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The whistle has blown. The belts have stopped. The furnace is silent and cold. After 14 years of continual development, Factorio has received its final major update.
Developer Wube Software revealed that update 2.1 would be the last significant patch for its genre-defining factory building sim back in May, with the team deciding the game had “reached a good place to conclude active game development”. The decision comes two years after Wube released Factorio’s remarkable Space Age expansion, which lets players take their industrialisation efforts into the stars and across four wildly different alien planets.
If you were hoping Wube might sign off on Factorio on a similarly spectacular note, you may be disappointed. In its latest Friday Facts blog, the developer reiterates that 2.1 “isn’t about new planets, enemies or research trees,” and instead delivers “a big collection of quality of life, small features, polish, and the things we wanted to for 2.0 but didn’t have time for.”
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This doesn’t mean 2.1 has nothing of interest, however. Quite the opposite. The primary changes revolve around the space logistics introduced by Space Age, with Wube making it easier to ferry goods up into space and between planets. Rockets, for instance, can now carry multiple different items rather than just one thing, making it considerably easier to get space platforms built. On top of that, platforms can also transfer items between one another in orbit and automatically import items from all available locations.
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Also on the space logistics front, Wube has added a constructable unloading bay that can be attached to landing pads, allowing inserters to pull out items and place them directly onto belts, into trains and so forth. This should make interplanetary logistics a bit easier.
There are also a bunch of non-Space Age related changes. Most interesting is an overhaul to the Biters that attack your base. Wube has altered the game so that biter expansion grouping scales with evolution, to ensure that clearing out biters poses a “meaningful challenge rather than lots of tiny annoying nests.” Biters will also “choose more natural locations” to build new habitats and will expand their territory regardless of whether the player chooses to explore the map early.
Elsewhere, the update reintroduces fluid mixing prevention, makes some tweaks to Space Age’s Quality system, and adds snazzy new graphics for assembling machines, oil refineries, rocket silos and heat exchangers. Finally, the patch adds a new rendering system that makes it easier for pumps to connect to rail fluid wagons. This might just be the thing I’m most excited about, because setting up fluid pumps is always an enormous faff.
While we may see some smaller patches in the future, 2.1 marks the definitive end of development for Factorio. As for what Wube’s plan is going forward, the studio said it was working on some new prototypes back in May, but it stressed that “there will not be anything to share for a long time.” For now, we’ll just have to settle for playing one of the greatest games ever made.
