The Conveyor Belt: Factorio's Final Major Update Hits Experimental

Grab a coffee — here’s your roundup of what’s moving through the factory this week.

📦 Patch Notes & News

Factorio 2.1 is in experimental — and it’s the last big one. Wube pushed 2.1 to the experimental branch with a graphics and audio overhaul, quality-of-life upgrades, and modding improvements — but no new planets, enemies, or research trees. They’re keeping it experimental through the summer so mod authors have time to catch up. Heads up: once you update, saves and blueprints can’t roll back to 2.0, and Linux/macOS minimum specs went up. It’s billed as Factorio’s final major update before Wube shifts into support mode — a milestone worth savoring.

Satisfactory is back from summer break with fixes. Coffee Stain returned from vacation and shipped a round of hotfixes cleaning up loose ends from Update 1.2. Notably, they squashed the bug where conveyor belt customization vanished after you ran a belt through a Splitter or Merger — a small thing that quietly annoyed a lot of us.

💡 Quick Tip of the Week

Factorio: Stop re-setting recipes one machine at a time. Hover an assembler (or requester chest, or inserter) and press Shift + Right-click to copy its settings, then Shift + Left-click — or drag across a whole row — to paste. It copies recipes, filters, and circuit conditions at once. Most players hand-click every machine for years before discovering this; drag-pasting a recipe down 20 assemblers in one swipe feels illegal the first time.

🎮 Tideward Corner

We think a lot about offline progression around here — reopening an idle game and seeing what happened while you were away should feel like a reward, not a math penalty. Tideward leans toward banking honest, full-rate progress rather than the diminishing “catch-up” curves so many idlers lean on. If the design side interests you, we wrote up the whole philosophy in Designing Offline Progression That Actually Feels Good.

🗳️ Poll of the Week

What’s your most embarrassing factory mistake? The one that still makes you wince. Melted your base to a forgotten fluid overflow? Spent two hours debugging a belt that was simply facing backwards? Hit reply and tell us — we’ll feature the best confessions next issue.

🎮 What We’re Playing

Most of the team is deep in Factorio 2.1 experimental this week, poking at the new audio and quietly rebuilding a mall we swore we’d keep tidy. One of us keeps loading Satisfactory just to stand in the new rain.

The Assembly Line is published by Manu Games, makers of Tideward, a peaceful idle RPG native on every Apple device. Learn more

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