Hello, It has been very quiet in the office this week, the calm twilight between Christmas and the New year.

Its not much of an exaggeration to say that the steam launch was the biggest event in Factorio history. The many months of preparation and research really came together really well at the end of February, and with the great support from our fans, we managed to top the steam charts for several weeks after launch. To put our success in short terms, 85% of all Factorio sales have taken place in the last 12 months. We're not quite there, but we will definitely have a big celebration when we reach 1 million.

Many months past after steam before our next big landmark. Along the way towards a 0.13 release, and with renewed confidence in the project, we looked at expanding the development team once again. To give a summary of our reinforcements, we welcome Honza and Denis to the C++ side, Jurek and Norbert to the GFX department, and Mishka and Jitka to reinforce me in the Support department. We've also recruited two contractors, one to help with Python related tasks, and the other to work on the new theme art.

0.13 was the largest update we've ever released, and it came at a time when we have the largest number of active players in Factorio history. After launch we had a flurry of reports of broken steam linking, troublesome multiplayer, and a nice list of bugs too. We had been preparing a long time for this, and with our full attention on the pesky bugs, it was not long before we had them in full retreat (more info). Soon though the dust had settled, and with the first waves of bug reports over, we set a good pace of further bugfix updates until it was stable just 2 months later.

Kovarex's displeasure with the multiplayer was sparked into action when he saw the MangledPork MP stream. You can read the chronicle of the multiplayer rewrite if you missed it: part 1, part 2. With the new multiplayer complete, we released a small major update, 0.14. This did not add many new features, but still took a lot of time to bugfix and make stable. Up until a few weeks ago, this was our main priority. Now at the end of the year, we are making great progress on 0.15.

There was a recent article on PCGamesN about fraud, grey-market resellers and what it means for all of us. After our steam release we experienced much of the same issues as many other indie developers and publishers in these regards, so I'd like to explain the problem, our experience, and some advice for any others.

In short the problem is fraud, and the process goes like this:

• A purchase is made on our website using a stolen credit card, hacked paypal etc.
• The purchaser sells the key on the grey market within a couple of days.
• Some weeks later the owner of the credit card notices, and issues a chargeback to us.

In many cases these people use a automated bot to deal with automatically purchasing the game and trying all of details in their credit card database, and then posting these keys to these 3rd party websites. We only saw this fraud happening for us after our steam release, because the real money is in selling steam keys - not many people care about website keys. On our side, the cost is very large, each chargeback costs roughly $20 in fines, effectively a negative sale, and we were seeing upwards of 10% chargebacks on our website transactions. Also each chargeback notice had to be handled on a case-by-case basis, at one point I was spending 12 or more hours a week dealing with individual purchases.

A common saying I hear is that this isn't a problem, because 'The devs just revoke the keys', well that simply isn't true, we don't get notice of a fraudulent payment right away, it can take upwards of 8 weeks for the chargeback to be issued, at which time the key is obviously going to be already sold for profit and forgotten. We still revoke these keys, often to the dismay of the purchaser.

So an easy solution would be to stop offering steam keys, the typical effect of some people ruining it for everyone else, but we didn't want to immediately go down that route. First we tried to add additional 'hassle' for these people. We limited transactions to 2 for each credit card, we tightened up the checks our payment provider offered, and we implemented the steam linking. Each stage of this was only effective for a short period of time, before inevitably the fraudsters adapted to the new circumstances, and our changes were circumvented.

After some research, we switched from processing payments through braintree and paypal, and instead implemented the incredible Humble widget. Specifically Humble widget has a built in fraud prevention, which completely stopped all the chargebacks we were seeing. I highly recommend the Humble widget for anybody looking to process payments on their own website.

In the end this fraudulent activity is only beneficial to the middlemen, in this case the fraudster and the 3rd party marketplace. For the developers, at best they are receiving the price of a normal purchase, and at worst they are charged for the privilege of being defrauded. From the consumer perspective its a bit more difficult, you receive the game for a lower cost, but run the risk of the purchase being revoked.

In summary of all this, I want to list the safe and secure ways of purchasing our game:

• Our webpage through the humble widget.
• Through Steam
• On GOG
• On the Humble store

If you purchase the game through any of these sites and you have any problem, please email in to support[at]factorio.com and we can help you out.

To break up what is otherwise a large wall of text, I have a small preview of a 0.15 feature - the kill statistics:



All in all its been a pretty good year for us here at Factorio. We have a lot of plans for our future, but as always, we listen to you, our community, for a lot of feedback on our direction. So drop in and give us your thoughts on our forum.

Hello, It has been very quiet in the office this week, the calm twilight between Christmas and the New year.

