Factorio Dev Tracker

Let me show you around. That's our lab table and this is our work-stool. And over there is our interplanetary space-platform! And here's where we keep assorted lengths of wire.

Whoa! A real live space-platform!

We designed it ourselves. Let us show you some of the different lengths of wire we used.

Electric pole improvementsboskid

This will be more of a technical journey, a peek behind the scenes of what we have to consider when adding features, and it will be wired to one of the features I had to refactor in order to allow more features: manual ghost wires.

The technical starting point

Traces of the first implementation of copper wires can be seen in Factorio versions as old as 0.2.10 from 2013 and they actually survived up to the 1.0.0 from 2020.
Copper connections between electric poles were just a targeter pointing at another electric pole saying "I am connected to this electri...

Hello!
The code refactor of rails presented last week is great, but the motivation for such a task wasn't quite just some shape changes for rails.

As explained last week, we can now define any kind of rail shape, and we had some very specific shapes in mind all along...

Over or under?

We want multi-level crossings for trains, but how? Bridges or tunnels?

At first it would seem like going underground is the safer bet - we already have experience with belts and pipes doing that. Simple - we draw the entrance and the exit, the middle is magically connected, and that's it?

• The second layer of rails should also be able to use curves and rail signals, otherwise it would be quite limited.
• Sometimes you already want to interact with items inside of underground belts, with trains this would be a lot worse as they can run out of fuel, stop at signals etc.
• Building curves,...

Hello!
There are certain areas in Factorio that we haven't really had the courage to change for a long time. One of those areas has been the rail system...

The rail system needs change?

Whenever playing the game, we'd be reminded about two annoyances that are caused by technical limitations.

So called "S-bends" are not possible - two parallel rails would need at least 6 tiles in the perpendicular direction in order to connect.

How many times has it happened to you that two of your rails wouldn't be able to easily connect.

Signal positions are often very restrictive as soon as curved rails cross any other rail. So building junctions is a lot of trial and error to see if you can signal it properly.

How many ...

Hello,
This week we will talk about some technology and research related changes coming in 2.0 and the Space Age expansion.

Quality clarificationskovarex

It was rather interesting to read the reactions to the last FFF-375 about quality.
It sparked a lot of debate and we noticed a lot of misconceptions about it. So we would like to address some of the biggest ones:

• When you don't put quality modules somewhere, everything works as before, so you don't have to sort everything everywhere as some people thought.
• The random aspect of the mechanic seems to be very upsetting to a lot of people....

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...