Factorio - a factory building game - now with Space Age expansion

[baud]

Did they finally happen? I remember them talking about it ages ago, but it never actually materialized.

The attack spiders? They got added with the 1.0 patch

 

[User was nabbed fit]

Picked this up on Steam and it's like crack. I've just gotten to uranium enriching. Only problem is I find myself going to sleep and thinking about ways to optimise things, do things differently, etc...

 

[Jaedar]

Only problem is I find myself going to sleep and thinking about ways to optimise things, do things differently, etc...

That doesn't sound like a problem to me. It means you get to play the game 24/7!

 

[Mark.L.Joy]

Yes I had few bad bights of sleep because of this.

 

[Twiglard]

Only problem is I find myself going to sleep and thinking about ways to optimise things, do things differently, etc...

That doesn't sound like a problem to me. It means you get to play the game 24/7!

Well, the Tetris Effect is real.

 

[Mark.L.Joy]

Launched a few satellites for the 1st time and have big module production setup but this is as far as I go, also tried Krastorio it starts fine but at tech 4 or so turns into big 'tism which I don't care for.
~300h in 4 years or so, great value, will play some more if and when it gets more updates.

 

[Infinitron]

https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-365

Friday Facts #365 - Future plans

Hello,
the 1.1 release is the final release of the vanilla game. It will be maintained, so bugfixes, simple modding interface additions, or minor tweaks can happen, but that's about it.

The future
So, what are we going to do? There are several possibilities. Retiring is not really an option for several reasons, not going insane being one of them. There are some smaller experiments outside the Factorio realm that we want to do, but apart from that, we still want to extend the game. There is a large pool of ideas, so all we have to do is to just pick from the most potent ones. But the question is: How to package them?

There are basically 4 options:

• Free updates forever
• Factorio 2
• Small DLC packs
• One big expansion pack

Free updates forever
A lot of games do it, notably Minecraft and Terraria. They do really well, so the model works, but I believe that it is not the best way to go for us, as we are a little bit more of a niche game with a smaller but more dedicated audience. This means that the room for expansion in the sense of getting more players is limited.

Factorio 2
The problem with a sequel is that it is expected to be very different in many ways, and technically a different game (Starcraft 1→2). Sequels that mainly just extend the content, but reuse most of the stuff from the previous installment were common in oldschool games (Baldur's gate 1→2, Fallout 1→2, Doom 1→2), but I'm afraid that this is not the expectation today.

The point is, that making a 'New Factorio' is exact opposite of what we want to do. Finally, the base game is in a state that we are happy with, things like Graphics, tutorials, engine, multiplayer etc. Specifically we spent most of the effort in the last year on finalising the GUI, and the last thing we want to do is to throw it all away for the sake of changing stuff.

Small DLC packs
Personally, as a player, I'm not big fan of a lot of small DLC packs. It gets cluttered, it gets harder to keep track of what I have, what features is in which pack, and what do I need to buy in order to play with a friend etc. Not even mentioning the developer pain of having small independent chunks of content that need to be compatible and balanced in every possible combination.

One big expansion pack
This seems to fit the best. We could focus purely on extending what we have and make new content, which we want to do so dearly! It would be one well-defined product that would be significant enough to recapture peoples attention, and it would be compatible with our workflow. Technically, it would be "just" a new version of the game, so all the infrastructure of mods being updated, multiplayer etc. would just work the same as it worked until now.

So, Expansion pack it is!

This immediately creates two main questions: What will it contain and when is it coming.

• What? It is way too early to show any of the plans, and since we want to keep the iterative process of expanding things that prove to be the most fun, the plan is quite loose anyway.
• When? All I can say is, that we are starting work on it now, and we don't think that it will take less than a year to develop. I'm personally very curious how the theory of getting more efficient once the engine is solid will hold.

Spoiler

Looking for humans
We don't want to discriminate, so if a talented animal or AI applies, we will happily give it a job.

Since we are finally going to add new content and we are financially doing quite okay, it is the best time to invest into reinforcing our team. One of the steps we have already taken is hiring a concept artist, he might be known to you under the nick of Earendel.

3D artists
We made a job listing, and we have already hired 2 out of the many applicants, please welcome Jerzy and Lucas! However this is still far from enough, so we are looking for more.

The full listing is on the ArtStation page and also on our website.

Operations developer
We have a lot of build servers, deployment processes, web servers, office network storage, etc. We would like someone to reinforce our DevOps team and help us maintain and develop our processes and systems. It will involve working with our CI and deploy scripts, as well as being available in emergencies to put out fires. Our physical servers often need maintenance and repair, so general computer building and repair experience is required.

