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Swarmdustry

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Swarmdustry

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Build a living factory and automate the Swarm. Harvest resources, build mega factories and evolve organic industry. Balance growth, efficiency, creep spread, and survive in a world that fights back.

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Most popular community and official content for the past week. (?)

Dev blog #10

6:33am

Hello everyone, today I want to talk about weather and localization. But before that, I want to share some thoughts about the upcoming demo.

I've been really busy this past month getting the demo ready for the public. It was mostly polishing and fixing small issues here and there, as well as preparing some marketing material. I'm making a demo available for this game for the simple reason that I think players should be given the chance to try out a game before they buy it. If you don't like the demo, you probably won't like the full game either. And that's totally okay! It will also help me gather more feedback and shape the game into a better version of itself.

Now about localization. Work is currently ongoing to translate the game into Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Turkish and Simplified Chinese with the help of professional translators! I'd like to add all the languages of the world of course, but that's gonna be another time. I do plan on opening up the translation of the game to everyone via a public google spreadsheet some time later this year and just have you guys, the community, add your own languages.

In the meantime, I've begun refactoring some of the code to support multiple languages. This is a bit time consuming because there are a few places in the UI where the size of UI elements were made to fix perfectly with a certain amount of characters in a given text. The problem is that some languages take more words to convey the same message. For example 'Wishlist!' which is a very short call to action verb, in French it would be something like 'Ajoutez à la liste de souhaits!'. That's a lot more characters to fit in a small place corner of the screen.

I've also been gathering all the player visible text and dumped in a Google Spreadsheet and used Google Translate to one click translate the whole game in French. I start with French because as a Canadian I speak French pretty well. Of course the translation isn't very good, so I will eventually either translate it myself or get some humans to do it. For now, I'm using this translation to prepare the code and make sure I didn't miss any text to translate. By the way, there are around 5'000 words of english text in the game currently.

Switching gears, I've also had some time to work on adding rain and thunder into the game. This doesn't really impact gameplay and can even be turned off in the settings if you really have some deep hatred for rain for whatever reason. But it does add a bit more mood and a certain vibe to the game that wasn't there before. There are basically 3 'weather patterns' for now: None, Rain, Thunder. None is the basic cloudy/sunny weather. Rain is a slow calming rainfall. Thunder is a more intense version of the same rainfall with some thunder sound effects.

In the future, I want to expand on weather mechanics to have an impact on the gameplay. I'm a really big fan of Rimworld and I loved its weather system. In Rimworld, you've got rain helping with crops and extinguishing fires. You've got snow slowing your colonists and your enemies down. And then you've got temperature affecting your colonists mood and other really cool and deep mechanics. You've also got natural disasters like volcano eruptions and tornadoes. For now I don't really have any concrete designs or even plans on how a deep weather system would work in Swarmdustry. At this it's just something to think and talk about.

So that's it for today's blog! Hope you guys are looking forward to playing this soon!

Swarmdustry

The factorio-killer itself?

Will this be the factorio-killer just like battlefield did to cod and arc did to tarkov? Let me know your thoughts on this

Frullato di ratti

7 Feb @ 11:19am

General Discussions

What makes this game not a factorio reskin?

The trailer fails to emphasise that. For all I can ses, you've got belts leading to assemblers, surrounded by power poles, feeding walls and turrets. Even the grid size is the same.

Robob

24 Nov, 2025 @ 4:36pm

General Discussions

Demo Launching April 16!

15 Mar

The wait is almost over. The Swarmdustry Demo will officially be released on April 16!

In the demo, you'll get your first chance to command the Swarm and begin building your living industrial network. Grow your colony, automate logistics with your bugs, and take back what rightfully belongs to the Swarm!

This demo gives you an early look at the core gameplay systems and a taste of the automation challenges waiting in the full game.

Help the Swarm grow and Wishlist Swarmdustry!

More details coming soon. See you on April 16!

Swarmdustry

Direct or indirect control?

I'm a big fan of both Factorio and bugs, this seems like it's right up my alley! I'm a little curious about unit control in Swarmdustry though, do I have direct control over them like I would in an RTS or do I have more vague control like I might expect from a management game?...

RampageCrumpet

19 Sep, 2025 @ 8:35pm

General Discussions

Epic first discussion

...on Reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/Factoriohno/comments/1nl6wh1/new_factorio_modpack/

Uriel4

2 Oct, 2025 @ 8:22am

General Discussions

Dev blog #9

10 Feb

Hello hello beautiful people, today we'll talk about UI and other small improvements made to the game over the last few weeks and the challenges that came with them.

First off, UI. When we did playtesting some time ago, people were asked to give feedback on different aspects of the game, like its visuals, its audio, its 'funness' and... the UI. The UI had the lowest score, I think it was around 5/10. UI is notoriously difficult to get right because people have different preferences and standards. For example, some prefer less UI for better immersion, others prefer more UI (buttons, info pannels etc). And then don't get me st arted on style. Some prefer a transparent UI, others solid, others a more old-school approach where each UI element is designed to look like it's part of the game theme (this is my preference).

This is not a trivial problem. I believe it's going to take some time before the game finds what works best for it. For now at least, I did change the way the main menu looks, mainly because of first impressions reasons. Instead ofa black background, there will now be a sequence of 'videos' playing. These 'videos' bring both nice in-game visuals and audio to the main menu. I use quotes because they're not technically videos. Though anybody who will play this game will see those as background videos like you see in other popular games like DSP. Video files have the disadvantage of taking up a lot of memory, gpu power and disk space. Especially if you've got 5 30s clip videos at 60fps. That's 2GB of disk space. That's not a big deal considering it's just the main menu and nothing else is happening anyway, so this is the first approach I tried.

But I soon discovered a more important problem: The game engine's video api fails to run these 60fps videos properly (stutters) if your pc is a potato. So I looked into including 30 fps versions of each video. Not only did this double the size on disk to 4GB, but it's like applying a bandaid to a problem. It's not a real solution. Ultra wide monitors would still have black edges. At this point, after about a week of video editing and programming, it became clear to me that playing video files is the wrong approach. So how can we have an animated background in the main menu that's both visually stunning on any monitor, comes with sounds and is as efficient as it gets?

Enter scripting magic: Pop an actual in-game factory into existence and let it run while disabling player interaction. One way to achieve this for example is to load up an existing premade savefile. Another way is to build the factory from script and configure it in a meaningful way to provide a good visual experience. I chose to go with the second approach as it is future proof even if it is more dev work. Loading a factory from file in future game versions or while the game is still under heavy development may break and require adjustments, and what dev wants to deal with that?

Other UI changes include a title in the main menu and more tooltips: hovering over combat entities shows a bunch of combat related info like damage amount or damage type, armor and attack rate. Worker bays also show their config on their tooltips. All swarm buildings that produce creep now have their creep production displayed as well.

That's about it for the UI for now and maybe for a while. The goal here is not to make a perfect UI that everyone loves, rather to make the game fun and enjoyable. If the UI conveys the information required, then it would have achieved its purpose.

In other news, playtesting should open up again sometime in the next 2 weeks. I'll be announcing it on discord so if you're reading this and are not part of it and want to try out the demo, and maybe leave some feedback, make sure you join the discord!

Happy gaming!

Swarmdustry

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