Friends and Soon-to-be-Friends,
🎉 Oddsparks 1.0 is now out on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series! 🎉 So, of course, it’s time to talk about all of the changes that we’ve made from Hot & Cold update to our new 1.0.
There is one important thing in case you haven’t read anything - You cannot continue your existing save. We’ve deliberately broken savegame compatibility to finally take care of some longstanding world generation issues that we really wanted to fix.
However, we have an “earlyaccess” beta branch, where you’ll still be able to play your old saves on the last early access version. If you’ve never accessed a beta branch, you just right click on Oddsparks in Steam, select Properties and go to the Betas section in the new window.
Alright, our list is quite long, so get comfy!
New Biome: Corrupted Ruins
We now have our final biome, the Corrupted Ruins and the final tier 10 quests! In this gloomy and rainy area, you’ll find some unusual enemies who will attack your base when you build in the biome!
These slimes come over from the Rift-Touched Ruins and attack your workstations, covering them in Corrupted Aether that turns your bustling base into silent stillness. Your Sparks in the buildings and on the paths can’t work and walk. You won’t be able to open, move or delete anything that's been corrupted.
Thankfully, you’ll have a Spark that can help you out, Scrubby Spark! You can throw Scrubby Sparks onto your gooped up buildings to clean them and get them back to work. However, the Scrubby Sparks won’t last forever. They’ll also become too dirty at one point and you’ll have to clean them!
Base Defense
Since now you have to defend your base, you’ll get a whole new set of tools to help you.
The first is the Hostility Overlay. It’ll allow you to see what areas are hostile before you build on it, by showing you whether a building is seen as something that will be attacked by the slimes or not and the danger level of an area!
Of course, an area is more dangerous if it can be attacked by multiple spawners, but it also warns you about the strength of the spawner. The more you’re able to defend yourself, the stronger the spawners will become, so you’ll need to update your defenses.
Let’s talk about those defenses!
So you have a Defensive Wall that blocks enemies. The slimes can move through gooped up buildings, but the wall still acts as your initial line of defense. You also have the Aetheric Attractor which the slimes are more interested in sending waves to than your base, giving you some room.
You also have a new Enemy Sensor! It’s a sensor that sends a logic signal when it sees an enemy or any corruption. You can filter it with a plushy, so it’ll only send a signal when it sees a specific enemy type. You can also change the angle and length of the sensor! We also added this feature to the Motion Sensor to make it more useful.
And of course, we have the Spark Cannon! It’s an upgrade to the Spark Thrower and is able to target things by itself. You can set the targeting mode to Enemies, Harvestables, Corruptions and Items. There’s even a little hidden feature where, by turning it off with logic, it will call back your Sparks!
With it, you can have one cannon that uses Burning Sparks to set the enemies ablaze, another cannon with Stumpy Sparks to pick up the items that drop, and one last cannon with Scrubby Sparks to clean up the corruption, all working in tandem!
Last but not least, we also tried to make the functionality of the Animal Scarer a bit easier to use. You can now see where enemies spawn before you build it and feel a bit more secure about whether the spawner is actually off or not.
It's all about you playing the pace that you want to - so you can actually use the Animal Scarer to turn off all of the Rift-Touched Ruins too. This way you can control how many spawners are going to attack you and take the challenge of base defense on your own pace.
Automation Challenge
And of course, inside of the biome, there is the final automation challenge. This is the end game that you do after completing tier 10 and it’s inside of this mysterious cave.
We won’t spoil much here but we’ll say that we tried to distill all of the different parts of the game into this one capstone challenge. Everything you’ve built outside is going to feed into this challenge and you’ll need to bring everything you’ve learned and juggle your base in the outside and in the inside to complete it!
Main Story
So we have an illustrated end-game cutscene for you, just like the beginning of the game. But what might be more interesting for anyone who’s curious in the lore of the game is that we’ve added more to the Ancient Tablets in the game.
