Factorio's Upcoming 2.0 Update Will Add Space Age, Features To Redefine Gameplay

Factorio, a highly popular automation resource management sim game on Steam, will add a variety of new features in its 2.0 update, including the Space Age and changes that could redefine the title's gameplay.

The game, which has a 97% positive review summary on Steam across 140,000 reviews, will also make changes to the Spidertron remote, the ability to pipette more stuff, and better blueprint grid adjustment.

Factorio's Upcoming 2.0 Update

The Spidertron remote will be rebranded into the "RTS Tool" and the game's developer, Wube Software, said that Spidertron selection and control in 1.1 was considered a bit "janky." The RTS Tool also slightly changed the controls of the original Spidertron remote.

Players will soon be able to left-click to drag spidertrons, shift plus left-click to add previously selected spidertrons, control plus left-click to remove spidertrons from your selected pool, right-click to send a spidertron, and shift plus left-click to queue the move command, according to PCGamesN.

The newly named tool would also remember players' previous spidertron selection per surface. This means that if they go between different planets and have a different selection of spidertrons, they can go back to the selection for that surface.

The new update will also have enhanced pipetting, which would make it work for more than just entities. The new patch will make it even easier for players to access more resources while placing items around the world. The pipette would work for recipe slots, logistic slots, inventory slots, placeable items, water, lava, and many more.

The developers are also adding some meaningful changes so that players will not have to go through the process of trial and error with their Grid position and Absolute offsets in getting blueprints down.

The new update would incorporate a user-friendly key combination mechanism that allows them to easily tweak grid positions and absolute offsets. Factorio is planning a lot of quality-of-life updates moving forward and the new update could come sometime this year, said Zaman.

A Variety of New Features and Improvements

Wube Software also noted that the 2.0 update will allow objects on conveyor belts to be picked up and dropped in stacks. This is a change that the developers have said was impractical to add for years now.

The new bulk inserters will pick up a whole stack of objects at once and will only swing to release when their hands are full. These will have the capability of picking up to 16 items at once and a new technology, known as "belt stack size," will let players pile stuff as high as four items per pile on belts.

However, the new stacking functionality is limited by a few key rules, such as inserters only being able to place objects on empty belt spots, not on existing stacks. Furthermore, splitters will not be able to modify stack height, which means that the new bulk inserters will make piles alongside a few buildings that will output piles, such as the big mining drills.

Factorio is currently the longest-running factory-building game that was initially crowdfunded in 2013. The game went through an extended development cycle commensurate with its complexity and was properly released in 2020, according to PCGamer.