Read this post on our website.

This wall of text is about my personal struggle with Factorio and life, feel free to skip to the next subject if you wish to see the actual Factorio content.

Since two years ago, I started to have these problems, it was harder and harder to force myself to work on the game and I didn't enjoy it that much. So I was looking for a way to have a break.

I know exactly when I disappeared from the Factorio development, it was August 26, 2019, the release date of World of Warcraft classic. The planned 3 weeks of playing kind of extended to be more like 3 months. One of the big reasons was, that I already had 60 level priest when I realized that tanks are so hard to come by, so I re-rolled a tank learned how to play it and levelled it to 60. It was a great fun to finish all the dungeon content and acquire the pre-bis (pre raid best in slot). This all just to find out tanks are far from a hot commodity when it comes to raiding, where you need just a few in the 40 people raid.

At this point, I thought, that I would come back to work with full power, but I just couldn't. When I tried to work, I had this strong, almost physical feeling of disgust, that was impossible to overcome. It was clear to me at this point, this is the the typical burnout situation. It is far from surprising after that many years of working that hard. The attempts to get to work were mainly motivated by guilt, and I knew well, that it is hardly a good motivation for anything. Trying to overcome it by sheer willpower would just make it worse, so I just stayed distant. The team was still working on its own and making good progress, so I was taking advantage of it and continued to have a break and spent more time with my family and on leisure activities.

As the situation was not getting that much better, there were even proposals of selling the company and getting rid of the responsibility for good. For most people, this would sound like a rational choice, but I was far from open to doing that. I generally don't like to do something just because it is the norm. The norm is to try to always keep growing exponentially, getting investors, expanding, getting more people, never stopping, never resting until you are the biggest and most horrible company, or you die trying. This approach dictates, that once you can't expand the enterprise, you need to sell it so others can grow it. And I don't like it. I didn't forget at all why we started working on this game. We wanted to make the game(s) that we couldn't find, and we wanted to have fun doing so. We wanted the game to be primarily fun for us, not for a focus group that has the most financial potential.

So, even if we faced the hypothetical decision : Either we sell it to a big publisher, or we shutdown the studio, I choose the latter, because you can't put a price tag on the fact, that we still own the game. In the latter case, we could come back to it any time when we feel like the time is right, instead of having to watch it being milked as micro transaction filled cashgrab by some company.

So, this was my lowest point personally I was generally not feeling well, and was lost in searching for purpose. One of the biggest reasons that I didn't feel well was, that I was becoming more and more lazy. When you don't have to overcome daily obstacles and annoyances, you become more and more lazy, until even the most basic things start to be huge pain in the ass, and you don't generally feel well, this is where I was.

In the meantime, I was occasionally playing some simple games with my 4.5 year old son (Earn to die and Into space 2). I was trying to find some nice cool games that we could play together, but I didn't find anything, feel free to give me suggestions in the comments. So I figured, that he could actually try to play Factorio.

I started a peaceful game for him, showed him how to move around, mine and craft basic stuff, and let him play. He was just running around and having a blast that he can mine trees and explore. Some other day, I joined the game, and built some small factory so basic technologies are unlocked and he could play around with that. Eventually he set himself a project to create a wall around the entire factory. He was focused and he kept at it, and 3 days later he came at me, and showed it to me, and he was so proud. Some time later, he played alone for a while, and than he showed me some very basic mining/smelting setups. It was very weird, but it worked. This is when I realised how great Factorio is for children, you can scale the skillset from very very basic up to almost infinity. He can't read, he didn't know numbers greater than 4, and yet he managed to play, and in a few days, he kind of recognized numbers up to 10 without even realizing. When I showed him how construction robots and personal requests work, he was super enthusiastic and talked about construction robots to everyone he met :).

Once he asked me "Father, what is this thing in the list of things I can order?" ... "This is atomic bomb" .. "Oh, I want to order it" .. "No, we don't even have it researched" .. "But, why is it in the list then, it doesn't make sense" ... "Hmm, you are right, it doesn't, I might actually fix that." So I opened Factorio source code after a long time, and made the change, that the filter and logistic request selections didn't contained things yet to be researched (unless you force-unlock it in the settings). I made a change to Factorio, and it felt good, and I started to want more, this is how I got from the lowest point.

