Hello Everyone!
Hey! I’m going to start posting more announcements here on Steam as development continues, so this place should be a bit less quiet going forward.
This is the shorter Steam version of the latest blog post. The full one has more details, videos, and technical rambling here:
https://exofactory.net/blog/2026-05-03/
This month I worked on two big things: Global Planning Mode and a big rework of belts.
Global Planning Mode
Global Planning Mode is a new quality-of-life unlock that lets you plan factories from the global view. Then you can hop into an Exoframe and actually build the stuff you planned.
The idea came partly from feedback from the October 2025 demo. A decent number of people understood the mechanics, but weren’t always sure what they should be working toward. Which, yeah, fair. So this is one of the first steps toward giving the game a clearer long-term direction without turning it into a giant checklist.
There’s already the weird spiderweb tech tree that grows based on how you play, but now there’s also a separate quality-of-life progression path tied to the AI’s development. Global Planning Mode is the first unlock there.
I won’t spoil exactly how you get it, because it’s tied to a story moment, but keeping access to it requires a steady supply of 64 structural iron per minute. So, you know.
Smooth Curved Belts
Exofactory has been slowly moving away from its older voxel/tile-based factory systems, because the world itself is a lot smoother and more organic now. The old system worked okay on flat ground, but once terrain got more natural, belts and buildings started doing weird stuff. Floating, clipping, sinking into hills, that sort of thing.
I tried a few ways to patch it up, but eventually the answer was pretty obvious: stop forcing voxel belts into a world that doesn’t really want them anymore.
So belts are now spline-based.
That means they can curve smoothly, follow uneven terrain better, and connect buildings even when everything isn’t sitting on a perfect little grid. It also makes belt logic way simpler, because each belt now has its own path instead of relying on the old tile-chain setup.
The rework happened in a few steps:
First, I made the dumbest possible version: a visual-only spline belt.
Then I made it look more like the old belts, with cleaner geometry and nicer turns.
Then I made items actually move on them.
And now they do! Items follow the belt path deterministically, which is much easier to reason about and should make the whole system way less painful to work with going forward.
There’s one small gameplay change too: belts now cost 1 iron per meter, rounded up, instead of 1 iron per tile.
They are still not totally done visually. The rail textures need work, and supports are not in yet, so they still look a little cursed in places. But the core system works, and it solves a bunch of problems I’ve been putting off for a while.
~ Cait