Hello Factoriods, last week we parted with a sad postcard of a biter dying after massacre on st. Valentines' day. Well they are tough fellas these biters so they got their claws sharpened, got some of their best boys together and set off for a revenge mission on the players' base. If you want to see them in action sweeping through a poorly protected oil expansion then check out the composition below. It was made by Albert, our fearless reporter from the Factorio planet. Now back to the Earth. Or more specifically Prague, yes that pretty city in the middle of Europe, where (among other wonderful things) the Factorio team is working day and night to deliver you the best build-factories-in-your-computer experience. And the day and night is not an overstatement. The "programming department" (me, kovarex and blue cube) usually works from something like 9 am to 7 pm. The working hours are VERY flexible. The part of the "working shift" is regular lunch with brainstorming at awesome local restaurant called The Carp in the honey (yeah no kidding - and they actually do serve the Carp in honey). The "art department" (Albert) has recently been in habit of working overnight. There are days when we chat in the morning after I wake up and he is just about to go to bed. Well the result is that sometimes (during very hectic days) we have a 24hr Factorio "development coverage". We do jokes about it, but it is definitely not something that we are proud or happy about. And actually it is getting better, in the early days we didn't do anything else then sit at home and code the game, nowadays the atmosphere is way more relaxed. Alright, so our efforts in the past week have been spent mostly on cutting down the massive list of bug reports that appeared after the Friday's 0.9 release. These efforts have culminated tonight by making the 0.9.1 bugfix release. While it fixes a lot of bugs we don't really expect it to become stable, namely after experiences from 0.7.x and 0.8.x generations :). Also some things are just not finished yet - like a migration of campaign or scenario pack to the new oil recipes. But if you were one of those who got corrupted saves from 0.9, chances are that this release will solve the problem for you. That is actually the reason why we tried to push it before the weekend. But as usual, no guarantees. We have been looking for someone to work on Factorio icons/items/technology images and graphic design in general for a while. It seems like we might have found such a person in the end. We will bring you more details when the deal is closed, for now it must suffice to say that the person is a she so Factorio could get a bit of a womans touch :). Also the rumors are that new assembling machine graphics are just around the corner, so stay tuned... No comments, no fun. Tell us what you think on our forum.

Hello, some people spend St. Valentines with their wives, some people spend St. Valentines with their girlfriends and some people spend St. Valentines making the Factorio release. The last group is us. We have been preparing the 0.9 release for a while now. Originally it was planned for the end of January, but we took the two extra weeks. That seemed like a lot of time back then:) Last weekend all looked smooth and easy, all the features were finished, we started playtesting. No major issues, the oil industry felt like a refreshing addition to the game, blueprints were blueprinting and the sky was blue (literally). However somehow during the week it started falling apart - a lot of small bugs came up, some more balancing, half a day here, half a day there and BANG suddenly it was Friday morning. With the last graphical piece (the chemical plant) still on the way, some non-trivial reworks done yesterday and a staring list of bugs on the forum the outlook was bleak. But we put ourselves together and made the sprint necessary to deliver the 0.9.0 as promised. The 0.9.0 will probably be "very experimental" which is a diplomatic way to say that we expect a lot of bugs to come up:) Heck, we were fixing the bugs all day long. We considered to postpone the release for a couple of days but we promised to deliver it this Friday and a lot of people were waiting for it joking about cancelling their dates to play the game, etc. So it is out now, if you are brave enough then go ahead and try it. The oil industry brings the oil spills, the pumpjacks, the refineries and a recipe redesign. We took the opportunity to do some more significant changes to other existing recipes as well. We went after having more "meaningful" intermediate products than before. The car will require an engine, the robots will need a flying robot frame, the rocket is made from the explosives and the list goes on ... . The feeling from the internal playtesting was more interesting gameplay compared to before when everything was made from the iron plates and circuits. However the result will be that most of the existing factories will just stop working. You can either take it as a challenge to get it up the speed or just start the new game :) Albert hasn't slept that much in the past few days. Last night he hasn't slept at all while he was finishing the chemical plant. Even today instead of taking the rest he gathered his energy and prepared a special Valentine's composition. It is called "Saint Valentine's Day Massacre". Today is no exception, we are waiting for your comments at our forum.

