Version 0.8.0

[kovarex]

Hello, we just released the experimental release of 0.8.
We didn't have the time to do as much testing as planned, so bugs are expected.

• Features:
  • Construction robots that can be used to automatically repair and reconstruct damaged structures.
  • Roboport - the home, charging point and transmission provider for the logistic and construction robots.
  • Recreated the new hope campaign (now 4 levels instead of 2).
  • Redesigned the map editor (separate editing layers, brush / spray / cursor tool, better character edit gui)
  • Structures keep their damage when mined and built again.
  • Structures can be manually by the player repaired with repair-pack.
  • Chests inventory size can be limited.
  • Inserters always work for loading/unloading in the train station, even when facing the gap between wagons.
  • Guis for item selection (i.e. inserter filters) uses Item Group tabs.
  • Zooming to cursor (like in online maps) in god / ghost controller, map and map editor.
  • Logistic robots take items on the way to chests into consideration when trying to keep separate chests for separate items.
  • Wiring cables in the map editor.
• Graphics:
  • New terrain graphics. Terrain is composed of tiles of different sizes (1x1 up to 4x4)
  • Laboratory has a light source.
  • Option to turn off showing pollution in minimap even when the detailed info is on.
  • Flickering light of furnace and boiler.
  • Highlighted chunk edges in paused game grid.
  • Cloud shadows over the terrain.
• Changes:
  • Unified all machines to show energy consumption (maximal) in entity info description.
  • Player starts with one burner mining drill and one furnace in the freeplay.
  • Unified the crafting time, crafting time 1 is now equal to 1 second of manual crafting. Crafting speed of assembling machine is relative to the speed of manual crafting.
  • Disabled loading of saves before 0.4.0 version (You can use 0.6.4 to load any old saves and re-save them).
  • Disabled technologies are not visible as continuation in the technology preview window.
• Bugfixes:
  • Fixed bug with the game being slow when the player was moving after the display was resized.
  • Fixed lack of correction of tiles when the tile with invalid neighbour is created. (grass in deep water for example)
  • Fixed of crash when trying to play a game with autosave interval set to never.
  • Fixed bug of wrong connection of pipe to ground when rotated.
  • Fixed incorrect calculation of mining speed of mining drills showed in tooltips/entity info
  • Fixed crash when viewing electric network info and the pole was removed or disconnected from the network.
  • Fixed bug with armor being insertable into the mining tool slot.
  • Fixed bug of the assembling machine with modules inside rebuilding.
  • Fixed bug with inserter not taking items from more stacks of the container when needed.
  • Fixed crash when connecting smart/logistic chest that was fast-rebuilt to circuit network.
  • Fixed directions of movement of disconnected/connected trains while the train is moving.
  • When manually controlling the train movement, the back/forward direction is determined by the direction of the currently occupied locomotive.
  • New inserted station to the train schedule are inserted under (instead of above) the currently selected station.
  • Stricter rules for enemy expansions.
  • Fixed shift building of smart inserters with green wires.
  • Fixed unlimited length of wire when shift building smart inserters.
  • Fail silently when player data cannot be loaded.
  • Configs are saved before unloading graphics and sound.
• Optimisations:
  • Enemy spawners are deactivated when there is no enemy force nearby.
• Balancing:
  • Increased mining speed of burner mining drill.
  • Increased the life time of defender robot from 30 to 45 seconds.
  • Changed the recipe of defender robot, instead of 2 steel, it requires piercing bullet magazine
  • Increased the range of the rocket from 20 to 22.
  • Decreased the range of medium worm from 25 to 20.
• Scripting:
  • Added onplayercrafteditem event.
  • Added read/write property currentresearch to LuaLorce.
  • Added the option to create and manipulate the checkbox gui element.
  • GameViewSettings to control what is shown in the game view.
  • LuaUnitGroup valid and members attributes.
  • Lua API call to check if path finder is busy (game.ispathfinderbusy).
  • Lua API call game.findnearestenemy.
  • Lua API call unitgroup.startmoving.
  • Lua API can read and control the wind.
  • Lua API to control the train (LuaTrain).
  • Added heldentity to the LuaEntity (only for insterters).
  • Zooming can be controlled in the lua script.
  • Lua API to read / write the mouse cursor.
  • Building the entity from the cursor.
  • Lua API to control god's flashlight.
  • Lua API to read / write player cursor stack.
  • Lua API to read fuel value, group and place result of LuaItemPrototype.
  • Lua API to read / write player states (riding state, walking state, mining state).
  • Lua API to check and start driving
  • Lua API to write entity orientation (works only on biters so far).
  • LuaTile has a field valid.
  • Added methods read and write pollution (game.pollute/getpollution)
  • Fixed crash when manipulating not generated LuaTile.
  • Fixed the bad coordinates of area in onchunkgenerated event for negative coordinates.
• Modding:
  • Enabled migration between different entity types.
  • Moved PathFinder settings to map_settings.lua
  • Added energy per hit point to rolling stock prototype (energy_per_hit_point).
  • Changed the energy specification in energy source from number to the energy amount format (J/W).
  • Changed mining drill specification to use mining_power instead of mining_speed and mining_speed instead of effectivity.
  • Moved light cone specification into data (character, car, locomotive).
  • Mods can specify allowed combinations of neighboring terrain tiles.
• Known Issues:
  • there are ocasional "thin lines" in the generated terrain
  • on Mac OSX 10.9 the game crashes during shutdown (configs are saved)

Downloadable at https://www.factorio.com/download/experimental as usual, or by automatic updater as long as you have checked to download experimental releases.

