Hello,
It has been a month since the Space Age release and things are settling into a steady state. It is a good time to wrap things up, and discuss our future plans.
The Factorio: Space Age - Original Soundtrack Album has been greatly updated on Steam. Soon it will be in the game also.
The addition consists of a second Disk, labelled Original Ga...
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Howdy,
this week we will be diving deep into the workings of cargo pods and their seamless flight animations. Most of you playing the expansion have probably already seen them in game. The positive reception makes us very happy.
Mp4 playback not supported on your device. Ascending to platform in orbit above Nauvis.
The initial draft of a pod being released from a set of claws came from Earendel. You can see that the essence of it has remained relatively unchanged throughout development. In the very first version, the player needed to insert a capsule item into the rocket to travel. It got scrapped, because it was just pointless busywork. However that item was one of the ingredients of mech armor, hence the visual similarity. Following the draft, Jerzy modeled a 3D version of the claw rocket and pod.
Then the branch lay dormant for a long time until core gameplay coding was finished...
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Hello,
We are still diligently working away at the Space Age bug reports.
While fixing an IME keyboard (Asian language) bug introduced by the 2.0 update, I got curious and started exploring localisation for various languages. Even though my native language is Czech, all of our development on the game happens in English, so I essentially never run the game in this mode.
As I was twiddling about in the Czech crafting menu, it quickly came to light that the user experience wasn't as smooth as I would expect.
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Hello,
You may have noticed we launched Space Age earlier this week :)
The reaction to the Space Age launch has rocketed past our wildest expectations. We had almost 100,000 concurrent players, and as of writing this post, we have passed 400,000 copies sold!
Needless to say, from all of us here, thank you. Factorio would not be possible without the support of our fans and players. We are working hard to address all the feedback and issues you've reported to us on the forums, Reddit, and Discord.
This week, kovarex, Lucas and Vinzenz finished off our last little surprise for Space Age, the Galaxy of Fame.
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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.
For more information about what comes with the expansion, check out our ...
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Hello,
3 days to go!
With a new Expansion of course comes a new trailer. After many weeks of work, fine-tuning, and polishing, Albert (with help from Vaclav, and the script written by Earendel) has finished the launch trailer for the Space Age expansion:
The result speaks for itself, and there are some details you might notice. For instance the rockets now have fixtures carrying the cargo pods, and we have animations for cargo pods landing on a planets and at landing pads.
Or perhaps you noticed the player running around with some of the new late game technologies...
From the very first prototype of Space Age, we had a new tier of armor in it. The only difference was a 20% larger equipment grid over Power armor Mk2, but along with quality this felt well above adequate already.
As Earendel and Albert were dev...
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Hello,
It's time to reveal the last planet. So. Warning: Spoilers ahead.
It's day, but stars still twinkle in the dark sky. You count the planet's sun among the stars, larger and brighter than the others, but still so dim you can barely feel its warmth at all. A howling wind chills you to the bone and gently rocks the iceberg you are sitting on.
This planet has no land. It's an ocean world of liquid ammonia. One continuous ocean covers the entire planet and it's at least 200km deep.
The best landing spot you could find was this large iceberg. The sheet of ice is only a few meters thick and seems to contain a lot of trapped air, but frozen water is a very solid material as long as it stays cold. It's able to support a landing pad, so that's good enough.
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Hello,
It's time to speak about more Gleba. Some changes, and also something new...
In the last few months we have been thinking about how to improve Gleba. There has always been this fundamental problem with a biological-oriented planet - other things you produce in the game tend to not be organic so it doesn't quite fit as easily as a planet based on making more Iron or more electronic circuits.
And during the LAN party we had about a month ago, these problems were only confirmed plus we've realized many more issues in other areas. And seeing people interact with Gleba put a...
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Hello,
Today we once again dive head-first into the world of fluids.
Back in June, the very same week that we revealed Fluids 2.0 (FFF-416), we were undergoing an in-office LAN party to test the game. As we played, it became apparent that the new system was a little bit too easy. Our Nauvis base had ridiculously huge pipelines that snaked all over the place with little to no thought or structure behind them. We did use some fluid trains to connect particularly distant outposts, but even this was mostly out of habit; a pipeline would have been superior.
...
Hello,
Welcome back to Vulcanus. It's been a while.
