By Dave Georgeson
So there are all these worlds out there for you to explore. A natural question for you to ask is “Can some of it be mine?”
The answer is “yes, absolutely”.
In our current pre-Alpha state, players can use the Trailblazer tool to set up temporary camps. Soon, they’ll be able to turn those temporary camps into long-term Homesteads instead.
WHAT IS A HOMESTEAD?
A Homestead is a patch of a world that you claim as your own. You set up a camp, register that camp with the Transplanetary League, and voila!, it is yours.
Now you can build on that plot of land. You can create a home, a shop, a manufacturing facility, a farm, a giant robot…whatever you desire. If you claim a homestead in space, you can build a starport, or hollow out the interior of an asteroid as a smuggler’s base, and more.
To do so, you use Civil Engineering tools, like the Instaformer, Fabricator, and Paver to build structures and roads. You can use Forestry tools like the Xyloslicer and Growth Pod to add/grow trees and plants. And you can use Mineralogy skills to transform the terrain around you with the Terraformer.
Later, you’ll also be able to add active defense systems (like turrets and force fields) to keep the aggressive wildlife at bay or simply build passive defenses (like walls and ditches) to discourage them from wandering into your property.
In other words, it’s your home and your imagination is the only limiter on what you can do.
EXPANDING YOUR DOMAIN
There’s a lot of planets out there. And we don’t want you limited to living only on a single world.
So, you can unlock new homesteads as you adventure, usually by acquiring new nodes on a skill tree, but there are other ways as well that we’ll unveil as we develop.
Those additional homesteads can be used to either establish another home on a different world, or they can be placed next to your existing homestead to enlarge your original claim.
CAN I MOVE A HOMESTEAD?
The answer is “sort of”. If your homestead is empty (you haven’t built or changed anything there), then sure, you can release it and go place it somewhere else.
But if you’ve built a lot of stuff, then it’s a different story. Eventually, we’ll be creating a system that packs up your stuff into a crate so you can move that somewhere and reassemble your structures at the new location. That takes some effort, but it does make it possible to relocate your homestead.
NOTE: The first iteration of this feature will not be nearly so refined. In the first iteration, if you release a homestead, you’ll lose everything on that homestead. So choose wisely until we get the rest of the systems built!
CAN MY FRIENDS HELP ME BUILD?
Absolutely. Even in this first release, you’ll be able to give a friend permissions to build and change things on your homestead (and you can revoke those permissions also). We’re also adding a Gifting feature so you can (for example) mine a bunch of resources and bring them back to a friend that is crafting building tiles and creating structures.
This, coupled with the fact that you can see the controls and tiles that people use as they build, allows you to cooperatively and easily build with others on any homestead. It’s a fun way to build, so enjoy!
WILL THERE BE OTHER FEATURES IN THIS UPDATE?
Well honestly, that’s already quite a bit. But we’re planning more on top of it. How much of the list below will make the cutoff for this particular update? We’re not sure yet. But we’re currently working on:
- Prospecting: The ability to find stone, metal and gemstone deposits on or below the surface of your worlds.
- Seasons: The world transforms around you as the seasons pass.
- Onboarding: The game now has a LOT of features (even though we’re not even close to feature complete), and despite the fact that we’re going to need to redo the onboarding many times in the future as things continue to change, it’s asking too much from our testers to join the game and learn it all from scratch without some assistance. Those F1 help screens just aren’t enough. So we’re going to try some stuff out to help with that.
- We’re working on cliff traversal and falling damage with the objective to make cross-country travel more challenging, but also more of a puzzle and fun.
- We have some ideas on how to make creatures smarter/more interesting, so we’ll be tinkering with that.
- Bug fixes. The tests we’ve run are continuously feeding us issues to examine and we keep knocking things off the list as we do these updates.
- And more. Yes. Definitely more. But that’s the list of major stuff.
WHEN WILL THIS UPDATE OCCUR?
After the Thanksgiving holidays, so early December sometime. I hope you’re looking forward to it! We’d really like to start running longer duration tests. We’ll see how things go with the bug fixes and then decide on that.