Upcoming features

This is a list of known information about the upcoming expansion pack Factorio: Space Age and the upcoming 2.0 version.

• As of August 2023, development is at the end of step 5 "First pass of tweaking" out of 7 total steps until release. [1]
• The planned price is $30.00 because it is "as big an addition as the whole vanilla game.". [2]
• The expected release date is around August 2024. [3]

Space Age expansion

Friday Facts #367 shows some concept art for the expansion. Friday Facts #372 shows some item icons from the expansion.

"Factorio: Space Age continues the player's journey after launching rockets into space. Discover new worlds with unique challenges, exploit their novel resources for advanced technological gains, and manage your fleet of interplanetary space platforms." [4]

Consists of 3 major mods which can be enabled and disabled at will: Space age, quality and elevated rails.

Space Age

Relevant FFFs: FFF 373 - Factorio: Space Age, FFF 381 - Space Platforms, FFF 386 - Vulcanus, FFF 387 - Swimming in lava, FFF 398 - Fulgora, FFF 399 - Trash to Treasure

Space Age features 4 new planets (Vulcanus and Fulgora are the only ones to have been officially revealed, the others are thought to be named Bacchus and Aquilo) with their own "unique theme, resource, challenges, and gameplay mechanics", as well as new enemies to deal with.

Rockets will be significantly cheaper. Chemical science unlocks rocket silo and access to space. Space science unlocks access to other planets. Some technologies have been moved to one of these planets; artillery, cliff explosives, spidertron, tier 3 modules, and some personal equipment are in this list.

Playthroughs of Space Age are expected to take approximately 60-100 hours, compared to 150-500+ hours for Space Exploration.

New Buildings:

• Crusher, assembler-like building for breaking down asteroids
• Asteroid Collector, sends out tentacle-like grabbers to collect asteroids
• Space Platform Hub, central unit for space platforms
• Foundry, processes molten materials
• Electromagnetic Plant, builds electricity-based items
• Big mining drill, upgraded electric mining drill

Space Platforms:

Space platforms are player-created surfaces that function both as factories and as transport to other planets.

Platforms are created by launching a "starter pack" on a rocket, which creates the surface with a hub on it with a small amount of flooring. More flooring can be placed, but can't contain any holes. The entire platform is lost if the hub is destroyed.

The hub counts as a construction and logistics handler (as the player is confined to the hub) as well as a train-like entity (for moving between planets).

Rocket silos now act as a requester chest and can request all items needed by a connected hub in orbit, including ghost entities. Silos can also be manually filled.

A number of buildings can't be built on platforms, including construction and logistics robots, chests, vehicles, and burner entities.

Storage within the hub can be expanded with cargo bays, which is important as you can't place chests on platforms. Cargo bays can also attach to other cargo bays.

Platforms act as a power transmitter, removing the need for power poles entirely.

Asteroids appear around space platforms and act as a renewable way to obtain iron, ice, and carbon. All three are required to produce fuel and oxidiser to move between planets. Moving causes larger, hazardous asteroids to appear that can be shot down into the smaller, collectible form. All asteroid types are collected and then crushed.

• Metallic asteroids are crushed into iron ore
• Carbonic asteroids are crushed into carbon
• Oxide asteroids are crushed into ice, which can be melted into water

Excess items can be dumped by "inserting" them into a space with no flooring.

All three asteroid types are also required to produce space science efficiently, as the satellite method now only produces 10 science packs, as well as needing some enriched uranium. Enrichment was moved to space science to compensate for enriched uranium being a required resource. Tier 2 modules were also moved to space science.

Vulcanus:

Vulcanus is a new volcanic planet. Its surface is divided between three distinct biomes: mountains, ashlands and lava basins.

Mountains are large volcanoes, covered in cliffs and with a large lava pool at their center. They are home to sulfuric acid vents where sulfuric acid can be directly obtained, and a new material, calcite, which is used as a cleansing agent in recipes.

Ashlands are plateaus speckled with sparse vegetation and deposits of coal. They are home to leafless alien trees, presumably a source of wood. They are relatively free of cliffs and lava, making them ideal for building.

