Factorio Dev Tracker

Hello!
Welcome to Fearghall's Factorio Friday Facts! (FFFF, if you will.)

Over the last few months, you have seen asteroids a few times as a background part of some other FFFs, but for all their understated majesty, they were actually quite a complicated trick to pull off! Come with me as I take you on a 3720 to 1 journey through this asteroid field.

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Asteroids do concern me

We first started with placeholder asteroids that were just the same as any other sprite - a 2D pre-rendered image with lights and shadows as part of it. This worked, but it looked pretty weird that the asteroids were all orientated the same direction, and only moved in the XY plane without rotating.

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Early placeholder asteroids by v453000

So rotation is something that we were talking about going into the asteroid design process.

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Aster...

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Hello,
We know you love to blow things up, and the Space Age expansion will be bringing ever more advanced and powerful ways of bearing arms against your enemies.

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Rocket turret

The rocket turret does what it says, it shoots rockets:

• 3x3 powerful long-range turret.
• Unlocked on one of the three initial planets.
• Minimum range of 15, and a max range of 36 (improved +10% for each quality level).
• Shoots any type of rocket (including atomic bomb).

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Graphics by Jarosław; Sound effects by Ian

It is very useful as an upgrade for Space Platforms, as laser and gun turrets alone start to struggle on larger asteroids. Each size of asteroid has resistances to different types of damage, but more on that another week.

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T...

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Hello,
Today we're going to take a look at a feature some of us have dreamt of changing for years now - the beacon transmission.

The main purpose of beacons is to allow massively increasing your production in the late game while being more than just a module or a faster machine. To make use of beacons you need to adjust your building layout for them.

Beacons succeed in this role, but...

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The Problem

We aren't so sure the resulting layouts are all that interesting - something both us and a lot of players have said many times before.

A 12 Beacon build

The...

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Hello,
welcome once again to the world of facts.

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StatisticsKlonan

Do you love watching your production graphs grow as much as we do?

Accumulator graph

It is a little bit tricky when you transition from Steam power to Solar panels and Accumulators, to know if you have enough capacity in the system to survive the cold dark nights. Generally you might just wait until nighttime and see if your factory blacksout, if so, build more solar and accumulators.

It would be helpful and convenient to see the statistics of accumulator charge levels, so we added such information:

...

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Hello,
Today we continue our musical journey.

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MotivationAlbert

Last week we presented a general approach to the Factorio Space Age music (...

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It was November of 2021 when we started conversations with Petr Wajsar, a very talented Czech music composer, to create the soundtrack for the Factorio expansion. Since then we have been working together on the soundtrack of Factorio Space Age. Conceptualising and finding solutions to our not small amount of problems, and filling the expansion with quality music, specially designed for the best possible Factorio experience.

Petr is a very special musician, because besides being a proven master of electronic music, his education and experience in the conservatory makes him capable of composing music using the full range of a classic orchestra. His modern style of going to more experimental solutions, makes him very flexible at ...

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

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Whole belt reader

Often times, you want to read the contents of a whole line of belts. Maybe you're doing some sushi set up, or just want to get an accurate gauge on how much stuff you have without buffering to a chest.

The way to do it, is to read every belt, but this has some drawbacks:

• Ugly
• Inefficient
• Tedious
• Obscures the items on the belts
• Doesn't work for underground belts

So we decided to make it work nicer. Boskid added a new mode you can choose when selecting the 'Read belt contents' mode.

It will read all the belts in the same 'Transport line' as ...

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Hello,
Today we have another dose of anti-frustration improvements for you.

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Spidertron RTS tool

Lets be honest, the Spidertron selection and control in 1.1 is a bit janky. As fans of RTS games, we know we can do better, and its not like we're reinventing the wheel here.

So we have rebranded the 'Spidertron remote' as the new 'RTS Tool', and the control should feel very intuitive.

• It is activated using the ALT + A hotkey.
• Left click and drag to select Spidertrons.
• Right click to command Spidertrons to go to location.

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The RTS tool remembers the last selection of Spidertrons, so pressing ALT + A again will have the previous group of Spidertrons already selected. Another detail is that...

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Hello,
When playing with trains, you tend to spend a lot of time building train stops. In my latest playtesting, I noticed a few annoyances and pain points, which we will go in to today, along with some other improvements for 2.0.

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Train stop GUI showing on the way

The Train stop GUI got a new lick of paint for the 2.0 update. Generally this was to make it conform to the typical layout of the entity GUIs, but I also took the opportunity to add a feature we were missing a little bit, that is the 'Trains on the way' tab.

Now you can tell which trains are coming to this specific stop.

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Train naming and train limit

There is an important order of operations when setting up a new train stop, and if you do it wrong, you can lead yourself to an unpleasant situation:

...

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Hello,
if we have any circuit lovers reading, this is another dose of facts for you.

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Radar transmission networkkovarex

It might be useful sometimes, to send circuit signals over long distances. I personally never used it for anything, but when we were playtesting a while ago, Boskid insisted that we include circuit wires into our rail blueprints, because you never know when it might be useful.

I felt uneasy about it, because it goes against the coding principle of "write it when you need it", as it adds a bloat for something which might not even be useful later. But I understand, that if it actually becomes needed, it would be way harder to fix later.

This is how our rail system looked "just in case".

To avoid this dilemma, we added a long requested feature of wireless circuit transmission using Radars.

...

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Surprise! There are 5 new planets in the expansion.

