Hello everyone, this is the third Factorio weekly update. It is scary how fast the week went by. The summer is definitely gone and it has been raining hard for the past two days here in Prague. We spent the weekend by playtesting the 0.7.1. The bugfixes were mostly finished and we were after the balancing. This resulted in two freeplay games in which we both (me and kovarex) managed to build and defend the Rocket Defense in a little bit more than 11 hours. We both used different strategies. Kovarex went after the logistic robots and the beacons, while I tried to keep my factory relatively small and was really focused on researching the rocket defense asap. With the balancing changes we made, the game seems to be well playable again. No more crazy medium biter attacks after 10 minutes. In my game I saw a first medium biter after cca 4 hours and the first big biter after about 9 hours of playing. That seems allright for the regular settings. After the weekend we focused on getting the 0.7.1 out. In the end we managed to do that on Tuesday night, after a full day of work on fixing small issues coming mostly from the Lua API refactoring. The 0.7.1 was received rather well. It still has some bugs though. Especially regarding the enemy expansion. There was this funny save where you stand in the middle of your factory and in like 20 seconds out of the blue sky there appears an enemy spawner and two worms right next to you:) So yeah, there will be 0.7.2. We will put in only bug fixes and will try hard to make this one the stable release for 0.7. After the hectic release we spent the next day trying to relax a bit and put plans together for the next iteration. More or less the plan is now clear. There are three priorities: New terrain - Originally we wanted to spend some time on the players' animation. But then a friend of ours came for a visit. He never saw the game before and his first remark was that the terrain is sh*t:) And he is sort of right. On top of that the terrain is omnipresent. We really want to polish the game as much as possible before the Greenlight campaign so we decided to take a shot at the new terrain and some doodads if there is time left. New main campaign - We consider the demo campaign more or less finished. It still needs some UI love but the content is there. However the main campaign (New Hope) is seriously lacking and it hasn't really changed since the Indiegogo. So one of the goals for the next iteration will be to extend this campaign to 5+ meaningful levels. Having multiple levels will also allow us to better explain some concepts (like trains, logistic robots or signals) to the player. New trailer - We cannot start a Greenlight campaign with the current trailer. It is painfully out of date. We have been discussing a lot of ideas and studying existing successful indie game trailers to come up with something entertaining and competitive. The details are not finished yet, but the main theme would be presenting a factory without "scene cuts". All the transitions between the consecutive scenes would be fluent and performed by elements in the factory. For instance - the camera follows the train which takes it to the next part of the factory. Albert has been onto the terrain for couple of days now. We were playing with an idea to use Wang tiles but in the end decided to go with different size variations of tiles for the same terrain. This should break the grid-like feel of the current terrain. Albert developed his own, simple yet clever technique for creating tile variations rather fast. Basically he creates the tileable edge of a single tile and then just changes the inside for every variation. Keeping everything as 3D models allows him to do all sorts of tricks (like changing the height gradient really fast). Some preliminary results look promising. Here is an example of dry dirt terrain with random machines on top of it: As before the link to the post is in the separate topic on the forum. So you can post your comments there

Hello, the regular dose of news from the developement of Factorio is here, I (Kovarex) wrote it today, and you can clearly see, that I like structured form of information :) Factorio is a continuous jam session. Albert had this observation yesterday and it is very precise description of our development. In the start I had no idea what will the game be like, I had no plans about the visual styles and proportions of the project that was just a hobby, an experiment. The rails were the first graphical assignment for Albert. I told him to just "do the rails" like it was some obvious one way street task. I didn't give him any clues about the style. Should it be cartoonish? Should it be realistic? Should it look modern, cyberpunk or 19th century like? We didn't know, we were searching for the direction on the fly. Any manager would probably say this is a bad thing, that we need a roadmap for the whole process from the start to the final release with all the contents, features and graphics planned ahead including cost estimates. I personally think, that the freedom of the jam (agile) way of development that allows us to react is the best for Factorio. We are inventing and extending the best ideas on the run, ideas that would never be visible in the start. The 0.8 We have less than a week for the preparation of the 0.8, we integrated all the new terrain tilesets to the game, Tomas is now working on the roboports, and construction robots can reconstruct destroyed buildings. We have few days to add some smaller features before we start bugfixing and preparing for the release. The new terrain The main graphical task of the 0.8 is almost finished. You can judge for yourself: The roboport The roboport is the control building for the logistic/construction robots, it will provide the radio signal with limited range for these to operate. This will limit the robots from following the player out of the factory and allow the player to have more distinct logistic systems. Apart from that, the robots will recharge there and stock inside if they have nothing to do. Reconstruction of destroyed buildings When any building owned by player is destroyed while he has the construction robots researched, the half transparent "ghost" building appear on top of the remnants. This ghost building has limited lifetime (5 minutes) and if the needed component is available in the local logistic system, the construction robots take it and automatically reconstruct the building. Nothing new, but still: the thread for comments is available on our forum.

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.