Previously, the tablets show a very small snippet of text from a mysterious unknown person, presumably the one who created the Sparks in the first place! But now, when you unlock a Shrine, you’ll get access to some more information. If you’ve ever wondered about the origins of the Sparks, how they got in this world, and why they were even made in the first place… Well, here’s your chance to find out!
World Settings
We’ve also added a new section when you create a new game!
You can now change the world settings! In general, we’ve split it up into 5 categories. Options in the Progression category allow you to skip parts of the progression or unlock all decorations and player upgrades for that save.
We also have a special “Automation Head Start” category. These allow you to unlock specific automation-focused quality of life features much earlier and play with them from the beginning. This is great for someone who’s already played a lot of other automation games and already want to start with the late game tools, like the replicas of the ancient bases, allowing you to build your base with more freedom. This is in it’s own section because what’s important is that we also change the actual price of the buildings so they can be used earlier in the progression.
There’s of course the World Generation category. You can change smaller things, but there’s two big things here. You can use the World Elevation setting to create completely flat maps for sandbox testing and your giant builds, and we included a terraform tool!
The Terraform Tool allows you for a cost to raise/lower a tile in the world. It’s meant as something to help you manage the world generation. Maybe there’s one bump that’s just too annoying, or you want to extend a little area? Then you can use the Terraform Tool.
The settings in the Items category allows you to make all recipe speed slower/faster, make fuel burn slower/faster, have the enemies drop more loot, buildings cost more or less items and have the villagers ask you for up to four times the amount of quest items!
We also have an item cheat menu. By turning it on, you’ll find a new button in the in-game menu that’ll lead you to a new screen where you can spawn any item to your inventory.
Last but not least, we also have a Combat category where you can turn on God Mode to receive no damage, and make the combat difficulty easier or harder. You can also make enemies spawn slower/faster and be more docile/aggressive.
We also have some presets which you can use as a base. Default is our default experience. Automation Focus is a version of the game for those who are used to automation games and want a bit more freedom earlier in the game. Sandbox makes everything free so you can test out some build ideas. And Hard Mode bumps the difficulty of everything to create a more challenging experience.
You can also change some world settings mid-game via the in-game menu.
There is one important thing - turning on some world settings can mean that the save will not be able to unlock achievements any more. Stuff like the item cheat menu, making buildings cost less or the combat very easy, that kind of thing. Anything that makes the game harder is obviously not an issue, and there's room to make the game a little easier while still getting achievements.
Oh, maybe you were wondering about the other little button in the new game section? It’s a Seed Preview!
Mod Support
You can mod the game!
And we already know because we’ve been working with community members who’s looked over the documentation and shout out to the early modders! We’ve also made some mods ourselves, like the Recipe Switcher and a mod that gives you access debug tools that we, as developers, use.
We have some documentation (you can check out the modkit now!) but if you need support with a mod you’d like to make, you can come to our Discord! The modding channel is open and we’d love to help you add what you’d like into the game.
Other Features
Alright, let’s now talk about some features that we added into the game, but didn't talk about properly in our previous roadmap!
Various Quality of Life features
We’ve added some additional quality of life features separate everything we’ve talked about. Let’s go through our small list.
Filter path addons now have reverse/additional functionality.
We’ve made our filter path addons more useful! The Spark Filter and Item Filter now can be “reversed”. So if you have an empty item filter, it allows any spark without an item and if you click the reverse button, now a spark with any item will walk through! We also added different modes to the Amount Filter, so now it can ask for not just a specific number but “equal to or more than” and “less than or equal to”.
Spark Gate to use with Logic
We also added one more path addon that’s unlocked late, the Spark Gate. It’s only usable with the logic tools but essentially, it acts just like the wait gate. So the Sparks will queue up behind the gate, and then when the gate receives a signal, it’ll let the Sparks pass!
One click path network up/downgrade
You can now upgrade and downgrade a network of paths with a single click! It stops right underneath path addons and follows the path network itself. It’s great for when you’re up/downgrading a windy network.
