Factorio's huge Space Age expansion will let you build conveyor belts among the stars

Factorio developers Wube have been teasing an expansion for a couple of years, but they've now announced what it is. It's called Factorio: Space Age, and it's about constructing space platforms in orbit and then visiting four new planets, each with their own resources for you to exploit and challenges for you to overcome with conveyor belts and robot arms.

"The space platforms are used on their own to generate space science, but mainly, they are eventually used to travel to different planets, and for automated interplanetary logistics," says the announcement on the Factorio blog.

The planets you visit are all predefined, not procedural, with each designed to offer "its own unique theme, resource, challenges and gameplay mechanics". Developers Wube had previously said that they wanted the expansion to feel as big as the vanilla game, and now say that they're aiming for it to take "less than 80 hours for an experienced player."

It sounds as if most players of Space Age will be experienced, given it's designed to continue on from the end of the base game. If you have the expansion enabled, there will be changes to the old tech tree to support the new endgame, such as making some items - artillery, cliff explosives - only available on a later planet.

If you don't have the expansion, the old tech tree will remain - although there are engine upgrades that will also be available to all players via update 2.0. That will include "the ability to control train systems better, better blueprint building, better flying robot behaviour and many more. It will all be covered in more details in future FFFs", according to the blog post.

Factorio: Space Age is will apparently be ready for release "about one year from now." In the meantime, Wube are going to start talking about it openly in future Factorio Friday Fact blog posts. They also point out that, if you'd been reading those posts all along, you would have seen a glimpse of space platforms way back in 2015, before the idea was scrapped for being too ambitious for the base game.