Hi there, after feeble weather during the Christmas it finally feels a bit like winter here in Prague. There is the snow outside, the air is fresh and some warm clothing is a must. When we add a new terrain into the game (and we will) it will definitely be the snow. Just imagine all those machines standing on the snow and puffing the smoke, furnaces glowing with fire and maybe even having traces of snow all over them. I am already looking forward to it:) All the big programming tasks for the 0.9 are finished and now we are working our way through our never ending issues list. They are either bugfixes, polishing tasks or small features. We have added couple of neat things, for example: better visible entities on the map, the "copy entity settings" feature (previously shift build) or possibility to have custom directories in the saves directory. In the beginning of the week we had around 30 closed and 30 opened tickets. Now we have over 50 closed tickets but 35 opened ones. The new ones keep springing up like mushrooms. The funny thing is that quite a few of these are more than 6 months old and they just keep "travelling across the releases" (when it is time to make the release we move all the unfinished issues to the next one). And of course in case we would actually finish everything, there is always a huge repository of ideas and suggestions to choose from at our forums:) In one of the previous posts I mentioned that the music for our new trailer(yes, we plan to release it eventually) has been done by Daniel, a musician from the United Kingdom. We decided to continue working together and came up with a plan for complete "soundification" of the game. Yes, we have some sounds at the moment but these are both incomplete and incoherent (they are mostly royalty free sounds we found ourselves in the dusty corners of the internet). We will start by replacing and extending the sounds we have at the moment and then we will move on to make sounds for every moving machine in the game. The sounds of the machines would be then played based on the players position and they should evoke a feeling of "walking through the factory". This is very hard thing to do, because the sounds must play well together, not be too aggressive but also not too monotonous. It might not work out, but we think it is worth a try. And of course this has been suggested before on our forums:) The creation of sounds for the game will be a continunous process, but some first results are coming already in the 0.9. When people see Factorio for the first time, one of their reactions often is: "oh, a 2D game :| ". Well yes, the Factorio engine works with 2D sprites and all the animations are done by showing sequences of the object in different positions (basically a motion picture). But behind all this there is a twist. All the objects in the game (including the terrain) have actually been rendered from the 3D models (and all of these models have been done by Albert:)). This results in animations with surprising amount of details (at least we hope so). A good example is the new machine Albert has been working on for the past couple of days. It is the oil pumpjack and in my opinion it instantly became one of the best machines in the game. There is a preview of couple of pumpjacks in the desert, together with a detailed look taken from the Blender when Albert was animating the model. As always, your comments are more than welcome on our forum.

Ladies (hopefully some) and Gentlemen, the 0.11.0 with first version of the Multiplayer has been released. The multiplayer experience is expected to be really buggy (as we learned today during a test with 4 players), but it is a first step. Oddly enough, our efforts haven't escaped the attention of a local newspaper which made an article about us - see the picture below.

Hi there, past week has not been the most productive one in the Factorio history. The Christmas was a good opportunity to take couple of days off, relax and spend some time with the family. In the meantime some more bugs have popped up in the 0.8.x resulting in the release of the 0.8.4, the current shot at the stable release. The end of the year is a good time to look backward and do some balancing. Many things have happened in the 2013 but for me, one of them clearly stands out. And that is the change in sort of a general feeling from the project. What I mean is following. In the beginning of the year we didn't have a plan, we didn't have an artistic direction, we didn't have any income, we were just two guys working over-full-time from the living room on kind of a hobby project. I remember that those were often desperate times filled with insecurity about the future. The comparison to now is staggering. We received the trust in the Indiegogo campaign, 5000 people (almost there) have bought the game, there is a great community at our forums, we have a clear roadmap and we are working on it, the looks of the game have improved drastically and we now have an actual artistic direction to follow, and much more... All in all we overcame many obstacles, some of them seemed impossible a year ago. Of course it hasn't been all smooth ride, but the despair and uncertainty are gone. Yes, often there is the stress (especially during the sprint before the release) or anxiety but, I think that is unavoidable and it often actually pushes us forward. Overall Factorio now feels to me like a healthy project with clear direction rather than a very uncertain experiment it was a year ago. We all have worked hard to achieve this but a big thanks goes also to our fans, without you we wouldn't succeed in the Indiegogo, we wouldn't have the funds to continue the development later on when things started to drag and also we wouldn't have all the positive feedback that have kept us going. Thank you! Now, for a more humorous look on what the development of Factorio is like check out this series of gifs by Kovarex on our forums. Albert has worked a lot on the doo-dads and some good results start to come out. Below is the preview of the desert with new trees, rocks and plants. The name of the image is "The desert hunt". Just to make sure, it is an artificial composition, not a screenshot from the game:). Next on the list are doo-dads for other terrains and then ship wrecks, destroyed machines, etc. As always check out the post on our forum for the comments.

