• Added Spidertron and Spidertron remote.
  
• Added Freeplay crash site.
  

• Added polluted water visual effect.
  
• Added biter base decoratives.
  
• New visual effects for the atomic bomb.
  

• Significantly reduced the volume of robots deconstructing and entity destroyed alert.
  
• Reverted mining drill sound to the 0.17 version with high pitched part removed.
  
• Reverted inserter, furnace and assembling machine sounds to the 0.17 version.
  
• Changed the checkbox click sound (based on dropdown open sound).
  
• Changed the "green button sound" to have a normal button sound.
  

• Added EnemySpawnerPrototype and TurretPrototype properties: spawn_decoration and spawn_decoration_on_expansion.
  
• EntityPrototype water_reflection can now be defined inside graphics_set.
  
• Added ExplosionPrototype properties: Explosion prototype: scale_animation_speed, fade_in_duration, fade_out_duration, scale_in_duration, scale_out_duration, scale_end, scale_increment_per_tick, scale_initial, scale_initial_deviation, scale, and scale_deviation.
  
• ParticleSourcePrototype particle is now optional, added smoke property.
  
• Added ProjectilePrototype properties: speed_modifier and turning_speed_increases_exponentially_with_projectile_speed.
  
• Added LightDefinitionItem::source_orientation_offset.
  
• Added DecorativePrototype::decal_overdraw_priority.
  
• Added AreaTriggerItem::show_in_tooltip.
  
• Added 'set-tile' and 'camera-effect' trigger effects.
  
• Added CreateDecorativesTriggerEffectItem properties: apply_projection and spread_evenly.
  
• Added CreateExplosionTriggerEffectItem properties: max_movement_distance, inherit_movement_distance_from_projectile and cycle_while_moving.
  
• Added DamageTriggerEffectItem properties: vaporize, lower_distance_threshold, upper_distance_threshold, lower_damage_modifier and upper_damage_modifier.
  
• Added PlaySoundTriggerEffectItem properties: min_distance, max_distance, volume_modifier, audible_distance_modifier and play_on_target_position.
  
• Added ProjectileAttackParameters::projectile_orientation_offset.
  
• Added build_blueprint_small, build_blueprint_medium and build_blueprint_large to utility sounds.
  
• Renamed build_big utility sound to build_large.
  

• Added LuaEntity::autopilot_destination, vehicle_automatic_targeting_parameters and time_to_next_effect read/write.
  
• Added LuaItemStack::connected_entity read/write.
  
• Added LuaEntity::is_entity_with_force, is_entity_with_owner and is_entity_with_health read.
  
• Added LuaEntity::spawn_decorations().
  
• Added on_cutscene_cancelled, on_player_configured_spider_remote and on_player_used_spider_remote events.
  
• Added optional spawn_decorations parameter to LuaGameScript::create_entity.
  

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

Read this post on our website.

Hello,
the atmosphere in the last week was kind of special. We experienced the feeling of the final release being on the horizon many times. And we were shown that it isn't the case time and time again. So it feels very special when it is actually becoming reality. We were trying to be especially careful with any last minute changes to make sure that we don't introduce major bugs into our precious 1.0 release. The image of all the players having the game crash on some simple stupid bug is horrifying.


People thanked us on many occasions for the hard work we do. It helped lift our mood in many of the desperate moments, when bugs and problems were piling up and we didn't see the end of the tunnel. We don't say it often enough, but the support from your side has been incredibly helpful throughout the years.

• We thank all who helped us to save the game before it could even start by supporting the IndieGoGo campaign back in 2013.
• We are grateful for all of the 18,855 bug reports. They were invaluable feedback that helped us reach our level of game stability.
• We value almost all of the feedback to our FFF and game releases. A lot of game improvements came out of it.
• We appreciate the work and creativity that went into creating the 5,603 mods. It certainly extends the potential for a lot of people, and of the ideas became great inspiration for us.
• All the online videos, articles and streams were immensely helpful to spread the word.
• We thank all who helped with the Crowdin translations, allowing the game to be played in a lot of different languages without us having to manage it directly.
• We are grateful that people spontaneously helped to manage the Wiki and created some great tools, like calculators, cheat sheets or blueprint databases.
• We value the effort put into organising events, like fMMO, Clustorio etc.
• We appreciate that our community is very civilised, and people who contribute are generally nice to each other, and keeping the criticism on the constructive side.
• And, lastly, we would like to thank all of you who bought the game, and allowed all of this to happen.

