Changelog

Version: 0.10.0
Date: 2026-08-17
  Major Features:
    - One video that follows you between planets. It cuts to each one as you arrive, instead of a separate video per planet each running the whole playthrough with nothing on it for the hours nobody was there. A planet you left out of the timelapse holds the camera where it was rather than cutting away
  Features:
    - The in-game panel says whether it is recording, for how long, and what each place is doing. It updates while it is open
    - The panel's Generate button now names the places it will snapshot, and greys out with a reason when there is nothing to do
    - Type your own seconds-per-frame in the window, instead of picking one of four presets
  Bugfixes:
    - Two playthroughs rolled from the same map seed no longer share one recording, where the second overwrote the first's baseline. Recordings already under way keep the identity they have and are unaffected
    - The Stop button now stops a video render. It set a flag nothing was reading, so a render ran to the end whatever you pressed
    - Stop also works during a ground scan, which used to ignore it for as long as Factorio took to open the save
    - Stopping is reported as stopping rather than as a failure

Version: 0.9.0
Date: 2026-08-15
  Major Features:
    - One program instead of two. The viewer is part of it now, so there is a single file to download and nothing to keep together
    - A window. Running the tool now opens one instead of a text menu, and it does everything the menu did. The text menu is still there behind --console, and each offers the other
  Features:
    - Build several places at once, rather than one or all of them
    - Every menu is picked by number, with nothing left to spell
    - What is on disk is managed in three parts: your recorded log data, the timelapses built from it, and the videos saved from those. Deleting a recording cannot be undone and says so first
    - Biters expanding is recorded, so a nest appears when they built it
    - Clearing a nest can be watched. One you destroy is not in the save the ground is read from, so it never appeared at all; the recording now puts it back and takes it away when you cleared it. Recordings already under way gain this for nests cleared from here on
  Graphics:
    - Pipe runs that dive underground join up on screen instead of stopping dead
  Bugfixes:
    - Ore patches your factory has eaten empty out as they are mined, instead of sitting there full for the whole timelapse
    - Recordings said how far you had played when recording started, rather than how far you have played
    - Saving a video no longer shows a black window while it renders
    - The ground under paving you laid partway through a playthrough is no longer a hole. Rebuild an existing timelapse's ground to fix one already made

Version: 0.8.2
Date: 2026-08-14
  Bugfixes:
    - Ore, trees and cliffs beyond the area your factory covered when you started recording are no longer missing. Rebuild an existing timelapse to get them back
    - Rail corners are drawn as curves instead of squares

Version: 0.8.1
Date: 2026-08-13
  Features:
    - The camera in an exported video glides between moves instead of snapping to each frame
    - Your factory is framed clear of the bottom of the screen
    - Buildings from any mod are drawn with their own artwork instead of a flat colour
  Graphics:
    - New mod thumbnail
  Bugfixes:
    - Black lines no longer flicker across an exported video

