Hello, we have only 2 weeks left before the 0.11.0 release date. It is scheduled to 31. october. All the things in progress are starting approach the finish line, but as always before the release, it will be tight.There are quite a lot of things we want to deliver and multiplayer (mainly for lan and low ping games until 0.12 don't forget!) is one of those, not even mentioning the backlog of bugfixes we need to go through before the release.

Public service announcement - Possible server breach and outages In the past 7 days, our services (authentication, multiplayer matching, mod portal, etc.) experienced multiple outages. One of them was caused by one of our service providers and resulted in a roughly 6 hour long outage on Tuesday evening. This was a widespread outage all over the internet caused by problems with Amazon's AWS S3 and also affected other services, for example Instagram, Imgur or Trello. The other 2 outages were the result of a possible security breach of one of our servers, acting as the master content server at the time. On Friday, just before midnight UTC, we were informed by Linode (our server provider), that a brute force SSH attack was originating from that server, targeting a specific IP in the OVH network. As a precaution, the server was cut from all network traffic, which caused a short outage. We haven't managed to determine, whether that attack was caused by a bug in some software or a runaway process, or if it was caused by someone who managed to gain access to the server. We can't say if it's possible to spoof the IP address of an attack of this kind and make it look like the attack is coming from someone else. As a security measure, we have destroyed and redeployed all 3 content servers we currently operate, improved our firewall and automatic banning rules and invalidated passwords and SSH keys. All the releases that are available for download were checked and none of them were modified. We apologise for any inconvenience we might've caused by these outages. Additional map info The Trello card to improve our map has been sitting in our queue for a very long time, and since I wanted to program some low hanging fruit for 0.15, I decided to pick this. Let me present how far I got. Now when I open the map view, it shows the map view settings mini-panel on the side (icons are temporary), which can be used to toggle different kind of additional info on the map. The logistics area visualisation It wasn't really possible to see the roboport coverage in the scale of the whole factory and I missed that a lot, so it was the first thing to be done. Now I can clearly see why did I get alerts of missing construction robots in the left part of the map. It can be also used to find all these small gaps in the coverage or off-by-one alignment issues. I'm also considering to show the roboport connections in this view, or as additional option. The electric network visualisation This one might be especially useful when you want to find out the reason of electricity breach. As with the previous one, it gives even more incentive to build electric network in OCD friendly way, as all the circumstantial electric pole placements are more than visible in this view. The pollution The pollution works the same as before, but it can be turned on and off the same way as other things. This means you'll no longer have to toggle the detailed info to see your base clearly through the pollution. Map interaction This was the most obvious step of all. You can open locomotives and train stations from any distance, you can access them from the train manager, but you couldn't open them by clicking in the map. It is possible now. Custom tags As the map shows train station names, people were actually using stations to put markers on the map. But as its kind of a hack, and it clutters the train destination selection dialog it needs a proper solution. This is why we have the custom tags now. It can be either text only, icon or both. As you can see it can be used to mark different parts of the factory, it can be used in multiplayer to coordinate different kind of tasks and I don't doubt that people will use it to draw penises or other 'creative art' on the map as well. Resource patch inspection Searching for the best patch around was quite tedious, as you had to walk to the locations and guess how much ore it contains by hovering over several ore patches. It is not needed anymore, as a player can just hover over the patch on the map to see how much it contains. As the area was discovered by radar, or by the player manually, there is no harm in providing this information. It also helps colorblind people as they couldn't distinguish the ore types by color so well. Other improvements There are other things we are considering. Just to be sure, this doesn't mean a promise or a plan, just an idea, that might or might be not implemented: Extend the custom tags, so they can refer to rectangular area. Interactive (clickable) electric and logistics networks that open the window with detailed info. Integrate the interaction into the train stop selection when adding new items to the train schedule Integrate the interaction into the train to allow semi-automatic one-time train order that wouldn't be limited to train stations. Be able to zoom from the map view directly to the world. Things not covered by radars would just be covered by some kind of blackness. Better map colors, more different colors for entities, so you would see whether it is an assembling machine, electric pole or turret. Option of Higher resolution of map. If we have 4 pixels per tile in the map it could be nicer and also provide more information when zoomed in Smarter map info. Especially in the high resolution option, the belts could theoretically remember the resource they are used for (if it is one purpose belt), and draw line of the color on them. Assembling machines could have a pixel(s) inside the square that would depend on the recipe. Etc. I would actually like to know what other things you might want, or what things from this list you find the most needed. As always, we can’t wait to read your reactions and feedback on our forums.

