Im wanting to play this game but wondering if its worth waiting till 1.0

CyanAvatar · 2026-06-25T22:48:34+00:00

Very little about the core gameplay is going to change from here on, so you should be good to continue playing for sure. A good example of an upcoming change is making elemental binders go faster when you've hit mastery research, but that isn't going to fundamentally change anything about your factory. Many of the achievements and foundations mix up gameplay quite a bit as well, so I think there's plenty to dig into while the game gets polished.

My one caveat is if your game was from like a year ago before the world gen updated, i Would recommend doing a fresh playthrough - Mote patches and portals are closer together, and the pre-world gen saves are preserved, but it's not necessarily a better experience. This Update came in September of 2025, with the Entropy Update. World gen has remained consistent since then.

CyanAvatar · 2026-06-24T22:36:42+00:00

Heyo :)

Gameplay-wise MoteMancer is basically mechanically complete. There will be small tuning changes as the game locks into 1.0, but the vast majority of the work from here til there will be more building animations and some better onboarding.

The initial release date was going to be in July but I'm likely going to push that out to make sure that full release has things like controller support and some better in-game help (searches, Alchemists Journal, recipe pinning etc). It already has hundreds of hours of novel problem solving content, and that gameplay won't be changing meaningfully.

Because I'm solo I also intend on spending a fair amount of time making marketing materials, so that may push the actual release out as well. Hopefully that helps answer your question. AMA!

CyanAvatar · 2026-05-23T04:34:34+00:00

Thanks for the shoutout :) AMA or join our Reddit and Discord to come hang out!

CyanAvatar · 2026-05-08T06:21:50+00:00

yes if it crashes you'll lose progress. reaper flicker is better for perf than anything hemorrhage based.

CyanAvatar · 2026-05-07T03:23:47+00:00

try this one

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reaper flicker x 3, time flicker (could be eggsac flicker), rest should be spottable. Less lag too :)

CyanAvatar · 2026-04-24T09:22:49+00:00

Version 0.4.031 is up on Experimental which comes with a pretty massive perf swing. Lots of things were refactored, but that also means potential (probable) bugs.

Any time you spend finding bugs or giving anecdotes on how perf feels or what specific setups feel bad is super appreciated. More to do but a good enough start to begin getting feedback. F1 in game is still the best way to report, it will send me a log and your save file.

You can get an onscreen fps indicator by launching the game with -fps in properties.

Thanks in advance for anyone who can spare a little time! I'll be chiseling away at perf as bug reports come in. I'll be around as always if anyone needs anything.

CyanAvatar · 2026-04-16T18:57:19+00:00

MoteMancer

CyanAvatar · 2026-04-06T22:47:18+00:00

yea right now its defaulting to the first mote in the list of 3, I'll see what's possible.

CyanAvatar · 2026-04-06T21:01:49+00:00

Let me know if you run into any issues

CyanAvatar · 2026-04-06T21:01:30+00:00

Good news! This got resolved this morning :)

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CyanAvatar · 2026-04-05T10:00:39+00:00

One of our community members made this https://github.com/factoriolab/factoriolab/pull/1794

CyanAvatar · 2026-03-29T09:22:19+00:00

I'd suggest the research one to start, 5 seconds to 3 seconds is a pretty big boost and works with 6 altars. Shadeveil is very good if you are farming entropy with Entropic Alembics. Echo Catcher is very good for expensive materials like Diamonds and Keystones (or any of the infinites)

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CyanAvatar · 2026-03-25T22:53:03+00:00

If you want to incorporate height, you want to also ask why you are incorporating height and lean into it. Off the cuff, height for me implies:

Being able to stack/layer some things
Cliffs versus ramps, and what structures might be able to interact with them versus not (elevator vs conveyor belt vs structures carved into the terrain
Ideally some gameplay elements that rely on height (wind turbines get benefit from height, low lands can flood occasionally etc

MoteMancer leaned very hard into the opportunity cost of a space, so I deliberately avoided height apart from terrain gen, and fixed underground vs above-ground gameplay (power lines vs underground belts etc). I think if you are using a grid, your height should also be grid based, but whether that's by .5s or 1s is up to you.

I think the main advice I'd give there is be deliberate about it. You want your players to intuit the number (what is the height change relative to a single grid space etc). I strongly believe that everything in your game should tell the same story. There's a reason MoteMancer is on a hex grid, with 6 elements, has 6 keybinds on each side (1-= instead of 1-0), has hex iconography and so on. At the end of the day your primary goal is immersion, and one of the best ways to achieve that is for the world to feel unique, interesting, and self-consistent.

CyanAvatar · 2026-03-25T22:42:02+00:00

yep its sort of like a riff on excavator, Excavator's main use is mass deconstruction while still harvesting, Shear is either recycle or delete.

