This post was written as a joke for April Fools' day. Nothing written here should be taken seriously. No doubt you have heard about NFTs, the latest Blockchain innovation. With some big gaming companies exploring NFTs, where does Factorio stand? We have received many offers. Some of the offers were quite silly, others very tempting. Since we have many Blockchain enthusiasts on the team, we decided to explore the subject ourselves. After consulting with some industry-leading experts on Discord, this is what we came up with: Non-fungible blueprints One of the many subjects of debate within the team is the blueprint library. Allowing players to easily share big blueprints (blue science, nuclear reactor setup, etc.) ruins the fun of figuring out how to build those things yourself. One of the best things about the blueprint library is that it contains your unique blueprints, which are almost like unique pieces of art. So it only makes sense to make them truly unique, using the Blockchain, NFT, and Smart Contracts technologies. What this means is that every blueprint in the blueprint library will now be stored on the Blockchain, and they will be truly unique across all of the blueprint libraries of all players. Just like NFTs, they can be traded on the Blockchain, also making them a great speculative asset. In essence your blueprint library will become your personal wallet, containing only the unique blueprints that you own. Unlike most NFTs, blueprints are created (minted) by the players, making it a truly decentralized system, controlled by the smart contracts we created. In order to guarantee uniqueness we will use AI and Machine Deep Learning to analyze any new blueprint before it is minted, this way you won't be able to just move one power pole and mint a copy. Once again, making blueprints truly unique. Our own Play-to-earn cryptocurrency Limiting the creation (minting) of new blueprints using just the AI will not be enough. To ensure the Blockchain is not flooded with useless blueprints, we will also create a cryptocurrency called Factorio Blueprint Token ⚙️. You will need to pay 1,000 of them to mint 1 new unique blueprint. Factorio Blueprint Tokens ⚙️ are earned from Space Science using a variable conversion rate we will control. Since you can now earn crypto by just playing the game, the game basically pays for itself. Factorio Blueprint Tokens ⚙️ come with all the advantages of a proof-of-work cryptocurrency, and all the fun of playing Factorio and optimizing factories for maximum UPS. Some say that Factorio offers so much value for money, that they paid more for the electricity bill than they paid for the game, so we are happy to take it to the next level. We will host an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) for Factorio Blueprint Token ⚙️, so make sure you invest as much as you can and HODL it, in the hopes that someone will tweet about it making the price go to the moon 🚀🌘. Click here to take part in the ICO.

Hello, after a long long time the 0.9.8 was marked stable this week. There were no big ovations or cheering, just a quite "stable sticker exchange":) The bugs forum is not empty though, as someone would expect. Quite a few small issues remain, but for the sake of moving on we decided to put them to our backlog and mark the release as stable. However if some game crashing or very serious bugs are discovered in 0.9.8, we will make a hotfix. Oh, and the good thing is that we managed to break the streak (for now) of ever increasing number of bugfix releases (the 0.9 had 8 bugfix releases - the same as 0.8). The whole "programming department" has been fully commited to the work on multiplayer for a while now. The task divison for now is following: Michal - fully deterministic simulation. This is an absolute must, because all multiplayer peers will calculate the simulation themselves and only the player input (we call it input actions) will be exchanged over the network. Nice effect of having deterministic simulation will be having functional replays again (hmmm not really again because there have always been some bugs in them even when they were "working":)). Kuba - lower level network layer. This includes the connection management, packets management (we will be using UDP for all the communication) and eventually things like NAT punching to allow connections for peers behind NAT (few people have public IP address). Tomas - synchronization layer. This logic will take care of keeping the simulation state same for all the players in the game. This includes queing up the input actions, sending them out in batches (tick closures to other peers), requesting missing tick closures, etc. These things are absolute minimum necessary for our multiplayer implementation. However there is more to be done after this, things like: starting the game (the lobby), mechanism for a player joining already existing game, hiding the latency for the player (most of the time the actions for different players will not collide so we can act as if common actions - like moving the player around - were confirmed immediately) and more (see our battleplan whiteboard in one of the previous friday facts). There is a lot of work ahead, but the good news is that we have finally fully dived into it. We will keep you updated about the progress:) Albert has finished with most of the map trailer tweaks. Today we also did a first test with exporting the trailer using the new screenshot mechanism. We did this on Michal's computer which is way more powerful than mine (it does take a while to export 3600 screenshots). However there was this funky bug that parts of the terrain in the screenshots had strange, kind of inverted, colors. We have spent like half a day looking into this issue. Finally it turned out to be a problem in our custom optimized version of d3d drawing routine (this was happening on windows only). Spending hours in frustration hunting bugs (that are not even visible to the player in the end) happens more often than you would think, so game programming is not just about sitting back, playing video games and calling it "research" (but that is part of the job too:)) Anyway to give you an idea of what was going on you can see a visualization of the problem below. For better effect (and for us to easier analyze the problem) the corrupted regions of the image (here all of the terrain) are drawn with reddish overlay. Any idea for the picture title? Want to cheer us up for the multiplayer work? Or feel like laughing at us for taking so long with the trailer? Go to our forums.

