an eruption, or irrelevant in all other cases. I changed it to be more of a persistent slow, but not a slow in the way that other slows in the game work. Instead of being a flat % reduction, the effect is more like a max speed with a % of effectiveness. If you don't have any exoskeletons then you're barely affected, but if you have loads of exoskeletons it will take you most of the way back to your natural speed. Keeping the range of player speeds to a slower, more narrow range, is an important change for a few reasons. The Demolisher speed can be much lower too so that the player is always slightly faster and can escape, but the difference with many exoskeletons is not as extreme. Eruptions can form slower and still have a chance of hitting. Exoskeletons are still very relevant though because even a small movement speed bonus helps you dodge an eruption, especially if you've fired a weapon recently. As part of the branch I also added various visuals for the ash cloud, trail effects, and placeholder eruption effects. This branch was made while kovarex was away so we weren't sure what he'd think of it. The Demolisher combat was something that had… "resisted agreed consensus" for over a year at that point. Towards the end of the work on this branch, the work started to represent a large investment of hours which isn't ideal for something that wasn't at all signed off, but deadlines were looming and things just needed to be done. Fortunately when he got back it all got signed off shortly before the LAN playtesting event so it was playable for the playtesters. However, there wasn't time for all of my scripted Lua code to get ported to C++, meaning that we had 100+ people playing with code that was never meant to exist outside of an experimental branch. * * * ### Territories The territories system is a completely new mechanic. I designed a system that used voronoi noise to make distinct regions that demolishers can claim and protect. If you build in a Demolisher territory it will get annoyed and earn its name. The system was built by StrangePan and Genhis. Demolishers patrol near the edge of their territory and you can see these patrol paths from decoratives on the ground (work in progress). You can also see demolisher territories on the map. _Orthogonal lines mark territory edges and the demolisher patrol path is close to the edge. Areas with diagonal red lines are the danger zones._ The planet's starting coal, calcite, sulfuric acid, and most of the starting ashlands region are not covered by Demolisher territories. This gives you a safe area to make a factory and get the basics set up. The starting tungsten patch is in the territory of a small Demolisher, so to get the planet's science pack you'll either need to defeat it or engage in some guerilla mining operations. We're considering adjusting the rules for which buildings in a territory provoke an attack because we have some options, such as: all structures (the current rule), active structures, or only mining structures. Demolishers don't have spawners, the whole creature spawns directly on the map. If you kill one of these ancient creatures then their territory becomes yours, permanently. There's no pollution. Demolishers are only provoked by you building in their territory (or damaging them). There's no evolution. Demolisher size is only controlled by distance from the starting area. * * * ### Combat Testing I've found many ways to kill all sizes of Demolisher at all tech levels (within reason), but for every successful way I found there are many more unsuccessful ways. I was looking forward to people encountering Demolishers during the playtesting event so I joined different servers to watch the first encounters. I'd estimate that at least 60% of the players survived their first encounter just by panicking and immediately running away. For players that tried to fight, I didn't see anyone get a kill on their first try, and only 25% survived their first try. Every server killed at least one Demolisher, but the ways that this happened were wildly different. Players even found one way that I didn't think would work (but I don't want to spoil successful strategies). The big Demolishers are much more difficult to kill. There are ways to do it early game but it's not easy and it's a big investment. For many players I expect them to wait for tech from other planets before killing big Demolishers. _You can lure Demolishers to follow you and force them to destroy cliffs, but be careful about leading them back to your base._ * * * ### Combat Clarity Improvements We're continuing to update the balance but right now the biggest problem is not with the combat stats themselves but with transparency and feedback to the player. For example, at the moment if you alt-click a segment then Factoriopedia shows you the body resistances but you need to click on the head to see the head resistances. Ideally all body parts link to the same page which can show you both sets of resistances. Likewise we need to clarify somewhere that segments take damage individually but all damage is transferred to the creature as a whole (which is really the head). Demolishers have no resistance to poison capsules. It's not a hint to use poison capsules, it's just because poison damage is so weak compared to other damage types that adding a resistance doesn't make sense. The problem is that if you test 1 poison capsule on a Demolisher, it looks like no