Factorio 2.1 Experimental Release

https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-444

by ibobev • 26 days ago

167 109 26 days ago

factorio.com

fooqux• 25 days ago

Their continued all-star Linux support is worthy of applause.

ivanjermakov5• 22 days ago

The only simulation game which keeps my laptop fans quiet, incredible.

Froztnova• 22 days ago

For a time I thought steam on Linux had begun to add .desktop files for games. Nah, just Factorio. Wube really is the GOAT.

allthetime2• 22 days ago

It also plays flawlessly on M* Macs

booi• 22 days ago

it does??! well... there goes my day...

jswelker7• 25 days ago

I love this game but am kinda disappointed with the patch after almost two years of hype. I was hoping for a total overhaul of the quality mechanics, not just a random nerf here and there. And there is still the big problem that by the time you unlock late game cool tech like foundation, fusion, and legendary quality, you no longer have much use for them. And I am still convinced Gleba was a terrible idea even though I have conquered it twice now.

wronex• 25 days ago

I’ve heard the Gleba gripe in many places but I don’t understand what people are frustrated about. I really liked the challenge. Care to elaborate?

OnionBlender• 25 days ago

My main gripe was fixed in this patch. Planting and harvesting with the agricultural tower can now be controlled with separate conditions. So now there is a better way to avoid wasting so much fruit and therefore, reduce spore pollution.

jswelker7• 25 days ago

It seems like the developer intent based on spores and spoil times and farm space constraints is to harvest small amounts as needed and build just in time products. But the tools to do that a suck, and the best solution is just massively overbuilding all products and burning huge waste piles. If products stop moving, you are kinda fucked because there is no good way to distinguish between fresh and nearly spoiled goods other than simple inserter priority rules.

It all works but feels wrong and dumb.

tekla• 25 days ago

People don't like Gleba because it forces you to play differently and not just re-do the optimized builds over again.

robotnikman• 22 days ago

Gleba was the only planet I really struggled with getting started on, mainly due to the spoilage mechanic. Felt like I was always manually 'jump starting' things at first because something got spoiled and stuck somewhere. Once I finally got a good production loop going though things got much easier.

The main thing I took away from it, was to not be afraid to burn anything that can be burned if things got overproduced, otherwise they would get stuck on the belts and become spoiled. My end setup had lots of looping belts and sorters to dispose of excess production of spoilable products

lowbloodsugar4• 22 days ago

Its not gleba i mind so much as the impact of spoilage. We could have the interesting effects of spoilage on the factory, without the impact of spoilage on transportation. End products, like science, shouldn't spoil. We can put eggs in a Biochamber, and then put that biochamber in our pocket and it doesn't spoil. Huh. And then we can take that egg out of the biochamber, unspoiled. But we can't put eggs in a crate and have them not spoil. Tedious.

vitally3643• 22 days ago

I was so disappointed to unlock fusion the first time. The complexity seemed interesting at first but the power it produces just wasn't worth my time.

terrelln• 22 days ago

Fusion is so useful though. It is easy to set up on ships because it requires no consumables other than the fuel cells, and it has a small footprint. It is easy to set up power on all planets by stamping down a blueprint, and requires minimal resources shipped to them. If you're not expanding the factory, you probably already have a setup that works, so I can see why it would feel useless. But, when you want to double, or 10x your power consumption, fusion makes it easy.

fabian2k6• 22 days ago

I don't think the developers promised more here, but the community might have overhyped itself as it is common. It's still a very solid .1 release, the improvements to space logistics and platform building are very nice. There's also a whole bunch of really nice circuit additions.

Gleba is different, but I think that is good in a game that is as long as Factorio. There's a bit of a bumpy difficulty curve here if you approach Gleba in certain ways. But it is very different mechanically than the base game or the other planets in a way that is interesting, at least to me.

It took me two or three iterations when I first landed on Gleba. But afterwards my factories there were more robust than on the other planets and almost never stalled or broke down. And solving that was quite satisfying.

zer00eyz• 22 days ago

And I am still convinced Gleba was a terrible idea even though I have conquered it twice now.

I hated Gleba at first. I have come to love it, and it might be my favorite part of space age. Embrace its organic nature, stop trying to centralize an focus on "flow"...

