Hello everyone!
I'm happy to say the wait has ended and as of right now Alpha 10, the Pipes Update, is out!
Pipes, Water, Methane
This is the big news and core of the update: Pipes now open another alternative to truck and train transport.
It's a lot easier to deal with pipe logistics, but you'll pay a hefty price in efficiency since buildings have to bear the cost of pipeline operation. You'll have to decide in which situations it makes sense to use pipes and when to use trucks and trains.
With the pipes update, we also introduce 2 new resources: Water and Methane. Water is an essential resource necessary for survival. In the beginning, you can filter it from the atmosphere, but once you've got enough power, you can operate a ground extractor to get water from the planet's crust.
Methane is found in certain locations on your map or can be produced by processing organic waste from your advanced farms. The main use for methane is power generation, but it also has some industrial applications.
All pipe-able resources can be stored in large tanks which give you some reserves for hard times.
Sandbox Mode
It's long been a communtiy favorite feature and now it's here: Sandbox mode.
What's more, you can select *which kind* of sandbox you want and turn off building costs, citizen needs or research all techs. Further, you can even change this in a running game!
Finally, there are two bonus settings regarding traffic:
You can turn off traffic jams completely *OR* you can enable round trips to make your traffic problems a lot worse. Your choice!
Spaceship & Backstory
The backstory is slowly coming to InfraSpace and your spaceship is the first piece. After a failed warp jump, your damaged ship is stranded somewhere in the galaxy. You need to repair it to get back to earth.
You can already repair all of your ships components, but what happens after that will be revealed during Early Access!
Per-District Production Overview
Another community favorite, this time for hardcore players:
You can now check out the production stats for all of your districts and see if your production is balanced the way you want it to be.
Other News
- Holo Displays are now used for VR-Edutainment Glasses
- Increased max bridge build height by a lot
- Added a tiny train station for those narrow places
- A bunch of fixes
Your Old Save Works
All of your saves should be compatible and even spawn the new methane resource on the ground - no collision issues.
You will need to make sure to provide your citizens with water quickly, but I filled up your habitats and you can turn on sandbox mode to bridge the gap if needed.
If, despite all of that, you want to continue playing an old version, you can do that with the Steam Betas feature.
What Next?
First of all, I'll be watching the forums closely for any new bug reports. If nothing major pops up over the weekend, I'll go through minor bugs from the update and all other reports next week.
Let me know how you like the update and if you run into any issues.
Happy playing!