Map Views
We wanted to make the map a bit more manageable and give you a better overview over a few things, so we added a bigger quality of life feature - Map Views! They’re essentially lists on the map to help you find and manage a few bigger things (trains, waypoints, wireless logic) easily.
Waypoints View
When you first unlock Map View, you’ll get a list of waypoints. To not make the list too full, they only appear on the list if you feed or open the waypoint. The one on top is always the village waypoint, and after is any that you’ve built yourself and then the prebuilt waypoints sorted by range. With a click, it’ll take you to that waypoint.
This way, we hope you can save some time scrolling the map to the waypoint you’re looking for.
Trains & Wireless Logic View
Once you unlock the Map view, you can upgrade it further and not just see Waypoints but also the Trains View and the Wireless Logic View.
The Wireless Logic View groups together various Wireless Signal Sender and Receiver into the channels that are being used, and whether something is on.
The Train View gives you a list of all your different trains with their ID, their colour, whether they’re fueled or not and with what.
Train Quality of Life features, including Remote Train Management
We also in general, made the trains a lot better. You can now use the edit tool to move train poles and other train buildings. We also added a new stop mode on both the train poles and train stops, so you can more easily pause a section as you work on another and reworked information on the train poles so that it’s a bit easier to understand.
Also once you’ve gotten the Train View, you can unlock Remote Train Management! Now you don’t just have a convenient list to browse your trains, but you can open your trains, train poles and even train stations from the map!
You can’t delete, build or move any of the buildings, but you can change IDs, refuel trains, and change modes of train poles and stops. The idea is to make managing big train networks a little easier.
We also added a Big Cargo Wagon. It has one big item slot, which means it can carry ten stacks of a single item, compared to carrying six stacks of any item. This way, you can specialise your networks into carrying single items, but have flexibility when you want to.
Glossary Overhaul
We completely overhauled the glossary with a new layout and optimised it. You can click at items and buildings like before, but now also collapse and open categories with one button press. We also pushed this to other parts of the UI wherever appropriate.
The gameplay glossary is now in these nice categories and are resorted so it’s a bit easier to find the information you’re looking for. We also changed how the gameplay glossary popups hide themselves. They’ll do something like a minimise first, so you can finish whatever you’re doing and then check it out or close it on your own time.
We also made the recipe numbers clearer. We now show both the “time cost of recipe” and the “item per minute” everywhere, so you can do the maths however you prefer. You can also change the decimal scale in the settings, so you can get the level of precision that you want!
We also tried to make the damage system clearer with these damage resist icons that are now in the glossary and when you hover over an object. We also took the chance and reviewed all of the enemies and changed some of them! You might want to make sure you have more than just the Stumpies before you start fighting the Mantis Stags!
New Customisations and Decorations
We added a bunch of new customisations! 20 new items in total, and a lot more combinations for you to express yourself.
We also went through all of the customisations and moved a few, so if there’s something that you liked, but you can’t find, it might be that it’s now locked to a different achievement, or that it’s in the tailor’s shop.
Talking about customisations, we got feedback about how annoying it is to get juuuust the right colour using the mouse, so we changed the UI for the character colour picker. You can now use the scroll bar to get somewhere quick, like last time, but then use the small arrows to do fine control.
We also have new decorations. We’ve added a set of stone decorations and a set of ancient decorations. We’ve also created more plushies to fill out the ones that were missing and made sure that the plant pots have all of the plants that was missing from the Hot & Cold update.
Steam Achievements, Trading Cards & More
We’ve gone through all of the achievements and added a few more and now have the final set of 60! They’re of course, connected to the Steam Achievement system and we also added Trading Cards and Badges so you can collect your favourite Sparks and show off with your favourite villager. And of course, there’s the emoticons too. Here's a selection!
First Time Setup Screen
We now have a first time setup screen to point you towards a few things, like the autosave interval, gamma, and the accessibility settings.