I wasn't yet prepared for big projects mentally, so I did few other small tweaks, and I started to visit the office occasionally, which gave me more and more energy, I was not working because of guilt, I was working because of joy again. This is when I decided to face the big elephant in the room: the blueprint library. I was scared to approach such a big project in my previous state, but now I felt brave enough. I started working on it and I was able to work in full-power mode again, the work went forward fast. I had to overcome a lot of annoying obstacles on the way, which had positive effect on my overall laziness very fast. As the new BP library started to shape up, I started to feel something almost forgotten, I was proud of what I was doing, yay :)

The story of blueprint and the blueprint library development is quite long and convoluted, we mentioned it in 12 FFF already and it wasn't always quite right. But I believe, that we are getting to the final stage with the current rework. Small tweaks and improvements can be always done, but the general feeling is like "Yea, this works, finally".

The first mention of a blueprint (apart the blueprinting mod) was in FFF-16, 6 and half years ago!

Blueprints were obviously a great upgrade when you compare it to the state of just not having them. But everything was very plain and primitive from today's perspective. You had to actually craft the blueprint (for one advanced circuit) and the setup window was not the greatest:



Note that the confirm button was the blueprint button. The exact example of us doing GUI in the logical way but not an intuitive way.There was no way to change the blueprint once it was set up, you could only clear it (for the price of one electronic circuit).

Blueprints started to be important, so we added some very basic way to edit them and a way to include tiles and modules. (FFF-131)



Also, the blueprint book was introduced (FFF-108, it cost 15 advanced circuits and could hold only blueprints directly.



The fact, that you didn't have a way to backup your blueprints and you would just plainly loose them when you died, or moved to a different game was quite harsh, so we started to work on the blueprint library. Our first mention of it was in the FFF-156.

The first implementation was pretty rough and first shown in the FFF-161



Note, that the play button was the way to export the blueprint into your game as an item, so you can put it into your inventory and use it.

We, mainly Oxyd (FFF-170), quickly realized that this needs to be more intuitive, so the way it was exported was streamlined, you just drag and drop into your inventory.

https://cdn.factorio.com/assets/img/blog/fff-170-drag.gif

Another way of exporting was done secretly: When you held a blueprint record while closing the library window. It was seemingly useful as you could just grab it from the library and build, but once you were done and pressed Q to clean the cursor, the item was just spilled into your inventory. It was common at these times, that your inventory was slowly getting cluttered with random blueprints and you had to do a cleanup from time to time.

The Blueprint editing window was also improved:



It was "only" about connecting the belt/pipe/wall entities, but it added a lot to the understandability (FFF-211).



We knew there were still a lot of problems with the blueprint library and we were desperately trying to figure out how to solve them in various different crazy ways (FFF-249). But a week later, we agreed on a relatively simple solution (FFF-250 and FFF-255): From the player perspective, blueprints are always just items,and blueprint library is just something like a persistent chest. Quickbar, movements, stack transfers, everything works exactly like with items, and the BP library technical magic is done under the hood.

After some time (32 weeks actually), we presented a UI mockup for the planned blueprint library FFF-282.This was the big plan, but since 0.17 release was approaching and there were just too many other things to do, we postponed it.

In this version we added a lot of tools:

• Upgrade planner
• Copy/cut paste (with history)
• Undo

And we also extended the amount of things blueprint can handle -mainly trains (FFF-263):



We just made a few small tweaks for 0,17, to make the usage of blueprints less of a pain, mainly the ability to make a quickbar reference directly to the blueprint library. Using it created a new item that is copy of the BP library record, so you can build from it and pressing Q to clean the cursor just deleted the blueprint instead of cluttering the inventory.

But blueprint library still didn't get any real improvement.

In 0.18 release, I improved the blueprint setup window so it matches our new GUI style:



But the blueprint library still didn't get any real improvement.

So, if this buildup led to nothing, it would be pretty lame so as you would expect the blueprint library is now finally getting a real improvement.