Nauvis is a monolith, then gleba is micro services...

lowbloodsugar4• 22 days ago

Quality mechanic is just broken as gameplay and broken as worldbuilding. Ford doesn't make a Lincoln by recycling 4000 Ford SUVs until they get a Lincoln SUV by change. It is stupid and tedious. Now even more stupid and tedious with the asteroid fix. Fortunately there are mods to just make normal things have the same stats as legendary. Also spoilage isn't fun, and the workaround of converting eggs into Q3 modules and recycling them later back into living eggs just undermines any argument against refigeration or other preservation tech. But hey, mods!

bryanlarsen• 25 days ago

I haven't checked, but have they done anything about my personal balancing gripe: trains vs conveyors?

Now that they have faster conveyors and stacking, they've become quite viable for moving large quantities long distances. Which is fine, but it feels like the right way to do that should be trains. My thought is that quality wagons should be able to hold a lot more and quality trains should move a lot faster, and/or fast fusion trains.

reitzensteinm4• 25 days ago

Yes. Quality boosts storage for wagons and speed for trains. Also unloading is more compact due to inserter belt side selection.

I did a 1m eSPM base though, and I don’t think the totality of all of that would bring me back to trains. Belts are extremely reliable, and I have never managed to make trains so.

rkuykendall-com3• 25 days ago

Trains don't need to be optimal, they just need to be viable. The fun makes them optimal. I think the quality, speed, and belt improvements did enough to return them to this balance (but I have not played, so I can't say myself).

bigstrat20032• 22 days ago

The right way to do that is trains. A fully compressed, stacked belt is 960/s, but a train can easily hit that throughput as well (and even exceed it). And they are much easier to set up across long distances than belts are.

LorenPechtel2• 22 days ago

A train can easily move more than 960/s, but the train isn't always moving. To actually exceed 960/s over time with trains gets some massive stations.

And a track is two spaces, thus two belts can fit. Even just blue belts gives 1440/s for the same space.

Your first item delivers a lot faster with trains, and when you're dealing with stuff that spoils the faster transit is a big benefit, but for the most part I find trains underwhelming other than on Fulgora where you don't really have a choice.

jswelker7• 22 days ago

The throughput of the rail is nearly infinity, but you will still be bottlenecked by the speed of inserters and belts on loading and unloading. I think of trains in best case as a highway that temporarily merges many belts together across a long distance before splitting off again at the end. Ultimately they are about saving space and keeping the infra tidy.

computably2• 22 days ago

Huh? I thought a stacked belt holds 4x60=240/s

edit: It does seem to be 240/s: https://wiki.factorio.com/Transport_belt_capacity_(research)

remarkEon2• 22 days ago

I’ve wanted the ability to hang pipe or wire along elevated rail.

jjcm• 22 days ago

If you want the core loop of Factorio but with a fresh spin, I highly recommend Dyson Sphere Program. It's my personal fav of the factory genre for the pure scale of it. As a tip, there's full multiplayer support from the mod community that works great.

skirmish• 22 days ago

Ditto, I never could get into Factorio, it was just too depressing for me to be a tiny human running around in an all-brown landscape (that was years ago, no Space Age), then getting attacked for pollution. Tried Dyson Sphere, and immediately got hooked: a flying robot as the avatar, and you very soon need interplanetary and interstellar exploration and resource exchange. Just felt more techno-optimistic in its mood.

BTW in one playthrough (in DSP) I tried to avoid destroying any native vegetation at all, so obviously no blueprints, just lots of fun figuring out factory placement and routing belts around all the bushes.

el_isma2• 21 days ago

I always just play peaceful in factorio. No attacks to worry, just build.

Sohcahtoa82• 22 days ago

IMO, Factorio has the most depth, but DSP is the most fun.

jswelker7• 22 days ago

DSP is awesome and makes you hate hydrogen with prejudice. Also interplanetary logistics are better than trains. Combat is kinda meh though. Also hate the spherical grid.

temp0826• 22 days ago

I'm on the fence about quality now. I really, really dislike the recycler and asteroid processing spamming as the endgame. But is it going to too hard to bother now? Will having to deal with the rare exceptions of actually having a quality item pop out be worth all the extra logic?

WJW3• 22 days ago

I don't think it'll be too hard; you can build infinite legendary iron from just a dozen or so foundries on Vulcanus. Legendary coal and stone are not much harder, and from legendary coal you get legendary plastic and then legendary steel and copper via the LDS shuffle. It's not quite as broken as the asteroid casinos and feels much more factorio-y IMO.