damage is dealt because the regeneration is higher than the damage of a few poison capsules (even if they hit multiple segments), so the damage is healed instantly and the health bar doesn't even appear. The reality is that they do offset some of the regeneration but that isn't communicated. If we make the health bar linger for a moment after any damage then it will make that situation clearer. These are the sort of small adjustments we will be making over the coming weeks. * * * ### Conclusion The demolishers aren't finished. Some graphics and other small details are still in progress, for example the eruption explosions are still the generic "huge explosion" but we're part way through a more appropriate lava-based animation that doesn't obscure the player so much. We're also intending for the Demolishers to have more sinusoidal motion but some other things need to be completed first. Unlike other planets where the expectation is that casual defences usually win, on Vulcanus casual defences will usually lose. That's fine though because generally they're not a threat to your base, only new expansions. Also on Vulcanus, most of what you're building in outposts is sort of free stuff from lava anyway so it being demolished is not a big loss. There's no need to build perimeter walls, and a typical line of turrets is one of the worst formations you can make because the Demolisher will cruise straight down it. From playtesting there's mixed sentiment on their difficulty level. Some players feel the Demolishers are overpowered and others think that they are in a good place. If Demolishers were a conventional enemy then they would be too strong at the current level, but the fact is that they are not a conventional enemy due to the territory system. They don't attack your base the way other enemies do. Maybe the eruptions are a bit too lethal but we can adjust that. Overall difficulty seems to be okay because you have a lot of options and you are given the space (and time) to find the option that's best for you. Without spoiling specific strategies the broader categories that you have are: * A good combination of personal weapons with well executed combat. * A static defence strategy that can be reused for multiple territories by luring in distant enemies. * Import special weapons from other planets. * Wait for more damage upgrade techs and quality to make all strategies better. Demolisher combat can be fun and strategic. Each one is a boss fight to unlock a new territory. Demolishers are definitely the toughest enemies in the game. When something which at first seemed impossible to kill, can later be killed quickly and efficiently due to a well-executed plan, it is very satisfying. * * * As always, face-tank every obstacle and leave your thoughts in the usual places.

Hello, It's time to reveal the last planet. So. Warning: Spoilers ahead. * * * ### Welcome to Aquilo It's day, but stars still twinkle in the dark sky. You count the planet's sun among the stars, larger and brighter than the others, but still so dim you can barely feel its warmth at all. A howling wind chills you to the bone and gently rocks the iceberg you are sitting on. This planet has no land. It's an ocean world of liquid ammonia. One continuous ocean covers the entire planet and it's at least 200km deep. The best landing spot you could find was this large iceberg. The sheet of ice is only a few meters thick and seems to contain a lot of trapped air, but frozen water is a very solid material as long as it stays cold. It's able to support a landing pad, so that's good enough. You sit on the edge of the ice watching the snow fall. It gracefully deposits itself on your frozen machines. Assembling machines, chemical plants, transport belts, and inserters, all frozen in place unable to move. In the distance you spot columns of teal gas, fluorine bubbling up from the depths. It's one of the resources you're here for, but out of reach for now. There seems to be plenty of oil, most likely from microorganisms in the core. Making fuel on site shouldn't be a problem as soon as the refinery is unfrozen. You take the time to plan your next moves: collecting ice from the surrounding ocean to extend the platform, heating towers to warm your buildings, heat pipes to move the heat around, and concrete to make sure that the heat doesn't melt the ice. The thought of running heat pipes through all your designs is starting to make your head spin. But it's okay, don't panic. The one thing you do have on this planet... is time. A flurry of shooting stars distracts you for a moment. You can't help but wonder if they are little meteorites burning up in the atmosphere, or the remaining parts of the space platform that dropped you here. The space platform barely made it to this planet and never made it out of orbit. You got out just in time. Hopefully a replacement platform will be here soon... if it survives. There's a clunking sound behind you as the landing pad opens its hatch. You turn to see a formation of cargo pods descend through the atmosphere. It's time to build. