Under 100 bugs We have a record low in our bug report forum, of only 55 active bug reports. I don't think in the history of Factorio the bug forum has been so clean. No doubt once we mark 0.17 as stable the count will shoot up again. For this weeks graph I added the count of players on Steam as the left axis. We thought it would be somewhat interesting to see if there is any correlation between the two. Note: The axis have different scales. I also prepared the same graph but for the duration of the 0.17 release. You can see our player numbers are dropping quite a lot, from the all time peak of 22,457 on the 3rd of March 2019. While bug reports might be at an all time low, we are not going to call the game stable yet. We still have an important milestone to reach, that is, implementing the new Introduction campaign graphics (FFF-301). A lot of the team has been on vacation these last few weeks, including the whole campaign team and most of the art department. What this means is that we expect it will be a few more weeks before we can call the current version stable. We have been asked a few times when stable will be released, but my question is, why does it matter exactly which version we call stable? Are you waiting for stable to play a new playthrough? The thing is, this stable is only going to be the 'first' stable. Our plan is to have a number of short experimental phases after the first stable, where we will add new GUI's and such, which will add bugs and technical debt. After fixing the bugs in a 'small' experimental content release, we will then mark that as the 'new' 0.17 stable. Besides, there are still a few edge cases with signals that kovarex is busy fixing: For instance the setup above took him 3 hours to fix. The cause of the issue was that the segment has both an incoming and outgoing signal at the same position.

Hello, We are down to 28 bugs on the forum. The last bugs are often the ones we have been putting off for a reason, they generally require some more meaningful changes and decisions. That is why this week we have a lot to discuss.

Hello, trains are one of our most favorite parts of the game. We already talked about the ways we improved rails (FFF-377), so its time to talk about how we improved the way you can control the trains that ride on them.

The boring phase of bug-fixing is still going, slowly but surely. Stable should be released next week, but with some people on vacation (Ben, Jitka, kovarex, Klonan, Sanqui) and with the release of WoW Classic, it might get slowed down a bit. (By the way, some of us will be playing on Pyrewood Village, Alliance, so if you want to have the chance of meeting Twinsen, kovarex or dominik while leveling, you can join that server). So since there's not much happening, this week we decided to explore some unpopular or controversial opinions about the game from within the team. In Wube we don't have a very strict management structure, everyone is free to have ideas and opinions about almost all aspects of the game. This means that with almost every change we argue and discuss a lot before making a final decision. Sometimes we argue about everything, from the smallest GUI change, to how a major feature should work. This is probably not a bad thing since this means changes are usually well thought out and unpopular ideas or changes don't make it to the game very often. Some people feel quite strongly about their opinions or sometimes the team is very divided on what should we do. Today we'll share some of those opinions and controversies. Keep in mind that these are simply opinions and none of them will actually make it into the game, we are simply sharing them to have an interesting discussion.

Hello inhabitants of a remote and unexplored planet full of life, richness and natural resources. The group of entities we are bringing to high resolution currently is the combinators. The main problem with them is the amount of shifting values needed, so we used a specific workflow which I will try to show and explain today. Some of the parts have already been described in FFF 146, so I will only mention what is necessary for this article. Please fasten your belt as this will be a ride full of automation.

Hello, the summer has hit Prague with full power. The temperatures are above 30 Celsius in the shade. Fortunately, our office is in the old stone building, so the climate here is quite comfortable even without the air-conditioning.

Hello, we have spent another week doing fulltime bugfixing for the 0.10 release. This includes working through the backlog of bugs accumulated for past couple of months as well (quite a few train related bugs have been fixed). The result is 0.10.2 which will be released later today. We had a small issue with the updater in 0.10.0 and 0.10.1, so 0.10.2 needs to be downloaded manually for Windows users having these releases. From then on it should work as expected. Eventually we will make an explicit 0.9.8 -> 0.10.x update package that will work for all the distributions.

We've been updating, reworking and redesigning many graphics, and the majority of entities have had high resolution for a while now. With 1.0 we're trying to be as "complete" as feasible.

Mod settings Right now when you want to customize a particular mod you have to: Know what folder the mods are stored on your computer Unzip the mod Figure out what line of which file has the thing you want to change Save and optionally re-zip the mod Hope what you changed is compatible with the way the rest of the mod works The game also forces everyone playing on the same multiplayer session to have identical mod files so any changes you've made make it impossible for you to join others unless they also have made those changes. This also makes it difficult for mod developers to troubleshoot bug reports because they don't know what you might have changed. This is obviously not so great and I want to address the main problem: there's no good way for mod developers to give users any portable way to configure their mods. To fix this we're going to add the ability for mods to define settings that will be presented like our in-game options menu now under a new section "options -> mods". This will let mods give some basic information about what kind of setting they have and we can present it to the player in a (hopefully) nice GUI with verification and feedback about why what they've entered isn't valid (if it's not valid) as well as the ability to change them runtime should the particular setting allow it. We can then sync these settings on joining multiplayer sessions (or not should you not want your settings to carry between games) and everything will just work.

Hello everyone, even though it is not Friday anymore here we come with yet another regular update. We didn't want to make a blogpost on Friday the 13th because for sure something would go wrong. And also I am on a skiing trip in Austria and I was too tired yesterday to do anything, after all the day going downhills. So the 0.8.0 has been succesfully released last Friday. We finished at the same time when first guests for the party started coming. We just crossed our fingers, pressed the release button (maybe we should have a real, big, red "release" button) and went off to drink beer and talk to people. The cake (see the picture in the last post) was delicious:) Back to the release - there were small issues, but nothing really major ("Pump cannot be built" kind of thing). We have already fixed most of the reported issues for the 0.8.1, which will happen in the beginning of the next week. We haven't worked on anything major aside from the issues. We took the time to relax after the intensive release sprint (says the guy who has been skiing all day long:). Kovarex was playing some games (including classics like Dune 2000) looking for inspiration. There was also a long conversation about how the new industry with oil and chemicals should work. Interesting things ahead. Originally we wanted to start the Steam Greenlight campaign before the Christmas. Now it is clear that this will not happen. The reason is that the music for the new trailer is not yet ready. The cooperation with the guy we hired for the music hasn't brought the expected result. So we are back where we started. Recently, we found a composer in Prague, who looks like a very good fit for the job, but he will not have time until after Christmas. At least Albert will have more time to work on doodads for the game (and the trailer) - things like trees, rocks, etc. Albert also took the opportunity to work on something completely different for a while and he came up with a proposal for the new Factorio logo. The old (current) logo has been done by me and then face-lifted by another artist. But still it looks painfully amateurish. The new logo doesn't have that problem:) Together with the logo Albert worked on the new forum style, this will be deployed sometimes next week. So here is the thing. We actually have two proposals for the logo. And we would appreciate some help and opinions for deciding which one to use. You can see the proposals below. They are shown on the potential loading screen of the game. We do have our preference but will not say which one that is to avoid influencing the outcome. They both work as links for larger versions. There are polls for you to vote and comment in the post on our forums, so go there and let us know what you think.