Its not much of an exaggeration to say that the steam launch was the biggest event in Factorio history. The many months of preparation and research really came together really well at the end of February, and with the great support from our fans, we managed to top the steam charts for several weeks after launch. To put our success in short terms, 85% of all Factorio sales have taken place in the last 12 months. We're not quite there, but we will definitely have a big celebration when we reach 1 million.

Many months past after steam before our next big landmark. Along the way towards a 0.13 release, and with renewed confidence in the project, we looked at expanding the development team once again. To give a summary of our reinforcements, we welcome Honza and Denis to the C++ side, Jurek and Norbert to the GFX department, and Mishka and Jitka to reinforce me in the Support department. We've also recruited two contractors, one to help with Python related tasks, and the other to work on the new theme art.

0.13 was the largest update we've ever released, and it came at a time when we have the largest number of active players in Factorio history. After launch we had a flurry of reports of broken steam linking, troublesome multiplayer, and a nice list of bugs too. We had been preparing a long time for this, and with our full attention on the pesky bugs, it was not long before we had them in full retreat (more info). Soon though the dust had settled, and with the first waves of bug reports over, we set a good pace of further bugfix updates until it was stable just 2 months later.

Kovarex's displeasure with the multiplayer was sparked into action when he saw the MangledPork MP stream. You can read the chronicle of the multiplayer rewrite if you missed it: part 1, part 2. With the new multiplayer complete, we released a small major update, 0.14. This did not add many new features, but still took a lot of time to bugfix and make stable. Up until a few weeks ago, this was our main priority. Now at the end of the year, we are making great progress on 0.15.

There was a recent article on PCGamesN about fraud, grey-market resellers and what it means for all of us. After our steam release we experienced much of the same issues as many other indie developers and publishers in these regards, so I'd like to explain the problem, our experience, and some advice for any others.

In short the problem is fraud, and the process goes like this:

• A purchase is made on our website using a stolen credit card, hacked paypal etc.
• The purchaser sells the key on the grey market within a couple of days.
• Some weeks later the owner of the credit card notices, and issues a chargeback to us.

In many cases these people use a automated bot to deal with automatically purchasing the game and trying all of details in their credit card database, and then posting these keys to these 3rd party websites. We only saw this fraud happening for us after our steam release, because the real money is in selling steam keys - not many people care about website keys. On our side, the cost is very large, each chargeback costs roughly $20 in fines, effectively a negative sale, and we were seeing upwards of 10% chargebacks on our website transactions. Also each chargeback notice had to be handled on a case-by-case basis, at one point I was spending 12 or more hours a week dealing with individual purchases.

A common saying I hear is that this isn't a problem, because 'The devs just revoke the keys', well that simply isn't true, we don't get notice of a fraudulent payment right away, it can take upwards of 8 weeks for the chargeback to be issued, at which time the key is obviously going to be already sold for profit and forgotten. We still revoke these keys, often to the dismay of the purchaser.

So an easy solution would be to stop offering steam keys, the typical effect of some people ruining it for everyone else, but we didn't want to immediately go down that route. First we tried to add additional 'hassle' for these people. We limited transactions to 2 for each credit card, we tightened up the checks our payment provider offered, and we implemented the steam linking. Each stage of this was only effective for a short period of time, before inevitably the fraudsters adapted to the new circumstances, and our changes were circumvented.

After some research, we switched from processing payments through braintree and paypal, and instead implemented the incredible Humble widget. Specifically Humble widget has a built in fraud prevention, which completely stopped all the chargebacks we were seeing. I highly recommend the Humble widget for anybody looking to process payments on their own website.

In the end this fraudulent activity is only beneficial to the middlemen, in this case the fraudster and the 3rd party marketplace. For the developers, at best they are receiving the price of a normal purchase, and at worst they are charged for the privilege of being defrauded. From the consumer perspective its a bit more difficult, you receive the game for a lower cost, but run the risk of the purchase being revoked.

In summary of all this, I want to list the safe and secure ways of purchasing our game:

• Our webpage through the humble widget.
• Through Steam
• On GOG
• On the Humble store

If you purchase the game through any of these sites and you have any problem, please email in to support[at]factorio.com and we can help you out.

To break up what is otherwise a large wall of text, I have a small preview of a 0.15 feature - the kill statistics:



All in all its been a pretty good year for us here at Factorio. We have a lot of plans for our future, but as always, we listen to you, our community, for a lot of feedback on our direction. So drop in and give us your thoughts on our forum.

Hello. With Christmas nearly upon us, life in the office has slowed down nearly to the point of complete hibernation. But we still bring you your scheduled programme to give you something to look forward to in the next year.

For the past few weeks, I've been working on our shiny new blueprint library. We already introduced the library in FFF 161, but to briefly recapitulate: The blueprint library is a place for you to keep your blueprints, and it does two things for you:

• Blueprints that you save in your library are saved on your computer, and when you load a new save, those blueprints are still available in your library.
• In multiplayer games players can see each others blueprints and can exchange them easily.

