When I see the big NPE? on the board, I imagine that the developers are having an enormous amount of trouble with some Null Pointer Exception

Congratulations!!!
It's been so amazing to watch this amazing game's development from pretty early on, and now 1.0 is almost here!

Also the Friday Facts have been a really awesome developer blog to read. I hope you continue this tradition for Factorio and future projects to come!

Anyone tried using cars on belts before? It's a bit tricky to set up, but for very high-volume factories you can set up an enormous loop which is not limited by belt throughput.

Kinda slightly related?

No, this is different from doing a red and then a blue, in the case where you upgrade an older blueprint to a newer one and some of the entities are already in place.

I like the idea quite a lot, although admittedly it's not a super high priority thing.

Well, I've been playing Factorio for years and never knew about that SHIFT+SPACE pause. That's actually kind of nice, but I very much doubt that many people know about or use that. It feels wonky to use in the map screen though; for some reason you can zoom while paused but not pan, and none of the ...

Good point, the tech screen already pauses the game (in single player, but not multiplayer of course). Map screen should be just like that, although there should also be a way to view the map screen while unpaused.

Suggestion: allow the player to pause the game while the map screen is open. Personally I would suggest that M pauses the game by default, with a pause/unpause button in the map GUI. By "pause" I mean that the game time stops, but you can still use all the map GUI functionality such as scr...

There seems to be a lot of talk about Z-levels and procedural generated caves and diamonds and other nonsense. Nothing in the OP suggests a new underground zone; rather just a new tier of mining drill which is placed above hidden ores that you have to scan for. The game could use another tier of min...

Very simple idea, just for each turret have a simple counter that says "kills: ###".

The only reason for this suggestion is that it can be rewarding to look and see that your turret has killed off hundreds of baddies.

Sounds nifty, but while the game is all about automating stuff, if you start to make basic things such as factory construction automated, the game will start going from constructing factories to waiting for the game to construct factories for you. I think it would work better as just a command chai...

We had many discussions about improving the crafting queue, including special shortcut to queue to front. After long thoughts I have strong feelings against improving the crafting queue like this, for an important reason: it won't force you to automate. If you were able to queue to front many playe...

I haven't read all 15 pages of replies, but based on what I've read the verdict seems pretty clear: people want these changes and more! I don't think you'll find hardly anyone willing to oppose a change on principle just because they don't like change and they're accustomed to a weird and wonky way ...

If I were designing this game, it would be clear to me that turret creep is a problem for combat balance. I would like to add my voice to the "long turret warmup" camp. A) Turrets (especially laser) are by far the most effective weapon for both offense and defense. In reality, nothing even...