Hello, We are down to 28 bugs on the forum. The last bugs are often the ones we have been putting off for a reason, they generally require some more meaningful changes and decisions. That is why this week we have a lot to discuss.

Hello, Another week has elapsed, which brings us another week deeper into the declining weather of autumn.

Locale plan update Klonan Earlier this week I received the English proofreadings from Altagram, and overall I integrated over 500 suggestions into the game. Most were small, such as replacing "can't" with "cannot", things like that. It was the exact sort of external scrutiny we really needed, as it showed some areas where we were quite inconsistent. It feels like things are in a better place now, even if the majority of changes are relatively unnoticeable. However it was very noticeable to our great community translators on Crowdin. When we update the English strings, the translations have to be updated on Crowdin. For the last few days I've been working through the issues raised on Crowdin, and there was a lot of good input on that last 1% of the changes. So this concludes the 'English proofreading' phase. Starting on Monday, Altagram will start proofreading the target languages, and filling in any missing strings where needed. This should take about 3 weeks. Since Altagram has their own translation system for their team, it isn't really feasible to include Crowdin in this part of the work, they will just take the content from Crowdin at the start of the process, and after 3 weeks, push what they have back to Crowdin. So any translation work by volunteers on Crowdin for these 3 weeks would be wasted. So we ask that, if you want to volunteer your time, save it for a little while. Any work done on Crowdin this weekend will be included. We deliberately made this buffer between the English corrections and the Target proofreading so that the players on Crowdin have an opportunity to contribute before Altagram starts. After Altagram has pushed their corrections back to Crowdin, we will start the 'Community review' part of the process. This is when the work that Altagram's team has done is reviewed by players and feedback is given to Altagram via Crowdin issues. This helps us make sure the terms of the translations are consistent with the established community usage, and ensure there are no contextual issues or misunderstandings.

We have a long history of trying to bring Factorio to other platforms, including consoles and mobile phones (not including April Fools). We even worked with some external companies, but the projects never even got to the point where they would run technically, let alone the complicated part of making the game playable using controllers or touch screen. After all the attempts, we even had a Friday Facts prepared that was going to say something along the lines of "we don't plan to bring Factorio to other platforms".

Menu simulation V453000 In the last FFF, we presented that we now have the capability to show real game simulations in the Tips and tricks. Naturally we asked ourselves what else could we use this new technology for... We've dreamed about this multiple times in the past, but the technical roadblocks didn't make us think too seriously. We'd like the main menu background to be a real animated simulation of the game, similar to what Transport Tycoon or Rollercoaster Tycoon games have. Instead of things like cinematic trailers, we always present the game in its true form, and the menu background does not follow this logic. Also, any time we improve any graphics, a static image immediately gets older while a real game simulation is updated automatically. We've created a variety of scenes that each demonstrate some feature(s) of the game, from first miners all the way to the artillery and Spidertron. The screen is quite zoomed in and the factories are rather small, so it's more of a demonstration of the game's features rather than a showcase of "the best things anybody has ever built". The scenes are randomly rotated, where all of them have to play once before any repeat. The main menu should include both Factorio and Wube software logos. The Factorio logo has been used in many places from prints to trailers many times already. Its concept is that the logo is an entity like any other, and integrates itself into the world by being built there if at all possible. The Wube logo is different, both graphically and in concept, so we can't represent it as an entity. It makes a lot of sense that Wube is in a layer underneath the world of Factorio, so we're using it as a special water tile. From now on, the Factorio entity and Wube water tile are both buildable in the map editor without the use of mods. The "water-wube" only works well in specific positions, as it repeats in a 8x8 tile pattern, so fitting it in an existing factory can be tricky. To make it clear that behind the menu is not your factory, every scene has the logos in the exact same position, and the screen has a vignette-like shader on the edges.

Hello, Make Way for the Pentapods! Last week (FFF-424) we announced two entirely new enemies coming to Factorio: Space Age: Stompers and Strafers. This week, we're going to take you on a behind-the-scenes tour of some of the features, systems, and optimizations that brought these adorable monsters to life. We'll also talk about the techniques we used to prepare last week's announcement. We've got a lot of ground to cover, so let's dive right in.

The release plan (kovarex) This week was the time to close and finish all the things that will go to 0.17.0. Not all of the things that we originally planned to be done were done (surprise), but we just left any non-essential stuff for later so we won't postpone the release any further. The plan is, that next week will be dedicated to the office playtesting and bugfixing. Many would argue, that we could just release instantly and let the players find the bugs for us, but we want to fix the most obvious problems in-house to avoid too many duplicate bug reports and chaos after the release. Also, some potential bugs, like save corruptions, are much more easily worked on in-house. If the playtesting goes well, we will let you know next Friday, and if it is the case, we will aim to release the week starting 25th February.

After a lot of work we have managed to release the first version of the demo. It is not graphically complete and there might still be bugs and issues, but we nevertheless decided to make it publicly available. Go and get it. The demo consists of a 3-level demo campaign which teaches the basic game mechanics, controls and concepts. Together with the demo we made alpha version of the game available 'per-request'. The alpha version contains 2 additional campaign levels, freeplay mode and map editor. On top of that there are many more game elements which are disabled in the demo (different inserters, assembling machines, faster transport belts, solar panels, weapons, etc.) If you liked the demo and would like to try the alpha version let us know by email. We wish you all the best in 2013 and we will work hard to bring you Factorio as soon as possible.

Hi guys, here is a promised update on the next steps after the Indiegogo. We have compiled a list of questions and answers and put them on our forum. Feel free to post comments and your opinions over there. There are also two news regarding the team: Indiegogo funds have allowed us to hire a new member. Kuba is a friend of ours and a very capable C++ developer. He will probably be spending half of his time on Factorio. We have given him a bunch of tasks already :) Our main graphic Albert came to Prague for a while to get more work done on Factorio. This will allow us to communicate better and move forward with the artistic side of the game. We will be posting some pictures of the Factorio team in work soon so stay tuned ;)

Hi everyone, we have updated the game preview page on our website. There is now a set of brand new screenshots from the game. These were taken in Factorio 0.6.x, the current experimental release. The old screenshots were more than half a year old and they were really obsolete. A lot of graphic placeholders has been replaced since then and many new assets were added. There is still a long way to go. However the artistic direction of Factorio has more or less stabilised and we now know where we are heading. Probably the biggest change that strikes the eye are the new color tones of the terrain. The terrain now looks more uniform and smooth, though it is still not a final version. Our artist is experimenting with new terrain meshes and variations. On top of that there will be a set of various objects (doodads) to make the environment more variable and interesting to explore. Things like wrecks of space ships, remnants of dead creatures, ruins left behind by the native civilization, different fauna, etc. Apart from the new screenshots there is an update of the theme pictures as well. Now there is a collection of 1 + 5 theme pictures capturing some essential concepts from Factorio. These are available as wallpapers for Furnace Attendant or higher member tiers.