Avadii made a great guide about good ways to farm legendaries in 2.1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuwBnOsULkc

reitzensteinm4• 22 days ago

Washing ore is probably the easiest solution - research high levels of mining productivity, put quality modules in drills, filter off uncommon+, and loop them through recyclers until they are at the desired quality level.

It’s inefficient but has a very low cognitive load.

You can improve the efficiency a little by increasing the quality floor each level, eg rare iron ore, epic iron plate, legendary steel. But in my post endgame playthrough I was drowning in so much legendary ore with this method I didn’t bother.

LorenPechtel2• 22 days ago

The crushers could be vastly improved by treating recipes as a filter.

kzrdude2• 22 days ago

Running upcycling loops for specific items and materials you focus on is the way to go. Upcycling blue chips is going to continue be overpowered, which nets you high quality of them and their components..

With that said, you can play without quality just fun and playing SE without quality is great too.

jswelker7• 22 days ago

Upcycling is not that hard. The real problem imo is that legendary quality is such a late unlock, and lower than legendary feels kinda worthless for everything except maybe personal gear and power poles.

laughing_man6• 20 days ago

Quality power poles are the key to Fulgora, IMO. Connecting islands gives you more power and a place to put your accumulators. Also, connecting a tiny island with a large amount of scrap but no room for power to your power grid turns that island from nearly useless to valuable.

WJW3• 22 days ago

I'm especially stoked about space-to-space logistics. One of my first projects will be an in-orbit space platform factory, so that making a new space ship won't take a bazillion rocket launches just for the platforms.

fabian2k6• 22 days ago

It's already faster even without that because it now uses mixed content rockets to build ships and platforms. But space-to-space logistics do mean that you can make rocket launches less bursty and continually ship stuff into space to then use it.

WJW3• 22 days ago

You could always have mixed rockets if you loaded them yourself, which wasn't ideal but not toooo much of a hassle. For me it was more that rocket platforms are dog slow to produce and can be shot up at only 50 platforms per rocket. Not too horrible in the endgame when you may have dozens of rocket platforms, but in the early to mid game it can really strain my rocket capacity sometimes.

I plan to have a slow but wide platform with lots of storage that just loops around between Nauvis and to hoover up as many metallic asteroids it can find, then turns them into space platforms. When it loops around to Nauvis, it ships off the platforms to any spaceship under construction that might need them.

Windchaser• 22 days ago

And the addition of mixed-use rockets! That is going to make it a lot cheaper to easily kick up initial platforms.

mvdtnz• 22 days ago

Is there a good tldr somewhere? I love Factorio but not enough to read a changelog that exceeds 40k characters.

fabian2k6• 22 days ago

The big changes are presented in the Factorio blog, read FFF #421 to #423 here to get an overview:

https://factorio.com/blog/

https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-441

https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-442

https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-443

ivanjermakov5• 22 days ago

https://youtu.be/CN4569sUz70?is=GBPUDe1rwt6xvvVm

rmunn• 22 days ago

One of the things that makes Factorio so great is how solid it is, not just in its programming but also in its game balance. (At least pre-Space Age; I can't speak to its Space Age balance from my own experience, though I'd be surprised if it was badly unbalanced).

To give just one point of evidence in support of the idea that Factorio is a well-balanced game, there is a guy who goes by "The Spiffing Brit", whose Youtube channel is all about breaking games by finding an exploit, or a bit of unbalanced interaction between two different game mechanics, and abusing that exploit or unbalanced interaction to the maximum extent possible. Armies with a million archers in Heroes of Might and Magic, that sort of thing.

When he did a video on Factorio, I wondered what exploit he had found in the game. Then I watched it. It was about how quickly you could win the game if you got 50 people to play multiplayer with you. That's it. No exploit, no broken game mechanics, just a game mechanic working as intended (yes, any job can get done faster if you can divide it between 50 people who can work on it more or less in parallel). I'm pretty sure that if there had been an exploit to be found, he would have shown it off in his video.

