After we posted our last Dev Diary which detailed some of the things you’ll be seeing in the next TerraTech Worlds update, we’ve had an amazing response from you all: we’ve been answering lots of your follow-up questions over on the TerraTech Worlds Discord server, and continuing to work hard to bring you the next game update.
Today, we want to share our updated TerraTech Worlds Roadmap, which has a few changes and updates from the one you may have seen previously:
As you can see, we have ‘Reimagined Planet’ scheduled for autumn of this year, which replaces the ‘New Planet’ information you would have seen on the older Roadmap.
What are ‘Megastructures’?
You might notice that we’ve also added ‘Megastructures’ to the Roadmap as part of the autumn 2024 update!
Megastructures are large structures which need the help of Prospectors like you in order to be completed: you’ll need to explore, craft and battle your way through a series of tasks in order to get them working again.
You can think of Megastructures like milestones for you to achieve in each biome, which will give you a large reward: Megastructures unlock buffs for the whole world (so everyone joining your game will benefit from them!)
You can see some (very early!) concept art ideas for them here:
More information about Megastructures will be coming soon!
Why has this been done?
In our previous Dev Diary, we talked about all the important changes we’ve been making to improve TerraTech Worlds.
A lot of these changes directly affect the way the planet has to be built: for example, the changes to the early-game progression flow (i.e. all the stuff you’ll do in the first few hours of playing the game!) required major updates to how the forest and swamp are laid out. What we already had was working well for the previous iterations of TerraTech Worlds’ early game, but in updating the way we introduce the biomes to newer players, we needed to also change the layout of the biomes themselves to reflect this.
Additionally, after releasing our summer update, we received lots of amazing feedback about the desert biome, with lots of you talking about both the look and feel of the desert as being a ‘step up’ in terms of environments in TerraTech Worlds. We agreed, and knew that we wanted to bring the rest of the planet up to the same standard as the desert.
Both of these factors combined meant that remaking Nibiru became a necessity, and that we had to prioritise reimagining it over making an entirely new planet from scratch. We realised that if we had to make all of these changes anyway that we wanted to do it thoroughly, and make Nibiru the best it could be.
The reimagined planet will look familiar to those of you already playing, but most of the terrain, plant life and resources have been moved, along with new enemy bases & behaviours, new or moved points of interest, and a completely reshaped coastline to support the new upcoming boat Techs. (Apologies in advance to all of you dedicated map-makers out there!)
This is a huge piece of work for us so we want to make sure that we nail it before we start working on new planets.
We hope you’ll agree that getting the fundamentals of the planet right is a higher priority than making more stuff…however, we’re also aware that new stuff is always fun and exciting, and once we’re happy with Nibiru, we’ll be getting started on that new planet ASAP!
When will the autumn update be released?
We’re still on track to release an Unstable build within autumn, but the Unstable build will work a little differently than previous ones: because this next TerraTech Worlds update is significantly larger than any we’ve put out before, we’ll be releasing several versions of the Unstable branch over the next few months.
We’ll begin with an Unstable branch which includes some of the features we’ll be bringing to the autumn update, and continue to update the build with more features over the subsequent weeks.
The Stable branch will follow later on: the date that this releases will be dependent on the feedback we receive from Unstable players, and the changes/additions/rebalances we feel we need to make based on both this feedback and our own development goals.
We’ll continue to keep you updated as we work towards releasing the next update for TerraTech Worlds: please feel free to leave any questions below, or join us over on Discord!
Until next time, Prospectors!