Today's edition of the Friday Facts has been written by Blue Cube, enjoy! Hello fellow Factorians! I'm breaking away from our magnificent testing / team building session here at our office to bring you more babbling about the development of your favourite game. This time there will be less of the regular "fixing bugs, fixing multiplayer, designing spaceships" theme from the past weeks and the post will be a little more technical, focusing on the workings of our magical multiplayer code.

Hi everyone, today we had a bit of misunderstanding about who will write the regular update so we are coming with the news later than usual. But it is still Friday here (around 10 pm) so still it can be called the Friday Facts :)

Hello, the days here in Prague are getting longer so the afternoons (and evenings) in the office are becoming less and less depressive. We have been working with a good consistent effort for the past week and the results are IMHO there.

Hi everyone, The full crew seems to show its results in its bug-fixing struggle. The working version of 0.11.16 contains historically biggest count of bugfixes and counting. We wanted release it by the end of this week, but it apparently needs more time as we always find some new problems when we test the multiplayer with more people. But the fact that we already managed to have less than 30 (relevant) unresloved bugs on the forums, and the fact that the multiplayer feels more stable every day makes us feel, that the hardest time of the stabilisation period of 0.11 might be over soon (TM).

Hi everyone, Two months went pass like that and I am back from south India to the winterish Prague. I had a great time full of Yoga, relaxation, new experiences and of course occasional remote work on Factorio over frustratingly bad internet connection. Now my (and whole teams) focus is clear: stabilize the multiplayer, finish the endgame content and prepare the game for Steam release.

Hello We released the 0.11.0 exactly 3 months ago. And here we are, 3 months later, still far from the stable release. Our estimate is still the same: just one more month until the stable. There are more reasons of this: It looks like the new wave of people coming to Factorio discovered many new problems. Many of these were in the game from the very early stage, but just haven't been detected until now. All the code written until 0.11 (2 and half years of work) needs to work in strictly deterministic manner now for the multiplayer. We started to cover all of the bugged areas by automated tests. Sometimes it takes 5 minutes to fix the bug, but another 2 hours to make the correct test for it. I hope it will pay off in the future. And last, but not least, lot of bugs have this kind of life-cycle:

Hello These weeks are quite quiet. We (Me and Kuba) are fighting the never ending wall of bugs, and Albert with Pavel (The graphics department) are doing the preparations of the 0.12 endgame graphics.

Imagine yourself living in a perfectly balanced natural environment. With total freedom. A place where your ancestors have been the inhabitants for centuries. Evolving, understanding, and being part of this peaceful world and rich ecosystem. Totally integrated. On this land you can get aliment easily, due the lack of serious predators and pollution, and with the friendly company of your fellows, the only thing you have to take care is food, relax, and reproduction. Imagine that suddenly, something falls down from the sky. Something that starts the extraction of the minerals, and the eradication of your forests. Even further. Imagine that this newcomer, making use of the stolen resources, starts the production of massive machines aimed to automate the robbery and the production of a never ending factory which creates not only pollution in the air and water, desertification on the land, and starvation for your people, but also, creates heavy weapons in order to exterminate you and your entire species. Wouldn't you be angry? Isn't that newcomer a sick bastard?

Albert is back from Spain and Cube is back from vacation, so the Wube is not lonely. Once Tomas gets back from India and Robert moves here, the place will feel fully populated again :)

I have to admit that the Factorio development is slowed down these days, but it is not stopped because it just can't stop. Or is it because we can't stop? I guess that we have come too far to give up who we are.