uFactory News

uFactory v0.5 "The Campaign Update" is now available in Steam Beta.

To join the beta, right click uFactory in your Steam library and choose "Properties". Then, choose the "nextversion_publicbeta - v0.5.0 Public Beta" option. No private code is required. Steam should then update the game to the beta version through its normal update process. Once complete, you can launch the beta!

WARNING: This is an early beta of an Early Access game. We're not going to warn you that it might be broken. We can tell you with certainty that it is absolutely broken. So, if that's not your thing, then please keep waiting for a more stable version to release.

WARNING 2: Save files are incompatible between previous versions of uFactory and 0.5. Please back them up if you want to save them. Otherwise uFactory will update your save manufacturing company profile to the latest version and ignore your standalone factory save files.


Funny you should ask:

[h3]Planetary Campaigns[/h3]

Generate your own random planet and try to build a logistics empire on it. Design your factories (yes, plural), source your raw materials, and sell your products to the highest bidder. But don't forget to take into account rent, tax, and delivery fees. Can you outsell your AI competition and become a global manufacturing mogul?

[h3]Time-Tracking Rebuild[/h3]

The entire time-tracking update system for factories has been rebuilt. Factory machines are no longer reliant on animations to perform their duties, and every machine works on a rhythmic beat to ensure they sync up as much as possible. This system also causes the simulation updates per second to drop considerably, allowing for a performance boost that allows for faster time lapse simulations.

In addition, machines will now (almost) universally be able to take in an "on-deck" object to work on. This, combined with the rhythmic time system, allows for significantly better throughput with existing factory designs as all the machines sync up.

[h3]Flow Rebuild[/h3]

The entire flow system (for transporting liquids/gasses through pipes/vents) has been re-done. Originally, it used a segment-based system, but it never did quite work right, and complex adjacent pipe connectors prevented segments from forming, which caused more problems.
So, all that's been thrown out in favor of a tile-based simulation. This has the added benefit of making it very obvious where the pressure is in your pipe system, as you can literally watch the pipe fill up and the liquid flow to its destination. With the number of new machines that process oil, getting the liquid pipes right was essential.

[h3]Manual Rebuild[/h3]

The old notebook manual was a bit of a mess, and growing to be a bigger mess with each successive update as uFactory grew. Since it was becoming unsustainable, it has been replaced with a nice, clean, efficient tablet that fits in better with the established style of the uFactory UI. Most of the content pages are data-driven and procedurally built instead of having to be built out individually by hand, allowing us to expose more information without fear of the work it would cause to have to update them after changes down the line.

But more than that, the tablet menu is just better. From the search bar on the homepage, to the bookmarking feature, to the saved states and generally more cohesive styles, we think you'll agree.

[h3]New Content[/h3]

To make the campaign mode viable, we had to make sure every product made in uFactory could be traced all the way back to the raw materials provided by the earth. So, this includes dozens of new manufacturing processes, including Oil Refining, Glass Blowing, Acid Distillation, Industrial Papermaking, and many, many more. Get building!



[h3]The tutorials and standalone scenarios.[/h3]
They need to be rebalanced, so they're not available in the beta. If you'd like to play them, you'll need to opt out of the beta.

[h3]Planned Content[/h3]
The rest of these are not in this update, but will come in future updates:

• Boats, Trains, Planes, and Helicopters. They're coming.
  
• Corporate Intrigue
  
• Disasters and Setbacks
  
• Grants and Loans
  
• Property Bidding
  
• Electricity Management & Production
  
• Machine Mod Chips
  
• World/AI Customization Options for Campaigns
  
• So much more...
  

[h3]Unplanned Content[/h3]
There is currently no plan to build a Battle Royale mode into uFactory.





Next, you start playing and report every bug you can find on our Bug Reports Forum. We'll squash those best as we can while implementing the most-requested quality-of-life upgrades. Once we have the campaign in a decent state, we'll polish up the tutorials and standalone scenarios and release 0.5 properly and start working on the next batch of content.

uFactory is bringing PC gaming on Steam into a whole new genre: the Logistics-Royale!

Up to 100 players will join a game and start with a 10x10 factory on a shared planet with $5,000 to their name. Players will have to build their production lines and logistics empires quickly, because once another player is able to amass twice their net worth in liquid cash, they can buy them out of the game! Last player standing wins a pithy epithet!



