I know HDR has come up before (I've read the old forum thread front to back), but it's worth revisiting now: Wube themselves call the 2.1 work "the update of our graphics and audio systems" (https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-444), and the art team is clearly investing. A new unloading bay, redesigned pumps with new fluid-wagon loading models, a redesigned oil refinery, a redesigned assembling machine (the most-placed building in the game), diagonal flamethrower turrets, and a visual pass on the planets. FFF #444 even asks for suggestions to be posted during the experimental, so that's what I'm doing. If there's ever a cheap moment to add an HDR output path, it's while the pipeline is open.
To be clear, this isn't about making sprites "brighter", they're pre-rendered at a fixed light level. It's about what the engine composites live: night bases, lamps, lasers and flamethrowers, lava on Vulcanus, machine glow, the sun on a space platform. Deep blacks staying dark while lights genuinely pop, instead of everything clipping to the same SDR white.
(And yes, Windows Auto HDR / RTX HDR exist, but they work from the final SDR frame, after the compositor has already clipped the range. They can guess at highlights; native output just has them.)
Performance-wise this should be one of the cheapest features imaginable at runtime: the game is CPU-bound and the GPU is mostly idling.
Bonus: the game currently has no deliberate HDR handling, so on HDR displays you get whatever the OS/compositor decides. Historically that meant broken rendering on early Plasma 6 HDR and the classic Windows alt-tab black screen. And the old "PC HDR is a mess" objection has aged out: Windows, the Wayland color-management protocol, and KDE Plasma 6.2+ all have real HDR pipelines now. The ecosystem is finally ready for a native path.
And it's not niche anymore. Most new TVs, roughly 40% of PC monitors, lots of laptops. I'm ~1500 hours in, play on an OLED, and honestly the art is a big part of why I keep coming back: I just sit and stare at my base sometimes. All shots are SDR captures… imagine the highlights with real headroom behind them.
Not expecting this to be trivial. Even an experimental, opt-in graphics setting would be great. But with 2.1 slated as possibly the last major update, it felt like now or never.
Official forum: https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?t=135230