Lava basins are filled with winding lava rivers. Within them are deposits of a new material, tungsten, which can only be mined using the new big mining drill.

The foundry, a new building for crafting with molten materials, can be researched here. It is used to process lava and calcite into molten iron and molten copper, with a byproduct of stone. It can also be used to melt iron and copper and cast molten metals into items such as iron gear wheels, copper wire, steel, and low density structures more quickly than other methods.

Lava can be used to destroy items by placing items over it with an inserter.

Big mining drills have a range of 13x13 tiles, harvest materials at 2.5/s, have 4 module slots, and have a 50% chance not to reduce resource richness, which can be further decreased at higher qualities.

Sulfuric acid and calcite can be obtained to create water, which is the only local source of water on the planet.

Coal liquefaction is now only obtainable on Vulcanus. A simplified liquefaction process is also available, wherein coal can be processed into oil without the need for heavy oil.

Tungsten is used in a foundry to create the Metallurgic science pack.

Fulgora:

Fulgora is a new barren desert planet. Its surface is split between island-like plateaus, and deep oilsands.

Oilsands can be walked through, but only elevated rail supports and offshore pumps can be built in them. Offshore pumps will produce an unlimited supply of Heavy Oil.

Factory buildings can only be built on plateaus. The only way to bridge the gaps will be with elevated rails, but you will be able to landfill the oilsands in the late game.

Fulgora is prone to lightning storms at night. Lightning will damage buildings not protected by the new lightning rods.

Lightning rods will also take energy from lightning and turn it into electricity for the power network. A bank of accumulators is needed to store it through the daytime.

The plateaus are far enough apart for power poles, so each island will need its own electric network.

The Electromagnetic Plant, Fulgora's equivalent to the Foundry, is found here. It is used for crafting electrical-based items such as lightning rods, supercapacitors, and modules. It has an inherent productivity bonus of 50%, which, unlike modules, is not restricted to just intermediate items.

The main resource on Fulgora is Scrap, which can be processed in the Recycler to create 12 different basic and intermediate products.

These products include the new Holmium Ore, which can be used to create the Electromagnetic Science Pack.

New Music:

The expansion will come with five hours of new music, some of it recorded using a live orchestra. [5] There will be around one hour of new music for each new surface (space, plus the four new planets).

It will also feature a new "variable music tracks" system [6], which seeks to "provide some variety in the music after tens or hundreds of hours spent in game". But, the developers note: "regular music is still the main focus and large majority of the soundtrack".

Quality

Relevant FFFs: FFF 375 - Quality, FFF 376 - Research and Technology

Quality offers "vertical" growth for factories and influences a variety of building and item stats.

Quality tiers are Normal (0), Uncommon (1), Rare (2), Epic (3), and Legendary (5). Note that legendary quality has a doubled level increase to 5 instead of 4.

Known effects per level increase:

• +30% health
• +30% energy output
• +30% crafting speed
• +10% turret range
• +30% robot limit (rounded down)
• +30% robot recharge rate (both number and speed, rounded down)
• +1 tile reach for power poles
• +30% positive module effects
• +1 equipment grid size (both dimensions)
• Larger inventory (unknown boost size)
• Increased ammo damage (30%?)
• Faster inserters
• Reduced resource depletion on miners
• Larger capacity on accumulators
• Increased output rate on nuclear reactors, boilers, and steam engines/turbines
• Reduced power consumption on beacons
• Larger scan range on radars
• +100% durability on consumable items (repair packs, science packs)

Quality items above Normal are created via quality modules. Quality modules have a strength of 10%/15%/25% in line with the 2/3/5 system other modules use, as well as a speed penalty.

When crafting an item, each step up applies a 10% (moddable per quality) multiplier to the quality strength to the chance of receiving at least that quality. With four tier 3 quality modules providing a 100% quality strength, this results in 10% odds of at least +1 quality, 1% of at least +2, and so on. The base quality of a craft is the lowest input quality, ignoring fluids; it's impossible to get a Normal iron gear from two Uncommon iron plates.

