Where can I read FOUNDRY patch notes?

This page lists official Steam announcements for FOUNDRY, including the latest post "DevBlog #108 | Foundry Fridays: Conveyor Lifts". Each entry links to the full changelog on Steam.

How many people are playing FOUNDRY right now?

FOUNDRY currently shows 267 concurrent Steam players on SteamScope. Player counts refresh on a rolling schedule — typically about every 30 minutes for high-priority titles.

How often are FOUNDRY patch notes updated on SteamScope?

SteamScope ingests new Steam announcements as they are published. Check back after major updates, seasons, or balance patches to see fresh entries at the top of this feed.

Is FOUNDRY patch note data official?

SteamScope republishes developer announcements sourced from Steam's public news feeds. SteamScope is not affiliated with Valve Corporation. Always verify critical gameplay changes on the official Steam announcement.

...

Browse Games

Steam news

FOUNDRY news & patch notes

Full Steam announcements and update articles for this title.

DevBlog #108 | Foundry Fridays: Conveyor Lifts

Labubu mommysteam_community_announcements

9d ago

Hello everyone! Last week I showed a preview about the way we intend to rework loaders and I’m glad that the feedback was very positive. There were a couple questions and suggestions, and we’ll refine the things a little based on that.

Small Conveyor Lifts

Now for today I wanted to address another age old request: Small conveyor lifts. For a very long time we have been asked to add 1x1 conveyor lifts so that belts can easily go up or down without the larger footprint of slopes or freight elevators. The reason we haven’t was because they aren’t trivial to implement and that I always felt like they’re not different enough from the freight elevator (especially before we recently added the ability for automatic excavation). I do understand the size argument, but then again it’s an infinite world… However, due to continued demand we’ll start looking into how a small conveyor lift could work in FOUNDRY and do some prototyping. We’re currently still in the design phase, so it’ll take a bit before we can show something in-game. One of the main things we’re currently exploring is a design where you don’t have to worry about the rotation of the lift. The way we would do this is to allow connecting belts on all four sides of the bottom/top piece. Here’s a draft: {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/31cf6d7f3907c5ab05ddf528e97f3d34aa347c20.png If you only connect one belt, it behaves as you would expect, and with multiple it would kinda act like a splitter/merger. Does that look interesting to you? Or would you prefer the classic approach with single input and output connection? This is just one of many questions, but certainly one of the more important ones. In case you’re wondering: We don’t plan to remove the freight elevators, as they still serve their own purpose in having higher throughput, being bi-directional and they have the ability to excavate terrain on their own.

What else is currently happening?

We have started to actively work on blueprints, and will most likely be able to show something soon. However overall this is a very big task and surely will take a while to complete. I don’t have more details today, but here’s a small work in progress screenshot: {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/37412b4ab837ec20cf6fcf0ea447077bc3613790.png We do have a couple other things we’ll soon want to look into, but currently it’s summer time and there’s a bunch of vacations, so things are naturally advancing a bit slower. Stay tuned! That’s it for today, see you next time! -mrmcd Follow us on socials:

Discord
Twitter
Reddit
Facebook
Paradox Forum

Stay tuned for more news! https://store.steampowered.com/app/983870/FOUNDRY/

FOUNDRY Patch Notes & News | SteamScope

Steam news

FOUNDRY news & patch notes

Full Steam announcements and update articles for this title.

DevBlog #108 | Foundry Fridays: Conveyor Lifts

Labubu mommysteam_community_announcements

9d ago

Small Conveyor Lifts

What else is currently happening?

Discord
Twitter
Reddit
Facebook
Paradox Forum

Stay tuned for more news! https://store.steampowered.com/app/983870/FOUNDRY/

DevBlog #107 | Foundry Fridays: New Loaders

Mr.McDucksteam_community_announcements

23d ago

Hello everyone! Welcome back to another FOUNDRY Friday. Today we’re taking a look at a new take on loaders. One of the things we’ve been working on the past months was a re-interpretation of loaders, and while it’s still work in progress, we’re finally ready to show it.

Redesign Goals

Before we look at what we’ve come up with, let’s summarize the key points we were trying to achieve:

Allow loaders to transfer from machine to machine without a belt.
Allow loaders to transfer directly from belt to belt.
Reduce the amount of unique items.
Improve user-experience and reduce the amount of clicks needed.

New Loader Design

First, we parted ways with the multiple Loader items representing different lengths. Going forward there is only one Loader item, and instead of it being placed like a regular building, you drag it from a start point to an end point. Work in progress. This system has a very nice side-effect: The direction you drag the loader will also automatically be the loader’s item move direction. However you can still toggle it from a button on the loader, just like before. The maximum range will be increased through research, and most likely we’ll also allow them to go further than they did before. Second, we managed to add support for belt-to-belt and building-to-building transfer. While we don’t see those use cases as future core gameplay, we believe that this will be very convenient and allow for new layouts and more diverse ways to build your factory. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/730a4e7efbfdc6ef6ab7a421115f2c628a5aa6c2.pngWork in progress. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/f9a7c287fbe4de3a6d0e4c42b8fdd529e94e6cfb.jpgWork in progress. We haven’t fully decided yet, but most likely we will merge the Filter Loader’s functionality into the regular Loader, so that every loader can have a filter assigned if needed. Please keep in mind that the video/image above represents work in progress, and there will be more polishing and things are subject to change. Still we’d like to hear your feedback and thoughts if that looks like a good solution. Let us know in the Steam comments below! See you next time, -mrmcd Follow us on socials:

Discord
Twitter
Reddit
Facebook
Paradox Forum

Stay tuned for more news! https://store.steampowered.com/app/983870/FOUNDRY/

DevBlog #106 | Foundry Fridays: More Work In Progress

Mr.McDucksteam_community_announcements

37d ago

Hello everyone! In this FOUNDRY Friday I want to share various improvements of existing features that different team members have been working on.

Increased Map Zoom

In a previous update we already were able to improve the performance on how the map is generated, allowing us to to zoom out the map a tiny bit. But with trains and growing factories it felt like an even better overview of everything was needed. After another round of performance optimizations you can zoom out roughly 4 times more than before! {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/ffcce3e82741e9076a672dcb0a405ed12deccecd.png Zoom level on the right image increased by ~4 times!

Improved Train Management

With the new Trains frame a better overview of your train fleet is guaranteed. There you can find a full list of all your trains and train groups. Clicking on one of the trains reveals its current position on the map and provides some extra interesting info. UI is work in progress Furthermore, clicking on a train station now provides you with real-time information about the station and its related trains. The train list in the side panel contains all trains that have the station anywhere in their schedule. UI is work in progress

Assembly Lines

Since we were working on better overviews we tackled another feature where we thought it was lacking: the Assembly Lines. You can now open the Assembly Line Planner (a new UI window) from the start building of your assembly line. This provides you with a step by step instruction on how your product (robot / bot) is supposed to be built. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/fe053bab2e83952cdb9d74afe190aaed89f84503.png Configuring your assembly line producers was streamlined: If an assembly line producer is connected to a configured assembly line start building, the UI will skip the selection of the product and immediately bring up the action selection. Also you will be able to see if a producer within the assembly line is already taking care of a production step, making it more obvious which further steps remain to be configured. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/fe1cca4aa967ba0a1f6b9a93305c60d5d5669030.png Last but not least, the snap mode for assembly lines has been improved, making them more comfortable to be placed.