[FrozenOne]

Yeeeeehaaaaaa!

*thows away everything and starts playing*

edit: i like the small things like water pump auto-rotating to fit!

[gr0mpel]

awesome!

[Nova]

AHHH!! AHHH!!!! AHHH!!! *going mad*

To be honest: In my opinion the most important feature is the updated campaign and the better terrain. ^^


Which feature was the most "annoying" / labor-intensive for the devs? The trains? The repair bots? Or even the terrain?

[ficolas]

Awesome gonna test it right now
Edit: terrain is SOOO awesome, but trees dont fit in the desert, and something that would be awesome with water is movement and waves :3

[FrozenOne]

Inserters now insert items to players inventory when running around...not sure if bug.

[Albert]

AHHH!! AHHH!!!! AHHH!!! *going mad*

To be honest: In my opinion the most important feature is the updated campaign and the better terrain. ^^


Which feature was the most "annoying" / labor-intensive for the devs? The trains? The repair bots? Or even the terrain?

Terrain was very intensive to me, the tiling is very evil-specially water, but not yet finished, we'd like to have more variations and biomes and specific details and much more.. so consider it just as the beginning of a new era ; )

[kovarex]

Which feature was the most "annoying" / labor-intensive for the devs? The trains? The repair bots? Or even the terrain?

Tomas was working on the editor for two weeks and on the trailer for three weeks.
Lot of changes had to be done to make the repair robots working, mainly in the lifetime cycle of entities (It gets in to the ghost state and is revived after that), it has to correctly unregister/register everything.
Also the tile repairing algorithm was pretty annoying, we had to try few different approaches to make something that works (and there are still small bugs there).

[Narnach]

As with every major patch, I started a new freeplay game to get a feel for the changes.

Starting with a miner and furnace is definitely helpful, making the first 5 minutes less tedious.

This patch really made the game more fun! Roboports are my new favorite feature. Not having your flying saucers fly between bases and get eaten by the aliens is so much of an improvement. Haven't had the aliens actually attack my roboport base yet, so can't say anything about the construction bots. Yay green energy?

Energy usage for the roboport confused me. The tooltip says 1.0 kW, but after charging up (using 2.0 kW during this period), usage drops down to about 0.2 kW. Having a few dozen robots docked increases energy usage to about 0.3 kW. Is the 1.0 kW an upper limit, which it will use once it's fully docket with robots?

The rocket launcher range changes are very nice as well, allowing you to take out small worms from a distance, but still having to hit and run against the large ones.

Graphics: shinier than ever before. I like.

Limiting chest "size" is very useful in the early game to have some form of production limits. I used it to keep my stone and coal miners in line: only allowing them to mine a couple of stacks into a chest, rather than filling it entirely. Miners not mining = energy saved. Very useful when switching from coal to solar power and only needing coal in your furnaces.

[malokin]

Things

I notice you didn't comment on the separate slot for each health level of an object.

Do you really have to give Wall 1 HP: 15.101 and Wall 2 HP: 15.102 each have their own slots?
Can we at least stack walls and turrets separated by whole numbers? You could maybe round down the damage values of walls when they get picked up? You MUST at least show me the REAL hp's of my walls (down to the decimal) if you are going to force me to use my precious inventory space on my damaged walls.
I seriously raged when I looked in my inventory.

[TGS]

Can we get some clarification on the roboports and construction bots?

Firstly what are the 'material' slots in the roboports for? Doesn't seem to do anything when storing items in there. I assumed it had something to do with the construction bots perhaps? Consuming resources to repair? Or is it for replacing destroyed buildings?

Secondly... how exactly do you get the construction bots to repair? I just flamethrowered some of my buildings to test it and they popped out of the roboport, but they didn't go to repair. In fact that just sat there hovering above the port.

Scratch that. I just realised there is a new item "repair pack" that you have to make lol. Though it still doesn't seem to do anything... hrms. Oh well. Guess I will keep an eye on it for future builds.

Okay it looks like it is working but still slightly glitchy. I think you have to create and place the construction bots, place the repair packs in the roboport first before they'll do anything. Though the autorebuild may not be working. (Smashed into building with car... building gone, overlay with a purple bar counting down... but the bots aren't doing anything)

[kovarex]

Construction robots both repair and construct.

To repair, construction robots need repair packs. They take these from the logistic network (provider/storage chest) when needed, they also take repair packs directly from the roboport tower whenever they are exiting it.