Quality modules can be used on any recipe, unlike productivity modules which can only be used on intermediates. Quality is also random, whereas productivity is a cumulative effect.

New building: Recycler, gives a 25% chance of returning items created from recipes.

Elevated Rails

Relevant FFF: FFF 378 - Trains on another level

New buildings:

• Rail ramp, to change layers
• Rail support, to support elevated rails

Elevated rails offer a second layer of rail planning, including curved rails and signals. Elevated rails require periodic supports which can be placed on water.

Known free changes for 2.0

• Expensive mode gets turned into a mod. [7]
• Better blueprint building. New "Super Force Building" will place Landfill underneath blueprints when building on water, or delete any other buildings in the way. Underground belts will be placed automatically, if possible. [8]
• Improvements to control of train systems. [9],[10], [11]
  • Any Item: A new wildcard signal that will replace itself with the first item in the train, allowing for generic trains.
  • Disabling: Disabled stations will now act as if their Station Limit=0.
    • A train en route to a station that is disabled will now continue to the station regardless, instead of skipping it and repathing.
    • A train told to go to a disabled station will enter the "destination full" state and wait until it is enabled again.
  • Locomotive Colours: Locomotives can update their colour based on the destination station's colour.
  • New Rails: Rails have a new texture. The geometry behind rail curves has been redone, allowing for 2 and 4-tile S-bends.
  • Reservations: Trains will give up their reservation in a station when they leave the block the station is in, opposed to immediately.
  • Station Interrupts: Trains can be directed to a different station when a condition is met, such as when Fuel is low.
  • Station Priority: A new slider on Station GUI. Stations have a priority of 0 to 255, with a default of 50.
    • When deciding between multiple destinations, trains will prefer stations with a higher priority.
    • Trains at stations with higher priority will be dispatched first.
  • Train Groups: Trains can be assigned a group, and have their schedules changed en masse.
• Factoriopedia: A new GUI which shows every item in the game, how they are crafted, what recipes they're used in, and what technologies unlock them. Can also be built on for Expansion and Modded content. [12]
• Assembling machines can now be connected to the Circuit network. FLuid-based buildings such as the Oil refinery can now be flipped. [13]
• Small changes [14]
  • Logistic Requests are re-enabled upon retrieving one's corpse.
  • Mathematical expressions can be typed in text fields, such as 4k, 4*5k, etc.
  • Save games can now be sorted by last time modified.
  • Lamp can now use colours without the need for the Circuit network.
• Filter inserter and Stack filter inserter will be removed. All remaining inserters will have the ability to filter 5 items. [15]
• Stack inserters will be renamed to "Bulk Inserter". This will be due to a new inserter in the paid Expansion with the ability to stack items on belts, which will take the more appropriate name of Stack Inserter. [16].
• Improvements to controlling spidertrons. [17]
• Ghost pipes will visually connect to each other. [18]
• Improved flying robot behaviour. [19]
• Mods can create more than 255 tiles. [20]
• The UI for Arithmetic combinators and Decider combinators are redone. Decider combinators can now handle multiple conditions at once. [21]
• An overhaul to the sound engine, allowing for more dynamic and layered sounds. [22]
• Improved world generation of Nauvis, the starting planet. [23]
• A new whole-belt reader for the Belt transport system that reads all the belts in the same 'transport line', and survives going through underground belts. It also features "less visual clutter" [24]
• Faster subsequent rocket launches: the Rocket silo can craft and buffer an extra rocket inside (meaning "the door closing and opening sequence is skipped") [25]
• The Pump now has a filter [26]
• A heavily reworked Logistic network GUI, with affordances like a remote view panel and table of inventory icons [27]

See also

• Friday Facts #365 - Future plans
• Friday Facts #367 - Expansion news
• Friday Facts #370 - The journey to Nintendo Switch
• Friday Facts #373 - Factorio: Space Age
• Friday Facts #374 - Smarter Robots
• Friday Facts #375 - Quality
• Planned releases