It looks nice now and mainly fits the style of the rest of the game:



As it was agreed 2 years ago (fuck), the blueprints in the blueprint library are manipulated as items in every way. Twinsen forced me to agree on this way, and I wasn't that convinced at that time, but when I started to implement it, it was instantly clear, that this is way better than any other proposal. You don't have to learn anything new and just manipulate the objects exactly the same way you are used to and it just feels right.

There is quite something happening in the background when transferring Blueprints, as they are still very different types of objects in the inventory and in the blueprint library, but the user is now completely shielded from this.

All the related UI was unified to look the same, in current version for example, opening a blueprint book as an item looks very different compared to opening it in the blueprint library, and it even has different features.

Now we get to the new features, first of all, every blueprint tool has editable name, description and icons.For Blueprint book, upgrade planner and deconstruction planner, these icons are optional, but overwrite the dynamic icons shown for them. This might be mainly useful for books that you want to just have the same preview regardless of currently selected blueprint.

When the names and descriptions become more important to the user, he can switch to the list view.



Small thing that helps is that the upgrade planner now updates also related icons of the blueprints and books

https://cdn.factorio.com/assets/img/blog/fff-356-upgrade-book.mp4

It is something we wanted for a long time, and it was highly requested, so now, it is possible. The maximum depth is set to 6, mainly to prevent the UI from getting out of hand.



It is just logical, that iterating through the book contents works hierarchically now:

https://cdn.factorio.com/assets/img/blog/fff-356-hierarchal-scrolling.mp4

Since both the upgrade planner and the deconstruction planner are also kind of virtual and configurable, it just makes sense to allow them in books and the blueprint library. The preview of the book is changing when you switch between different types of objects.

https://cdn.factorio.com/assets/img/blog/fff-356-tools-in-books.mp4

Since blueprint manipulation is now always moving the blueprint around, never making a copy (apart the export-import workaround), we really needed this feature to make an explicit copy. The nice touch is that the copy is made based on the current unconfirmed edit of the blueprint, so you can make slightly modified versions of it quite fast.

https://cdn.factorio.com/assets/img/blog/fff-356-copy.mp4

My personally most wanted feature. You can change the contents of the blueprints while the name, description, icons, quickbar links and positioning is preserved.

https://cdn.factorio.com/assets/img/blog/fff-356-reassign.mp4

Rseding had a great timing with his feature of building blueprints directly in the game map.
https://cdn.factorio.com/assets/img/blog/fff-356-blueprint-in-map.mp4

These changes are being finalised and tested, so they should be available in the upcoming weeks just in time before 1.0.

• New high resolution tips and tricks images.
  
• Visual improvements to the tips and tricks GUI and the rocket silo stats GUI.
  

• New remnants for assembling machines and land mine.
  
• New visual effects for slowdown capsule.
  

• Changed sorting order of items: Same items but without data are first. Descending order of Health/Ammo/Durability.
  
• Units are now affected by the 'movement_slow_down_factor' defined in their attack parameters.
  
• Slowdown capsules slowdown factor increased from 50% to 75%.
  

• Updated sounds for assembling machines 1, 2, and 3.
  
• New sounds for mining and eating fish.
  
• New sound for spitter spawner, repairing robots.
  
• New sound for throwing capsules, grenades, combat robots.
  
• Various levels adjusted including new default sound settings.
  

• Fixed that force.reset() wouldn't clear saved research progress. more
  
• Fixed disabling, renaming or destroying unreachable train stop would not cause repath of trains in NO_PATH to go to next station.
  
• Fixed bonuses GUI showing duplicate entries if it was open when a research finished. more
  
• Fixed auto-launch would send rocket when there were still empty slots for payload. more
  
• Fixed corruption related to sorting module inventories.
  
• Fixed logistic robots would keep trying to feed chest which has item stacks over the stack size. more
  
• Fixed entities with wire rendering disabled in entity prototype would still have wires rendered in screenshots. more
  
• Fixed upgrading mining drill would disable input fluid box if resource was depleted. more
  
• Fixed pause game control input was not working when in multiplayer. more
  
• Fixed that the RCON interface would sometimes send an extra empty reply. more
  
• Fixed that groups of enemies wouldn't be distracted by a player in a car or tank. more
  
• Fixed tank icon having accidental border. more
  

• Improved performance of sorting inventories.
  