But don't worry, because you'll have nefarious options at your disposal to prevent other players from buying you out, including: devious sabotage, investigative espionage, and term-life insurance policies.

Because of the intense development and server costs involved with bringing this game mode into the uFactory brand, uFactory: Logistics-Royale will be sold as a $25 DLC add-on to the base game.



Also, the release of the long-awaited campaign update is being pushed back six months to support the Logistics Royale mode.

Hi everyone! Working fast and furious to try to get everything in for the next version. We assure you it will be appropriately huge, at least in the context of indie game updates. Anyway, here's a few examples of what we've been working on:

[h3]Simulation Core Rebuild[/h3]
We've been a bit quiet about this part, but it's an important part of the future of uFactory. In versions of uFactory up to this point, each machine operated whenever it wanted, and often, the machines' operations were dependent on their animations. For very complicated game-developery reasons, this made it very difficult to simulate the game at high speeds.

So, we've made the change to a rhythm-based approach. Each machine will have its own rhythm; a length of cycle that's a power of two. This allows them to work in glorious synchronization with each other. Not only does this add some order (especially to the audio) of chaotic larger factories, but it reduces the simulation steps down from 30 to just 8 with no visible loss of quality (animations still run as fast and smooth as your system can render them). This gives us a 73% reduction in computation overhead for the simulation and allows us to speed up time much faster than before, especially when not rendering the factory. This also means uFactory should run much better on older rigs after the update, and big factories won't have nearly the performance penalty they used to.

There's another really big benefit to this more rhythmic approach to factory simulation, but that's a story for another day.

[h3]Manual Rework[/h3]
The hand-drawn manual added a lot of charm to the game, but as our production trees grew and processes were tweaked to improve their parallels to real manufacturing processes and fix game balance, keeping the manual up-to-date was proving to be very challenging. Moreover, many of the detail pages for the machines and resources didn't even have all that much useful information on them.

So, the old notebook-style manual has been scrapped and replaced. uFactory is joining the 21st century with a tablet manual!

This manual draws a great deal of its information dynamically from the definitions of the materials and machines themselves, so it can provide you with considerably more in-depth details about exactly how efficient they are, what processes they're used in, what materials they need, etc.

Each material will have its own page showing every machine it can be an ingredient for, every manufacturing process it is a part of, and everything that can produce it, both in the factory and on the campaign map.

For items that need assembly, the manual page will also now clearly show the steps necessary for assembly, and which machine is needed to accomplish that step:


[h3]Flow Resource Piping[/h3]

Flowing resources (gas & liquid) in vents and pipes have been a bit buggy ever since they were introduced to the game. Fluid simulations have proven difficult for computers for some time, and balancing flows of hundreds or thousands of tiles 30 times per second without overloading the processor proved difficult. Some of the solutions to this problem, namely trying to divide the pipes into segments and junctions and balance those, simply didn't ever work properly, leading to bugs where some small 1 or 2 length pipes would never accept anything because they were essentially orphan junctions even though they should have been connected.

So, we scrapped the old system. With the new simulation time management detailed above, we had a bit more wiggle room to use a straight-tile-based approach. This has some knock-on effects: (1) distance matters a lot more than number of junctions now, (2) we can show density as a gradient in the pipe fill indicators, and (3) there's no more empty-looking junctions where flowing resources get locked up or just don't appear even when they are flowing.



Anyway, we have lots more planned, and we're still hoping to have this ready for you by the end of the month, but we can't make any promises just yet.

We'll have more info for you soon enough!

Thanks for playing uFactory and sticking with us through this development process!

Hi everyone! Progress continues, slowly but surely, during the pandemic. Today, we wanted to talk some more about how the upcoming Campaign Mode will work!

This is a major addition to the game (almost like a second game on top of the first!), so it's definitely taking a bit longer than anticipated, but we're making progress!



When you start a new campaign, a planet will be randomly generated for you:


These planets are separated into tiles. Each tile has its own biome that determines what kinds of resources are available there.

In addition, there are four types of structures that can be built on a tile: Resource Gatherers, Cities, Industrial Parks, and Logistics Stations.

