Hello, apart few bugfixes, there isn't much of a progress this week in the absolute terms. Most of the work done this week was mainly to save time in the long run, so we should be able move forward faster. There are still some bugs in the 0.10.8 but these are not so critical, so 0.10.9 (stable candidate I hope), will get more time to accumulate more bugfixes.

Hi everyone, today we had a bit of misunderstanding about who will write the regular update so we are coming with the news later than usual. But it is still Friday here (around 10 pm) so still it can be called the Friday Facts :)

Hello everyone, The preparation for the next release (the 0.8) are in the full speed. Original expected release date was today, but we are not ready yet. It will take at least two to three more weeks. Especially the graphical work on the new terrain has proved to be more trickier than we expected. Last week we had some good sales driven mostly by the people from the US. That had a very positive effect both on our credit balance but more importantly on our moral strength. We have been working on Factorio for a long time with a lot of uncertainty regarding the outcome. We keep getting moral boost from people on our forums but actually selling the game feels great. The absolute numbers were not staggering (the peak was at around 50 sold copies per day) but for us they were still high above average (usually it is like 10 copies per day). So the mood is better now, we even went out for some social activities this week. Back to the programming. The repair robots mentioned in the last post are done. Michal is fast:) He spent past couple of days with smaller tasks we had on the list for a while. Now he is fiddling with "ghost" entities (transparent outlines of entities without bounding box). These will be used for reconstructing entities that has been completely destroyed and in the future also for the blueprints. I have spent most of the time from the past week improving the map editor. We have quite a few mods for Factorio, but very little maps / scenarios. The people on the forums asked for the better editor multiple times, so we listened to them. Also during the work on the trailer I confirmed just how big pain it is to use the map editor. Now on to the features. I have a list full of things that need to be done, but couple of most important ones are: Terrain painting - before only one tile at a time could have been changed. Now there is a brush with different sizes that can change the surface pretty fast. Laying out the resource fields - The biggest pain in the old editor. Resources had to be laid out one by one and then manually increased by holding a specified key. Now the brush or spray can be used to do that in matter of seconds. Creating forests - Not so common, but still time consuming. Creating big forests one tree at a time will be a history by using a brush to draw many trees at once. Copying entity strutures - Moving a part of the factory 10 tiles to the right is not possible now. The plan is to allow some sort of selection and copy-pasting that selection to other place on the map. Inventory manipulation - Chests can be filled only one stack at a time now. I still don't know how, but this will be improved. From the above list the first two tasks are finished already. The rest is work in progress but will be ready for 0.8:). The map editor early preview is below. The tabs at the top left represent different layers(terrain, tiles, entities, items). Below is the tool list. The active tool is the spray which I used to spray the coal field. The usual thread for comments is on our forum.

Hello, the summer is officially over soon. I have this tradition of denying it by wearing just a t-shirt as long as possible, so I'm getting less and less comfortable outside until I accept the defeat by the cold weather. The experience is, that the short days and ugly weather speeds up the work on Factorio as we tend to stay inside and code all the time.

Hello, this week's Friday Facts is brought to you by Michal (one of the new guys). We are getting close to release of 0.12. We're trying to fix as many bugs as we can; trying to get everything stable and polished. Currently we are so busy that we even haven't had time for any team building activity with Rseding91 who has come to visit us for next few weeks. So, I am going to take advantage of this no-big-news week to present more closely a feature I have been working on for the last month or so.

Hello, it's vacation season here in the office, with a lot of the team taking some time off. We just released what will probably be the last version of 0.15, so now is the best time for everyone to take a breather.

Hi everyone, Two months went pass like that and I am back from south India to the winterish Prague. I had a great time full of Yoga, relaxation, new experiences and of course occasional remote work on Factorio over frustratingly bad internet connection. Now my (and whole teams) focus is clear: stabilize the multiplayer, finish the endgame content and prepare the game for Steam release.

