Quality of Life Update is out now!

Friends and Soon-To-Be-Friends,

We’ve been working on our big August update (our roadmap is here), but we felt that a few smaller features are already ready to be showed off and added to the game now! These are primarily quality of life features, a little bit of rebalancing, and some bugfixes that weren’t breaking the game.

It’s a big list for version 0.1.S20573, so we’ve tried to make it a little easier to read. Let’s talk about all of it properly.

Quality of Life Features

Trash Slot

We’ve added a Trash Slot! You can get it by unlocking it from the village monument, it becomes available from Tier 2. You'll be able to retrieve the last trashed item, in case you accidentally threw away something important, and in general, it tries to keep a single stack of items.

(Basically, if you throw away 5 logs and then 10 logs, you can actually get all 15 logs back. If you then add 5 stone, all of the logs are gone though.)

Big Slots

It’s an inventory slot, and it’s BIG.
Big Slots are a new type of inventory slots that can hold ten stacks of a single item!

When you get one, it replaces one of your standard inventory slots. You'll get them by unlocking it from
the monument. For now, you can get three of them and they become available tier 3, tier 5 and tier 7.

New Inventory Shortcuts

We've added two new inventory shortcuts to go along with Sort, “Move All” and “Transfer Same Type”.

• “Move All” just moves all items from one inventory to another and exists in both your primary inventory and other storage inventories.
• “Transfer Same Type” only exists in other storage inventories, and basically pulls items that already exist in the storage.

So if you have some wood and some bark in your inventory, and one piece of wood in the storage inventory, you can press “Transfer Same Type” to pull only the wood in your inventory to the storage inventory.

Balancing Changes

Harvestables Respawn Slower

Running out of resources is not what the game is about, but clearly, harvestables such as trees, stones, etc have been respawning a little too fast. Harvestables now take 20 minutes before they roll the 20% chance to respawn.

Enemies will respawn roughly the same as before.

Shortened Callback Delay

It’s now a little faster for the callback to change from targeting individual sparks to the bigger spark circle. It should feel a little better when you need to get all of your Sparks back.

Quest Rebalancing

So for some quests we require you to manually harvest stuff or require parts from enemies. Sometimes it’s because you’ve just unlocked something new and we want you to use some new tools, sometimes it’s to give you an excuse to explore further, sometimes it’s to get you into the combat part of the game. We’ve gotten the feedback that the overall balancing for this has been too tedious and that’s not our aim, so we tried to change that.

To that end: We’ve tried to explain and communicate a bit clearer when we’re trying to encourage you to use new tools. We’ve balanced a few of the quests to need less items. We also swapped when two quests unlock - you now unlock Limestone Harvesting first and then Quartz Harvesting, so you don’t need to manually harvest so much.

If you wanna see the full details, they're here:

Better Throughput of Vertical Logistics Tools

We buffed the cannon, elevator and zipline, we noticed that you had to build a few too many. Cannons and Ziplines will now bring approximately 60 items per minute instead of 30 and 50 items per minute respectively, and the Elevator will bring approximately 90 items per minute instead of 60.

Communication “Bugs”

Better Quest Flow

We’ve done two changes to the quest flow. Number one, NPCs will let you hand in quests that you are able to complete before they give you a new quest. We’ve seen a few people get distracted because they have to accept a quest before handing in an old one, and it’s clear to us now that this is too disruptive. So now you can always hand in a ready to be completed quest before the game tries to give you a new one.

We also have made now made sure that the villagers will always give you “older” quests first - there was a specific instance where your quest log can have a quest that you are technically not able to do, and while the quest is available in the quest giver, but that can be missed. So now, that can’t happen and the villagers will give you the quests they are able to give you in a linear order.

Gameplay Clarifications

There’s a lot of stuff to learn in the game and we missed out on some glossary entries that could’ve had a bit more clearer stuff.

We now have an actual clarification on how you equip Sparks. We have a better Hauling Spark explanation. Did you know you can toggle the Aim Mode button instead of the holding the Aim Mode button? We didn’t realise it was so easy to miss, so we added info about the Aim Mode Toggle and Hold in the little popup you get when you first get a Spark.

New Save and Quit Button

We saw on social media that someone lost their 40 hour save. They completed the early access content in a single save, only using the autosave. They then started achievement hunting in a new world, but of course, since they only used the autosave, their 40 hour save was deleted.

We want to prevent that, so we’ve added a “save and quit” button that hopefully encourages people to manually save more often, and also streamlines that process.

Bugfixes

It’s the lightning round! Here are some bugfixes.

• Fixed build menu not updating if you’ve unlocked something while the menu is open.
• Fixed Hauling Spark pick up AI where it would hang around instead of picking up items.
• Fixed the build menu not remembering what type of path you used last.
• Fixed “Full Inventory” showing up when it shouldn’t be.

Multiplayer Bugfixes

We do want to specifically shout out that we've fixed two major desyncs and thank folks who helped us out by playing multiplayer in the Beta branch!

New Customisation

Pride Flag Pattern

We also squeezed in a Pride flag pattern - as a diverse team with queer people, we wanted to add this one in for ourselves and for all the other queer folks out there. Fun fact: In Germany, Christopher Street Day is what we call pride parades, and it happens all throughout summer! We're based in the Cologne area, a historically queer city, and our pride parade is in late July.

That's all for now!

Alright, and now, we're going to go back into working on the August update. If you're looking for more WIP stuff, you can join us in our Discord! We told them a little earlier about when this update would be ready and showed off some of the features there!

Little sneak peek on this month's devlog... We're gonna properly show off our trains! Choo Choo! Look forward to it!