Update 0.8.0.0 is out! The new Population Dynamics adds a new game mechanic, the largest such gameplay change since MegaFactory Titan has entered early access!
Older saves will work with the new mechanics, however, you will need to rearrange and rework parts of your factory to do so.
Population Dynamics
People are no longer solely the domain of the AI. Now, as a player, you too need to manage your own population! In order to run your factory, you will need to build habitats, hire workers, pay their wages, and supply them with food, potable water, oxygen, and medicine, and also make sure they remain happy. You start the game with several days of necessities, but once those run out, you will need to start producing them yourself at your factory, or buy them from other factions. You can also hire workers off of other factions, but be careful -- this can cause other factions to be drained of people, and they will demand less trade from you as a result.
Pollution Dynamics
Pollution dynamics have been expanded greatly. Pollution now negatively affects most production facilities in the game. Pollution also reduces the happiness of your workers, and can cause them to leave your factory if you don't address it. In addition to previous pollution removal buildings, there is now an early pollution scrubbing augmentation you can install directly into your structures. Visually, polluting now leaves huge black clouds lingering all over your factory.
Interface Theme Overhaul
The main interface has been overhauled, with changes made to nearly aspect of the interface.
The default color scheme has been redone as well, and now there is support for many different color schemes.
The infolinks have been completely redone to be much clearer and easier to navigate. A lot of extraneous / useless information has been removed from it. The info is much more compact, and infolinks can now be searched.
A ton of changes have been made to make the UI better suited for players with smaller monitor resolutions, with more compact interfaces in a lot of places.
Difficulty Rebalancing
Normal difficulty has been made less difficult financially. Crises are now less devastating on Normal and Easy mode.
There are more ways to deal with the meteors, as certain defenses which work well against storms now work well against meteors.
Certain Crises, such as meteors, now show you a countdown timer of when they will arrive. This gives you enough time to prepare defenses.
Crises are less frequent in general.
You can also change the difficulty mid-way through the game. If you are in custom mode, you can edit the individual variables as well.
Performance and Memory
Vulkan now uses significantly less memory during the game, especially for players who explore a lot. There is now better performance in general when lots of mining is occurring. Load times have been improved. Large save files use less memory as well.
Quality of Life
Graphical improvements for lower resolution monitors, such as improvements to jagged bloom effects, and ugly SSAO artifacts.
Mission success or failure messages go away after a few seconds if you ignore them.
The ledger shows a pie chart of your expenses so you can quickly tell what is costing the most money at a glance.
All tutorials and loading screen tips are now readable in Infolinks.
And a huge amount of small tweaks and UX fixes.
Full Changelist
0.8.0.0
Gameplay
- Production structures, extractor structures, large powerplants, certain upgraders, radar, research labs, cloud seeders, vaporizer stacks, and most population-related structures now all need workers to function.
- Habitats now can have population assigned to them, which allows them to send out workers to nearby structures.
- You can hire workers from most of the allied factions. This will pull away population from that faction, reducing their trade demands.
- You can lay off any of your unassigned workers.
- Workers cost a flat daily wage (except for the Cult faction).
- Population needs food, potable water, oxygen, and medicine. If they don't get what they need, they will become unhappy, and if too unhappy, they will leave. In the case of missing oxygen, they will immediately leave.
- Oxygen, when consumed, converts into Carbon Dioxide, which must be passed back into Oxygen Gardens (or Farms) to convert it back into Oxygen.
- Potable Water converts into Waste Water once consumed, which must be passed back into Water Treatment Plants to be cleaned.
- You can purchase necessities from some of the allied factions, if they have any in stock.
- Population becomes unhappy when there is no power in their habitats, but they still function just as well.
- Population becomes happier if they don't have any work to do.
- Luxury habitats reduce unhappiness modifiers.
- Comm Towers, Office Parks, and Hospitals increase the happiness of nearby habitats.
- Happiness of population drifts towards the mean over time in the absence of external factors.
- In new games, you will get a fixed amount of population and several days worth of necessities to start with. In older saves, you will get these as well.
- Pollution reduces the working speed of most production facilities in the game.
- Pollution reduces the happiness of habitats.
- Pollution Scrubbers help reduce inefficiency caused by too much pollution.
- New Scrubber Augmentation for installing into your structures, which reduces pollution generated.
- Farms and Habitats now can take augmentations.
- Most population-related structures are now in the tech tree and must be researched.
- You can change the difficulty while in game. Easy, Normal, and Hard can be switched between. Sandbox can not. Custom difficulty allows you to tweak some of the individual variables of the difficulty, but not all of them.
