Hello Cosmorists!
This was the month of v 0.1.5, or the On the Defensive update, alongside some other changes!
Cosmorists OST
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Although I haven't been uploading the game's soundtrack every day lately, as doing the same thing with different tracks can get rather repetitive, I'm almost done with uploading the game's soundtrack. It's expected that the remainder of the tracks will be uploaded on the YouTube channel sometime next month at this rate!
Technical implementation of shields (Math involved!)
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When a player gets damaged, a variable, which I'll call [damage multiplier], is calculated with this formula below, with m as a constant, and x is the total armor of the player:
[damage multiplier] will always be a value between 0 and 1, and the armor always has a minimum value of 0. Once [damage multiplier] is calculated, the damage taken by the player is multiplied by [damage multiplier].
E.g. The player gets 80 damage, and has 50 armor. [damage multiplier] is calculated to be 0.571, whose product is 45.71. Its rounded up to 46, and the player receives 46 damage as a result.
Here's a graph displaying the relationship between [damage multiplier] and armor:
And here's a table for the damage multiplier (DM) as a percentage at certain values depending on the armor!
| Armor | DM |
|---|---|
| 0 | 100.0% |
| 5 | 95.01% |
| 10 | 90.09% |
| 20 | 80.64% |
| 30 | 71.94% |
| 40 | 64.10% |
| 50 | 57.14% |
| 60 | 51.02% |
| 70 | 45.66% |
| 80 | 40.98% |
| 90 | 36.90% |
| 100 | 33.33% |
| 110 | 30.21% |
| 120 | 27.47% |
| 130 | 25.06% |
| 140 | 22.94% |
| 150 | 21.05% |
| 160 | 19.38% |
| 170 | 17.89% |
| 180 | 16.56% |
| 190 | 15.36% |
| 200 | 14.29% |
| 250 | 10.26% |
| 300 | 7.692% |
| 400 | 4.761% |
| 500 | 3.226% |
A potentially radical direction change...
Lack of direction
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Due to a lack of direction for what the future of Cosmorists should be apart from adding random content here and there, where it was this way for quite a while now, I highly considered changing the direction of the game to cut back on ambition, while also staying true to the game's space theme.
Cut out Luna, Move Aquatica's content to Tierra
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Although planetary exploration has existed in the game for around 2 years now, due to slow progress and lack of motivation lately, and especially lack of direction on what to do next, I've considered cutting out planetary exploration entirely, such as cutting out Luna, only preserving it for existing saves to maintain backwards compatibility.
At the same time, Aquatica is also cut out as its own planet, but all of its content is moved to Tierra where in a future update, Tierra would generate oceans across the surface alongside a new beach biome bordering oceans, and if the player walks into an ocean, it transitions to an ocean frontier resembling Aquatica, with walls generating where the land is, and if a player touches those walls, it'll take the player back to the surface.
In cave systems, I also envision unbreakable walls separating oceans from Tierra's current cave biomes, so players don't walk into an underwater biome, and get crushed by the water pressure, where the deepest that underwater biomes can go would be roughly layer 500 until going back to lava caves.
More distinct resource identities
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The thing that will likely be a high priority at the moment is to give each resource a more distinct identity. Shields are already undergoing another change shortly after the On the Defense update:
In the above screenshot, instead of each shield having a general armor stat that blocks nearly all types of damage, each shield will block different types of damage, blocking one type of damage very well but offering weak protection in others. So far, it's melee, projectile, and blast armor, but I'm considering adding a 4th one, one for hazards, a stat that blocks damage from cactus floors in desert caves, poison in jungle/wilting caves, or lava in lava caves, anything static that damages the player on contact!
In the screenshot shown, copper shields will be great for early defense against melee attacks, but will offer little protection against explosions or projectiles (stats are subject to change).
Tin shields are strong at blocking projectile damage, but less so with melee or explosive damage.
Iron shields will offer the best protection against explosions, but blocks slightly less melee damage than copper shields, and slightly less projectile damage than tin shields, but has higher durability, and so on.
Another change made is that copper swords and tin arrows will now deal 50% more damage, and tin bows will shoot arrows around 40% farther.
This rebalance is primarily to give existing resources more contrast with others, and a stronger sense of identity instead of rare metals having strictly better stats than metals before it. In the early game combat space, copper tools will now be best for melee combat, and tin is best for ranged combat. For the shields, it still uses that same formula as described in the technical implementation, but now applied to different damage types!
Beyond just combat, I have plenty of ideas on where to take this, something like a gadget giving +20% movement speed but only in a specific biome found in that biome's treasure or a rare enemy drop, or a gadget that gives the player immunity to a certain debuff, or a set of 2 or 3 shields in the shields slot giving the player something like +10% melee damage or +25% movement speed when damaged, the ideas can go on and on!
Asteroid exploration direction
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Alongside this planetary exploration cut, the spaceship will still exist, and the large biome and landing site system will also still be around, but instead of exploring other planets, I considered replacing it with some kind of explorable asteroid field around Tierra to keep the game's space exploration theme.
In this asteroid field, the spaceship is stationary, and the cosmorist can leave the spaceship tethered to it for oxygen to mine asteroids for ore and other resources, with hostile alien spaceships serving as enemies. The more distant from Tierra the spaceship is, the more valuable asteroids there will be, but also the more dangerous the hostile spaceships get.
Here's roughly what I envision the asteroid field to look like:
If I do go through, this will likely be a low priority thing at first due to the focus on resource functionality.
Automation serving as endgame content
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After early ambitions for automation once it was added into the game over a year ago, only to not add much to it since then, in this direction change, automation content will likely still be added, but serve primarily as end-game content instead of mid-game content, as the game's foundations were more focused on being a survival-crafting sandbox game instead of an automation game.
Now that we're halfway into 2025 (time flies!), this new direction and cuts on planetary exploration content may be a rough choice for me to make, but this pivot is primarily to prevent scope creep from getting too out of hand and slowing me down, and for Cosmorists not to be stuck in early access for multiple years longer than it should.
This is also to ensure content that does get added is concentrated on one planet instead of being spread thin across multiple planets!