My task with the library is to work on the GUI to make it nice and easy to use. Even though slpwnd said in FFF 161 that the UI is “(hopefully) intuitive to work with” – my initial reaction to the GUI was that it was a cruel and unusual punishment for our users.

One of my biggest gripes was that you had to open the blueprint and then click a button in order to copy it to the library. Getting a blueprint out was a similar process – open it, press a button and you get a blueprint item. On a certain level this made sense – items in the library are not items but rather special records – special in a way that they can be saved on the disk or sent over the network in multiplayer. From a UI point of view, however, it didn't make much sense.

With a bit of work, we've managed to make it so that you can simply move a blueprint from the library window into your hotbar like you would any other item. Converting the blueprint record into a blueprint item is handled mostly transparently.



This wasn't a completely trivial task (as if anything ever is): When copying ablueprint out of the library into your inventory, it might be necessary toactually download the blueprint from the player who owns the blueprint – andthat download can take some time. Our hope is that for most blueprints, the download time won't be much, so the download will be able to complete by thetime the user moves the icon over its destination. For big blueprints, however,this might be a problem. This problem is currently left unsolved – the libraryis very much a work in progress at the current time – but it's likely that we'll either display a progress bar in some corner of the screen, or we'll allow the user to drop the item, but grey it out and display a progress bar over it.

The library window itself has received a bit of a redesign since the last time we showed it in an FFF. Here is the current look of the library:



One of the changes is that it displays the blueprint name under its icon. Didyou know you could rename blueprints? You can, even in 0.14. Naming blueprintswill be very useful with the library, as you can stuff only so much informationinto the preview icon to help you remember which blueprint is which.

Another big change is that we changed the library to a two-panel window. On theright, you can see all of your blueprints – these are the ones that are saved onyour disk and follow you from save to save. They are also automatically shared with others in an MP game. The left panel houses other players' blueprints, and it's there you'll be able to get someone else's blueprint from.

A topic of great debate was what to do with the “Game Blueprints” section inorder to make it easy to understand what it's for and how it works. Game Blueprints are blueprints associated with the save itself – they are useful forsave-specific blueprints that you don't want to drag along with you to every save you play. They are also useful for server-specific setups: When a new player joins an MP game, they can be directed to grab blueprints from this section, rather than being told to hunt them from various other players (who may not even be on at the time!).

I'm still not completely convinced that this is the correct place for Game Blueprints to be. Game Blueprints are somewhat special in that they are tied to a specific save, and in this sense, they don't belong to the left panel. However, introducing a third panel would make the window too wide in my opinion. The interface is still very much work in progress, though, and perhaps we'll figure out an even better way to do it soon.

Seeing how much of a struggle a handful of GUI windows can mean for us, we've been looking for a UI and UX designer. And as a bit of an early Christmas gift,we actually found one! Say hello to Norbert, our official GUI guy.

Norbert is starting for real in January, but he has already spent a week with us. During his week with us he was mostly getting to grips with the rest of the team, but even so he managed to come up with an improved design for one of our GUIs – the blueprint preview GUI.



This is the window you see when you first create a blueprint, or when you open a blueprint item by right-clicking it. it really is the same as it always was, but rearranged.

Remember how I told you earlier in this article you could rename blueprints? In0.14, there is an icon next to the “Blueprint” title that looks like a refresh button. That's how you rename it. Maybe it should not have taken a UI designer to tell us that that was the wrong icon for the task, but at least someone finally told us.

Another point Norbert made was that the old GUI didn't make it entirely clear that you could select which icons would show up on the blueprint item in your inventory. And while we're at it, why not make the preview icon larger so you can see the icons better?

Like everything else, even this GUI is still a work in progress – the annoyingly green tick mark icon is my own creation – Albert will make it look good once he gets around to it, don't you worry. Still, I hope you will appreciate the improvements being done, and maybe Factorio's GUI will be less quirky one day.

So let us know if you have any thoughts and opinions you'd like to share over on our forum.

Hello. With Christmas nearly upon us, life in the office has slowed down nearly to the point of complete hibernation. But we still bring you your scheduled programme to give you something to look forward to in the next year.

For the past few weeks, I've been working on our shiny new blueprint library. We already introduced the library in FFF 161, but to briefly recapitulate: The blueprint library is a place for you to keep your blueprints, and it does two things for you:

• Blueprints that you save in your library are saved on your computer, and when you load a new save, those blueprints are still available in your library.
• In multiplayer games players can see each others blueprints and can exchange them easily.

My task with the library is to work on the GUI to make it nice and easy to use. Even though slpwnd said in FFF 161 that the UI is “(hopefully) intuitive to work with” – my initial reaction to the GUI was that it was a cruel and unusual punishment for our users.

