Broken Ground: craters, cliffs, and living rivers

Every map in The Last Factory used to be the same map, really — a flat plain with resources sprinkled on it. Your factory changed; the ground never did. v1.1.0 "Broken Ground" is about making the world push back. New factories now generate three kinds of terrain features, each one a real obstacle your layout has to answer.

The terrain trilogy

Impact craters punch through the plain with raised rims and a breach or two — and at their centre, asteroid cores carrying Meteoric Alloy, a new resource you can't get anywhere else. It feeds the endgame Capsule Bay, so sooner or later you're belting ore out of a hole in the ground.

Cliff ridgelines wall off whole regions. They're not decoration: cliffs block movement, block building, and funnel both your logistics and the things hunting you through natural chokepoints. Holding a pass with a pair of turrets feels very different from defending open ground.

Rivers carve channels clear across chunks. You can't build on water, so a river is a planning problem that arrives before you do.

All three have density steppers on the New Factory screen, right next to the resource scarcity controls — crank them up for a fractured battleground or zero them out for the classic open plain. Existing saves load exactly as before; the new terrain only generates on new factories.

Making cliffs look like cliffs

We rewrote cliff rendering twice before it felt right. What shipped is a relief shader: cliffs draw as raised 2.5D escarpments with solid rock tops, a hanging south-facing wall, a soft contact shadow where rock meets ground, and stone tints that shift with the biome — warm sandstone in the scorched zones, cool slate on the night side.

Just as important: the collision now matches the picture exactly. During testing, worldgen would occasionally leave one-tile gaps in a ridge that rendered as sealed rock — walkable wall, basically. Those accidental gaps are now sealed in the world data itself, and the gaps that remain are real, visible, walkable passes. If it looks like a way through, it is one.

Living water

Rivers got the same treatment from the other direction — where cliffs rise out of the ground, riverbeds read carved into it, with directional inset banks and a wet-sand shoreline. Then we animated the water: a drifting surface shimmer, a gently lapping waterline, darker pooling mid-channel, and sparse sun glints. It's all shader work — zero extra cost to your factory's frame budget, and it runs the same on phones as on desktop.

Production goes N:M

Until now every recipe was one input, one output. This update introduces proper multi-input, multi-output chains, with three new intermediates — Structural Frame, Optical Lens, and Sensor Array — each with its own item art. Glass stops being a dead end and becomes load-bearing in the chain. The practical effect: mid-game factories now have real routing decisions and real bottlenecks, which is where a factory game's fun lives.

Unlimited saves, with previews

The 5-slot save cap is gone. The redesigned save manager gives every slot a strategic map-overview preview, so you can tell your sprawling megabase from that one experiment you abandoned at a glance.

Quality of life, all over

• R&D dashboard — research progress now renders as module tiles with completion percentages, replacing the old wall of text.
• Build tray categories — modules grouped under EXTRACT & MOVE, PRODUCTION, POWER, DEFENCE, RESEARCH, and CHRONORAIL.
• Production rates — tap any inventory item to see its per-item production and consumption rates.
• Positional audio — sounds attenuate with distance (with stereo panning on desktop), and turret fire finally knows about indoor voices.
• A fairer start — guide popups for early objectives, guaranteed starter iron within your first reveal, and a marked safe-zone frontier so you know exactly where protection ends.
• Darker dark — never-explored terrain is now a hard blackout, and storms no longer leak light into places you've never been.

Plus a stack of fixes, including the one where iOS and Android went silent after starting a New Factory — sound effects survive the reset now.

What's next

The R&D lab is not idle. Sharp-eyed players poking at the update may notice the world feels ready for something that moves heavy cargo a long way — all we'll say for now is that it's elevated, it's fast, and it's coming when it's ready.

Break some ground, and tell us what the terrain does to your layouts — this DEV LOG is where we'll keep the updates coming.