Factory Town Idle News

- Added button to on home page to minimize credits, version notes, feedback, and other misc buttons. This minimization preference is preserved between game sessions.
- Included button in this collapsible section that links to store page for Factory Town 2

For those interested, I'm working on a sequel to the original Factory Town (the one that Factory Town Idle was spun off of). Here's the store page for the sequel so you can wishlist it if you want a notification when it's available:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3312130/Factory_Town_2_Paradise/

Hello again! I've been secretly working hard on a true sequel to Factory Town. It takes place on a series of tropical islands, where you're building up a town at the foot of a giant (but friendly) volcano. There's more items, buildings, transportation gadgets, a day/night cycle, rotational power, electricity, flowing water & waterfalls, an optional controllable avatar, and lots more that will be developed & announced over the next several months.

Estimated launch date is loosely in late 2025, but definitely could get into 2026 based on how development goes. It now has a 'Coming Soon' page on Steam so you can wishlist it and get a notice whenever it releases!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3312130/Factory_Town_2_Paradise

Also answering questions over on the Discord: https://discord.gg/factorytown

Cheers!

Erik

- Fixed bug: Was able to assign production capacity (workers) to market recipes in excess of available capacity to borrow from other recipes, causing available production capacity to go negative

[h2]Misc Improvements[/h2]

• When all production capacity (workers) are assigned at a building, you can now hit the ‘+’ button to assign additional workers to that recipe. - they will be reassigned from other recipes at the same building.
  
  
  
  
  • Some conditions must be met for worker reassignment: those recipes have more than one worker assigned and must be in ‘Auto-assign’ mode. If multiple recipes are available that meet those conditions, worker will be reassigned from the lowest priority recipe, and among those, it will reassign from the recipe with the highest surplus for its primary output item.
    
• When the icon of a locally locked item is clicked on (e.g. in the Research panel) it will open up the guide for the item
  
• A filter of “Increasing” or “Decreasing” on the Inventory panel will be preserved when switching towns
  
• In the item activity tooltip, the Production “Potential” and “% Potential” values will now display the true max potential based on recipe speed and assigned production capacity.
  
  
  
  
  • Previously, this value would not take into account situations when more production capacity was assigned than the output capacity or rate limit could accommodate. This new behavior allows display of "% Potential" values > 100%, and the logic is consistent with the percentage shown on each recipe's output progress bar.
    
• Item activity tooltip for “Consumption” now shows demand more accurately. If the item being examined is the limiting factor in its recipe, its demand is set as its full (unrealized) potential consumption for that recipe. In all other cases, Demand is calculated based on its actual consumption.
  
  
  
  • For example, if making Paper (water + wood), and the recipe would normally consume 10 wood / second and 10 / water second, but the recipe is slowed to 50% of its normal speed because of a lack of Water, then the demand for Water is 10 / second and is being supplied at 50% of its demand. The demand for Wood though should only be 5 / second, and it is being met at 100% of its actual demand. As Water supply increases, the Paper recipe will be able to run faster and the Wood demand will increase correspondingly.
    

[h2]Bug Fixes[/h2]

• The town perk 'Storage Boost' was only assessing ‘Local Consumption’ when deciding how much to increase storage by. This was causing it to ignore potentially large effects of exports, and thus storage was much too small to handle throughput. Now it calculates based on Active Demand and storage expands appropriately. This should resolve some unintended limits on production speed due to insufficient storage.
  
• The bonus capacity given to items based on its consumption rate (to allow greater item throughput than storage would normally allow) was based only on local consumption, not exports. This was also causing unintended limits on production speed due to insufficient storage.
  
• Misleading entry in tooltip for Power made it seem as if it was exclusive to the Desert biome
  
• When ‘Extra Active’ game modifier active, player could still use hotkeys to trigger Turbo and Turbo Max mode. However, they would not function properly
  
• Requirements for Quest “Produce Copper Wire” (that unlocks Power Line) was displaying an obsolete quest as a prerequisite. Now it shows the correct prerequisite quest of “Produce 50K Copper Ingot” which is necessary to make Copper Wire.
  
• If game was quit while ‘Assign Worker’ buttons were highlighted during tutorial, and another game was loaded, they would remain stuck in highlighted state
  

[h2]Auto-Trade Improvements[/h2]
In this update, the Auto-Trade feature has been changed to give players better control of how their trades work, and in general to result in more stable behavior (less flip-flopping between import and export modes)

'Auto' trade mode is now split into 2 options:

• Local Balance: If there's a local deficit of the item, the recipe will Import. If there's a local surplus, it will Export. (This is closest to the current 'Auto' trade mode, so older trades in Auto mode will be migrated to use Local Balance)
  
• Local Fill: If the local town has spare storage capacity for the item, the recipe will Import. Otherwise, it will Export.
  

Note that when these modes are using the fallback 'Export' mode, they will never export more than the local surplus of the item. This is because doing so would cause a local deficit, and thus force it to flip-flop back to Import mode.

[h2]Balance Changes[/h2]

• Added Omni upgrades for Well
  

[h2]Misc Improvements[/h2]

• Improved loading times for large files
  
• Improved inventory filter when Trading recipe selected: now it shows the local inventory and the global trading post storage for the selected item. It can also do this regardless of the active trade mode (import, export, of Off)
  
• When an item filter is applied to the main production list, the relevant trade recipe will be shown whether the trade is importing, exporting, or off.
  

[h2]Bug Fixes [/h2]

• When Unlimited Consumption modifier was on, Item production tooltip would always show zeros for item demand / supplied for its market consumption
  
• Last frame’s item demand was not stored in save file, so recipes that targeted demand would not be immediately stable when loading a game