Hello... Part of the GUI rework for 0.17 is also tweaking the tooltips: They should be structured better. They should contain more useful information. They should be a better tool for new players to understand how things work. We will cover more of the tooltip changes in a future FFF, but the necessary preparation for this is to rethink the way we explain some basic properties of machines to avoid as much bloat as possible. One of the good ways to do that is also to remove the need to show some of the mechanics by simplifying them, or completely removing them if we figure out that they are not really important for the game.

Factorio logo patches Jitka We would like to introduce our new fabric Factorio logo patches, which are now available at our e-shop. These sew-on embroidered patches are ideal for clothing, hats, backpacks, etc. The dimensions are 2.5 x 12 cm. As we are uncertain how large the demand for these patches is going to be, we have only limited stock available at the moment. Please note that our online store ships only once a week every Wednesday, and it is highly possible that the orders placed now will not be delivered before the 25th or December, this applies especially for orders shipped outside of Europe.

Hello, we are in the phase of finishing the bug report stream, we expect to smoothly transition from the bug fixing phase to the work on 0.15 in the upcoming weeks.

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

Inserters are now smarter Twinsen A few days ago I was investigating a rather minor bug report related to "Rotational Asymmetry in Belt/Inserter interactions" (aka Inserter was not behaving identically when rotated). This was a classic case of floating point equality comparison. The Inserter would move it's arm and then it would pick up the item if the current arm orientation is equal to the desired arm orientation. Because of some chain of calculations related to rotation, some precision was lost and the equality check would fail for 1 tick, delaying the item pickup for 1 tick in some Inserter rotations. So I fixed that by finishing the inserter movement if it's close enough. Now the inserters should be a tiny bit faster in some rotations, plus all rotations should again be symmetrical and identical. While analyzing the code and Inserter behavior for that bug, I also noticed that inserters with stack bonus would do nothing for 1 tick after picking up an item from a belt. I changed it so inserters will start moving to a new target immediately after they pick up something. This also sped up the Stack Inserter by a tiny bit. Both the speedups were enough to fix another bug that was often regarded by the other devs as "not a bug": A Stack Inserter was not fast enough to pick up all the items placed on a belt by another Stack Inserter. Furthermore, because of different timings, the amount of items a Stack Inserter would pick up would depend on how far that Stack Inserter was from the item source: We released the change on Thursday. Something strange was quickly discovered after release... From Nefrums speedrun stream. As someone from Twitch chat noted "Inserters are so fast now, they even don't care about the side of belt". Remember that I fixed the rotation problem by finishing the Inserter movement if it's close enough. Well, what ended up happening was what now the Inserter would stop 0.0001 degrees short of perfectly vertical. That was of course closer to the other belt lane so the item would be dropped there. Previously it was always dropped perfectly vertical, and the lane decision algorithm would choose the right lane. The fix was easy and it's probably released by the time you are reading this. So with everything fixed, inserters are now more consistent, predictable and intuitive, things that I think are important for a precise game like Factorio. Some situation might end up being slightly slower or will consume a bit more electricity, but generally inserters are now faster.

Hello, Today we once again dive head-first into the world of fluids.

Hello, I'm going to cover a feature I only just finished. I was thinking about this idea for years already. I always thought the feature is too hardcore to be included, but I learned that it is usually a mistake to underestimate the players, so I gave it a go, and decided to share it right away.

Hello, Today we have quite a range of new features and improvements coming in 2.0.

It's been over 4 years since we planned the infamous GUI update. If all goes well, next week the game will get the last big GUI update for 1.0. While the state of the GUI is not close to our crazy plans we recently had for the GUI, it's above what we initially planned 4 years ago. The update you will see next week includes: A visual update to over 100 game GUIs New high resolution icons for all game items (visible both in GUI and in the world) New GUI sounds for most interactions

Hello, It has been a month since the Space Age release and things are settling into a steady state. It is a good time to wrap things up, and discuss our future plans.