Hello time is flying by and we have started some serious preparations for the Steam release. Martin and Kuba are making sure that we have the Steam compatible builtds as soon as possible. This basically means that out automated build process time will be doubled (the Steam binaries are different because of linkage against Steam libraries). We haven't yet figured if all the experimental updates will go to Steam, or what exactly will be the model, but we are working on that. Albert is wrapping up the new gameplay trailer and based on the testimony of couple of "unbiased" testers you have something to look forward to. The trailer will be released when we launch on Steam. Ondra (Oxyd) has been working hard on the Pathfinder improvements. This time it is mainly connected to how our path cache works. He wrote the following to give you an idea of what he has been up to.

Hello everyone, we have been lucky that the New Years day happens to be on Friday this year. I am happy to wish you all the best for the 2016 both in the real world as well as in your factory worlds. Let the machines work smoothly, the pollution spread slowly and the biters be merciful.

Hello there, I just took a short walk around the block to get some inspiration for the Friday Facts (it has been one of those weeks where many things that are not really worth talking about took majority of our time). And it doesn't feel like winter at all outside. More like the beginning of the spring. This has been the case for past couple of winters actually here in Czech Republic. It seems like there is some truth to the global warming. This triggers interesting associations with Factorio in my head. Things like: "Hmmm, so maybe all this warm weather is really caused by us (as a society) producing too much pollution. We should switch to Solar energy ASAP before nasty creatures start attacking us". Professional deformation I suppose=))

Good evening, after a long long bug fixing period we have declared the 0.12.20 as a stable release. Owing to the great effort of all the developers, the open bugs count at the forums is at unbelievable ... wait for it =) ... 3 items. And one of these will be solved by us dropping support for the OSX Snow Leopard. So unless there are quite a few people who have been holding the bugs reports back (out of pure mercy with us of course=)) the game should be rather stable.

Hello hello, I hope that the powerful constellation of Friday the 13th has brought you good luck or at least good humour. We have seen quite sharp decline in some Factorio related statistics in the past days so it seems that the AAA titles invasion starts to be felt ... many of you playing Fallout 4?

Hi everyone, wednesday (28th of October) was a national holiday here in Czech republic (commemorating the creation of standalone Czechoslowakian republic in the 1918). Still, quite a few of us came to the office. The atmosphere was relaxed (even more than usual) and in the afternoon some people played the recently popular Keep talking and nobody explodes game. It is amazing to see how creative people can get (talking about the creators)=) IMHO this project shows a bright side of indie games scene: good idea + good execution => good fun. Back to the Factorio reality=) In the past two weeks we have increased the frequency of the bugfixing releases. There were a few silly bugs that were created while fixing other things. Thanks for bearing with us. The general mood is to just finish the 0.12 so we can get it off our plate. Kovarex + 2 - 3 people are still focused on the 0.12 while others are either wrapping up other smaller tasks or have started working on some 0.13 stuff already.