It took us 8.5 years. It has been an incredible ride and we have arrived at the destination!
Factorio is leaving early access. This opens the game up to all the players who just don't play early access games, the same with reviewers who only cover finished games, which is very understandable.
For this special occasion, we created a launch trailer. It tries to capture the story of the development in 45 seconds.



Since the main Trailer is kind of timeless, we updated it to the 1.0 state of the game.



When we released pretty much all the content in 0.18, there was nothing left for 1.0 other than the formality of "it is complete".The crash site, nuke, alien decoratives and polluted water are awesome, but not too impactful... As a result, we really wanted to add something to make the release special.

• It is a vehicle that can be driven, or remotely controlled.
• It can traverse obstacles and small bodies of water.
• It has a built-in radar, and you can place blueprints in its vicinity.
• It has an equipment grid, so it can build with construction robots and use combat equipment.
• It has four rapid-firing rocket launchers that can shoot automatically.
• It can be researched very late in the game (all science packs except Space).
• Multiple of them can be deployed at the same time, but each requires its own linked controller.

This all means it can be used as a tank upgrade, a less automated version of artillery, or a builder/repairer. We look forward to seeing what other uses you can invent.

We haven't added it earlier as we saw it just as a gimmick without much contribution to the gameplay mechanics. This changed rather recently, when we had the idea of the remote control combined with the equipment grid. So we decided to extend our already crazy todo list, and add it as a last minute bonus.

We were doing the best we could, to fix all the relevant bugs and issues for the 1.0 release, but we just couldn't do everything. So we had to prioritise just the more critical stuff. We would still like to address all of the remaining issues as there are currently around 150 bugs on the forums and around 80 internal tasks to be solved. The plan is to eventually go through all of them, and decide on how to resolve each one.

A good example is, that we have a "continue" button, but it just ignores multiplayer. You press continue automatically just to find out, that you are building alone for half an hour. It is my (kovarex) personal story actually.

This means, that 1.1 is going to just focus on filling the most obvious gaps in our existing feature set, not on adding some new major content.

When we started with the Friday facts, it was at a time when we worked a lot, but if there wasn't any release for a while, people were starting to ask whether the game is still being worked on. So this was our first motivation. Eventually we learned many additional advantages of the blog, other than it being just a dead mans switch.

• It established the communication channel between us and the community.
• It started to be an internal every-week milestone to get something into a presentable form.
• In some cases it even motivated us to add a cool last minute feature to make the topic feel more complete. (This is how the undo and copy-paste feature was created for example)
• It became a great archive of the evolution of the game throughout the years. Opening old posts is like reading our own diary.

It became an every Friday habit for us and some of our players too, but we believe now is the right time to stop. There will hardly be a better moment to do so. It should be very understandable that we need a break, and we also need the freedom to think about the long term without the obligation to cut it into small chunks for FFF.

Since you can't expect weekly posts from now on, we wanted a way for you to be notified once we have something special to say. Feel free to give us your email address so we can let you know.

For now please enjoy the game, and we’ll be back!

• Electric mining drill graphics now fill bounding box more accurately.
  

• Fixed hovering over unit that was going toward an entity would crash if the entity was destroyed. more
  
• Fixed crashes/desyncs related to various different operations on a shelf of a player that just joined, and his blueprint shelf meta-data hasn't be synchronized yet.
  
• Fixed crashes/desyncs related to swapping item with a blueprint/book in the blueprint library that is not yet fully transferred into the game. more
  
• Fixed electric mining drill circuit connection graphics.
  
• Fixed crash when picking up something using the quickbar while setting up a blueprint from the inventory.
  
