Hello, We have another exciting batch of facts for you today.
Hello, we've already shown the space platform processing cycle in FFF-380. Let's talk a little bit more about the machine which makes it all possible - the asteroid collector.
Hello, It is time. STOMPY TIME! If you don't want spoilers on enemies and want to discover them naturally then you might want to skip this one. Let's continue the story from FFF-413. A trumpeting scream quietens all the small animals. You hear the breaking of waves followed by stomping: earth-shaking steps that are getting louder and louder. Looking in the direction of the sound, you see a cliff rising to a tall hill. The fungus at the top shakes a little with each stomp, but the source is somewhere further behind the hill. You ready your weapons, but the sound stops getting louder and instead moves to the right, then gradually fades into the distance. Whatever it was, it was big. After climbing the hill to investigate, you see a valley on the other side. Some large translucent green eggs float on a raft of slimy foam in a pool of shallow water. You get closer. The eggs are soft like jelly, the portion above water sagging under their own weight. In the centre is a dark blurry mass of... tangled limbs and eyes. This video has sound. Also available on YouTube in 4k. Suddenly the egg erupts and a clawed limb swipes at your face. A strange creature wriggles around in the water trying to claw at you, and through the splashing you make out 5 limbs like a starfish. A bulging head-like structure has many eyes on one side and a sponge-like material on the other. On the sides of its head are crests of transparent blisters that are inflating with air to form something like a paddle or wing. It drags itself around like some sort of ravenous tentacled baby. With the occasional lurching movement it launches itself at you, trying to grapple you with its limbs and bite you with its underside. The claws glance off your energy shield with minimal damage. Your personal laser defence springs into action and in a flash of light the newborn is cut to shreds. The laser then switches targets to the egg raft. A few moments later all the eggs burst into a horrifying swarm of angry thrashing creatures. The sea of flailing limbs and odd movement makes it difficult to target individuals. You bravely retreat back to the cliff and equip the flamethrower to protect yourself with a wall of fire. The undaunted wriggling creatures run straight into the fire and die soon after. Another trumpeting scream pierces the sky but this time it doesn't sound distant at all. A slender towering creature stares straight at you with its large bulging eyes. It strafes sideways circling you, gracefully stepping over cliffs and tree-like fungi with its 5 thin legs. It launches something from its head, a projectile high into the air and arcing toward you. You start retreating, but 4 wings spring from the sides of the projectile and it steers towards you like a homing missile. The flying creature rams into you, grappling you with its clawed limbs and slowing your movement. You throw it down to the ground and it becomes indistinguishable from the Wriggler you dispatched earlier. Your laser defences make short work of it, but without warning, you're struck by another projectile creature from the other side. Another Strafer has arrived and is also bombarding you. Both Strafers are staying out of range of your automated laser. You dash towards one of the Strafers with your submachine gun in hand, but as you do the Strafer to your front retreats and the other advances. They seem intent on keeping you at range, constantly circling while flinging homing projectiles. No matter, you have another weapon up your sleeve. You dash forwards again, this time with a rocket launcher in hand. A rocket snakes its way through the air and blasts its way into the first Strafer. The creature shrieks and attempts to retreat, but another rocket is already on its way. The second rocket strikes unerringly and a moment later, the Strafer is blown apart leaving a cloud of pieces to rain down on the swamp below. Stomp stomp stomp. The stomping has returned. A colossal spiked shell rises into view from behind a hill. It strides effortlessly over a cliff with its 5 huge armour-plated legs. This creature is clearly related to the others, but it is far heavier with a wide stance and thick legs. The central body or head region is like a shielding shell with small eyes peering through narrow holes. You fire some rockets at the Stomper and they do some damage, but nowhere near enough to take it down. You have very few rockets left and they won't be enough to kill the Stomper so it's better to save them for the other Strafer (which is difficult to catch otherwise). The Stomper charges towards you. Even with your exoskeleton equipment the Stomper can outrun you. You stand your ground with the submachine gun but you can't dodge effectively while you fire. As it gets close the tremors stress your shield, and thrown debris from its stomps pummel the shields further. The creature lands a foot directly on you and your shields falter. That hurt. This isn't working. You start moving again, not to outrun it but to outmanoeuvre it. It may be faster than you in a straight line, but it can't change directions as quickly. The other Strafer is still alive and flinging new enemies at you from a distance. By switching between dodging movement and bursts of SMG fire, you're able to evade most of the Stomper's damage and keep the number of Wrigglers low enough to not get overwhelmed. You wait for an opening when you're not being stomped on, swarmed, and the Strafer is in view. Away go the last 2 rockets and... success. The last Strafer falls dead. Now it's just you and the Stomper. A duel to the death. While continuing to dodge its feet, you make your way to a larger area of land to make your last stand. No more rockets. Gun ammo is low. Time for the flamethrower to shine. As you circle each other, you douse the arena in flames. The dance continues in flames until one of you falls. More fire, more spinning, more fire! The world becomes a hazy blur of flames, smoke, and death.
