La Bidouillerie

Your robot fits in a single line of text. A Blueprint button, next to Save and Load, turns your build into a string of characters you can paste into a message. Whoever receives it pastes the same line into their game and gets your robot back, part for part. It is what Factorio blueprints do, and for the same reason: showing a build had become harder than making one.

A robot you receive is filed with your own saves, under the name you give it. It does not overwrite what is on your bench — you load it when you want to.

And a “To the workshop” button sends it straight over. One click and the robot lands in the message board. No more hunting for a file on your disk to show what is not working.

Gears that do not mesh no longer count as a success. Turning a wheel by hand used to tick the box even when nothing was driving anything. The steps that ask for a train to follow now check that it actually does.

Charges no longer haunt a wire you removed. Cut the power, change your wiring, switch back on: the current used to reappear along a wire that no longer existed.

A new Encyclopaedia page: the controls. Every key and every mouse gesture in one place — including H, which folds the circuit board away to reach the mechanics underneath, and the difference between a short click and a held one.

The words that stopped people are now explained where they turn up. Three players got stuck on the same three words, each on their own. The chassis slot is now called “the large opening in the chassis”. The idler wheel announces its catalogue name, “the ball caster”. The green plate is a circuit board, no longer an “electrical plate”.

The cursor changes shape over the supply leads. They had always been clickable, but nothing said so: one player hunted for them for eight minutes.

The Encyclopaedia answers better. The word you searched for is highlighted in the page you land on, and the page opens on the tab that contains it. Back returns to the list of results instead of the contents. New page: the chassis, with its real dimensions and the twenty-millimetre grid.

Every game carries a first name. Three children on the same computer were told apart only by a number, and one of them carried on with his sister's game.

The game tells you when a new version is online. The demo did not update itself, and nothing said so.

Six new parts: the brush roller, its housing, the dust bin, two pulleys and a 240 axle. Enough to turn the motorised trolley into a sweeper. The brush scrubs the floor and asks for force — the first part in the kit that costs something, and the one that makes torque tangible.

The belt can be crossed, and the machine runs the other way. R switches it from straight to crossed — a figure of eight, exactly as in the workshops of old. It is the kit's only way to reverse a direction of travel without adding an idler gear.

Two more pulleys: a Ø10 and a Ø60. The four sizes now cover ratios from 1.33 to 6. The Ø10 driving the Ø60 divides speed by six while multiplying torque by as much, without adding a single shaft.

Volume is set part by part. Open a part that makes a noise and a slider appears in its data sheet. You can silence one solenoid to listen to the other. The setting travels with the robot when you save it.

The brush roller scrubs, and its voice follows its speed. The sound rises when it spins fast, drops when it labours, and stops the moment the robot leaves the floor. You hear your machine run out of torque before you read it.

The flywheel is spoked. A solid disc that spins is indistinguishable from one at rest — and it is precisely the part you want to see carrying on when everything else has stopped. Asked for by a player, who was right.

The connecting rod no longer comes off its pin. It drifted away as soon as the machine picked up speed — six tenths of a millimetre at a crawl, fourteen at full tilt.

Solenoids no longer run away. A solenoid beating fast now opposes its own movement, as in real life: the voltage it produces by moving is subtracted from the one feeding it.

Wires that cross now pass over one another. Each wire sits on one of four levels, rising from its terminal and coming back down to the other: a bridge, as on a diagram — except that here it really does pass over.

And a long list of smaller things: deleting a game asks for confirmation, the end-of-course button finally opens the sandbox, wheels no longer fit between the bearings, the flywheel fits anywhere under the chassis, a chassis hole is no longer lost after a dismantling, and every rewritten instruction is translated.

French and English localisation.

First release of the demo.