If you are interested or know someone who is, you can find the full details here.

C++ programmer
We don't need programmers that much at this moment, but someone exceptionally skilled can always find a place here. Bonus points for Linux/macOS specialists, as we are lacking these now.

Final numbers
8 years of Factorio in numbers
The initial Factorio commit was done 31.3.2012, so Factorio was in the development for 8 years 10 months. I did this kind of comparison in FFF-223 and FFF-81, I hope you don't mind if I compare it with the current state.

Our effort in numbers:

• In development for 1106 → 2099 → 3233 days.
• 88 → 221 → 411 public releases.
• 14 082 → 34 686 → 57 932 commits in the master branch.
• 204 917 → 465 550 → 856 800. lines of code, 546 339 → 1 258 939 → 2 340 804 words and 7 693 483 → 17 517 675 → 35 216 019 characters, this is equivalent to 15 → 35 → 70 average books.
• 20 791 → 56 947 → 87 703 different sprites with 54 114 147 → 336 907 147 → 945 930 442 non empty pixels.
• 1492 → 5034 → 8688 resolved bugs (only counting those reported on our forums).
• 3027 → 7670 → 13 265 lines in the changelog.

Results in:

• 56 500 → 341 000 → 799 000 Youtube videos
• 403 000 → 1 900 000 → 2 670 000 Google hits of Factorio.
• 75 146 → 303 773 → 483 539 forum posts
• 0 → 11 704 → 38 870 years of combined playtime played on Steam.
• and finally 74 914 → 1 200 000+ → 2 500 000+ copies sold.

This leads me to different kind of comparisons:

• 2.7 → 0.42 → 0.34 lines of code per one buyer
• 12.7 → 16.5 → 17.9 commits per day
• 2.7 → 6 → 9.2 Youtube videos per one sprite
• 0 → 2.3 → 4.4 years of playtime per resolved bug report
• 0 → 4 → 8 months of Steam playtime per one commit
• 0 → 9.1 → 37 days of Steam play for each line of code
• 0 → 18.2 → 21.5 minutes for each pixel

I could go on like this for a while But mainly, it makes me realize, that making changes, improving things, and fixing even small annoyances in the game is worth it. Also, it seems like we generally doubled everything in 2 years, which sounds like a good progression, lets see where we get in the next 2 years

Final words
We are going to stop Friday Facts for a while (again), and there are more reasons:

• We need to focus on experimenting and iterating design ideas.
• If we show something that ends up being removed or replaced, it can feel like a broken promise, and we learned that it is generally the worst thing we can do.
• We don't want to start building hype too early and drive attention away from the finished Factorio.
• Some of the additions require extending the engine, but some of them could be reproduced with mods to a certain extent. We have experience with people trying to use mods to emulate our future changes before they are released. This has a few problems, people playing with these emulations can have altered expectations for the expansion, and it also wouldn't feel that new anymore.

But still, there are many interesting topics related to designing and implementing the planned features, so as the release approaches, we will be more than happy to present a peek into the process, and discuss some of the content additions. That is to say, Friday Facts will start-up again once the time is right.

Thank you all for being with us on this journey, and we look forward to what the future may bring. As always, let us know what you think at the usual places.

 

[anvi]

Fuck them so much

 

[Perkel]

apparently they hired guys from some space mod so probably this is where it will go now

Imho i would love for it to became more space city builder. So for example you crash on planet in colony ship so you have to start factory operations to support them etc. Research wouldn't be just retarded labs but would be % of people you have etc.

End goal of firing rocket is just boring.

 

[Paxton]

Maybe this one? Looks ambitious.
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/space-exploration

 

[Caim]

I just installed Bob's mods.

How fucked am I?

 

[Perkel]

I just installed Bob's mods.

How fucked am I?

On the scale of:

vanilla(0) <-------> PyXXX (1)

about 0.3

 

[Hellraiser]

Damn it, I saw a bump of this thread and thought they spilled the beans on what will be in the expansion. I need new reasons to build more rail lines and trains.

 

[MrBuzzKill]

Respect to the dev for standing his ground:

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

Based Czechs.

 

[baud]

it had already been posted, but it was moved to the dedicated drama thread: https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads/factorio-dev-gets-in-trouble-with-sjws.139051/

 

[Twiglard]

It would help if FPS scaled beyond a single blue belt of each type of science. I can just barely keep 60 FPS on my latest save. And even that's with a 12-beacon setup on most things. They should add a feature enabling part welding, i.e. a complex functioning as a single entity. For instance, my 16-belt plastic/green-circuit build is fully deterministic. Same with most complexes, each produces at least half a belt of stuff. Doing 16 belts of inputs is trivial, and I could scale it up to 24 for 2-8 trains.