Another Small Assembly Line Sneak Peek

As already mentioned in our last FOUNDRY Friday we are experimenting with small assembly lines that are used for the production of bots. Here is another proof of concept video: Work in progress We hope you’ll enjoy those changes! Let us know in the comments below. That’s all for today. Thanks for tuning in. -lxi Follow us on socials:

Discord
Twitter
Reddit
Facebook
Paradox Forum

Stay tuned for more news! https://store.steampowered.com/app/983870/FOUNDRY/

DevBlog #104 | Foundry Fridays: Work in Progress

Mr.McDucksteam_community_announcements

65d ago

Hello everyone! Last FOUNDRY Friday I asked about what you’d like to see next for the future, and the amount of responses was (pleasantly) surprising. We often get a lot of feedback in the comments or on Discord, but this time it was more than ever. Over 125 comments just on Steam (that’s over 9 pages!) and many more on other channels. It’s nice to see that there is genuine interest in the game and in the direction it develops. Rest assured that we have read every message and we’ll take them into account when we work out the plans for the future. We don’t have a fully scoped plan yet, regular work outside of supporting the launch of the last update is only slowly resuming and considering summer is approaching, we also have a bunch of vacations coming up. That being said, we of course have started planning. So let’s look into a subset of the things we have been looking into. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/1458a2bc1514b34f76c8a1227eb30d69d90cdbb7.jpgCommunity Screenshot from Natiri

User Experience & Comfort

After each update we generally like to take a bit of time and improve a couple of UX things, to ensure the game gradually plays better. One of the things we have decided to improve are conveyor belts. We have removed the slope as a separate item, and adjusted the drag mode accordingly to reflect that change. Then we tried to address that the placement of objects next to slopes and balancers can be annoying, because they snap to their voxel bounds instead of the real shape of the object. It now works the way you would expect it (snapping to the real object bounds) and it feels a lot better. And finally we have added auto-snapping when aiming at the start or the end of a belt, making belt placement a bit more comfortable as it requires less manual rotation. I know that explaining those things in text isn’t easy to follow, so I’m looking forward to sharing it with you. We’re also looking at improving some under-the-hood features like it sometimes taking a long time to load a large savegame, something that has gotten worse as our game started to get bigger. There will be more UX and performance improvements, but those are the things I can share right now. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/fec898e1a33940542abadc1fbdc6393dc4899d27.jpgCommunity Screenshot from Delicious Desire

Blueprints

Now that we have shipped trains, blueprints are probably the new most requested feature, therefore I wanted to address it a bit. We will be adding some sort of blueprints, but it hasn’t yet been decided how they should work specifically. This is a very essential system and we want to get it right, so for now I don’t have more details. But as things progress, we’ll keep you up to date. As a reminder, there is a great blue prints mod available on the steam workshop (and the author now works directly on Foundry). {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/bd5d42f58d78efc34752561471e71c59b2a54826.jpgCommunity Screenshot from Avernar

Trains and Power

Tracks will get the ability to conduct high-voltage power. We’ll add a new “connector piece” that allows you to connect a regular power pole with the tracks, and then you can branch off to a different power pole wherever you want. We’ll make trains consume power, but we are most likely going for a solution where they don’t fully break down if the power goes out, but instead they’ll go rather slow. Additionally, based on feedback and requests, we have added more (minor) improvements to the train system, for example path-finding and train priority at crossings. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/41dd2b5f82159f5a4f1f54c0e4a233d4a834c208.jpgCommunity Screenshot from Avernar

Loaders

We’re actively experimenting with the Loaders so that they become more flexible. For example one of the main features we’re looking at is that you can also connect belt to belt or machine to machine. We’re also looking at a couple of UX (mostly placement) improvements and adding the filter functionality into the default loader. I don’t yet have a preview, but progress on this is good and I’m optimistic that this will work out well. There’s more I could talk about, but I’ll also have to save some of it for the upcoming FOUNDRY Fridays! See you next time, -mrmcd Follow us on socials:

Discord
Twitter
Reddit
Facebook
Paradox Forum

Stay tuned for more news! https://store.steampowered.com/app/983870/FOUNDRY/

DevBlog #103 | Foundry Fridays: What's next?

Mr.McDucksteam_community_announcements

79d ago

Hello everyone! I’d like to start by thanking everyone who has played the game since Update 4 launched! Feedback has been positive and we’re glad that trains have finally arrived. We’ve been pretty busy monitoring the situation and reacting to any bug or issue reports, but ultimately this has been a relatively smooth update launch.

What would you like to see next?

As the dust settles on Update 4, we are getting ready to decide on what comes next. So it’s time to get that conversation going, and I’d like to hear your thoughts about what you think FOUNDRY needs the most. Whatever you’d like to see next, please let us know in the Steam comments below, at our Discord or on Reddit. We’ve always cared a lot about the community's opinion and are excited to hear from you. Whatever it is, don’t hold back.

Do we already have some plans?

We have some ideas, as well as exciting prototypes, but we’re still in the exploration phase. There are a couple of things that have been requested for a while, and we’re evaluating if they are a good fit for the next update, but we haven’t made any final decisions. Examples of often requested bigger features are blueprints, expansion of the commerce system or a pressure mechanic. Improving the commerce system seems like a good idea. We’d also like to polish the assembly lines and make more products on them. Of course there is the space station, which can be expanded. Ultimately there’s a lot of stuff we can do to add more content and expand on existing features, but at the same time we’re also looking if there’s something else that might be a little more transformative. And now is the right time to spend some time on planning. We’ll keep you up to date on how it goes! See you on the next one, -mrmcd Follow us on socials:

Discord
Twitter
Reddit
Facebook
Paradox Forum

Stay tuned for more news! https://store.steampowered.com/app/983870/FOUNDRY/

DevBlog #102 | Foundry Fridays: A Random Retrospective

Rambussteam_community_announcements

93d ago

Foundry, from an Itch to Reality

Today Foundry has Trains, Mega Nuclear Xeno power plants, and hundreds of hours of gameplay. But what has become a sprawling factory simulator, was once just a humble Itch.io game with a retro Minecraft aesthetic. The story of how Foundry came to be what it is today hasn’t really been told before, and I wanted to at least share my own first person account on the many random strokes of luck that allowed this game to exist the way it does today.

A fortunate day in 2018

Patrik, an avid Buildcraft and Factorio player, had a simple dream, to build the ultimate voxel factory game. And what now seems like an eternity ago he began development of what was to become Foundry.

Early versions featured greyblock texturing, acid trip skies and sharp Minecraft style voxels. An alien planet perhaps?

Many of the core system for Foundry were worked out early on, but took countless iterations to make them feel right.Original power poll design against a neon sky

Early on the decision was made to take advantage of the first person perspective by having players configure machines manually in-world.

Human Machine Interfaces (HMI)’s mimic real world factories

As the game began to mature the skies turned blue and the voxels were lit with ambient occlusion to provide some depth

Blocky terrain with ambient occlusion applied

Asset pack art and texture libraries mixed with some contracted work to create the initial prototype. Chunky asset store art adorned the blocky world of early days Foundry.

As a game started to form, it became clear the scope was beyond one man, and so Patrik enlisted the help of his longtime childhood friend, Michael, to help speed things up. Together they tried many unique experiments from underground mining networks to monument like research facilities

The original version of Foundry had you creating large research labs to progress

As they prepared to share the game with the world, the sun set on this quiet version of Foundry…

How the heck did I get here?

I started my career in the middle of nowhere Saskatchewan doing one of the few tech jobs around, industrial automation. Writing software to automate factories, and then going far north to install the systems on site. I never dreamed of doing that.. I always wanted to make games.

By a total stroke of luck I crossed paths with some game developers and was launched into the industry, making games like Dead Rising 2 and 3. I then went Indie when my coworker Johann invited me to join Klei Entertainment, making games together like Don’t Starve Together, Oxygen Not Included and Hot Lava.

But as the pandemic dragged on, I felt my passion drained. Then at one fateful lunch, Johann mentioned a strange little factory game he saw on Itch, and I decided to reach out and lend a hand. I started working with Patrik on marketing and polishing his game for a wider audience.

A brief return to the neon skies of Foundry

But the more time I spent with him and Foundry the more I fell in love with what he was building. I might have been burnt out, but Patrik had a passion and a vision that I could rally behind. Finally, with zero funding, Johann joined us to form Channel 3 with the express goal of fulfilling Patrik’s dream. Gone were the Minecraft cubes, replaced with bevelled edges

The way buildings were placed, caves were lit, terrain rendered. Every system was revised or replaced. With the added muscle Foundry started to even look… pretty.

We each brought our own unique perspective to the genre, while Patrik continued to build out content and core game design.

Johann, who made games like Oxygen Not Included, brought a tremendous amount of optimization, rendering and systems work to the game.

And I made things pretty… and explosive.

The orbital laser felt like a core feature to me

Together we turned the game into the top seller on Itch.io, and then with that momentum we partnered with our dream publisher and build out a team of talented developers.

Is the game perfect now? No, of course not. But it is what we set out to build, a game that turned a dream into a reality.

Looking back, I’m still surprised how this all came together. One random message to an itch.io developer, and then years gone in a blink of an eye.

I can’t thank the community enough for your support, every comment, every bug report, every Steam review. We read it all, and it gave us the confidence to continue building this game. We are real people behind this project, who somehow found a way to do what we love.

I never imagined I would return to industrial automation. But I’m sure glad I did.

-Mark Laprairie

Stay tuned for more news!

Foundry 4.0 "Rails & Reactors" is out now!