• Improved performance of inventory highlights.
  

• Added on_player_flushed_fluid event.
  
• Added LuaPlayer::hand_location. more
  

You can get experimental releases by selecting the '0.18.x' beta branch under Factorio's properties in Steam.

Read this post on our website.

We've been updating, reworking and redesigning many graphics, and the majority of entities have had high resolution for a while now. With 1.0 we're trying to be as "complete" as feasible.

As one of the less used items in the game, the slowdown capsule got kind of forgotten.

The slowdown capsule has multiple parts - the item icon, the effect, and the animated sticker that shows on slowed enemies.

We've already updated the item icon which sets some expectation for the effect and sticker, like what color should it have. The poison capsule has already taken blue, and green or brown would be very similar to rocket or nuclear fuel in the icon, so we chose orange.

https://cdn.factorio.com/assets/img/blog/fff-355-slowdown-sticker.mp4

It makes a lot of sense to also use the same graphics with different tints for the acid sticker from spitters/worms.

https://cdn.factorio.com/assets/img/blog/fff-355-acid-sticker.mp4

In a way the slowdown capsule is doing the same to them, as they are doing to you, except the acid damage. Take that, nature.

Resources got high resolution sprites for 0.15, but we didn't have time for the crude oil spills. The new ones are very similar.



We've been waiting with remnants for assembling machines as they were planned to get a redesign. It doesn't seem likely we'll be able to finish the assembling machine redesign before 1.0, so we've finally given them their own specific remnants at least.



The last missing remnant was the land mine, which didn't have high resolution until the icon update, so here it is.



With version 0.15.0 we released the first batch of high resolution graphics for many entities. In FFF-187 which announced 0.15.0 experimental and presented all of the new graphics, we stated:

"During 0.15 stabilization we will be adding more high resolution graphics, with the aim to do everything. Let's see how that goes, but seeing what we already have, we are confident we can get it done sooner or later."

You as readers of this periodical might have already heard the "stuff takes longer than expected" a few times, so "the sooner or later" is now, 3.5 years from then.

There are still more graphical updates coming in the following few weeks, but this is it for the high resolution updates.

• High resolution power switch graphics.
  

• Entities of other forces that are mined and brought back by undo are now set to have player force upon the undo application. more
  
• Fixed a desync when unit group radius settings are changed.
  
• Fixed that the final health value in the entity damaged event was wrong. more
  
• Fixed a performance problem with the production stats GUI. more
  
• Fixed the double slider with discrete values functionality. more
  
• Fix 'Train stop names' checkbox showing tooltip with no locale entry. more
  
• Fixed rendering of pipe pictures and covers when fluid box compound covers some fluid boxes without pipe pictures or covers. more
  

• Visual improvements to the bonuses GUI.
  
• Visual improvements to the tutorial list GUI.
  

• Gps tags are now surface aware.
  

• Added on_player_clicked_gps_tag event.
  

You can get experimental releases by selecting the '0.18.x' beta branch under Factorio's properties in Steam.

Read this post on our website.

To celebrate the launch of the game later this summer (only 6 more FFFs to go!), we have decided to throw a party! It is going to be at the same venue as our 1 million sale party (FFF-192). It will take place on Friday the 4th of September, 2020, at Žluté Lázně here in Prague.

We are inviting a lot of people to the party, such as other Czech game developers, Youtubers, and of course we will be there. As we want you (the fans) to be able to come, we have some tickets for sale. The reason to sell them, rather than give them away, is so that we don't have 'messers' saying they will come when they don't intend to. You can buy a ticket here.

While the COVID-19 pandemic might be 'over' here in Czechia (Czechs hold 'farewell party' for pandemic), the reality is, the situation could change with great speed. It is likely many won't be able to come due to travel restrictions, or we may even need to cancel the event. Please keep this in mind while you are considering whether to come.

We hope everything lines up in our favour, and we look forwarding to meeting you.