• Fixed that blueprint book GUI was scrolling to the top whenever something was done. more
  

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

Read this post on our website

With 1.0 approaching, we want to ensure that the day of the launch goes as smoothly as possible, and shows the game in the best light. Something that would really work against that would be if the update broke a bunch of mods and disgruntled all of our most dedicated players. So we are making efforts to ensure that mods that work in 0.18, will work without any update needed in 1.0.

Theoretically this isn't so difficult, as the 0.18 release structure has meant that mods have maintained compatibility with all the latest changes, and in essence 1.0 will just be a small update of 0.18. However it does take a bit of special handling:

• 1.0 will allow mods marked for 0.18 to load.
• The mod portal will show 0.18 mods when browsing in 1.0.

Avoiding breaking mods also means we need to be very careful with changing anything, even something as simple as renaming a sprite can break dozens of mods. I think we never realised how easy it is to break mods before we started this new release structure. Big apologies and big thanks to all the modders who stuck with us through these breakages.

We hope that what this effort means, is that on the day of 1.0, players new and old alike can login to the mod portal and have a very large catalog of mods they can enjoy right away, and that the modders can relax and enjoy the game instead of worrying about updating all their work. However, we cannot say 100% that all mods will work, it is possible one of the features in 1.0 (like the new nuke or alien decoratives) will break some mods.

In FFF-350 we presented the new electric mining drill graphics, and released them in 0.18.31 shortly after. However, we hadn't realized soon enough that it had some issues...

The most obvious one is the tile overlapping. All of our graphics try to find a balance between overlapping the tile a lot to be aesthetically nicer, and not overlapping the tile at all to be technically correct and readable.



With the electric mining drill we got bolder than with other entities, and overlapped the tile more. This problem got massively strengthened by the fact that the mining drill outputs directly to a belt, so it doesn't even have the typical gap where inserters usually are.

The secondary but related issue would be that the entity is no longer as recognizable as before. We attribute that mostly to the new height that the drill has, as it gets a bit overcomplicated, and not as clear what the shape of the entity is.



Originally the main reason to add the higher structure was because we wanted to create a much more complicated miner movement (both horizontally and vertically), and to fit pipe connections easily. However the miner movement was too complicated so we didn't do it, and the pipe connections are kind of an edge case.

We could have addressed just the issue of overlapping the tile above the mining drill, but that would already cost some amount of time and we felt like we could go one step further.



It was tight in time, which is why we're presenting it now, but we decided to move the whole structure down, so the mining mechanism would move on ground-based rails. After a lot of effort put into moving things, redesigning parts of the drill, and reworking the pipe connections, Ernestas has arrived to the new version.



The electric mining drill is one of few entities that the player sees from the very first stages of the game, all the way to the end. Long story short, it's a really important entity so we wanted to get it right.

We were happy with the concept of the mining drill redesign for the "aggressive ground penetration" against the "gentle harvesting" of the original, but we traded away a few of the good parts about the old mining drill graphics, like clarity and identifiability. This revisit tries to fix that, and we believe now it's good.

The new mining drill graphics have been released with 0.18.44 (today). As it could break some mods, we wanted to push the new graphics as soon as possible to give mod authors a chance to fix their mods for 1.0.

As many graphics have changed over the years, more and more related technology icons became outdated. We didn't have enough time to do a complete rework of the technology icons as we did with the item icons, but we could at least update the clearly outdated ones.



Even though a simple one, Factorio does have a story - An engineer crashes on a planet and through building a complex factory, becomes capable of launching rockets back into space (...or builds the sickest combinator contraption instead).

This story is quite well represented - building a crazy factory in the process, ending with an epic rocket launch - except the beginning is not. The player character just appears in the middle of the map with nothing showing where they came from.

When we were working on the crash site for the NPE, we created the special assembling machines, a lab, a power generator and chest capsules.



The NPE has been removed, but Albert didn't design just those special ship chunks. The central piece of the composition was always meant to be a large spacecraft - but per usual, we didn't have enough time to finish it, and since it wasn't really gameplay breaking, we released 0.17 without it.

Although the NPE was removed and its custom crash site entities remained only for modding and custom scenario use, we would like to finish the main crashed ship.

The plan always has been that if we're investing a lot of time into designing the crash site entities, then we better use them for Freeplay as well, as that's the main game mode.

