Folks, we’re just a couple days from the release of Factorio: Space Age and there’s a nice new trailer out that gets into what’s going on without digging into too many spoilers on how it’ll be to play the new worlds you can explore. If you’ve been living under a rock factory, this is Factorio’s massive new expansion that more than doubles the size of the game and that’s accompanied by a free 2.0 patch packed with quality of life goodies.
The four new worlds show remarkable variety of how you’ll build and explore—not to mention the variety of terrain with Space Age’s entirely overhauled world generation algorithms.
The trailer goes through hot, magmatic Vulcanus with its oceans of molten metals. It steps to swampy and lichen-crusted Gleba, a world of organic products that can spoil and a very new twist on Factorio’s enemies that I was immediately compelled by: the starfish-like pentapods.
There are also a lot of smaller upgrades coming in Factorio 2.0. Objects on conveyor belts, for example, can now stack, which lets your Factories achieve levels of throughput previously thought impossible. There’s also the simple fact that, and please remain calm as I say this, they’re adding elevated train lines. I know. I know. My heart is racing again just thinking about it.
It’s remarkable to think that this is a game as large as the original Factorio over again—a shockingly good and deeply optimized game that can easily eat hundreds of hours of even a casual player’s time. It’s a game so enticing that people do giant cooperative megaprojects like the networked “God Factory” that took thousands of hours to complete.
You can watch the trailer from 2016 and compare it to the Space Age trailer of today—that’s some pretty hardcore improvements in visuals and performance over the life of a game.
Factorio: Space Age is on Factorio.com and Steam and launches on October 21.