Hello everyone, we have just released Factorio 0.3.0 ! We took quite some time and put a our effort into this release. There is a lot of internal refactoring and preparations which won't be visible to the player but they will make our live a lot easier in the future. We are "tying our laces before setting for a run". Apart from that we have put quite some effort into improving modding capabilities. Uptil now making and using mods was just for the hardcore fans of the game. We really see the importance of good modding system so we started building one. The mods are now standalone packages and allow for much easier and cleaner combination. Together with modding improvements we updated our Lua scripting API based on the feedback gathered from our forums. Apart from code changes there is some new graphics in the game. Our graphic Albert has spent more than two weeks here in the Prague. That allowed us to get a lot of work done. There are new inserters, turrets, walls, etc. Even though these all pieces are new graphic they might not be the final version. At the moment Albert is working on a high level artistic direction for the game. That might look like quite late (with the game already in the alpha). But better late than never :). The release is marked as experimental. This means that in order to download it you need to click the "experimental" link on our download page next to the "Download" title. After the release gets tested and no serious bugs are reported it will be marked as stable. Allright, enough of the talking. You can find more details about the changes on our forums. Now go and test the 0.3.0 out ;)

Hi everyone ! So we have a brand new release of Factorio for you packed with new features, improvements and bug fixes. The game is still far away from being graphically complete (surprise) but the gameplay is slowly getting where we would like it to be. So here is a short teaser for some of the new features: Technologies Build labs, create science packs and discover new recipes and improvements.Logistic Robots When your factory gets big use small flying robots to ease the transportation of material.Signals This has already been in 0.1.x, but now it has been tested and verified. Define conditions to switch on / off certain inserters based on number of items in your chests. This is perfect for controlling how many items are produced.Day night cycle Are you scared of the dark ? Well, too bad ...Graphic polish Character animations (mining, shooting, standing), light sources, mining particles, rocket smoke ...Freeplay There is a simple freeplay mode in the full version now. You play on the unlimited map full of enemy bases with scarce resources. Your task is to build a rocket defense for soon-to-land spaceships from the earth. The rocket defense is meant to protect the ships from potential allien attacks. However in order to build the rocket defense you need to research appropriate technologies first. And to spice it up a bit in order to research certain technologies you will need allien artefacts which you get when you destroy allien bases. So you will have to craft that shiny looking flamethrower and go out there get some artefacts. As usual the demo is downloadable without any restrictions and without signup. A lot of features that have been added are not available in the demo though (nor are the 2 extra missions). If you would like to play the full version, just send us an email at "factorio (at) factorio (dot) com" and we will give you a free download key for the full version.

Hello, the stabilising (hopefully) 0.10.1 release is here along with the regular news from the Factorio development.

Hello, some people spend St. Valentines with their wives, some people spend St. Valentines with their girlfriends and some people spend St. Valentines making the Factorio release. The last group is us. We have been preparing the 0.9 release for a while now. Originally it was planned for the end of January, but we took the two extra weeks. That seemed like a lot of time back then:) Last weekend all looked smooth and easy, all the features were finished, we started playtesting. No major issues, the oil industry felt like a refreshing addition to the game, blueprints were blueprinting and the sky was blue (literally). However somehow during the week it started falling apart - a lot of small bugs came up, some more balancing, half a day here, half a day there and BANG suddenly it was Friday morning. With the last graphical piece (the chemical plant) still on the way, some non-trivial reworks done yesterday and a staring list of bugs on the forum the outlook was bleak. But we put ourselves together and made the sprint necessary to deliver the 0.9.0 as promised. The 0.9.0 will probably be "very experimental" which is a diplomatic way to say that we expect a lot of bugs to come up:) Heck, we were fixing the bugs all day long. We considered to postpone the release for a couple of days but we promised to deliver it this Friday and a lot of people were waiting for it joking about cancelling their dates to play the game, etc. So it is out now, if you are brave enough then go ahead and try it. The oil industry brings the oil spills, the pumpjacks, the refineries and a recipe redesign. We took the opportunity to do some more significant changes to other existing recipes as well. We went after having more "meaningful" intermediate products than before. The car will require an engine, the robots will need a flying robot frame, the rocket is made from the explosives and the list goes on ... . The feeling from the internal playtesting was more interesting gameplay compared to before when everything was made from the iron plates and circuits. However the result will be that most of the existing factories will just stop working. You can either take it as a challenge to get it up the speed or just start the new game :) Albert hasn't slept that much in the past few days. Last night he hasn't slept at all while he was finishing the chemical plant. Even today instead of taking the rest he gathered his energy and prepared a special Valentine's composition. It is called "Saint Valentine's Day Massacre". Today is no exception, we are waiting for your comments at our forum.

Hello, this week has been a week of typical bug fixing of 0.16, so development news wise, there is not much to write about. However we have some updates on some other goings on in the company.

