Factories and new resources have been deployed to the PTR.

See previous discussion.

API Changes

• New API prototypes: StructureFactory, Deposit.
• A lot of new constants.
• PWR_OPERATE_FACTORY power is now operational.
• New resources added to the market.

Other changes

• Dismantle does not work through own and public ramparts.
• Removed minimal limit for StructureTerminal.send.

All the rest planned changes (NPC strongholds, Store refactor, market improvements) will be deployed as separate patches for proper discussion.

This update is available in ptr beta branch on npm and Steam starting from version 3.5.0-beta.1:

npm install screeps@ptr

Dismantle do not work through own and public ramparts

So this means that you can no longer dismantle under ramparts period? Rampart has to die first?

TO help the economy or something?

But lets assume I'm misreading the tone and answer to parts.

What is the point? Philosophy for a moment, why add new features to a game at all? On a less deep plane I think the point is to enrich the breadth of screeps. Create so much content and possibilities that no one can write code for it all. In that messy, lovely sandbox players can choose which aspects that appeal to them most and long time active players still have new challenges to conquer.

What do factories change? How do the devs foresee factories interacting with existing systems, (also acknowledging that a good system should be solid and vague enough to allow new emergent, unforeseen play).

My impression is that factories will help anchor Strongholds into the world better.

The Deposits are geodiverse, which is a new element of the game (until now we've really only had center, meridian, edges, and corners for sector variation).

I believe elsewhere in forum @o4kapuk said that one of the goals was to encourage diversity in rooms for empires >10 rooms. Up to now there has been very little pressure to specialize rooms.

The Deposit spawn, harvesting, and decay are tuned to defeat any single obvious best approach.

An finally wrt to the economy which I think might be your real question. Why are NPC buy_orders being removed from the market? Why not keep them both? To that I only have speculation. On the surface limiting buy_orders to Factory commodities helps anchor Factories into the world better. There might be some other problem the devs a trying to correct with the market, thus killing two birds with one stone.

Deposits not despawning?

[16:35:54][shard1]{"room":{"name":"E0N28","energyAvailable":0,"energyCapacityAvailable":0,"visual":{"roomName":"E0N28"}},"pos":{"x":7,"y":43,"roomName":"E0N28"},"id":"5ce1bf1261ed4811bd6216b0","depositType":"biomass","cooldown":12,"ticksToDecay":49997}

update: multi-harvesting would still work before cooldown starts to occur. But if my math is correct that's around 500 extracted (so pretty early on).

@o4kapuk I think this should be a bug. Dual harvesting is an interesting optimization that some players make for mineral harvesting. It'd be a shame if they could not do it as well for Deposits.