Factorio News

Read this post on our website.

Hello,
we had a party last night in the office to celebrate the work we have done over the last 6 months on 0.17 stablisation. It was nice to have most of the team together to share some beers and pizza.


Unfortunately a couple of nasty bugs appeared this week, in no small part due to forum member boskid and his crusade to find bugs. In the last month alone boskid has reported over 20 bugs, so very special thanks are due. Saying that, we have been efficient in our fixing, and are now down to 32 open bug reports on the forum.

While there are issues being reported, the number of crashes is at an all time low. Below is a comparison between 0.16 and 0.17.



We compared the current number of 0.17 crashes to the number of crashes in 0.16 before we released 0.17. From what we can tell, comparing the number of crashes against average player counts, about two thirds of players are playing on 0.17. Factoring the player counts into the data, we can determine that 0.17 is close to being as stable as 0.16.

A lot of the crashes are from older 0.17 experimental releases, which might be skewing the data. Additionally about 1 in 20 of the bug reports are due to Cheat Engine, and not something we can fix.

What this means for the stable release, the plan is the same as last week. We have just release 0.17.66 with a bunch of fixes, and if it weathers the weekend player base and nothing critical arises, we will mark it as stable next week.


Forum member lilstrip has spent over 8 months working on a map, based on the idea of an Abandoned Colony/City, first talking about his baby in this thread. After long last he has a version ready for publishing, and a little bit of a backstory to go with it.

Click to view full size

In the years before the gates shut Nauvis used to be a promising colony. Equipped with a massive orbital ring the planet was an absolute power house when it came to building ships for the Tyrador Safeguard Coalition.

Sadly the colony was lost in the first AI war long after the collapse. In reality things weren't going too well in the first place after the gates closed, famine and unrest were a common occurrence for the colony of Nauvis. To this day [REDACTED] of the AI war still roam the system in massive numbers and eventually a few decades later the location of the colony was lost..

Xterminator has made a video showcasing the map too, if you want a more hands-on preview.

https://youtu.be/kBlFp9FF81k

You can find the download link and the information on the scenario in the forum post. The scenario itself requires a pretty beefy PC to run, a map this large is stretching the limits of the engine a little.

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

• Blocked underground pipe connections (see e.g. https://forums.factorio.com/73840) are always highlighted.
  

• Fixed crash when using the close button while the client is saving the map for desync report. more
  
• Fixed a crash related to settings copy/paste of some modded assemblers. more
  
• Correctly highlighting blocked connections of modded underground pipes. more
  
• Fixed a case of disappearing fluid in a special fluid furnace configuration. more
  
• Fixed programmable speaker caused crash when using --disable-audio command line option. more
  
• Fixed that an underground pipe ghost did not split fluid systems. more
  
• Fixed that an underground pipe ghost did not split blocked connection. more
  
• Fixed that fluids in assembling machines and furnaces would get voided any time mods changed. more
  
• Prevented construction of underground pipe that could crash the game due to blocked pipe connection. more
  

• Added LuaEntityPrototype::terrain_friction_modifier read.
  

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

• Modded achievements and their progress are now stored even when the mods adding extra achievements are temporarily removed. Up to 5000 modded achievements are stored indefinitely. more
  
• Programmable Speaker sounds now change volume accordingly as player moves. more
  
• Rocket Silo sounds now change volume accordingly as player moves.
  

• Fixed tightspot level 5 expecting old chemical science recipe. more
  
• Fixed Transport belt madness inserter exploit. more
  
• Fixed that filling energy of entities in map editor didn't work for accumulators in electric network.
  
• Fixed a crash or desync that could happen after assigning a build_base command to a single unit. more
  
• Fixed that mining drill covering more than 1 infinite resource showed the mining speed as sum instead of average. more
  
• Fixed that infinite item based resources with yield of more then 100% didn't actually mine more. So yield of 260% for example means that it mines 2 resources and 60% probability of 1 extra.
  
• Fixed cloning of accumulators in the map editor not setting available energy correctly.
  