The first planet you arrive on is a strange new land, rich with iron, copper, coal, stone, oil, and uranium. Everything a starting factory needs and more. There's also water, fish, grass and trees. Yes, this is a fertile land, and we will thrive. We will rule over all this land, and we will call it... "This Land" "Nauvis".

So yes, the new planet Nauvis is similar to the 1.1 version of the map, but there are some substantial updates. Hopefully this is a surprise for you, because updates to the base map weren't planned at all. It just got harder and harder to not make changes after getting more experience with the other planets and seeing things that were missing or broken.

For clarity, these changes affect the 2.0 version in gener...

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Hello,
Is it me you're looking for?

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The UI searchkovarex

When it comes to UI, one of the things we are proud of is the standard search feature in every window where it's even remotely relevant. It all comes nicely together. You stop thinking about it, and press the CTRL + F shortcut to search whenever you look for something.

But once we got really used to it, we suddenly started to want to search even when not in some window, but just in the game itself. This combined with the fact, that the most frequented question in multiplayer games was, "Hey, where do we make X please?" (especially once planets were added).

Which lead us to the most obvious complementary feature:

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The map searchkovarex

Why not extend the searching to the whole map as well?

We were not sure about what exactly should be searchable, so we just started from the most obvious, the production search. ...

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Hello, It's Earendel back for another electric adventure.
You got your first look at Fulgora in FFF-398. (If you haven't read that already please read that first.) Now let's take a look at the new planet's mechanics.

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Lightning storms

Every night on Fulgora brings an immense lightning storm. Lightning hits things at random based on material and height. If you're wandering around in the middle of nowhere expect to get zapped a few times. It can kill you and wreck your stuff so look for shelter when it starts getting dark.

Mp4 playback not supported on your device. Damage and frequency boosted for demonstration purposes.

Ruins provide init...

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Hello there,
Where shall we go today?

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Welcome to Fulgora

You land on an unfamiliar planet, a lifeless and desolate place. The thin air is freezing cold but bone dry. A distant sun twinkles in the dull purple of the sky. Wispy clouds race by as a gale whips up sand that grates against your armour.

As you look around, you find yourself in a desert with endlessly snaking dunes of dust-like sand. The dust almost seems to hover as though gravity were overwhelmed by static electricity. As you press forward, you pass peculiar pillars of fused sand and metal. The sand gives way to rock as you find yourself on the edge of a wind-swept plateau.

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Standing on the cliff-edge, you see similar landforms ...

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Hello,
we have gathered here today to talk about a new quality of life feature coming with 2.0.

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Motivation

Factorio has a quite a lot of items and recipes. Since the new things are unlocked over time, the number is manageable. However with Space age, there are a lot of new things you unlock, and you can start to lose track. Mods have had this sort of problem for a long time, and there are also mods which help to solve it , such as FNEI and ...

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Hello,
Today we will be looking at (and listening to!) many of the sound improvements we have been working on for 2.0.

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Working sound accents

The sound an entity makes when it is active is usually a single looping main sound, some entities might have sounds that play when they become active or when they stop working and go idle. In addition there are several properties and modifiers that can be used to control working sounds a little bit more. But there is only so much one can do creatively with a single looping sound when it needs to work in all situations.

The ability to synchronize the sounds of a machine to its animation was very high on the list of requested audio features. What I came up with was the concept of Sound accents. Shorter sounds which get played at a specific frame of a specific animation. Initially I expected a machine would get two or three sound accents to complement its main sound and that woul...

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Hello,
Another trains FFF!

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Generic interrupt

We first showcased the new Schedule interrupts in FFF-389. They allow you to control your trains using conditions and target destinations.

We have played with schedule interrupts extensively, and they work very well for controlling larger numbers of trains and train systems. One small problem/annoyance/crime is that you need to add an interrupt for each type of item manually. So if you want the train to handle Iron gear wheel, you ne...

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Hello,
let me show you another dose of things we just can't stop ourselves from doing.

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Assembling machine circuit controlkovarex

Being able to change the recipe of an assembling machine using circuit network is an obvious feature, and we considered it in the past.

The idea was always postponed, as we didn't see an easy way to solve the problem of potentially having unrelated items to deal with when the recipe was changed.
But, the solution is actually pretty easy, we just create a special "dump inventory" in the assembling machine and put the extra items there.

Assembling machine controlled to produce wooden chests right after it was producing electronic circuits.

The dump inventory is right next to the products, and can be removed from the assembling machine in the same way as the normal products. T...

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Hello,
I have an irresistible urge to tell you a little story. I'm sure you come here for stories, don't you?

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A story

Once upon a time, in a land where smoke, pollution and genocide is the norm, there were these developers. They have added various methods of logistics to their game, and the various methods were not always in harmony.

In the community, camps were created and on occasion arguments were raised. Eventually, even these developers added their perspective which could only be equalled to fuel to the fire. Torches and pitchforks were picked up... There were ideas how to calm this dispute, but not much came out of it. Except 96 forum pages of arguments, along with splitter output filters and priorities.

But some ideas are harder to kill than others, and one Friday a developer dug too deep. "For the lulz and discord reactions!" He thought to himself in the heat of FFF discussions, and charged his ...

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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.

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Motivation

The most common motivational example is the train unloading station.
Typically, I have the whole setup in a blueprint: rails, train stop, filtered inserters to avoid contamination, etc.

This is nice, but whenever I build the blueprint I need to re-configure all the filtered inserters for the target item, and also change the name of the stop, and it is tedious.

Mp4 playback not supported on your device. The long monotonous process of setting up station after station.

There are 2 ways to solve it in 1.1:

• Use circuit network, but it feels l...

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