2019 Year in Review
Hello @everyone - this announcement will detail our recap of 2019, and a hint at things to come in 2020! For a TL;DR, scroll down or click here. Included in each month are maps we released, Quality-of-Life changes you might (or might not) have noticed, and notable events in the factorio community. Let's get started!
In January, we started our beta testing program, to help with the development of our Racecar map. We also made a significant change under the surface of how our scenario works - literally! In #631, we created the "Redmew surface" for all our mapgen. You can read about it in detail here, but as a - surface - level explanation, we make a copy of the existing terrain (called the "nauvis" surface in factorio), duplicate it onto a new "redmew" surface, and can then make extensive modifications to it without the traditional performance overhead that scanning and removing on a tile-by-tile or chunk-by-chunk system places on the game.
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Notable map released: Grid Bot Islands by Jayefuu and Terraforming Danger Ores by grilledham
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QOL changes made: Our scoreboard (that little rocket icon) turned on for the first time, and loaders became enabled by default.
A picture of an early crash site map, circa 0.16. It's hard to believe the game looked so different less than a year ago!
February got off to a strong start with our largest one-time change to the codebase (I promise all the months aren't like this!), with map_selection.lua. If you've ever downloaded our scenario (or just joined a MP game and then gone back to tinker with it later) and wanted to play a map for yourself, it's likely you've had to interact with it. The premise is simple: You edit one line of text to select the map you want, and then load the scenario directly in Factorio, with the goal of being easy to use and other settings available in an advanced config.lua file.
This core change to our scenario also allowed us to make otherwise difficult changes, like moving all maps into one directory and automatically release working versions of our scenario each night. The User Guide in preparation for a big Factorio milestone, the 0.17 release! On February 26, 2019, our friends at Wube released 0.17.0 Beta - which promptly broke a lot of things in the scenario.
One of the things that broke was our server during 1000 Yard Stare - but not right away!
That's why we got most of our events out of the way with sweet, stable 0.16 - notably, the Prehistoric Factorio MMO which proved that it is in fact possible to launch a rocket with no electric miners or inserters used to build a factory. People thought that was too easy, and we followed it up a week later with the Thousand Yard Stare! The 1000 Yard Stare was an interesting event to say the least, and we all learned some valuable lessons along the way.
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Notable map released: 1000 Yard Stare by Plague006
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QOL Changes Made: Overhaul of the Rank System meant we implemented some nice donator perks, including special messages printed in chat when you joined the game or were lost in combat (or to those pesky trains).
Make some steel inline without red inserters, they said. It'll be easy, they said.
With 0.17 hot off the presses, we spent the first week mostly fixing bugs in the scenario, and finally got around to adding a helpdesk channel over on discord. If you ever need to get staff attention about something (a bad actor on one of the servers, asking for a reset, ban appeals) that is the place to go! We also reached out to the international community for help with localization of the scenario, so that factorio players all over the world can use the scenario in their native language!
If you are interested in helping out with the localization process, we have a page on Crowdin that you can get started on! We plan to do an extensive check and subsequent merge of current translations in early 2020.
Our other major change was that biters now changed... with hail hydra! Depending on who you ask, it might be someone's most loved or hated feature.
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Notable map released: Quadrants by SimonFlapse
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QOL Changes Made: We added subtle onboarding nudges and documentation ingame, for those who needed a little help getting started. A lot of updates were also made to crashsite!
Compilatron was not the spidertron we have wanted, but the that cute face will live on for years to come.
We (mostly Orange) decided it was a good idea to celebrate April Fool's day with several significant, but temporary changes to our discord and running servers. It didn't quite turn out as planned - I guess our vision wasn't 20/20. A lot of things are uncertain for the upcoming year, but our decision about what to do for April 1st isn't - no pranks that make it seem like anything serious has happened to our discord guild, server network or saves catalog.
The only surviving screenshot of the "Project Ping-win" map. Almost as much chaos as the end of a Space Race battle!
What the team (mostly plague006) released in the second half of April was much better than the first - our biter attack module, and the quickbar saving feature! It's hard to believe that you can't set your quickbar/hotbar on one map and have it stay the same on another in vanilla factorio, so we will do it for you, at no charge!
