Factorio News

• Fixed that the infinity pipe mode could sometimes reset when changing other infinity pipe settings. more
  
• Fixed that electric energy interfaces didn't consume power correctly. more
  
• Fixed market GUI not showing price in the tooltips of modifiers. more
  
• Fixed market GUI showing empty price property in the tooltips when no price is set.
  
• Fixed lights render quality slider in graphics settings missing tooltip. more
  

You can get experimental releases by selecting the 'experimental' beta branch under Factorio's properties in Steam.

• Fixed a desync related to biter pathfinding. more
  

Read this post on our website.


Hello,
we feel that the Factorio development is taking way too long. The approach "It is done when it is done" was serving us well to deliver a high quality product, but if we continued this way, we would be doing it basically forever. A lot of us don't have any problem working on Factorio for some more time, but the main problem is, that we would like to introduce new features and content instead of just polishing parts that are already present in the game. We also considered, that the game is quite polished now, and if we just pushed the button to release 1.0, it wouldn't be a catastrophe. From our perspective, a lot of things wouldn't be finished, but from the perspective of a new player, the things we are working on now are mainly nitpicks.

With this in mind, we decided to just specify a 1.0 release date publicly, so we have to stick with it. We will just focus on the most important aspects as we approach the date, and we just do whatever we have time to do. Once the 1.0 happens, we can have some rest and after that, we can finally focus on the content and features again.

The date is 25th September 2020.

Version 1.0 does not mean that development on the game will end, or that Factorio is 100% finished. When we have a better idea of what we will be working on after the 1.0 release, we will let you know.

Game Developers Session 2019 is happening in a few weeks, Friday 29th and Saturday 30th of November. This year, like last, we are silver sponsors of the event, so you will see our banners around the venue if you attend.

This year we are happy to have two of our team doing talks at the conference:

• Albert - "Developing the Visual Style of Factorio".
• Vaclav - "Technical Side of Creating Factorio Graphics".

You can read a bit more about our talks and others on the speakers page.

Other than our two speakers, a lot of the team will be attending the conference, so if you see anybody sporting a Factorio t-shirt, it could be one of us (don't be afraid to come talk to us).

We also took the opportunity to do some updates to our cover art.




We have been on a bit of a hiring spree lately, trying to fill gaps in the team where we can identify them. We are happy to say, we have continued our team growth, with two new additions to the team.

Ian is a sound designer from the UK, who has moved to Prague quite recently. He will be working with us full-time here in the office, and with the help of Rseding for engine features, will be developing the soundscape of the game as we narrow in on the 1.0 release.

Next up is Allaizn. You might remember a few of our team mentioned him in past Friday Facts, and he is infamous for his experiments with cars on belts. He has had source access to the game for a long time, and in the past has made some good contributions through the program, so he has been able to get up to speed with us very quickly. For now he is reinforcing Posila in the Graphics backend department.

For some more details on our new colleagues and the rest of the team, we have short bios for everyone on our Team page.

As always, let us know what you think on our forum.

• When a team loses in PvP, all their characters will die.
  
• Technology GUI shows saved progress of partially-researched technologies.
  

• Fixed a crash when when loading modded saves that had construction robots working on modded entities.
  
• Fixed that 'corpses' and 'dying_explosion' wouldn't be created on the correct force. more
  
• Fixed that LuaEntity::get_fuel_inventory() didn't work on burner pumps. more
  
• Fixed ammo turret tooltip not showing the damage bonus correctly. more
  
• Fixed fluid name and amount not being shown when the tooltip is on the side. more
  
• Show how module energy consumption is applied more clearly in the tooltips. more
  
• Fixed several issues related to modded reactors set to use electric energy. more
  
• Fixed spitters were not able to destroy trees and rocks. more
  
• Fixed that shift+click recipes in cheat mode wasn't able to handle recipes that included fluids but still only produced 1 item result. more
  
• Fixed a difference in map editor paused vs unpaused game ticking related to enabled/disabled train stops. more
  
• Fixed that produce item per hour achievements could not be progressed. more
  
• Fixed an issue with reading localised strings in Lua. more
  
• Fixed that right clicking to add 1 item to assembling machines had no limit. more
  
• Fixed that teleporting players/cars between surfaces would invalidate lua references to them.
  