Recently Ernestas picked up Albert's 3D model and finished texturing it, bringing it to life, and to the game.



Klonan has also added a short skippable cutscene at the start of Freeplay, where the crash site is revealed.

The crashed segments are randomly placed, and there's a little bit of resources to be found in each of the ship segments (the 8 combined iron plates that until now just appeared in your inventory).

All of the crash site parts can be mined, but it gives no reward, takes a long time, and the crash site can't be re-built.

The crash site is spawned at the start of the game, so it won't show on pre-1.0 maps. The crash site will be released in 1.0, on 14th August 2020 - at 11am Prague time.

• Updated the technology icons.
  
• Updated the "Make a copy of blueprint" icon.
  

• Added simple credits gui.
  
• Updated the style of progressbar dialogs.
  
• Updated the style of map editor.
  

• Changed the default debug settings to only show grid and nothing else.
  

• Fixed that Blueprint books in the library didn't propagate its modded icon backups properly into the game.
  
• Fixed that Blueprint books in item form did loose its modded icon backed up state when saved between versions 0.18.37 and 0.18.42
  
• Fixed that swapping ghost cursor with an item didn't clear the quickbar selection immediately.
  
• Fixed PvP script error when starting a new round with duplicate starting areas. more
  
• Fixed PvP scenario not restoring character bonuses after respawn. more
  
• Fixed that most of the windows were not squashing as they should when they couldn't fit the screen.
  
• Fixed squashing of save name label in the load/save map dialog and load/save map progress windows.
  
• Fixed that biters could attack entities beyond their attack range. more
  
• Fixed crash when opening train gui through non-locomotive while in map view in latency state. more
  
• Fixed that the deconstruction planner was ignoring specified tile filters when removing tile ghosts.
  
• Fixed that the deconstruction planner with normal tile setting was ignoring tiles when the selection contained only tile ghosts + tiles.
  
• Fixed that the deconstruction planner with tile ghost filter selected didn't select (with whitelist) or ignore (with blacklist) the tile ghosts.
  
• Fixed that the deconstruction planner with tiles and rocks only and blacklist always ignored tiles.
  
• Fixed lights of entities just outside of right or bottom border of screen were drawn twice sometimes.
  
• Fixed drag-placing ghost item in zoomed-to-world view would drag the view instead. more
  
• Fixed that barreling recipes were generated for "fluid-unknown".
  

• Empty LuaPrototype collision masks will now return an empty table, rather than nil.
  
• LuaEntity::circuit_connected_entities and LuaEntity::circuit_connection_definitions return data for entity ghosts. more
  

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

• Fixed a crash when holding a blueprint book.
  
• Fixed that blueprint book in an item form didn't have mod-persistent icons.
  
• Don't drag map when in zoomed in map mode and building blueprints.
  
• Don't place map tags when building blueprints.
  
• Fixed crash in rendering due to game state being modified by buildability checks for drawing blueprint placement visualization on chunks in fog-of-war when zoomed-to-world.
  

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

• The tiles and entities filtering logic in the deconstruction planner is now independent.
  
• Selecting first entity filter switches tile mode to never when it has the default normal mode and no filters.
  

• Probably fixed problem with blueprint preview data not being empty when blueprint is empty.
  
• Improved layering of rocket in rocket silo, so it occludes inserter hands. more
  
• Fixed inventory consistency check failing when loading some saves. more
  
• Fixed inventory error messages in god and editor controller. more
  
• Fixed smoke might not be spawned from generator entity if its animation was too short. more
  
• Fixed underground belts and loaders would not draw half-belt with layers correctly. more
  
• Fixed localised strings in text objects created through script rendering API, would be untranslated after saving and loading. more
  
• Fixed that right-clicking blueprint book with empty blueprint being selected destroyed the whole book.
  
• Fixed that cut and copy created empty blueprint when nothing was selected with alternative selection type.
  
• Fixed that the mouse "cross" selection cursor was not present when selection tools from the blueprint library were held in the cursor.
  
• Fixed that the latency state of deconstructing using tool from library didn't take the tool settings into consideration.
  
