Dwarven Den Preview 2!
Fellow Dwarves! Grab a mug of ale, a good chunk of bread and cheese, and gather round for another announcement of the Dwarven Den! Where we bring news on the upcoming future of Orebound straight from the halls of our engineers!
Road to Anvil Update 5
Anvil Update 5 is going to be our biggest and most impressive yet, with major changes to the cave system, expanding the capabilities of Poi's, and a massive content release for factory/automation gameplay.
With everything we want to do, we have decided to break up Anvil Update 5 and will be releasing some smaller updates when they are ready, rather than waiting for the big package update.
So before we sink our teeth into the bigger details of Anvil Update 5, here is what we have decided to release as standalone smaller updates. Strap in and get ready for a host of dwarven content to come!
The Mobility Update
The next scheduled update will be the Mobility update! In which we will be adding new methods to traverse the world of Orebound. Which means the release of the Steam powered dwarven vehicle! It will seat two dwarves, come with an inventory, run on steam power and have an attachable drill!
Alongside the dwarven vehicle will be pairs of tinkered boots to grant the player improved jump height, reduced fall damage and increased movement speed!
This smaller update will aim to release content to improve QoL when it comes to general mobility while playing the game and although we don't have a set date yet, will be the next update coming to Orebound.
The Citadel Update
Sometime after the mobility update, we will be releasing another smaller, concentrated update focused around the citadel. The aim here will be to bring more life into this area in the form of:
Interactable mini-games
A "Orebound Manual" to help guide new players and explain aspects of the game
More rooms and places to explore
Giving all Npc's in the citadel voicelines
Sound, particle effects and more Interactables to improve life within the citadel
Anvil update 5
Our biggest Anvil Update yet, it will change the world of Orebound forever. All things previewed here are in various stages of development and still all require rigorous testing, so it won't be ready for release for a while. But we are happy to announce what will be coming and give some teasers where we can!
Caves and world improvements
The caves, they change. While many a dwarf on too much mead has said the tunnels twist and warp before waking up in some hole and wandering back, this time it is true!
We have made major changes to cave geometry to add a variety of new, unique formations. Alongside the previous flat caves, now there is greater variance. Great halls of columns, jagged ridges that block the view. Fractures that break up and make the ground uneven. Immense care and work has gone into this, the voxel graph itself had to be changed greatly to improve performance to pack in more edits. But done it was, utilising inbuilt operations to separate logic, instead of the whole world always generating together, each cave generations differently. And the surface doesn’t try to generate cave logic, while cave logic doesn’t try to generate surface! For those of you with more stones in yer head than brains, that just means we get greater performance from some back end wizardry!
The mountains are now also a bit taller, never a bad thing, while using less noise to generate. At some point, this performance gain may be used to enhance the land a bit more.
Poi Improvements
The great changes to the cave system also required adjustments to the points of interest (POI) generation. Aye while every orc camp is a bane to any good dwarves mining operation, their placement became most humorous in the new system without adjustments, with orcs placing tents high up stalagmites, or off the edge of cliffs. Who truly understands the working of an orcs brain, it’s a mystery even to them!
An opportunity presented itself not just to add smoothing around POIs but to make a brand new POI creator. And yes, we do intend to release some form of this! First, we will want a select few people to help us test and create new POIs to place in the world, to allow us to refine it properly. Then we will consider the steam workshop after for community creation.
The POI system will be expanded to not just caves, but the surface as well! Find overgrown ruins in the deep enchanted jungle. Come across burned cottages in the plains, and brave the wreckages of the snowy tundra's. Of course, there may be dangers you didn’t expect from those that have made their home here. An unprepared dwarf will be a dead dwarf.
Finally on POIs, with our new voxel editing in the POI itself, we will be able to really expand on such a beauty of dwarven engineering, with great dungeons to delving into the earth and many foes to face within. Mostly orcs and goblins, they get everywhere.
Patrolling Greenspawn
And speaking of orcs and goblins getting everywhere, very soon, they will!
