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.

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.

Aster...

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.

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...

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...

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.

The...

Hello,
welcome once again to the world of facts.

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:

Hello,
Today we continue our musical journey.

MotivationAlbert

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

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 ...

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

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 ...