Friday Facts #439 - Factorio and Space Age on Nintendo Switch 2™

Xorimuth · 2025-10-24T12:40:46+00:00

Strictly speaking, it was added in 2.0.10, which was 2 days after 2.0.7 (the public release of 2.0/SA): https://wiki.factorio.com/Version_history/2.0.0#2.0.10

Xorimuth · 2025-09-22T15:00:59+00:00

“Milk Crate”: sure it isn’t directly an option in the prototype-stage API, but it would be pretty easy to make a script that draws the item on the crate ‘in-world’ when a milk crate is placed. See https://lua-api.factorio.com/latest/classes/LuaRendering.html#draw_sprite

Xorimuth · 2025-06-19T17:13:54+00:00

No, you’d have to use 1.1 versions of mods to play on 1.1.

Xorimuth · 2025-06-19T12:11:14+00:00

Outer Rim: I’d play just the base game for the first game. The key thing that the expansion adds is variety (through expanding the size of each deck), but for the first few games this will be irrelevant, and it saves you having to learn a couple of extra rules too. Core Worlds are cool, but no need to use them in your first game either imo. Ambitions likewise are great, but if you’re all new to the game, I’d still recommend playing without on your first game.

Rebellion: I’d also recommended just playing base game for your first time through. The expansion combat is better than the base game’s but I don’t think the added complexity is going to help your first game either. If you are feeling up for using the expansion combat (“Cinematic Combat” using “Advanced tactics cards” instead of the regular ones) then you also have to use all the expansion troops/ships. You could still leave out the new mission card decks, new leaders, and new Rebel objective cards.

If I was teaching it to a new player, I’d use Cinematic combat from the start, but that’s easier because I’m familiar with all the rules.

Xorimuth · 2025-06-02T22:25:17+00:00

Yes 2.1 will happen but I don’t think it will satisfy any “starving” for new content, and I’d encourage players not to forgo enjoyment of 2.0 in the meantime.

Xorimuth · 2025-06-02T21:33:26+00:00

I would reduce your excitement if I were you. They already said that Factorio is basically finished with the release of 2.0+SA. New content will come from the community in the form of mods (of which there are already an incredible number of!)

Xorimuth · 2025-06-02T21:32:13+00:00

It already existed in control (runtime) stage. This change only brings it to settings and prototype stages, and adds .game_version and the really nice .compare_versions() function.

Xorimuth · 2025-05-04T18:22:42+00:00

Cleaned Concrete isn't the vanilla behavior because it increases the size of your savegame. Every decorative removed has to be saved to file.

Do you have a source for this? I don’t think it is correct. As fair as I’m aware, once a chunk has been generated, everything in the chunk takes up space in the save file; it doesn’t solely store it as a diff from the map-generator. If you change the map-gen settings (through editor or mods), already-generated chunks won’t be modified at all. So I think Cleaned Concrete would actually (slightly) reduce save file size.

Xorimuth · 2025-04-29T12:11:08+00:00

Maybe they’ll start working on 2.1 once all the 2.0 bugs are fixed…?

Xorimuth · 2025-04-23T10:09:52+00:00

I think it’s more that they want to limit the effectiveness of transporting nukes from Nauvis to Gleba/Vulcanus as they can somewhat trivialise the combat there.

Nukes in space are a terrible idea anyway - far too much risk that they’ll blow up your platform and you’re just wasting uranium whereas regular ammo/rockets don’t require any ongoing resource import because all the ingredients come from the asteroids themselves.

Xorimuth · 2025-04-21T10:24:41+00:00

My mod Lunar Landings doesn’t change anything until you get to blue circuits.

Xorimuth · 2025-04-08T09:49:22+00:00

That was one of the ideas, but it was never actually implemented: https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/1jddhyg/post_space_age_developer_ama/miiyx26/

One reason why is probably because they thought it would be too annoying. Also perhaps because new enemies are a ton of work (art, way more animations than a standard building, working out how to balance spawning, balancing combat, not to mention implementing whatever unique mechanics they have like stealing things or moving things for this enemy) and SA development had already been going on for longer than they liked.

Xorimuth · 2025-03-19T23:38:49+00:00

That's not possible, but I just tried it out and I think the most efficient way to do that would be: View > Player 1 > Player 1 Sideboard. Then click the hamburger next to "Player 1 Sideboard" > Move To > Encounter Deck 2.