Version: 0.8.0
Date: 2026-08-12
  Features:
    - Exporting a video is several times faster on a big base. Every frame was drawing the natural ground tile by tile, which on a real megabase was 19.7 million of the 24 million shapes in a frame, four fifths of the work for the one layer with no detail to lose. Ground is now grouped once it is too small to see, while your factory keeps full detail exactly as before
    - Timelapses built from your existing save files are dramatically smaller too. Every save reports your entire factory, having no idea the other saves exist, so a hundred megabase saves used to mean a hundred copies of the same factory. They are now compared against each other and only the differences kept. They are also put in the order the ticks inside them say rather than the order their filenames suggest, which matters because Factorio's autosaves rotate: _autosave1 is as likely to be your newest save as your oldest
    - Built timelapses are dramatically smaller and faster to build and open. Every frame used to store your entire factory again: on a real Space Age megabase that was 863,862 buildings and 3,354,339 floor tiles in each of 660 frames, 5.5 GB of which almost all was the same data written over and over. A frame now records only what changed since the one before it, which on that capture is a couple of hundred things
    - Choose what goes on top of an exported video. The in-game clock, so the footage says how long the factory took, and a marker showing where you were. You are asked when you export, and the marker is only offered for recordings that have your position in them
    - Player markers can be turned off with P, and the viewer remembers your answer between runs
    - Export an MP4 when you have FFmpeg. It is offered only if FFmpeg is already on your PATH, and it is far smaller than the AVI: measured on real frames, about 15 times. It is also what sharing sites accept, where an AVI often will not upload or preview at all. Nothing changes if you do not have FFmpeg, and nothing asks you to install it: the built-in AVI writer is still there and still needs nothing
  Bugfixes:
    - Rail looks like rail. Every piece was drawn as a single square on the tile it starts from, but a rail spans two tiles and the pieces sit two apart, so a straight run came out as a dotted line, a diagonal as a staircase, and a corner as scattered blocks. Track is now drawn along the path it actually occupies, including the diagonals and the 1.0 style corners you get on a map built before 2.0. All of that works on recordings you already have, with nothing to reinstall
    - Corners on 2.0 rail need one thing from the mod. Factorio keeps rail shapes inside the engine and will not describe them, and unlike every other piece a corner cannot be worked out by measuring a recording either, since 2.0 splits each one into two halves that meet each other rather than anything of known shape. So the mod now writes down which rails the game says are connected, and the tool works the corner out from that. A recording made before this version keeps square corners until you record with this one
    - A timelapse where a huge part of the factory disappears at once now opens. Clearing ten million entities in a single tick produced a timelapse the viewer would never finish loading: it sat with no progress and no error, because the step that folds a frame's changes in was doing an amount of work that grew with your factory multiplied by how much of it changed at once. It now takes about a quarter of a second. The loading screen also names the step it is really on, having previously kept the last step's label up while it worked
    - Going back to a branch of your playthrough you had left keeps the history you left it with. Loading an older save and building something else tells the recording the play you left behind was replaced, which is what keeps a timelapse showing one coherent history. Loading a save from the branch you abandoned used to leave you with the other branch's factory, because nothing said which recording a save belonged to and the most recently written one was assumed. Every save now knows, so returning to a branch drops the one you walked away from instead. Saves made before this version do not carry it, so a branch left with an older version is still gone
    - Loading a save always starts a new stretch of recording rather than continuing the one that save remembers. Continuing could not be made safe: the file a save names may have been deleted by a reset, in which case the game recreated it in a form the tool could not read, and a stretch named for when it started could end up holding a completely different branch of your playthrough. Recordings damaged this way are now recovered when they are read
    - Resetting a recording no longer stops it recording. After /timelapse-reset-capture the mod kept using the name table belonging to the recording it had just deleted, so every change you made afterwards was written in a form the tool could only throw away. The new recording stayed empty until the save was reloaded, and said nothing about it
    - Dragged belt corners face the right way. Turning a corner while dragging a belt line makes Factorio rotate the belt already placed, without telling a mod, so every corner made that way kept the facing it went down with and drew as a straight belt
    - Mining ore out from under a machine takes the ore, not the machine. A removal only said where it happened, and where a deposit and a building share a tile that always meant the building, so hand-mining the ore under one made the building vanish instead

