Time to fix the game's progression | Terrafactor News #1

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]Hello and welcome to Terraact the news.

[00:00:03]It has been a few weeks since launch and we have our very first minor update almost ready to go. It is currently in the experimental branch. So there's a full change log in the Discord right now. It's almost ready to go live. I have to do a couple more things to fix it up. But uh let's just go over some of the highlights. The main thing that I've been working on here is a new way of doing saves. How it used to work is that all the data is just kind of living inside a folder, all the chunks. And the problem with this is that if you somehow crash in the middle of your save for whatever reason, then the world is now basically going to be corrupt. And so I noticed a couple of issues being reported in the Discord, which kind of smelt like corrupt world problems. It wasn't happening to too many people, which is a good thing. still enough for me to be like, "All right, let's let's solve this problem." Right now, what happens when you save a world is just this TF world file. And so, it's a single file. And so, what that means is that we can write into the file and then when we're ready to like actually do the quote unquote save, it's like an atomic action which flips it over. But yeah, TLDDR stability in the world saves. Uh hopefully we'll be a little bit better with this. Another thing, we have a brand new world lister. It's looking rather quite sexy if I do say so myself.

[00:01:23]And actually, when you go to play an old world, for example, you're going to get a little upgrade notice saying like, yo, it's going to get upgraded. Backup will be created. There's a loading screen.

[00:01:33]And uh there we go. Yeah, that's a little bit of housekeeping with that one. The only other like interesting thing I think in here to everyone is going to be the buff to the torches. So, these guys will now stop mobs from spawning in a five block radius out from the center. So, 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 and it's just a square. So, that's going to be the range on it. Just light up your base and that'll stop mobs from spawning. Now, earlier you'll see these guys over here, the little slime spawners, right? These pesky little fellas. Um, they were still spawning on top of light levels. So, I fixed that bug and now you should be completely mob free inside your base if you light it up properly. So, your carrots will be nice and safe. So, that is the minor update.

[00:02:22]Uh, like I said, it's on the experimental branch. Full change log is in the Discord. Whole bunch of like balancing things and bug fixes here and there. Next up, we got the stats. The V26 feedback is in. So that was the version that we just kind of like launched on Steam a few weeks ago. Fun fact, uh we're in version 26. So there's been, you know, 26 different iterations up until now. How this usually goes is I will work for a little bit and then I'll push an update and then I'll get feedback from the update to figure out what to work on next. Um and you know, this launch has really been just another round of feedback really. Um it's kind of interesting. It's been a massive wave of feedback, but still a wave of feedback nonetheless. So, we take a little look here. Those are some little cheeky cheeky sales numbers if you're interested in that. Doing pretty well.

[00:03:15]Uh the number that I like the most here outside of the revenue number is the median play time. So, we're sitting at 3 hours right now of medium play time, which basically like if if you don't know what medium play time is, you can kind of think of it as like we say time and then persons. This is a person, he plays for this long. This is another person, they play for that long, this long, this long. So, what median is is you basically just take all the people and you and you line them up like this and then you figure out what this middle kind of value is. And that right there is the medium play time. Thank you for coming to my TED talk. It's it's probably the best measure of like how much like quote unquote play time I guess there is in the game because it's out of everyone. What is the absolute most common amount of play time? That's like how I like to think about it, I guess. So yeah, 3 hours pretty good. It is the absolute most that I've ever seen on any of my prototypes or games so far, which is really good to see. But for context, Factorio's medium play time is something like 50 hours. So, we do have a long long way to go. The reviews are sitting at 91% positive so far across 61 people, which is pretty good, man.

[00:04:33]You'll see that some people have a lot more play time than the median. 30 hours. 110, bro. Are you kidding me?

[00:04:41]Jesus Christ. Nice factor game that could finish in 20 to 30 hours. Yeah, that's that's kind of like roughly end to end what the current play time is if you do actually go hard on that and you're a big factory builder person. But there is always room for improvement.

[00:04:55]So, how are we going to fix this next update? What are we going to work on?

[00:05:01]What are the priorities? What's the vision? All right, so this right here is a breakdown of how far people got in the game. Uh you can see we got the first quest here, which is feed fiber to the hole. And then you kind of progress down a little bit and there's a little bit of a cliff and then it just is a slow and steady decline to the point where by the end of age one uh only really 45% of people are making it through that and if we go on to age two only like 18% of people are making it to the mining. I'm actually really excited to see all this because it just means there's so much room for improvement. I I I have a rough pulse on what the problems are based on, you know, everyone joining the Discord and providing feedback. Um, and even from just playing myself, I'm I'm doing a little play through here, and I have a hunch of what I want to do next to try and increase that medium play time.

[00:05:48]We're going to bump it all the way up to 50. That's That's the goal. 50 hours of medium play time, 95% positive reviews.

[00:05:56]That is the mission, gentlemen. For this next version, version 28. Let's take a little look at the road map. Like I said, version 27, that is more or less kind of done. We can almost cross it off. Now up next, research system. This is probably the number one issue that I personally have with the game right now playing. While this like quest tree thing does an all right job, it's just too tangled right now and linear in very weird ways. And it basically forces me to like I have to make like a perfect progression quest tree piece by piece.

[00:06:30]It just feels like it's way too restricting and on rails. you got to do this and then you got to do that and you got to do that then you got to do that.

[00:06:37]You know, four hours in and you only just realize that you only realize that there's solar power after you've done this. And so there's a lot of room for what I would like to say like nonlinear goal setting and that's what I want to try and tackle with the research system.

[00:06:53]Rough idea so far. I just started sketching this out yesterday. Here's a little sneak peek. We're basically going to take the Factorio style like research lab thing and more or less do that. So, you choose what you want to unlock from like a massive dependency tree. So, I kind of started on mapping out a bunch of the stuff so far. I have no idea how I'm actually going to get this in the game, but I'll figure it out, man.

[00:07:19]That's what I do best. And the idea here is you're basically going to be like, "Okay, cool. There's there's like an excavator over here. I want to I want to work towards that." Very nice. That'll basically just put the progression into your own hands of like whatever path that you want to go down and then the quest tree that we have right here. I mean, this was basically serving as like both a quest tree of like things that you could go do and also a tech tree of the progression of getting the blueprints and stuff. So, it was a little bit tangled. So, we're basically going to separate out the progression side of things, put it in the research system, and then this quest tree will go back to being just like a pure objective line of things that you could go do in the game to make it fun, right? So, yeah, that's kind of my uh short-term goal. That's what I'm going to be working towards the foreseeable future.

[00:08:07]And then I also want to tackle a new power generator. So, something in the midame right now, which will be a bridge between like the early game crude generator that you have and then the late game solar panels. We need something right in the middle. And yeah, I'm going to experiment with that as well. Yeah, that's basically it. Thanks for tuning in.