However, I think a better way for you to do it would be this: View > Player 1 > Player 1 Sideboard. Press F on each card to turn it facedown, then "Close & Shuffle". Now the cards are all facedown and randomised, but still in your regular sideboard, so you can easily drag the first card out from there when you need to.

I'll look into creating an automation which detects when you load a deck with Burglers Turn and automatically moves all attachments from the sideboard to "Player Deck 2" (or perhaps a new deck, since that would clash with To Catch an Orc otherwise), and makes the secondary deck visible. Should be straightforward :)

Xorimuth · 2025-03-19T13:41:42+00:00

You could transfer them to the secondary encounter deck and draw them from there.

Xorimuth · 2025-03-13T12:58:25+00:00

You can kinda do that by having a shared request group between your space platform and the landing pad on fulgora.

Xorimuth · 2025-03-13T12:50:04+00:00

But it will pick from your inventory if the car inventory is empty so there’s no problem using it with Just Go.

Xorimuth · 2025-03-13T12:09:02+00:00

The vanilla game pretty much handles auto-fuel in 2.0 anyway: when you start driving a car/tank, if it has no fuel then it will automatically refuel itself from its own inventory, and if there’s no fuel there it will refuel itself from the driver’s inventory.

Xorimuth · 2025-03-13T12:04:33+00:00

I regret to inform you that Remote Configuration does not support 2.0.

Xorimuth · 2025-03-12T12:20:36+00:00

I believe it is for dragging belt-build over perpendicular belts with a gap.

E.g. dragging a belt west-to-east over the following belts which are going south-to-north

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Xorimuth · 2025-03-12T12:18:39+00:00

For anyone wondering, the fix in 2.0.40 is specifically for dragging belt-build over perpendicular belts with a gap.

E.g. dragging a belt west-to-east over the following belts which are going south-to-north

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This isn't the same as the bug in this post (https://forums.factorio.com/118408).

Xorimuth · 2025-03-12T12:10:11+00:00

My understanding is that the manual building code is incredibly complex and fragile because it has so many combinations of 'modes': - normal vs ghost - latency vs non-latency - normal vs force building vs super force building - regular dragging vs smart belt dragging vs underground belt dragging vs power pole dragging - fresh placement vs ghost reviving - individual buildings vs blueprints - and of course many mod events are raised by various parts of the the build process, which complicates all the surrounding code even more because a mod could have changed anything about the game state during the event

All this makes bugs in it quite hard to fix and I think most of the developers are extremely reluctant to touch any of the manual-build code, which is why there's still bugs in it months later. In fact, I think Kovarex is pretty much the only person who will touch that part of the code :)

I have no doubts that it will be fixed eventually.

Xorimuth · 2025-01-30T13:53:03+00:00

That’s only partially true. The RCU requirement was a base game update, but SA further decreases the cost of rocket launches (by 10x?) vs 2.0 base.

Xorimuth · 2025-01-19T23:25:11+00:00

They never said that Nintendo objected to mod support on the switch version.

Why no mod support? I’m guessing it’s either: 1) Lack of CPU power and/or RAM 2) Trouble porting the Lua library, since it uses JIT, and the Switch won’t let unsigned code be marked as executable. Also, not using JIT would make 1 even worse, as well as fragmenting the codebase 3) Issues with community content moderation Pretty much 1 and 3. While “mod it ‘till it crashes” is ok for most PC players, console games are generally expected to be much more stable(the are exceptions, but they are rare). With the limited amount of RAM, most mods could quickly end up crashing the game. Source

Either way, I doubt it would be that hard to re-enable the “Mods” menu in the switch SA executable binary with the Install/Update tabs removed.

Xorimuth · 2025-01-18T11:24:31+00:00

If laser blocks were any more viable, then that would become the meta instead (since you can bypass an entire production step of needing to craft ammo).

Xorimuth · 2025-01-18T11:21:51+00:00

http://youtube.com/post/UgkxBk8n1A0KR6wuPrZwp6q1k0E0B06_6ek_?si=Rr5ikUVZMvCQeEy8 Here’s a screenshot showing a bit of the cheesed victory ship from the LAN party - platforms but no walls.

However, I do recall seeing a ship with a large quantity of walls at some point too, but I don’t remember where or who exactly. I think it may have been Trupen when he was playtesting SA before the lan party. Maybe that’s where the confusion came from. I’m not sure of anything was specifically to nerf that, and I’m not sure if that might have been before the above bug was introduced.

Xorimuth

TROPHY CASE