Factorio developer begins work on a big expansion pack
Production has begun.
Factorio is getting an expansion pack.
In a blog post, Factorio director and designer Michal Kovarik said this expansion will be significant enough to capture people's attention.
It's too early to discuss what the expansion is, exactly, but the developers have started work on it, and "we don't think that it will take less than a year to develop". Perhaps we'll see a release at some point in 2022.
Steam hit Factorio launched in August 2020 and was met with an overwhelmingly positive reception. It's a game about building and creating automated factories to produce items of increasing complexity, within an infinite 2D world.
The recent 1.1 update is the final release of the vanilla game, Kovarik said. "It will be maintained, so bugfixes, simple modding interface additions, or minor tweaks can happen, but that's about it."
Reflecting on Factorio, Kovarik revealed it was in development for eight years and 10 months. 2.5m copies have been sold.
Don't expect to see the new expansion soon, Kovarik cautioned. "We don't want to start building hype too early and drive attention away from the finished Factorio."
And then there's the issue of modders making mods based on announced additions:
"Some of the additions require extending the engine, but some of them could be reproduced with mods to a certain extent. We have experience with people trying to use mods to emulate our future changes before they are released. This has a few problems, people playing with these emulations can have altered expectations for the expansion, and it also wouldn't feel that new anymore."