Factorio

Factorio
Developer(s)	Wube Software
Publisher(s)	Wube Software
Director(s)	Michal Kovařík Tomáš Kozelek Albert Bertolín
Designer(s)	Michal Kovařík
Artist(s)	Albert Bertolin Václav Benč
Composer(s)	Daniel James Taylor Petr Wajsar (Space Age expansion)
Platform(s)	Linux macOS Windows Switch
Release	Linux, macOS, Windows 14 August 2020 Switch 28 October 2022
Genre(s)	Construction and management simulation, real-time strategy
Mode(s)	Single-player, multiplayer

Factorio is a construction and management simulation game developed and published by Czech studio Wube Software. The game was announced via an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign in 2013 and released for Windows, macOS, and Linux on 14 August 2020 following a four-year long early access phase to positive reviews. The game was released on Nintendo Switch on 28 October 2022.^[1]

The game follows an engineer who crash-lands on an alien planet and must harvest resources and create automated industry to build a rocket; however, as it is a sandbox game, players can continue the game past the end of the storyline. There are both single-player and multiplayer modes as well as eight additional game scenarios.

On 21 October 2024, a major paid expansion called Space Age was released, adding 4 new planets explorable after the base game's end goal of launching a rocket.^[2]

Factorio is a construction and management simulation game focused on resource-gathering with real-time strategy and survival elements. The player survives by locating and harvesting resources to craft various tools and machines, which in turn create more advanced materials that allow for the progression to more sophisticated technologies and machines. The game progresses as the player continues to build and manage their automated factory-style system, which automates the mining, transportation, processing, and assembly of resources and products. Factorio's form of progression incentivize players to design and create their factories in ways that allow for larger scales of production and automation. Players research advanced technologies that allow them to create new structures, items, and upgrades, starting with basic automation and eventually leading to oil refining, robots, and powered exoskeletons.^[3][4]

The game features a blueprint system, which allows for players to create reusable blueprints for factory parts. The blueprints consist of a baseline for construction, allowing for the copying of factory systems or entire factories, and subsequent construction in the current or any other game world.

The game is formally "won" by launching a rocket. Constructing a rocket requires a massive amount of resources, motivating the player to set up a sizeable, effective factory in order to achieve this goal. After launching the rocket, the player can continue to build their factory.

The player is tasked with defending themselves and their factory from the planet's indigenous fauna, known as 'Biters', 'Spitters', and 'Worms', who live in colonies which can be destroyed by the player to prevent further enemy spawning. Additionally, they become increasingly hostile as pollutant emissions created by the player's factory increase, necessitating consideration of the balance between the player's production and the enemy's aggressiveness. The player can utilize defensive turrets, tanks, and other weapons to eliminate enemies.^[5][6] As the game progresses, enemies evolve and become harder to defeat.

Players may also elect to set the planet's fauna to "peaceful," during the start of the game. The fauna will still spawn, but will only attack the player and factory in retaliation from direct physical damage on themselves or a neighboring unit.^[7]

Multiplayer mode allows people to play together cooperatively or versus one another both locally and via the Internet.^[8][9][10] Factorio supports both dedicated servers as well as player-hosted listen servers. Originally, the game used peer-to-peer connectivity; this was later removed as more robust options were developed.^[11] Saved world files can be seamlessly loaded in either single- or multiplayer. By default, all players on a server share technologies, unless a system of multiple teams has been instituted by the server host. Friendly fire is present. Players can share construction blueprints with other players on their server via a public blueprint library.^[10][12]

Factorio is designed to be customisable via mods to create additional content, such as modifications to gameplay or re-texturing of visual elements. The developers offer an online portal on the Factorio website for mod developers to host their content. To help support the modding community, there is an in-game mod manager that allows players to quickly download them. Mods are written in the Lua programming language.^[13] Mods range from small ones such as Squeak Through, a simple quality-of-life mod allowing you to walk between most buildings, to overhauls like Industrial Revolution 3, which entirely reworks the majority of gameplay.

The Space Age expansion expands the gameplay of the base game to include interplanetary travel and four new planets, as well as a new end goal of interstellar travel. Each planet features new methods of acquiring resources, unique challenges, and novel technologies to further expand the factory. The planets added are Vulcanus, a volcano-themed "lava planet";^[14] Fulgora, a lightning-plagued desert planet hosting the ruins of an alien civilization;^[15] Gleba, a lush jungle-like planet of diverse lifeforms;^[16] and Aquilo, a frozen planet covered in a liquid ammonia ocean.^[17] The expansion encourages users to greatly scale up their factory's production and automate interplanetary logistics, assisted by new machines and equipment.