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.
Hello, I'm sure you're familiar with the good old Nuclear reactor. It's a fission reactor that makes a lot of power in conjunction with its steam turbines. The nuclear energy system is unlocked on Nauvis, and in the context of Space Age, that makes it an early-to-mid game unlock. For the planet Nauvis, nuclear power is great for the whole game. Water is endless, and uranium is plentiful. For space platforms it's not ideal because it takes a lot of water and a fair amount of space. Solar panels are so good in space, especially near the sun, that it's harder to justify a reactor on a small platform. If you're mainly going around Fulgora then nuclear becomes more competitive because Fulgora has more ice from asteroids and less solar energy. Later, when you head to the 4th new planet, nuclear becomes a much better option because the solar power is so low and ice is more abundant. At that point, you've had nuclear as an option for all the 5 planets (although you probably don't use it on all of them), and a few space routes, so it's time to unlock a new and exciting energy system.
Hello, as promised we have started the Factorio Alpha preorder today. Our PayPal funds have finally been unlocked and delivered to our bank account. Therefore it will be possible to buy the game with both Bitcoins and via the PayPal. The PayPal also accepts credit cards from the users who don't have the PayPal account. However our recommended payment solution is the Bitcoins. We believe that Bitcoins have a huge potential to become a world-wide online currency. We are proud to sell Factorio accounts with Bitcoins. At the moment there are three membership tiers for you to select from. When you perform the preorder you will automatically receive an email with your account upgrade code. This will allow you to upgrade your account and get the alpha version of the game immediately. The extra contents on top of the Alpha access (wallpapers, scenario packs, etc.) is not ready yet. We are working on this. By preordering you are supporting further Factorio development. Thank you !
Hello, the stabilising (hopefully) 0.10.1 release is here along with the regular news from the Factorio development.
Hello, the sunny spring weather seems to have taken a break these last few days after Denis' arrival to the office. His work continues on the belts optimization, as the rest of the team has been playtesting 0.15, as well as closing off remaining minor features on our Trello board.
Hello everyone, Factorio 0.6.4 release has just been marked stable! Following our usual release procedure the 0.6 release has been around for a while. Users from the forum helped us to find the most annoying bugs and now the release is considered "serious bugs free". The release has been packed with features and new stuff. Here are the most significant gameplay improvements: The world map (and a minimap). These allows for a much better orientation in the world. The steel furnace (faster) and the electric furnace (requires no coal). Smelting resources is one of the basic tasks in the factory and these new furnaces provide interesting alternatives to using brute-force approach of many stone furnaces. Logistic robots can suplly the player directly. In the later stages of the game the player can focus more on managing and extending the factory and not running around collecting the created items. Modules and beacons. It is now possible to influence machine properties (speed, productivity, energy efficiency) with inserting module items. This way the assembling machines in the production bottleneck can be sped up without extending the production line. Improved terrain generator. The trees now follow the same fractal terrain generation as the terrain. This makes them look more realistic. Apart from the features we have focused a lot of energy on speed improvements as well. With larger factories the players often experienced slowdowns because too many objects have to be updated every tick. We have made optimizations to the way items move along the belts. These were the biggest "performance eaters" (there are often tons of items on the belts in the factory) so this helped quite a lot for the big factories. We also optimised the way graphical rendering works. This is mostly notable on the Windows operating system (our graphical library uses a different backend - d3d on the windows compared to the linux / mac - openGL). Another major improvement has been made to the core loop of the game. The graphical rendering can now run parallel to the game update using different threads. This can take advantage of at most two threads. And finally the render preparation phase (collecting the sprites to be rendered) has been parallelised as well. This can take advantage of multiple threads, we empirically tested that the best results are shown for 4 or 5 threads (given that there are enough cores for these threads to run on). Last but not least our artist has also done a lot of work. There is a new terrain and plenty of objects have new graphics (labs, car, chests, logistic robots, etc.). The game is less contrastive compared to early versions with RGB colors, on the other hand it is also more aesthetically pleasing now. As usual you can find the full changelog of the changes at our forum in the news section . The changelog is now available also directly in the game in the "About" dialog. As mentioned before, the work on 0.7 is in the full speed now together with preparations for the Steam Greenlight campaign. So stay tuned for more news.
