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 ...

Hello,
Today we have another dose of anti-frustration improvements for you.

Spidertron RTS tool

Lets be honest, the Spidertron selection and control in 1.1 is a bit janky. As fans of RTS games, we know we can do better, and its not like we're reinventing the wheel here.

So we have rebranded the 'Spidertron remote' as the new 'RTS Tool', and the control should feel very intuitive.

• It is activated using the ALT + A hotkey.
• Left click and drag to select Spidertrons.
• Right click to command Spidertrons to go to location.

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The RTS tool remembers the last selection of Spidertrons, so pressing ALT + A again will have the previous group of Spidertrons already selected. Another detail is that...

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:

...

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.

...

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".

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...