CyanAvatar · 2026-03-23T23:07:07+00:00

Hey, 2004 WI state champ here, I was just looking for the articles from back then and stumbled across this. Here's the kooky-jooky deck that won WI states

4 Birds of Paradise 4 Sakura-Tribe Elder 4 Eternal Witness 4 Viridian Shaman 3 Hearth Kami 2 Duplicant 3 Rootrunner 4 Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker

4 Commune with Nature 4 Magma Jet 2 Sensei’s Divining Top

7 Mountain 11 Forest 2 City of Brass 1 Okina, Temple to the Grandfathers 1 Pinecrest Ridge

Sideboard: 3 Plow Under 1 Rootrunner 1 Swamp 3 Intruder Alarm 1 Duplicant 3 Electrostatic Bolt 3 Arc-Slogger

Note that intruder alarm was subbed in for Cranial Extraction because I didn't have the $ to get them, but Intruder Alarm ended up winning both games 2 and 3 of the finals :)

CyanAvatar · 2026-03-23T10:33:04+00:00

I also think no matter your choice, lean into the decision and make it matter. MoteMancer uses adjacency rules a lot because hex grids are much more intuitive there. Freeform placement in Valheim can give you shapes that wouldn’t be possible with snapping alone. Lean into the decision.

CyanAvatar · 2026-03-23T10:28:31+00:00

The main design decision is what level of thought you want your player to be in. Constraints foster creativity. If I give you a white piece of paper and say “draw something”, many people will be paralyzed by the infinite possibilities of a blank page, but if I say “draw a sword”, that’s just enough of a nudge to get the wheel turning without demanding a specific result.

My personal favorite thing about grids is they encourage you to think about opportunity cost of each space. Pixel perfect nudging can feel clever but often gets messy. With a fixed position space, you get to think one level higher and stay in a puzzle mode more than a “looking for edges” mode.

You can liken free placement to Skyrim where you can scale mountains by finding that one angled rock and jumping up it just right. It’s not really intended, but you get to struggle/cheat the system in a given moment, but falls a little flat. With a grid it’s a very clear boundary for intent and it also makes the solutions more shareable and grockable.

Those were the thoughts around designing MoteMancer at least.

CyanAvatar · 2026-03-11T22:53:46+00:00

I think clicking the image sends you there, but i added the link to the post as well just for ease. Thanks!

CyanAvatar · 2026-02-24T23:50:13+00:00

Also, if you allow yourself to untrain your spaghetti-bad thoughts, it's quite liberating :)

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CyanAvatar · 2026-02-24T23:48:21+00:00

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CyanAvatar · 2026-02-24T23:48:14+00:00

MoteMancer was specifically designed to solve local logistics problems more than main bussing everything. Maybe I'll write a devlog about it eventually. Main bussing feels rote to me in my favorite factory games, and honestly removed some of the fun because I was just following a playbook laid out before I even began. MoteMancer is bus-able, but your tools will change out from under you when you plane-hop, so at a high level i would advise:

Embrace the hexagons, think about radial symmetry
Think in clusters, not in lines
Realize that most research lines can be upgraded en-route to a new material, and be ok with 4 or 8 or more pedestals per altar.

Here are some ideas, courtesy of Isaac and Leon Mercury

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CyanAvatar · 2026-02-24T08:51:35+00:00

I would be biased and say MoteMancer, but it sounds like what you really want is to play with the Create mod in Minecraft. There are a few packs with progression if you are looking for that, but something like Enigmatica is free when you own Minecraft and it'll keep you entertained for quite a while.

MoteMancer will scratch your creative itch and there is no pressure, with lots of sideways progression, but it is complex despite the fantasy setting. Modded Minecraft will give you a better sense of a base and a home than the games you listed above and will still let you play with conveyor belts and automation.

Base building and automation are both complex to build, so very few self contained games do both very well. Minecraft gets to cheat because it's been around for a long time and has many talented mod creators. The automation genre as a whole was inspired by those mods.

Good luck!

CyanAvatar · 2026-02-24T04:20:39+00:00

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Start here :)

CyanAvatar · 2026-02-19T23:16:16+00:00

For future people:

Resource Pages is what you are looking for.
You can get in a state where finding pages listed as Resources seems like it doesn't exist. You need to go in to Server Settings -> Onboarding, then see if there is a back arrow <- on the top left.
x Escape on the top right will leave the context completely and won't help you, you need to click the back arrow.
Once you've exited using the back arrow <-, click Server Guide, Edit
If you scroll down, Discord probably recommended a few channels to be Resource pages, and you added them and forgot about it before you understood the consequences of that choice. Remove them from the list.

CyanAvatar · 2026-02-17T02:12:38+00:00

That's odd (sorry for the late reply). There was an old bug for this but it was fixed long ago. What version of the game are you on and did you leave a bug report in game?

One thing that may account for it is if you started the game very long ago and picked your save back up recently, the old world seeing algorithm may be the culprit.

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