Underground Movement: spaghetti is now legal
There's a moment in every factory game where your neat little starter lines meet in the middle and you discover the awful truth: belts can't cross. In The Last Factory that moment usually arrives right around the second smelter column, and until today the only answers were "route around the entire factory" or "tear it all down." v1.1.1 "Underground Movement" adds the genre's classic third answer — go under.
The Underpass
The Underpass is one module with one rule. Place two of them facing the same
direction within four tiles of each other, and the upstream one becomes the
entrance: anything riding in dives underground, passes beneath whatever sits
between them — crossing belts, machines, terrain, your regrets — and
surfaces at the exit, still moving. There's no pairing dialog and nothing to
configure. An entrance with no exit yet simply holds what it's fed — nothing
ever spills onto the lines you're trying to cross — and the info panel tells
you which state you're in: a green PAIRED - 2 TILES AHEAD, a green
EXIT - FED FROM 2 TILES BACK, or an amber UNPAIRED - HOLDS ITEMS.
It unlocks with Advanced Metallurgy, the same research that gives you the Alloy Forge — which is exactly when layouts start wanting to weave. And because the pairing rule re-checks on every delivery, you can demolish an exit mid-flow and the entrance just holds the line — items back up behind it until you give the tunnel somewhere to surface. No spills, no orphaned state.
The art is a set of hand-rendered 3D frames: the entrance conveyor physically dives into broken ground, the exit climbs back out of it, and both ends animate with the rest of your belt network. The two ends look different because they are different — you can read a tunnel's direction from across the map.
You can see your map before you commit
The New Factory screen now generates the actual map — not an artist's impression — and shows it as a preview: biome bands, cliffs and rivers, resource nodes, your spawn point, and every AUTON base as an angry red dot. The seed sits in a field above it with a reroll button. Change the map settings and the preview regenerates; hit Start and you get precisely the map you were looking at. WYSIWYG worldgen.
Speaking of angry red dots: AUTON base density is now a map parameter, from None to Overrun, and the default got turned up. Distant chunks carry an extra spawn bonus, so pushing your frontier out is now a decision, not a stroll.
The game explains itself now
A run of quality-of-life work shipped alongside, mostly aimed at one player complaint: "there's no way to build a frame item." (There was. Nothing told you how.)
- Configurable processors — Smelter, Alloy Forge, Fabricator, Forge Engine — wear a corner badge showing the item they're currently making.
- Try to place something you can't afford and the denial now names the module that produces the missing item; module stat panels do the same.
- A guide pops up the first time recipe switching unlocks, because the long-press Configure flow was the single most missable mechanic in the game.
- How to Play was rebuilt as a responsive overlay that actually fits on a phone, with a RECIPES tab generated from live game data — every recipe, every producer, every cook time.
The factory on your taskbar
Desktop builds get widget mode: press F9 and the game collapses into a slim, always-on-top strip along the edge of your screen. Production keeps running, storms keep rolling, and you can glance at power and threat while pretending to work. Raids hold in sentry mode while collapsed — the AUTONs politely wait until you're back — because losing your base while it was minimized would be cruel, and we reserve cruelty for design decisions you can see coming.
Housekeeping
Belt items now glide at full display frame rate with real cornering arcs — that work shipped quietly last week and is covered in its own post. Legacy factories from before the terrain update, whose maps have no craters, can now buy Meteoric Alloy from the Remnant Syndicate once Chrono Hypothesis is researched — no save left behind on the road to the Chrono Project. Coolant vents went back to their old abundance, cliff pockets can no longer wall a resource node off from the entire map, and the new intermediate items show up in the HUD strip like they always should have.
v1.1.1 is rolling out on iOS, Android, and Steam. Existing saves load clean. Go make something unforgivable — the Underpass will cover for you.