IntroductionAlbert Making a new world in Factorio is relatively "easy", just create a new set of tilesets for the ground, add some new models of trees, create a bunch of new decoratives, some decals (optional), a new skin for the cliffs (optional), and bam! you get a new planet. Well, to be fair, you also have to play with the terrain generation noise and autoplace algorithms, experiment with proper LUT's, and adding some new shader won't hurt either if you want to succeed. The problem of making it from this simplistic perspective, is the danger of falling into a superficial automatism. So probably all your planets will end up looking the same with just different colours. Gleba is the one planet that has all the things needed to make a new Nauvis-like planet in Factorio, but it is still different on many other levels. What makes Gleba very special, at least to me, is how we twisted the core-concept of the planet and pushed the necessary elements in a specific way to make it more unique. Before having its final name, Gleba was internally called "biological planet", and an obvious direction for that would be a planet looking like a jungle. This would be fine for a new biome in Nauvis, but for an exotic planet, never explored, and full of life (more than ever), this time we needed something more alien looking. With not too many clichés in it, extravagant, and if possible playing with new colour palettes. Ah! But also with some link to the reality of Nauvis. And it needs to look very different from Nauvis. Ufff, Okay!. So we started to think about the microcosmos of the world of lichen, fungi and algaes under the sea. Something that exists in our reality, which it's believable already, but it has all the requirements mentioned above. In this video we made the effort of showing what exactly we have in mind for the look and feel of Gleba. The planet is still work in progress. But we better show it now because we will need to keep showing elements of Gleba in future posts. The map was handmade, but with a realistic vision of the autoplace algorithm and the map generation. The "trees" used are concept art used as placeholders. The cliffs are also placeholders, some tilesets will get tweaked to integrate them better. Some doodads will be added and modified. Colour grading is less or more missing, and the rain shader on the foreground will be tweaked. For a planet full of life (more than ever!), now it looks very static, but we are planning on adding some more animated "things" to really bring some life to the experience. And overall, we are avoiding to show, on purpose, the red area of the planet (look at the map during the last frames of the video) that one is too early to show. This video would be 55% worse (or more) if Petr wouldn't have composed and recorded this soundtrack for Gleba. You do remember our dear Petr, right? from the FFF#406 Space age music. The track is not exactly as it will sound during the game, now he is finishing some remixes of the tracks to make them flow perfectly fine for the gameplay requirements. Now our usual galactic tour operator will guide us through the sophisticated nuances of the nature of the biomes and habitats of Gleba.
Hello! Welcome to Fearghall's Factorio Friday Facts! (FFFF, if you will.) Over the last few months, you have seen asteroids a few times as a background part of some other FFFs, but for all their understated majesty, they were actually quite a complicated trick to pull off! Come with me as I take you on a 3720 to 1 journey through this asteroid field.
Hello, Today we're going to take a look at a feature some of us have dreamt of changing for years now - the beacon transmission. The main purpose of beacons is to allow massively increasing your production in the late game while being more than just a module or a faster machine. To make use of beacons you need to adjust your building layout for them. Beacons succeed in this role, but...
Surprise! There are 5 new planets in the expansion. The first planet you arrive on is a strange new land, rich with iron, copper, coal, stone, oil, and uranium. Everything a starting factory needs and more. There's also water, fish, grass and trees. Yes, this is a fertile land, and we will thrive. We will rule over all this land, and we will call it... "This Land" "Nauvis". So yes, the new planet Nauvis is similar to the 1.1 version of the map, but there are some substantial updates. Hopefully this is a surprise for you, because updates to the base map weren't planned at all. It just got harder and harder to not make changes after getting more experience with the other planets and seeing things that were missing or broken. For clarity, these changes affect the 2.0 version in general and are not exclusive to the expansion. This has been a solo side project for me for a while and it's only just come to a conclusion. Anyway, here's the story:
Hello, It's Earendel back for another electric adventure. You got your first look at Fulgora in FFF-398. (If you haven't read that already please read that first.) Now let's take a look at the new planet's mechanics.
Hello, We've had a lot of requests to talk about map generation. It's difficult to talk about map generation without first explaining noise expressions. From time to time we need to talk about noise expressions anyway because they are a critical part of the game, but I don't think we've ever done a good job of explaining what they actually are at a high level. We will a closer look at planet mapgen again in the future, but for now this will introduce the basic concepts and act as a primer for later.
Hello there, I know a lot of you have been eagerly awaiting some solid information on the new planets, if so this blog is for you. Get comfy because it's a long one. As you already know, there are 4 new planets in the expansion. We will take an in-depth look at each planet's terrain, challenges, processes, technologies, and new gear, but not all at once. In some cases the planet content will be split into multiple parts. To kick things off I'll cover the terrain and natural aspects of the planet that is closest to being finished. I'll need to be in games master mode for this:
Hello, we've already shown the space platform processing cycle in FFF-380. Let's talk a little bit more about the machine which makes it all possible - the asteroid collector.
Hello, long time no see! Today we are going to talk about the expansion which is called Factorio: Space Age.