One of the leftover entities that didn’t get the love of a high resolution update yet is the power switch. It has waited this long mostly because we weren’t sure about its design and because it is not a very frequently used entity. However, after all this time we don’t have better ideas for the design, so we don’t want to change it significantly. And of course we have other higher priority things on our plate now, so reworking an infrequently used entity doesn’t sound too pragmatic.

Other than that, the 3D source file is a mess, unsurprisingly as it’s the first thing (FFF-102) I worked on for Factorio. Back then I was trying to create a texture painting system where we could paint RGB masks instead of grayscale ones, to control multiple channels at the same time.



Not only was this not as useful as I had thought (it was more efficient for me to just get used to switching between textures), but unfortunately this also caused something in Blender to go wrong, and the scene crashes frequently.

Luckily I was able to combine forces between Blender 2.8 where I could actually paint textures but couldn’t render, and 2.79 where I could render but not paint. If you’ve been even remotely following the development of Blender, your first question is probably why are we not using 2.8 as it’s been out for quite a while now.



Our workflow is quite specific and the early versions of 2.8 simply didn’t support all of the obscure features that we use. On top of it all, we have a lot of tools and scripts that would probably break in 2.8, and eventually it got so late in our development cycle that we couldn’t just afford to be insecure about our software, when 2.8 introduces all kinds of new changes. We’re very much looking forward to switching to 2.8 after 1.0.



Here we have a high resolution version of the power switch, including a destroyed version from our remnant specialist Dominik.By the way, the power switch was actually one of the first entities we had high resolution sprites for. I had prepared them shortly after finishing the power switch years ago. However the way we create high resolution entities was only really established a while after that, so it wouldn’t fit today any more.

We plan to release the updated power switch next week.

Read this post on our website

Earlier this week I received the English proofreadings from Altagram, and overall I integrated over 500 suggestions into the game. Most were small, such as replacing "can't" with "cannot", things like that. It was the exact sort of external scrutiny we really needed, as it showed some areas where we were quite inconsistent. It feels like things are in a better place now, even if the majority of changes are relatively unnoticeable.

However it was very noticeable to our great community translators on Crowdin. When we update the English strings, the translations have to be updated on Crowdin. For the last few days I've been working through the issues raised on Crowdin, and there was a lot of good input on that last 1% of the changes.

So this concludes the 'English proofreading' phase. Starting on Monday, Altagram will start proofreading the target languages, and filling in any missing strings where needed. This should take about 3 weeks. Since Altagram has their own translation system for their team, it isn't really feasible to include Crowdin in this part of the work, they will just take the content from Crowdin at the start of the process, and after 3 weeks, push what they have back to Crowdin. So any translation work by volunteers on Crowdin for these 3 weeks would be wasted. So we ask that, if you want to volunteer your time, save it for a little while.

Any work done on Crowdin this weekend will be included. We deliberately made this buffer between the English corrections and the Target proofreading so that the players on Crowdin have an opportunity to contribute before Altagram starts.

After Altagram has pushed their corrections back to Crowdin, we will start the 'Community review' part of the process. This is when the work that Altagram's team has done is reviewed by players and feedback is given to Altagram via Crowdin issues. This helps us make sure the terms of the translations are consistent with the established community usage, and ensure there are no contextual issues or misunderstandings.

Rather recently we’ve started working on trailers, and first of all we needed to decide what exactly we want to do with them.The goal is that we will have the main trailer updated to the latest graphics, as all of it is rendered by a Lua script. It of course won’t be absolutely the same, since many things have changed or have been added, but we are going to try to match it as close as possible as we are very happy with this iconic trailer.

We are very happy with the other one as well, but we won’t update the Gameplay trailer, at least not for now. This has multiple reasons - mainly that it’s created entirely by manual screen recording which is a lot more work to try to replicate, and the gameplay message of it is still relevant today. It’s not helping that if we were to revisit this trailer, we’d like to make some changes/additions to the voiceover, which would mean creating a completely new voiceover, as added parts would just not feel perfectly integrated.

Long story short, we’re aiming to prepare a new third trailer dedicated to releasing 1.0 instead. We believe a special 1.0 Launch trailer will have more impact than just refurbishing the existing gameplay trailer, as it is more interesting to provide something fresh, tailored specifically for its use case.

Last but not least, the release of 1.0 is a big milestone and we find it appropriate to give it its own trailer.