Small Features and Changes
Final section! Let's quickly go through some smaller stuff we added
Minor Quest Rebalancing
We did some minor quest rebalancing to make the beginning a bit smoother, added an optional quest to try to get people using the Spark Thrower earlier. There's not a lot of changes. Hopefully you shouldn't notice anything!
Dedicated delete item from inventory button
So we’ve been figuring out what our “final” controls will be and we decided that the move to trash inventory shortcut was worth a dedicating a button to. In case you didn’t know, we actually have some shortcuts in the controls that’s not set to any buttons, and you can change them if there’s something you use more!
PC Multiplayer
We’ve moved it out of “beta” after more extensive testing. We’ve always felt relatively comfortable about the stability of the multiplayer (although, of course, there was still the occasional issues) but we’ve spent some time to iron out a lot of the wrinkles.
Misophonia Mode - Electric Humming Sounds
We added one more misophonia mode setting, so now you can also silence any kind of electric humming sounds.
Force Accurate Timestep
So! Our game forces an accurate timestep and depending on how many calculations have to be done at once, this may cause performance issues.
We’ve now added a way for you to disable forced accurate timesteps. That means that if you’re having a CPU bottleneck (e.g. your camera stuttering, even though the graphics setting is low), you can disable forcing accurate timesteps and change your timestep budget to stabilise your framerate. The timestep budget is the number of milliseconds per frame the game has to calculate everything happening in the game, and if there’s more calculations on that frame, it’ll simply push the calculation to the next frame.
You’ll have a stable framerate, but this means that parts of your base will end up being delayed. We set the default to 4 so it immediately feels better and you can crank that number up until you notice any more performance issue. (The default for the budget looks low, but that’s not the actual budget used if you’re forcing an accurate timestep.)
World Generation Rework
This is going to be mostly invisible, but we reworked the world generation to ensure that locations of various cells in the biome is more reliable.
Improving Load Distance
We also tried to improve load distance so that there’s less of a chance for you to see things popping into frame.
Art and music polish for Hot & Cold biome
The Hot & Cold update was a bit rushed on our side, and some of the world objects (like various rocks and trees in the hot/cold biome) wasn’t as polished as we’d like to be. So we spent a little more time making it look extra nice. We also shipped fewer tracks for the hot and cold biome, so we added a few more too.
Deluxe Upgrade/Deluxe Edition
Oh, in case you wonder where the Supporter Pack went and what this new Deluxe Upgrade is all about:
It's the same thing! We renamed it, as the Deluxe name made more sense on other (non-Early-Access) platforms and we didn't want it to be called different things depending on which platform you purchase it on. If you have already purchased the Supporter Pack, you'll already own the Deluxe Upgrade.
The content is also still the same: You'll get the Royal Outfit, the Corrupted Aether Outfit and decorative golden statues of all Sparks!
The Supporter Bundle has also been renamed to Deluxe Edition accordingly.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3073500/Oddsparks_An_Automation_Adventure__Supporter_Pack/
Alright, that's everything!
What’s next for Oddsparks?
You want to know already?! Well, I understand. Of course, our first priority right now is keeping our eyes out on any bugs you find and fixing them as soon as possible. We do have a small list of things that we were interested in adding but didn’t have time for. Depending on how well our release goes overall, we'll see how much time we can dedicate to continuing to support and add more stuff (both included in the main game and as DLC) to Oddsparks. So if you like Oddsparks, please tell your friends and your favourite streamers about it!
For now, since our programmers have been busy bug hunting and the artists had a little more time, we do want to say that we have some customisation and decoration focused things in the works! Please look forward to something soon.
Well, that's all I have! You should play the game or something. And maybe go to our Discord and talk about all of the new things you've found, tell us all the weird tricks you've learned and show off all of the spaghetti mess that is your base.
Thank you so much for all those who have joined our early access and given us feedback, and to everyone who have supported us. We're quite proud of what we've made and we're looking forward to seeing everyone play. Thank you so much for reading!
Enjoy Oddsparks 1.0!