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _Terrain graphics by Fearghall and Earendel._ * * * ### A liquid planet Aquilo doesn't have any land. It has a few icebergs floating around, but the building space is very restricted. If you use an offshore pump in the ammoniacal ocean you don't get water, you get mostly liquid ammonia but with some ice particles floating in it. You can separate these in a chemical plant. These substances have a variety of uses, but among them is the ability to make Ice platform. Ice platform allows you to extend the iceberg and extend your build area. Making ice platform can be a slow process so it's good to scale this process while you have spare energy and heat. * * * ### Freezing and heating Heat is the next big mechanic and it's a wonderful twist to the way that you build. Most things on Aquilo freeze if they are not heated. _A collection of frozen machines. Frozen effects are all hand painted by me (Earendel). It's better and faster to paint snow in 2D than to add a snow layer in 3D, especially considering most of the original graphics have a lot of hand-painted post-production._ Heat is generated by a heating tower, which burns chemical fuels that can be made locally, or the nuclear reactor that requires imports from Nauvis. The heating tower is interesting as a burner because it's more like the reactor, it continues to consume fuel even at max temperature. As well as heating, this can be a good way to get rid of anything burnable, which means it can also be very useful on Gleba. _Heating tower from line art to concept art (inactive and active) by Earendel, to the final graphics by Jerzy._ Both the heating tower and nuclear reactor are heat sources. They spread heat to adjacent entities, but they only need to get the entity up to 30°C for the entity to thaw. This means that in some places like outposts, going for higher temperatures is a waste, so that is one of the reasons we added the ability to read the temperature of heat sources and control them with circuits (FFF-428). Heat sources only being able to warm adjacent things that touch them is very limiting. Instead you use heat pipes to move the heat around to all the entities adjacent to connected heat pipes (including diagonally). Every entity that needs heat also consumes heat. The effect is minor per entity but can result in a lot of heat loss over long distances, so sometimes you want a hotter heat source so that the heat can travel further. Heat pipes and heated buildings would melt the ice, so to protect the ice that keeps you floating you can place concrete (or refined concrete) as an insulator. In practice this just means that most entities can't be placed directly on to ice, we don't actually turn the ice tiles into ocean... anymore. That used to be a mechanic, but it was too annoying to deal with when you try to build in an already heated area. Heat pipes can't go underground (or under ice) so you'll need to route the belts and pipes around them while building. Often this means a machine will need access to belts, pipes and heat, but all the belts and pipes also need access to heat, and this can lead to some nice little puzzles and some very interesting builds. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. * * * ### Resources Aquilo is notably lacking in basic resources. On the other planets you can land with nothing and build your way to another rocket. On Aquilo if you land with nothing then you can do nothing. Ok, but what _DO_ you have? Your resources are: * Solar (1%). * Ammoniacal solution from the ocean directly. * Crude oil from resource nodes. * Lithium brine from resource nodes * Fluorine gas from resource nodes. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _New resource graphics by Jerzy._ Solar output is truly pathetic, only 1% of Nauvis. You need some solar panels to kickstart your first few machines so efficiency modules go a long way to speeding up that process. Ammoniacal solution can be gained via an offshore pump. With a powered heated chemical plant you can split it to ice and ammonia. Ice can be melted for water which is needed for any power beyond the pathetic solar. It's also useful to extend your iceberg. Ammonia can be used with crude oil to make solid fuel, or combined with solid fuel to make rocket fuel. Crude oil can be collected with a pumpjack in a few places where it floats up from the ocean depths. It can be combined with ammonia to make fuel, or refined the usual way which can be a useful sink for excess ice and water while also making fuel. Also, note that it's an animated resource now, even on Nauvis. Lithium brine floats up to the surface in some spots and requires a pumpjack. It's used to make lithium, which you'll need for a variety of things including the planet's science pack. Fluorine gas bubbles up in some places and this also requires a pumpjack. Fluorine is used to make coolant which is an essential part of this planet's industry: Cryogenics. Coolant is used in a few things but initially it's only used for Aquilo's science pack, the Cryogenic science pack, which is made in a... * * * ### Cryogenic plant Mp4 playback not supported on your device. The Cryogenic plant is a powerful 5x5 structure with a base crafting speed of 2. It doesn't have base productivity because it deals with a lot of looping recipes, but it does have **8** module slots, so extra productivity modules can be used for the recipes that support it. _Early Cryogenic plant sketches by Earendel. Albert liked the bottom 2 designs so I made something based on those. Some elements of the top 3 got reused in other designs._ _Cryogenic plant line art and concept before final pale turquoise paint colour was chosen._ While the structure can use some chemical plant recipes, it is mainly focussed on recipes that need cold temperatures and a lot of precision. Some examples are: coolant, coolant cooling, the cryogenic science pack, fusion power cells, quantum processors, and some other late-game items. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _Final graphics by Jerzy, sounds by Ian._ Quantum processors are like the final tier of circuit, they need something from each of the new planets. They are needed to make the fusion reactors that you saw in FFF-420 (Cryogenic plants are the hidden structures in that post). Quantum processors are also needed to make the final turret in the game which is also unlocked on Aquilo: The Railgun. * * * ### Railgun turret Mp4 playback not supported on your device. The railgun turret requires both ammo and electricity to function. It has a range of 40 and the damage... well it starts at 10k. It damages everything in a continuous line, so be careful not to stand on the wrong side of it. _Railgun line art and concept by Earendel. There are pipe connections in the design because it was intended to a be a turret that requires cooling to function._ This turret has a 3x5 base. It has a fixed direction like a flamethrower turret but the attack cone is narrower than 90 degrees. If you could only build in 4 directions this would create blind spots, so you can build railgun turrets in 8 directions. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _Graphics by Jarosław, sounds by Ian._ There's also a handheld version that is very effective against Demolishers (FFF-429), but that's not the main use for the turret version. What do you need the turret for? I'll let you speculate. * * * ### Conclusion Aquilo is a challenging but very unique planet. After spending a few hours getting absorbed into Aquilo's unique building patterns, it feels really weird going back to any of the other planets. By comparison everything else suddenly looks so simple. It's a feeling that struck me after playing on my very first Aquilo gameplay prototype, but the same feeling hits me after every playtesting LAN we've done too. It's quite easy to accidentally under power your base, which can lead to a lack of heat, and subsequently freeze half your base. When this happens to you, I invite you to turn off Alt mode and appreciate the view. The frozen factory isn't a sight you get often, so enjoy the moment. * * * I know you're getting unreasonably excited for the release of Space Age, but as always, keep your cool and comment in the usual places.

Hello, It's time to speak about more Gleba. Some changes, and also something new... * * * ### The Gleba problems In the last few months we have been thinking about how to improve Gleba. There has always been this fundamental problem with a biological-oriented planet - other things you produce in the game tend to not be organic so it doesn't quite fit as easily as a planet based on making more Iron or more electronic circuits. * It's difficult to integrate the biological production chains into the rest of the traditional factory, as it's mostly metals there. * Finding useful things to unlock is difficult, especially compared to the metal and electronics based producers like Foundry and Electromagnetic plant. And during the LAN party we had about a month ago, these problems were only confirmed plus we've realized many more issues in other areas. And seeing people interact with Gleba put a lot more urgency on finding solutions. There is one change in particular which is significant and outlines our approach fairly well: * * * ### Bacteria cultivation One of the key issues on Gleba was that you'd be building two factories - one for agriculture which would eventually output the science pack, and the usual Iron/Copper one which craft the factory and rocket parts. _The normal crafting tree was completely severed from the organic one._ This was especially problematic as the agriculture factory didn't contribute in any way until you'd have delivered the science packs to your labs. And as we've learned, it is preferable to attempt to have each step you take feel rewarding and immediately useful. For a very long time we had wanted to add a way to create Iron and Copper ore via agriculture but we weren't quite sure how. Getting factory-grade amounts of minerals from plants felt just too unbelievable. _Stromatolites waiting to be mined._ The idea we've implemented is that some bacteria can be found in the swamps where agricultural plants grow. * Stromatolites are rock-like objects which have formed there over many years, acting as accumulated bacteria and ore for you to quickly obtain at the start. * Yumako/Jellynut can be processed with a small chance to obtain Copper/Iron bacteria respectively, reinforcing the feeling that there really isn't much in it. * Soon enough you unlock the Biochamber, and as you are the ingenuous engineer, you replicate and grow the bacteria in it to truly industrial amounts. