Hello,
recently we have been programming day and night to ship the features we have promised for Factorio 0.4.0 release. However apart from that we also found some time to start delivering the promises we made in the Indiegogo campaign. So this is an update on the state of perks delivery from Indiegogo and the preorder.
To start with I will repeat the obvious. All the membership accounts are eligible for Factorio alpha access, beta access and full release (when these are made). This is including all the future updates. Whenever someone buys Factorio membership he immediately receives upgrade code and can go and play the alpha right away.
On top of this the Furnace Attendant tier promises digital factorio wallpapers and a scenario pack. The wallpapers are ready and if you have the Furnace Attendant (or higher) membership you can download them already. The wallpapers are available on your user settings page. Just click your username at the top right of the screen and scroll down. The wallpapers come in different resolutions. These are some of the most common resolutions in terms of widht : height ratio. If your resolution is not there you might still use a wallpaper with the same width : height ratio and higher resolution. For instance if your resolution is 1280 : 800 you can use the 1680 : 1050 which has the same width : heigh ratio. Originally we promised three wallpapers based on our theme pictures. However we decided to add some more. So at the moment our concept artist is working on two additional theme pictures which will be available as wallpapers as well in the near future.
The other highly anticipated perk is the scenario pack. We are working on that right now. The first version of the scenario pack will be available together with the Factorio 0.4.0 release at the end of April. As mentioned already the scenario pack will be work in progress as well. We intend to keep adding new content until we feel "it's right".
The Mining Drill Operator on top of these contains the "name in the game" and the Concept Art Book. First backer names will appear in Factorio 0.4.0. If you have the Mining Drill Operator tier or higher you can already insert your name into the form at the user setting page (below the wallpapers). Before every release (starting Factorio 0.4.0) all these names will be collected and exported into the list directly in the game. The names from the list will be used as name tags for different machines in the game, train stations, etc.
The concept art book should be released by the end of April as well. Even though our concept artist spent a lot of time with the concepts in the art book we are still not sure whether it is up to the standards. Therefore we will name it version one and it might get updated in the future. Also we are toying with an interesting idea regarding this topic at the moment. We have sort of internal graphical wiki using Google sites. We use it for communication with Albert (main graphic behind the game), for sharing graphic proposals, concepts and finished sprites. What we are considering is to give readonly access to this wiki as part of the Mining Drill Operator tier or higher. This way people could actually see the process of graphical shaping of Factorio. Things that never made it into the game, evolution of some machines graphics, etc. We are still not sure whether this is a good idea so in case you would find this interesting please let us know (email, forum, facebook).
Last thing regards the Inserter Constructor. This tier was only available during the Indiegogo campaign. After the campaign ended we sort of felt that the tier was a bit overpriced. That is the reason why for the preorder on the site we created the new tier Mining Drill Operator with pretty much the same content but cheaper. This can naturally happen however we feel it would be correct to somehow compensate the people who bought the Inserter Constructor tier. One thing we came up with would be giving them an extra upgrade code for Factorio which they can use as a gift for someone they know. Again this is something we are considering at the moment so if you have any ideas in this regard please let us know.
Ok enough talking. Go and download those wallpapers and put them to your screens;)
