Factorio is getting an expansion pack.

In a blog post, Factorio director and designer Michal Kovarik said this expansion will be significant enough to capture people's attention.

It's too early to discuss what the expansion is, exactly, but the developers have started work on it, and "we don't think that it will take less than a year to develop". Perhaps we'll see a release at some point in 2022.

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Wube Software's much-loved construction and management sim Factorio will be leaving Steam early access a little sooner that expected; its version 1.0 release is now scheduled to arrive on 14th August in a bid to avoid the mad clamour of Cyberpunk 2077's launch window.

Factorio, which originally entered Steam early access back in 2016, casts players as sort of impromptu space industrialists, tasking them with building increasingly elaborate contraptions in a ceaseless grasp for ever-more efficient automation.

The gist is that players, having crash-landed on a distant, untouched planet, must manufacture their eventual means of escape. Initially, natural resources can be used to fashion basic machines which, in turn, open up new construction possibilities, enabling players to creep up the game's dizzying tech tree. Eventually, when the planet has become a smog-shrouded industrial hell-hole, the indigenous creatures are banished, and conveyor belts stretch as far as the eye can see, they might finally be ready to launch back into space.

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UPDATE 1.30pm UK: G2A has forwarded the following statement intended to show clearer contrition than in the blog post it published last night. It does not include the words apology or sorry.

"We would be the first to admit that, in our formative years as a company, we took too long to recognise that a small number of individuals were abusing our Marketplace," a G2A spokesperson told Eurogamer. "However, the criticism we received was the wake-up call we needed, and over the last years we have been totally committed to tackling any incidents of fraud on our site. Today we [sic] some of the most sophisticated proprietary anti-fraud AI technology of any online marketplace for digital products."

ORIGINAL STORY 12.30pm UK: After years of shrugging off claims it sold stolen keys, grey-market reseller G2A has admitted to shifting copies which were "illegally obtained".

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The much-loved Factorio finally has a 1.0 release date: 25th September 2020.

The date was revealed in a post by Prague-based studio Wube Software, which said development on the game "is taking way too long".

Factorio, an engineer simulator about building and creating automated factories to produce items in a 2D world, launched on Steam as an early access title in February 2016 and quickly met with a very positive reception. But development began back in 2012. It'll hit 1.0 eight years later.

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