Step 7 - Release
The tricky part is, that we want to release basically directly to stable, without an experimental phase, like when we released 1.0. The reason is the obvious problem we would have otherwise: An experimental release is not interesting to many people, but by the time it becomes ...

I set-up ifttt.com to email me the Friday Facts from the rss feed, https://www.factorio.com/blog/rss.

IMO items should sparkle like christmas decorations when first put down, and them grow increasingly grimey with a) use and b) time under pollution, stopping a bit before they become soot covered silhouettes (you should still be able to tell what colour belt/inserter/... you're looking at).

@Klonan About wave defense, my idea is:

-Use a procedural generation for wave defense maps
-Each month, you take a randomly generated map, tweak the difficulty the way you want, publish it.

This way you have:
-Replayability
-Competition
-Polished difficulty
-Possibility of sharing strategies ...

You're doing great work with UI scaling! I do wish you wouldn't limit it to 200%. Consider a 4K screen in a 13" laptop, like the Dell XPS 13. It's about 330 dpi. A 32x32 icon scaled up by 200% would still be TINY: approximately 5mm across.

I feel it's OK to leave the icons at 64x64 and simply ...