Scrappy Platypussteam_community_announcements

96d ago

Hello everyone! The long-awaited Foundry 4.0 update "Rails & Reactors" is finally here! Before we go into details check out a short trailer we prepared for you! The 4.0 update brings a few key, frequently-requested features to Foundry.

Key features:

Trains: Unlimited long distance transportation possibilities with a flexible train system.
Xeno Power Plant: Generate high amounts of power with a power plant made out of multiple large buildings.
Info Overlay: We added a toggle-able info overlay that makes it easier to check if everything is working properly in your factory.
Construction Drone: A remote-controllable construction drone that adds convenience when building your factories.
New Assembly Line Robots: More robots to produce and to sell on the galactic market.
New Neon Decor Buildings: New glowing decor opportunities.
Modular Casting Machine: A large modular building to be used in conjunction with the blast furnaces.

The changelog:

Besides the above key features, the 4.0 update also comes with a lot of changes and quality-of-life improvements. Check out the full changelog below: Gameplay Changes:

Drone miner output is now a fixed rate per minute.
Drone miners are now connected to the entire ore patch instead of just the voxels in range.
Xeno and Technum ore patches now spawn closer to the player’s start location.
Increased character crafting speed.
Reduced research time and requirements for science pack 1 and 2.
Station upgrades sped up for tier 1.
Changed shipping pads so that they cannot move the same item type in both directions simultaneously (you have the option to disable this when you load an old save or when you start a new game).
Reduced cargo capacity of cargo shuttles, but increased speed.
Cargo shuttles now need to accelerate before reaching top speed.
Loaders no longer require power or foundations.
Reduced power demand for xeno crystal/scrap miners by roughly 50%.
Increased high voltage cable range to 24 for every building that had a lower range.

UX Improvements

Polishing pass on power generation building tooltips and screen panels.
You can now open screen panels from any side of the building by pressing ‘E’.
Inventory ui frame now has a helper panel to show all available hotkeys.
Added pipe/power indicator icons to base of fracking tower.
Improved crafting recipe tooltips.
Fixed tooltips sometimes being too transparent.
Improved research frame search functionality to also scan for names of unlocked crafting recipes.
Improved many of the building’s tooltips and polished tooltip frame.

Graphical Improvements

Improved texture filtering on all buildings.
Improved SSAO.
Added ground cloud shadows.
Lighting and fog tuning.
Improved placement effects.
Improved digging effects.
Tuned clouds.
Adjusted workstation LOD distances.
Adjusted screen panel LOD distances to prevent z fighting.

Audio Improvements

Improved many of the machine sounds.
Many of the machine sounds are now limited to prevent cacophony.
Improved drilling sounds.
Improved harvesting sounds.
Improved placement sounds.
New Ambiences.

Optimizations

Optimized foundation tile energy system simulation.
Optimized map rendering.
Reduced dedicated server memory usage.
Optimized audio processing.
Part 1/3 of save file optimization for worlds that have many chunks explored (Part 2 and 3 will be in a future update).
Optimized shipping pad container rendering.
Optimized large solar panel rendering.

Bug Fixes

InfoDB pages now display the correct keybinds.
Fixed an issue that was causing the game to no longer popup an error message when the player’s system is unable to play the game either due to their video card being unsupported or their system missing the correct C++ runtime.
Fixed an error that could occur when using an invalid hex code in the color tool frame.
Fixed an error that could occur when deleting a save file from in game that the player had deleted using windows explorer.
Fixed issue with getting on ladders on some modular buildings.
Fixed incorrect mesh on modular building walkways.
Fixed getting stuck on collision on assembly line producer buildings.
Fixed placement effect not being played correctly on certain buildings.
Fixed an error that could occur when trying to load a very large save file.
Fix bug with xeno tower coverage being incorrect on map.
Fixed issue with stats displayed on ore vein miner.
Fixed issue where workstations weren’t taken into account on finance overview for throughput statistics.
Fixed research queue not showing the proper information when researching infinite researches.
Fixed incinerator screen panel showing wrong time per item when boosted by workstations.
Fixed issue where walkways were preventing proper deconstruction raycasts.
Fixed bug where personal mining drones would not despawn when a character logged off in multiplayer.
Fixed issue with freight elevators not working properly when colliding with certain types of buildings.
Fixed issue with freight elevator upgrading when freight elevators are too full of items.
Fixed error that could occur when using certain symbols in save file names.
Fixed sun/moon rendering when far from origin.
Fixed 3rd person rendering of mining laser in multiplayer.
Fixed desync that could occur when using pumpjacks and workstations.
Fixed desync that could occur when deconstructing modular buildings.
Fixed error that could occur when placing conveyors/pipes.

Modding

The crafting/item yaml files are now shipped with the game in the SteamingAssets/Templates folder.

Thank you for your support! As always, we want to thank you all for playing Foundry! We still have exciting updates ahead of us, so please keep sharing your feedback on our official channels! Ideally here or in our Discord! We hope you'll enjoy Foundry 4.0! Here's one more video to wrap things up!

DevBlog #101 | Foundry Fridays: Trains & Update 4

Mr.McDucksteam_community_announcements

107d ago

Hello everyone! This is the final FOUNDRY Friday before we’re launching Update 4 “Rails & Reactors” on Tuesday, April 28th. Therefore today we’re covering the update’s content in general, and are looking more deeply into one of the core features: Trains!

Update 4 Main Content Pieces

Trains: Expand your factories with trains. From small end-to-end lines to complex multi-track rail networks, we’ve got you covered. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/46cdaa613c7cfff1abfaa0b1cabd2d2ce3c9ab4f.png Xeno Power Plant: Endless power from a complex power plant made out of multiple modular buildings. More details here. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/3bd3a328ef91ee94aa959f451bb46599852dbfdb.png More Science Pack 5 Content: Three more assembly line robots and some new components. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/c4a21a98a4a323957757f95045409e5dd2154c40.png Information Overlay: More information about your factory with a brand new info overlay showing various machine states. More details here. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/1f35f5463982a52db34db3920df3ebe91810344c.png Construction Drone: A remote controlled construction drone which makes building your factory more convenient. More details here. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/63eee80b7fe8e3d909289b6a2e879de0fda87c6b.png New decoratives: A set of glowing neon tubes. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/abd739356083fd4b1355de994ba0814b48c858d2.jpg Polishing and Improvements: Lots of polishing, bugfixes and improvements.

Trains

I’m thrilled that we’re finally able to deliver trains. They have been highly requested for a very long time, and we’ve been working on them for quite a while. Some of you might have tried them already on the experimental branch, but for everyone else here are the details. Let us start by looking at the individual parts of the Train System.

Tracks

This is where your trains will drive on. You place it with a drag mode similar to how belt dragging works. They snap to a 4x4 voxel grid, and we do support a wide range of shapes: differently sized curves, slopes for going up and down, diagonals. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/5a0b2db102292fa72fb3e4ecd035d1a6240b68de.png Obviously we support branching and merging, and also tracks crossing each other. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/80a391f5ba0ed0d3047a8ba98a75bbd846d11604.png

Train Stations

This is where your trains stop at, you place them adjacent to tracks and automated trains will be able to stop there. More details below when we’re talking about the scheduling. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/69d873ae197cbcb0dcd994639b3013a4b4dd78e9.png

Train Loading Stations

Loading Stations are supposed to be placed next to the Train Station itself. You need one per wagon and it can either be set to Load or Unload mode. A Loading Station has an internal inventory which can be filled or emptied while the train isn’t present, which allows for faster train loading/unloading. The building itself has two input and two output belt connections to connect your factory to. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/b7e3e3674758d935fcc03d208344bf782f1c023e.png

Signals

We decided to go with a widely used solution of having two signal types: The regular and chain signal. Signals divide your tracks into so-called track segments and trains will only ever enter empty segments. The regular signal lets trains pass whenever the upcoming segment is empty, and the chain signal lets the train pass only when the next segment after the upcoming segment is also empty. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/9c3e9d286ab3eab59838d7151a2e9576b0df5493.png It is the same solution most factory games and many simulation games with trains use. I know it needs a bit of time to understand for a beginner, but ultimately we wanted to ensure that complex train solutions will work and that the player has the control needed to make interesting builds. We’ll have an info database page where we’ll try to explain the basics to get started. We also have helper visualization showing the segments (while having a signal equipped): {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/67e9c04c6ee0298cfb8d2af5f57ecf918763e176.png