• Fixed a desync related to cloning accumulators. more
  
• Fixed 2 crashes related to custom-switch. more
  
• Fixed that train could consider itself being parked in station when in fact being misaligned. more
  
• Fixed that activating deconstruction planner/blueprint/blueprint tool from the shortcut by pressing the buttons didn't clear the cursor if it wasn't empty. more
  
• Fixed condition operator button visibility when dragging conditions in the train schedule GUI. more
  
• Fixed few layouting issues with scroll panes.
  
• Fixed that biters could get stuck in narrow passages between water tiles. more
  
• Fixed that members of unit groups could sometimes get far ahead of the group. more
  

• Added CraftingMachinePrototype::match_animation_speed_to_activity.
  
• Added LoaderPrototype::structure.back_patch and front_patch.
  

• Added ability to clear a sprite or sprite-button by writing nil or empty string to LuaGuiElement::sprite. more
  

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

• Range modifier and shooting speed modifier are now shown in ammo tooltip and ammo turret tooltip.
  
• Allow pressing ESC to cancel saving or downloading the map while desynced. more
  
• Added copy paste from assemblers to infinity chests, similar to requester chests.
  

• Fixed crash when loading a save containing modded crafting machines with fluid boxes, with mods disabled. more
  
• Fixed turret range drawing not accounting for ammo range modifier in world and in map view. Fixed turret unfolding and animation not accounting for ammo range modifier. more
  
• Fixed case of swapping left and right lane of underground belts. more
  
• Fixed desync related to marking and then un-marking combinators for deconstruction. more
  
• Fixed Infinity Chest GUI showing wrong label when modded as a storage chest. more
  
• Fixed when target of combat robot changed force to an allied force, the combat robot wouldn't stop attacking it. more
  
• Fixed silo script error using generic on_event function. more
  
• Fixed a desync related to using multiple custom fluid indexes in a recipe. more
  
• Fixed some labels getting cut of in the statistics GUI, on some translations. more
  
• Fixed a crash that could sometimes happen when fighting large groups of biters. more
  
• Fixed a special corner case of signal internal state consistency. more
  
• Fixed that the circuit and logistic network buttons in the train stop GUI were swapped. more
  

• Combinators can now be activated or deactivated through LuaEntity::active.
  
• Added LuaEntity::upgrade_target read.
  
• Removed the ability to convert a table address into a string.
  

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

Read this post on our website.

Hello,
We had a lovely surprise waiting us this Monday, one of our fans had sent us a delicious cake:



It didn't last very long...



Thank you very much Conn! It certainly helped with the bug fixing push this week.


This last week we have made a big push to fix as many remaining bugs as we can, and we are down to only 36 reports on the forum. Since these remaining bugs aren't really hard crashes, save corruptions, or desyncs, we are looking to consider 0.17.64 (releasing today) as our 'Stable candidate'.

What this means is that, if all goes well over the weekend and nothing too serious comes up, we will mark it as the 0.17 stable next week. We will continue to fix bugs and issues after the stable, and we will also start our work on the features of the 'next stable', so the GUI improvements and all the rest we have mentioned in the past.

In the next few weeks a lot of the team is going to be on vacation, so things won't get up and running with the new feature work for a while. This experimental period has been quite a long one, we had a lot of new things to fix and debug, and a lot of technical debt from the year of development. There won't be another release quite so large, we only have a few major things left to cross off the list before we can call Factorio finished:

• All new GUI's implemented.
• New Campaign and mini-tutorials.
• Completed high-res graphics.
• Maybe some small surprises along the way.

By no means are any of these easy, but each day brings us closer to concluding this chapter of Factorio history.


Just in time for the stable version, the prototype documentation for mods has received a major overhaul. The backend has been converted to use semantic mediawiki to store the prototype documentation data in a machine readable format.

Using the new ability to query the stored data, prototype pages now display all their base classes at the top for easy navigation. Furthermore, each prototype page now provides a compact overview of not only its own properties and their types, but also the properties it inherits from other prototypes. The documentation also boasts a new overview page that lists all 199 prototypes and their 1943 fields.

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