[h3]Resource Gatherers[/h3]

Resource Gatherers are structures like lumberjack camps, mines, quarries, farms, and pastures that grow or extract raw resources from the land. These can only be built by AI companies, who then offer competitive market prices for export contracts that you as the player can choose to take. But beware! There are AI manufacturers who may scoop up the best contracts if you're too slow, causing prices to go up with demand.



[h3]Industrial Parks[/h3]

Industrial Parks are tiles that contain factories and warehouses. Many of these will be vacant upon starting a new game, just awaiting a lease. These factory spaces have varied sizes and shapes, and their rent will be based on many factors, including square footage, amenities, and local supply/demand.



[h3]Logistics Stations[/h3]

By default, all purchase and sales contracts are carried out by cargo trucks on roads.



But sometimes, you need to be able to haul more goods or haul them to/from somewhere not connected by a road. That's what logistics stations are for. Eventually there will be three types:

• Train Stations - Allowing trucks to load/unload large quantities to transport long distances. Expensive to build the stations/tracks/trains, but very cheap to run afterwards. We hope to have train stations implemented for the initial campaign, but they may be pushed back to the first post-campaign update.
  
• Cargo Harbor - Allows huge but slow cargo ships to transport goods across bodies of water. These are big and expensive, but require no tracks (just water) and have the biggest cargo capacity in the game. Cargo Harbors and water transport will not be available in the initial campaign update, but will come in a later update.
  
• Airport - Airports are a very expensive, but completely unrestricted, method of cargo transportation. Airports and air transport will not be available in the initial campaign update, but will come in a later update.
  

[h3]Cities[/h3]

Cities are the true heart of the campaign mode's simulation. Cities will contain hundreds or thousands of residents who each live individually simulated lives. They live in houses with families, they get jobs and take care of kids and their elderly parents, they move out and get married and have children themselves... and each of these households need products that you can provide.



Everything that can be manufactured in your factories will be categorized and graded by quality and quantity. In the cities, to feed the needs of the population, AI retail companies will open stores and place purchase order requests to fill their shelves. You, or your AI rivals, can take these contracts and deliver an agreed upon amount of product to their store once a day for a tidy profit.

But you have to watch the markets carefully... flood a consumer good category with too much product and the prices will bottom out. Alternately, you can limit your production to make sure demand outpaces supply to drive the price up, but this gives your rivals an opening to undercut you on price. Products sell at different rates too; i.e. furniture doesn't need to be replaced often, but if a population is growing, they'll need more of it, whereas things like clothing and cleaning products are purchased more regularly. In addition, the households that are simulated will have different buying habits based on their economic situation. Lower class households will tend to buy cheaper goods, middle class usually looks for a good value that they can afford, and upper class will often buy the most expensive regardless of quality.

Building efficient factories will help you keep lean margins, which will be important when trying to make up your overhead costs for rent and deliveries and raw materials. Or you could just play hardball negotiating contracts to buy low and sell high. Or just find an untapped niche where untold profits await. Maybe a rival sawmill has a surplus of planks, so it's cheaper to buy them from there instead of cutting your own from raw logs? You'll never know if you don't look!

Every campaign will start out randomly generated and have a reactive, organic economy, so no two games will ever be quite alike.



We hope you're as excited about this update as we are! We've certainly been looking forward to releasing it for a long time. Right now, nearly all of the core mechanics are working, so we're primarily just expanding the amount of content and production trees available to make sure the economy has enough goods to remain diverse, and then we'll need to do some balance testing.

We're hoping for a release in time for the holiday season, but no guarantees just yet.

Also: This is another reminder that the price of the game will increase when this update comes out, to reflect the value of the new content.

Hi everyone! I know it's been a while since we've had a serious content update, but progress is being made on the second layer of uFactory, the campaign mode! We wanted to give everyone a quick preview shot of the new randomly-generated Planetary Maps that will allow you to tie together multiple factories and build a global logistics empire!

Getting everything to work with two separate modes and switching between them and maintaining a consistent game state is a lot of work, but work is coming along, and we're excited to share this new game mode.

There's no hard release date yet, but we definitely expect to have this out to everyone before the end of the year.







We've got a lot more cool stuff planned, so stay tuned for more info!