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _Cultivating bacteria which turn into iron and copper ore._ This results in the agriculture chain being immediately useful for creating Iron and Copper ore which you can use for building more of the Gleba factory, and once you've got enough of that you can "just" switch it for full-on agricultural science production. As a result the steps you're taking are much more useful and less tedious. A beautiful little detail is that the bacteria spoils directly into ore, so it's a place where spoiling is helping you, for once. * * * ### The reward It's nice when an activity is fun, but it's much better when it's also meaningful and leads somewhere. Obtaining powerful factory improvements is how we like to be motivated in Factorio. There's a handful of improvements to be unlocked by the agricultural science pack like the stack inserter, spidertron with rocket turret, or more efficient recipes for space platforms, but there is one specific new technology... #### Biter captivity Bioflux is a combination of processed Yumako and Jellynut. It's crafted on Gleba and it can be used to capture biter spawners on Nauvis. A capture robot loaded with doses of Bioflux solution and is shot from a rocket launcher. The capture robot latches onto a spawner and soon enough the spawner is rendered harmless and docile. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _(Capture time reduced for demonstration)_ Once captured, the spawner no longer hatches biters, and biter eggs can be collected with inserters for further processing or disposal. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. As long as you keep feeding it Bioflux in frequent intervals, the spawner will remain that way. Otherwise it 'goes rogue' and returns back to its natural form, spawning hostile biters again. Biter eggs can be immediately used for improvements to agriculture, crafting Productivity module 3, or because we felt like the Gleba unlocks aren't motivating us enough... #### A new laboratory Combined with some other items, the egg can be grown and hatched into a mutated laboratory. As you will be able to read down below, the work on the graphics has only just started, but here you can see a work in progress version of it from Earendel and Jerzy: Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _Work in progress graphics of the new Biolab. Subject to change._ The Biolab can be used only on Nauvis as the organism inside would die on other planets, but in turn it only consumes **half** the amount of science packs for any given research. It can process all science packs just like the normal lab. It also has 4 slots for modules. This means it's a powerful unlock and obtaining it early on should feel quite rewarding. Whether we finally broke the imbalance of Vulcanus and Fulgora being clearly superior to Gleba, we will see - but at least the difference is much, much less stark now. * * * ### A bit of backstory You may notice that the Biolab above looks awfully similar like the captive biter spawner. Until very recently, that's pretty much what it was. _Concept art from Earendel._ We had an entity in the game called Synthetic biter spawner. We added it because we felt like it would be nice to be able to just place your own spawners anywhere in order to scale up biter egg production in the typical Factorio fashion of rows on rows of machines. As we were trying to simplify some things and find rewards for Gleba, the Synthetic biter spawner started to lose its significance - and at the same time we felt like some powerful Gleba unlock is missing. At first we changed it to be a more universal crafter, giving it the ability to craft Nauvis science packs, solid fuel and rocket fuel, all with a productivity bonus similar to the foundry and electromagnetic plant. The recipes felt a bit forced and the bonus wasn't that great compared to its rivals, but it was something. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _The discarded synthetic biter spawner in its science pack crafter form._ Along the way we started dreaming about turning it into a full-on laboratory... The graphics however would be far from a proper visual solution so we've put our heads together with Albert and Earendel and we decided to make a last minute adjustment making a proper semi-organic Biolab which would include more of the typical lab structure. The finished version will be in Space Age on release day. :) Because this means we've discarded the synthetic biter spawner, we have added a way to craft the captive biter spawners which you could then place anywhere on Nauvis you like, so you can still scale their production up conveniently. This technology is unlocked at the last planet so it won't get trivialized too early, and the captive spawners you make will have their own quirks... * * * ### Conclusion The idea of capturing biters has been in our heads for a long time, and in Space Age since the very first serious brainstorming going into the initial prototype. Biter eggs also make use of the spoiling mechanic as they spoil into live biters. The biter based lab has had many uses before and we believe now it has found its true form. Over the last month we've improved the experience on Gleba in many other ways. Changing map generation, cleaning up some graphics, tweaking many if not all recipes, making the enemies less crazy, adding new ways to obtain resources and making the rewards a lot more appealing. A lot of the changes are too detailed for the context of FFFs, but we'd like to express our deep gratitude for the feedback from our testers, which has been immensely helpful. Speaking of testers, please be aware that the content/press embargo ends on the 14th October, so if you want to avoid spoilers please keep it in mind as there are no restrictions on what they can show. * * * Captivate us with your least spoiled ideas in the usual places, and don't argue whether Bioflux is drugs or food, it's obviously...