• Fixed the alert tooltips showing all surface names in the tooltip when multiple surfaces existed.
  

• Added LuaEntityPrototype::rocket_entity_prototype read.
  

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

• Fixed clearing ghost from cursor would not clear quickbar selection. more
  
• Fixed blueprint book not shrinking when the last item was destroyed.
  
• Fixed crash when Lua received event of player selecting area to deconstruct.
  
• Fixed upgrading book by item would not work while being in editor. more
  
• Fixed biters not grouping before attacking an artillery outpost. more
  
• Fixed crash related to saving blueprint which has all the entities/tiles as question marks.
  
• Fixed desync when loading blueprint shelf with modded entities. more
  
• Fixed that swapping blueprint cursor into a non transferred blueprint didn't trigger the transfer.
  
• Fixed that cycling blueprint book in the shared blueprint library could also cycle the index for other players holding the same book.
  
• Fixed that cycling book wouldn't mark blueprint storage to be resaved, so the indexes would be lost if no other changes were done.
  
• Fixed a desync when returning to a multiplayer game while the book active index was changed in a different game. more
  
• Fixed that the action to put item into a blueprint library was not based on the latency hiding state of held item, which could result into the action doing nothing when the item held was not in the server state yet.
  
• Fixed that quickbar links into items contained in blueprint books in the player inventory didn't work.
  
• Fixed that it was possible to setup empty blueprint of other player if the original player was still having the quickbar link to it.
  
• Fixed that quickbar links did work only for the main inventory of player, so it didn't work for currently equipped armor for example.
  
• Fixed that LuaInventory.insert() didn't work properly for blueprint books. more
  
• Fixed crash when reassigning blueprint with non-even snap grid size to contain rails. more
  
• Fixed crash when holding a blueprint from the blueprint library while being dead. more
  
• Fixed that the info for selecting entities to be upgraded was mentioning entities that were marked for deconstruction, even when these are ignored by the upgrade planner.
  
• Fixed that ordering deconstruction didn't cancel upgrade order. 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.

The COVID pandemic around the globe is making it really hard to plan any event these days, and we were pretty optimistic just a few weeks back. However the situation here is now changing for the worse it seems.

The number of positively tested cases of COVID here in Czech has been increasing in relatively high numbers every day for the past two weeks, and the restrictions are again taking place. In Prague, face masks are required to be worn again where more than 100 people gather indoors, no events over 500 people are permitted as of last week, etc.

The current uncertainty together with the fact that at least half of the invited guests will not be able to attend the party (including some members of our own team), have led us into making a tough decision: we have decided to cancel the Factorio 1.0 release party we were intending to throw on 4th September 2020.

For those of you who already purchased a ticket(s) - the full ticket price will be refunded.

We hope there will be another opportunity to meet you all in the foreseeable future, but for now, please accept our apologies for any inconveniences caused. This wasn't an easy decision for us to make, but we believe it is the right one.

Over the last weeks and months, we have been preparing for the marketing of our 1.0 launch on the 14th of August (just 2 weeks to go now). Part of our plan is going to be sending out some free press keys to Youtubers and streamers and other content creators, in the hopes they will give the game a try, and help spread the word. To prepare, Jitka and I have been doing our research and compiling a list of suitable individuals to send a key to.

It is not a shocking fact to find out that Youtube is massive, and I think even if we spent a year everyday going through it, we still wouldn't find 10% of channels that we would like to send a key to. So we decided to start this simple form, that you can use to suggest your favourite Youtubers to us, and help us make sure they don't miss out on the review keys when we are sending them. If you are interested and would like to help us out, you can fill in the form here.

As we're done with redesigning graphics for 1.0, we could focus on other graphical improvements. Because we are so close to release, it's a good idea to focus on things that are unlikely to break the game and don't cost too much time, while having as large an impact as possible.

One of the biggest themes of the game is pollution. Considering that, it's one of the least visible elements in the game - you can only see it in the map view, and on dying trees. It would be lovely if we could make grass or decoratives die too, but that's something way too technically complicated for now.

But one thing that could and does show pollution is water! For a very long time we’ve had green water tiles in the game and we've used them in campaign missions.