Hi there, after feeble weather during the Christmas it finally feels a bit like winter here in Prague. There is the snow outside, the air is fresh and some warm clothing is a must. When we add a new terrain into the game (and we will) it will definitely be the snow. Just imagine all those machines standing on the snow and puffing the smoke, furnaces glowing with fire and maybe even having traces of snow all over them. I am already looking forward to it:) All the big programming tasks for the 0.9 are finished and now we are working our way through our never ending issues list. They are either bugfixes, polishing tasks or small features. We have added couple of neat things, for example: better visible entities on the map, the "copy entity settings" feature (previously shift build) or possibility to have custom directories in the saves directory. In the beginning of the week we had around 30 closed and 30 opened tickets. Now we have over 50 closed tickets but 35 opened ones. The new ones keep springing up like mushrooms. The funny thing is that quite a few of these are more than 6 months old and they just keep "travelling across the releases" (when it is time to make the release we move all the unfinished issues to the next one). And of course in case we would actually finish everything, there is always a huge repository of ideas and suggestions to choose from at our forums:) In one of the previous posts I mentioned that the music for our new trailer(yes, we plan to release it eventually) has been done by Daniel, a musician from the United Kingdom. We decided to continue working together and came up with a plan for complete "soundification" of the game. Yes, we have some sounds at the moment but these are both incomplete and incoherent (they are mostly royalty free sounds we found ourselves in the dusty corners of the internet). We will start by replacing and extending the sounds we have at the moment and then we will move on to make sounds for every moving machine in the game. The sounds of the machines would be then played based on the players position and they should evoke a feeling of "walking through the factory". This is very hard thing to do, because the sounds must play well together, not be too aggressive but also not too monotonous. It might not work out, but we think it is worth a try. And of course this has been suggested before on our forums:) The creation of sounds for the game will be a continunous process, but some first results are coming already in the 0.9. When people see Factorio for the first time, one of their reactions often is: "oh, a 2D game :| ". Well yes, the Factorio engine works with 2D sprites and all the animations are done by showing sequences of the object in different positions (basically a motion picture). But behind all this there is a twist. All the objects in the game (including the terrain) have actually been rendered from the 3D models (and all of these models have been done by Albert:)). This results in animations with surprising amount of details (at least we hope so). A good example is the new machine Albert has been working on for the past couple of days. It is the oil pumpjack and in my opinion it instantly became one of the best machines in the game. There is a preview of couple of pumpjacks in the desert, together with a detailed look taken from the Blender when Albert was animating the model. As always, your comments are more than welcome on our forum.

Hello, today the Factorio Friday Facts turn 18. That is considered an age of maturity in many countries. So the glass of Jagermeister on my desk is completely justified :) The time here in Prague feels just like whooshing around us faster and faster with the end of January approaching rapidly. That was the original estimate for the release of 0.9 but now it seems that it will take a week or two more. The usual "everything takes longer than expected" has applied this time as well. The current development version has placeholders for some new entities (like a plain rectangle box saying "oil refinery" or another one with "chemical plant") and we really want to make proper graphics for these and deliver the basics of new oil content as a whole package. Recently we got a bug report claiming that the game is too slow. The guy who posted it was right, the game was running well under 60fps. In our defence it needs to be added that his factory was pretty monstrous. It was actually the biggest one we have seen by far. Just to get an idea, his factory had 9000 solar panels, 15 000 laser turrets and thousands of logistic robots. So kovarex took it as a challenge to squeeze as much performance from the engine as possible taking this save as a reference. He has been working on it for the past couple of days. The most significant optimizations he made are: Efficient dispatch of pending logistic robots. This was probably the cause of the biggest slowdown in the given save. Wake-on-demand mechanism for inserters. Until now the inserters always asked every tick the objects in front of / behind itself whether they should transfer anything. Now, instead they put themselves to sleep and the object wakes them up when its state changes (that means there is a chance a transfer will be required). Improved cache locality for the electric energy network. The result: game update dropped from roughly 30 milliseconds per 1 update to about 10 milliseconds (and there is more to come). Of course not everybody will get this amount of performance improvement (the optimizations are aiming at the game update for big factories). But in general this batch of improvements pushes the bar for the size of the factory further up. The work on the oil industry has entered the last phase. The fluid and recipe mechanisms as well as new entities are ready and now it is all about adding the actual content. I have been studying the oil refining process quite a bit recently and also I took this opportunity to refresh some bits from my high school chemistry curriculum. The way it shapes now the oil industry will be a middle to late game resource. Its usage will start somewhere between the green and blue science pack and its products will cover a variety of areas (fuel, plastics, lubricants, explosives, etc.). There has been quite some discussion about the oil industry on the forums. If you are interested and want to contribute your opinion you can do so in this thread for instance. Kuba and Albert have been working together a bit on the integration of the new doo-dads into the map generator. The goal is to approach the scenery compositions shown in the previous posts . Though that is difficult (because those compositions are hand made and imho very good) the doo-dads should greatly improve the current flatness of the landscape anyway. On top of this Kuba has been busy with a neat feature when the game will natively treat zip archives as directories (so the saves / mods can be zip packages). And of course Albert's table is full of "oily stuff" - now comes the interesting part - the oil mining drill, the oil refinery and the chemical plant. Today's picture is a glimpse into the internals of Factorio. The screenshot shows a diagram of entities' (objects on the map) class inheritance structure generated by doxygen. If you feel like expressing your opinion regarding anything above then go ahead and do so on our forum.