Train Engines & Wagons

The train engine is what makes your train move. It needs to be at the front of your train, and if you want your train to be bi-directional, you need an engine on each side facing outwards. For this update, we have decided that trains will not require fuel. It’s something we want to change eventually, but we didn’t want to rush it and therefore delayed it. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/d6c40f942eb4ad1013851b9b462a2d067cee57e3.jpg For cargo transportation we have a wagon for solid items and one for liquids/gases. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/e4ada4a8a05bc2752d72907c618d96d3140ca95c.jpg

Manual Mode & Autopilot

You can drive your train manually from the screen panel, but this isn’t very useful for automating freight transportation in your factory, so there is an autopilot mode. For the autopilot you can create train schedules, which are a list of stations the train should go to, and a related set of conditions for how long a train should stay in the station. The typical conditions are “Wait until full” and “Wait until empty”, but there are also timers or data signal conditions. You can combine multiple conditions with “AND” or “OR” logic. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/a8da9814c92f6d47dbc38a99eb71903f67c73173.png Work in progress

Advanced Features

I won’t go into too much detail here, but we do also have advanced features like train limits per station, support for multiple stations sharing the same name or creating shared schedules for multiple trains. There is also a bunch of data system support in case you want to do more complex things. This concludes today’s episode and I hope you’ll have fun with Update 4! See you at the next one, -mrmcd Follow us on socials:

Discord
Twitter
Reddit
Facebook
Paradox Forum

Stay tuned for more news! https://store.steampowered.com/app/983870/FOUNDRY/

DevBlog #100 | Foundry Fridays: Xeno Power Plant

Mr.McDucksteam_community_announcements

121d ago

Hello everyone! This is episode 100 of FOUNDRY Fridays! Time flies when you’re building the factory (game). Looking back, it’s incredible how the game has progressed over the years. Quite an improvement over our first version on itch, but also over the Early Access launch version from two years ago. From the bottom of my heart, thank you for your support through this journey. There’s a lot more to be done, so stay tuned! Soon, on April 28th, Update 4 will officially launch and today we’re looking at the new Xeno Power Plant and a few upcoming long distance transport changes.

The Xeno Power Plant

Our new power plant, made out of multiple modular buildings, will unlock new heights of power generation. The whole complex is made up of five different buildings, it can generate up to 360MW of power and it is fueled by new items derived from Xeno-Crystals. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/a7a3d8c2b45b264d5d4dd2aaadacaacf5ea9cecd.jpg Let's have a look at each of the five new buildings.

The Fuel Mixer

The building that creates the liquid reactor fuel from precursor items and liquids you’ll have to manufacture. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/de68c2ed07c9777d0869d6a7604665f26215cede.png

The Xeno Reactor

The central piece of the plant, the reactor burns the fuel and generates Energized Reactor Compound (another liquid). {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/806baccd19c19c114593b9deddab76fc4ab8c647.jpg

The Steam Generator

A giant heat exchanger that takes the Energized Reactor Compound from the Reactor, and together with Water, it generates High-Pressure Steam and Depleted Reactor Compound. The Steam goes to the next building, while the Depleted Reactor Compound needs to be looped back to the Reactor. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/0da9a013802ac2846e1c8181a0883e4919e44d37.png

The High Pressure Turbine

It works just like the regular Turbine, but it is much larger and produces ten times the amount of power. It needs High-Pressure Steam to generate power and produces Exhaust Steam as a byproduct. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/d1dff04ac8eda4dc0d16395b372300b6646dad09.jpg

The Cooling Tower

And finally, to disperse the Exhaust Steam from the High Pressure Turbine you need the Cooling Tower. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/459ed3655528b6b17d34c14e99ed0eb6e6be28b6.png Except for the Reactor and the Steam Generator, which need to be connected in a loop, all buildings are to be connected sequentially. We initially thought about going for a more complex mechanic, but ultimately felt that this would be enough to achieve our goals. Those of you familiar with real life nuclear power plants will certainly see the parallels in the design approach, although in reality you’d have up to three loops instead of just one. Let’s talk about the configurability of the modular buildings next. One of the key features our modular buildings support, is the ability to make buildings with different properties, depending on which or how many modules you use. However, for the power plant we have kept it straight forward, and there is no module tinkering on any of those buildings. The reason is simple: To modify a building, it needs to be shut down and construction can take several minutes. If the power plant is your main source of power, it is just too frustrating to be forced to shut it down as your factory might spiral into a power blackout. If your construction industry runs out of power, you can’t even finish the construction to get the power back up. We do not want to introduce any catastrophic pitfalls like that. However we went with a different approach: The reactor can be throttled up or down, in steps of 10%, and this affects both power generation and fuel consumption respectively. For each 10% of reactor utilization, you’ll need exactly one Turbine. This allows you to start with a small power plant of, for example, just one or two turbines, which should be enough at the point where it is unlocked. After that you can gradually expand the generation capacity of the plant by building more turbines without the need to shut down the other parts of the plant. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/36049c87732da0c87f06145bb5df03f0ec5422ee.jpg

Long Distance Transport Changes

We are going to make changes to the behavior of the shipping pads (planet to station ships). Specifically we’ll remove the ability to abuse them as long distance transport, you’ll only be able to either move items up or down, but not in both directions at the same time. They were never intended that way, and in all honesty it was an oversight on Update 2. The most important information first: For existing saves, you’ll be prompted at savegame load if you want to switch to the new ruleset or not. So your factories won’t break if you heavily rely on it. For new games the new rules will be active. Why are we doing this? We never wanted a free and ultra high throughput long distance transport. It made our cargo shuttles completely obsolete and no other logistics solution will ever be able to compete with it. While we’re adding Trains with Update 4, this is a change long overdue even if we wouldn’t add trains. I know this might be a little controversial, and I’m looking forward to reading your feedback on the topic. Additionally we’ll also adjust the cargo shuttles so that they are more distinct from trains. They will get a speed increase, but at the cost of a storage capacity decrease. That means they’ll be even stronger for low to medium throughput, but they’ll be worse for moving massive amounts of items. Ultimately, this change does not force you to use trains, but it’s an incentive for certain goods. I think that different logistics systems should have different strong suits. Again, we’re looking forward to hearing your thoughts on that. And finally before we conclude this blog post, I’d like to share one of the videos from our train stress tests: And one more video, showing off another new building: The heavy caster, a replacement for the 96 Casting Machines needed for the largest Blast Furnace: Thank you for reading and see you in two weeks, -mrmcd Follow us on socials:

Discord
Twitter
Reddit
Facebook
Paradox Forum

Stay tuned for more news! https://store.steampowered.com/app/983870/FOUNDRY/

DevBlog #99 | Foundry Fridays: Update 4 Date & Construction Drone

Mr.McDucksteam_community_announcements

135d ago

Hello everyone! Welcome back to another FOUNDRY Friday. Today I will be writing about the Update 4 progress and its planned release date, the construction drone and some smaller polishing we have added to the game.

Update 4 Release Date & Progress

We’re happy to announce that Update 4 is scheduled to release on Tuesday, the 28th of April. Due to us having worked on some of the new content (like trains) during previous update cycles, it allows us to go with a shorter timeline between the last and the upcoming update and we’re excited about that. Overall development progress is going well on several fronts. We’re making solid progress on the new core features, while also adding polish to various existing aspects of the game. As we’re still in Early Access we’re constantly trying to improve existing features as well. We can’t do it all at once, but I think we’re doing a good job of shipping multiple smaller improvements with every update along with the new main features. Trains being out on the experimental branch has helped us tremendously to find bugs and issues early. Therefore we have decided to bring the modular power plant also to experimental. We will provide more information once we feel the power plant is ready for the public.

Construction Drone

We have mentioned it briefly in the last FOUNDRY Friday, but now it is time to take a closer look at our new construction drone. Let’s start with a video: I think the video is pretty self explanatory. You’ll get a remote-controllable flying drone you can use for factory building. In terms of building it can do everything you can do from first person, but you cannot use it for things like mining. It will unlock as one of the early science pack 1 researches, therefore making it available almost from the start. The drone does not need any fuel, but there is a maximum range on how far you can go with it. Let’s talk about why we have decided to add it. In short: comfort and usability. Building things from first person isn’t always as comfortable as it can be, and in a game where most of your time is spent on building things we need to ensure it is as accessible and comfortable as possible. Lots of players started building from a flying perspective as soon as they unlocked the jetpack, and that is something we want to allow right from the beginning. The ability to quickly ascend and get a top down perspective makes it easier to see where other machines are or where a certain conveyor belt is going. We believe it will be a great addition to the game. As a little side note: We’re aware that there are other things we can and should do to improve our building mechanics and we’ll get there. One thing at a time. If you have particular feedback on how the building mechanics can be improved, please let us know in the comments below.