That doesn't prove there are NO software bugs in Factorio. But it's pretty good evidence that any remaining bugs are quite hard to run across.

laughing_man6• 22 days ago

That video was hilarious, with fifty people running around destroying alien nests with pickaxes.

kzrdude2• 22 days ago

Here's one of their many impressive software dev stories: making transport belt update multithreaded https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-364#:~:text=Multithreaded...

pdpi2• 21 days ago

That one will never cease to impress me. Belts are basically the “Turing complete” of parallelism — I expect that every single data dependency pattern imaginable can be expressed as belts.

mattas• 22 days ago

There's another guy who I love watching (@MichaelHendriksLIVE) that exploits the heck out of biter mechanics. But it's generally in the context of difficult modded playthroughs.

bombcar3• 22 days ago

Next time

He exploits the game in a different way - entertaining if you know a bit about the tooling. It’s great watching him bring out minor side effects that don’t normally matter - until you’re on a 1,000x science run.

supertroop• 22 days ago

I play on an 8 year old MacBook Pro and with 10k logistics bots it still has smooth graphics and zaro boogs. It reminds me of how good blizzard was in the 90s.

AmericanOP• 22 days ago

Space Age is superbly balanced because it’s dynamic, offering multiple paths.

You can mega Nauvis with molten foundries, but that requires importing Calcite.

You can mega Gleba for just-in-time and resource generating blades, but how do you handle stone?

Vulcanus offers limitless resources- yet other planets may actually offer more.

Fulgora offers much if you learn modular design.

How do you handle quality? Dedicated factories, or integrated with production? How much footprint reduction do you want, and how much input efficiency via production modules. But that requires circling back to Nauvis…

DiabloD3• 22 days ago

I'm already playing 2.1, and have been since it came out like 3? 4? days ago.

Seeya sometime next decade.

lowbloodsugar4• 22 days ago

Disallow quality modules to be applied to crushers with asteroid reprocessing recipes.

ruh roh.

remarkEon2• 22 days ago

Added fluid mixing warnings. If you attempt to connect two pipes with different fluids, a warning will be shown until the conflict is resolved.

Be still, my heart.

sghiassy• 22 days ago

DONT PLAY THIS GAME - It’s called Cracktorio for a reason. I’ve lost years to this game :)

abhaynayar• 22 days ago

Lmao. Yea I played it once and lost a day. I knew I had to uninstall ASAP else my life as I knew it would never be the same. Never touched it since.

mft_3• 22 days ago

I was at risk, but weirdly I can never get automated trains to work, and this blocked my progress.

And then I discovered Mindustry. Which is crack-squared, for me at least.

ivanjermakov5• 22 days ago

automated trains

It was really tricky before 2.0 (LTN mod solved most issues but was not very elegant).

Since 2.0 it's quite straightforward using interrupts:

https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-389

https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/1gauzdz/factorio_...

sleepybrett• 22 days ago

I prefer 'Satisfactory' it's a very very chill factory builder. And less annoying in that it's fully 3d, meaning that its always possible to fit one more belt through somewhere wihout having to refactor large parts of your factory.

mikewarot2• 22 days ago

Reduced centrifuge stack size to 10.

Well, that'll make Rocket Rush a bit more fun to play. It was taking forever to get up to 40 U235s.

[Edit] Nope.... it doesn't change the requirements from 40 U235, just makes it so a centrifuge will fit on a rocket. 8(

Am I the only one who likes rocket rush?

laughing_man6• 20 days ago

Why do you need nuclear for rockets?

mikewarot2• 19 days ago

I need nuclear for cheap power, I almost never actually rush to make rockets, I just want to avoid the grind for technology research. ;-)

pm90• 22 days ago

Factorio is an amazing piece of work. I wish the devs would open source the codebase and artwork; its just such an amazing piece of engineering that I think the world deserves to own it. They could continue charging for players to play the game and charge some royalty for derivatives… The devs have said that they are tired of working on it, which is fine, but wish their solution would then be to release the code or organize institutions that would continue development outside of wube…

I feel like the game could be taken in many directions. True multiprocess support, parallel execution, multi-level buildings and so much more.

HDBaseT2• 22 days ago

I would buy this game but $50 is a bit steep and it has effectively never gone on sale (at least not in the past 2 years).

wilg2• 22 days ago

This is a $35 USD game.

HDBaseT2• 22 days ago

$50 AUD, with another $50 AUD DLC.

shelune• 22 days ago

The game will never go on sale (stated by the devs)

el_isma2• 21 days ago

Don't, unless you're ready to "waste" 200hrs. They call it cracktorio for a reason. And the devs have a "no sales" policy.

Factorio 2.1 Experimental Release

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