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Huge Factorio Expansion Announced

Factorio 1.0 Release Date

You read that headline right. Factorio is getting a full expansion. The team behind the factory builder has announced their plan to release an expansion to the iconic and complex title is proceeding at pace. They didn’t provide a full release date, but gave a ton of detail on what to expect as development proceeds.

The core focus of development is to deploy the next major game updates and the expansion side-by-side. “We will release the 1.2 update to the base game, and the expansion will be based on the same version, and will also contain the expansion mod,” said the team. And gong further, they said that the version getting deployed in beta will be a pretty solid base to build on. “The tricky part is, that we want to release basically directly to stable, without an experimental phase,” said the team on the update post. This means that they’re going to follow a very similar release plan to the base game. What you’re going to get on launch day will be relatively feature-complete.

One of the core concerns is how the expansion will function in multiplayer. The answer to that implicit question, is natively. And since the new expansion is essentially a mod, it can work with any previous version. The expansion will be able to connect with non-expansion multiplayer games by disabling the expansion mod.

The currently unnamed Factorio expansion will cost $30, which is the same as the base game. And there’s never going to be a sale either, so it will stay at whatever price it debuts at for some time. The developers have previously said that they may increase the price of the base game when it’s feature complete though, to encourage users to buy in while the game remains in active development. Considering that Factorio has been in a beta-like state for nearly a decade, that’s a fair price for the amount of content you get.

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Factorio Expansion Development Plan

The developers haven’t revealed details about the Factorio expansion, and probably won’t for some time. Wube software has said that they plan to only reveal the expansion when it’s closer to release. Let’s talk about what that means, and how it’s affecting fans.

Currently, there are seven total steps that the team has to complete before the expansion debuts for gamers. Currently, the dev team is on Step 4, out of the seven listed below. That basically means that the team has a basic concept laid out, and is actively massaging it into the main game. The core design work is in progress, so it could be some time until we see what this new expansion plans to add.

  • Step 1 – High-level plan
  • Step 2 – Basic shape
  • Step 3 – Implementation of subsystems
  • Step 4 – Connecting systems into a prototype
  • Step 5 – First pass of tweaking
  • Step 6 – Beta test
  • Step 7 – Release

Very little is known about the Factorio expansion at this time. Players will just have to wait for more info to come out. Some fans are hopeful for a space-themed expansion, given the core gameplay loop is about escaping an alien world. It’s also possible new game modes could be added that fundamentally alter the way the game plays. There’s plenty of inspiration from within the modding scene to draw from, and gamers aren’t shy about sharing their feedback.

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