To reconstruct buildings, they need the item to build the destroyed building (naturally), and they take the item from the logistic system as well.

In the future, the construction robots will be used to build according to blueprints and it will work in very similar way as reconstructing.

[Narnach]

I notice you didn't comment on the separate slot for each health level of an object.

I pay very close attention to the range of my pollution vs nearby creeper camps and I go solar power / -40% power mods as soon as possible. This limits my pollution a lot, so I don't get a lot creeper attacks. Less creeper attack reduces the number of damaged items a lot, so I did not really have an issue with it.

I had a single creeper attack which took out half my copper mining camp early on, because a creeper camp had spawned in an area I had previously scouted, but lost sight of. Sneaky creepers!

After that I built a radar. It's a huge energy hog on solar (10 solar cells to keep it running during the day!), but worth it to know where the creeper camps are. I also built walls around "my" area to prevent more creepers from entering. Since then I've had another half a dozen or so damaged walls and one damaged laser tower in 18 hours of playing. In hotspots I put 5-6 laser towers surrounded by a wall to keep creepers at bay.

The repair kit is cheap and easy enough to build, so I use it when something gets damaged. It took a little bit of fiddling to figure out how they work, but repair you figure it out quick enough. Put in hotbar -> select it -> hold right-click on something to repair it. Most things in the game are single-click for effect, but a single click on a wall with 90% damage has no visible effect (heal 1 hp?). Maybe add a description to make it easier to figure out you need to hold the right mouse button?

Repair drones could be a convenient armor extension: they automatically use repair kits from your inventory on nearby damaged items, so you don't have to.

After picking up 2 or 3 damaged walls while re-designing defenses also discovered they don't stack and that you can't repair them in your inventory. The latter was more annoying to me. Maybe damaged walls could stack with other damaged walls and their health can be equalized? So 2 walls with 50 and 100 health each becomes a stack of 2 walls with 75 health each? This preserves the damage, but makes them easier to manage. Then allow them to be repaired in your inventory and I'm happy.

To repair, construction robots need repair packs. They take these from the logistic network (provider/storage chest) when needed, they also take repair packs directly from the roboport tower whenever they are exiting it.

I figured out you can put repair packs in the tower, but the logistics network I did not read/figure out. Maybe put that in the description somewhere

[RawCode]

now we have crysis armor (with portable fusion reactors), advanced AI robots, pollution and mostly magical upgrade dispenser but still rely on good old steam boiler as only source of energy (solars and accumulators too weak compared to boiler), game development looks "imbalanced".

[FreeER]

now we have crysis armor (with portable fusion reactors), advanced AI robots, pollution and mostly magical upgrade dispenser but still rely on good old steam boiler as only source of energy (solars and accumulators too weak compared to boiler), game development looks "imbalanced".

LOL, don't worry, from what I remember fluids (aka oil) is coming in future (next? 0.9) updates, as well as nuclear.

[Gammro]

In real life, those are only alternatives to heat up the steam. In our present-day world, we still rely on good ol' steam turbines for the majority of our energy because it's one of the easiest and most efficient ways to transfer heat into motion, and then into electricity. I think it's 90%+ for modern turbines.

What a nuclear plant does is heat up the water with the nuclear reaction. It is then transferred to a heat exchanger, where another circuit of water is used to put steam into the turbine. This is about the same for burning oil for energy. Hell even nuclear fusion reactors that are developed right now, still rely on heat to boil some water to steam.

So unless the devs think of other ways to transform burning or heating stuff into electricity, I don't think we'll see anything else than a steam turbine to make our dirty electricity ingame.

[FreeER]

So unless the devs think of other ways to transform burning or heating stuff into electricity, I don't think we'll see anything else than a steam turbine to make our dirty electricity ingame.

well, obviously solar but also:

• * wind (still turbines, but not steam), I do believe they added a way to manipulate wind from scripts as well...
  * hydroelectric dams (also turbines, but again not steam)
  * hydrogen fuel cells (not entirely sure the science behind these)
  * kinetic energy generation (forget the proper term but takes the energy of motion, earthquakes, running, vibration of train tracks, etc. and converts it to electricity)
  * biochemical (anyone up for harvesting aliens? Reminds me of playing the Oiligarchy flash game)

Still steam I suppose but also

• * geothermal
  * biofuel

edit: hm, I suppose you did say dirty and most of these aren't...oh well, still decent ideas

[Gammro]

Some of those are indeed good ideas to expand on ingame. My comment was to illustrate you probably won't be able to ditch the steam turbines if oil and nuclear energy are implemented. I'm not aware of any other methods of extracting energy from those 2 sources of fuel. Although it might be possible to make a gamma-radiation sensitive PV cells and extract energy from emitted radiation.

[RawCode]

ever tiers similar to assembly plants and furnaces will be good, currently some parts of game provide no chance of progression, but others provide exceptionally long chains with new stuff every step.

[Balinor]

Alternate sources of energy (wind, oil and nuclear in particular) are my most wished for addition to Factorio closely followed by better defense/offense options without me having to get my hands dirty