Hello everyone, Factorio 0.6.4 release has just been marked stable! Following our usual release procedure the 0.6 release has been around for a while. Users from the forum helped us to find the most annoying bugs and now the release is considered "serious bugs free". The release has been packed with features and new stuff. Here are the most significant gameplay improvements: The world map (and a minimap). These allows for a much better orientation in the world. The steel furnace (faster) and the electric furnace (requires no coal). Smelting resources is one of the basic tasks in the factory and these new furnaces provide interesting alternatives to using brute-force approach of many stone furnaces. Logistic robots can suplly the player directly. In the later stages of the game the player can focus more on managing and extending the factory and not running around collecting the created items. Modules and beacons. It is now possible to influence machine properties (speed, productivity, energy efficiency) with inserting module items. This way the assembling machines in the production bottleneck can be sped up without extending the production line. Improved terrain generator. The trees now follow the same fractal terrain generation as the terrain. This makes them look more realistic. Apart from the features we have focused a lot of energy on speed improvements as well. With larger factories the players often experienced slowdowns because too many objects have to be updated every tick. We have made optimizations to the way items move along the belts. These were the biggest "performance eaters" (there are often tons of items on the belts in the factory) so this helped quite a lot for the big factories. We also optimised the way graphical rendering works. This is mostly notable on the Windows operating system (our graphical library uses a different backend - d3d on the windows compared to the linux / mac - openGL). Another major improvement has been made to the core loop of the game. The graphical rendering can now run parallel to the game update using different threads. This can take advantage of at most two threads. And finally the render preparation phase (collecting the sprites to be rendered) has been parallelised as well. This can take advantage of multiple threads, we empirically tested that the best results are shown for 4 or 5 threads (given that there are enough cores for these threads to run on). Last but not least our artist has also done a lot of work. There is a new terrain and plenty of objects have new graphics (labs, car, chests, logistic robots, etc.). The game is less contrastive compared to early versions with RGB colors, on the other hand it is also more aesthetically pleasing now. As usual you can find the full changelog of the changes at our forum in the news section . The changelog is now available also directly in the game in the "About" dialog. As mentioned before, the work on 0.7 is in the full speed now together with preparations for the Steam Greenlight campaign. So stay tuned for more news.

Hello everyone, The preparation for the next release (the 0.8) are in the full speed. Original expected release date was today, but we are not ready yet. It will take at least two to three more weeks. Especially the graphical work on the new terrain has proved to be more trickier than we expected. Last week we had some good sales driven mostly by the people from the US. That had a very positive effect both on our credit balance but more importantly on our moral strength. We have been working on Factorio for a long time with a lot of uncertainty regarding the outcome. We keep getting moral boost from people on our forums but actually selling the game feels great. The absolute numbers were not staggering (the peak was at around 50 sold copies per day) but for us they were still high above average (usually it is like 10 copies per day). So the mood is better now, we even went out for some social activities this week. Back to the programming. The repair robots mentioned in the last post are done. Michal is fast:) He spent past couple of days with smaller tasks we had on the list for a while. Now he is fiddling with "ghost" entities (transparent outlines of entities without bounding box). These will be used for reconstructing entities that has been completely destroyed and in the future also for the blueprints. I have spent most of the time from the past week improving the map editor. We have quite a few mods for Factorio, but very little maps / scenarios. The people on the forums asked for the better editor multiple times, so we listened to them. Also during the work on the trailer I confirmed just how big pain it is to use the map editor. Now on to the features. I have a list full of things that need to be done, but couple of most important ones are: Terrain painting - before only one tile at a time could have been changed. Now there is a brush with different sizes that can change the surface pretty fast. Laying out the resource fields - The biggest pain in the old editor. Resources had to be laid out one by one and then manually increased by holding a specified key. Now the brush or spray can be used to do that in matter of seconds. Creating forests - Not so common, but still time consuming. Creating big forests one tree at a time will be a history by using a brush to draw many trees at once. Copying entity strutures - Moving a part of the factory 10 tiles to the right is not possible now. The plan is to allow some sort of selection and copy-pasting that selection to other place on the map. Inventory manipulation - Chests can be filled only one stack at a time now. I still don't know how, but this will be improved. From the above list the first two tasks are finished already. The rest is work in progress but will be ready for 0.8:). The map editor early preview is below. The tabs at the top left represent different layers(terrain, tiles, entities, items). Below is the tool list. The active tool is the spray which I used to spray the coal field. The usual thread for comments is on our forum.

Hello, it's vacation season here in the office, with a lot of the team taking some time off. We just released what will probably be the last version of 0.15, so now is the best time for everyone to take a breather.

Hello These weeks are quite quiet. We (Me and Kuba) are fighting the never ending wall of bugs, and Albert with Pavel (The graphics department) are doing the preparations of the 0.12 endgame graphics.

0.15 status Work has been going swiftly on 0.15, but there are still many major topics we have left to close. We mentioned previously that our estimate for release would be near the end of February, and while this has been our internal goal, we won't quite be able to make it. One of the main reasons for this delay is us underestimating how long it would take to stabilize 0.14 and the new multiplayer code. We thought that because it was a relatively small 'major' release, that it would not take much time to make it stable. However the great community members playing the experimental version kept finding bugs for us to fix, and even now there are still several 0.14 bugs being identified and fixed in 0.15. The extending bug fixing of 0.14 was no doubt necessary, but it has led us to be somewhat behind schedule on several features of 0.15. Our current optimistic estimate is that we will be able to release an experimental version of 0.15 at the end of March, and we will keep you all up to date on its progress.