It is highly likely that starting this week Logs will move to Thursdays for the foreseeable future. Mondays were not working great for me and I have always liked Thursdays so I will try swapping.
I have been examining the crafting machines within the game lately and I have decided to make some changes. I had always envisioned that there would be a couple crafting machines in the early game (power hammer and forge currently) then in the late game there would be some kind of universal "assembler" that could make basically any item in the game. In my playing of Engineer Alpha (and some others) I have decided this is not the way I want to go.
When looking at machines there needs to be some variety. If there isn't setting up a production line becomes the same as setting up any other production line. When you unlock a new part to craft and are setting it up to be built there need to be some amount of "oh, this is new" and not just "assembler with 2 items in and 1 out, I know how to set that up". So to achieve that I will be adding in more crafting machines and each one will have it's own unique setup of inputs and outputs as well as size and possibly even other requirements. I will not over load you with tons of machines that only can make one recipe as that would just be annoying. But I do want to narrow down on what machines can do and likely add a few new machines in each tier.
With these Ideas in mind I will be making some changes to 0.4.
First comes the forge and it is being cut. I was never happy with how this building was in the game. In my head it was never clear it just "made stuff" the what and how were up in the air as well. I also don't like how it uses solid fuel items for power and in the future there will likely not be any production machines that use solid fuel. I want to keep power production and Item production separate.
To replace the forge there will be a second hammer the "Steam Hammer" that runs on steam made in a boiler (see last weeks log for more). Both hammers will see changes to their recipe list to account for the changes. I have decided to double down on the hammer idea as I think it works quite well for a simple crafting machine and offers a good visual spectacle unlike some alternatives.
There will also be at least one new machine the "Rolling Mill" but more on that on a later day.