Hello, You may have noticed we launched Space Age earlier this week :) * * * ### Space Age reception The reaction to the Space Age launch has rocketed past our wildest expectations. We had almost 100,000 concurrent players, and as of writing this post, we have passed 400,000 copies sold! Needless to say, from all of us here, thank you. Factorio would not be possible without the support of our fans and players. We are working hard to address all the feedback and issues you've reported to us on the forums, Reddit, and Discord. * * * ### Galaxy of Fame This week, kovarex, Lucas and Vinzenz finished off our last little surprise for Space Age, the **Galaxy of Fame**. When players finish Space Age and reach interstellar space, they will be invited to upload a snapshot of their game to the Galaxy of Fame. Once uploaded you can find your star in the Galaxy of Fame, where you can see details such as: * General map info - Title, comment, time played, etc. * Chart view of planets and platforms. * Item, Energy and Kill statistics. You can browse around and see other peoples factories and see how they work. You might notice that some of the maps look a bit suspicious, well at this time we aren't blocking saves that use cheats/commands/editor, as we don't want to be overly restrictive, but we will add some filtering options soon. There is only a single Galaxy of Fame entry per player account, uploading a new one will overwrite the previous one, and the option will be in the in-game menu after completing Space Age. Since the feature is quite new there are some other details worth sharing: * The location, size, color and shape of each star is random and assigned at the first upload. * Zooming issues on mobile are known and will be fixed soon. * Error 100 when uploading is known, in most cases the upload actually succeeded. * We support uploading modded saves. * Galaxy of Fame will receive more updates in the future. As you can see, there aren't that many stars lighting up the Galaxy of Fame at the moment, but as more people play and finish, we hope to see it fill out to a full bright sparkling Galaxy. * * * ### Factorio 2.0 and Nintendo SwitchTwinsen Since the Space Age launch on Monday, we've had a few questions about our plans regarding support for the Nintendo Switch Platform. #### Factorio Space Age is not coming to Nintendo Switch. Space Age factories are much bigger compared to vanilla, as they span 5 planets. There's simply not enough RAM to fit them and not enough CPU power to run all of it at 60 UPS. Not to mention all the new sprites that were added that will not fit in VRAM. #### Factorio 2.0 is coming to Nintendo Switch. I am currently working on bringing the 2.0 free update to Switch and making sure it's optimized well enough. Since the release process on consoles takes a long time, I prefer to not to give you a conservative release date, and instead just release it as soon as possible, when it's ready. My estimate is that the update will come to Nintendo Switch in 1-2 months. Meanwhile I recommend you finish your current playthrough if you are almost finishing your save game, as the 2.0 update comes with some updates to rails, fluids, recipes and technologies that might break parts of your base and on Switch you will not be able to downgrade once you update. * * * As always, let us know what you think at the usual places.

Hello, Today we once again dive head-first into the world of fluids. * * * ### Since last time Back in June, the very same week that we revealed Fluids 2.0 (FFF-416), we were undergoing an in-office LAN party to test the game. As we played, it became apparent that the new system was a little bit _too_ easy. Our Nauvis base had ridiculously huge pipelines that snaked all over the place with little to no thought or structure behind them. We did use some fluid trains to connect particularly distant outposts, but even this was mostly out of habit; a pipeline would have been superior. _Our infinite throughput continent spanning pipelines._ These "omni-pipes" created a situation where pumps never increased throughput, they only ever restricted it. This was counter-intuitive, but also meant that you just never used pumps in the network unless it was to disable a specific section with a circuit connection. Additionally, steering people towards using long pipes everywhere turned out to be a huge trap for fluid mixing, as the chances of accidentally connecting two different pipelines increased significantly. If this happened from bots constructing something while you were on a different planet, then good luck finding the single incorrectly placed pipe in such a huge search area. It was time to search for solutions. * * * ### The importance of visual feedback Transport belts are fun to play with because they are extremely visual and interactive. You can see exactly where items are coming in, where they are going, and where the bottlenecks are, all at a glance. By contrast, pipes are almost entirely opaque, and the tiny windows are not enough to give you sufficient visual feedback. This is part of the reason why we went for a "no-thought-required" solution to fluid flow. If we are to add a limitation to the fluid system, then that limitation needs to be extremely easy, obvious, and interactive. After butting heads for a while, this is what we came up with. * * * ### Pipeline extents Pipelines are constrained to a 250x250 tile area, and exceeding this limit will cause all flow through the pipeline to cease. You can split a pipeline using a pump. The game displays a visualization to show that the pipe is broken and will generate an alert at the location(s) where you need to place pumps. This makes the problem easy to diagnose and easy to fix. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. When holding a fluid-related entity, the game displays connection visualizations on visible pipelines that are tinted to match the fluid inside. You can also visualize an individual pipeline by hovering over it with your mouse, in which case you will also see arrows telling you how large the pipeline is. _This might look familiar to users of myPipe Visualizer mod._ As the final cherry on top, you can also enable a toggle to see pipelines on the map! When you are building an individual setup, you still don't have to worry that much about pipe throughput - you connect the pipes and it "just works". However, connecting your setups together requires slightly more thought, as now you actually have to worry about directionality and the throughput of your pumping stations. The pump-isolated sections also make it much less of a disaster if you accidentally mix fluids. * * * ### Balance tweaks In addition to the extents, we have made a few tweaks to the balance of the fluid components: * Pumps have been nerfed to 1200/s (10x decrease), but this can be increased with quality. * Fluid wagons have been buffed to 50,000 (2x increase). * 1 Water expands to 10 Steam in boilers and heat exchangers. With three pumps per wagon that is 3600/s per fluid wagon, or about 14 seconds to fully pump out a wagon's contents. This is much more reasonable than the previous _0.7 seconds_ you could get in 1.1. This is still plenty fast for vanilla megabases, and in Space Age you can increase pump quality if you need even more throughput to feed your legendary foundries. The Water to Steam ratio change makes it more possible to supply power or nuclear setups using fluid wagons or even water barrels. The change doesn't affect the power consumption/output of any machines, they just consume 10x less water to make the same amount of Steam. The extents, combined with these changes, have made the choice between fluid trains and large pipelines much more varied. Omni-pipes are no longer the one true solution to everything - you can still build them, but they require circuits and are far less magical. Will you choose the near-instant transportation of a pipeline, or the enhanced flexibility of a fluid train? * * * ### Algorithm tweaks There have been a few changes to the algorithm since it was first introduced: * Output rate used to be unlimited, but it is now inversely proportional to the fullness ratio of the sink. * The special exception for storage tank flow has been removed. * The input rate limit used to only apply when pulling from a pipeline, but now, it and the new output rate limit are applied to every fluid flow operation, with the exception of fluid wagons. Something that I failed to adequately explain before is that while there is no limitation on the total flow through a pipeline in a given tick, there _is_ a hardcoded limit of 100 fluid per flow operation (6000/s). This limit is multiplied with the fullness ratios of the source and sink to produce the actual flow value, and this proportionality is what allows machines to share fluid more evenly. Machines that update first will still get the greatest share of fluid, but the difference is much more subtle than it was in 1.1, where the order that you build each pipe entity would greatly affect the flow. The output rate limit is particularly interesting because it makes the fluids feel much more like fluids again. Before, a pump could just push fluid in at the max 6000/s rate until the pipeline was 100% full, but now it slows down as the pipeline fills. For each pipeline, there is a certain fullness ratio where the output and input rates equalize, and the level of fluid in the pipe oscillates around this point as the machines do their work. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _Pipe fullness shown using the debug view._ * * * ### Never quite done The pipeline extents system and balance tweaks were in place for the LAN party, and the reception to them was pretty positive! It has been a long, _long_ journey to get here, and there is still so much to do and so much to tell you about. What you see is the system as it will be when 2.0 launches, but I will continue tweaking and iterating on it in the future. I would also like to take a moment to thank everybody for their exhaustive feedback on the previous post. Rest assured, I read every single comment, even if I don't respond to most of them. Your passion is a huge part of what makes Factorio such a great game. * * * As always, pressurize your thoughts and pump them into the usual places.

