What's new
The wand no longer gives up
You place an assembler for Alclad Casing, nothing is wired yet, and you click the magic wand. Until now you could get the message that the combined production chain cannot supply every target, with the machine still reading zero and its inputs unconnected. We went through every production recipe in the game, once with the base recipes only and once with all 113 alternate recipes enabled, and the wand failed in more than half of those cases.
The failures had four separate causes, and none of them was the recipe itself.
- A machine that nothing consumes yet is meant to follow its supply. The solver rewards such a machine for running, but every machine in the chain above it paid a small penalty. Behind about nine machines the penalty outweighed the reward, and the whole chain sat idle. Heavy chains such as Copper Powder, Motors or space elevator parts hit this every time. Machines that feed such an end point are now nearly free to run.
- With alternate recipes enabled, chains that use water came back with a nonsensical amount of water routed straight into a byproduct outlet. The precision step that cleans up the solver's answer failed on the huge number, so the cleanup never ran. That step is now robust, and the phantom water is gone.
- Byproduct outlets in a wand block used to pull as hard as a real demand. In a Rocket Fuel chain the outlet took the whole plastic stream and the coated iron plate refinery next to it starved. Outlets are now capped at the surplus the plan actually produces.
- A smelter placed directly behind an ore input has nothing that could size it: no demand below, unlimited supply above. The wand plans for one machine, and it now writes that one machine into the count instead of leaving the smelter at zero.
After the changes every production recipe builds its chain. The remaining cases where the wand reports that no feasible chain exists are recipes whose ingredients cannot be produced from resource nodes at all: leaves, wood, alien protein, power shards, nuclear waste, and, without alternate recipes, anything that needs Compacted Coal or Dissolved Silica. That message is correct, and it names the reason.
Recipes in two tabs
The recipe settings of a factory used to stack the alternate recipes and the base recipes in one long dialog, each with its own scroll area. They now sit in two tabs. The tab labels carry the counts you used to see in the section headings, such as 12 of 113 alternates enabled or 3 base recipes blocked, and each list gets the full height of the dialog. Filtering, the World and Plan recipe columns and the All and None buttons work as before.
The AI connection is back in testing
The AI / MCP page and the homepage box now say "coming soon". The connection itself keeps working for the accounts that are testing it, and nothing changes for those worlds. We paused the public launch because we want to finish testing the assistant workflows with real factories before more people connect their own tools. The launch will be announced here and on the homepage.
Team and roadmap
The redesigned About overview opens with an animated factory illustration and cards leading to the team, roadmap and our approach to AI. The project story remains on the page, now divided into readable panels. Sources and supporters and testers now share this design, with grouped source cards, category shortcuts and a refreshed presentation of helpers and partners.
The new team page introduces Marco Foof, Carlos Ziegler, Sam Ueberle and Alexander Zink with their responsibilities; you can apply for the open community role directly on the page. A separate NPC crew presents Claude and Grok for development, Codex for development and images, and Jev for decision support, each with an animated chip avatar. The avatars and roadmap animations respect your device's reduced-motion preference.
The roadmap now covers nine stages, with status filters and expandable details. Six describe what is already available, from the planner, map and shared worlds to wiki guides, savegames, blueprints and Calc; the remaining stages cover the MCP beta, a planned real-time seed finder and a planned Recipe Ranker. We have outlined how the ranker could compare alternate recipes for your production goals and explain the resource, power and machine tradeoffs; it is not available yet. There are no promised release dates. A new Built with AI page, linked from About and the NPC crew, explains our position on using AI in the project in English and German.
What we're working on
The magic wand is checked against every recipe automatically now, so a future change to the solver cannot quietly bring one of these failures back. Next on the list are the open items from the last weeks: the blueprint archive, savegame analysis and the German interface.
Why we changed it
The wand exists so that you can place the machine you want and let the planner work out the supply. A tool that answers "cannot supply every target" for a plain assembler with nothing wired to it is worse than no tool, because it makes you doubt your own plan. Checking the whole recipe list instead of the one reported case is what made the four causes visible, and it is the reason we trust the wand again.