Hello,the hopefully final 0.14 version was recently released, meanwhile most of the team have been assigned their major tasks for 0.15.

The modern biter (Albert, Ernestas) Besides vegetable and plant stuff, biters are the main population on the surface of the Factorio planet. They are the locals, and somehow, from a twisted perspective, they can even be considered the bad guys. Not anymore. The magic of high resolution gives us the chance to move deeper into their conceptualisation and we've added a new ingredient to their formulation: cute...-ish. For the last couple of weeks Ernestas and I have been working on the new version of the biters. Together we worked on developing the concept and ideas behind them, and Ernestas was doing the rest: modeling, texturing, shading, rigging, skinning, animating, rendering, post-processing, and being patient with me and my constant comments and changes. Cute is how we like them, we want you to feel sorry about planning massive biter massacres. In fact we want you to feel pity towards them, especially when you are killing them and destroying their habitat at industrial scale. But also we want you to be disgusted by them, because they are alien to you, and they need to look the part, so it is quite a complicated equation. Basically after the experience in-game with the classic version, we've learned what aspects of the biters are working well, and how to improve the parts which aren't. So we've decided to elongate their legs and accent their eyes in order to provide this more insectoid feeling. Also their new design is optimized for their attacks, they have 2 stronger front legs for providing destruction, 4 back legs to be able to run and stand during the attack, and stronger articulated mandibles to chew on your factories. In these animations we can fully see the potential of disgust, the way they move now is more insect-like, similar to a cockroach (many people are disgusted by cockroaches), and also we've balanced the animation loop with their speed in the game, so they shouldn't slide around. Keep in mind that this is still a work-in-progress and we have some more tweaks to do and extra animations to make, like their attack and death. We are also working on their sound design, and apart from that we might have some other surprises to make killing them extra gratifying to watch.

Good afternoon, today is the national holiday to commemorate the end of the WWII. Yet, surprisingly quite a few of us have met in the office. But the atmoshpere is very relaxed and we will call it a day early. The week has been spent mostly on smaller tasks (quite a few of those were non-game-development related).

Factorio: Space Age continues the player's journey after launching rockets into space. Discover new worlds with unique challenges, exploit their novel resources for advanced technological gains, and manage your fleet of interplanetary space platforms. For more information about what comes with the expansion, check out our Space Age content page.

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 guys, past week has prepared some ups and downs for us. On the up side, we have marked the 0.10.12 as stable and we also moved closer to getting the multiplayer reasonably working. On the down side our reservation for the new office has been cancelled which means we had to start looking for an office place yet again. That is rather unfortunate because we really liked the place we picked originally. Anyway, I am sure we will find another one soonish (we have already had couple of viewings this week but so far without success).

Hello, You may have noticed we launched Space Age earlier this week :)

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.