Hey there, quick stop on the conveyor belt before you clock out for the weekend. Here’s your roundup.

Satisfactory 1.2.2.1 hotfix landed on Experimental May 7. Coffee Stain squashed the locomotive-dismantle crash that’s been plaguing the branch since the last patch, along with a handful of other quality fixes. If you’ve been holding off on a train build because of that one, you’re clear to lay rail again.

Dyson Sphere Program quietly dropped a 5th-anniversary patch. Build v0.10.34.28524 shipped May 4, riding the coattails of the April 30 Anniversary dev log. Mostly QoL tightening, feature tweaks, perf fixes, and the team teased the long-awaited vehicle system again (still no ETA). Five years in and DSP is still one of the most underrated factory builders out there.

Factorio: copy a module loadout with shift + right-click, paste it with shift + left-click. Click a building that already has the modules you want (productivity 3s in your smelters, say), then shift-left-click across the row to apply the same loadout instantly. Most players still swap modules one machine at a time, this lets you re-tier an entire smelter array in about ten seconds. Same combo also copies recipe selection, train schedules, filter inserter settings, and combinator configs. Not new, but the tutorial never mentions it, and it completely changes late-game retrofits.

Idle games have a long-look problem: a player closes the app, comes back six hours later, and the catch-up numbers are either insulting (too small) or trivializing (so big the active play didn’t matter). The math behind balancing those two is trickier than it looks, we wrote up how we’re thinking about it for Tideward.

What’s your most embarrassing factory mistake?

A) Built the megabase, forgot the power. B) Ran out of iron 40 hours in and didn’t notice. C) Belted in the wrong direction for an entire shift. D) Genuinely cannot pick, they’re all me.

Reply with your pick (or your own confession). We’ll feature the best ones in Tuesday’s issue.

Mostly DSP this week, that anniversary patch reminded us how good the early-game pacing is. Also a few rounds of Mindustry on the iPad during commutes.

The Assembly Line is published by Manu Games (manugames.com), makers of Tideward, a premium idle RPG for iPhone, iPad & Mac. Learn more at manugames.com.

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