Happy new year to everyone! We have spent the New Year's Eve with friends in our appartment / office on a last-minute improvized party. The entertainment was provided by the usual elements - food, drinks, chatting and board games. The traditional fireworks all over the Prague kickstarted the 2014, which is going to be a crucial year for Factorio. The main points from the 2014 battle plan are: Get on the Steam. Get the multiplayer done. Get some quality holidays:). After some relaxed time during the Christmas we are back to full speed development. There will be a stable release of the 0.8 in the beginning of the next week. The periods necessary for release stabilization has been getting longer and longer. That was one of the reasons we decided to dedicate more time in the future to the automated testing. You can read more on this topic in our latest random ramblings. Past week has been spent by working on the new features for the 0.9. Mainly the oil industry and blueprints. Both are still in the process of development so I will go into the functional details later, after they are more or less stabilized. You can also read our plans regarding the functionality in that random ramblings post. One thing is clear already. The 0.9 is a very ambitious release and if all goes well it will be one of our most content rich releases (if not the most content rich). After the 0.9 we plan to start working on the multiplayer which might be a long period with little other updates. Therefore we plan to get a lot done before that. In the meantime, Albert has finished with a first set of doo-dads. Below is a composition with some new shipwrecks. Actually the current shipwreck sprite in the first level was cut (and adjusted) from one of our theme art pictures (can you find it:)?). It is time for this one to be replaced. There is still much more that could be (and will be) done for the doo-dads, but now we need to move on to making graphics for the new "oil related" machines ... Comment thread is not hiding anywhere. It is right there on our forum.

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, so here we go with the last Friday Facts before the big day next Thursday. 0.12.23 The 0.12.23 is getting latest tweaks regarding the integration of Steam functionality for sharing saves for one account across different locations (different computers). In the meantime the majority of the dev team has been playtesting the game for past couple of days (and doing the usual "factory building shouting" across the office). Hopefully it will be out in the beginning of the next week. Steam page So the Steam page is up and running. We have uploaded the 0.12.22 and that (together with the page content) has been approved by the Steam review. The game is now listed in coming soon section. Things to check out: Updated existing trailer. The new gameplay trailer is hidden and will appear together with the game release (just to keep the expectations=)). New Factorio cover image (Albert is really proud of this one=)). A bunch of selected screenshots. As usual, we are open to ideas and recommendations in the comments on the forum=). Other Steam Stuff There is now a Steam FAQ page on the Factorio subreddit which contains a lot of useful information regarding the Steam release. We have had a betting round in the office what will the Factorio review percentage be in 1 week and 1 month after the EA release (so 2 numbers, i.e. [90, 86]). You are welcome to give your bets in the comments. We took down the Furnace Attendant tier from our webpage. The Mining Drill Operator is still available, because it adds stuff (name in the game, gfx wiki access) which will not be available after Steam release. There has been some discomfort on the forums about people overpaying on the Furnace Attendant tier (because Scenario Pack will be given for free alongside the basic game). We don't percieve this as an unfair treatment on our side. Still, we are thinking about ways how to provide some additional value / recognition to people who supported us by buying the higher tiers. In the middle of the finishing gfx craziness, Albert has spontaneously stopped shaving his beard. This has been going for long enough time to catch attention. I found the "idea" somehow compelling and joined him not so long ago. Though not impressive beards they are quite unusual for us. We might make a picture next Thursday=) There is still a possibility of Factorio release day coinciding with Kovarex's baby being born. New trains overview screen One of the new features in the 0.13 will be a new screen for viewing all the trains in the game. This one is invoked from the mini side menu mentioned in one of previous FFF. The screen basically shows every train depicted as a minimap and a train schedule below it. Trains will be ordered lexicographically based on the first station (also lexicographically) in their schedules (this should be the "expected" ordering - see trains sharing the stations close to each other). Schedules give hint about current station and whether the train is on the way / waiting in the station / in manual mode or without path. Also there is a search field which narrows the listing based on the stations in the schedule. Below is an example of the trains overview. Updated train screen We made some more updates to the existing single train screen. Namely adding the "open ttd" inspired preview of the train. There is a switchable "camera view" and "map view". Both are zoomable by scrolling the preview. Check out below how it looks in the game. We are also thinking about using this embedded minimap / camera views in other parts of the game. One straightforward example would be to have a camera entity (it could also be just existing radar entity). Then there would be a screen pretty much like the trains overview screen showing all the cameras and you could quickly check what is happening in different parts of the factory without physically going there. Or maybe another approach would be to allow player (with a special object in his armor?) view real-time any part of the map covered by radars. The non-surprising comments thread at our forums is waiting for your feedback.

Game Developers Session 2018 GDS 2018 will be taking place next week, running from Friday 7th to Saturday 8th. This year, like last year, we are silver sponsors of the event, which means you will see some Factorio branding around the event and in their official booklet. Part of the preparation on our side was to produce a nice graphical asset for their use, which you can see below: The image is an aesthetic composition to showcase the design and theme of the game and its elements (while not necessarily making logical sense), and also contains the first public display of our new official Wube Software logo. About half the office team here will be attending the event, so if you are also going you might bump into us.