Alt-F4 is a weekly blog that's written and edited entirely by the Factorio community, and features various topics that are relevant to it, such as mod spotlights, community showcases or gameplay columns.
It is a follow-on to the venerable Factorio Friday Facts ('FFF'), which documented the development process of Factorio for 360 weeks. It expressed the developers beliefs about pricing strategy, guided us through their crazy optimization process, and detailed how a machine design comes to be.
After coming full circle in August 2020 with the proper release of the game, the developers decided to discontinue this habit and take a well-deserved break. The community did not want this tradition to end though, so it picked up the torch and continues on. The focus necessarily shifted from insights into the development to a miscellany of topics that are of interest to the community.
If you want to contribute anything that's not a submission to the weekly issue of Alt-F4, please join the Discord and talk to us about what you have in mind first. If you do have a submission in mind though, please read on to learn how you can contribute.
- Basically, anything that's Factorio-related and of potential interest to the community is welcome. There are no hard boundaries here, if you think something is interesting, give it a shot! If you're not sure about whether your idea is a good fit for Alt-F4, feel free to pop into the Discord and ask about it. We'll be able to guide you in the right direction.
- Some general categories that are bound to come up regularly are mod reviews, either by players or the mod creator themselves; fan creations from the subreddit or the forums that you want to highlight; or some interesting thing you created while playing. If your idea doesn't fit these categories, that doesn't mean it is not permissible of course; These are just so you get a feel about what you could write about.
- Your submission should be formatted in Markdown. It's easy to learn; if you have any issues with it, the Discord is there to help.
- It should have a reasonable length, approximately 100-500 words, but that's not a hard limit at all. Try to orient yourself on the previous Alt-F4s and of course, on the FFFs themselves.
- It can and should include some images, gifs, and external links. Use these to illustrate what you're writing about, or to explain a concept that not everyone might be familiar with.
- Don't worry too much about getting everything perfect right away. We're here to council you on things you might not be sure about, be it writing style, content, length, anything really.
There are two ways to submit your work. Both are equaly valid options, just choose the one that works best for you.
- If you're not familiar with git and Github, you can join the Discord where you'll find several channels dedicated to submissions. Take a look at the #instructions channel to find out how to proceed.
- If you are familiar with them though, the submission process can be handled through pull requests.
- To submit your work, create a pull request that adds a folder to the submissions-folder. The folder you create should contain your submission-file in Markdown (.md) and any assets (images, gifs) you have used in your post.
- This pull request can then be reviewed by our editors, who'll make suggestions, fix spelling and formatting until the submission is ready for publication. If it reaches that stage, it'll be merged, putting it into the submissions-folder.
- There, it'll wait until the editors select it for publication on any particular week, at which point it is properly distributed into the file structure for the website, and released to the world shortly after.