Factorio, the excellent Early Access building and resource management game from Wube Software has a massive new release out ready for testing.

The experimental build 0.17 (and the 0.17.1 bugfix) include some ridiculously big changes for the game. There's far too many changes to list them all here but at a glance, here's some highlights of what to expect from it:

A brand new introduction campaign

The new introduction tutorial is actually really nice, while it's not entirely complete it does seem to do a pretty good job of getting you up to speed and interested in actually playing the game. As someone who loves the game but hasn't played it for a long time, it really helped. I especially like the limit helpful robot following you around.

New UI style, with a number of places having their final versions up with plenty more still being finished

New quickbar, which no longer acts like inventory space (middle click to an remove item)

Loads of new graphics for things like the accumulator, biters, spitters, worms, spawners, chests and so on

Rich text tags that can be used pretty much anywhere

They reworked the Map Editor so it's now part of the standard game

Added clipboard functionality and undo functionality (Control + Z)

Modernized and optimized rendering backend using OpenGL 3.3 Core Profile with texture streaming

Steam networking support

See everything else in the changelog here for 0.17.

The newer quickbar is a massive improvement, being a lot more useful than it was before. Being able to easily click a slot and pick an item to have there is really great.

Factorio is a game where you can easily lose track of time, it's pretty incredible what craziness you're able to create with it. I was only supposed to quickly test out the update and I ended up spending multiple hours building up a new start. It certainly can get a little confusing as you progress though, you end up juggling so much although it does allow you to mark points of interest on your map which comes in real handy. It performs amazingly well too, no issues for me.

You can grab copy from Humble Store, GOG and Steam.