One of my biggest gripes was that you had to open the blueprint and then click a button in order to copy it to the library. Getting a blueprint out was a similar process – open it, press a button and you get a blueprint item. On a certain level this made sense – items in the library are not items but rather special records – special in a way that they can be saved on the disk or sent over the network in multiplayer. From a UI point of view, however, it didn't make much sense.

With a bit of work, we've managed to make it so that you can simply move a blueprint from the library window into your hotbar like you would any other item. Converting the blueprint record into a blueprint item is handled mostly transparently.



This wasn't a completely trivial task (as if anything ever is): When copying ablueprint out of the library into your inventory, it might be necessary toactually download the blueprint from the player who owns the blueprint – andthat download can take some time. Our hope is that for most blueprints, the download time won't be much, so the download will be able to complete by thetime the user moves the icon over its destination. For big blueprints, however,this might be a problem. This problem is currently left unsolved – the libraryis very much a work in progress at the current time – but it's likely that we'll either display a progress bar in some corner of the screen, or we'll allow the user to drop the item, but grey it out and display a progress bar over it.

The library window itself has received a bit of a redesign since the last time we showed it in an FFF. Here is the current look of the library:



One of the changes is that it displays the blueprint name under its icon. Didyou know you could rename blueprints? You can, even in 0.14. Naming blueprintswill be very useful with the library, as you can stuff only so much informationinto the preview icon to help you remember which blueprint is which.

Another big change is that we changed the library to a two-panel window. On theright, you can see all of your blueprints – these are the ones that are saved onyour disk and follow you from save to save. They are also automatically shared with others in an MP game. The left panel houses other players' blueprints, and it's there you'll be able to get someone else's blueprint from.

A topic of great debate was what to do with the “Game Blueprints” section inorder to make it easy to understand what it's for and how it works. Game Blueprints are blueprints associated with the save itself – they are useful forsave-specific blueprints that you don't want to drag along with you to every save you play. They are also useful for server-specific setups: When a new player joins an MP game, they can be directed to grab blueprints from this section, rather than being told to hunt them from various other players (who may not even be on at the time!).

I'm still not completely convinced that this is the correct place for Game Blueprints to be. Game Blueprints are somewhat special in that they are tied to a specific save, and in this sense, they don't belong to the left panel. However, introducing a third panel would make the window too wide in my opinion. The interface is still very much work in progress, though, and perhaps we'll figure out an even better way to do it soon.

Seeing how much of a struggle a handful of GUI windows can mean for us, we've been looking for a UI and UX designer. And as a bit of an early Christmas gift,we actually found one! Say hello to Norbert, our official GUI guy.

Norbert is starting for real in January, but he has already spent a week with us. During his week with us he was mostly getting to grips with the rest of the team, but even so he managed to come up with an improved design for one of our GUIs – the blueprint preview GUI.



This is the window you see when you first create a blueprint, or when you open a blueprint item by right-clicking it. it really is the same as it always was, but rearranged.

Remember how I told you earlier in this article you could rename blueprints? In0.14, there is an icon next to the “Blueprint” title that looks like a refresh button. That's how you rename it. Maybe it should not have taken a UI designer to tell us that that was the wrong icon for the task, but at least someone finally told us.

Another point Norbert made was that the old GUI didn't make it entirely clear that you could select which icons would show up on the blueprint item in your inventory. And while we're at it, why not make the preview icon larger so you can see the icons better?

Like everything else, even this GUI is still a work in progress – the annoyingly green tick mark icon is my own creation – Albert will make it look good once he gets around to it, don't you worry. Still, I hope you will appreciate the improvements being done, and maybe Factorio's GUI will be less quirky one day.

So let us know if you have any thoughts and opinions you'd like to share over on our forum.

Twinsen here. As you might have read in Friday Facts #166, we wanted to do some combat balancing. First, to not bring the hopes of everyone up too much, this did not mean a combat overhaul. It means mostly tweaking numbers to make the game more fun and make some of the the weapons more viable. No new entities or new mechanics.

As I was doing the combat balance, it was clear the everyone has their own different opinion of how combat is, how it should be and how to make it "better". It's hard to please everyone, especially when you are just tweaking numbers.To try to objectively evaluate combat I used the following methodology. As the game progresses, the player's power increases through research, but so do the biters(mainly due to evolution factor).So I split the game in 7 sections based on research progress. Each section also has the evolution factor I tested biters will approximately have in an average game.

