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Factorio is experimenting with controller support and Steam deck optimizations
When Valve first showed off Steam Deck, a nice top 100 Factory Alien worthy game was there. It makes sense: Steam Deck runs Linux, and Factorio has a native Linux version. There was no mess back then, it worked just fine, and the low graphics requirements meant it should have decent battery life.
But anyone who’s played Factory Alien can tell you that it’s a hotkey-intensive, mouse-intensive game that requires a lot of clicking and clever use of the mouse. This means you have to do a lot of remapping and profile building to get it to run super smoothly on Steam decks. The developers of Wube Software are aware of this problem, and in a recent development blog Outlined some of the work they’ve been doing to get Factorio working with controllers.
“We’re trying to provide proper controller support for Factory Alien; this is good not only for the Steam platform, but also for those who want to play games more casually with a controller. Expansion remains a priority for the team, controller support It’s not going to be easy, so if Factory Alien is involved, look forward to it later this year,” Wube said.
Any controller development is going to take a back seat to developing a really big expansion set that doubles the size of Factorio, but I must say I’d like to play that expansion on the Steam deck if I can. Currently, Wube is working on some other minor fixes, such as UI tweaks for better resizing on the smaller Steam deck screen.