Factorio News

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Last weekend, a bug report came in on our forum. The issue was that the groups of biters were trying to path over the water, but the bugs can't swim.



It seemed like something quite typical of a mod being funky. I looked into it, and it seems the Hovercraft mod was playing monkey business with water collision masks to make his vehicles ride over water. One thing involved setting water tiles to be walkable, and then adding an additional collision layer to all players and biters.

What this modder didn't realise though, is that unit groups have a fixed collision mask. It used to be hardcoded, but a while ago it was added to the utility constants. So we just say "hey its a mod problem, here's a quarter, call someone who cares"... right?

Well it didn't sit right with me, because deep inside I knew that the unit groups shouldn't have a fixed collision mask, it doesn't make sense really. Lets say you add flying units to the game. If you give individual commands to the flyers to go attack the base, they will happily fly over the water and attack without issue. However if you put them in a group together, a group of flying units, the group will path around the water, because the unit group still has a fixed ground collision mask.

So this week I decided to fix it once and for all. It turns out it wasn't so hard in the end. As we mentioned somewhat in FFF-340, unit groups already have logic in place to recalculate their properties based on their members. I hooked into that logic to also make them recalculate their collision mask.

The way that made sense to me, is that they should add the masks together, so that they only path where all of the units can path.

https://cdn.factorio.com/assets/img/blog/fff-345-small-biters.mp4
A group of only small biters, they can't walk on water, so they walk around it.

https://cdn.factorio.com/assets/img/blog/fff-345-water-biters.mp4
A group of 'water biters'. They can walk right over water, so they go straight through.

https://cdn.factorio.com/assets/img/blog/fff-345-mixed-biters.mp4
A mixed group of small biters and water biters. They add their masks together, so only go where all the units can go.

You can imagine it quite intuitively I think, the group will try to stick together, and that will mean the group can only path to places that all the members can reach.

It feels quite nice to make fixes like this, as they are relatively small in scope and risk, but cleanup a lot of potential problems, and open a lot of interesting possibilities.

[h3]Artillery shell particle effect[/h3]
Another nice small finishing touch for you all this week. Adding a shell being ejected from the Artillery cannons was suggested back when we showed the new sounds integrated into the game (FFF-341). While we can't get too fancy with it, we think the relatively straightforward effect that we've added fills in the detail nicely.

https://cdn.factorio.com/assets/img/blog/fff-345-artillery-shell.mp4

It is just a particle with a nice spritesheet that Dom rendered from the original shell models. With a bit of engine tweaking here and there, we had it ready in quite short order. Just another small bit of polishing that characterises this stage of development.

• Added shell particle effect for the artillery shooting.
  
• Added tinted scorch marks for explosion effects. Explosions on different tile types will result in scorch marks of different colors.
  

• Pressing escape/close GUI when a search field is focused only closes the search field instead of the entire GUI.
  
• Updated GUI styles for PvP configuration GUI.
  
• Unit groups will determine their collision mask based on the collision masks of their members. more
  

• Fixed landfill spawning under player when building landfill elsewhere. more
  
• Fixed a crash when a train recalculating path during movement is unable to reserve rail signal within movement distance. more
  
• Fixed production statistics corruption when recipe returns some but not all catalyst. more
  
• Fixed a pathfinding crash related to changing tiles in a way that affected neighbouring tiles' transitions. more
  
• Fixed that malformed data in data.raw wouldn't show the minimal-mode failure GUI. more
  

• Fixed that writing to mod settings would silently ignore bad values.
  
• Added "allowed_effects" support to the lab.
  
• Added "creation_distance_orientation", "use_source_position", "height" and "vertical_speed" to particle creation parameters (related to shooting effect shell particles).
  
• Added "scorch_mark_color" to TilePrototype.
  
• Added util.remove_tile_references for easier compatibility maintenance with future game updates when removing base game tiles.
  
• Removed migration for CustomInputPrototype consuming types that were removed in 0.15.24.
  

You can get experimental releases by selecting the '0.18.x' beta branch under Factorio's properties in Steam.

Read this post on our website.


We first mentioned a change to our tile transition logic back in FFF-199, and not long after in FFF-214. These two posts focused more on the visual side, and how it makes the game terrain look so much better.

In short, the tile transition logic overlays an additional sprite over adjacent tiles, so that where the two tiles meet has a much more natural look.

Tile transitions on. Tile transitions off.

So while the looks were taken care of, we also had to deal with the 'feel' of the tiles. The easiest example of this is the 1x1 landfill 'stepping stones'. It really looks like you should be able to walk/drive across the 1 tile of water. So we added in an additional layer of collision checks, which will consider the transitions when performing the logic of what can go where.

https://cdn.factorio.com/assets/img/blog/fff-344-stepping-stones.mp4

Now some of the cheesier among you will know that biters don't know how to get across these 1 tile gaps. That is because simply we never enabled the biters to use this collision check logic. One reason is that more checks means more UPS usage for the biter pathfinding, another is that we didn't think it was necessary. However it was available in the engine, and any mod could enable it if they want. That is exactly what I did with my Mining drones mod. Initially this seemed to work, and I thought it might make them walk around lakes a bit more naturally (like the player character does).

