Factorio Dev Tracker

Hello,
Today we are going to talk a little bit about a big feature in the expansion, Quality!

What is Quality?

Quality is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work... when you go to church... when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.

What truth?

That you are a noob, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into normal quality. Into a prison that you cannot taste or see or touch. A prison for your factory.

You take the blue module, the story ends, you wake up in your factory and believe whatever you want to believe.
You take the white module, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Horizontal versus Vertical...

Hello,
today we are going to talk about some flying robot behavior improvements. Some of the problems we fixed were reported countless times, so I hope that some people will appreciate it :).

Quality of life versus flashy featureskovarex

I know that you are mainly looking forward to the new content, and that just quality of life improvements aren't the kind of things that make people buy the game and get excited for.

But I strongly believe, that if you want to add content, mechanics, and systems to a game, which already isn't simple, there is always a risk of just it being too much. By doing QOL improvements, we reduce the small hassles and annoyances, which effectively creates an extra mental space to enjoy more in the game. Its like cleaning your room before getting a new toy.

So to make things clear, the reason that we make and present these kind of changes is not because we don't want to make new flashy f...

Hello, long time no see!
Today we are going to talk about the expansion which is called Factorio: Space Age.

(Click here for static image version)

What is Factorio: Space Age?kovarex

Factorio: Space Age continues the player's journey after launching rockets into space. Discover new worlds with unique challenges, exploit their novel resources for advanced technological gains, and manage your fleet of interplanetary space platforms.

Vanilla Factorio ends by launching ...

Hello, another year has come and gone.

We know this year we were very sparse with any details about the expansion, and it is what you all really want to hear about. Trust me we really want to tell you about it, and in time we will. There are still major sections of the gameplay being changed and adjusted, and if we tell you about them now, the information would quickly become outdated and inaccurate.

For now, we can offer this Christmas postcard Albert has made, which has a sneak peek of some new item icons.

As well, we do have some other topics we can discuss.

Sales update

This year we have reached another sales milestone, with 3.5 million sales being passed this Christmas. We are still having steady and consistent sales of about 500,000 each year, which in retrospect validates the original no-sale policy ...

Hello, engineers! I'm a newer face at Wube and have been mainly working on expansion content for about one year now. Today, I'm here to share some exciting non-expansion news for our Mac players.

Factorio Runs on Apple Silicon

As of version 1.1.71, Factorio runs natively on Apple Silicon Macs! On these machines, the game should run faster and use less energy than in previous versions. You can see which binary version you are running in the top-left corner of the main menu.

x86_64 binary for Intel Macs

arm64 binary for Apple Silicon Macs 🥳

This has been a long time coming, but we were never in a good position to implement these improvements... until now.

Motivation

In February, I t...

As announced ...

We have a long history of trying to bring Factorio to other platforms, including consoles and mobile phones (not including ...

For the past one and a half years I've been working on a secret Factorio project. Today we are finally revealing it.
As announced during Nintendo Direct, Factorio is coming to Nintendo Switch! It's already in the final stages and the global release date is set for 28th October 2022.

Here is what to expect:

• All of the game's content will be available. The gameplay is not simplified and there are no artificial limits.
• There will be no mod support.
• Multiplayer will be available, including playing cross-platform. Nintendo Switch Online is required for online play, but not required for LAN games.
• Save files are compatible between all platforms. There will be no save transfer feature at launch, but you can transfer your saves using multiplayer.

Performance

On...

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 t...

We are a games company based in the Czech Republic. Russia's invasion of Ukraine affects us directly. We have team members there, we have friends there, and we get information first hand. There is no excuse for the actions of the Russian army, they have little regard for civilians including children.

We support Ukraine and have made contributions to relief efforts.

We support Russians that stand against the actions of the Russian government.

You can help too, even if it is just with your voice. World leaders are listening: every voice counts.

The Czech National museum, which has bullet scars from the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Please, keep the discussions about the world events (if you can't help it) specifically in threads related to this post, as we want to keep the rest of the content on topic.

Hello,
Today is actually the 6 year anniversary of Factorio launching on Steam, and just recently too we passed 3 million total sales (and we're even past 3.1 million at this point), so it is quite a milestone. It is great for us that the game is still selling consistently year on year, even though we never take part in sales or bundles.

Steam Deck support Twinsen

Today is the official release day of the Valve Steam Deck, so it seems fitting to talk about how Factorio performs and what our plans are.

Valve was nice enough to send us a devkit early on, so here's a recent video of me playing the game a bit.

Hello, long time no talk, we've got some catching up to do...

Almost 1 year ago (...

Hello,
long time no see :)

We obviously have a lot to talk about when it comes to the game changes we recently did, or plan to do, but we don't want to share any of it yet.