You place your new prototype big mining drills, the pinnacle of resource extraction technology, on the closest tungsten deposit to your fledging Vulcanus factory. A few power poles later and they are happily mining away providing a new consistent source of valuable tungsten. A rail ramp and station just about fit in the area too, but without any rail supports in your inventory that line isn't going anywhere soon. Transport belt will have to do for now.
As you're returning to the main factory, placing transport belt to connect this new resource to your base, you feel a trembling from the ground. Big mining drills make a lot of vibrations, but this is on a whole other level. Something else must be going on.
You head back towards the mining site. Across a river of lava you see a truly gargantuan creature snake its way around a volcano. This formidable beast most closely resemble...
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Hello,
It's another week! The release is getting closer!
We added the ability to connect reactors to the circuit network, which allows the player to:
This makes it quite easy to set up a lossless smart reactor, which doesn't insert any fuel unless it is needed.
In some ways, it feels a little bit too easy. The previous solution of people reading the amount of Steam in storage tanks felt like it needed a bit more brainpower and engineering, but it's hard to justify missing capabilities with this reasoning.
Anyway... reading the heat and contents from the reactors may prove to be ...
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Hello,
We are a bit busy this week hosting a small LAN party with some fans and community members to playtest the Space Age expansion, so this FFF might be a little bit shorter than normal.
As with every major update, there are a few tweaks and balancing changes we have made. With new enemies and changes to existing enemies, we took some time to look at the current balancing.
In the early game spawners are pretty tough, you need to take a good bit of time to focus fire them. As the game progresses, biters, spitters and worms all get stronger, but the spawners stay the same.
When the end-game comes around, spawners just melt the first instant you look at them with personal lasers and upgraded ammo. In some ways this is satisfying and gives a feeling of how powerful you have become, but in other ways it is just strange.
So we have...
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Hello,
As the 2.0 release approaches, we have been spending time polishing and resolving things which we found during our playtesting.
It is the same old story... A feature we've wanted for a long time but was never high enough on the priority list. With more types of resources, it became a little bit more important to have a way to find resources on the map view, and with the new chart search (FFF-400), it was finally time to put it into place.
It took some care to make it work in a performance friendly way. The game doesn't keep track of ...
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Hello,
GUI improvements often surprise us with just how impactful they can be, even for simple cases, they can really compound on the quality of life.
While playtesting, it was a little bit annoying having to remote view to the labs back on Nauvis, just to check if research is working. So we wanted to add a nice and convenient display of what is going on without having to completely break the players current gameplay context.
The graph shows the last 10 minutes of science production (FFF-408), and we di...
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Hello,
It's time for those "tesla items" I mentioned in FFF 399.
On Fulgora you learn to control lightning, turning it from a threat into electricity. After learning to make more advanced electrical components and mastering the planet's Electromagnetic science pack you are ready for the next stages: Converting electricity back into lightning and unlocking the Tesla turret.
Mp4 playback not supported on your device.
Graphi...
Hello,
We all love building bigger and bigger, but hitting the UPS ceiling really puts a damper on the mood.
Thats why we must continue our endless quest to optimize the game.
I've profiled many save files over the years of working on Factorio and frequently see saves where logistics and or construction robots are taking a lot of update time. That's nothing new, but along with robots come Roboports - in large numbers.
A typical factory with lots of roboports.
Roboports have never been "slow" but they're always present and people are encouraged to build a lot of them - even more in the upcoming Space Age where you want to do a lot remotely. After the most recent play-testing session, the resulting save once again showed them taking some small, but non-zero amount of time, and it got...
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Hello,
I'm sure you're familiar with the good old Nuclear reactor. It's a fission reactor that makes a lot of power in conjunction with its steam turbines.
The nuclear energy system is unlocked on Nauvis, and in the context of Space Age, that makes it an early-to-mid game unlock.
For the planet Nauvis, nuclear power is great for the whole game. Water is endless, and uranium is plentiful. For space platforms it's not ideal because it takes a lot of water and a fair amount of space. Solar panels are so good in space, especially near the sun, that it's harder to justify a reactor on a small platform. If you're mainly going around Fulgora then nuclear becomes more competitive because Fulgora has more ice from asteroids and less solar energy.
Later, when you head to the 4th new planet, nuclear becomes a much better option because the solar power is so low and ice is more abundant. At that point, you've had nuclear as an option for all the 5 ...
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