Just by typing /quick-bar-save on any redmew-hosted map, your filters will be synced, and automatically loaded on any future redmew-hosted maps to save yourself some time, and get straight into the game. This is probably our most under-utilized feature (only 26 out of over several thousand users have set anything) and we would love it if you gave the feature a try, the next time you're online.
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Notable map released: RedMew was the (unofficial) home of Hive Mind (a mod by Klonan) beta testing during the Spring of 2019.
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QOL Changes Made: We disabled biter attacks in crashsite, after a note was left in our suggestions channel. We still listen to anything posted in there, but the last message is from November 19th, more than a month ago!
The early days of hive mind. It was a great month for beta testing!
May was the start of our (never-ending) project, Miscellaneous Map Modificaions. The goal was to go through our entire map catalog (over 100 unique .lua map files in the scenario), making sure that at the very least each one of them loaded as expected. Some maps in our catalog are over two years old (an eternity in factorio time) and have gone through several major version updates, so it was important to make sure the experience for the end-use was still bearable.
If you were looking closely at the launch of our vanilla maps from May onwards, you could see that we started to follow a trend of going down the alphabet. The project, believe it or not, is still a WIP! You can check out the progress on our Other Maps Portal, which has the goal of providing detailed documentation on every map in our scenario. In 2020, documentation will continue to be a focus! While you're reading this article on our Wiki, feel free to check out some of the others (the sidebar is on your right), and maybe even try to test something out for yourself!
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Notable map released: Rocky Road by TheOrangeAngle
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QOL Changes Made: Based on feedback from the quick bar sync, we started to automatically sync your player color between maps. Scores were also made prettier, in continuing improvements to the Diggy scenario.
Rocky Road got off to a rocky start. Apparently building a factory from inside a car is harder than you think!
Starting at the end of May and continuing through most of June was coverage of our Diggy scenario by none other than the content creator Zisteau!. We had a big surge of players onto the server network, and thousands of visits to our scenario's download page. If you found out about us for the first time through Diggy, we're glad you're here! Despite some issues with installation (trying to install an experimental save on a stable version quickly puts you between a rock and a hard place) on our end, it was overall a resounding success, showing that the scenario designed for a Multiplayer environment could be adapted to singleplayer.
In 2020, the pushes for improved documentation will start to lean towards using the scenario for single-player or co-op oriented hosting, as we see that a larger % of our userbase is not just from the multiplayer side. If you are using the scenario currently outside of a multiplayer enrivonment - please, let us know! We'd love to take in feedback regarding how to make our scenario more user-friendly to those not on our hosted servers.
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Notable map released: June was the month of Jail Break, a PvP mod by MFerrari. We will definitely bring back Jail Break for some further hosting in 2020, but currently Space Race is our primary PvP/Event oriented map.
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QOL Changes Made: We added Autofill to automatically fill your gun turrets with ammo, but with a cost - all turrets have a delay from when placed to when they can become active. It's a balanced way of achieving what is otherwise an overpowered method of exterminating the biters.
Another example of the "voice of the people": The research queue was implemented!
July is the halfway point of 2019, and this month a lot of the Refactorio team (RedMew is the scenario made by Refactorio, who also make the FactorioWebInterface) went to go over and help with the yearly Clusterio event, "The Gridlock Cluster". Now slated for its third year in 2020, Clusterio brings together staff and players from all across the factorio hosting community with the goal of building a factory so large, it has to be spread out across multiple servers. You can read more about it here.
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Notable map released: Crash Site Desert by grilledham
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QOL Changes Made: We made a snake map, to be used in "lobby" maps when there is waiting for whatever reason. It's pretty fun, and brings back our old friend Compilatron!
The premise of Gridlock was that each day a server (box) would open up, and it would suit both the players who like killing bugs and the players who like killing inefficiencies back at the factory. Internally, we spent a lot of time trying to stop the servers from killing themselves.
August was the month of relaxation, partly to enjoy a mostly bug-free factorio (and mostly working scenario) and partly because we were all burnt out from Gridlock. RedMew took a dive back into our modded offerings, both with normal and PvP maps. We also tried to start putting out a weekly schedule, and then decided to just have Crash Site and Diggy reset on an as-needed basis, running 24/7 otherwise. In 2020 we want to automate restarts, notably in Space Race and then in Diggy, Crash Site, and our other vanilla maps.
