Hello,
Another year has come to an end, from all of us here we wish you good fortune in the year to come.

Mod portal recap 2023Vinzenz

Hey it's the end of 2023 and surprise surprise we're still counting mod downloads. While most of those downloads are via the built-in mod manager, some of you like to automate your Factorio installs with download scripts or Docker containers.

Some of them crash when updating their mods, then restart, download all the mods again, crash, restart and after a short while it's very likely that the Factorio auth server starts ignoring the download script. So maybe this festive season is the time you'll remember your poor mini-PC sitting in a forgotten closet, mindlessly downloading 'Power Armor MK3' over and over again.

In 2023 we had:

• 676 651 engineers downloading 44 954 072 mods.
• 2 043 new mods and 7 832 mod updates...

Hello,
We've had a lot of requests to talk about map generation. It's difficult to talk about map generation without first explaining noise expressions. From time to time we need to talk about noise expressions anyway because they are a critical part of the game, but I don't think we've ever done a good job of explaining what they actually are at a high level. We will a closer look at planet mapgen again in the future, but for now this will introduce the basic concepts and act as a primer for later.

What are noise expressions?Earendel

The "expression" part

When making a game world in Factorio you need to decide what gets placed where. All you really have to work with is the X and Y position. The terrain generator can't know anything about what is already placed. Somehow you need some code that converts X and Y into the type of tile to place, and which tree...

Hello,
trains are one of our most favorite parts of the game. We already talked about the ways we improved rails (FFF-377), so its time to talk about how we improved the way you can control the trains that ride on them.

Train Schedule Interrupts

The way you control the trains is very static at the moment. You have a list of stops to visit, and the train just goes through them one by one and thats it. The only dynamic part is the wait time at each of the stops.
There is no way to just go somewhere else dynamically based on what is going on.

T...

Hello,
we have shown some bigger things recently, so it is time to also show some smaller things, because the bigger things wouldn't shine that good without the smaller things working properly!

Billions of years' worth of Factorioraiguard

We had always thought that having a normal 32-bit unsigned integer to track the number of ticks passed would be enough for everyone. You have 60 ticks per second, which makes it 2.2 years of continuous playing on a single game save. But Factorio is a game about automation, so it was inevitable that someone would leave their factory running in the background and eventually overflow the tick counter.
This obviously will n...