Hi everyone, another week filled with bug fixing, technology sprites work and general small issues, has passed. Our internal wish to get the 0.12 stable before 0.12.10 release just flew by laughing merrily. But that will not stop us. Step by step we continue=) The Wedding The title says it all. Tomorrow is Kovarex's wedding day. The ceremony is going to take place in the countryside and we will stay at the venue till the next morning - afterparty, playing board games and stuff=). Kovarex is already at the spot doing some preparations but if there is a message you would like to leave him, you can use the comment thread on the forums . No Greenlight So there will be no Steam Greenlight. We were in touch with one of the Valve employees and they made us an offer to enter Steam directly without going through the Greenlight process. This is something that we will gladly do because that means less things to worry about (we have quite some of that already). Speaking about Steam. We have drawn quite good inspiration from community forum discussions following past Friday Facts episodes. Namely the ones regarding when to enter Steam and how to promote the game . So as for entering the Steam, we have settled to aim for January 2016. As usual this is a plan and plans can change (especially when it comes to Factorio release announcements=)). Gameplay preview Regarding game promotion, we have decided to give it a shot and create a gameplay footage / preview video. Basically it would be a short (less than 2 minutes) video that shows basic game mechanics and how the game is played. If the trailer gives a taste of Factorio (and it is a first video we expect potential player to see) this gameplay preview should be the 2nd video and it will give him a "glimpse on the menu". At the moment we are in the planning stage but we will make sure to keep you up updated. Also we are getting in touch with some professional (Indie) game promoters to see if we could work together and give more shine to Factorio Steam release. If you have more recommendations regarding our planned Steam launch please share them (ideally on the forums). It is a great source of inspiration for us. Community spotlight I would like to start a new section here in the Friday Facts when we ocasionally introduce interesting content from the community. The thing is that the Factorio community-generated content (mods, youtube videos, tools, suggestions and tutorials) is getting quite big and it might be of a good value to people who are not up to date with what is happening. It will of course be biased by our preference=) So here we go. For today I would like to mention an interesting video series made by Negative Root. Negative Root is very active Youtuber with quite some Factorio content. What I especially like is the variety in the content he produces. He has an extensive tutorial series (also higly recommended), break the game series, couple of regular Lets plays etc. The one I have chosen for today is his Factorio Fixit series. So the idea is that Root Negative "visits" other people's factories, inspects them, improves them and also gives ideas on how to do things more efficiently. And this whole process is recorded. Something like Factorio public consulting. Root Negative has played the game a lot (a LOT). So he has quite some experience to share (judging from the videos much more than me for instance :D). Making a series like this gives a great value for the person who made that factory as well as for general audience who is interested in improving their factory building skills. The series has been running for a long time so there is plenty of "study material" there. Below is a recent episode where he is dealing with building blue science setup. Team update On monday, Vaclav has reinforced our GFX team as we have announced in the past. So we are now 10 people sitting at the office. Actually, yesterday we went to take a few photos of the team. The team page update is coming soon. Stay tuned. That is it for today. The commenting thread is where you expect it .

Hi folks, so this has been one of those weeks when it is suddenly Friday afternoon and you are wondering where did the week go. Fortunately there are the Friday Facts to put myself together and retrace the events=)) The Grey Zone At the moment we are kind of in a grey zone. The 0.12 bugs are more or less solved (though there is still some "popping up" of new issues) and the full speed work on 0.13 hasn't started yet (actually not even slow speed work has started). We are finishing with little (often technical debt) tasks from our internal lists. There is just ton of issues like: fixing locale fonts, updating tips and tricks, writing tests for compilcated existing functionality, tweaking our automatic deployment and testing setup, auto-generating the Lua API documentation, fixing sound glitches, etc. The list goes on. One of the tasks has been related to our headless binary. This is the binary to run on linux servers without graphics card. This is now available in the downloads section alongside other releases. There is a small convenience difference where by clicking the download, the resulting download link (from one of our cdn servers) is valid for 10 minutes (instead of regular 10 seconds) so the server owner can conveniently copy this url and download the game directly from the server. In the future we plan to have the updater work for headless servers as well so that will make things even more convenient. The good news is that the list of these little tasks is getting shorter. Also we have already more or less agreed on distribution of big tasks for the 0.13. These have been discussed in the past and are also visible at our roadmap. Some work on these should start already next week. We will keep you up to date=)

Hello, quite unsurprisingly, yet another week has passed (in my experience this has always happened so far:)) and it is the FFF time. Our almost almost fully automatic release mechanism (now only missing the big red button) has taken care of the latest 0.12.8 release which is looking quite good so far (only 17 outstanding issues! YaY!). We have shifted the release day to the middle of the week (this time wednesday) to have some time for a hotfix in case something goes wrong. And also to alleviate the "Friday release stress". However, long ago are the times, when release would take hours to prepare then some more time to test and then waiting with fingers crossed if some serious issue doesn't appear in bug reports. Now all the process is automated, tests give us kind of security than things won't go horridly wrong, so we can just start the script in the evening and go home :)

Hi everyone, the summer is slowly preparing to pack its stuff. Overall weather is still very pleasant however mornings and evenings are getting colder and days are getting shorter. So is our list of bugs on the forum actually! With current 0.12.6 there are about 30 open bug reports in total. The pendulum is swinging back and forth all the time but it seems like a good start for having stable release within few iterations. At the moment it looks like that development work for the release will be done before the gfx work - we are commited to ship a full set of new technology and equipment sprites for the stable 0.12.