Hello there, the 17th of January brings you the 17th edition of the Friday Facts. Recently, even without our active participation the game has been doing quite well. There are plenty of new videos on the youtube and the forum has also been buzzing with activity. One of our fans put it as follows: "Factorio is going places". Well, we certainly hope he is right :). Anyway let's get down to business. The past week has been spent mostly by work on the new functionality for the 0.9. The blueprints and the oil industry. Both of these are quite large tasks so to finish them completely does take a lot of time. Though the core functionality for both is finished and we are now sort of tweaking the details. I have experimented a bit with some new simple pipe vs. assembler setups and it was quite refreshing and fun. We are really curious how this turns out. The oil industry will result in quite a few new recipes and while we are at it we might go and rebalance the recipes overall a bit. There are things we know for sure should be fixed (for instance the green science pack being too cheap and close to the red one) and there are things we want to experiment with a little bit (like introducing a more complex intermediate products - small engine, navigation system, etc.). We haven't mentioned our new trailer for a while. The thing is that we struggled for long to find someone who would be able to compose the music for the video. We even mentioned that in one of the past Friday Facts. After that post we actually got contacted by a player who bought the game and was following its development news. His name is Daniel James Taylor and he is an awesome (now we know that :)) composer from the United Kingdom. Check out his website if you are interested in more details / his music samples. We agreed on the cooperation and he went and composed a great piece of music fitting our new trailer very well. We are now discussing with Daniel further cooperation regarding the sound effects and ambient music for the game. With the music finished, the biggest bulk of the work for the trailer has been done. The last step is to integrate the new graphics (terrain, doo-dads, etc.) into the trailer and polish it to perfection :) This will most probably happen after the 0.9, but we are getting there. Since the "job advertisement" worked so well last time for the music, we have another one :). It is very apparent to anyone opening the game that the items, gui icons, technology pictures, etc. are a mess. So we are looking for a graphic designer to help us out here. Albert's todo list is long enough already and this job is a lot of work. We would prefer someone from the Czech Republic or the vicinity (for easier communication), but the music experience has proved that a quality cooperation can be done based solely on electronic communication as well. Let's see, maybe we will get lucky twice :) Albert has been "in the oil industry state" for a while. We found out that the current pipes are not fitting the art direction very well. Therefore we decided to take a step back and redo the pipes before anything else. The pipes are the base for the other machines so it certainly needs to be done. It does slow the things now a bit, but as the wise man once said: "If you want to run fast, you need to tie your laces well. Or go barefoot." So below is a composition preview of the new pipes and storage tanks that will be used for holding large amounts of fluids. If you feel you have something to say there is a post for that on our forum.