More Visual and SFX Polish

Here’s a small but impactful change, a new animation for building and demolishing machines. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/5a8b4c3ada9ec6a1d6e00fa7c5dc2f05d0cd1610.gif What do you think? Looks good? We have also started the process of adding more polish on the sound effects side, we have improved a bunch of SFX and are working on improving more. We’re also working on making multiple machines play the same SFX in parallel to sound better. FOUNDRY has a very large amount of sounds, so please do not expect most of them to change with Update 4, but we’re addressing those we believe are the most critical and will continue to do so with future updates. Are there any in particular you believe we should take a look at? Alright, that concludes this week's blog post. I hope you like the new stuff. We’ll be back in two weeks. Until then, -mrmcd Follow us on socials:

Discord
Twitter
Reddit
Facebook
Paradox Forum

Stay tuned for more news! https://store.steampowered.com/app/983870/FOUNDRY/

DevBlog #98 | Foundry Fridays: More Quality Of Life

Mr.McDucksteam_community_announcements

149d ago

Hello, dear robots! In this episode of Foundry Fridays I am excited to introduce… myself. My name is Omi, I recently joined the team to support all things game design. We are currently baking Update 4, and besides new content like trains we are also working on some Quality of Life features and various improvements to the early game. You might have already heard about the Info Overlay (U key) or the screen panel remote access (E key) in the last Foundry Friday episode. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/ede1df7f8f1d38e26d8201cf9d17b2c9c356d265.png There are more things in the oven! For example, a remote controllable construction drone which should make early game building more comfortable. However, I won’t be talking much about it today (oh wow, spoilers!), but what I’d like to mention in this episode are a couple other changes we’ve made recently.

Drone Miners

With Update 4, Drone Miners will have a fixed base output of 60 ore per minute, and the entire ore patch will be considered "in range", meaning that drones will mine until the last bit while maintaining the stated output. Of course, the upgrades and bonuses to production will still be there. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/9a604e3ff2d7d0c9d1968b6908f8c2cb529e9238.png The Control Panel will also show how much ore is left in this patch. Truly, a revolution! Some other elements were removed to make the panel easier to read.

Tooltips, inventory and crafting UI update

Another Quality of Life change that should streamline the planning and designing stage is an update to item tooltips. First, recipe tooltips will display production per minute instead of time needed per item. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/09bba4adde0dd25289bc18378ee884873a808e1e.png Second, item tooltips will have an expanded mode (ALT key) which allows you to immediately bring up the crafting recipe. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/50978d171b4413b40beee45068a9202f91809055.png As a small bonus, inventory and crafting action hotkeys will be always displayed on the little panel to the right instead of being hidden behind tooltips. There is more to come from where this came from, so stay tuned and don’t forget to oil your joints! -Omi Follow us on socials:

Discord
Twitter
Reddit
Facebook
Paradox Forum

Stay tuned for more news! https://store.steampowered.com/app/983870/FOUNDRY/

DevBlog #96 | Foundry Fridays: Trains on Experimental

Mr.McDucksteam_community_announcements

177d ago

Hello everyone! It’s been about two weeks since we launched Update 3 “Xeno Tech” and I wanted to take the time to say thanks to everyone who played the game so far. Many of you came back for the new content, and feedback has been very positive. We’re really happy to see the Steam reviews trending upwards and we will continue to work hard to improve FOUNDRY! {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/c17ea688b3db1aa8fe669d7108c4631155358762.jpg

Trains now on the Experimental Branch

As some of you might already know, the Trains are now available on the experimental branch. We have quietly rolled them out on our Discord during the past two weeks to get some initial feedback and find the most serious bugs. It’s a big feature and we knew there would be bugs, so we didn’t want to let everyone know at the same time in case there are some bigger roadblocks. But now it’s time to let everyone know! We have set up a Steam discussion explaining how to get access and what’s important to know: Link to Steam Discussion I’ll recap the most important points:

Savegame Compatibility: While we will try, it is not guaranteed that saves on the experimental branch will never break since we’re giving access early while the feature is actively under development. Never overwrite your current Update 3 savegame. Ultimately when Update 4 launches, it will be compatible with Update 3 saves.
Feature Preview: This version is a feature preview, we haven’t added surrounding content yet. The trains are not part of the research tree, but immediately unlocked. We haven’t added any new content or made any changes to integrate trains better to the core gameplay loop.
Work In Progress: This time we’re giving access to the experimental branch way earlier than with Update 3, so expect things to be less polished.

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/f8d677a483b3f3cf46ee5ee68f422e5406a83060.jpg We’re looking forward to your feedback! It’s important to get trains right and every bit of feedback helps. Enjoy trains and see you next time, -mrmcd Follow us on socials:

Discord
Twitter
Reddit
Facebook
Paradox Forum

Stay tuned for more news! https://store.steampowered.com/app/983870/FOUNDRY/

DevBlog #95 | Foundry Fridays: Path to Update 4

Mr.McDucksteam_community_announcements

191d ago

Hello everyone! Just two days ago Update 3 “Xeno Tech” was released and we hope everyone is enjoying the new features. Naturally we’re now mostly focused on reacting to feedback and bug reports, but thanks to Update 3 being on the experimental branch for about 6 weeks this should be a smooth launch - fingers crossed! {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/a02b7eaa32d8f329f6321f3469ae4610f1209606.png

What’s next?

Next up for us is of course Update 4, which will center around Trains, the new Power Plant and more Science Pack 5 content. On top of that we will look at improving some of the existing features. We don’t have a public timeline yet, but given we have already put in quite a bit of work on some of the Update 4 features we expect the time between Update 3 and 4 to be shorter than between the recent big updates. Meanwhile the public experimental branch for trains is on track to arrive next week. Stay tuned for more information. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/a14f4a8236c013ab2cf20b3ec820807cc3085581.png

Which parts of FOUNDRY need improvement?

I would like to use today's blog post to start a conversation about which existing features of FOUNDRY could need improvement the most. I’ll start with an example, for me personally modular buildings are high up that list. The general idea of large buildings that allow for different configurations, built by the construction industry seems full of potential and fun, but I don’t think we have managed to make those super interesting in terms of gameplay. I don’t have an immediate suggestion for improvement, but it’s certainly something I will spend some time on in the upcoming weeks. I would love to hear your thoughts on the subject! Every suggestion is welcome. Please let us know in the Steam comments below. Enjoy the weekend, -mrmcd Follow us on socials:

Discord
Twitter
Reddit
Facebook
Paradox Forum

Stay tuned for more news! https://store.steampowered.com/app/983870/FOUNDRY/

Update 3: Xeno-Tech is NOW LIVE!

Labubu mommysteam_community_announcements

193d ago

Hello everyone! We just wanted to let you know that Update 3: Xeno-Tech is now live! You can read more about the highlights in this steam post here. If you're interested in the full changelog, you can read all of it here: New Features:

Exploration content and related mechanics
Robot Workstations
Xeno Logistics (remote inventory resupply)
New terraforming building: Quarry
81 Steam Achievements
Improved controller support
Reworked Inventory + Crafting Frame

Changes:

Tuned character movement acceleration.
The character now turns when standing inside the drill ship and the drill ship rotates.
Emergency beacon and station terminal can now be made in assemblers.

Fixes:

Fixed orbital laser particle system bug.
Fixed localization issue on recycler.
Fixed unlocalized strings on the galaxy map.
Fixed fracking tower strut positions appearing in the wrong location(only works on new fracking towers)
Fixed issue with tooltips going offscreen.
Fixed large interaction volumes on logistics containers, preventing users from putting signs on them and being able to interact with the sign button.
Fixed bug that could occur when connecting to a dedicated server.
Fixed bug that could cause not all freight containers to render.
Fixed issue where Foundry would not properly restart after changing which mods are enabled.
Fixed issue that could occur where a dedicated server wouldn’t start correctly if it was forcibly shut down before it could complete saving the game.
Fixed a bug that could occur when the game attempts to autosave to a folder that is being backed up by onedrive.
Fixed a bug that could occur when cancelling crafting actions.
Fixed a crash that could occur when deconstructing buildings that allow for direct conveyor connections.
Adjusted player collider to reduce the chances of it getting stuck.
Fixed issue where an item could appear miniaturized during placement.
Fixed issue in data processing system related to using the “each” signal
Orbital laser now properly turns off when switching equipped item.
Fixed issue with orbital laser sometimes visually flickering at last fire position.
Fixed issue where fuel depot couldn’t actually be set to 0% fill rate on automatic mode.
Fixed desync/incorrect behaviour that could occur when data cables were connected to conveyors.
Fixed error that could occur if you unplugged a mic and changed your settings while the game is running.
Shipping pad frame now correctly displays fractional weights.