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Notable map released: RedMew Space Exploration by Soggs
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QOL Changes Made: We went back and renamed a lot of things on our saves portal to be more user-friendly with the legacy saves.
September was largely uneventful, unlike some of the movies that hit theaters. Speaking of movies, the one feature we did add was cutscenes! Starting with Diggy (and later with Crash Site) we added a cutscene played when you join the game, that explains first how our scenario works (it can be a bit of a learning curve from vanilla) and then how the specific map is unique and presents its own sharp challenges. You can watch the video here or click the image below to play it on YouTube.
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Notable map released: Krastorio Rail Grid by Soggs
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QOL Changes Made: The cutscenes! We also fixed a lot of lingering bugs and started work increased Wiki documentation.
Terraforming Danger Ores made a comeback in September! Maybe people just wanted to see the fall colors.
Things picked back up a bit in October, where we nerded out over celebrating Issue/PR #1000. (In the context of github, an issue is a comment thread discussing something in general while a pull request/PR is someone requesting to add code to the scenario, sometimes involving a discussion). We added new maps like Hilbert Water Trap and took a second look at older things, like going through another sync of all our translation progress. The "Space Race" map came out into beta, and you might have seen it discussed earlier in this thread.
In 2020 we plan to pour a lot of resources into making Space Race a great map to play, both for those that like direct combat and PvP action, those that only like to build and optimize, and those that want to do a little bit of both. In the current KOTH configuration, you win by launching a silo and lose by having your silo destroyed. If you're interested, you can:
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Look at the inital PR here
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Read our evolving feedback thread here
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Join us for our weekly matches! We play every Saturday at 16:00 and 20:00 UTC and would love to have as many people as possible join us, to help work out any bugs and collect feedback.
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Notable map released: Space Race by SimonFlapse
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QOL Changes Made: We added descriptions to the first third of legacy maps, added pictures and even dug up their old saves, to show in one convenient place - the "Other Maps" guide.
Here is Orange's attempt to explain Space Race in one image. It's easier to understand if you've played a round or two!
After Halloween it's hard not to get in the holiday spirit, but for Thanksgiving we brought back our "Turkey Map"! Complete with a main course of turkey ore patches, a helping of US circa 1620 map generation, and a side of thanksgiving facts every 10 minutes printed in chat, it was a factorio feast to remember. And to help decorate, cutscenes were added to Crashsite along with some bug fixes. And based on demand from another old video, we re-made an old map for a slow but steady pilgrimage of players that come searching for one specific map.
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Notable map released: Turkey by TheKid0Z
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QOL Changes Made: Cutscenes to Crashsite, using multi-surface to not disrupt gameplay
Making peace for the natives, even for one day, was harder than expected.
December is the season of final exams, and both player numbers and staff availability were lower as a result. That doesn't mean we weren't able to get things done though - like documentation on how to make cutscenes or a new map called Terra by T-A-R.
In the last week, we've been celebrating the holidays with our yearly Christmas Tree of Terror, complete with gifts in the form of random cars scattered throughout the map, and the best gift of all - anonymity with our random name feature, which might have to take a trip back to Santa's workshop for another year.
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Notable map released: Christmas 2019 by The Refactorio Team
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QOL Changes Made: Ongoing improvements to legacy maps with descriptions and save archives. Also, this Year in Review!
A great map to cap off a great year.
- We released a bunch of features, and made substantial additions to several maps in the portfolio that now includes over 100 unique files! The scenario was updated to 0.17 and is now relatively stable, even with substantial additions to core maps like Diggy and Crashsite
- There will be a larger focus on documentation, translation, and bringing existing ideas in our roadmap to fruition, setting us up for success in 2020.
- Stay tuned for events, we will be doing MMOs more often leading up to the release of Factorio in September! In fact, there's an event this Wednesday (the 1st of Jan) at 20:20 UTC, a Space Race MMO. We hope to see you there!
- And last but certainly not least, a massive thank you to all of our patreon supporters who make it possible to host servers 24/7, to all our staff who keep things running behind the scenes, and to our growing community, who gives us the inspiration to keep working hard on making a better scenario for everyone. We couldn't do it without you.
Here's to 2020! 🥂