Hello, Your friday facts today are written by the community manager Klonan. He's been with us here in the office for nearly 2 months now, working hard marketing the Steam release and responding to all the media inquiries sent to our email. He's going to write a little about the behind the scenes of the Steam release.

Electric mining drill redesign Ernestas & V453000 The electric mining drill is one of the older designs still in the game, and we have had our eye on it for a long time as a candidate for redesign. We would have loved to rework the mining drill in 0.15 when we added high resolution graphics and the pipe patch for it, but we had many nuclear related graphics to do for 0.15, so we just did the necessary minimum and postponed the full redesign. Now was finally the time we could unleash Ernestas onto it.

Hello, we spent one whole day by playtesting the 0.12 multiplayer. To my surprise, we didn't encounter any problems so we are just few small bugfixes far from the 0.12.23 which will be probably the version used on steam. I thought how experienced and good we are when we managed to make pretty big factory in just 8 hours, but once I saw the Factorio world record speedrun I don't think so any more :)

Hello, The year is wrapping up, and we have been hard at work finishing off some topics before we take our Christmas break. As you can imagine, releasing any new version of the game without a few weeks to do bugfixing wouldn't be wise, so you can rest easy this holiday period without the worry of a surprise 0.18 release.

You would expect that we wouldn't have anything new during christmas, but you couldn't be more wrong, as the Factorio development never stops.

Taming the random generatorTwinsen One of the things in the large TODO list for 0.17 is giving a final polish to the map generator. There are quite a few obvious problems now in 0.16, and some less obvious ones. Here are some of the fixes and improvements (some work in progress): All combinations of settings should no longer create strange maps such as circles of cliffs. Much more predictable starting area resources that don't overlap each-other and are not covered by water. The resource generation settings now have a much more dramatic effect (previously they had little to no effect). Increased the number of steps (small, medium, big, etc) for each setting from 5 to 9 for even more customization. The starting area will always contain water, most often a lake close to the spawn position. Since the algorithm for generating ores was pretty much completely rewritten, there are many small improvements. Now for the less obvious problem: unpredictability. I saw quite a few people complain with vague comments like "the map generator sucks". So I often asked them what the problem is in detail. Some were complaining about the above problems, some did not understand what the settings do, and some had problems finding a "good map". I saw quite a few players click "regenerate" like crazy until they got a map with fat patches in the starting area, big oil patch and also uranium, complaining that it's too hard to find a "good map". Due to the randomness we seem to have set the expectation for "good map" a bit too high. Oil and uranium were never intended to be in the starting area, but due to the randomness of the generator they sometimes were there. Also sometimes maps were so wild that you would start off either swimming in resources or desperately looking for another iron patch. It would be simple to just say "that's just RNG, deal with it", but blaming poor game experience on RNG is just bad design. So what we did is: The starting area contains only iron, copper, coal and stone, in very predictable amounts. Uranium and oil are explicitly excluded from the starting area. Starting area resources are usually in one ore patch each (depending on settings). The starting area patches are usually close together. The starting area size setting no longer affects resource placement, it just has a fixed size. Outside the starting area, the regular algorithm "kicks in" so you can still get quite wild results, but they are far enough that it averages out. I believe this is a good balance where you can still have different experiences depending on your luck, but your starting experience is much more predictable and does not leave you with the feeling that you got screwed over by the map generator. We definitely don't want the map generator to be extremely flat and predictable. Opinions on the subject are quite wild too, with people having different expectations of what a good map should look like, so we try to only make changes based on actual problems. This might seem a bit controversial so we can add an option that disables this whole starting area logic, for purists. We plan some small tweaks coming to biters also (a tiny bit more biters close to the starting area), small tweaks to terrain, cliffs, water generation and possibly some new features to make the generated trees and decoratives look better. Most of these problems including the obvious and apparently simple ones were not that easy to solve. It's hard to make random generators do what you want, so TOGoS will explain what it took to actually get it done.

Menu simulation V453000 In the last FFF, we presented that we now have the capability to show real game simulations in the Tips and tricks. Naturally we asked ourselves what else could we use this new technology for... We've dreamed about this multiple times in the past, but the technical roadblocks didn't make us think too seriously. We'd like the main menu background to be a real animated simulation of the game, similar to what Transport Tycoon or Rollercoaster Tycoon games have. Instead of things like cinematic trailers, we always present the game in its true form, and the menu background does not follow this logic. Also, any time we improve any graphics, a static image immediately gets older while a real game simulation is updated automatically. We've created a variety of scenes that each demonstrate some feature(s) of the game, from first miners all the way to the artillery and Spidertron. The screen is quite zoomed in and the factories are rather small, so it's more of a demonstration of the game's features rather than a showcase of "the best things anybody has ever built". The scenes are randomly rotated, where all of them have to play once before any repeat. The main menu should include both Factorio and Wube software logos. The Factorio logo has been used in many places from prints to trailers many times already. Its concept is that the logo is an entity like any other, and integrates itself into the world by being built there if at all possible. The Wube logo is different, both graphically and in concept, so we can't represent it as an entity. It makes a lot of sense that Wube is in a layer underneath the world of Factorio, so we're using it as a special water tile. From now on, the Factorio entity and Wube water tile are both buildable in the map editor without the use of mods. The "water-wube" only works well in specific positions, as it repeats in a 8x8 tile pattern, so fitting it in an existing factory can be tricky. To make it clear that behind the menu is not your factory, every scene has the logos in the exact same position, and the screen has a vignette-like shader on the edges.

Hello, I was peacefully writing the code when suddenly, I heard the sound of gun being reloaded. I gave a quick glance at my own gun. Yes, it is not loaded, of course. So I took cover under the table to search for some lost ammo. I needed to be able to return fire soon. Long story short, our nerf guns package arrived this week, and the office looks as a battlefield these days.

Hello, In the last FFF-386 we covered the natural landscape of Vulcanus which mostly showed the visuals, but as you are probably aware we always put gameplay first. Now it's time to find out what kind of greater good you can do to the planet...

Hi all, the august is almost over. So is the holiday season (check out a picture from my visit to Beskydy mountains below). It was fun, we charged our (power armor) batteries and now we are ready to take another step and push Factorio forward (looking at you multiplayer!).