However quickly I noticed that people were reporting on the forum that the game was crashing with the mod installed. I quickly reverted the change to my mod and we started looking into it. It turns out that the new abstract pathfinder we added for better unit pathfinding (FFF-317) was not set up to consider units using this tile transition collision logic. This same crash was happening sometimes without any mods installed, but the case was more difficult to reproduce, so this is a nice situation where mods help us work on issues in the base game.

Recently I have been working on another unit heavy mod, Transport drones, and the principle design behind the mod heavily relies on the tile collision logic (the units don't even collide with entities). It turned out to be a really nice test of our new pathfinder, but also highlighted some of the issues that not considering the tile transitions can bring.

https://cdn.factorio.com/assets/img/blog/fff-344-drone-zig-before.mp4
By not considering the tile transitions, the drone takes an awkward path along the diagonal road.

This week Oxyd finished his work on an upgrade to the pathfinder, so we can enable the tile transition collision logic with units. The change is immediately noticeable with the above example.

https://cdn.factorio.com/assets/img/blog/fff-344-drone-zig-after.mp4
By considering the tile transitions, the drones path much more naturally.

With the logic now in place, we are debating whether to enable it for biters or not. We probably won't, it is only a minor change and would have a non-zero performance impact (a rough test puts the worst case at about 5%), but then again it is a fun way to surprise those who thought the 1 tile of water would stop the biters attacking, and it kinda makes sense they can walk over it just as the player can. Well we will see if there are any issues with it in the modded cases before any further consideration.

As a bonus fact (this is Factorio facts after all), I spent a bit of time benchmarking some late game Transport drone based factories (screenshot), and found a few nice performance gains.


This Wednesday, Team Steelaxe set a new Any% multiplayer speedrun world record at 1 hour, 15 minutes and 21 seconds. This is the fastest anyone has ever launched a rocket in an unmodded Factorio game.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

I am part of Team Steelaxe, so I want to take the opportunity to explain how we managed to beat the game this quickly. In general, it is all about planning and preparation, we estimate that we have put a combined 200 hours into planning just for this speedrun. The Any% speedrunning category allows to change all map generation settings, including disabling enemies. Multiplayer subcategories allow for up to eight players. Planning begins with picking a map seed. Since there are many possible maps to choose from, we let a script generate maps and automatically filter out the ones without enough ore in the starting area, and then handpick from there. With the map picked, it is possible to start planning the base. This begins with setting a target time to finish the game and calculating the amount of science and number of assemblers required from there. We then come together and arrange a base on the chosen map, which will serve as a reference for the factory built in the actual run. It should be noted that the category rules do not allow blueprint imports, so instead we usually have the planning save file open in another window or use screenshots during the run.

Part of the spreadsheet that contains every player’s responsibilities.

Another big part of the planning is also to create a spreadsheet of everyone’s tasks and when they should be done. We distribute the tasks so that two players build smelting, two build mining, one player builds the power plant and only three people build the factory itself. This strict divide means people only ever take and craft the material that they need, so ideally we don’t have to fight over resources. Furthermore, the task list allows us to optimize by shuffling tasks around, so that no time is wasted by anyone. One example of this is that only two people ever chop wood for power poles, the rest get the wood from them and do not have to waste time on finding trees. The task distribution also means that every player has a very different perspective of the speedrun, so here are some more:

• Zulan is doing mining.
• I (Bilka) am doing smelting.
• AntiElitz is another base builder.

With the complete plan prepared, we do runs and iterate on the planning, taking into account what worked well and what did not. The speedrun above is the result of a few of those planning iterations combined with some improvisation to compensate for mistakes in execution. It may not always sound like it during the run, but we are all friends and when someone makes a mistake, others jump in to help out, so the linked run is the result of good teamwork. Without everyone working together like that, we would not have been able to reach our target time of 1 hour and 15 minutes.

In the future, we hope to be able to launch a rocket in less than an hour, you can watch our next attempts on Sunday at 20:30 CEST on Twitch. You can find over 20 active speedrunners, resources such as save games and replays, or even try running yourself, at Speedrun.com/Factorio.

• Added new environmental trigger effects for grenade, artillery and nuke explosions. more
  
• Added 3 level 'First steps' tutorial Campaign. more
  
• Mini-tutorial improvements.
  

• Moved Compilatron and Compilatron speech-bubble entities from demo to base game files.
  
• Removed Introduction Campaign.
  