Optimizations:

Optimized power grid.
Optimized crafting queue.
Optimized escalator rendering.
Optimized terrain updates when using drill bot/mining drones.
Optimized machine screen panel streaming.
Optimized solar panel and battery lods.

Discord
Twitter
Reddit
Facebook
Paradox Forum

Stay tuned for more news! https://store.steampowered.com/app/983870/FOUNDRY/

Tiny Factory Winners! & 25% off!

Labubu mommysteam_community_announcementsworkshop

226d ago

Hello fellow factory-optimizers, once again.

First things first:

Right now there is a 25% discount on FOUNDRY! The perfect holiday gift for friends & loved ones who has still not been bitten by the factory optimization-bug. Grab it one before it's too late! https://store.steampowered.com/app/983870/FOUNDRY/ Now to the real news. We're gathered here today to look at the Tiny Factory winners! In the start we did not get many submissions. We were all very nervous. Me most than anyone. What if this was one big failure? What if I loose my job? What if mrmcd yells at me? What if they delete trains from the roadmap because of this? Not long after that we got this meme posted. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/591c7223c428f4b26f707edcdcbd05d08d9b7017.png Then they started flooding in. And let me tell you... They're all a real treat!

Inverted Cow's Underground Factory

Key attributes:

Underground factory
Pumps resources up & down
Pumps robots up to the surface

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/786705d4e19a84da5b187be8406c4085a81be251.jpg{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/c50cfd602a6a2bc05fd48bacabf4c811b4c40806.jpg{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/1e7e4005cf479ddaaf0a20784c6029b0e0a2c554.jpg{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/c8a89870bfb8082c2a3bab96d5d669133057eddb.jpg We're very impressed with this factory. Not only was it one of few underground factories, but it also uses a system of belts which pump resources up & down. Assembling the robots on the up to the surface - it gives a very clutterd but compact feel.

Bob_says_hello's Oil Rig

Key attributes:

Compact
Oil rig-esque design
Ontop of a lake

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/f865560a0c10b94076d6efb31198d67e9eeb5834.jpg{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/c1a02689416b8e6edda8cbaa1c3d71a317633177.jpg{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/5054e02af7f5df33ecc0b711ef43618e4735f79a.jpg{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/112eecb247146531b5d09520d2a28416d79bee35.jpg{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/003291bb379c1f495027f87bcc6ce6912af16a5b.jpg The design of this certainly was cool! And putting the shipping pads on the top gives it such a clean & thoughtout look.

Raptibun's V2 Factory

Amazing atmosphere
Logic System
No item destruction
Green

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/270568ffaf09dc167a1f3ce917af60ac85441548.png{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/ef4e0b739be41704d52816ab9b9a3d83607dea88.png{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/9818188b13073ff25554b1fd117a87b5ca85e10d.png{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/b58649722dab94775d1df51e03b44db43c5a9e16.png The overall winner! This AMAZING tiny factory has it all. An office, windows overlooking & decoring! We're super impressed with the themeing while keeping within the terms of the challenge!

Honorable Mentions

Jiandi's Triangle Factory {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/d2ae59da69adcd952b252492c8d7f6e794dd5d45.jpg The triangle architecture gets me. Raptibun's V1 Factory (Square) {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/96c12bf07b10cc05bc9fbe96d15858aecb986c72.png Similar vibe as the V2, but more square. Not as interesting but deserving of a mention. Bob_says_hello's Data Center Factory {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/67fc16f5061897be752bcf3dde0e037ef72caa2c.png{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/c0a731f4cc3d7045b3e4ef9ea68814dd6d2b3b54.png Although not the official name, it gives me data center vibes. Very cool! That's it folks! The challenge winners will be added in a future update in the credits! Although it might not be glorious, it's about the journey and not the destination. Hope you enjoyed this challenge! - Lizz The Community Manager Follow us on socials:

Discord
Twitter
Reddit
Facebook
Paradox Forum

Stay tuned for more news! https://store.steampowered.com/app/983870/FOUNDRY/

Update 3 on the Experimental Branch

Mr.McDucksteam_community_announcements

230d ago

This message is also a pinned post on the Steam forum and can be found here: Link Hello everyone, Update 3 is now available as an experimental version on the experimental branch. For an overview of the new content and more details in general check out last week's FOUNDRY Friday blog post. We’re planning to maintain the experimental branch for a bit over a month to collect feedback before the update will be officially released in January. We've created a separate thread (linked below) for discussion. Please keep in mind that experimental means it isn’t meant for you to treat it as the real update yet, instead you should see it as a preview. There could be bugs, there is no guarantee of saves not breaking (never override your existing saves when playing experimental), and there could be missing polish. That being said, we're aiming for the highest possible quality for a test version and we’ll always try to address any issues as quickly as possible. For now you’ll have to restart a new save, but support for existing saves will be added during the time leading up to the official release. Also the official release will support continuing existing saves. Hope you’ll enjoy the new content!

Branch Information

Branch: experimental_update3

Discussion Thread

https://steamcommunity.com/app/983870/discussions/0/685240346634995779/ Alternatively there is also a discussion channel #experimental-branch on our Discord.

How to report bugs

https://steamcommunity.com/app/983870/discussions/0/685240346634995024/ Alternatively you could also use the new #experimental-branch channel on our Discord.

How to get access

Go to your Steam Library.

Right click on FOUNDRY in the list of games on the left side.

Click on “Properties…”.

Go to “Betas” on the left navigation bar.

Select the experimental_update3 branch from the dropdown on the top right.

How to get back to the most recent official game version (Update 2.2)

Same as above but select “None” on the “Betas” tab’s dropdown.

DevBlog #93 | Foundry Fridays: Update 3 Announcement

Mr.McDucksteam_community_announcements

233d ago

Hello everyone! Today I have exciting news for you as I'll be sharing the content and release timeline of Update 3 “Xeno Tech” with you. I’ll start with a short TLDR section, before going into detail below.

TLDR

Update 3 is expected to release within the 2nd half of January.
Update 3 will go live on an experimental branch on December 15th to collect feedback.
Update 3 is themed around Xeno (Alien) Technology and adds Robot Workstations (put your robots to work), Light Exploration Content, Character Logistics (auto-refill your inventory), Steam Achievements, Improved Controller Support and two new robots to sell.
We are still planning on doing a separate experimental branch with trains soon, but there is no date yet.

In case you are curious about what to expect from Update 3 in terms of size, I would say it’s quite a bit bigger than Update 1, but it’s not as big as Update 2 (which was actually two big updates combined). {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/a73f7978cf70f2ff6139208febc82e9bd17b84bf.jpg

Robot Workstations

A factory making robots, and yet there are no robots working in the factory? That surely doesn’t feel right. Robot Workstations are our first attempt at bringing more (robotic) life to the factory. Workstations are computer terminals where either one, two or three of any of your factory-made robots will be able to work at and project various benefits onto machines in close proximity. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/c9015ba853853314476789db99d7cb7dbbfe24fa.jpg Each robot has a different effect and different building types it affects. So unless you start making every robot, you won’t have access to every improvement. The robots either improve machine speed or production efficiency (producing more output items from less input items) while increasing the power draw of your machines. Each machine can only be affected by one Workstation at a time. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/1692290d36caf3098d64a7821df7d0699ef1e296.jpg

