Hello, long time no see!
Today we are going to talk about the expansion which is called Factorio: Space Age.

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What is Factorio: Space Age?kovarex

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.

Vanilla Factorio ends by launching the rocket into space, so I always expected it to be quite obvious what we are going to do next.
Honestly the space platform related gameplay was actually planned a very long time ago, and we had shown a little bit in FFF-74.
We had a similar kind of story with the Spidertron. Its concept was teased for the first time in FFF-120, just to be quietly abandoned and then revived 4 years later.

But as you might or might not know, the name ‘WUBE’ is an abbreviation of Wszystko będzie, which means something like “Everything will be done eventually”. We didn’t abandon the plan, we just realized it would be way too ambitious to try to fit it into the 1.0 Factorio release, so it was eventually just postponed to the expansion. In retrospect, it was clearly a good idea.

The main structure

Instead of sending one rocket to space, you have to send many, because you need to use them to transport materials to build big space platforms in orbit.
The rocket is cheaper in Space Age to not make it drag forever, but you still are expected to build bigger in preparation of what is to come.

• The space platforms are used on their own to generate space science, but mainly, they are eventually used to travel to different planets, and for automated interplanetary logistics.
• We decided to go with the approach of having a small number of predefined planets, which represent your progression through the game.
• The expansion contains 4 additional planets. Each of which has its own unique theme, resource, challenges and gameplay mechanics. Most of them also have different military targets.
• Every planet leads to production of specific science packs and its technologies.
• The order in which you exploit the planets is an impactful strategic choice.

The rewards

Since we have a lot of new challenges, we also had to balance the set of rewards you get for each stage of the game.
We have a set of cool new things in the expansion, but the player is quite omnipotent at the end of the vanila playt