• Removed Compilatron chest, Compilatron roboport, Compilatron logistic chest.
  
• Removed Tutorial/Campaign Lualib (base/lualib).
  
• Removed other campaign-only prototypes, such as styles, sprites, sounds.
  

• Fixed that thumbnails wouldn't show in the update-mods tab of the mods GUI. more
  
• Fixed that LuaSurface::spill_item_stacks return value didn't work correctly. more
  
• Fixed that the research progress of the current tier showed for next queued tier in the technology GUI. more
  
• Fixed that the game didn't validate modded rail-planner item type values and would crash in some cases. more
  
• Fixed that modded units with consider-tile-transitions in their collision mask would cause the pathfinder to crash. more
  

• Empty layers in sprite or animation definition will yield an error now. more
  
• Added support for playing a sound when using smart-pipette.
  
• Added support for playing activate/deactivate sounds for night vision.
  
• Added support for playing a sound while an resource-style is being mined through mining_sound.
  
• Added mod-setting value "hidden" to hide mod settings from the GUI.
  
• Added 'invoke-tile-trigger' and 'destroy-decoratives' trigger effects.
  
• Added 'rotate-offsets' to the create-particle trigger effect.
  
• Added 'trigger_effect' to tiles. It is called with the 'invoke-tile-trigger' trigger effect.
  
• Added 'trigger_effect' to decoratives. It is called when the decorative is destroyed with the 'destroy-decorative' trigger effect.
  

• Added on_pre_script_inventory_resized and on_script_inventory_resized events.
  
• Added 'allow_paths_through_own_entities' and 'no_break' path finding flags.
  
• Added LuaModSettingPrototype::hidden read.
  
• Added 'to_be_deconstructed' to the options for LuaSurface::find_entities_filtered. more
  
• Added LuaGuiElement::badge_text read/write.
  

You can get experimental releases by selecting the '0.18.x' beta branch under Factorio's properties in Steam.

• Fixed a crash when loading saves from 0.18.12 and older while re-spawning and having personal logistics researched. more
  
• Fixed offshore pump selection box to match the new graphics. more
  
• Fixed possible performance issue related to animated trees in OpenGL rendering backend. more
  
• Fixed opening the character GUI through hotkey when the logistic tab isn't visible. more
  
• Fixed that curved rail ghosts selection didn't work quite right. more
  
• Fixed that the offshore pump would play sounds even when it wasn't doing anything. more
  
• Fixed wrong Lua docs for LuaCommandProcessor::add_command. more
  
• Fixed a desync when personal logistics is researched while a player is disconnected from the server with personal logistics disabled. more
  
• Fixed a crash when moving armors around in other players inventories in multiplayer. more
  
• Fixed a regression issue with the select-a-signal GUI related to group ordering. more
  
• Fixed that trying to load a save created from a scenario in a now disabled/removed mod would crash the game. more
  
• Fixed a crash when trying to join games through Steam when the Steam API fails to initialize.
  
• Fixed that the character corpse wasn't included in the post-player-died event 'corpses' parameter. more
  
• Fixed that trains pathfinder could create non contiguous path in case of single segment cycle with a single train stop. more
  

• Added warning for empty layers in sprite or animation definition. In next release, this will become an error. more
  
• Added a check to make sure placeable_by.count isn't larger than the placeable_by.item.stack_size. more
  
• Added support to play sounds when left clicking radio buttons and checkboxes.
  
• Added ParticlePrototype::fade_away_duration and vertical_acceleration.
  
• Rolling stock entities can no longer have next_upgrade set.
  
• Added support for rotated_sound on entity prototypes.
  

• Fixed that LuaEntityPrototype::fluidbox_prototypes didn't include fluid energy source fluidbox prototypes.
  
• Added LuaEntity::productivity_bonus, pollution_bonus, speed_bonus, and consumption_bonus read.
  
• Added LuaGameScript::create_inventory() and get_script_inventories().
  
• Added LuaInventory::destroy() and resize().
  
• Added LuaInventory::mod_owner read.
  
• Added LuaEntityPrototype::adjacent_tile_collision_box, adjacent_tile_collision_mask, adjacent_tile_collision_test, center_collision_mask read to access new offshore pump prototype properties.
  
• Added "final-health" to the entity-damaged event.
  
• Added "final-health" to the entity-damaged event filter.
  
• Added LuaGameScript::max_force_distraction_distance, max_force_distraction_chunk_distance, max_electric_pole_supply_area_distance, max_electric_pole_connection_distance, max_beacon_supply_area_distance, max_gate_activation_distance, max_inserter_reach_distance, max_pipe_to_ground_distance, max_underground_belt_distance read.
  
• Added LuaEntity::deplete().
  

You can get experimental releases by selecting the '0.18.x' beta branch under Factorio's properties in Steam.