It's April and with it a new installment of the devlog, showing off work that is being done at the proper, rewritten version of Alien Horizon (so far still scheduled for November at the earliest). Let's take a look at some new features and improvements:
Starting sector selection
Before your ship lands, three probes are sent ahead to explore a suitable area for landing, revealing three sectors you can choose from. All of them should be much more suitable than they were in the preview alpha, but if you have some more specific desires, you have an option to choose. This should minimize the number of times you have to restart the game in order to get a starting position you're happy with.
Once you select a sector, you can choose the specific spot your colony ship will land at. There's going to be an animation of the landing too, but I haven't gotten to that yet.
Exploration
Once you establish the colony a bit, you can, of course, start exploring the area around you, just like in preview alpha. However, you may have noticed that the sectors are very irregularly shaped - their borders follow ridges and contours and rarely cross over water. They do follow mostly hexagonal pattern, though, so you should be able to guess which sectors you need to go through to get somewhere. Their size can also vary.
The green and yellow markers mark the sectors - green if they are neighbouring an explored sector and yellow if not. If you mouse over a green sector, it highlights where the sector borders explored sectors with orange color (visible at the bottom of the screenshot)
The markers also show you exploration progress at a glance. And since sectors are larger (4x the area on average) and there are fewer of them, it takes significantly longer to explore them, depending on size and terrain - from some 6 hours up to about a year.
Next time, we'll take a look at resource deposits and surveying. You can also hop on the official Discord server, where more features are already presented. I hope you've enjoyed this devlog and see you next month!