Hello engineers!
In this week's update we're taking in an important piece of feedback from all the demo and play testing that went on over Next Fest. People are frequently confused about what can connect to what.
I've implemented a new UX that shows valid slots in the game world when you are attempting to place a single item blueprint. Here's an example where I'm about to place a solar panel:
We're currently working on an alternative tutorial experience as well to accommodate more veteran players who might not want the full tutorial experience. We built the first tutorial to really try to onboard new and veteran factory players alike, and we think it's been wildly successful. However, there's a strong cohort of players that are put off by how hand-holdy it is.
Our tutorial development framework is very robust, and so it's quite easy to add an alternative tutorial to the game that's a bit lighter. This will be coming soon, before release!
Anyway, release is just around the corner, we cannot wait!
0.17.0.8-15 Full Patch Notes
Usability
- When placing a single-item blueprint, nearby available slots will show a green valid slot indicator to make it more clear what things can be connected to what
- Added option to the interface option to disable/enable this feature
Map Generation
- Actually fixed the logic that shows the nearest planet and oracle
- Oracles and planets should spawn closer more consistently
- Fixed an issue in the map gen where obelisks would all be grouped up together; they should now more evenly distribute across the map
- Improved the map gen algorithm overall to distribute terrain more evenly
Balance
- Laser turrets no longer cost stability - I want to encourage large battleship builds. Laser turrets already have a cost to use via fuel and heat, and I felt stability was unnecessary for them, especially since they aren't involved in the automation part of the factory
- Reduced heat generated by laser turrets to .2 c/s, down from .3c/s
- Reduced material cost of Laser turrets by about 30% (which also lowers their mass)
- Reduced material cost of armor blocks by 50%
- Reduced mass penalty on rocket speed by 20%
- Reduced cost of later game Fleet Command Techs
Commands
- Added new command AddLumenOrbs
- Added new command MapFixer which will clean up ghost entities on the entity grid
Bug Fixes
- Fixed a bug where hotbars would be cleared when loading a game after a patch
- Fixed a bug causing ships to jam up at the ship reprocessors
- Fixed a bug where no obelisk and portal would spawn near the start area
- Fixed a bug where damage and health increases to your fleet ships awarded via technologies was not being applied correctly
- Fixed a bug where Oracles were not granting health and plasma bolt damage
- Fixed a regression where inserter endpoint lines wouldn't take blueprinted structures into account
- Fixed a regression where inserters picking up cargo wouldn't trigger the respective objective
- Fixed regression causing inserters to load up infinitely sometimes
- Fixed a host of bugs related to using the floating point position to place things back on the grid when loading a game - This fix is a huge stability win for the game and fixes long outstanding bugs that we couldn't figure out for a long time
- Fixed an issue where if you saved your game during one of the inserter objectives, you would get stuck at the loading screen when trying to load that save
- Added error handling on the blueprint panel that would prevent bp's from loading if any of the bp's were corrupted in some way
- Fixed a bug where comet catchers, harvesters, and reprocessors were not showing grid warnings
- Fixed a bug where rotating structures on the map would not update their grid tiles correctly, leading to bad behavior
- Fixed a crash related to a race condition when removing items from the map