As we get closer towards Early Access (which, if you haven’t seen the news, is dropping on March 22nd 2024!), we’ve been continuing to look at feedback from various playtests to aid the development of TerraTech Worlds.
Here’s some of what we’ve been working on most recently: please note that everything we’re sharing here is very much work-in-progress previews, and may change over the course of TerraTech Worlds’ development as we work towards Early Access. Everything shown below is not necessarily the final product!
Early Access, for us, is the start of a real journey that involves you, the player, from the offset. We’re not interested in just publishing our version of what we think makes a great game and leaving things there: we want our development process to be directly influenced by your feedback as you play. We’ve already done this with some of our recent work like adjustments to the Tech Yard, and we want TerraTech Worlds to continue to be moulded and shaped by its playerbase as we progress through Early Access and beyond.
Now, let’s show you some of the fun stuff!
Graphical Settings Update
The first (and possibly the biggest) set of changes we’ve made are to graphical settings. During our last round of playtesting, we received a lot of feedback from you all about certain things you’d like to tweak or toggle in terms of in-game graphics settings, and we’ve been hard at work to add those options into our Settings Menu.
You’ll now be able to amend the following graphical settings:
- Frame Rate Cap
- Clutter Draw Distance
- Scenery Draw Distance
- Motion Blur: On/Off
- Cloud / Fog Quality
- No HUD: On/Off
Pausing in Single Player Mode
During various playtests, lots of you were asking for an easy way to pause your games in single player mode, without having to exit back to the Main Menu screen.
We have now added the ability to do this to TerraTech Worlds, and when you open the Pause Menu now, the game will automatically pause in the background.
Efficiency Budget
We’re adding more cabs than the basic/default one you would have seen in the demo: each unique Cab now provides different attributes and also expands your in-game building options, but also has a brand-new feature called the ‘Efficiency Budget’.
Points saved from mounts, axles, cabs or other blocks on a Tech are called ‘Efficiency’. These savings are now capped by a new cab attribute: the Efficiency Budget. Once a Tech has reached 100% Efficiency, it will no longer 'save' points by attaching to a frame, mount or axle as the Reactor has used up its budget. Additional attached blocks will cost their full Reactor Load once the Efficiency Budget has been used up.
Some cabs have almost no Efficiency, but have really big Reactor Caps, whilst other cabs have very high Efficiency Budgets and lower Reactor Caps.
Honk
You may have seen in some of our recent streams that you can now change the colour of your cabs’ liveries (i.e. their skins) at will, but more importantly, Techs now have a horn enabled, so you can alert your friends to danger or simply annoy them over and over again at the press of a button.
We’ll be updating you more as we get closer to Early Access: remember to Wishlist us over on the Store Page if you haven’t already to be notified once the game is live on the 22nd!