Factorio Forums

I just bought the game a few days ago, but I just wanted to explain what I've spent the last 1.5 hours doing, and how frustrating it's been.

So I go to play Factorio (via Steam) and it tells me I need to update. That's fine, my wifi is a bit dodgey, so I go and plug into the router, and it downloads and installs fine. I get into the game, and it tells me a bunch of stuff has been migrated. That's fine, I know it's early release and things aren't always backwards compatible in early release. Then I see my electricity network isn't working due to the issues with boilers. I try to play around with things to get it working (i.e. remove and rebuild boilers, pipes and steam engine), but can't get it working.

Ok fine. As I said, I haven't been playing long, so not that far into this game. I'll just start again. I start a new scenario and start building up, and it comes time to build electricity again, and I still can't get it to work. It's not obvious (to me anyway) how I'm now supposed to connect the boilers to the steam engine. At one stage, I also tried building a pipe (because I thought I might need one to connect it) but for some reason, I can't rotate the pipe - unsure if this is a bug or that's just how the game works.

So I give up and try to go back to 0.14. Have never used this feature of steam before, and it wants me to download something again. I'm guessing that's Steam's fault, but it's a pain for me given my wifi issues (yes, I realise this is my problem). Anyway, I finally download it, but by that stage my allotted time for gaming is pretty much over (don't get a lot of time to play games these days!), and to be honest, I wasn't really in the mood to play any more.. I also tried to go back to 0.15 to figure out the steam/boiler problem, but now it wants to download the whole few hundred mb again.

Anyway, I know a lot of this is my fault (or possibly Steam's fault), but it would have really helped to have more information on this change. The announcement post on Steam only mentions a few minor bug fixes, but this is a major backwards incompatible change. Also, the changes to boilers are confusing, and really could have been explained better. I have also played a lot of RimWorld, which is also in early release, and also has backwards incompatible releases. But it is made really clear, and it's easy to find out the major changes (you also can't play old save games with newer versions to avoid some of the weirdness). It would have been really good to have had similar information for this release (especially for those of us who don't follow every announcement and piece of news about a game, so don't know what is coming until the update gets launched).

Hi, thanks for the feedback. I appologize for not releasing announcement right when we pushed 0.15 for everyone.

We make sure maps from several previous versions can be loaded in the latest version, but factory setups that used to work before don't need to work anymore in the latest version. And it is usually not very hard to fix your factory for it to start working in the new version again. I realize when you launch the game for the first time after big update, it doesn't tell you an update happened and what changed, and it is something we should work on.

Anyway, boilers now have to pipe connections for water (so you can chain them as before) and one output connection for steam that should go to steam engine. One boiler can saturate two steam engines.
See: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/f ... =915914450 or http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/f ... =946686136

Well this won't change much to you, but here are a few informations that may help you unerstand.
As you know, the game is still in development.
There are two major families of versions :
- Stable
- Experimental

If you use Steam for your game, depending on if you have opted-in for experimental content or not :
- Either you get only updates that are considered as stable
- Either every increment of experimental update

What happened is that the last stable version before all what happened to you was 0.14.23.
There has been since then 30 experimental versions of the next major update (0.15.xx). You didn't opt-in for experimental stuff, so you didn't see them at all.
and the very last increment of 0.15 major version, the 0.15.31, was published as stable. Steam then forced update on your game.

Using Steam for your games has the big advantage of automating the keeping your games up-to-date stuff. It also has the big disadvantage of ... keeping them up-to-date, even when you don't want to. There's nothing one can do to prevent this.

If you want 100% freedom on what version you play and when to update it, the best way to go for the extremely rare game devs that offer this service (which is happily the case for Wube Software for Factorio), is link your Steam account to a Factorio Account here, and download the game version you want. There, you wan chosse exactly when you want to upgrade, and even download different older versions of the game that can coexist freely on your system, and switch from one to another without redownloading everything (I advise the "zip version" for that).

So, sorry for what happened to you, you fell in a bad circumstance conjuction of plenty of things, because of Steam, the way updates work, your bad connexion, ... and sorry it ruined you gameplay session. Hope next one will be better with what's above.

Pipe automatically 'rotate' based on what they are near when you place them.
Boilers now have a side connection where steam engines go... not in-line like they used to be. inline connection is to connect more boilers in series.

0.15 Was declared stable?! Finally!!!

Watch MangledPorkGaming on Youtube (this video exactly) as he have to modify his whole factories (mainly energy and science production) after the upgrade to 0.15.x ...

Maybe this video helps somebody

Thanks for all the responses, I know what to do next time I play.

I've only played about 5 hours so far, and am enjoying it. So looking forward to trying out the new version.

Part of the joy of Factorio is figuring out how to do the different functions (power, trains, research, etc) of the game. The further you get into the game, the deeper it gets. I've been playing this game since just before 0.15 came out. I have about 8-10 different maps so far. Each map, I learn something new that I want to do in the next map. Currently, I'm trying to learn circuits and how to build a better map with them. (previous knowledge of the circuit system was limited to just the logic of the Uranium process)

The good thing is that there is a wealth of knowledge out there - these forums, youtube, and google. If you get stuck on something, someone has posted the answer somewhere. And the beauty is that there is usually "more than one way to skin a cat" as the saying goes. Don't be afraid to experiment and try new ways to approach a problem. I think my smelting design has been different in every single map.