Version: 0.7.0
Date: 2026-08-12
  Features:
    - Your mods are recorded as themselves. The mod now writes down what the loaded prototypes are, so a timelapse takes its terrain and building colours straight from the game's own map view, and knows a modded belt is a belt, a modded ore patch is ore, and how far a modded underground belt reaches. Alien Biomes terrain looks like Alien Biomes, a Krastorio2 belt curves at corners and pairs up underground, and a modded ore field no longer drags the camera off your factory. Nothing to set up, and mods added partway through a playthrough are picked up the next time you load the save
    - Belts, underground belts, splitters and pipes are drawn with Factorio's own artwork instead of their inventory icons. Belt corners actually curve, an underground belt's two ends face opposite ways, splitters look like splitters from either side, and a run of pipe joins up with corners, tees and crossings
    - A new viewer interface. Your factory fills the window: a planet switcher in one corner, the time in the other, and playback controls you can click rather than keys you had to know. Everything else is one keypress away and nothing else is in the way
    - Press ? in the viewer for every control it has. Three of them, jumping between milestones, jumping between busy stretches, and bookmarking a moment, had never been listed anywhere
    - The tool no longer closes on you. Building a timelapse, watching one, or hitting an error all return to the menu, so making a second one no longer means starting the program again
  Optimizations:
    - Floors are drawn in one pass however many kinds of paving a base has. Concrete, refined concrete and hazard concrete each used to interrupt the batch, which on a heavily paved base was a real cost for something that is only ever a backdrop
  Bugfixes:
    - Ore comes back when you mine up what you built on it. Anything placed on an ore tile took that tile's place rather than covering it, so building across a patch ate it a tile at a time and removing the building later left a gap where the ore had been
    - Mining a building that stands on ore removes the building rather than the ore. Which of the two counted as being on top depended on the order they happened to be recorded in, so for anything already standing when recording started, mining it left the building in place and deleted the ore underneath instead
    - Rotating something that stands on ore no longer destroys the ore. A rotation is recorded as a placement, and that placement pushed the ore out and left a second hidden copy of the building behind, which stayed standing after you mined the real one
    - The building count counts buildings. Trees, cliffs, ore and nests are recorded as scenery around your base, and every one of them was counted as something you built, so a wooded map reported a factory several times the size it really was
    - Space platforms grow instead of appearing whole. A platform's own foundation was not counted as floor you lay, so the tiles you place to expand one were never recorded as built and the whole platform showed up finished from the first frame. Aquilo's foundation had the same problem, and so did every floor added by a mod
    - Rotating a belt is recorded. A belt rotated after it was placed kept its original direction forever, so its corner drew as a straight belt. Belts the game connects up for you as you drag are still not covered; a fresh baseline corrects everything placed so far
    - The viewer's readouts no longer cover the factory. Entity counts, zoom, frame rate and the draw-call profile moved behind F3, where anybody who wants them can still find them
  Changes:
    - Floors are drawn as flat colour rather than a stretched item icon. A floor only needs to show that there is a base under the machines, and the icons did not look like the real thing anyway
    - The companion tool speaks plainly. Recordings are listed by where they happened and how big the factory got, rather than by a hex id and a raw tick count, and a finished build reports one line instead of six paragraphs of internal detail

Version: 0.6.0
Date: 2026-08-11
  Features:
    - Save a timelapse as a video file you can share. Nothing to install: no FFmpeg, no command line tools, no separate encoder. Pick a resolution and a frame rate and the finished video lands in a videos folder next to the program
    - Export a numbered image per frame instead, at any resolution, for editing the result yourself. Both are independent of the window size, so a 1080p export comes out of a small window unchanged
    - Terrain can be added to a capture you already have. It no longer has to be switched on before your first snapshot, so changing your mind about it does not mean resetting and losing everything recorded so far. You are asked when the timelapse is built, and you choose which save it is read from
  Optimizations:
    - The initial snapshot is significantly faster. Terrain is no longer recorded while you play at all: it does not change during a playthrough, so recording it was storing the same answer over and over, and it is now read once from a save afterwards instead
    - Exports are smaller, especially across several planets, because terrain is no longer repeated in every frame
  Bugfixes:
    - The camera framed the outermost thing you had built rather than your factory. A wall on the far perimeter or a signal at the end of a rail line to an outpost decided the shot, leaving the factory small and off centre in a mostly empty frame. It now aims at where the buildings actually are
    - Biter nests no longer drag the camera. They are generated across every explored chunk, so counting them as construction stretched the view across the whole revealed map. They are still recorded and still drawn in red, they just no longer decide where to look
    - Terrain covers the whole factory. It used to stop wherever your base reached when recording started, so anything built after that stood on nothing
    - Trees and cliffs stop where the ground does, instead of extending past its edge
  Changes:
    - Videos are rendered at full detail rather than the simplified drawing used while browsing, and oversampled before being written. The viewer simplifies to hold a frame rate; an export has no frame rate to hold, so it does not have to. On a large factory this is the difference between belts being visible and a paved area reading as a grey block
    - Nothing that moves is recorded any more, not just biters and robots. Gleba's pentapods and Vulcanus's demolishers were being captured because Space Age gave its enemies new prototype types that the old filter did not cover, and cars, tanks, Spidertron and trains had never been excluded at all. Every one of them was pinned wherever it happened to be while the real one carried on. Rails, signals, stations and roboports stay, and so do nests and worms: those are enemies that do not move
    - Captures made with 0.5 keep working and need no reset. Nothing about the capture format changed in this release

