Factorio’s 2.1 experimental branch, detailed in Friday Facts #441 and released to the experimental channel in late June 2026, rewrites the rules of Space Age logistics. Two long-requested capabilities finally ship: rockets that can carry multiple item types in a single launch, and space platforms that can send cargo directly to one another without touching a planet’s surface. Together they let engineers rethink how inventory, fuel, and bulk science move between Nauvis and the off-world colonies.

What changed

The headline mechanic is mixed rocket payloads. In 2.0, every automated rocket launched a full stack of one item type. Building a small platform meant firing 10 to 20 separate rockets — one for tiles, one for belts, one for assembling machines, one for furnaces — each leaving the hub stuffed with surplus the player might never immediately use. Players who planned ahead saw full-stack launches as wasteful, especially in the early game when rocket capacity and resource throughput are scarce.

Wube avoided the feature during 2.0 development because packing multiple item types into one rocket produced too many edge cases. The team revisited it for the 2.1 wishlist, and engineer Genhis implemented the batching logic that now drives automated silos. The design goal was explicit: keep delivery fully automatic so that a platform request, combined with a silo’s automatic-request toggle, picks the right batch and dispatches construction robots to load it — without forcing the player to micromanage each launch.

The companion change is platform-to-platform transfers. In 2.0, orbital requests could only pull items from a specific planet’s rocket silos. If you wanted to move Tungsten picked up on Vulcanus down to Nauvis, you had to route it through a planet. The new orbital-request filter adds a source selector with three options: Planet (rocket silos on the surface), Platforms (other platforms in orbit over that planet), and All (both). A checkbox on each platform controls whether it provides cargo to other platforms, preventing surprise transfers and making the feature discoverable.

How it works

Mixed payload batching

The batching algorithm processes platform requests sequentially and starts with the lowest request count first. These represent one-off construction requests and high-priority items, so they get delivered before bulk goods like calcite from Vulcanus or planetary science packs that platforms normally haul in volume.

When a platform has too few unsatisfied requests to fill a rocket on its own, sending a half-empty rocket would be wasteful. The 2.1 solution is to select the most requested items and overdeliver them, on the assumption that you likely want more. Waiting for the player to request additional items would break the “all requests satisfied” condition and stall construction.

The algorithm can still fail to assemble a complete batch because of sorting constraints, usually when the logistic network doesn’t yet hold enough supply. In that case the logic hopes the missing items will be produced eventually and waits. To keep platforms from stalling during playtesting, Genhis added a fallback to single-item rockets so material keeps flowing. The team reports the fallback should be rare and is open to tuning based on feedback.

A related fix targets custom minimum payload, a setting players used to work around the old all-or-nothing launches. The reworked behavior requests as many items as possible, capped at the requested amount or the amount available in the logistic network — whichever is lower — and launches as soon as the minimum payload is satisfied and no robots are inbound with more.

Platform construction deadlocks

Mixed payloads reopened an old bug. After 2.0 launched, a player pasted a large platform blueprint whose hub lacked the inventory space for all the requests; before enough tiles and cargo bays could be built, other items filled the hub completely. Rseding’s original fix prevented unbuildable items from entering construction requests, which worked for full-stack rockets but starved the new mixed-payload logic.

Rather than reintroduce the deadlock, Genhis added a request priority API to item prototypes and enabled it for platform foundations and cargo bays. Cargo bays are prioritized to accelerate large-platform construction by adding more input hatches and growing inventory. The trade-off is that in an extremely rare case, cargo bays can still deadlock the platform, which Wube judged acceptable. The change also re-adds all ghosts to construction requests — even when the platform has enough supply — and includes item requests for unbuilt entities.

Platform-to-platform transfers and import-from-any

Orbital requests now let you leave the Import from field blank to mean “import from all locations.” This is the clean way to handle items platforms themselves consume — fuel cells, repair packs — where you don’t want the platform to drop them at any planet on its route.

A paired fix stops platforms from leaving a location while trash slots still hold items. Previously, a platform set to dump depleted uranium fuel cells at Nauvis could depart with the cells still in trash, randomly deciding where they ended up. The amended logic waits to clear trash slots before departing whenever a surface is available to receive them.

Hub set requests and the circuit network

2.1 adds circuit-controlled hub requests. A space platform hub can now use ‘Set requests’ while also reading its own contents. The mechanism evolved during the experimental run: FFF-441 described it as signal self-subtraction on the circuit network, but FFF-443 replaced that ‘magic’ logic by directing circuit inputs and outputs to different wire colors — a change Wube judged more understandable, and one that also lets requester chests combine ‘Set requests’ with ‘Read contents’. Because the ‘Import from Any’ option exists, circuit requests import from all locations and from both planet silos and platforms, keeping the design clean and intuitive. This pairs with the new Radar Universe mode, which lets radars share a SignalID channel so platforms and planets can transmit signals to one another — letting you filter channels by current location to read missing materials or available cargo and command a fleet accordingly.

What it means for players

The practical upshot is that space logistics in 2.1 gets meaningfully more capable, and a few common design patterns open up that were awkward or impossible before.

Buffer platforms in orbit become a real tactic. A small platform holding a buffer of calcite, ice, or iron ore in orbit over a planet can shorten transport turnaround, since rockets don’t have to reload from the surface every trip.

Faster platform bootstrapping is the most immediately useful change. Seeding a new platform with a starter kit of ice, carbon, or iron ore from an existing platform — rather than waiting on a fresh chain of surface rockets — cuts the dead time before a new platform is productive.

Orbital assembly of space materials lets you build space platform foundation in orbit and ship it platform-to-platform, saving the surface rockets you’d otherwise spend hauling the intermediate goods down and finished parts back up.

Mixed rockets also reduce the launch count for early-game platform construction. A platform that once needed a dozen single-item rockets can now receive most of its build kit in a handful of mixed loads, which matters most in the first hours of Space Age when silo throughput is the bottleneck.

What to watch for

The experimental branch carries the usual caveats. Wube’s FFF-444 notes that 2.0 saves load in 2.1 but some changes may break existing factory designs, blueprints and saves cannot be downgraded, and relied-upon mods may not be updated yet. The mixed-rocket logic has edge cases: the batching algorithm is designed to wait when a complete batch cannot be assembled, which means a mixed rocket can sit on the pad longer than a single-item launch would have. That waiting is riskiest for spoilable Gleba goods like bioflux and agricultural science packs, where extra idle time eats into the spoilage timer before the items even arrive. Players running spoil-sensitive shuttle routes may want to review their minimum-payload settings after switching to 2.1, or keep partial-rocket loads for perishables on a dedicated platform.

The modding surface also expanded. Rocket lift weight, previously a global utility constant that modders couldn’t tune per-silo, is now per-prototype, and the silo inventory can run in either a weight-restricted slot-unlimited mode or a weight-unrestricted slot-limited mode. Mixed rockets made the optimal-packing problem harder, so the current logic picks the smallest available rocket that fits all requested items rather than splitting a load across smaller rockets — a compromise Wube may revisit.