• Initial - 0 evolution
• Red - 0.1 evolution
• Red+Green - 0.3 evolution
• Red+Green+Military - 0.4 evolution
• Red+Green+Blue+Military - 0.7 evolution
• Red+Green+Blue+Military+High Tech - 0.9 evolution
• Red+Green+Blue+Military+High Tech+Production - 0.99 evolution

Then for each section I tested both offensive combat and defensive combat using the available guns and turrets and tweaked the numbers accordingly. While tweaking the numbers, I keep this in mind (this is not a complete list):

• Fun always wins: I prefer changes that are more fun and less annoying even if it means it could be slightly unbalanced.
• New weapons should be slightly more powerful than old weapons, to incentivize you to experiment. So near the end game, a rocket launcher will be better than the machine gun.
• Destroying biter bases is hard in the beginning and significantly easier toward the end game, to give the sense of combat power progression.
• Defending is not too hard in the beginning. I try not to put a new player in the situation of "you didn't prepare properly, you have to start a new game, because no matter what you do you will get killed". Then throughout the game you have to upgrade your defenses as the biters evolve.

So far, the changelog looks like this. There are many numbers that were tweaked and are not included in this list.

• Player regains health at a much higher rate, but only after being out of combat for 10 seconds.
• Discharge defense equipment pushes back, stuns and damages nearby enemies when activated by the remote.
• Decreased the size of Discharge defense equipment from 3x3 to 2x2.
• Greatly increased the damage of Personal Laser Defense Equipment.
• Flamthrower gun has a minimum range of 3.
• The flames created on ground from the flamethrower significantly increase in duration and damage when more fuel is added to them by firing at the same spot.
• Increased fire resistance of biter bases.
• Increased the health of player non-combat buildings.
• Increased player health from 100 to 250.
• Increased collected amount and effectiveness of Raw Fish.
• Increased the damage, range and health of biters worms.
• Decreased health and resistance of Behemoth biters.
• Doubled the stack size of all ammos.
• Tweaked the cost and crafting time of some ammos.
• Increased the damage of most player ammos. Greatly increased the damage and fire rate of Rockets and Cannon Shells.
• Increased the collision box of Cannon Shells.
• Increased Tank health and resistances.
• Added research for Tank Cannon Shells damage and shooting speed.
• Tweaked research bonuses and added more end-game research for military upgrades.
• Greatly increased the damage of Mines. They also stun nearby enemies when they explode.
• Biters stop following player after 10 sec of not giving or receiving damage if the player is more than 50 tiles away.
• Other minor changes.

As usual, these changes are not final and will probably change to some degree as we playtest more.
There are still many things to be done. We are always talking about more end-game weapons, so don't worry, the combat in the late-game will be even more worry-free.


There is also one thing that we always talked about trying to remove: turret-creep (destroying biters base building turrets closer and closer). This method is very powerful and usually doesn't cost anything. So far I believe that we did not find a simple, fun and fair solution. Ideas include: large power-up times(annoying and also weakens base defense); simply not allowing turrets to be build near biter bases (makes the player feel cheated); underground anti-turret worms (sugar-coated version of the previous idea). With the combat changes that were done I believe there is almost always an option to destroy bases without being forced to use turret-creep.In the end maybe your ingenuity and effort of building all those electric poles should be rewarded; If the player wants to do it that way, why not let him? Let us know what you think.

With Twinsen diving into the deep end in combat, I (Klonan) started work on a new scenario. A staple of the RTS genre is some sort of a tower defense mode, where mobs spawn and move towards a key building the players must defend, so of course we had to give it a shot in Factorio and see if it works. The traditional definition of a tower defense has the mobs follow a maze like path, and they do not attack the players towers. It works really well in these games due to the mob and tower varieties, interesting upgrade systems and styles, but without these systems here, the gameplay would not be too compelling.

So I opted for a more free form Factorio oriented style, that I'm calling the 'Wave defense'. The players will spawn in one corner of a square map, with biters spawning in the opposite. After some time, the biters will begin spawning for a period, and head towards the silo. After this wave, there is a short skippable intermission before the next more powerful wave starts.



At start of each wave, the rocket silo ticks up if progress by 5%, and on wave 20 you will have to launch a satellite to win. Each unit you kill along the way will reward your team with a bounty, which you can use to purchase any number of upgrades, such as turret damage, shooting speed and more.

The testing of the scenario fits in quite nicely with Twinsen's recent combat changes, it will take many hours of playtesting to find a nice balance to how difficult the scenario, especially in multiplayer. Still I am interested if any of you (the community members) had any different ideas about a 'Tower defense esque' level for the game.

So let us know if you have any thoughts and opinions you'd like to share over on our forum

Twinsen here. As you might have read in Friday Facts #166, we wanted to do some combat balancing. First, to not bring the hopes of everyone up too much, this did not mean a combat overhaul. It means mostly tweaking numbers to make the game more fun and make some of the the weapons more viable. No new entities or new mechanics.

As I was doing the combat balance, it was clear the everyone has their own different opinion of how combat is, how it should be and how to make it "better". It's hard to please everyone, especially when you are just tweaking numbers.To try to objectively evaluate combat I used the following methodology. As the game progresses, the player's power increases through research, but so do the biters(mainly due to evolution factor).So I split the game in 7 sections based on research progress. Each section also has the evolution factor I tested biters will approximately have in an average game.