(Light) Exploration Content

The update is going to add underground caves and new objects to collect and discover within those caves, but also on the surface and in the existing lava caves. Gathering those various items will unlock character upgrades, as well as things that are useful in your factory. All the collectibles are tied around an ancient alien race, and there are some flavor texts providing context, but you shouldn’t expect to discover a full story or background lore. While it starts out as manual collection work, it ultimately leads into gameplay you can automate. But I don’t want to go into detail too much because I don't want to spoil everything in advance. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/654f5cc2020cc036e282d8ca8e97dae84bce7e45.png However I do want to talk a bit about what to expect and how we approached this. We’re calling this light exploration because ultimately you’re not expected to spend massive amounts of time gathering those objects. For years FOUNDRY has been a game where everything was focused around the core of factory building and it is going to stay that way. You will have the venture in lava caves and dig into some caves to get the upgrades you need, but once you reach the midgame you’ll be able to automate it. At this point it will actually connect very well to the established factory gameplay loop (for example there are some alternative recipes unlocked with the new resources). {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/be92d5b5594cb9e2fb24e249f3b93ce5d35814ac.png Our goal was to make the world feel less empty, and provide a bit of alternative gameplay, without it being annoying for anyone who wants to fully focus on the factory stuff only. We’re looking forward to your thoughts around the balancing, and I’m sure it’ll change a bit based on your feedback during the experimental branch. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/0e0cd6697e9248299a27c1def5e1dbfc72753508.png

Character Logistics

This feature allows you to automatically restock your inventory from remote storages. The discovered Xeno-Technology allows you to build Xeno-Logistics Storage Containers, from which you can automatically draw items into your inventory, should you be in range of Xeno-Logistics-Tower. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/76eb9eba944a6c2a557a92f450fede5fe52d4df7.jpg On your character (inventory) frame - which has been fully overhauled - there will be “resupply slots” which allow you to configure item types and a target amount up to which they will get resupplied. You’ll start out with a limited amount and through the exploration system you’ll be able to unlock more slots. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/1e2c49983f21e61d9a251025bac043ca78c9b25c.png Let’s be honest about this one, it’s all about player convenience. Building large factories can take time and going back to restock your items in between isn’t part of the fun. We still wanted to game-ify this feature by requiring you to build Logistics Towers and to progress to unlock more resupply slots and I think it worked out very well.

Steam Achievements

We have added over 80 Steam achievements for you to pursue and unlock. They provide an initial set of baseline achievements that fit the game, and as time passes we expect more achievements to be added. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/f2cab0d0bc57a54b64c054ef3910a81d892ef5d2.png This batch of achievements covers the simpler achievement types (amount of robots sold, researches completed, station upgrades, lifetime earnings, …) and more complex conditions might follow once the game is a bit closer to its final 1.0 version. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/fdabeaf84e9fc2025e9b66a83359984d001a96bd.png As for difficulty we went for balancing values that seem (mostly) achievable for the average player instead of creating dozens of hardcore achievements which are close to impossible to reach. I know this is very subjective and everyone enjoys different types of achievements but personally I always liked games where the achievements can be completed by the average player in reasonable time. But worry not, there is a mega-endgame-achievement for getting market dominance on 100 planets.

Improved Controller Support

After receiving some feedback about less-than-optimal controller support we have decided to give this some love and improved controller support. Playing FOUNDRY with a controller should now feel a lot better. Specifically we added UI support for the controller (no more relying on the virtual cursor), glyph support to show bindings, and added a command wheel that lets you access some less commonly used buttons. That being said, there is still more work to be done and it is not yet perfect. We’re looking forward to your feedback on this topic and you can expect it to improve with every future update. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/6713c47300c75cc5f0fa5ddf92e704f99da7fb0d.png

Why this and what about trains?

In a previous blog we have mentioned four big topics we want to look at next: Trains, Nuclear (aka Modular Power Plants), Content Expansion & Exploration. As we were working on all of those in parallel we realized that it might take a bit to get all of them into a polished and ship-able state. Therefore we decided to split them, which helps us with providing regular updates instead of going dark (not again!) for too long and also makes it easier to improve the quality of all of those features. After doing the Terraforming Update we wanted to add some light exploration content underground and focused on that first. As this shaped up nicely we figured that it would make - together with some of the Content Expansion Features like the Robot Workstations - a pretty solid update on its own. And most importantly, those parts wouldn’t benefit from being held back until Trains and Nuclear would be ready. Which led to the obvious conclusion of putting it out as soon as it’s done. The plan for Update 4 hasn’t changed much, it’ll still be Trains, Modular Power Plants, and even more Content Expansion (most likely the full science pack 5 content). And while I don’t want to spoil too much, I think the Xeno-Tech content will lead very well into the Modular Power Plants. Regarding a timeline I can reveal that Update 4 is expected to launch in the first half of 2026, but this isn’t yet a promise. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/c4208fa8d4d74fc1ae9f43774ef995f761672eea.jpg

What to expect from the experimental branch?

The experimental branch is something we have been using in the past when we were still on itch.io instead of Steam. It has been very beneficial because it allows us to push a preview version of the upcoming features to our players so that we can get feedback and testing from people who enjoy taking a closer look early. Experimental means it isn’t meant for you to treat it as the real update, instead you should see it as a preview. There could be bugs, there is no guarantee of saves not breaking (never override your existing saves when playing experimental!), and there will be missing polish. However it does not mean that you should expect lots of issues, we’re well aware that your time is valuable and we’re trying to deliver the best possible early version. I think the balancing might be the part that will be the most “work-in-progress”. Therefore in case you’re looking for the best possible FOUNDRY experience, you should wait for the full release in January. And should you instead be eager to jump into the preview version, more information about how to use the experimental branch and how to provide feedback will be released on Monday. Thank you for reading and see you in-game! -mrmcd Follow us on socials:

Discord
Twitter
Reddit
Facebook
Paradox Forum

Stay tuned for more news! https://store.steampowered.com/app/983870/FOUNDRY/

DevBlog #92 | Foundry Fridays: Worms and Caves

Mr.McDucksteam_community_announcements

247d ago

Hello everyone! We never stop trying to make the most out of the voxel-based world of Foundry. With the introduction of Lava Caves we already brought some more gameplay content underground. But there is still a lot of untouched terrain between the surface and them. As mentioned in an earlier Foundry Friday we are currently experimenting with adding some exploration mechanics. Combining these two thoughts there seems to be a logical consequence: Caves! {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/a7c62174082b2ca22e3dd7b3374efc37ca877dd4.jpgCave Entrance

Worms don’t just like apples

All of the world generation in Foundry is noise-based and thus the cave generation needs to be as well. For this we use so-called “pseudorandom noises” that appear statistically random, but are produced by a deterministic process. So passing in a value into the noise function will always lead to the same output value. Otherwise playing Foundry wouldn’t be much fun when the world changes every time you load your game. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/a363ebc5bdfc6b73ff1d8b91dcb773bd975142b2.pngAt first glance a noise (visualized above) doesn't seem special, but it can be a very powerful tool for procedural generation. Our caves are created with the help of “Perlin Worms”, a method that is based on using a Perlin Noise, which is a pseudorandom noise as mentioned above. Using these can give the caves some sort of slithering effect, making you think a worm just passed through and ate away the terrain. If you are interested in more mathematical details about Perlin Worms, here is a link to a site that i found helpful and well explained: Link Let’s look at a video! But keep in mind that everything is still WIP. You might spot some new rarities in these images. Maybe our robot can find some use for them?

Inventory UI Experiments

Meanwhile others in our team have been experimenting with a new inventory and crafting frame. Some of the upcoming features require a bit of a rework for the inventory frame itself, and therefore we have decided to try overhaul the whole thing a bit. User experience about the crafting frame being tied to the inventory frame was always a bit awkward, so we're trying to make it into a single frame and increase the quality as a whole. Here's a first image: {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/e53beea6c08c55b05aad697bcb600cbfce85091a.png Note that this is still work in progress! Also the additional headers inside the crafting frame can be toggled with the button on the top right above, so you can have it as compact as it previously was. But this should help new players finding their preferred crafting buttons faster. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/d07918d64913499aaf762c8b381ba5393b77e4d1.png We're sharing this with you early so that we can have your feedback influence the process, please let us know what you think! And that's it for today! -lxi Follow us on socials:

