Friday Facts #442 - Flip, Flow, and Fresh Paint

[EricGamer87]

I hope there are other updates to quality they will reveal in the future.

[jguy1987]

To be clear, it sounds like this does not completely deprecate mods like Bob's inserters. The ONLY thing the inserter flip allows you to do is flip the lane the inserters drops on when the belt is moving directly away from the inserter.

I never saw any example or info that indicates that an inserter outputting from a machine onto a belt moving past the inserter will allow you to change the inserter to drop on the near side.

[waterBear]

All of these updates have incredibly consequences for the hardcore Factorio player. Awesome!

For me personally...this is absolutely mind blowing...

06-12-2026, 08-13-38.png (27.88 KiB) Viewed 1662 times

[EndOfHistory]

First of all, thank you for all of the work that you have put over the years. Each and every one of you. Regardless of what types of games you enjoy I always point to Factorio as being a pinnacle of good software design principles. I am genuinely overwhelmed by how well this project is run.

One thing I hope will see some love are the agricultural towers. Currently quality does nothing except increase HP (no increased range or faster harvesting) and the circuit conditions for them are a bit lacklustre (checking quantity of harvestable stuff would be great). The other thing I really wanted was quality trains, but you are doing that now (now please also the fluid tanks).

Other than that.... this game is getting very close to complete. I'm sad to see you let go of it, but I absolutely understand why you would want to do it. I cannot promise to love your next game, but that is not remotely important, you should make what you love. Kovarex mentioned making something that was to WoW what Factorio was to Minecraft.... and I have absolutely no wish to revisit my WoW days, but if this is what you want to do you should absolutely make it and maybe even prove me wrong .

Thank you once again. You are making a difference (in a very positive way).

[Hurkyl]

I'm confused since I keep hearing people say this -- and now the FFF does too -- but asteroid productivity research doesn't affect the reprocessing recipes. And I've just tested it again. Is there something I'm blanking on?

Now, it does affect the crushing recipes, and you can get a silly amount of resources cycling chunks through the basic crushing recipe.

Do people really just mean the basic crushing recipe and people collectively keep using the wrong word to talk about it?

Anyways, is it just the basic crushing that is being nerfed, or is advanced crushing and/or reprocessing being nerfed too? Or, is crushing being left alone and just reprocessing being nerfed?

[CeDoMain]

Does anyone noticed the selection in the last image whether to output signal to red or green cable? I like it much!

[bartekltg]

> lane flipping.

So, putting items on the close side of the belt is still out of the question

Seeing that expression I thought we will get lane splitter. Do I remember correctly, it is already in the game, just not available.

> Low Density Structure in Foundries or such, but we are leaving those alone.

The nerf got nerfed:(

It may seems like I'm complaining, but it will be a great patch.
If I get the ability to put items of higher quality in lower quality recipes (mainly to upcycle eggs and send them to make normal promethium science with normal asteroid chunks, but there are other ussages), I would be completely happy.

[SHADOW13]

All of these updates have incredibly consequences for the hardcore Factorio player. Awesome!

For me personally...this is absolutely mind blowing...

06-12-2026, 08-13-38.png

yes, all storage scales with quality now but not storage tanks

[radical_larry]

That's some amazing work, except for the space casino nerf, at least if there's nothing else coming to replace it. I can't really see how it broke the game.
Thankfully it's easy enough to mod back in.

[waterBear]

Losing the asteroid casino is a bit of a shame.
The real problem with quality is that is a "nice to have" during the normal play through but becomes a necessity when you want to build a megabase. I just can't imagine anyone forgoing legendary machines and modules when designing for even just 100k spm.
But I suppose we just have to upscale the less powerful "casinos".

That is a bit dramatic. I have never used space casinos and have all-legendary things for my 1.5m spm factory. It is not really that hard to do.

[MEOWMI]

Very cool updates again! As usual, I am still a big fan of all the small details! The new rocks look so much nicer, even though the old graphics would have been totally okay!

Also very glad to finally see quality trains!

One thing I still continue to be surprised by, is how you did not realize how strong asteroid recycling was with quality modules. Maybe there were some last minute changes... Otherwise it seems like exactly the kind of thing a good test player would jump onto.

[bartekltg]

Does anyone noticed the selection in the last image whether to output signal to red or green cable? I like it much!

Oh! Nice catch.

Also, fluid temperature... Nice to have, but temperature play almost no role in the game. So, will be there more temperature related changes? (it may always be for mods)

[RocketManChronicles]

Getting rid of the "Space Casino" is the best thing to see here. I always viewed it as a cheaty exploit and refused to ever do it.

The increase of quality trains is a welcome addition.

But man, I am still waiting to see graphical improvements for the Assembling Machines and the Refinery....

I have 24,000 hours in this game so far, and have been really happy with the devs working on such a quality game. Thank you for so many years worth of my time enjoying your vision.

[CheeseMcBurger]

The new stromatolites and especially the new Vulcanos rocks look bad.

[Whar]

Reading about flipping and choosing lanes I thought "wow, can't wait to see the new KoS blueprints" and then my heart skipped a beat.

Thank you for all your hardwork, I hope she can play 2.1 in heaven <3

[Erfar]

While [flipping] some things will always be impossible (Train stops, Rail signals, etc.), we do what we can.

Sentences like this are a bit more bittersweet to read now that we're in the final stretch of development, huh?

How so? If a train stop would move to the other side of a rail, a blueprint would change between left-hand-drive and right-hand-drive, which i think would make it pretty much useless feature since it would create a blueprint that is incompatible with the rest of the rails system.

That will allow compitability of blueprints with stations included between lefthand drive and right hand drive.
Please consider adding something like warning error message, or separate function to flip such blueprints.

I personally like to design "cells" from import by train to export by train and If I want to explore changing from righthand drive to lefthand drive inability to flip "cells" are big restriction.

It also feels bad moments for 2-direction rail segments as those also coulnd't be flipped for some arbitrary reason

[Edriel]

Amazing work! I love all of these QoLs coming in!

P.S. Speaking of pipes, may we also have increased distance in-between two underground pipes the more quality they are? That would be amazing!

[Nova]

@Hurkyl: Asteroid productivity doesn't buff the reprocessing, but the crushing, yes. The central point for this is the reprocessing recipe because you lose only a much smaller part of the asteroid in comparison to recyclers. Every reprocessed to legendary asteroid gives more legendary ores with higher amount of productivity, but the productivity is only from the crushing recipe.
You also get 20% of the asteroids back from the (basic) crushing recipe - but with max productivity you get four times the amount back, which means you five times the amount of ore that you would have got from without productivity.

[radical_larry]

How so? If a train stop would move to the other side of a rail, a blueprint would change between left-hand-drive and right-hand-drive, which i think would make it pretty much useless feature since it would create a blueprint that is incompatible with the rest of the rails system.

So it's not impossible, just useless for the case where it's a one-way rail and someone wants to connect it to the same one way rail network.
I think it would be nice if everything was flippable. Let people decide for themselves what they find useful flipping or not. I like to use two-way rails, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.

[Dogmai]

2.6k upvotes; just one more tile (underground pipe length)

https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comme ... ave_their/

Aside from that, this is my favourite update so far. It will be sad to see casino's go, but I'm hoping there are going to be some better ways to get quality that you guys have up your sleeves that will be revealed at a later date.