Of course I’m not going to spoil all the details of what is actually going to be in the new trailer, but there is one specific section I have so many feelings about, it’s irresistible not to share them.

Factorio is much more than just the result product. It’s been a journey, and a very unique one. I think the process of how Factorio has been created is so important to the result, that it’s worth giving it a special place in the new trailer.

More specifically, this will be done by a series of clips, ranging from Factorio 0.1, transitioning all the way to 1.0, showing how Factorio evolved over the years.

There isn’t enough time to go through all of the major versions as the trailer is going to be rather short, so I reduced the selection to versions:

• 0.1 as "the original idea";
• 0.6 as "the prototype" (0.7.0 was released with FFF#1);
• 0.12 as "the early access game" (stable 0.12 was the first version on Steam Early Access);
• 0.18/1.0 as "the version for launch".

It is technically possible to load a savegame from 0.1 in 0.18 if you go through the necessary middle-version steps. So I just started casually playing version 0.1, imagining I’d just continue it in 0.6, build a bit there, then jump to 0.12, and so on...

Note: none of the images below are final, as the trailer is being worked on.


A random factory being built in 0.1

When I had a small factory built I started to wonder how do I actually bring this to 0.6...

As always, it’s not that simple. While technically working, loading obviously does not handle all of the changes to the game, like map generation, entity sizes, or recipes...


A random factory being built in 0.6

I didn’t even bother trying to migrate after realizing that this would mean I’d have to show 0.18 with 0.1 map generation, and just tried to build a new factory in 0.6 and then again a new one in 0.12. This seemed like a reasonable approach as each of the versions works quite significantly differently, so the resulting factories should also be different, right?


A random factory being built in 0.12

Not so much. Since the trailer is short and quick, it’s absolutely critical to minimize confusion as much as possible.

This is why after a few days I restarted it all, and started by designing the final clip in 0.18, and going backwards, with the aim to have the factories look very similar. Of course newer save games can’t be loaded in older versions of the game, so I just had to take a screenshot of a factory with a grid, and try to replicate it in the older version by hand. Having played each of the versions earlier at least gave me a good overview of the differences between versions and made it easier to realize what should be highlighted in each.


A concept of a factory for the trailer in 0.18

When I create factories for screenshots (like FFF), I almost always use the /editor as things can be done very quickly that way. It wasn’t necessarily a surprise that 0.12 did not have the same editor as 0.18 does, but I was completely shocked actually experiencing the differences.


A concept of a factory for the trailer in 0.12

For example, console commands could not be run in the map editor, entities would get removed by X instead of normal clicking, blueprints would not place real entities, the game could not be unpaused in map editor (making placing items on belts almost impossible), and so on. And it wasn’t just the map editor, having gotten used to Cut/Copy/Paste, pipette and Shift+R and so on, the game suddenly felt extremely clunky to use and everything took much longer than it normally takes.

I placed in map editor what I could, and after that put a lot of items in chests to build more, and spent some time playing the factory, making science and generally making the factory run in order to have things move in the final video.


A concept of a factory for the trailer in 0.6

The process was getting progressively more difficult with 0.6 and 0.1, some things making me actually laugh instead of cry, or both. I’m not going to paste our complete changelog from the last 8 years, but I’ll just point out a few things that really stood out.

• The old quickbar was so confusing, I could never find things in my inventory, because they were hiding in the quickbar.
• Technologies did not guarantee that if you unlock something, you are able to craft it. No technology tree view without a search function made this even harder to find something.
• Hand-crafting did not automatically craft intermediate ingredients in 0.1, making crafting feel a lot worse.
• In 0.6, trains had to be connected by the "Connect rolling stock" hotkey after being built. I never knew this was the original purpose of that hotkey.
• When taking an entity in your cursor, it automatically rotated to be facing towards you (just like in minecraft) in 0.1... in a 2D game it does not make nearly as much sense though, and I was totally confused what was going on until kovarex explained it to me.
• I definitely forgot to build a vertical train station longer because trains didn’t stretch in 0.12 like they do now.
• Building rail signals and train stations is a lot of pain without the visualisation helpers we have now.

