Citizens and overseers,
After a very long journey, the nomad cities are ready to spread their wings (so to speak) and fly! Six years in the making, out of which 3 years were in Early Access, the full release of Dream Engines: Nomad Cities is now available to everyone.
The full version comes with the largerst update that Dream Engines received to date. The update includes plenty of new content, mechanics, a narrative that explores some of the game world's lore, and several other improvements.
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Read on below about some of the larger changes in the 1.0 update. You can find the full list of changes on the patch notes page.
Story-based campaign
Dream Engines now has a campaign. As you advance in the game and complete the campaign missions, the story will unfold and you will learn about some of the lore and history of Twyst.
For the most part, the story is presented in the form of a dialogue with three city officials - your advisor, the archeologist and the chief scientist.
Please keep in mind that Dream Engines is not a story heavy game, the campaign was added to make the game a bit more interesting as you pursue greatness for your city. You can continue playing after you complete the campaign, and you can also ignore the story missions and just play the game like a sandbox if you prefer.
Steam achievements
I've added about 60 achievements that you can obtain. Some achievements are simple enough, and some will really challenge your skills. Will you try to get them all?
In these achievements I implemented lessons learned from the achievements in our previous game and made sure there are no achievements that required unique circumstances that depended too much on random number generators and that are very rare.
Archeologist
The Archeologist is a new building that you can build, and then use it to complete archeology projects. These projects, that can be unlocked by scavenging ancient ruins in the game map, will provide you with significant bonuses once completed. Completing these projects, however, will require a substantial amount of time and resources.
New tribes - Lore Keepers & The Doomed Tribe
Two new tribes were added that you can unlock and play with.
The Lore Keepers are historians, experts in anything related ot the old-world. As such, they are more nomadic than other tribes as they travel often in search for new ruins and places of interest. They perfected more efficient travel and can easily locate ancient ruins. Their frequent meddling with ancient Dreamtek devices causes them to attract more Dream Plagues.
The Doomed Tribe is very different from all other tribes. Usually, I try to make new tribes somewhat unique but overall balanced, so they don't make the game much easier or harder than normal (that's what the difficulty settings are for). The Doomed Tribe, however, are considered as an "expert" tribe.
They are a cursed people, that more often find themselves in locations that are more hostile, with less resources, and generally with more negative traits than positive ones. The early game is especially hard, since they start with a global infestation rating of 2 (but the time it takes to reach 3 is more or less like it would take if they started from 1). They do have a bonus to the scoring in the end of the game.
Will you be up to the challenge? Will you be able to lead these poor, cursed people to peace and prosperity?
The Toxic Moors
A new biome was added - the Toxic Moors. This toxic environment filled with poison mushrooms and noxious fog is the only place you can find the rare Candyshroom resource.
This is a tier 5 biome, and it requires a special upgrade to the city core before you can fly to it (I also added such a requirement to the Ashfall Range - the ash biome). Explore these beautiful and dangerous landscapes at your own peril.
Plenty of new content
The new content resolves for the most part around the late-game era. Two new map-resources (Sulfur and Candyshroom) can be found in 4-skull and 5-skull maps. New weapons and armor were added, and all of them now have an "Elite" variant which is stronger than anything we had in the game before this update.
New enemies that will challenge even the most well defended city, as well as new stronger walls and a new "Trumpet" turret that emits powerful sonic-based attacks were added to the game. There are new types of ranged weapon for Tiny that fire piercing projectiles that can hit many enemies at once.
There are also lots of new produced resources, alternative recipes, equipment, traps, and much more, some of which are also available earlier in the game.
More ruin types
Additional types of ancient ruins were added. Some ruins will now let you convert between different resources, so you can boost your supply of specific resources that you are missing at the expense of others. Some will let you produce resources from Flux. Others will grant you passive income of specific resources that will be regularly deposited in your storage.
There are now 8 different types of ruins, and you can see which ones will spawn in each map when you choose your next destination.
Balancing, bugfixes, performance and UX improvements
As in every update, there's also a multitude of smaller changes that include fixing bugs, tweaking and balancing different game elements, performance improvements and user experience improvements to make the game more seamless and intuitive to play.
Saves from previous builds
With considerable effort, I did manage to make sure that this new build is able to load older saves from the last EA build. That said, I highly recommend starting a new game, or if you prefer to finish your old game, then opt in to download the latest EA version using Steam's beta branches feature.
While the 1.0 build will be able to load and continue old games, a lot of things might get messed up. This was only tested for basic compatibility, and I may not be able to support issues that arise from playing these games. There won't be any story missions, which means that you will not be able to win the game, and a lot of the balancing changes may make the game too easy or too hard when continuing one that started during the EA.
Future Plans
It's been more than 3 years since Dream Engines released in Early Access. Over this time, Dream Engines received 13 major updates as well as some smaller ones.
So now, after the 1.0 release, I'll spend the next few weeks monitoring Steam forums and our support email as well as the in-game "leave feedback" forms, to support the game and fix any issues as necessary. After that I'll probably get some much needed rest, and then start planning Suncrash's next project (Sign up here to get updates).
Perhaps when I need a break from that new project, I'll release a new content update for Dream Engines like I recently did with our first game, Judgment: Apocalypse Survival Simulation's 5th anniversary.
Here's a small reminder of some of the major changes and additions to Dream Engines during the Early Access phase.
This is a big moment for me. I hope you all enjoy the full version of Dream Engines. I've said it before, but now more than ever, I want to thank everyone who supported Dream Engines and Suncrash during the development, alpha and Early Access phases of the game, thank you for all your support and feedback. I couldn't have done it without your support.
If you want to chat, you can find me in our discord server. I'll probably be swamped in the next few days, but I try to make time for it whenever I can.
Tomer @ Suncrash