• Initial - 0 evolution
• Red - 0.1 evolution
• Red+Green - 0.3 evolution
• Red+Green+Military - 0.4 evolution
• Red+Green+Blue+Military - 0.7 evolution
• Red+Green+Blue+Military+High Tech - 0.9 evolution
• Red+Green+Blue+Military+High Tech+Production - 0.99 evolution

Then for each section I tested both offensive combat and defensive combat using the available guns and turrets and tweaked the numbers accordingly. While tweaking the numbers, I keep this in mind (this is not a complete list):

• Fun always wins: I prefer changes that are more fun and less annoying even if it means it could be slightly unbalanced.
• New weapons should be slightly more powerful than old weapons, to incentivize you to experiment. So near the end game, a rocket launcher will be better than the machine gun.
• Destroying biter bases is hard in the beginning and significantly easier toward the end game, to give the sense of combat power progression.
• Defending is not too hard in the beginning. I try not to put a new player in the situation of "you didn't prepare properly, you have to start a new game, because no matter what you do you will get killed". Then throughout the game you have to upgrade your defenses as the biters evolve.

So far, the changelog looks like this. There are many numbers that were tweaked and are not included in this list.

• Player regains health at a much higher rate, but only after being out of combat for 10 seconds.
• Discharge defense equipment pushes back, stuns and damages nearby enemies when activated by the remote.
• Decreased the size of Discharge defense equipment from 3x3 to 2x2.
• Greatly increased the damage of Personal Laser Defense Equipment.
• Flamthrower gun has a minimum range of 3.
• The flames created on ground from the flamethrower significantly increase in duration and damage when more fuel is added to them by firing at the same spot.
• Increased fire resistance of biter bases.
• Increased the health of player non-combat buildings.
• Increased player health from 100 to 250.
• Increased collected amount and effectiveness of Raw Fish.
• Increased the damage, range and health of biters worms.
• Decreased health and resistance of Behemoth biters.
• Doubled the stack size of all ammos.
• Tweaked the cost and crafting time of some ammos.
• Increased the damage of most player ammos. Greatly increased the damage and fire rate of Rockets and Cannon Shells.
• Increased the collision box of Cannon Shells.
• Increased Tank health and resistances.
• Added research for Tank Cannon Shells damage and shooting speed.
• Tweaked research bonuses and added more end-game research for military upgrades.
• Greatly increased the damage of Mines. They also stun nearby enemies when they explode.
• Biters stop following player after 10 sec of not giving or receiving damage if the player is more than 50 tiles away.
• Other minor changes.

As usual, these changes are not final and will probably change to some degree as we playtest more.
There are still many things to be done. We are always talking about more end-game weapons, so don't worry, the combat in the late-game will be even more worry-free.


There is also one thing that we always talked about trying to remove: turret-creep (destroying biters base building turrets closer and closer). This method is very powerful and usually doesn't cost anything. So far I believe that we did not find a simple, fun and fair solution. Ideas include: large power-up times(annoying and also weakens base defense); simply not allowing turrets to be build near biter bases (makes the player feel cheated); underground anti-turret worms (sugar-coated version of the previous idea). With the combat changes that were done I believe there is almost always an option to destroy bases without being forced to use turret-creep.In the end maybe your ingenuity and effort of building all those electric poles should be rewarded; If the player wants to do it that way, why not let him? Let us know what you think.

With Twinsen diving into the deep end in combat, I (Klonan) started work on a new scenario. A staple of the RTS genre is some sort of a tower defense mode, where mobs spawn and move towards a key building the players must defend, so of course we had to give it a shot in Factorio and see if it works. The traditional definition of a tower defense has the mobs follow a maze like path, and they do not attack the players towers. It works really well in these games due to the mob and tower varieties, interesting upgrade systems and styles, but without these systems here, the gameplay would not be too compelling.

So I opted for a more free form Factorio oriented style, that I'm calling the 'Wave defense'. The players will spawn in one corner of a square map, with biters spawning in the opposite. After some time, the biters will begin spawning for a period, and head towards the silo. After this wave, there is a short skippable intermission before the next more powerful wave starts.



At start of each wave, the rocket silo ticks up if progress by 5%, and on wave 20 you will have to launch a satellite to win. Each unit you kill along the way will reward your team with a bounty, which you can use to purchase any number of upgrades, such as turret damage, shooting speed and more.

The testing of the scenario fits in quite nicely with Twinsen's recent combat changes, it will take many hours of playtesting to find a nice balance to how difficult the scenario, especially in multiplayer. Still I am interested if any of you (the community members) had any different ideas about a 'Tower defense esque' level for the game.