Two water tile types, one or the other.

As it's 'just' tiles, it wasn't really feasible to use both of them - because transitions between them would be too abrupt. Not to mention water tiles would have to generate that way, and dynamically change as the map gets more polluted, leading into more technical problems.



Manually placed tiles in map editor.

However, since water has been updated to use a shader rather recently (FFF-323), we could make it look polluted dynamically.

After some typical posila dark magic of interpolating and converting the pollution values on chunks, we could blend between a primary and secondary tint of water tiles. This way it is also directly tied to the red cloud you can see on the map so it's consistent.


Polluted water slowly spreading.

The green water tiles still exist if scenarios want to use them, they just always show as polluted.

The pollution effect won't show if the 'Show animated water' setting is off, or if pollution is disabled in the map settings. Mods can also adjust or disable the effect it by changing the secondary water tints in the tile prototypes.

When the whole family of biters got their redesign, one of the plans for later was to give them their own biome in the world.

We had some temporary decal and decoration sprites prepared for a long time now, but somebody needed to add them to map generator. In the end, we didn't want to spend an awful lot of time on tweaking generator properties to place them just right, and also we wanted them to be created under new bases as biters expand, therefore we decided to add special logic to generate them as spawners and turrets are created. If your mod already has its own solution for creep, you can disable base game one by clearing spawn_decoration prototype property on spawners and worms.

Our initial naive implementation was placing the decals just randomly, and Ernestas turned the number of the decals created up to 11 to make them cover the ground the way he liked. That in turn made me (posila) unhappy, because in the middle of biter bases there were too many decals overlapping each other, that even your GTX 1080 would take notice of the increased workload, and a laptop with an integrated GPU would fall to its knees. That made me realize that artists probably wished our tile renderer had a texture splatting feature. But I wasn't really ready to change the specification for tile renderer yet again and rework it to add more new features into it this close to the release. We also really didn't want to add an option to disable the rendering of decals as that together with already existing option to disable decoratives would make terrain look completely plain.

So instead we changed the decal placement logic use Poisson-disc sampling, which produces points that are randomly placed but somewhat evenly spaced out from each other, and this fixed the excessive overlapping.

Once we knew it could actually be generated (including bases created by biter expansions), Ernestas could finalize the graphics. Mucus, mold, eggs, worms, all kinds of bodily fluids and slimes. You can see how this immediately looks much more like a 'nest'.



We decided not to bother with a migration as we need to focus also on other things (like fixing bugs), so existing biter bases on older maps loaded in 1.0 won't have these decoratives. We imagine a lot of people will want to start a fresh map anyway, and it's a nice identifier of a 1.0 map.

Both the polluted water and the biter decoratives will be released on 14th August in 1.0.

• Improved the blueprint grid visualisation, so it shows a rectangle instead of just the corners.
  
• Added blueprint grid visualisation when building in the world.
  

• Fixed cleaning ghost cursor. more
  
• Fixed crash when clicking a blueprint book upgrade slot with an upgrade planner in hand.
  
• Fixed navigating in a blueprint book item when opened directly from a quickbar. more
  
• Fixed that it was possible to put book into itself using hand->swap and clean cursor.
  
• Fixed that the hand functionality didn't work properly for gun and ammo and gave misleading error messages in some cases.
  
• Fixed "slice" property of animation definition was interpreted as dicing parameter, possibly causing large memory allocations. more
  
• Fixed that grabbing gun/ammo, swapping it with some other item in the inventory and pressing Q, gave a message of inventory full, instead of the item in cursor not being returnable to the hand location
  
• Fixed that Internal inventory stack transfer messages weren't specific enough, or not present at all.
  

• Renamed sprite and animation properties for sprite dicing from "slice", "slice_x" and "slice_y" to "dice", "dice_x" and "dice_y", because "slice" collided with property of rotated animation definition used for defining spritesheet sliced into multiple files. Sprite dicing is a technique of chopping large sprite into smaller ones to improve packing in sprite atlas.
  

• Fixed a typo (per vs pre) in the on_pre_permission_group_deleted event name.
  

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