Yet, there is currently a topic very relevant to us and we can share it without revealing any specific changes to the game. Today's post will be quite technical and related to programming, so if you just came for the game news, you can safely skip this one.

Uncle bob

Now that there are only developers here, I can share my new discovery of Uncle Bob and his really nice explanation of some of the fundamental principles related to programming project management, and more. If you...

Hello,
the 1.1 release is the final release of the vanilla game. It will be maintained, so bugfixes, simple modding interface additions, or minor tweaks can happen, but that's about it.

The future

So, what are we going to do? There are several possibilities. Retiring is not really an option for several reasons, not going insane being one of them. There are some smaller experiments outside the Factorio realm that we want to do, but apart from that, we still want to extend the game. There is a large pool of ideas, so all we have to do is to just pick from the most potent ones. But the question is: How to package them?

There are basically 4 options:

• Free updates forever
• Factorio 2
• Small DLC packs
• One big expansion pack

Free updates forever

A lot of games do it, notably Minecraft and Terraria. They do really well, so the model works, but I bel...

1.1 stable kovarex

Hello, we have a stable version!

When we were releasing the ...

1.1 is getting close kovarex

I have been tracking the amount of tasks and forum bugs required to finish 1.1 since the 1.0 release. This allowed me to get quantifiable feedback whether we are actually keeping the timeframe of the 1.1 release reasonable, or digging too deep and expanding the scope too much.

If we extrapolate the graph, the 1.1 experimental should be ready next week.

New merchandise - 1.0 Rocket T-shirt & Wube bag Klonan

To celebrate and commemorate the launch of 1.0, we wanted to produce a special limited edition T-shirt. For a few reasons, our supply was not ready in time for the launch in August, but we are ready now.

We have also always wanted to h...

Menu simulation V453000

In the last FFF, we presented that we now have the capability to show real game simulations in the Tips and tricks. Naturally we asked ourselves what else could we use this new technology for...

We've dreamed about this multiple times in the past, but the technical roadblocks didn't make us think too seriously. We'd like the main menu background to be a real animated simulation of the game, similar to what Transport Tycoon or Rollercoaster Tycoon games have.

Instead of things like cinematic trailers, we always present the game in its true form, and the menu background does not follow this logic. Also, any time we improve any graphics, a static image immediately gets older while a real game simulation is updated automatically.

We've created a variety of scenes that each demonstrate some feature(s) of the game, from first miners all the way to the artillery and Spidertron. The screen is quite zoomed in and the factories ...

Hello,
we finished with the regular Friday Facts series, and yet, there is still so much we want to talk about. I want to clarify, that we are not going to release FFF every week, but there are a few of them coming in the near future.

1.1 - The real 1.0

The point of 1.1 isn't to add some new content, the main motivation is to finalise all the existing features so that they work together in a proper way. This may sound a little bit abstract and boring, but it will be explained more clearly in the upcoming FFFs. Believe me, the sentence "I didn't know I needed this until now" will come to your mind more than once.

The work on the 1.1 update started basically right after the 1.0 release, so there is already lots to show.

Right now we aren't going to make any promises as to when it is coming, but we will keep you updated on our progress with these blog posts, and give some notice before it is deployed. Though I'm quite certain th...

Hello,
the atmosphere in the last week was kind of special. We experienced the feeling of the final release being on the horizon many times. And we were shown that it isn't the case time and time again. So it feels very special when it is actually becoming reality. We were trying to be especially careful with any last minute changes to make sure that we don't introduce major bugs into our precious 1.0 release. The image of all the players having the game crash on some simple stupid bug is horrifying.

Thank you

People thanked us on many occasions for the hard work we do. It helped lift our mood in many of the desperate moments, when bugs and problems were piling up and we didn't see the end of the tunnel. We don't say it often enough, but the support from your side has been incredibly helpful throughout the years.

• We thank all who helped us to save the game before it could even start by supporting the IndieGoGo campaign back in 2013.
• We ...

0.18 mods will be loadable in 1.0 Klonan

With 1.0 approaching, we want to ensure that the day of the launch goes as smoothly as possible, and shows the game in the best light. Something that would really work against that would be if the update broke a bunch of mods and disgruntled all of our most dedicated players. So we are making efforts to ensure that mods that work in 0.18, will work without any update needed in 1.0.

Theoretically this isn't so difficult, as the 0.18 release structure has meant that mods have maintained compatibility with all the latest changes, and in essence 1.0 will just be a small update of 0.18. However it does take a bit of special handling:

• 1.0 will allow mods marked for 0.18 to load.
• The mod portal will show 0.18 mods when browsing in 1.0.

Avoiding breaking mods also means we need to be very careful with changing anything, even something as simple as renaming a sprite can break dozens of...