Hello, It's another week! The release is getting closer! * * * ### Reactor circuit connection We added the ability to connect reactors to the circuit network, which allows the player to: * Read fuel (including currently burning) * Read reactor temperature This makes it quite easy to set up a lossless smart reactor, which doesn't insert any fuel unless it is needed. In some ways, it feels a little bit too easy. The previous solution of people reading the amount of Steam in storage tanks felt like it needed a bit more brainpower and engineering, but it's hard to justify missing capabilities with this reasoning. Anyway... reading the heat and contents from the reactors may prove to be quite useful when you get to the final planet. * * * ### Roboport circuit improvements With the ability to set assembler recipes (FFF-394), there was one missing piece of the puzzle related to making a fully automated magical 'craft everything' circuit setup. That was the ability to read what items are missing from the logistic network. So we added that: It outputs the amount of items needed to satisfy all the logistic requests in the system, including mobile entities like the player and spiders. Importantly (or unfortunately), it does not include items needed to build ghosts (construction requests). This is mostly a technical restraint on our behalf, as logistic networks do not track ghosts in a way that would make it performant to include. Additionally, we added the ability to read the number of roboports in the network. This can be used for example to automatically top-up the number of robots as you expand your logistic network. * * * ### Logistic chest enable/disable It can be a little bit hard using the logistic network to prioritize things, like "only bring advanced circuits here if we have enough". So we added a way to disable them using the circuit network. This is for all types of logistic chest, and works the way you expect: * Disabling requesters - Stops new deliveries being ordered (current orders will finish). * Disabling providers - Stops the items being provided to the logistic network. It is common with these circuit network features, that the community ends up doing crazy things we could never think of. So it will be interesting to see what will be possible in 2.0. * * * ### LAN Party result We finished up our 5 day LAN party on Monday this week. We'd like to thank everyone who came, it was a really great time and the amount of feedback from all the players was amazing. During the event we had nearly 900 individual feedback reports, which is a crazy amount. Katya spent her time during the event sorting through the reports as they came in, and raising the biggest bugs and issues to boskid. This is not to mention all the ideas and suggestions we had from talking to everybody. Some of the teams finished in the 50 hours we played, so we are feeling okay with the overall pacing and progression. There were a few areas that we will have to focus on for the Space Age release, but overall the game seemed stable and fun enough, so there is no worry about keeping to our release date of October 21st. * * * As always, wire us up to your thought reactors at the usual places.

Hello, 3 days to go! * * * ### Factorio: Space Age Trailer With a new Expansion of course comes a new trailer. After many weeks of work, fine-tuning, and polishing, Albert (with help from Vaclav, and the script written by Earendel) has finished the launch trailer for the Space Age expansion: The result speaks for itself, and there are some details you might notice. For instance the rockets now have fixtures carrying the cargo pods, and we have animations for cargo pods landing on a planets and at landing pads. Or perhaps you noticed the player running around with some of the new late game technologies... * * * ### Mech armorv453000 From the very first prototype of Space Age, we had a new tier of armor in it. The only difference was a 20% larger equipment grid over Power armor Mk2, but along with quality this felt well above adequate already. As Earendel and Albert were developing the concept, the design settled on the idea that the player is locking themselves in a metal sarcophagus, transcending humanity to become the perfect Factorio machine. We have been thinking what kind of special features could the new piece of armor have and the most obvious and convenient one seemed to be the ability to fly, especially as the Jetpack from Space Exploration is quite convenient, though we'd want to do it a bit differently... Some ideas would be: * We didn't want to add a button to toggle flying. * We would prefer precise movements unlike the spidertron bobbing and rubberbanding. Therefore, the flying would just happen automatically whenever you would be about to hit any obstacle. This raises some immediate questions, like do we have separate speeds for walking and flying and with it exoskeleton equipment and jetpack equipment? We decided against adding jetpack equipment, have just one movement speed value, and have exoskeleton equipment effectively make you fly faster. Which may sound strange, but as the flying happens automatically, it would be very annoying to have one of the speeds slower. Being part of the armor also means that we can show the flying capability in the armor graphics. Mp4 playback not supported on your device. _Graphics by Jerzy_ As you can see, you not only take flight if you were to hit an obstacle, but also when an obstacle is about to hit you. The mech armor went from a minor upgrade to a game-changer. Being able to move freely makes basic navigation in the game feel incredible, and as a secondary effect it means you feel much better about stacking many legendary exoskeletons in your armor because it doesn't make you run into obstacles all the time. It doesn't require fuel, or electricity from your equipment grid, it just works whenever it would be useful... almost. The combat abilities were in fact so powerful that we had to give the Demolishers a smoke cloud which prevents you from flying, as otherwise fighting them felt like a joke. If you ever feel like missing construction robots when starting a new game, this feeling just got a lot worse. The mech armor also makes you forget to fear walking over rails, which can be a hazardous habit. From the perspective of visuals and concept, we wanted the mech armor to be the player becoming one with the machine and in part one of the stronger symbols of Space Age, and now the mechanics match that. _Line art version of the concept by Earendel._ * * * ### Conclusion Factorio: Space Age has been almost 4 years in development, and now the finish line is just ahead of us. We look forward to seeing you all enjoying Space Age on Monday, and don't forget to put shield equipment in your mech suit, trains aren't the only enemy! Let us know if you are ready to become one with the machine at the usual places.