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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. ...

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...

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.

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 ...

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 ...

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...