A concept of a factory for the trailer in 0.1

You can see the last few screenshots always share some features. This will be even better in their final version, making the video flow much better between these clips.

It felt quite interesting to just play the old versions after all this time. In a way it felt like playing a different game or some spinoff. Apart from the immediately obvious differences in graphics, the core idea of mining-smelting-assembling was still there, but with so many differences... Especially in the interaction, it’s usually small differences, but they really add up. This really made me appreciate what we have come to so much more, and in a way remind me that the details we’ve spent time on were really worth it.

Eventually I got through it all and I can now record clips for the trailer. You’ll be able to see them on 14th August.

• Fixed desync related to non-deterministic transport belt merging order when multiple merges happen in the same tick. more
  
• Fixed alignment of number input entries.
  
• Fixed that undo didn't remove deconstruction task to remove things in the way. more
  
• Fixed stray tooltip bug in the map generator window. more
  
• Fixed of saving control inputs related to mouse buttons 4+. more
  
• Fixed minor clipping issue. more
  
• Fixed that train fuel request were unreliable. more
  

• Windows with item and count to be selected have count/confirm buttons disabled when item is not yet selected.
  
• Logistic request related item and count windows now have notched sliders for 0 to 10 stacks selection. Different numbers that are not multiplies of stacks can be still written into the textboxes.
  
• Added an interface option to show both crafting and logistic windows in the character screen.
  

You can get experimental releases by selecting the '0.18.x' beta branch under Factorio's properties in Steam.

• Full English text proofreading and corrections.
  

• Fixed Trains gui listbox labels not being readable when hovered. more
  
• Fixed a crash when using LuaChunkIterator. more
  
• Fixed a desync related to placing blueprint with assembling machine with not yet researched recipe. more
  

• Windows with item and count to be selected are now merged into single window and double click on the item auto-confirms the window with the default count. Windows affected are logistic request, signal selection and (debug tool)infinity count selections.
  

• All mining results of resources are forced to be unlocked in the selection lists, even when recipe to create them exists as well. more
  
• Added ItemPrototypeFlags::always_show, which forces the prototype to be always visible in the selection lists regardless of related recipes.
  
• Added RecipePrototype::unlock_results bool (true by default). When set to false, the recipe doesn't unlock the item to be shown in selection lists.
  
• Added RotatedSprite::counterclockwise bool (false by default). Set to true to indicate sprites in the spritesheet are in counterclockwise order.
  
• Added CharacterPrototype::has_belt_immunity bool (false by default).
  
• Entities no longer require the order string be set when there's no item-to-place them.
  
• Added EntityPrototype::remove_decoratives. "true", "false", or "automatic". Defaults to "automatic".
  
• Added TurretPrototype::attack_target_mask and ignore_target_mask. more
  
• Changed roboport tooltip to not show robot recharge rate when the roboport has no charging slots. more
  

• Added LuaRecipePrototype::unlock_results read.
  

You can get experimental releases by selecting the '0.18.x' beta branch under Factorio's properties in Steam.

Read this post on our website.

Over the course of the past year, you have seen the team put a lot of effort into polishing the game to get it ready for a full release. There's no doubt this is the most important effort here: we're all here to play the game. At the same time, the website is often the first thing people encounter—and in for many, return to every week! Unfortunately, until this point the looks of our websites have been neglected. The current set of websites are a complete mishmash of styles that are not coherent and do not fit with the look of the game.


Which website am I looking at again?

We set out to rework the looks of our websites last year to make them harmonize with the final game.

Albert and Aleš worked together to design the new website and make mockups in a process not too dissimilar to the GUI work in the game. Of course, web technology is a different beast from anything the game uses. My task was to take the mockups for each page and implement them as closely as possible (my own creative liberties notwithstanding).


The process from original page to mockup to the new version

My approach to creating websites is conservative, and in a way mirrors the philosophy we use when developing the game. The Factorio website doesn't use a fancy modern JavaScript framework. I'm not a JavaScript hater. There is no harm in using JavaScript to make parts of the website interactive, and of course many web applications wouldn't be possible with it. But for a website like ours, avoiding the use of bloated JavaScript frameworks helps keep everything load and render quickly, and of course the website can be browsed without JavaScript as well.

