What's new
The biggest change is how transport routes move goods. Until today a route only carried what the destination consumed. If factory B had nothing plugged into its unloading station yet, the round trip settled at zero, nothing arrived, and factory A complained that it produced more than the route could transport — which was not true; the route was not the bottleneck at all.
Now a route takes everything the loading factory offers, limited only by wagon capacity. What
the receiving factory does not consume shows up as a surplus on its unloading row: information,
not an error. And the delivered amount goes into the receiving factory's calculation as a source
with a fixed rate. Put a coal power plant on "auto" behind an unloading station and it sizes itself
to the coal that actually arrives, instead of sitting at zero forever. A quantity you type in by
hand stays an upper limit.
Second: machines at a dead end now run. A refinery set to auto, fed by an auto water extractor, used to calculate at 0 per minute, because a product with nobody to consume it gave the Planner no reason to make any. That was technically defensible and practically useless — you build the extraction first and the consumer afterwards. Machines with no reachable consumer now get built out anyway.
Also new: the Dimensional Depot Uploader is a consumer, not a pass-through. In the game it has a belt input and no output. It now accepts what arrives, capped at 240 per minute per uploader, and an overview card shows real numbers per item. If you were routing a belt through a depot to machines behind it, connect them directly — the depot no longer passes anything on.
Number fields across the Planner accept arithmetic now: type 4*4.5 into an overclock or machine
count and it calculates on blur. Copy, cut, paste and duplicate work in the Planner with the usual
shortcuts, across factories. On the Map, C toggles connect mode, and node settings can be copied
from one node to another.
Why we changed it
People were finding numbers that changed under them and concluding the site was broken rather than young. So a short notice now meets you on your first visit and says outright that this is a beta. Say it once, up front, and then get out of the way.
One consequence of the route change worth knowing: a factory's plan now depends on what its supplier delivers. Change production in A, and B's stored numbers are stale until you open it. The station says so.