Version: 0.5.1
Date: 2026-08-10
  Bugfixes:
    - Space platforms no longer flood the capture with thousands of useless records. Asteroid chunks are collected continuously and are never built by anyone, so every collection was recorded as the removal of something that had never been there. On a save with five platforms this was 6,101 of 6,259 recorded events, and made the desktop tool warn that almost nothing it read did anything. Collectors and the rest of a platform are still recorded

Version: 0.5.0
Date: 2026-08-10
  Features:
    - Milestones now work for timelapses built from existing saves, not just live capture. A save records that something happened but never when, so each milestone is marked at the first save that shows it, making them as precise as your save cadence
    - Built timelapses are kept. You can close the tool, open it again, and go straight to one you already made instead of rebuilding it
    - Bookmark any moment in the viewer with b, then press m to jump between bookmarks and milestones, or c to jump between the busiest stretches of building. Hold shift with either to go backwards. Bookmarks are saved and still there next time you open that timelapse
    - The tool remembers where Factorio is, how much game time each frame covers, and whether you wanted terrain, so it stops asking the same questions every run
    - Removing a placed tile now restores whatever it was covering, so mining landfill puts the water back instead of leaving a hole. Needs terrain capture switched on
  Optimizations:
    - Exports are around 90 percent smaller on a save with several surfaces. A surface is only written at the moments something on it actually changed, and a playthrough only ever builds on one surface at a time. Measured on a real nine surface megabase, one export went from 238 MB to 16 MB
    - Opening a timelapse is roughly twice as fast, because the analysis done while loading now skips the frames that were reconstructed rather than read from disk
  Changes:
    - Capture files are built to stay readable from here on. New capture features are added in a way older versions of the desktop tool can step over instead of choking on, so the mod and the tool no longer have to be updated together
    - Captures made with 0.4 keep working, and you do not need to reset your capture when updating to this version
    - The tool now says what it is doing while it works, instead of sitting silently while it reads a large baseline
  Bugfixes:
    - Space platform construction is now recorded. Everything on a platform is placed by platform construction bots, which raise different events than planet side robots, so a platform previously showed up fully built and then never changed
    - Entities revived from a ghost by another mod, rather than built by a bot, are now recorded too
    - Paving on Aquilo is recorded. Concrete and stone path freeze into their own tile types there, which the mod did not recognise as floor you had placed, so an entire Aquilo base's paving was invisible
    - Turning terrain capture off now also stops recording Gleba's plants. They are a different prototype type than trees, so switching terrain off silenced Nauvis's forests while Gleba's kept being captured, on a planet that is mostly wilderness

