Hello there, I just took a short walk around the block to get some inspiration for the Friday Facts (it has been one of those weeks where many things that are not really worth talking about took majority of our time). And it doesn't feel like winter at all outside. More like the beginning of the spring. This has been the case for past couple of winters actually here in Czech Republic. It seems like there is some truth to the global warming. This triggers interesting associations with Factorio in my head. Things like: "Hmmm, so maybe all this warm weather is really caused by us (as a society) producing too much pollution. We should switch to Solar energy ASAP before nasty creatures start attacking us". Professional deformation I suppose=))

Hello, long time no see! Today we are going to talk about the expansion which is called Factorio: Space Age.

Hello, I can't believe that we have been able to produce a post every Friday for 200 weeks without missing a single one. To be honest I'm not sure if this isn't the right time to pause for a while, to avoid being this kind of show that gets worse and worse over time until it is so bad that you want to take your intestines and strangle yourself with them. But people in the office convinced me with arguments like "FFF is the only good thing we have", so we probably have to continue for a little longer.

Mod portal features (Klonan) Sanqui has been quite effective these last weeks getting stuck in with the mod portal, so we have some interesting additions to talk about. Mod deprecation A modder can mark a mod as deprecated, which indicates they are no longer updating or maintaining it. The typical case is a mod will add something relevant for the current version of the game (E.G, a mod to scan the players starting area), and then an update to the base game makes the mod obsolete. Just deleting the mod could potentially cause problems for people playing an older version, people might ask what has happened to it etc. Marking as deprecated will keep the mod up on the portal, but it will be hidden from any public searches. This way people downloading using 'Sync mods with save' feature can keep playing, while new players won't stumble upon a mod that is no longer useful or up to date. It also preserves the downloads and discussions in case the author wants to revive it later. Collaborators It is often the case, that a mod author will want someone else to help them maintain and manage their mod, for instance if they are going on holiday when a major release is coming out. The way it has worked in the past, another modder would have to come and upload an updated version of the mod under their own name. Now a modder can set another player as a 'collaborator', which means they can help out will all the maintenance of the mod. Collaborators can do everything the author can do, except add or remove collaborators. You might also spot the other feature, transferring mod ownership. This lets the author give the mod completely to a collaborator, in the case that they are no longer interested in working on the mod at all. Discussions notice Mod authors can now display a notice above their mod page discussions, informing the users of any useful information. For example, an author might prefer you to report bugs on their GitHub page, so the notice will inform users of where they should go. An additional option allows the author to disable the discussions completely, in the case they have their own forum/thread somewhere for discussions. If you have any ideas for an improvement to the mod portal, please let us know on our Mod portal discussion subforum.

We have a long history of trying to bring Factorio to other platforms, including consoles and mobile phones (not including April Fools). We even worked with some external companies, but the projects never even got to the point where they would run technically, let alone the complicated part of making the game playable using controllers or touch screen. After all the attempts, we even had a Friday Facts prepared that was going to say something along the lines of "we don't plan to bring Factorio to other platforms".

Hello, the Friday is here much sooner than expected as always. Albert just arrived back in Czech republic yesterday, so the team is localised again. Albert met with Pavel, the graphics reinforcements of our team, for the first time and it seems that they could get along quite well, so we can call these two our graphics department from now on :)

Hi there, the Friday 0.9.x release "mini tradition" continues by the release of the 0.9.7 today. Though the changelog is rather long, the amount of code behind those changes is rather small (they were all simple fixes). If the amount of stress and haste before the release would be a measure of release quality then 0.9.7 should do rather good. We released it before Friday lunch without any last minute hotfixes and without any complications. The pack in the post title refers to the scenario pack. The set of currently 3 "mini campaigns" available for the furnace attendant tier or higher. We finally got around to make it compatible with the 0.9.x release branch. So now there is a scenario pack 0.9.7 available that will work with the 0.9.7 binary version. The changes have been quite significant, because the Tight Spot and Supply Challenge had to be rebalanced to take the oil industry into account. The playtesting of these has been a refreshing experience and definitely a good motivation to think about new challenge missions and content for the scenario pack (we still take it as a work in progress). You can check out the main part of the factory that got me through the new Supply Challenge below. It was built in about 3 hours under constant pressure to provide 6 "hungry chests" in the center with new and new items - that is why it is called the Supply challenge. Alongside the bugfix branch for 0.9.x the work in the master branch has continued on some small features for the 0.10 (see the new roadmap). Namely things like environment sound playing and map generation strings. But this is now coming to conclusion and Kuba already started with design and planning for the multiplayer network layer. Immediately some scary technical issues showed up: floating point operations non-determinism across different platforms, peer-to-peer communication for players without public IP addresses, etc. We will definitely not be bored in the near future :) Recently a lot of old entities have been reskinned or remade. Things like inserters, transport belts or assembling machines are now (0.9.x) consistent with the artistic direction. This is all part of the plan to improve the visuals for our new trailer. It has been taking ages, but we are really getting close now. Albert is now working on doodads and aesthetic tweaks for the trailer map. Actually we just spent like 2 hours discussing some details of the map :) Please bear with us a little longer. In the meantime you can enjoy the "good-old" red cadillac in the old trailer, it is not going to be around for long. And here is the mentioned screenshot from the supply challenge close to the finish: If you have something to say, then say it at our forums.

Hello, on Thursday we received a belated Christmas package from our friends over at Steam: They definitely won't be lasting long :-).

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

0.18.0 release Klonan Early this week we pushed the deploy button on 0.18.0 (patch notes). This was quite a surprise to many of our players, as more typically the time between major releases and the scope of the release is greater. However this isn't like the old days, we are trying to keep the size of releases as small as possible (FFF-314). What this means, is that what is currently in 0.18 is only really a small part of the work needed to be done on 0.18, and releases in the coming months will continue finishing off our 0.18 task list. Once everything on the 0.18 list is completed and the time is right, we will turn 0.18 into 1.0. What we have accomplished with 0.18.0: GUI Main menu redesign GFX Water animation Tree animation Color correction (LUTs) New explosions and damage effects Other Optimizations New Particle system First work on new sound design Steam login What we have left to do in 0.18: GUI Character GUI Blueprint library Statistics GUIs (production, electric network stats, etc.) Entity GUIs (Inserter, Assembling machine, chests, etc.) Main screen GUIs (Chat, minimap, etc.) Many more... GFX Offshore pump redesign Assembling machine redesign Beacon redesign High-res icons Final tweaks and polish Other Further sound design improvements Mini-tutorials Replace NPE with old tutorial Final game balancing and tweaks Finalised locale and proofreading With this in mind, it wouldn't make sense to mark 0.18 stable before most of the above is finished. We made 0.18 a major version because it will break mods with all the changes we are making, and while initially it hasn't broken that much, many things to come will have a bigger impact, such as the Character GUI.