To get the looks right, I set out to create a CSS framework to visually mimic the Factorio GUI style. Where possible, I avoided the use of images. This keeps the page fast and ensures it stays sharp on all resolutions and levels of zoom.

For instance, the buttons match their game counterparts closely, but are made only using shadows.



The only exception is the arrow facing to the right, which simply isn't possible to reproduce using CSS (I tried!). However, even then the performance is kept slick because the graphics for it are embedded in the stylesheet.

The layout for new pages with sleek grids is enabled thanks to modern CSS technologies like Flexbox and CSS grid (no floats, no tables).



At the same time, the mod portal also received the new design.



I also took the effort to unify login sessions between the main website and the mod portal, so you no longer have to log in twice.

This Friday Facts is the last time you're seeing the current (old) style, so enjoy it while it lasts! The new website will go live sometime next week. Once the new design is out, don't forget to click on the rocket!



My part in the website update was going through all the pages and updating the content, with a side goal of reducing overall the number of pages we have, either by merging pages or just deleting pages we no longer value.

Since 1.0 is so close, I decided to just 'pretend' that 1.0 is already out, and update the content to match it. That means there is no mention of early access, ongoing development, roadmaps, alpha releases, etc. This allowed me to clean up quite a lot of the pages, and make them much neater and more clear. This might cause some confusion until 1.0 is actually released, but that's just 2 months away now, so its not a big concern for me.

While going through the Presskit, I found myself wanting to include some of the 'cool' images that we've made over the years that aren't really screenshots. Things like the 2020 Rocket poster, or the Player and the biter giving a toast the new year.

Initially I thought I would just throw them in the Presskit page willy nilly, and that will get them out there. We have some really nice images that are good for things like Youtube thumbnails, Website articles and reviews, etc. so I really wanted them to be accessible at least somewhere. However having them only on the presskit might mean they aren't really discoverable to the average player or new website visitor.

So I decided to add a brand new page, the Artwork page. Initially I just added the nice flashy posters, the 2020 rocket, GDS cover, etc. but I figured there are lots of interesting images we can include from the years of publishing the FFFs. So I went through all the 350+ blog posts, to try to find the best images to put up on the page. I wanted to avoid images that shows old graphics or potentially confusing/outdated information.



It feels like this Artwork page is a great showcase of all the work we've done over the years, and I am really happy with how it turned out. Gathering the best images and compiling them into the single page, it started to seem like we really are reaching the finish line, and we will have some closure on the alpha development. Its been a long journey, and while we have a lot to look forward to with Factorio development, part of me feels a bit sad knowing this chapter of the game is drawing to a close.

• New beacon graphics.
  

• Changed fluid mixing to a simpler version that only checks when manually building most things.
  
• Added a flush fluids button to the pipe, underground pipe, and storage tank entity GUIs.
  

• Show only unlocked items in filter selection (inventory and quickbar) and logistic/trash requests. Other selections like signal selection/upgrade selection are not affected. New interface settings (off by default) bypasses this and allows the player to see all items as before.
  
• When selecting an element from a slot that has already value, the selected value is now going to be highlighted with the related tab (if applicable) selected.
  

• Fixed a few weird pixels in heat exchanger East sprites. more
  
• Fixed player mining animation had the backpack affected by the color mask. more
  
• Fixed mining drill status after disconnecting it from logistic network. more
  
• Fixed massive script time usage in Wave defense scenario after configuration changes. more
  
• Fixed that infinity GUI filters didn't list all items.
  
• Fixed issue with upgrading ghost of assembler with pipes. more
  
• Fixed new electric mining drill was missing integration layer. more
  
• Fixed crash when unit group is destroyed while its goto behavior is being updated. more
  

• Changed beacon graphics definitions. Graphics are now defined in graphics_set prototype property. If graphics_set is not defined, old animation and base_picture properties will be loaded instead for limited backwards compatibility.
  

• Added LuaFluidBox::flush().
  
• Added LuaPlayer::auto_sort_main_inventory read.
  

You can get experimental releases by selecting the '0.18.x' beta branch under Factorio's properties in Steam.