Version: 0.4.0
Date: 2026-08-09
  Features:
    - Milestone markers on the timeline: the first of each science pack, the first rocket launch, and each planet you reach, shown under the scrub bar and labelled on hover
    - Manage your captures from the desktop tool: give each playthrough a name so you can tell them apart, see how much disk it uses, and delete ones you are finished with
    - The timeline now shows elapsed in-game time at each end and above the playhead, and hovering it shows the time and frame number at that point before you commit to a seek
    - Activity graph along the scrub bar showing how much was built at each point in the run, so busy stretches and idle ones are visible without playing through them
    - Construction heatmap in the viewer (press h, off by default): shows where building happened over the last few frames, drawn under the factory so it never hides what you built
  Optimizations:
    - Exported frames are roughly 5x smaller. Entities of the same type are grouped together and their positions stored as small differences rather than full coordinates, and each prototype's size is recorded once instead of on every entity. On a megabase, one surface went from 200 MB to 38 MB
    - That format is also faster to write than the one it replaced, so the baseline export freezes the game for less time rather than more
    - The viewer keeps a whole timelapse as spans rather than a full copy of every frame, which measured 37.7x less memory on a large capture, and loads in small batches so opening a long capture no longer needs the whole thing in memory at once
  Changes:
    - Construction and logistics robots are no longer recorded. The capture format stores that something was built or destroyed, never that it moved, so a bot in flight was pinned wherever it happened to be while the real one flew on. A megabase mid construction job also has tens of thousands of them, all describing nothing about how the factory grew
    - Biter nests and worm turrets are now recorded, and the viewer draws them in red. They are stationary, so unlike biters the format represents them honestly, and watching the front line move outward as they are cleared is part of how expansion looks
  Bugfixes:
    - Fixed live capture mislabelling every entity and tile logged after any reload. Loading a save resets the mod's internal name table while the log it was writing keeps the names already in it, so from that point on everything decoded as whichever name happened to be first. Nothing about the file looked damaged; the names were simply wrong
    - Fixed reloading an earlier save leaking entities from the timeline you reloaded away from, which made things you had undone appear immediately and stay for the rest of the timelapse
    - Fixed anything built after a long stretch with no construction appearing at the start of that stretch instead of when it was actually built
    - The viewer now explains that it found no loadable frames instead of crashing, which is what happened when it was pointed at captures from an older format version
    - Fixed the mod's own packaging leaving out a required file, which would have made this release fail to load
  Info:
    - This release changes both file formats, so update save-timelapse.exe and the viewer alongside the mod. An older tool will refuse the new files rather than misread them
    - Captures recorded by earlier versions still open. They keep the mislabelling described above wherever they were resumed, which cannot be repaired after the fact

Version: 0.3.0
Date: 2026-08-09
  Features:
    - In-game control panel for live capture: a toolbar shortcut (and Control+Shift+T) opens a panel to toggle live capture, choose which surfaces are recorded (including planets not yet visited), and reset capture, without the settings menu or console commands
    - Live capture can now exclude individual surfaces from recording, skipping their baseline cost entirely rather than only their future events
    - Un-excluding a surface and pressing the panel's Generate button gives it its own catch-up baseline without disturbing already-tracked surfaces; checking several surfaces before generating batches them into one freeze
    - Resetting capture now asks for confirmation first, since it permanently deletes this playthrough's recorded data
  Changes:
    - Resetting capture (the console command or the new panel button) now deletes this playthrough's own capture files instead of only clearing in-memory state, so files no longer need to be deleted by hand first
    - A failed capture write now degrades gracefully instead of crashing the game
    - Baseline warnings now name which surface(s) they cover and pause long enough to actually be read before the game freezes to export them

Version: 0.2.1
Date: 2026-08-08
  Bugfixes:
    - Fixed terrain capture duplicating the entire captured terrain tile set into every frame during live capture replay. On a long capture this made every frame file huge and could crash the viewer loading them. Terrain is now captured once per surface instead of re-included per frame.

Version: 0.2.0
Date: 2026-08-08
  Features:
    - Build a timelapse from existing save files, no need to have had the mod installed while you played
    - Live capture mode: records incremental changes as you play instead of repeated full exports
    - Interactive viewer with pan, zoom, timeline scrubbing and adjustable playback speed
    - Camera auto-follow: locks onto wherever the base is actively being built, with smooth pan/zoom transitions; favors whichever site is closest to a tracked player when more than one is active at once
    - Multi-surface support (Nauvis, platforms, planets)
    - Optional terrain and terrain-scatter rendering (grass, water, trees, cliffs) around the base
    - Player position tracking, shown as a marker in the viewer
    - Checksums and format versioning, so a corrupted or outdated capture file is detected rather than silently misread
  Changes:
    - Live capture writes each playthrough's files into its own subfolder under script-output/save-timelapse, instead of one shared folder with every filename tagged