So let us know if you have any thoughts and opinions you'd like to share over on our forum

As Twinsen continues tweaking the combat, he started to complain about the “green fog” effect that is applied during night when the player’s character has nightvision goggles equipped. Nightvison in 0.14 works in a way that it reduces the darkness of night, and then draws a transparent green overlay. This washes out the colors, reduces contrast, and makes the picture pretty unpleasant to look at.



The first idea was to just make the green overlay be rendered around light sources, to reward players who put lights into their bases, by not making the base look worse with nightvision on. This didn’t look too good, and as we were trying to figure out how to improve it, other developers, especially artists, caught on to what we were doing, and started to provide their own ideas.

Next we tried to darken only the red and blue channels when nightvision is on. This will make the picture green without losing contrast and we can drop the green overlay. We kept “not applying effect onto lighted area” logic and it started to look interesting.


Albert wasn’t happy with the result though, so we continued experimenting. We added a soft green tint to lighted areas, and a bright green glow onto the transition between light and darkness. Then we added white highlights to light sources and it finally started to pleasant to look at.



We will stick with this version for time being, but plan to work on it more. We can’t agree if this change is for better or worse even inside the team. It seems everybody has their own idea about how nightvision effect should look like and what benefits it should provide to players. For example it would be nice to have goggles with greyscale effect that would highlight biters. So maybe heat vision?

Game developers usually boast about what great tools they have developed to help create content for their game. For Factorio so far there exists a single python script for creating sprite sheets, and the in-game map editor for creating maps, for scenarios and the campaign. We don’t have any database of all entities from which we would generate prototype definitions or anything like that.

There has always been a need for some tools to help the artists with the post-production of sprites, and so we have added a developer feature that allows the Factorio engine to reload any sprite sheet within a second of it being changed. Our artists are very excited about this, as they can edit a sprite in Photoshop, save it and immediately see their changes in the game.

Next we plan to add the ability to modify certain prototype values in runtime. This is again mainly intended for artists, but eventually should help balancing various aspects of the game, as we could just open a developer menu and try out several different values in matter of seconds.Hopefully both of these features are also going to be useful to modders, as it should be available to some extent in builds we release to public.

As always, let us know your thoughts and opinion on our forum

As Twinsen continues tweaking the combat, he started to complain about the “green fog” effect that is applied during night when the player’s character has nightvision goggles equipped. Nightvison in 0.14 works in a way that it reduces the darkness of night, and then draws a transparent green overlay. This washes out the colors, reduces contrast, and makes the picture pretty unpleasant to look at.



The first idea was to just make the green overlay be rendered around light sources, to reward players who put lights into their bases, by not making the base look worse with nightvision on. This didn’t look too good, and as we were trying to figure out how to improve it, other developers, especially artists, caught on to what we were doing, and started to provide their own ideas.

Next we tried to darken only the red and blue channels when nightvision is on. This will make the picture green without losing contrast and we can drop the green overlay. We kept “not applying effect onto lighted area” logic and it started to look interesting.


Albert wasn’t happy with the result though, so we continued experimenting. We added a soft green tint to lighted areas, and a bright green glow onto the transition between light and darkness. Then we added white highlights to light sources and it finally started to pleasant to look at.



We will stick with this version for time being, but plan to work on it more. We can’t agree if this change is for better or worse even inside the team. It seems everybody has their own idea about how nightvision effect should look like and what benefits it should provide to players. For example it would be nice to have goggles with greyscale effect that would highlight biters. So maybe heat vision?

Game developers usually boast about what great tools they have developed to help create content for their game. For Factorio so far there exists a single python script for creating sprite sheets, and the in-game map editor for creating maps, for scenarios and the campaign. We don’t have any database of all entities from which we would generate prototype definitions or anything like that.

There has always been a need for some tools to help the artists with the post-production of sprites, and so we have added a developer feature that allows the Factorio engine to reload any sprite sheet within a second of it being changed. Our artists are very excited about this, as they can edit a sprite in Photoshop, save it and immediately see their changes in the game.

Next we plan to add the ability to modify certain prototype values in runtime. This is again mainly intended for artists, but eventually should help balancing various aspects of the game, as we could just open a developer menu and try out several different values in matter of seconds.Hopefully both of these features are also going to be useful to modders, as it should be available to some extent in builds we release to public.

As always, let us know your thoughts and opinion on our forum

Hello,
Denis has joined us for another month here in the office, a small overlap with Rseding who is flying back to the USA next week. With the festive season upon us, Tomas and Kovarex have both taken some time off for a vacation.

As mentioned in a previous FFF, the implementation of the nuclear power will require some changes to the way the boilers currently work. Instead of heating water inside of their fluidboxes, and passing the slightly heated water along, they now output a to a seperate fluidbox. The initial result of this was a unworkable boiler, the small 1x1 size simply didn't play out to make the system intuitive enough.