A new patrol system is being developed. Aye the brutes are going to move about the tunnels rather than just stand around, menacing the darkness, they’ll creep and stomp through the great underground. Not just all, but make frequent forays to the surface to hunt, smash and just be a general nuisance. Arm the turrets, prepare your defences, for they won’t just come in small numbers. The scouts report that the green horde gathers in large numbers, ready to descend in large raids upon your innocent settlement of industry. Mow down the scum as they charge upon you, and feed the earth with their carcasses!
Gold, Silver & Precision Tier Factory content expansion!
Coming alongside these might improvements to the world, we will be releasing the second phase of our three planned three-part factory expansion content. This time it is Gold, Silver and the Precision tier seeing new gameplay!
This second phase will build atop what we released for Copper, Iron & Steel in Anvil Update 4, aimed to go deeper into the dwarven theme of factory automation gameplay. The Third Phase in the more distant future will revolve around expanding on gem-tech and automation for Ruby, Sapphire & Emerald. Once that is complete, we will be able to announce our ambitions plans for what will come after...
But focusing on what is happening now, the content released in Anvil Update 5 will add new items, new machines, new methods of factory automation, a new deposit type and new tier of steam power! So, top up your ale and lets get into the details!
New factory-automation Items
Spread across automation tiers 5 & 6, we will be adding new recipes to manufacture which will expand on the mid-game factory content. The new items will be made of Gold, Silver, and a redesigned precision tier, building upon what was released for anvil update 4.
There are currently a planned 16 items to be going in, but this is subject to change as time goes on & the design matures. You can expect slightly more demanding resource requirements & complex recipes here, all aimed to improve the mid-game experience and expand on what we offer for factory automation gameplay.
Combined with Anvil update 4, we will have released well over 30 new items to be manufactured and so will be changing the resource requirements for building the keys in the Deepseeker to match the evolving factory gameplay.
New Machines
Coming alongside the expansion of items, we are also planning of bringing in 6 new machines to truly bolster your grand dwarven factories!
These machines will bring in a whole new tier of automation, with new gameplay and built out of gold, silver and precision components.
The Mastercraft assembler- A 4 input machine used for making more difficult item recipes
The Molten Smelter- A new type of machine that will melt metals into liquid metal
Precise Forge- Used to turn Liquid Metal into Ingots
Geothermal Station- Placed upon new Magma Deposits, it will extract Magma from the earth
Superheated Steam Generator- Converts Magma into a higher tier of steam power
Steam Transformer- Converts Superheated Steam into regular Steam for lower tier machines
These machines will of course be connected together with new Magma belts, Unique Steam pipes, Splitters, and Steam Tank!
It will of course take a lot of time to get all of this ready and tested for release, but there is plenty of factory gameplay to look forward to coming in the near future!
Here is a prototype design flow of how the new Magma/Liquid Metal will play out, subject to change with testing.
To summarise in order of planned release:
The mobility update:
Vehicles
Mobility improvement boots
The citadel Update:
Interactable mini-games
A "Orebound Manual" to help guide new players and explain aspects of the game
More rooms and places to explore
Giving all Npc's in the citadel voicelines
Sound, particle effect and more Interactables to improve life within the citadel
Anvil Update 5:
New cave generation system with a variety of different cave types and shapes
Taller mountains
Poi generation improvements
New poi creator tool which once refined, will be released to the community
New Surface layer Poi's
New poi's that will spawn within voxel terrain
Plans to have community held poi-building competitions
New enemy patrol system, orcs will actively roam around the world
16+ new factory automation items of Gold, Silver & precision tiers
Expanded tiers of Automation 5 & 6
6+ new machines
New methods of factory automation gameplay
New tier of power, superheated steam & methods of generation
New magma deposit type
The Long Road to 1.0
Everything we have discussed in this post is the tip-of the iceberg for what we still have planned when it comes to content for Orebound. There is still a way to go before we can come close to announcing what we have planned for the 1.0 release of Orebound, but we are slowly getting closer.
What we can say is that we plan to follow up Anvil Update 5 with content surrounding:
Gems (as mentioned)
Combat content expansion for weapons, armour & new enemy types
Expanding on Biomes with unique resources and content
Animal husbandry & more farming/cooking content
Side-quests & expanding on the Three brothers/Deepseeker story
New resources, deeper cave layers & rune tech
There is a long way to go before starting on any of this, but we hope this post has helped shine some light on the near-future of Orebound!
Dig deep and hold!