Hello,

the current week was the time of merges.
Different branches with functionalities were merged into the master branch: traingulations(finally), combinators, robot beams, personal roboport and others. Every other day the game/tests didn't work, because some merge broke something. But now it is starting to be stabilised again.

Short term plan

The timetable of the 0.12 preparations is now quite clear, starting from next week it looks like this:

• Week 1 Finish all the small features and changes.
• Week 2 Go through the bugs on the forums + small polish.
• Week 3 Play the multiplayer and fix all the problems we find, we are already using the the heavy mode test to track all the newly created desync issues, so it shouldn't be so painful.

To be honest I'm actually super excited about the 3rd week, as most of the annoyances we encountered during our 0.11 stabilisation games are fixed now, so the game will allow us to mass produce in even bigger scale this time. Yes I still enjoy playing Factorio very much :)

Mid term plan

So the aim is to release 0.12 at the end of this month (June), but this is not really a promise, as everything takes longer than expected, so one or two extra weeks wouldn't surprise us.
Once we release 0.12, we expect the stabilisation phase to take a month, this might be an optimistic estimate compared to the 5 months of 0.11 stabilisation, but there are much more programmers in the team now, and we already write automated tests for many things while developing, so the game shouldn't be as broken as before.

Long term plan

When the stabilisation of 0.12 is done, we will start with the steam greenlight process, which shouldn't take long I hope. This would mean the start of the Factorio Early access era on Steam (and yes, you will still be able to use the game without steam). We also plan to make the game little bit more expensive at this point.
According to our FAQ we are supposed to have the 1.0 version by this summer, but it is quite clear now that this is not going to happen. We specified this a year ago, and it always seems that a year is almost an infinite amount of time, but ... well it isn't :)

The game needs a lot of polishing and we are quite sure about some features and enhancements we want to have before the 1.0. Long story short, we shifted the 1.0 estimate to the next summer again :) We will really try to follow this estimate, as developing the game more than 4 years seems like a mistake to me. This doesn't mean we wouldn't continue developing if we feel like we would like to, but at least it would feel more optional :)

Turrets

The final new look of the turrets is finished. The new look should be more consistent with the style and level of detail of the Factorio 2015. You can note, that both laser and ammo turret are now 2X2 entity. We believe it is a better solution if the turret is bigger, more expensive and stronger. For the ammo turret, it means less fiddling with inserters. And the balancing in 0.11 was done in a way, that one turret was almost meaningless anyway, so the smaller granularity shouldn't be a problem.

Also, the color of the turret is specified by the mask now, so the owner of the turret will be clearly visible now:

As always come to our forums and let us know what you think.