Hello, This week we will talk about some technology and research related changes coming in 2.0 and the Space Age expansion.

Surprise! There are 5 new planets in the expansion. The first planet you arrive on is a strange new land, rich with iron, copper, coal, stone, oil, and uranium. Everything a starting factory needs and more. There's also water, fish, grass and trees. Yes, this is a fertile land, and we will thrive. We will rule over all this land, and we will call it... "This Land" "Nauvis". So yes, the new planet Nauvis is similar to the 1.1 version of the map, but there are some substantial updates. Hopefully this is a surprise for you, because updates to the base map weren't planned at all. It just got harder and harder to not make changes after getting more experience with the other planets and seeing things that were missing or broken. For clarity, these changes affect the 2.0 version in general and are not exclusive to the expansion. This has been a solo side project for me for a while and it's only just come to a conclusion. Anyway, here's the story:

Hello, we had a party last night in the office to celebrate the work we have done over the last 6 months on 0.17 stablisation. It was nice to have most of the team together to share some beers and pizza.

We've been updating, reworking and redesigning many graphics, and the majority of entities have had high resolution for a while now. With 1.0 we're trying to be as "complete" as feasible.

I have to admit that the Factorio development is slowed down these days, but it is not stopped because it just can't stop. Or is it because we can't stop? I guess that we have come too far to give up who we are.

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.

Hello, recently we have been programming day and night to ship the features we have promised for Factorio 0.4.0 release. However apart from that we also found some time to start delivering the promises we made in the Indiegogo campaign. So this is an update on the state of perks delivery from Indiegogo and the preorder. To start with I will repeat the obvious. All the membership accounts are eligible for Factorio alpha access, beta access and full release (when these are made). This is including all the future updates. Whenever someone buys Factorio membership he immediately receives upgrade code and can go and play the alpha right away. On top of this the Furnace Attendant tier promises digital factorio wallpapers and a scenario pack. The wallpapers are ready and if you have the Furnace Attendant (or higher) membership you can download them already. The wallpapers are available on your user settings page. Just click your username at the top right of the screen and scroll down. The wallpapers come in different resolutions. These are some of the most common resolutions in terms of widht : height ratio. If your resolution is not there you might still use a wallpaper with the same width : height ratio and higher resolution. For instance if your resolution is 1280 : 800 you can use the 1680 : 1050 which has the same width : heigh ratio. Originally we promised three wallpapers based on our theme pictures. However we decided to add some more. So at the moment our concept artist is working on two additional theme pictures which will be available as wallpapers as well in the near future. The other highly anticipated perk is the scenario pack. We are working on that right now. The first version of the scenario pack will be available together with the Factorio 0.4.0 release at the end of April. As mentioned already the scenario pack will be work in progress as well. We intend to keep adding new content until we feel "it's right". The Mining Drill Operator on top of these contains the "name in the game" and the Concept Art Book. First backer names will appear in Factorio 0.4.0. If you have the Mining Drill Operator tier or higher you can already insert your name into the form at the user setting page (below the wallpapers). Before every release (starting Factorio 0.4.0) all these names will be collected and exported into the list directly in the game. The names from the list will be used as name tags for different machines in the game, train stations, etc. The concept art book should be released by the end of April as well. Even though our concept artist spent a lot of time with the concepts in the art book we are still not sure whether it is up to the standards. Therefore we will name it version one and it might get updated in the future. Also we are toying with an interesting idea regarding this topic at the moment. We have sort of internal graphical wiki using Google sites. We use it for communication with Albert (main graphic behind the game), for sharing graphic proposals, concepts and finished sprites. What we are considering is to give readonly access to this wiki as part of the Mining Drill Operator tier or higher. This way people could actually see the process of graphical shaping of Factorio. Things that never made it into the game, evolution of some machines graphics, etc. We are still not sure whether this is a good idea so in case you would find this interesting please let us know (email, forum, facebook). Last thing regards the Inserter Constructor. This tier was only available during the Indiegogo campaign. After the campaign ended we sort of felt that the tier was a bit overpriced. That is the reason why for the preorder on the site we created the new tier Mining Drill Operator with pretty much the same content but cheaper. This can naturally happen however we feel it would be correct to somehow compensate the people who bought the Inserter Constructor tier. One thing we came up with would be giving them an extra upgrade code for Factorio which they can use as a gift for someone they know. Again this is something we are considering at the moment so if you have any ideas in this regard please let us know. Ok enough talking. Go and download those wallpapers and put them to your screens;)

Hi there, after a hectical sprint, the 0.8.0 release is done. We have continuously reported on the progress, so the content of the release won't be a big surprise. Still, you can checkout the release notes on our forums. And if you are brave enough you can even try it out. The thing is that considering the circumstances the release will be "very" experimental. We have fixed all the major errors and crashes we came acrros. But still there were plenty of changes under the hood in non-trivial areas (namely the logistic system) so there are a lot of potential places for error. Just a reminder, you need to set "Enable experimental updates" in the "Other settings" for the builtin updater to update your version to 0.8.0. After a major release we usually take a day or two off. This time it will be no exception. Moreover it was Kovarex's birthday yesterday, so today in the evening we will have a party in our place. After the headaches are gone, the place is clean again and we recharge our batteries, we will be after the (supposedly found) bugs in 0.8 and planning the 0.9. It is kind of a never ending story:). The last bigger feature we worked on for the 0.8 was the Roboport. That is the "home" for the logistic and construction robots, where they can charge, station and which navigates them on the map. This neatly solves some issues there were with the logistic system before: Balancing - Roboport requires quite some energy to charge the robots. So the Logistic Robots will be less overpowered than they have been. Stationing - In the past robots without orders kept hanging at the place where they stopped. This was annoying and even caused robots to become a target for enemies after they delivered stuff to the player's inventory. Now every robot that has nothing to do goes to the roboport to station there. Area Separation - Before, all the logistic robots could fly all over the map. From the base to the expansion if necessary. Following the player fighting the enemy bases, etc. This was also less than desirable. Now the connections between the roboports define separate logistic networks which can't be mixed. This way, small independent systems can be setup in the expansions and one large network in the main base for instance. And on top of all that the roboports look really cool:D Albert happily took the break from the terrain and made a great machine in a short amount of time. You can checkout the "making of" animation below. Some of the instructional pictures in the demo were getting really outdated. So we replaced them with setups with the current graphics. Below is a side-by-side comparison for the instruction on how to use inserters from some months ago and from now. The last picture is the courtesy to Kovarex's grandmother, who made this wonderful cake for his birthday. The tradition is the commenting thread on our forum.

Good afternoon, the week in the office has been relatively quiet. The whole non-dev department is away, kovarex is flying his paraglide somewhere over Macedonia so in the end there is like 6 of us meeting here to make the game crash less often=)

Hello, It is exactly a year since we moved to the new office. I had also the Factorio presentation in the university for the third time already (third year), and I realized it is the third time I said there that Factorio will be finished in a year. I want to believe it to be true this time so we will try to really make it happen.