The Space Age expansion also includes a chance-based quality mechanism in a separate quality mod to further upgrade the abilities of machines and equipment. The quality mod is required to use the Space Age expansion, but can also be enabled in the base game, by users who have purchased the expansion. ^[18]

One notable feature of Space Age is the "Galaxy of Fame", an online star map to which victorious players add themselves, along with a snapshot of their base and gameplay statistics.^[19]

The game has been developed by a team of developers from Prague, Czech Republic, since mid-2012. The development team originally consisted of a single person, but has grown larger. Wube Software was created in September 2014 by Michal Kovařík and Tomáš Kozelek in Prague. To fund the game the development team began an Indiegogo campaign, which started on 31 January 2013 and concluded on 3 March 2013. The campaign raised €21,626, exceeding its €17,000 goal.^[20][21][22] Following the crowdfunding success, Wube sold early access editions of the game to raise further funds. The developer credits the April 2014 release of the game's trailer as a significant driver of those sales.^[23] As of February 2024, the team consists of 31 members.^[24]

Michal Kovařík, the game's lead designer, cited the IndustrialCraft and BuildCraft Minecraft mods for inspiration during the game's development.^[25]

The game was released on Steam as early access on 25 February 2016, but had been available to download from its official website since early on in development.^[26] It was officially released out of early access on 14 August 2020.^[27][28] It was originally planned to be released on 25 September 2020, but was moved up a month as to not compete with the release of Cyberpunk 2077, which, at the time, was scheduled to be released on 17 September 2020.^[29][30]

A port of the game to Nintendo Switch was released on 28 October 2022. The port does not contain modding features, nor does it support the Space Age expansion.^[31][32][33]

In February 2021, the developers announced that a new expansion pack was being developed.^[34] The expansion's theme and name, Space Age, were revealed in August 2023.^[35] It was made to be as big as the base game, extending gameplay to an interplanetary stage.^[36] The expansion was released on 21 October 2024.^[2] The expansion comes in the form of 3 developer-made mods: "Space Age", containing the 4 new planets; "Quality", adding the new quality mechanic; and "Elevated Rails", adding a height variation to the games Rail transport system.

Released alongside this expansion was the "2.0" update, a major touch-up of the base game consisting primarily of quality-of-life and cosmetic changes, but with some gameplay changes as well.^[37] The expansion sold over 400,000 copies in its first week of release.^[38]

Video game key reseller G2A was accused of selling stolen keys on its site, affecting developers of games, specifically in the indie scene. On 5 July 2019, G2A offered to pay the developers of a game ten times the worth of the stolen game keys if the problem could be proven via audit.^[39] Wube was the only developer to call on this, stating "G2A - worse than piracy" and emailed a list of 321 canceled Steam keys due to chargebacks.^[40][41] After over ten months, G2A confirmed 198 of those keys were sold on the platform and paid Wube Software $39,600 as part of the promise. Due to the sensitive nature of the investigation, the audit was conducted internally.^{[42][43][40][44]}

Factorio received positive reception from critics while still in early access.^[49][50] In the 2018 Steam Awards, Factorio was voted by Steam users as a runner-up in the "Most Fun with a Machine" category.^[51] By the beginning of 2020, the game had sold two million copies,^[52] by the beginning of 2021, the developers reported over two and a half million sold copies,^[34] and by its sixth anniversary in February 2022, the game had just passed 3.1 million copies sold.^[53]

Upon its release in 2020, Factorio received positive reviews. Rick Lane of PC Gamer praised Factorio, calling it "a manufacturing masterpiece".^[47] Nicolas Perez of Paste praised the game's use of early access, stating that "Factorio has set an example of what the Early Access system is truly capable of."^[54] It was named IndieGameReviewer.com's Indie Game of the Year, after also naming it one its most anticipated in 2013.^[55] In 2021 Rock Paper Shotgun ranked Factorio the 7th best management game for the PC.^[56]

The Financial Times noted that despite the simplicity of the graphics, the game had earned the nickname Cracktorio due to its addictiveness. Tobias Lütke, a co-founder of Shopify, allows his staff to write-off their purchases of Factorio as a business expense. Elon Musk declared to be "speedrunning Factorio in real life".^[57]

Neobuthus factorio is a species of scorpion from the family Buthidae found in Somaliland. It was named after the game by one of the researchers who first described the species, František Kovařík, who is the father of the game's lead designer, Michal Kovařík.^[58][59]

Satisfactory, a 2019 factory-building game by Coffee Stain Studios, has been compared to Factorio and described as a first-person, 3D interpretation of the game.^[60]

• Official website