Which is going to be the last meaningful patch for Factorio, ending a 10 year dev cycle. And well, hundreds of thousands of engineer (player) hours. 2.1 is going to bring a lot of QoL bits but no actual content… fine, there are seemingly infinite mods for that!

Most of the design concepts of Vanilla were thrown out with Space Age, as production chains dramatically changed and ‘free’ material was the new foundation. No longer did you need to mine iron patches, you simply used free molten lava and had infinite amounts. The mechanical transport mechanisms of vanilla were sort of cut and pasted to the space versions, specifically relating to rockets.

Trains used to be required on Nauvis, not a little required, like a LOT required. They generally operated on a single concept of maximum efficiency of moving 1 type of material from one place to another. Need another type of material? Build another train. The investment cost of trains is exceptionally low, and they are mostly sunk costs. The ‘challenge’ with trains was making sure that railways didn’t conflict. Blueprints solved this.

Rockets in Space Age are treated as disposable, and somewhat expensive, trains. You load them up, shoot them up, and move on. The ‘challenge’ here is on the actual platforms and landing pads, a give an take of requests and availability. If you need 15 of something, the rocket will generally only send you a full stack of 100. If you don’t have a stack of 100, you won’t get any items. You can certainly manually change this, but it’s painful. And in the early stages of Space Age, this is very costly. Even late game, the method of delivery of parts means that you can only effectively build platforms around Nauvis, as all other planets will have asteroids attacking you and no real way to defend them.

2.1 is going to modify the logic on the pile of this. Rockets will be able to ship partial stacks, based on requests. You’ll be able to ship between platforms. You’ll be able to apply better logic on requests so that you can pick up a material from any planet, rather than just one. Very useful QoL bits here and will certainly smooth out some rough spots. For those struggling to ‘kick start’ Space Age, this is a welcome change.

Of all the items, I have only seen one mechanical item of note. What 2.1 is also bringing is the death of space casinos but for some reason keeping the LDS shuffle. Space Casinos are space platforms that upcycle material to legendary, notably iron and coal using rarity mods. In 2.1 rarity mods will be removed from space platforms. This is odd since casinos are actually a pain to build, while the LDS shuffle remains (recycling legendary low-density structures give MORE material than you invested, meaning free LDS, copper, and steel.) It is entirely possible to get legendary iron and coal from other means, though admittedly scaling those is it’s own challenge. To me though, this doesn’t address the core issue – that legendary items exist in the first place. I like the benefits legendary items provide, it’s just the mechanisms to get them that are broken and burdensome. But hey, there are mods that just permanently unlock legendary once researched, and I would think that is the likely end-scenario here.

Given 2.1 is just around the corner, and marking the end of an era, it’s bittersweet to see it come to a close. Factorio isn’t just a great game, it’s honestly a gold standard for the genre where there are dozens and dozens of imitators. What was achieved with an insanely small team of absolutely dedicated developers is beyond impressive. Now for the modding community to figure out what’s next…