Good evening Factorians, today we had a presentation about the game at one of the universities here in Prague for the subject called "Video game development". It was focused on what is it like to develop an indie game. So yesterday we spent some time reflecting the past year and a half to come up with topics to talk about. We were thinking a lot about the period about a year ago before the Indiegogo campaign started, when the game was completely unknown to the public and we were close to burning out. The positive finding wat that as opposed to that period the work is now much less stressful and generally enjoyable. Maybe we (and people in general) should think about our down moments more often to better appreciate what we have ... Last Friday Facts promised a stable 0.8 release in the beginning of this week. Well, that was a false promise because couple of more bugs have been found that resulted in the new record for number of bugfix releases. Now we have the 0.8.8 in the experimental stage. If there are no serious issues found this will be made stable during the weekend. Having so many bugfix releases is rather annoying (and we plan to improve here by starting with automated testing) but it doesn't slow us down in the regular development. We have multiple development branches and the work on the 0.9 has been going for a while in the master branch, while the bugfixes are collected in the current release branch (the 0.8.x) and then merged back into the master. Talking about the 0.9, the work has been progressing well. Quite some internal rework of concepts is required for the oil industry and fluids in general. However, yesterday we already had an assembling machine that makes a recipe from some items and water supplied by the pipe. For this to work the recipe mechanism has been generalized and in the end (not yet done) following will be possible: The recipe ingredient can be a fluid. The recipe can have multiple results (both items and fluids). The results of the recipe can be randomized (there will be a probability of getting the result and a min - max range for the amount of the result). There might not be much more fluid content aside from the oil (and its variations) in the 0.9, however the mechanisms will be there for the modders to play with and take advantage of them. And we are curious what they come up with:) Kovarex has been working on the native blueprints for some time and he has the core functionality more or less finished. Of course that is just a small portion of the total work required (polishing, bugfixing, integration with other concepts, etc.) but it is something that can already be played with in the 0.9 branch. And it is actually quite fun to play with. The system is relatively straightforward now: You make the blueprint item. You select what to store in it (you get the blueprint preview on the item afterwards). You place it and the construction robots build it. You can check it out on the mini picture series below, where blueprints have been used to build the standard furnace line. If you would like to share your thoughts or ideas about this post, you can do so on our forum.

Happy new year to everyone! We have spent the New Year's Eve with friends in our appartment / office on a last-minute improvized party. The entertainment was provided by the usual elements - food, drinks, chatting and board games. The traditional fireworks all over the Prague kickstarted the 2014, which is going to be a crucial year for Factorio. The main points from the 2014 battle plan are: Get on the Steam. Get the multiplayer done. Get some quality holidays:). After some relaxed time during the Christmas we are back to full speed development. There will be a stable release of the 0.8 in the beginning of the next week. The periods necessary for release stabilization has been getting longer and longer. That was one of the reasons we decided to dedicate more time in the future to the automated testing. You can read more on this topic in our latest random ramblings. Past week has been spent by working on the new features for the 0.9. Mainly the oil industry and blueprints. Both are still in the process of development so I will go into the functional details later, after they are more or less stabilized. You can also read our plans regarding the functionality in that random ramblings post. One thing is clear already. The 0.9 is a very ambitious release and if all goes well it will be one of our most content rich releases (if not the most content rich). After the 0.9 we plan to start working on the multiplayer which might be a long period with little other updates. Therefore we plan to get a lot done before that. In the meantime, Albert has finished with a first set of doo-dads. Below is a composition with some new shipwrecks. Actually the current shipwreck sprite in the first level was cut (and adjusted) from one of our theme art pictures (can you find it:)?). It is time for this one to be replaced. There is still much more that could be (and will be) done for the doo-dads, but now we need to move on to making graphics for the new "oil related" machines ... Comment thread is not hiding anywhere. It is right there on our forum.

Hi there, past week has not been the most productive one in the Factorio history. The Christmas was a good opportunity to take couple of days off, relax and spend some time with the family. In the meantime some more bugs have popped up in the 0.8.x resulting in the release of the 0.8.4, the current shot at the stable release. The end of the year is a good time to look backward and do some balancing. Many things have happened in the 2013 but for me, one of them clearly stands out. And that is the change in sort of a general feeling from the project. What I mean is following. In the beginning of the year we didn't have a plan, we didn't have an artistic direction, we didn't have any income, we were just two guys working over-full-time from the living room on kind of a hobby project. I remember that those were often desperate times filled with insecurity about the future. The comparison to now is staggering. We received the trust in the Indiegogo campaign, 5000 people (almost there) have bought the game, there is a great community at our forums, we have a clear roadmap and we are working on it, the looks of the game have improved drastically and we now have an actual artistic direction to follow, and much more... All in all we overcame many obstacles, some of them seemed impossible a year ago. Of course it hasn't been all smooth ride, but the despair and uncertainty are gone. Yes, often there is the stress (especially during the sprint before the release) or anxiety but, I think that is unavoidable and it often actually pushes us forward. Overall Factorio now feels to me like a healthy project with clear direction rather than a very uncertain experiment it was a year ago. We all have worked hard to achieve this but a big thanks goes also to our fans, without you we wouldn't succeed in the Indiegogo, we wouldn't have the funds to continue the development later on when things started to drag and also we wouldn't have all the positive feedback that have kept us going. Thank you! Now, for a more humorous look on what the development of Factorio is like check out this series of gifs by Kovarex on our forums. Albert has worked a lot on the doo-dads and some good results start to come out. Below is the preview of the desert with new trees, rocks and plants. The name of the image is "The desert hunt". Just to make sure, it is an artificial composition, not a screenshot from the game:). Next on the list are doo-dads for other terrains and then ship wrecks, destroyed machines, etc. As always check out the post on our forum for the comments.

