Hello, You may have noticed we launched Space Age earlier this week :)

Hello, Welcome to our facts for the week. Sign posts or bulletin boards are a common sight in videos games, probably not far behind the ubiquitous wooden crate or explosive barrel. They are a nice clean understandable way to communicate with the player, and it was something we wanted to see in Factorio for a long time...

Hello, another year has come and gone. We know this year we were very sparse with any details about the expansion, and it is what you all really want to hear about. Trust me we really want to tell you about it, and in time we will. There are still major sections of the gameplay being changed and adjusted, and if we tell you about them now, the information would quickly become outdated and inaccurate. For now, we can offer this Christmas postcard Albert has made, which has a sneak peek of some new item icons. As well, we do have some other topics we can discuss.

As announced previously, Factorio is now available for Nintendo Switch. You can find it on the Nintendo eShop in your region. I hope you will enjoy it. Remember that if you are not sure, you can try the demo. I recommend playing through the tutorial campaign even if you are a veteran player, as it gradually teaches you how to play the game with a controller.

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".

For the past one and a half years I've been working on a secret Factorio project. Today we are finally revealing it. As announced during Nintendo Direct, Factorio is coming to Nintendo Switch! It's already in the final stages and the global release date is set for 28th October 2022. Here is what to expect: All of the game's content will be available. The gameplay is not simplified and there are no artificial limits. There will be no mod support. Multiplayer will be available, including playing cross-platform. Nintendo Switch Online is required for online play, but not required for LAN games. Save files are compatible between all platforms. There will be no save transfer feature at launch, but you can transfer your saves using multiplayer.

This post was written as a joke for April Fools' day. Nothing written here should be taken seriously. No doubt you have heard about NFTs, the latest Blockchain innovation. With some big gaming companies exploring NFTs, where does Factorio stand? We have received many offers. Some of the offers were quite silly, others very tempting. Since we have many Blockchain enthusiasts on the team, we decided to explore the subject ourselves. After consulting with some industry-leading experts on Discord, this is what we came up with: Non-fungible blueprints One of the many subjects of debate within the team is the blueprint library. Allowing players to easily share big blueprints (blue science, nuclear reactor setup, etc.) ruins the fun of figuring out how to build those things yourself. One of the best things about the blueprint library is that it contains your unique blueprints, which are almost like unique pieces of art. So it only makes sense to make them truly unique, using the Blockchain, NFT, and Smart Contracts technologies. What this means is that every blueprint in the blueprint library will now be stored on the Blockchain, and they will be truly unique across all of the blueprint libraries of all players. Just like NFTs, they can be traded on the Blockchain, also making them a great speculative asset. In essence your blueprint library will become your personal wallet, containing only the unique blueprints that you own. Unlike most NFTs, blueprints are created (minted) by the players, making it a truly decentralized system, controlled by the smart contracts we created. In order to guarantee uniqueness we will use AI and Machine Deep Learning to analyze any new blueprint before it is minted, this way you won't be able to just move one power pole and mint a copy. Once again, making blueprints truly unique. Our own Play-to-earn cryptocurrency Limiting the creation (minting) of new blueprints using just the AI will not be enough. To ensure the Blockchain is not flooded with useless blueprints, we will also create a cryptocurrency called Factorio Blueprint Token ⚙️. You will need to pay 1,000 of them to mint 1 new unique blueprint. Factorio Blueprint Tokens ⚙️ are earned from Space Science using a variable conversion rate we will control. Since you can now earn crypto by just playing the game, the game basically pays for itself. Factorio Blueprint Tokens ⚙️ come with all the advantages of a proof-of-work cryptocurrency, and all the fun of playing Factorio and optimizing factories for maximum UPS. Some say that Factorio offers so much value for money, that they paid more for the electricity bill than they paid for the game, so we are happy to take it to the next level. We will host an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) for Factorio Blueprint Token ⚙️, so make sure you invest as much as you can and HODL it, in the hopes that someone will tweet about it making the price go to the moon 🚀🌘. Click here to take part in the ICO.

Hello, Today is actually the 6 year anniversary of Factorio launching on Steam, and just recently too we passed 3 million total sales (and we're even past 3.1 million at this point), so it is quite a milestone. It is great for us that the game is still selling consistently year on year, even though we never take part in sales or bundles.

It's been over 4 years since we planned the infamous GUI update. If all goes well, next week the game will get the last big GUI update for 1.0. While the state of the GUI is not close to our crazy plans we recently had for the GUI, it's above what we initially planned 4 years ago. The update you will see next week includes: A visual update to over 100 game GUIs New high resolution icons for all game items (visible both in GUI and in the world) New GUI sounds for most interactions

The Character GUI Twinsen It was 11 months ago when we first mentioned the new Character GUI, in FFF-289. After all that time, it's finally getting ready. Since you can expect to see it released sometime in the next 1 or 2 weeks, we would like to present a quick recap of the features and changes, and some real in-game screenshots. ​ The Character window is now split into 3 tabs. Logisitcs and auto-trash were moved from the central frame into a tab and a new tab called Character was added. Using inventory/stack transfers in the player inventory will transfer the items either to weapons and armor slots or to trash slots depending on the selected tab, regardless of item type. Logistics and auto trash are now merged into 1 panel. Using a double slider you can set an interval. If you have less than the first value, robots will bring more, if you have more than the second value, extra items will be auto-trashed and taken away by the robots. The double pop-up and extra confirm might seem strange, but it's made this way to solve the problem of robots bringing you items before you finished setting up your request. With the merging of requests and auto-trash, we also made it so you can now set an unlimited number of requests, regardless of research. Furthermore, everything is unlocked in one research: unlimited logistic requests, auto trash, and 30 trash slots are all unlocked by the "Logistic robotics" research that is at blue science. Searching now not only searches the recipe GUI, but also the inventory and logistic requests. By popular demand, we also added a switch to quickly turn personal logics on or off. Turning off personal logistics will stop logistic robots from bringing requested items. It will also stop items from automatically being moved to the trash slots. Logistic robots will continue to empty the trash slots. Since the recipe GUI has a new style, we also updated the look of the filter, item, circuit signal, and upgrade selection GUI styles. Some of the other GUIs in the game will have some visual issues due to the mix of old and new styles. My next step will be to fix these issues as soon as the Character GUI is released. Looking back, this GUI took 13 months and 3 programmers (working alternatively) to implement. This is excluding mockups and UX design. It's a long story, but one thing that's obvious is that the GUI scope has grown far beyond what our codebase is capable of. For this reason, we won't be focusing obsessing that much on the GUI in the future. We will finalize the transition of styles, fix obvious issues and low hanging fruits, and try to get everything at a consistent level of quality for 1.0. This new Character GUI and changes will likely affect some mods, especially those relying on logistic technologies, logistic slot related APIs, old style definitions, etc. Thankfully a lot of mods will be unaffected, so we hope it won't be too much disruption. Still, we wanted to give some forewarning.