So the solution was to increase the size of the boiler. The new size is 3x2, significantly larger than before, and the power output and fuel consumption had to be changed to fit this new size. This means we can say goodbye to the old 1-14-10 ratio of before. What is the new ratio? We haven't calculated it, but this is what a 0.15 set up might look like.



Kovarex has also made the first working prototype of the nuclear reactor and its associated mechanics. Each reactor has these 'heat connections', which can hookup connect with the heat pipes and boilers. Heat is than transferred through these connections, where it is used to boil the water into steam. This is all subject to change, but below is how a simple early nuclear power station could be set up.



This design is of course very inefficient, as the steam engines cannot use all the power available in the steam. Later designs would incorporate the steam turbines and cooling towers, for greater efficiency and power output. The heat pipes will also add a layer of complexity to the puzzle, while the incentive towards larger nuclear power blocks adding to the semi-fractal nature of expanding your designs.

Jurek was focused these days on producing a bunch of new rocks and stones with several different sizes, some new bushes and dry trees. One of the best new improvements is the decals system, a new concept that we are testing on this new biome.

The theory behind it is that even having different randomized tile sizes for generating a terrain, the grid still is somehow noticeable there, not to mention the restrictions that tileability produces for achieving the desired result.

So we came out with the idea of using big patches (decals) that are working independently off the grid, so by using them we can get a lot of detail for the terrain, and the artists don't have to be concerned about tileability at all. As a side effect, the square grid pattern gets broken and the feeling of the terrain is much better.

In the preview we have also the new destroyed railroad, something that Vaclav is working on, he prefers not to show it yet because is not 100% finished, but it is very showable, and fits very nicely in the red desert scene.



The most important thing in this preview, is that after several experiments, we decided not to render anymore in normal-resolution from Blender. Instead we are going to render just in high-resolution and re-scale the output bitmaps to normal-resolution using a bilinear interpolation. This gives a better result than a separate render output, it is sharper and saves us quite some time and many headaches. Next for the red desert will be finding the best rules with Kuba for generating the map, and hopefully that will be all. Honestly I (Albert) can't wait for this moment of procedural fine-tuning joy.

As always, let us know your thoughts and opinion on our forum

Hello,
Denis has joined us for another month here in the office, a small overlap with Rseding who is flying back to the USA next week. With the festive season upon us, Tomas and Kovarex have both taken some time off for a vacation.

As mentioned in a previous FFF, the implementation of the nuclear power will require some changes to the way the boilers currently work. Instead of heating water inside of their fluidboxes, and passing the slightly heated water along, they now output a to a seperate fluidbox. The initial result of this was a unworkable boiler, the small 1x1 size simply didn't play out to make the system intuitive enough.

So the solution was to increase the size of the boiler. The new size is 3x2, significantly larger than before, and the power output and fuel consumption had to be changed to fit this new size. This means we can say goodbye to the old 1-14-10 ratio of before. What is the new ratio? We haven't calculated it, but this is what a 0.15 set up might look like.



Kovarex has also made the first working prototype of the nuclear reactor and its associated mechanics. Each reactor has these 'heat connections', which can hookup connect with the heat pipes and boilers. Heat is than transferred through these connections, where it is used to boil the water into steam. This is all subject to change, but below is how a simple early nuclear power station could be set up.



This design is of course very inefficient, as the steam engines cannot use all the power available in the steam. Later designs would incorporate the steam turbines and cooling towers, for greater efficiency and power output. The heat pipes will also add a layer of complexity to the puzzle, while the incentive towards larger nuclear power blocks adding to the semi-fractal nature of expanding your designs.

Jurek was focused these days on producing a bunch of new rocks and stones with several different sizes, some new bushes and dry trees. One of the best new improvements is the decals system, a new concept that we are testing on this new biome.

The theory behind it is that even having different randomized tile sizes for generating a terrain, the grid still is somehow noticeable there, not to mention the restrictions that tileability produces for achieving the desired result.

So we came out with the idea of using big patches (decals) that are working independently off the grid, so by using them we can get a lot of detail for the terrain, and the artists don't have to be concerned about tileability at all. As a side effect, the square grid pattern gets broken and the feeling of the terrain is much better.

In the preview we have also the new destroyed railroad, something that Vaclav is working on, he prefers not to show it yet because is not 100% finished, but it is very showable, and fits very nicely in the red desert scene.



The most important thing in this preview, is that after several experiments, we decided not to render anymore in normal-resolution from Blender. Instead we are going to render just in high-resolution and re-scale the output bitmaps to normal-resolution using a bilinear interpolation. This gives a better result than a separate render output, it is sharper and saves us quite some time and many headaches. Next for the red desert will be finding the best rules with Kuba for generating the map, and hopefully that will be all. Honestly I (Albert) can't wait for this moment of procedural fine-tuning joy.

As always, let us know your thoughts and opinion on our forum