• Fixed a crash with trains that had wheels.direction_count = 0. more
  
• Fixed statistics not counting items correctly on large intervals when a large number of items are produced/consumed. more
  
• Fixed Beacon ghost tooltip missing some information. more
  
• Fixed ghost tooltips not showing correct max energy consumption.
  
• Fixed tooltips for tile creating items showing wrong title. more
  
• Fixed blueprint strings not saving empty values for some circuit network settings. more
  
• Fixed PvP config import would always append the default item and equipment lists. more
  
• Fixed that creating infinity chests with logistic_mode set would ignore request filters. more
  

• Added LuaEntity::command, LuaEntity::distraction_command, LuaUnitGroup::command, and LuaUnitGroup::distraction_command reads.
  
• Added LuaUnitGroup::is_script_driven read.
  

• Changed RollingStockPrototype::wheels to be optional.
  

You can get experimental releases by selecting the 'experimental' beta branch under Factorio's properties in Steam.

Read this post on our website.


Factorio is in a state that even though is not yet finished, it is very close to it's 1.0 version. That means that most of the work is done and we are polishing the game in order to make it bright. That's what we've been doing for the past 2 weeks. Literally making it bright.

Since years I wanted to do this post-production work. But I didn't dare to do it until most of the graphics were finished. I was afraid of breaking the consistency of the look and our production pipeline.
Now it's different. There's only a couple of entities to re-design and some other stuff to do, but in general this missing details are not affecting the possibility of working in the post-production.

Factorio is a dark game. I mean conceptually. All these things about industrializing a planet, polluting an entire world just for the sake of the factory, and killing all its inhabitants are not precisely happy concepts full of light. This old article could explain better my thoughts regarding this concept. But the look of the game was dark, too dark. So we cleaned it up without betraying its spirit. Like restoring an old painting.



The difference can be subtle, but very effective. We added more light, and a little bit of color saturation. Adding these general changes to the entire sprites collection is not an easy task. Many sprites were badly affected by this general correction. V453000 was fixing individually the broken sprites and icons in order to keep the consistency with the new context.

We took the chance to work on the terrain a bit further. Not only this color correction was applied, but the contrast and integration with other terrains was also improved. Also experimenting with the color of the trees, trying to achieve a more colorful feeling with the excuse of an alien planet. I have to say the Alien Biomes mod was opening my mind - a little - to experiment with the color a bit further.



In order to break this general brown feeling, we added a more orange tonality to the sand biome. Here is were you can the difference more. Going further to too saturated colors is dangerous, after all, the terrain is a background that should provide a good and comfortable contrast with the entities and the icons.



Touching terrain colours means touching map colors also. We were very keen to keep the visibility of the map information and the similarity with the terrain. The result is a more vibrant look in the entire game.



We tweaked the night also. Thanks to posila and Wheybags, we can use LUTs (Look up tables) to dynamically modify the colors. Instead of playing with the alpha channel of a solid black layer on top of the game. Now we can gradually move to a different color palette for night with more control. So the colors are losing their saturation and becoming more blue and cold. This is important, because part of the annoying darkness of the game comes from this black layer.



We are still experimenting with this LUT, and the transitions of day/night cycles. I'm pretty sure also that I will have to touch the map colors for some missing details and fine tuning. Possibly there is some entity that is not in its best shape with these new color palettes, and maybe we keep tweaking the terrain. But I feel very confident with these additions and I'm very sure that these changes will improve the experience of playing Factorio. After playing with these colors, the feeling is good. I hope you see it the same way.


By changing the colors of all game graphics, most mods are going to look out of place. We’ve used scripts to apply LUTs to most of the images, and one such script is ready for mod authors to clone or download here, together with the information of which LUT was used for which spritesheet in the game data, with the exception of terrain tiles, electric wires and combinators which were adjusted manually.

For technical support don’t hesitate to contact me directly, you’ll get quickest reply by messaging me (V453000#1894) on the Factorio Discord.

We still have some work to do on the LUTs, so they aren't going to be ready for release for another short while.

As always, let us know what you think on our forum.