Date

Yes, the BuildCraft 8.1 Announcement was an April Fools joke. Except that not all of it was a joke.

Version

Both Supermario and Tencao have worked (seperatly) on a port to 1.10.2, Tencao's version will likely be released in about a week. (Sometime after 7.99.16 is released).

Transport

This was entirely a joke. Although simple logistics pipes are very useful for simplifing the building of large sorting systems, they won't be a part of buildcraft itself.

Robotics

Robots are coming back, however (due to their complexity and changes I want to make to them) they won't be back anytime soon. And no, we won't be getting microsoft clippy style robot helper's in GUI's.

Silicon

The charging table isn't going anywhere anytime soon. Obviously it hasn't been ported yet, but that's just due to buildcraft still being in alpha.

The programming table will be ported alongside robots. It will not self-destruct on placement either.

The assembly table changes are planned, but will likely be relased alongside the engine / MJ changes in a testing build. So unfortunatly they won't be availible in 7.99.16. Fortuntaly the changes seem to have been well received.

The (near) future

7.99.16 will be released shortly (although it will contain none of the changs listed either here or on the original page), and a 1.10.2 build (likely starting at version 7.88.16) will be released a few days afterwards.

The (far) future

...Is already listed in the roadmap - we won't be changing these plans.