There are some designs that I've made that I'm actually happy about, even if the base game is kinda' simplistic. For instance, the train-limiting station setup that's more robust than LTN and one I've made without looking it up. Or all these fancy-schmancy complexes with belts spiralling around beacons, internal backlogs for full-beltage and relatively few moving entities. Or keeping things from turning into a clusterfuck without using some kind of power pole/roboport consistent blueprint grid.

I should try some mod adding expensive superpowered factories, as the logistics are way more fun to manage than designing factories, which gets old after a while. Or should I try Space Exploration? How is UPS? At least without liquid cooling the CPU and RAM. I'm running a 7600 at 3.8 Turbo during Factorio workload, along with 32 gigs of 2400 MHz dual-channel RAM.

Next base I'm going to try is going to have fully separate train lines for different types of goods in the dependency graph. Somehow optimizing a setup that I understand feels more right than constantly adding complexity with mods.

 

[Average Manatee]

What? Factorio runs way better than that. What's your base doing, having a million unneeded pipes with fluid calculations? Try downloading a megabase save.

 

[Nutria]

I have a 10-year old potato and I never ran into any issues. It's not that demanding.

 

[Andnjord]

So yeah, following the SJW brouhaha against the developper, I finally bought this game, it had been on my radar for quite some time. I must say I've been enjoying it tremendously, it scratches an itch that had been there since playing Pharaoh, SimCity, Rimworld and the likes, but never being fully satisfied.

I decided to restart my first game after I started realising just what kind of scale things needed to be and how badly my first base was set up to handle it. I had only just reached military tech, so it wasn't too far gone. Took me a long time to get some oil, since the game decided to generate the nearest oil field really far away (the first train that I sent there instantly got me the 1000 tiles travelled achievement, that's what I get for picking a 'Trains' map). At least it seems to have a really high yield of >4000% with more than 15 oil pits, that's a lot, right?
It was really fun "liberating" the oil field though, I ended up taking a locomotive filled with all the materials I needed to set up the outpost, built the railway from the locomotive and only going down occasionaly (ok, a lot) to clear all the biter's nests that were on the way. Next thing I know, I'm sitting in a fully walled-in outpost surrounded by dozens of flamer turrets with a fully functioning double-tracked train line that runs all the way back to my base, glorious.

Now I just need to set up all the industries to actually use all that bloody oil...the factory must grow

EDIT: If I read the wiki correctly, 15 pumpjacks at 4000% yield is 6 000 crude oil per second or more than 20 hours of continuous extraction before running dry. I don't think I'll need another oil extraction base for a while.

 

[Nutria]

I decided to restart my first game after I started realising just what kind of scale things needed to be

As things get more and more complicated the one thing you're really running out of is space to fit everything in. It's always good to leave big gaps for future expansion.

As for oil, it's a pain in the ass to take over an oil field because they're so rare, but once you've got one it will last you a long time. My last game I launched the rocket using just 2 oil fields, and I'm probably a below-average player and didn't have a field with 15 wells.

 

[Andnjord]

As things get more and more complicated the one thing you're really running out of is space to fit everything in. It's always good to leave big gaps for future expansion.

Yeah, I'm like a man who first sees a small puddle of water, then finds out the puddle leads to a pond, the pond to a stream, the stream to a lake, the lake to a river, the river to a sea... and keeps building a bigger and bigger boat thinking that this time it will be big enough. Can't wait to get access to the robotics tech, or the ocean is going to drown me :D

 

[Joggerino]

Now I just need to set up all the industries to actually use all that bloody oil...the factory must grow

Just don't forget about all that pollution Be ready for the aliens

 

[Average Manatee]

With a main bus layout and good planning you can build really compact and still expand indefinitely. Don't just leave "gaps", leave an entire axis to expand into. Later on you can rebuild for beacons which will make everything incredibly efficient and reduce your factory to a fraction of its original size.

 

[Andnjord]

Correction, I've just gone back to it and counted the pumpjacks. There are 27 of them in the bloody field :D

With a main bus layout and good planning

Bit tricky to do so when I don't know what and much of I'll need next. My initial design was quite good, but it only took into account the early few hours of requirements. Now the spaghetti is starting to grow but still manageable. Soon I'll have to redesign the whole bloody thing.

Just don't forget about all that pollution Be ready for the aliens

I've got flamethrower turrets all around my base, I'm ready for the buggers

(Besides a slightly panicky start they have barely been a nuisance for a long while now, I have to say that when I did my long recon to find the oil field I did kinda do a little teensy tiny genocide of them)