Factorio 2.1 Experimental Release

One of the things that makes Factorio so great is how solid it is, not just in its programming but also in its game balance. (At least pre-Space Age; I can't speak to its Space Age balance from my own experience, though I'd be surprised if it was badly unbalanced).

To give just one point of evidence in support of the idea that Factorio is a well-balanced game, there is a guy who goes by "The Spiffing Brit", whose Youtube channel is all about breaking games by finding an exploit, or a bit of unbalanced interaction between two different game mechanics, and abusing that exploit or unbalanced interaction to the maximum extent possible. Armies with a million archers in Heroes of Might and Magic, that sort of thing.

When he did a video on Factorio, I wondered what exploit he had found in the game. Then I watched it. It was about how quickly you could win the game if you got 50 people to play multiplayer with you. That's it. No exploit, no broken game mechanics, just a game mechanic working as intended (yes, any job can get done faster if you can divide it between 50 people who can work on it more or less in parallel). I'm pretty sure that if there had been an exploit to be found, he would have shown it off in his video.

That doesn't prove there are NO software bugs in Factorio. But it's pretty good evidence that any remaining bugs are quite hard to run across.

I haven't checked, but have they done anything about my personal balancing gripe: trains vs conveyors?

Now that they have faster conveyors and stacking, they've become quite viable for moving large quantities long distances. Which is fine, but it feels like the right way to do that should be trains. My thought is that quality wagons should be able to hold a lot more and quality trains should move a lot faster, and/or fast fusion trains.

I'm especially stoked about space-to-space logistics. One of my first projects will be an in-orbit space platform factory, so that making a new space ship won't take a bazillion rocket launches just for the platforms.

Their continued all-star Linux support is worthy of applause.

I'm already playing 2.1, and have been since it came out like 3? 4? days ago.

Seeya sometime next decade.

I'm on the fence about quality now. I really, really dislike the recycler and asteroid processing spamming as the endgame. But is it going to too hard to bother now? Will having to deal with the rare exceptions of actually having a quality item pop out be worth all the extra logic?

>Disallow quality modules to be applied to crushers with asteroid reprocessing recipes.

ruh roh.

I love this game but am kinda disappointed with the patch after almost two years of hype. I was hoping for a total overhaul of the quality mechanics, not just a random nerf here and there. And there is still the big problem that by the time you unlock late game cool tech like foundation, fusion, and legendary quality, you no longer have much use for them. And I am still convinced Gleba was a terrible idea even though I have conquered it twice now.

Is there a good tldr somewhere? I love Factorio but not enough to read a changelog that exceeds 40k characters.

If you want the core loop of Factorio but with a fresh spin, I highly recommend Dyson Sphere Program. It's my personal fav of the factory genre for the pure scale of it. As a tip, there's full multiplayer support from the mod community that works great.