Factorio

Factorio Dev Tracker




22 Mar

Post

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.


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.


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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15 Mar

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


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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08 Mar

Post

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".

Nauvis planet icon

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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01 Mar

Hello,
Is it me you're looking for?


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:


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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23 Feb

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.


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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16 Feb

Post

Hello there,
Where shall we go today?


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.

Fulgora planet icon

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.

Mp4 playback not supported on your device.

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

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09 Feb

Post
    Pard on News - Thread - Direct

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


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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02 Feb

Post

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


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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26 Jan

Post

Hello,
Another trains FFF!


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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19 Jan

Post

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


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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12 Jan

Post

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


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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05 Jan

Post

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.


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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29 Dec

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...
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22 Dec

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...

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15 Dec

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...

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08 Dec

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...

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01 Dec

Post

Hello,
In the last FFF-386 we covered the natural landscape of Vulcanus which mostly showed the visuals, but as you are probably aware we always put ga...

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24 Nov

Post

Hello there,
I know a lot of you have been eagerly awaiting some solid information on the new planets, if so this blog is for you. Get comfy because it's a long one.

As you already know, there are 4 new planets in the expansion. We will take an in-depth look at each planet's terrain, challenges, processes, technologies, and new gear, but not all at once. In some cases the planet content will be split into multiple parts. To kick things off I'll cover the terrain and natural aspects of the planet that is closest to being finished.

I'll need to be in games master mode for this:


Welcome to Vulcanus

Allow me to introduce this toasty volcanic wonderland, conveniently sandwiched between idyllic Nauvis and the sizzling sun. Vulcanus is closer to the sun than most would dare to venture but trust me, it's a splendid place to start your interplanetary travels.

Vulcanus planet icon...

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17 Nov

Hello,
we've already shown the space platform processing cycle in FFF-380. Let's talk a little bit more about the machine which makes it all possible - the asteroid collector.


Origin of tentaclesEarendel

When I was working on the early space platform concepts trying to figure out how movable ships would look, we knew that we wanted some way of getting parts of asteroids onto the ship but hadn't decided how that would be done. At this early stage all of the new structures had very simple placeholder graphics.

Although we start with grey boxes, it's b...

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10 Nov

Hello,
we are going to focus on the general improvements of the way circuit network is used in the game.

I wasn't using it often, because all the problems combined made it too big of a hassle most of the time, which was an indication of problems.
So we improved each part of the process of using it a little, from UI, to feedback of what is going on, to stronger/more accessible combinator functionality.
I can say that it worked, at least for me. Once these changes were available, I used the circuit network way more in my latest playthrough, and it felt good, so lets hope it won't be just me :)


Circuit GUIs rework

We learned over the years that it is always better to use disabled/enabled state on control elements which can be turned on or off, compared to making them just disappear.
Circuit control GUI was one of the last places in the game where we didn't apply it properly:

... Read more