Hello, there is a sickness running around the office this week and I wasn't excluded so there is a growing pile of used tissues on the table while I'm writing this and when Robert talks, he sounds like a creeper from horror movies :)

Hello everybody, the work on the 0.13 is slowly getting to the final phase and hence it feels like a good time to give an overview of actual multiplayer changes that have been implemented over past couple of weeks. This is a recap and extension of a FFF post that mentioned the Multiplayer improvements while there were in progress.

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.

Hello, it has been long, but successful week, mainly because we gave our first tax returns containing Factorio earnings while keeping mental health intact, hopefully. As celebration of the 2^13 copies we are about to approach I made a Factorio version of the game everyone is playing now , the time you can spend on it should justify the shorter length of this text :) Apart playing 2048 we managed to make 2 bugfix releases this weak just to find out, there are still some small bugs left, but the version is close to be stable for sure. So we sit down and it took us few short minutes to write down the roadmap that will take us almost the rest of this year to finish. There are many smaller things on the way, but these are the milestones we would like to aim for. What we are still unsure about is when to try to hit the steam+bigger exposure button. I just read my post on the steam from half a year ago, where we stated, that when 0.6 is stable, we will get the trailer and we will apply for steam. Here we are waiting for the 0.9, the trailer almost finished, but still not sure whether we should really start the campaign now. When we start imagining the additions and polishing we have planned for the foreseeable future, the only rational thing that seems to be viable now is to wait for these. We still believe that we have just single shot for the first impression and if we shoot too early for it, we risk to hit our leg. The updated look of the belts We are always eager to learn what you think at our forums.

Hello. It has been a quiet week in the office, we are slowly arranging everything needed for the office moving, which (if all goes to plan) will happen 7-11th of May.

Hello, here is another update on progress in delivering perks from the alpha preorder. The game development itself is going along quite well. The updates are coming out more or less once a month. This gives the people who have bought the alpha access a sneak peek at the Factorio evolution in progress. Some time ago we have also introduced the first version of the scenario pack. The forum community helped us to tweak the bugs and balance the missions. The result are three mini campaigns that provide various factory-building challenges to the player: Tight spot - Little space, limited resources and fixed amount of time. Buy land and machines and sell your final product. Transport Belt Maddness - So many chests and such a small island. Can you connect the chests without your head spinning? Supply challenge - Six hungry chests that change their taste often. Is your production flexible enough? These missions are the first batch and there will be more coming in the future. The scenario pack is available to the Furnace Attendant tier or higher. Another update in the same tier is a new Factorio wallpaper displaying the Assembling machine in the night. The Mining Drill Operator tier has been updated as well. For a while there has been an option to put your name in the game. Quite a few people already did this and now there are train stations named after them in Factorio. As of 0.6.0 the name generator will be used for Labs as well. Another update for this tier is the first version of the Concept Art book that is available for download now. As mentioned before this is some very early Factorio concept art and the book will definitely be updated as the game development progresses. Last update regards the access to our internal art wiki. The Mining Drill Operator members (or higher) from now on can observe the evolution of the in-game graphics via a read-only access to the wiki. There are plenty of sketches, inspirational photos and different variants of the game objects. The wiki is hosted on the google pages, therefore the google login is necessary. For now the invitations will be send on request. That means if you are a Mining Drill Operator member (or higher) then send us an email with your login name and we will send you an invite. This process will be automated in the future:D Here comes just a tiny recent preview of things you can see there: the evolution of new electric furnace model.

Hi there, past week has not been the most productive one in the Factorio history. The Christmas was a good opportunity to take couple of days off, relax and spend some time with the family. In the meantime some more bugs have popped up in the 0.8.x resulting in the release of the 0.8.4, the current shot at the stable release. The end of the year is a good time to look backward and do some balancing. Many things have happened in the 2013 but for me, one of them clearly stands out. And that is the change in sort of a general feeling from the project. What I mean is following. In the beginning of the year we didn't have a plan, we didn't have an artistic direction, we didn't have any income, we were just two guys working over-full-time from the living room on kind of a hobby project. I remember that those were often desperate times filled with insecurity about the future. The comparison to now is staggering. We received the trust in the Indiegogo campaign, 5000 people (almost there) have bought the game, there is a great community at our forums, we have a clear roadmap and we are working on it, the looks of the game have improved drastically and we now have an actual artistic direction to follow, and much more... All in all we overcame many obstacles, some of them seemed impossible a year ago. Of course it hasn't been all smooth ride, but the despair and uncertainty are gone. Yes, often there is the stress (especially during the sprint before the release) or anxiety but, I think that is unavoidable and it often actually pushes us forward. Overall Factorio now feels to me like a healthy project with clear direction rather than a very uncertain experiment it was a year ago. We all have worked hard to achieve this but a big thanks goes also to our fans, without you we wouldn't succeed in the Indiegogo, we wouldn't have the funds to continue the development later on when things started to drag and also we wouldn't have all the positive feedback that have kept us going. Thank you! Now, for a more humorous look on what the development of Factorio is like check out this series of gifs by Kovarex on our forums. Albert has worked a lot on the doo-dads and some good results start to come out. Below is the preview of the desert with new trees, rocks and plants. The name of the image is "The desert hunt". Just to make sure, it is an artificial composition, not a screenshot from the game:). Next on the list are doo-dads for other terrains and then ship wrecks, destroyed machines, etc. As always check out the post on our forum for the comments.

Hello, you can sit tight, because the batch of insiders from the world of Factorio development are here.

Hello, I was talking with a guy in a pub yesterday and when we get to the topic what we do, I told him that I do a computer game. He asked me what is the name of it, and when I told him it is Factorio he couldn't believe me. He actually knew it, he played it from the alpha release and he apparently really liked it. I didn't expect at all that some stranger would know the game. This was really a nice confirmation, that the sales and forum posts are probably real people playing the game, not just some numbers in a database and I won't lie to you, the experience is nice :).

Hello, this week has been a week of typical bug fixing of 0.16, so development news wise, there is not much to write about. However we have some updates on some other goings on in the company.