The space age is finally upon us. That is to say that Factorio: Space Age, the long-awaited DLC pack for the beloved factory management game, has finally gone live after a years-long wait. The expansion has already been lavished with praise from players, and the launch has seen Factorio more than double its previous Steam player count record.
Factorio went 1.0 after a lengthy stay in Steam Early Access back in 2020, and at that time the game reached a peak concurrent player count of 34,700, as SteamDB shows. In 2021, developer Wube Software announced its follow-up would be a major expansion pack, and in 2023 it was announced that this expansion would be Space Age, built in part by one of the game’s most notable modders.
Today, Space Age finally launched, and it’s already hit a concurrent player count of 76,646 – and that number’s still rising as I write this. Players who’ve got a few early hours in – and those with more extensive time in the early betas – have already dropped 1,057 reviews on Steam, which are 98% “overwhelmingly positive.” By all accounts, Space Age is indeed a sequel-sized update, and might actually be much, much bigger than the original game.
In Factorio, you’ve crash-landed on an alien planet and have to start harvesting resources in order to build a rocket to get yourself off of that planet. As the name suggests, Space Age is about what happens afterward, challenging you to find new resources and build new factory chains in space and across a wide variety of new planets with their own biomes. Judging by the response so far and the precedent set by the original game, you can probably expect it to devour hundreds of hours of your free time.
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