Hello, Prospectors!
We know a lot of you have been enjoying updating your Techs with different colours, to make your mark and stand out against the terrain - and we also know that you’re interested in being able to customise your Techs even further, with even more skin options.
Additionally, structure blocks have always just been orange, which is a beautiful thing if your favourite colour is orange, but if not, we imagine you’ve been crying out in anger every time you have to load your carbon into that orange monstrosity of a generator.
Fear no more, orange haters, because you’ll soon be able to update your structure blocks to the same set of colours as your Techs, so you can match your wheels to your Workbench!
Additionally, we’ve updated the default colour of structure blocks to yellow, so when you jump into your game, you’ll see your buildings will be a bright new yellow hue. You can change back to the same shade of orange in just a couple of clicks though, if you prefer the old orange colour scheme!
And, more importantly: we’re adding a whole host of new skin options which can be applied to both Techs and structure blocks, meaning you’ll soon be able to completely change the look of your bases and Techs within TerraTech Worlds.
Let’s jump into the good stuff and show you just what we’ve been working on!
Tech and Structure Customisation
Basic Skins
A Basic Tech skin is a set of visual customisations that can be applied to any Tech. A basic skin includes:
Primary Colour: the main/most prominent flat colour, pre-selected parts of the block will get this flat colour.
Secondary Colour: the second most prominent flat colour (applied to other pre-selected sections of the block)
We’re going to be adding more Basic skins to TerraTech Worlds to give you a greater selection of colours to choose from when customising your Tech or structures.
Advanced Skins
Advanced skins are a little more complex than the Basic ones. Whilst Basic skins are made up of just two basic flat colours, Advanced skins will feature patterns, decals etc on them, as well as a multitude of colours. (In 0.4, we’ll just be starting off with various colours and patterns whilst we work on decals for 0.5!)
Advanced skins offer a palette of different colours that can be used as either primary, secondary or accent colours for customising blocks.
We’ll be adding this new skin type to the game with the release of 0.4, so you won’t need to wait too much longer to check out this first wave of Advanced skins!
Obtaining and Applying Skins
In terms of how to get these skins, you’ll still have access to the full range of eight currently-available Basic skins just by playing the game, as well as three new Corporation-themed Advanced skins.
Some skins will also be unlocked via in-game progress, eg. as rewards for completing certain missions, though we won’t be adding these skin rewards until 0.5. We’ll provide more information on this soon!
We also want to make it clear that we won’t be charging any additional real-world money for skins during TerraTech Worlds’ Early Access period.
You can select both Basic and Advanced skins from the Skins Menu:
- The left panel shows the library of skins available to you.
- Once a skin from the library is picked, it appears held on the cursor and your cursor will automatically switch to the skin brush tool.
- Now you can left-click to apply the skin to an individual block on the Tech or structure that you are mousing over.
- Alternatively, you can hit shift+left click to apply the skin to the whole Tech or structure clump that you are mousing over.
- The “No Skin” option in the Skin UI can be used to restore defaults
For more in-depth customisation, with the pattern tool selected, you can do the following:
- Hold ‘Shift’ down
- Use the WASD keys to rotate and resize the pattern to where you want it to be placed over the Tech or structure:
- Hold AD to rotate the pattern and WS to rescale the pattern
- QE will switch the direction of the pattern
- Alt + any of the WASD keys will move the pattern
- F will flip the pattern
- Left click and the pattern will be placed as shown on the ‘floating’ preview
Starting from 0.5, every skin will be obtainable by in-game methods such as completing objectives or defeating mini-bosses. New Skins added in 0.4 will be available to all players by default from the Skins menu.
Future Plans
We’ll do our best to have the majority of this polished and ready to go by 0.4., but there’s also a lot more we want to add in when it comes to customisation for TerraTech Worlds.
Some other things we’re looking to add in the future include:
- Seasonal/thematic skins tied to special events/times of the year
- Skins which replace block meshes (similar to some of the skins in TerraTech)
- More/different ways to unlock skins
That’s all for now, please let us know in the comments below what you’d like to see in the future when it comes to customisation for TerraTech Worlds!