Engineers, get ready for something truly extraordinary! We've pushed every aspect of Incremental Factory to enable what you've been asking for - true megafactories. From groundbreaking performance improvements to streamlined building tools and new power systems, everything in this update is designed to help you build bigger than ever before. Remember when we celebrated reaching 2,000 parcels? Well, hold onto your hardhats, because we're about to enter a whole new dimension of factory building!
Scale & Performance: The 100k Factory Dream 📈
We've achieved what seemed impossible just months ago: Our reference machine (MacBook Pro M2) can now handle factories with 100,000 parcels! Yes, you read that right - that's a 20x increase in scale compared to our previous update. The doors are now wide open for truly massive factories, and this is genuinely only the beginning!
This breakthrough comes from two major improvements:
- Introducing a new LOD (Level of Detail), that groups parcels into clusters to reduce the number of draw calls significantly for large factories
- Massive performance optimization in all interactions with the map, including adding new parcels, deletes, pastes, and drone task operations
Radically Improved Building UX 🏗️
We've completely reimagined how you interact with the map, optimizing every interaction to align with your natural building flow. The new interface eliminates menu diving and streamlines construction so effectively that we often found ourselves happily lost in the rhythm of expanding our factory for hours. Welcome to truly fluid factory building!
(there is still a lot of work to do here, but we are very proud of the progress we made)
The New Radial Menu System
The star of the show is our new radial menu. Here's what makes it special:
- Lightning-fast resource and building selection
- Minimizes mouse movement
- Alt-click to auto-build buildings directly from the radial menu!
- Build entire factories without ever entering the parcel menu!
Fun Fact: The radial menu is based on Fitts Law, which states that the time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to the target and the width of the target.
Predictive Handles - Because Your Factory Knows What You Need
Simple, yet powerful: Smart, predictive handles that anticipate your next move:
- Ghost handles appear automatically for required inputs/outputs
- Skip the menus entirely - just drag and connect
- The game flows with your thought process, not against it
Multi-Edge Magic
Building and managing large factories just got a whole lot easier:
- Select multiple nodes and create edges from all of them simultaneously
- Move bundled edges together - just grab them where they converge
- Delete multiple edges in one swift action
- Perfect for large-scale factory reorganization
Nuclear Power - Powering Your Megafactories ☢️
Bigger factories need bigger power solutions. Enter nuclear power - our most sophisticated system yet. This isn't just another energy source; it's a whole new engineering challenge:
- Complex reactor design space with non-trivial optimization challenges
- Multiple approaches to efficiency and safety
- A deeper layer of strategy for powering those massive 100k+ parcel factories
- The perfect companion to your megafactory ambitions
Nuclear Plant
This system has taught us so much about what's possible in factory games, and we can't wait to see what you'll build with it!
What's Next?
This is a massive step forward, but we're not done yet.
There's more cooking in our development kitchen that we can't wait to share with you.
Stay tuned!
Feedback, Bug Reports & Feature Requests
If you notice anything that needs attention, hop onto our Discord
The Factory Must Grow! 🏭