Hi everyone,
As I’ve been extensively testing the current version of the game, I decided to introduce a QoL feature I have been planning on bringing in for a little while now: Fast travel.
Fast travel has been on my radar to add to the game for a few months. Ever since the long and narrow layout of Pirate’s Peak meant that the distance between the port and further outposts could be almost 3 kilometres, I thought that it would eventually be necessary to introduce “faster” travel. There were a few ideas in the mix, including a horse, cart, and teleportation - all of which had pros and cons, and would take a while to implement.
I am still toying with the ideas of the horse and the cart, but had settled on introducing an implementation of “teleportation” first. The “teleportation” was meant to be locked behind some research, as well as potentially a dedicated building (and certainly would not have been called teleportation), and as such, I was intending on incorporating it into 0.9. However, the long slog back and forth between my outposts and the port in my current test game got in the way. When I finally reached an outpost after 5 minutes of walking and realised that I had forgotten one of the materials I had gone to the port for - I knew it was time to at least implement a rudimentary version of fast travel.
And so, let me introduce to you: The village to village fast travel. Once you have at least one outpost, you can select any warehouse, and will find a dropdown for your fast travel destination at the bottom of the right page (see today's image). You can select either the original village (port), or one of your outposts, and will then be transported to the main (first) warehouse of the selected outpost. For now, fast travelling costs a quarter of the distance in coins (so travelling to a village 1000 metres away will cost you 250 coins). I will play around with the balance for this and will update it to adjust how it works out.
Locking the fast travel behind research and a dedicated building in 0.9, as well as UI updates on how to select the destination will probably happen eventually - but as usual, I will keep you updated. Fast travel is on the experimental branch as of last Saturday.
Until next week!