Hello there, the 17th of January brings you the 17th edition of the Friday Facts. Recently, even without our active participation the game has been doing quite well. There are plenty of new videos on the youtube and the forum has also been buzzing with activity. One of our fans put it as follows: "Factorio is going places". Well, we certainly hope he is right :). Anyway let's get down to business. The past week has been spent mostly by work on the new functionality for the 0.9. The blueprints and the oil industry. Both of these are quite large tasks so to finish them completely does take a lot of time. Though the core functionality for both is finished and we are now sort of tweaking the details. I have experimented a bit with some new simple pipe vs. assembler setups and it was quite refreshing and fun. We are really curious how this turns out. The oil industry will result in quite a few new recipes and while we are at it we might go and rebalance the recipes overall a bit. There are things we know for sure should be fixed (for instance the green science pack being too cheap and close to the red one) and there are things we want to experiment with a little bit (like introducing a more complex intermediate products - small engine, navigation system, etc.). We haven't mentioned our new trailer for a while. The thing is that we struggled for long to find someone who would be able to compose the music for the video. We even mentioned that in one of the past Friday Facts. After that post we actually got contacted by a player who bought the game and was following its development news. His name is Daniel James Taylor and he is an awesome (now we know that :)) composer from the United Kingdom. Check out his website if you are interested in more details / his music samples. We agreed on the cooperation and he went and composed a great piece of music fitting our new trailer very well. We are now discussing with Daniel further cooperation regarding the sound effects and ambient music for the game. With the music finished, the biggest bulk of the work for the trailer has been done. The last step is to integrate the new graphics (terrain, doo-dads, etc.) into the trailer and polish it to perfection :) This will most probably happen after the 0.9, but we are getting there. Since the "job advertisement" worked so well last time for the music, we have another one :). It is very apparent to anyone opening the game that the items, gui icons, technology pictures, etc. are a mess. So we are looking for a graphic designer to help us out here. Albert's todo list is long enough already and this job is a lot of work. We would prefer someone from the Czech Republic or the vicinity (for easier communication), but the music experience has proved that a quality cooperation can be done based solely on electronic communication as well. Let's see, maybe we will get lucky twice :) Albert has been "in the oil industry state" for a while. We found out that the current pipes are not fitting the art direction very well. Therefore we decided to take a step back and redo the pipes before anything else. The pipes are the base for the other machines so it certainly needs to be done. It does slow the things now a bit, but as the wise man once said: "If you want to run fast, you need to tie your laces well. Or go barefoot." So below is a composition preview of the new pipes and storage tanks that will be used for holding large amounts of fluids. If you feel you have something to say there is a post for that on our forum.

This post was written as a joke for April Fools' day. Nothing written here should be taken seriously. No doubt you have heard about NFTs, the latest Blockchain innovation. With some big gaming companies exploring NFTs, where does Factorio stand? We have received many offers. Some of the offers were quite silly, others very tempting. Since we have many Blockchain enthusiasts on the team, we decided to explore the subject ourselves. After consulting with some industry-leading experts on Discord, this is what we came up with: Non-fungible blueprints One of the many subjects of debate within the team is the blueprint library. Allowing players to easily share big blueprints (blue science, nuclear reactor setup, etc.) ruins the fun of figuring out how to build those things yourself. One of the best things about the blueprint library is that it contains your unique blueprints, which are almost like unique pieces of art. So it only makes sense to make them truly unique, using the Blockchain, NFT, and Smart Contracts technologies. What this means is that every blueprint in the blueprint library will now be stored on the Blockchain, and they will be truly unique across all of the blueprint libraries of all players. Just like NFTs, they can be traded on the Blockchain, also making them a great speculative asset. In essence your blueprint library will become your personal wallet, containing only the unique blueprints that you own. Unlike most NFTs, blueprints are created (minted) by the players, making it a truly decentralized system, controlled by the smart contracts we created. In order to guarantee uniqueness we will use AI and Machine Deep Learning to analyze any new blueprint before it is minted, this way you won't be able to just move one power pole and mint a copy. Once again, making blueprints truly unique. Our own Play-to-earn cryptocurrency Limiting the creation (minting) of new blueprints using just the AI will not be enough. To ensure the Blockchain is not flooded with useless blueprints, we will also create a cryptocurrency called Factorio Blueprint Token ⚙️. You will need to pay 1,000 of them to mint 1 new unique blueprint. Factorio Blueprint Tokens ⚙️ are earned from Space Science using a variable conversion rate we will control. Since you can now earn crypto by just playing the game, the game basically pays for itself. Factorio Blueprint Tokens ⚙️ come with all the advantages of a proof-of-work cryptocurrency, and all the fun of playing Factorio and optimizing factories for maximum UPS. Some say that Factorio offers so much value for money, that they paid more for the electricity bill than they paid for the game, so we are happy to take it to the next level. We will host an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) for Factorio Blueprint Token ⚙️, so make sure you invest as much as you can and HODL it, in the hopes that someone will tweet about it making the price go to the moon 🚀🌘. Click here to take part in the ICO.

Hello, It is a busy time fixing bugs and cleaning up after the Space Age release.