Fellow Dwarves! ⛏️ Yesterday we set the next update live onto the main games branch. Quite a few things in there and It’s now live to all players. I'll list them below!
New features
Herbs have been added as a growable to farm plots
Herb seeds can be gotten with a random chance from herb bushes.
Key input rebinding has been changed to be less of a hassle. This was an issue for some. If a key is already bound, you'll be asked to confirm setting that key and it will remove the already bound key from its binding.
Added a progress bar in the Machine UI to display crafting progress
Changes
Due to new dwarves STILL struggling to find the relay in the citadel, it has been moved to be closer to your bedroom.
Improvements to AI inside of the tutorial map to stop them getting stuck on each other.
Boar spawning has been increased by 20%
Fixed snap points of new tiles on stone foundation and square stone pieces.
Changed crafting recipe for navigator from ruby ingots to ruby ore
The player now has a few cooked boar meat when they start
Different alcohols now give different inebrations.
Altered vsync checkbox size in settings.
Instructions in toolbar now update keybinds displayed
One of the tutorial quests no longer consumes an item on completion
Typo fix up on tool stations
Typo fix up on quests (English only)
Bug fixes
You should now not be able to complete a quest unless you have the necessary inventory space.
Blacksmith returns contents when destroyed.
Fixed a small bug that wasn't allowing items to be shift clicked into the Minecart Station
Fixed a bug where you could stack items of 1 stack max (Tools)
Fixed cost consumption and refund for long belts
Please let us know if you have any questions or issues.
The future
We want to take a moment to discuss Orebound and what we are currently working on for the end of the month. 🔧
Adjusted plans slightly based on player feedback
We are delaying the new map and will pick a new date for that in the near future. We got very excited about adding a new map to play that was custom made, however after hearing the community we feel there's more important things to come first. We are still working on this bespoke experience and it will be great when it’s done.
So what are we doing? 🤔 Well we’ve read your feedback, read all the reviews ( literally all of them ), watched gameplay and seen what still needs to be done.
Quality of life is one of the biggest areas that need improvement, so we’ve pushed that forward, after that we are also working on how our factory system works. We understand how slick and polished this needs to be. So many people want stands for belts, want the ability to snap belts in lines, and have more functionality to make a base without frustration. Improvements to splitters and snaps for factories etc. We think there's a lot here that will make everyone's experience better and we want this to happen now so it’s all done for the future.
The key rebind system also needed an overhaul which is in this version of the game now. We set up the keybind system when we didnt have many keys in the game. As this grew it caused issues. So this needed a work ( currently in this update. )
We have noticed some players are turning on and off build systems without knowing it. Causing frustrations. Orebound contains an extremely powerful build system so it’s important we make sure that the quality of life for these tools is really good. Something we want to work on in January and February.
So we have decided to work on that for the next few weeks but this is also alongside two other major things.
We have made some huge improvements to performance and massive factories with a new asynchronous system for belt items. This basically means you will be able to have thousands of items on belts without a CPU slow down. Something that is a big pain point for some people and something everyone will encounter eventually with a mega base. This will be a massive improvement.
We have also made changes to how items are registered inside inventories and storage. Our inventory system, for example how we detect things going in and out at scale, was inefficient and caused performance issues. Again this will be another massive improvement.
We hope rolling all of this out will ease up on CPU usage for the game for the factory side of things and essentially mean you can build anything without major performance loss. 💪
We will demonstrate these soon after we are done testing them.
There are two other areas we need to improve on. One is the navigation and the other is the voxel landscape. Both are quite CPU intensive; these are the next areas we want to focus on ( in terms of optimisation ) to make the game even better in the future. These are more long term.
We are also ever closer to putting our GAS system live for the RPG aspect of the player. @deathwyrm has done some great work here and it’s going to allow our RPG game to go up multiple tiers of quality.
We plan to roll out as much as we can for the end of January 2025 and keep working of course releasing more updates throughout the year.
All of these additions will build a solid foundation for Orebounds development over 2025 and we cant wait to bring you more awesome updates!
Thank you fellow Dwarves for your continued support! Please remember to drop us a review if you’re enjoying the game. We’re a small team and it really helps us out!
🙏