Discord
Twitter
Reddit
Facebook
Paradox Forum

Stay tuned for more news! https://store.steampowered.com/app/983870/FOUNDRY/

DevBlog #91 | Foundry Fridays: Save File Size Optimizations

Mr.McDucksteam_community_announcements

261d ago

Greetings Founders! On today’s FOUNDRY Friday I wanted to share some of the behind-the-scenes work that’s being done to support the announced features for update 3.0 that we’ve covered in Foundry Friday #89. When adding trains for example, we also wanted players to utilize more of the infinite world that Foundry has to offer. I did an initial analysis to see what issues crop up when playing in a much larger world with trains, and most things thankfully seem to hold up well, with the exception of some visual bugs that we’ll have to mitigate. But a larger problem is that due to all the world exploration, the save file that I used for testing had already surpassed 100mb. This save file growth needs to be addressed with some significant optimizations. Generally the saves that we receive from players reporting their feedback (thank you!) range from 10mb to 50mb depending on how far they’ve gotten in the game. Of course there’s some more dedicated fans with even larger saves, but those will benefit even more from these save file optimizations. The reason why a smaller save file is beneficial is that it makes it way quicker when a friend joins your world, syncing your saves with Steam Cloud and it also reduces the time it takes to (auto-)save your game. With some profiling, in the save files that are shared (but especially in my save file) a lot of it is just the terrain data from the chunks that was travelled through to get to their destination, with a singular belt or train (soon™!) connecting those points. But every chunk that is viewed at some point, unmodified or not, is still stored in the save file. This causes roughly half of your save file to consist of terrain data. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/32366b8aa44f4ef57d85a4424daaa483302b5640.png To tackle this, we tried a few options, starting with the easier ones:

Increasing the level of compression used (Foundry internally uses Zstandard to compress the 3D chunk data with great results) but this didn’t really net any significant gains and came with a large speed penalty.
Compressing multiple chunks in groups. Due to a big overlap and continuity between the chunks in a group, this seemed like a great idea, but it unfortunately only netted a 15% improvement for the scene I tested.
Don’t store the chunks that aren’t modified, and simply regenerate them as needed. This allows us to save (pun not intended) a lot of data, but it comes with the big downside of having to make sure that *all* places in Foundry’s code make sure to tell the saving system that a chunk is modified if there’s anything that a player does there.

Ultimately we decided on going for the last option, since the first two options didn’t seem to combat the increased train-driven save file size quite as well as the third option was likely able to achieve. To prevent creating too many headaches for our later selves, I decided to only implement the regeneration for the terrain for now, since it's the largest part of all the chunk data. And with that, it came to a solid 30% reduction in save file sizes. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/2526d555017c2c14849c46d27207075bfa2e2a6a.png As an additional security measure to make sure that the game never deletes anything important, I’ve made it so that it’ll always fully store any of the chunks near your factory, and that it also won't guess which chunks might have been modified in any of your existing saves. Here’s a visualization of a base surrounded by a large number of unmodified chunks that will now no longer have their terrain data saved. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/53f3f71c7d596620eb7b3bcd441e6e2c3fc3d391.png We’ll wait until we get positive feedback from our playtesters there’s any unforeseen issues with it, but so far it has shown great results. There’s quite a lot more stored inside the chunk data that is able to be regenerated, so it's definitely possible to be reduced even further. - Milan Follow us on socials:

Discord
Twitter
Reddit
Facebook
Paradox Forum

Stay tuned for more news! https://store.steampowered.com/app/983870/FOUNDRY/

DevBlog #90 | Foundry Fridays: Achievements

Mr.McDucksteam_community_announcementsworkshop

275d ago

Hello everyone! For today's FOUNDRY Friday we’re going to look at something we’ve been quietly working on: Achievements. They were always on our roadmap towards 1.0 and recently they fit in nicely with our development schedule so we decided to start implementing them. Rest assured we didn’t divert resources from our other features like Trains or Nuclear. Given there were also quite a few messages requesting them it seemed like the right time.

How Achievements Work

Achievements in FOUNDRY are tracked per savegame and there will be an achievement window where you can see all achievements and how your progress is going. Of course each Achievement will also exist as Steam Achievement, and whenever you unlock any achievement in your game, it will unlock the respective Steam Achievement. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/de7e2edba74de20027f66505a04a01e7d6359391.png

Achievement Types

We started by implementing the obvious achievement types related to factory progression:

Unlocking Researches
Space Station Upgrades
Lifetime Sales Profit
Completing C3-BB Quests
Building certain amounts of buildings
Produce a specific amount of items of various types

And on top of that we’re looking at custom achievements where you need to do specific things like interacting with critters. We already have implemented a few and we’re currently looking into adding more of those, which brings us to the next paragraph.

What kind of achievements would you enjoy?

We would love to hear your thoughts about what kind of achievements you would like to see in FOUNDRY. Either let us know in the Steam comments below or on our Discord, our team is going to read all your messages. It would also be interesting to hear if there are any achievement types you would actually dislike. Same about the amount of achievements, can there be too many? What would be a number you felt comfortable navigating? As always we’re very grateful for any type of feedback! Thank you for reading and see you next time, -mrmcd Follow us on socials:

Discord
Twitter
Reddit
Facebook
Paradox Forum

Stay tuned for more news! https://store.steampowered.com/app/983870/FOUNDRY/

DevBlog #89 | Foundry Fridays: Road to Update 3

Mr.McDucksteam_community_announcements

289d ago

Hello everyone! Welcome back to another FOUNDRY Friday episode, today we’re looking at what’s next for FOUNDRY after the recently released Terraforming themed Update 2.2.

The road to Update 3.0

After delivering two smaller updates, our next update is going to be a bigger one again. The central feature will be the addition of trains, but we want to expand the game in other ways as well. We’re still working on finalizing the full scope of the update, but currently we’re looking at three additional improvements:

Nuclear Power: A complex power plant which is made out of multiple modular buildings. Including new related resources and items. The goal is to add an additional endgame power source and lay the foundation for more energy-intensive content.
Content Expansion: More Science Pack 5 content to extend the maximum playtime before you reach the end of the game. This content would link into the new systems.
Exploration Mechanics: We’d like to add a few mechanics that provide a purpose to explore the world. As of now we’re thinking about various collectibles, especially tied to our voxel system (cave exploration), which eventually can be used to further improve your factory.

Don’t take all those features as confirmed yet, but as always I wanted to share them early so that we can get some feedback. I won’t go further into detail for today, but it would still be interesting to hear your gut feelings on how interesting or important each of those things sounds. Or is there anything else you believe the game urgently needs? {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/92591a5722fcd69867d180679a5f17165a37d9f7.jpg

Public Train Test Branch

We are planning to launch a public test branch where you can try out trains in the very near future. It will feature an early preview version of the train system and it is purely intended to gather feedback while we’re still working on finalizing the systems. This will be your chance to help push the implementation of the beloved train system in the “right” direction. Please be aware, and I really need to emphasize this, that it’s unfinished, unpolished and there won’t be any real content supporting it. It is meant for us to get feedback and find issues before launching it as part of the real update 3. We don’t have a specific date for this yet, but we will share more information soon. See you soon, -mrmcd Follow us on socials:

Discord
Twitter
Reddit
Facebook
Paradox Forum

Stay tuned for more news! https://store.steampowered.com/app/983870/FOUNDRY/

FOUNDRY news & patch notes

Small Conveyor Lifts

What else is currently happening?

FOUNDRY news & patch notes

Small Conveyor Lifts

What else is currently happening?

Redesign Goals

New Loader Design

Increased Map Zoom

Improved Train Management

Assembly Lines

Another Small Assembly Line Sneak Peek

User Experience

User Experience & Comfort

Blueprints

Trains and Power

Loaders

What would you like to see next?

Do we already have some plans?

Foundry, from an Itch to Reality

A fortunate day in 2018

How the heck did I get here?

Key features:

The changelog:

Update 4 Main Content Pieces

Trains

Tracks

Train Stations

Train Loading Stations

Signals

Train Engines & Wagons

Manual Mode & Autopilot

Advanced Features

The Xeno Power Plant

The Fuel Mixer

The Xeno Reactor

The Steam Generator

The High Pressure Turbine

The Cooling Tower

Long Distance Transport Changes

Update 4 Release Date & Progress

Construction Drone

More Visual and SFX Polish

Drone Miners

Tooltips, inventory and crafting UI update

Trains now on the Experimental Branch

Update 3 Hotfix #1 Patch Notes

What’s next?

Which parts of FOUNDRY need improvement?

Release Date Announcement

Experimental Branch Recap

First things first:

Inverted Cow's Underground Factory

Bob_says_hello's Oil Rig

Raptibun's V2 Factory

Honorable Mentions

Branch Information

Discussion Thread

How to report bugs

How to get access

How to get back to the most recent official game version (Update 2.2)

TLDR

Robot Workstations

(Light) Exploration Content

Character Logistics

Steam Achievements

Improved Controller Support

Why this and what about trains?

What to expect from the experimental branch?

Worms don’t just like apples

Inventory UI Experiments

How Achievements Work

Achievement Types

What kind of achievements would you enjoy?

The road to Update 3.0

Public Train Test Branch

Steam news for FOUNDRY

Frequently asked questions

Explore SteamScope

FOUNDRY