Welcome back to the Conveyor Belt — your roundup of everything factory, automation, and idle, served quick enough to read before your coffee goes cold.

Factorio 2.1 enters experimental — and it’s the last big one. Wube has slated 2.1 for an experimental release toward the end of June, with a stable build expected by late summer. It’s a polish-and-logistics pass: mixed rocket payloads, platform-to-platform transfers, “import from any” orbital requests, and circuit control for space hubs. The catch — Wube has confirmed this is the final major Factorio update before the team turns to new projects. No new planets or enemies, just a thorough farewell to a genre-defining game.

Satisfactory 1.2 is stable — and finally everywhere at once. Coffee Stain’s 1.2 landed on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S the same day, the first time Satisfactory has shipped with full platform parity. It rebuilds vehicle paths from scratch (lay them with the build gun, like railways), adds Fluid Trucks and Stations at Tier 5, brings back an upgraded weather system with proper rain and fog, and jumps to Unreal Engine 5.6.1 for an across-the-board performance bump.

Satisfactory: build manifolds, not balancers — until you can’t. A manifold (one belt feeding a row of machines via inline splitters) is faster to build, trivial to extend, and takes far less space than a load balancer. The catch most new players panic over: manifolds ramp up slowly. The last machine in a 20-long line might sit idle for several minutes while buffers fill. That’s normal — give it time and every machine hits 100%, as long as your input rate matches total demand. Save load balancers for fixed, planned lines where you need instant, even output. For roughly 90% of builds, the manifold wins.

Manu Idle’s external TestFlight alpha is live across iPhone, iPad, and Mac — free to join, 24-hour offline progression, no ads, no tracking. A lot of the current build came directly out of the Discord alpha, where tester feedback reshaped core mechanics in real time. If you’re curious how that open-development loop actually works, there’s a write-up on it: How Alpha Testers Are Shaping Manu Idle.

What’s your most embarrassing factory mistake? We’ve all got one — the belt running backward for three hours, the power grid you browned out the second you connected the smelters, the main bus you had to demolish because you left it one lane too thin. Hit reply and confess. We’ll feature the best (worst?) ones next issue.

Mostly Factorio this week — poking at the 2.1 experimental branch and relearning space logistics before the stable lands. On the side, a little Textorio, the ASCII-everything factory game that launched this month; it’s weirdly hypnotic once your eyes adjust.

The Assembly Line is published by Manu Games — makers of Manu Idle, a peaceful idle RPG for iPhone, iPad & Mac. Learn more →

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