- Difficulty - Normal difficulty has reduced costs. All difficulties have reduced crisis intensity by default.
- Crises are less frequent in general.
- Meteors can now also have their damage reduced slightly by using Stabilizer Floors and Mass Dampers.
- Underground structures are also resistant to meteors by default.
- Different Crises have differing warning times now. Meteors, in particular, have a very long lead time, to give you plenty of time to set up turrets.
- Selling trophies is no longer a way to get near-infinite money. The price of trophies now falls off the more you sell. They still can net you a lot of money in the short term, but in the long term, it stops being a viable way to support your factory.
- You can only stash items from structures, not from vehicles now.
- You can't destroy your main base while there are items inside of it now.
Graphics
- Large pollution clouds now hang around your factory if you pollute too much.
- Dust clouds don't move as fast in the wind.
- Tweaked fog to look nicer, especially in the minimap view.
- Fog has greater variety of color, and is more noticeable.
- Minimap view exploration cutoff is smoother.
- Tweaked pollution/temperature/tides/geothermal overlays to look nicer.
- Improved SSAO to be crisper and less noticeable.
- Reduced bloom jaggies on lower resolution screens.
- Toned down the brightness of certain glowing structures.
- Added floor lights to farms and oxygen gardens.
- Tweaked smoke particles.
- Tweaked a number of other structure models.
UI
- Default color scheme redone.
- Several new color schemes to choose from.
- The infolinks have been completely redone to be much clearer and easier to navigate.
- Infolinks subsections has a search bar.
- Extraneous info removed from many infolinks sections.
- Certain Crises now show you a countdown timer of when they will arrive. This gives you enough time to prepare defenses.
- UI is more compact in size, better suited for smaller monitor resolutions.
- In the Missions Board, requests are grayed out if you already have a prior request from the same faction.
- Below your money display is now a population display, which tells you your total population, assigned population, if any habitats have errors (such as lacking in oxygen), and a button to lay off your workers.
- Habitat UI now shows you a breakdown of where your people are working.
- Mission success messages now go away after a few seconds if you don't open them up.
- Explorer notifications are usually sent to the bottom corner of the screen now. These notifications only appear in the middle of the screen if that explorer is selected.
- Inefficiency due to pollution is now shown in the "Bonuses and Penalties" panel of all producers.
- High Priority setting now applies to worker usage as well as power consumption.
- Land buying UI made more compact, with improved clarity of options.
- Loading screen reports load progress better.
- Ledger shows a pie chart of daily expenses.
- "Sell Only" structures build button removed, replaced with "Population" structures button at the bottom of the screen, also rearranged.
- New overhead floating error that appears when a location has no workers that can work there.
- In the tech tree, nodes will stay filled when researched fully.
- Tutorials and loading screen tips are now readable in Infolinks.
- Items are now sorted better across all readouts in the game, in infolinks, in the action bar, etc.
- In Infolinks, some goods (like necessities) will show you where they can be purchased at.
- Added a new tutorial for population dynamics.
- Tons more small changes made to all the UI across the game, too many to list.
Performance / Memory
- Performance - Improved load times for large save files.
- Performance - Better performance when lots of mining is occurring.
- Performance - Made improvements to UI performance.
- Memory - Significantly better memory usage in general, especially with large save files.
- Memory - Vastly better memory usage when mining or altering terrain.
Other
- Bug fix - Floors no longer report a repair cost because they don't cost anything to repair.
- Bug fix - Fixed UI badges not showing up.
- Bug fix - Fixed thumbnails showing blackness in parts.
- Bug fix - Fixed goods classifications being sometimes incorrect.
- Bug fix - Fixed glowing models sometimes causing black spots.
- Bug fix - Fixed window size resetting whenever you change options.
- Bug fix - Fixed changing themes not resetting all of the UI.
- Bug fix - Fixed a major bug where the stores wouldn't sell autocannon rounds in a meteor storm.
- Bug fix - Fixed a shadows bug where far away shadows at dusk and dawn were not getting rendered.
- Bug fix - Floating icons in game fade out properly when far away or when the mouse moves close to them.
- Bug fix - Fixed bug where mining vehicles would freeze up when their pickup vehicle was near, even if they had nothing to give their pickup vehicle.
- Bug fix - Fixed vehicles going to the wrong spot after finishing a job.
- Bug fix - Fixed tutorial not triggering properly in some cases.
- Crash fix - Crashes when exploring or buying maps fixed.
- Crash fix - A number of general out of memory crashes in Vulkan fixed.
- Crash fix - Rare crash when mouse cursor moves outside the window.