A long time ago, in FFF-191 I wrote about improving the GUI. Well, things are finally starting to move, so this week I'll bring you an update on that. We even have a GUI team: Twinsen(me): UX and programming Albert: UI, graphical design, layouts, mockups, UX Rseding91: main programming and GUI internals The plan is to go through the entire game's GUI (including main menu, all entity GUIs and all game windows) and improve it both visually and interaction wise. This is quite a huge undertaking because: Factorio's interactions are quite complex If you count all the entity windows and panels, we have about 120 windows to go through in the game. Mods can change many aspects of the game so we have to account for that to make sure windows still look good and are still easy to use: e.g. having 15+ recipe categories, having assembling machines with 20+ module slots, having recipes with 20+ ingredients, having players with 200+ inventory slots, etc. Many players are already used to interacting with the game in a specific way, so any major changes are hard to make. Our GUI back-end (heavily modified AGUI) is not exactly well written, programmer-friendly, or feature-rich. Many of the features and polishing we want to add were not done previously due to their programming complexity. At the moment we are still early in the project, just defining the style and the concepts. During the next months, I'll try to make a series of FFF talking about the improvements we are making (starting with this one) so you can see how the project progresses, and offer feedback along the way. Everything I mentioned in FFF-191 will be there, but we have even more cool improvements coming to the toolbar that we are working on, so today I'll talk about something else: the new train/locomotive GUI. Disclaimers: Everything you see are mockups made by Albert and are not from the game, but we will try to make it look almost identical in game. The style (colors and look) is not final. This is the 3rd iteration and Albert is still experimenting with making everything look nice. The purpose of these mockups are mostly to define the layout and interaction. This is how the new Locomotive GUI will look. As you notice, apart from the style changes, they way the stations and conditions are shown is very different, but I'd say much more intuitive, informative, and easy to use. Let's go through a short use case. You click add station and the list of stations appears. You can add a station by clicking on the station in the list or by clicking it in the small map. The map can be zoomed and moved around so you can easily find your station. Also, as you hover over stations in the list, the map will show their location. The stations marked differently are unreachable from the train's current position. This way you can more easily recognize and possibly ignore stations outside of the current network. Once you click a station, it is added to the schedule, along with a default condition. You can continue adding more stations, or add/edit the conditions for the new station. Finally a schedule can look something like this. The path of the train will be shown. We will try to paint the path the train is taking at the moment, it will change as the train takes different paths. The fuel can be accessed from the separate tab and the color of the locomotive can be changed using the color picker. The buttons in top of the map, from left to right are as follows: Turn station names on or off. Change the angle of the station names. Switch to map view. Switch to camera view. Center view on the train. The small 'info' button you see on the right side will be a help button we will use throughout the game to help explain how different GUI work and when their elements mean. We will write more about this in some of the next parts of the FFF GUI update series. We also want to add a neat tool for advanced players. Control-clicking on any point on the locomotive's map (or any station) will add a 'Temporary stop' to it's schedule. The train will try to go as close as it can to that point, wait a few seconds and finally automatically remove the 'Temporary stop' from it's schedule. This is very useful for quick transportation. It also allows you to quickly 'hijack' an existing train and use it to get somewhere, since the 'Temporary stop' will be deleted and the train's normal schedule will be resumed. Another quality of life improvement will be a game option to automatically add some fuel from the player inventory when building vehicles (car, tank or locomotive), making rail transportation as simple as placing a locomotive on a rail, entering it and control-clicking where you want to go. We hope you like the proposed changes. No doubt things will change as we implement and playtest these changes, but we thought it would be interesting to show you an early preview. Finally the million dollar question is when will this be in game? Because it's quite a bit of work we already pushed the GUI update to 0.17. On the bright side, this mean 0.16 will come a bit sooner. Let us know what you think by commenting in our usual topic at the forums.

Hello, the 1st of June, which is the goal of the 0.13 release is starting to feel uncomfortably close, especially if I want to start play-testing 2 weeks before the release date. There are a lot of bigger and smaller tasks appearing all over the place. It is now the time of moving some of them to the next release again. Many of them are moved like this for years already.

Hello guys, Factorio 0.4.1 has just been released! This is a bugfix release to the 0.4.0 update that has been made on Friday. The 0.4.0 has been tested by the guys at the forum and in 0.4.1 we provide bugfixes to the things they found. Let's have a look at the biggest changes introduced in the 0.4.0 and 0.4.1. The main theme has been the trains. Connected rolling stocks form a train. The trains can be assigned schedules of stations to visit. In the station the train can be loaded / unloaded an refueled. There are also semaphores to guide trains in the railway network. Apart from this we have also fixed some bugs in how railroads and rolling stocks work. Further information about how railway transportation works is available at our wiki. Apart from the trains we have added quite some functionality to the electricity. There are three new elements for energy distribution: the medium electric pole, the big electric pole and the substation. They all have different properties and are appropriate for different situations. Also there is the long awaited accumulator. Now finally even in night the factories can be protected from the alliens by the laser turrets. We have invested a lot of time into the tuning the determinism. The game is now (almost) fully deterministic. This is a necessary first step towards the multiplayer. Players can see our effort in action already in the replay functionality. Because of the determinism limitations the replaying functionality works only on the games that has been played within the same version with the same sets of mods all the time (and started in 0.4.1). As usual the release contains a lot of fixes and extensions in the scripting. As a result some of the 0.3.x version of the mods (especially those using a lot of scripting functionality) might cause errors with the new version. This can be repaired by using updated mods (when that happens). As before, the new version is compatible with all the previous saves. We really don't want the players to lose the games they have spent so much time with. After the long time of waiting we have added more Linux support. Next to the .deb package there is now a generic .tar package available for download. This is aimed at the more experienced users who will be able to deal with the dependencies themselves. That was longer than expected. The release details are available as usual on our forums. Time to go for a run to clear the head:)

Cars/Tanks remember their color Klonan This really is a tiny feature, the car and tank will now save the color of the passengers when they exit the vehicle. So now you won't forget which vehicle you were driving, and can warn everyone else on the server: "Pink tank is mine".

0.13 release is getting close. The programming guys are trying to finish the features so we can start internal playtesting and bugfixing next week. The art guys are working hard on the new trains graphics. In the meantime, here's some more information about the circuit network.

Hello guys, the winter is not yet completely over in here. Even though we had a few days that felt like real spring still now it is cold and unwelcoming outside. One more reason to stay in the office with a cup of tea and a screen full of Factorio code.

Hello, Robert here again. It's time for the information I teased about in the previous Friday Facts edition.

Hello, long time no talk, we've got some catching up to do... Almost 1 year ago (FFF-365) we said "we don't think that [the expansion] will take less than a year to develop". Well it has been less than a year and it is not finished, so we kept our word on that :). But while it might not be finished, there is a still a lot we have done so far.