Hello everyone, Just a very short post. We, the Factorio team, would like to wish you all very Merry Christmas. Take the opportunity to have some rest and recharge your energy (we certainly will). We have also prepared a small present for you. It is a never-before publicly released prototype of the game from the autumn 2012, so it is more than a year old. It is from so long ago that the game was not yet called Factorio. At that time we provisionally called it Energycraft. There are only the win32 and win64 binaries available (you can use emulator on other systems). Bundled with the game are 2 saves from that time, so you can have a look at some existing factories. Playing that version even for couple of minutes brings back a lot of nostalgia:) Merry Christmas everyone! If you wish to leave some comments you can do so on our forums.

Hello, another Friday means another update on what is happening here in the Factorio central in Prague. It doesn't really feel like the Christmas are actually around the corner. There is no snow (just cold) and the shopping spree / Christmas tree hunt doesn't really affect us that much:) Therefore the only clear signal that the year is coming to an end has been the Christmas concert we attended with Kovarex. The stabilization of the 0.8 has been our main topic for the past week. We have found and fixed many bugs ranging from little annoyances to serious game-crashing or save-corrupting beasts. The 0.8.1 contained a magical number of 42 bugfixes, but unfortunately some of the fixes brought in new bugs (this happens so often that it became a programming folklore). Therefore we made another bugfix release - the 0.8.2 which has been published today and so far it has been looking good. The way I put it sometimes, the bugfixing probably sounds like a boring / tedious work. Well there is not that much creativity involved, but it can get really interesting. It is like solving a puzzle or a small criminal case of your own. In the beginning you only have the problem. Then you are looking around, noticing small odities and other clues. If you need, you can use the debugger or debugging prints to get a glimpse of what is happening behind the curtains. You need to think a lot and picture how the different parts of the code interact and what could be going on. You make a hypothesis, test it and often ... find nothing. But in the end you get this AHAAA moment when everything becomes clear and the source of the problem is revealed. Actually fixing the bug is usually the simple part, once you have traced its origin. The AHAAA moment feels really good, it is like figuring out a riddle or solving a tricky math problem. Kuba started working on the biomes for the 0.9. The model he is using is taking into account two semi-independent variables: the temperature and the humidity. The noise of temperature and humidity is generated over the map, assigning a specific combination of values to every tile. The placement of terrain and doo-dads (trees, rocks, fauna, etc.) are driven by these two variables. For instance, the definition of plain green tree would say that it has the peak at humidity of 0.5 and temperature of 17 degrees. The probability distribution is then formed around this peak to determine whether the tree should be placed on a given tile (based on the tile's temperature and humidity values). In the end, based on these definitions, the different biomes should emerge (we are already curious if they do:)). Below there is an image which demonstrates the relationship between biomes and humidity / temperature. Albert is at the moment working on the doo-dads (new trees, rocks, plants, etc.) to give the environment a realistic feel. We have collected quite some feedback on the new logo direction in the past week. Personally, the biggest surprise to me has been that a lot of people would prefer the current logo to the old one. We still believe in the new logo and we will use the feedback from the forums and emails to improve it (experimenting with the color, increased readability, the wheel shape, etc.). The second post picture is called "The giant and the machines". It demonstrates the scale functionality of the engine that can be used to draw scaled pictures on the fly rather than scaling them first. This way the picture uses both less space on the drive (some mods are already bigger than the vanilla game:)) and less video memory. It was really funny to see the giant player walking around the tiny machines:) As always you can let us know what you think in the dedicated post on our forum.