Update 0.9.2.0 is out! It is heavily focused on rebalancing existing gameplay rather than adding new content. In general, the early game is now much easier, and far less overwhelming.
Gameplay Rebalance
The game has been drastically rebalanced in many subtle and not-so-subtle ways. First, the money situation is different. Early game missions now dump money on top of you, so finances are not nearly as problematic in the first few hours. Late game missions, in contrast, are much more stingy. This means, early on, completing a single mission can keep you afloat for many days.
Many changes to consumables have been made. You start with a big pile of every consumable, except for oxygen, that should last you quite a while. However, the bonus packages that show up from time to time always have the option to gain one of the main consumables or fuel. Furthermore, ruins now yield consumables or fuel the majority of the time, so exploring can greatly benefit your early game resource situation. This means you don't have to rely nearly as much on the Conflux Market, or at all.
The glut of money from early game missions means the price of paying off your loan early game is much higher. However, loan interest, and all daily payments are the same price as before.
Additionally, price collapses don't occur nearly as fast when you sell off various resources or trophies to other factions.
Some other balance changes: Some enemy factions activate much later in the game. Pollution doesn't become a serious problem until mid-game. Trash is produced at a much faster rate, for you to burn if you want. All ally factions give you much more time to complete missions. Population becomes unhappy slower.
Mining Rights
You can now buy the Mining Rights to land, rather than the Full Rights. Mining Rights allow you to only mine, but not build on the land. Why would you do this? Because Mining Rights are dirt-cheap. This lets you buy the Mining Rights to tons of land plots without fear of financial trouble, and set up mining outputs everything, all of which can feed into your central base.
Mining Depots
You can now build Mining Depots, a storage structure that can only hold mined resources. It is the default mining automation destination, but the main advantage of it, is that it is the only structure that can be built on a plot where you only hold the Mining Rights. Useful for setting up your far-flung mining outposts.
And a ton of small quality-of-life changes, mainly to the tutorial, but also to error-reporting in general.
Full Changelist
0.9.2.0
Gameplay
- When buying land, you can now purchase Mining Rights rather than Full Land Rights. Mining Rights are much cheaper than full rights, and allow you to mine resources, but you can't build structures there. This allows you to set up significant numbers of mining outposts cheaply.
- Full Land Rights are now more expensive than before. Mining Rights are much cheaper than prior.
- Property Tax on Mining Rights is significantly lower than Property Tax on Full Rights.
- New storage structure, the Mining Depot. It can only carry mining spoils. It is the default dropoff destination for mining automations. In addition to having a significant amount of space, it has the advantage of being buildable on land that you only have the Mining Rights to.
- Non-Mining Depot storages no longer support being the destination of mining automation. Existing save files will not change this, but new storages will not have this support.
- Ruins now are much more likely to yield resource caches rather than money. Resources are usually food, oxygen, water, or fuel for your starting powerplant.
- Starting necessities are placed in a pile outside of your headquarters now, which allows you to do with them as you see fit much more easily.
- Recurring bonus packages now always provide 1 option to gain resources (either fuel, or necessities like food) rather than vehicles or structures.
- When you choose a resource bonus from a bonus package, a spacecraft now lands and drops it off in your territory.
- Necessity and fuel rewards scales based on how needed they are.
- Starting loan payments required are much higher (but daily interest payments are the same).
- Drastically increased payouts for early game missions. Early game money is extremely easy to come by if you do missions.
- Some late game mission payouts are reduced, so it is less lucrative to, for example, farm Gunships throughout the late game.
- Low Orbit Mercantile Guild payouts don't fall nearly as quickly if you give them the same resource over and over (though their payouts will still fall eventually, just much later).
- All factions have a higher price floor when buying resources off of you, rather than the price collapsing to 1 if you oversell.
- Habitats can accept larger overflows of waste goods before they become unhappy.
- Tweaked some unhappiness values for habitats.
- Oxygen is consumed much faster, but Electrolyzers produce Oxygen just as fast to compensate.
- AI factions give longer times to deliver resources.
- Pollution is less of a problem early game.
- Increased trash production rate.
- Scavengers and pirates activate later.
UI
- Improved many error messages.
- Added a tutorial for pausing and a tutorial camera controls.
- Tutorial is now smaller and less obtrusive. You have to specifically open up the tutorials if you want to follow them. Otherwise, they just hang out in the corner where you can dismiss or ignore them.
- Other general Tutorial improvements.
- Loading screen tips are now slightly more topical based on estimated user experience level.
Other
- Ambient audio pauses when the App is paused.
- Bug fix - Fixed music sometimes getting cut off.
- Bug fix - Mouse hover highlight properly highlights transparent parts of models, like glass.
- Bug fix - Visible resources in vehicle or structure inventories are properly highlighted on mouse over.
- Bug fix - Fixed the tech tree nodes not highlighting when trying to find a tech from infolinks.
- Bug fix - Fixed colors of inventory bar.
- Bug fix - Fixed bugs related to AI behavior regarding unsolicited trade requests.
- Bug fix - Scavengers weren't breaking down buildings.
- Crash fix - Crash relocating pop to nowhere.
- Crash fix - Crash during the tutorial.
- Crash fix - Crash on using the quick locator.
- Crash fix - Crash when sending items from a cache to your stash.
- Crash fix - Occasional crash when deleting items.