Starground's second major update has arrived! While the last one was focused on enhancing the dungeon experience, this update is all about automation. The main focus is the new planet Tyria, which is a completely underwater zone with brand new materials.
What's New
Tyria is the first (of hopefully many) planet additions to the game. Players can venture onto its underwater surface after reaching the final research on Veridian. Here on Tyria, there's a whole bunch of new items, resources, buildings, technologies, music, and more.
Tyria is not a regular planet, in that there are no surface landmasses. Everything is underwater, subject to deep sea pressures. The only creatures able to evolve here are inorganic, and made out of strong minerals in order to withstand the immense pressure.
Water, electricity, and fire are a bad mix, so players will need to build underwater pressurized zones. These will give players an area that they can build inside of safely.
Below is an overview of everything new, and how they work:
Pressurized Interiors
As mentioned, Tyria is completely underwater in a high-pressure environment. This update introduces 4 new buildings to aid players in building these zones.
Pressure walls, airlocks, and interfaces are all for the exterior of your rooms. Encircling an area with these will get things ready to go.
Once you have walls put up, you can build a pressure pump, which will stabilize the internal environment and get things ready to go.
New Buildings
The Purifier and Tesla Coil V2 are new buildings in Starground.
The purifier does a variety of tasks, including processing uranium dust into pellets, refining slag, purifying mineral water, reprocessing nuclear waste, and more!
The Tesla Coil V2 is an upgraded version of the tesla coil, with a larger radius and being completely waterproof. This is absolutely necessary for the underwater environment on Tyria, but can also be a great addition to Veridian as well.
Space Elevators
With multiple planets that the player can build on, being able to transfer items between them in an automated way is necessary. This is where the new space elevator comes into play.
These are large heavy-duty structures that can import and export resources from planets. They've been setup with lots of customizability, including options for when to export, what region, and elevator groups. Taking 40 SE units, these buildings are only fit for a solid power network after a self-sufficient factory has been established.
New Resources
Tyria comes with two special new resources, which include:
Cobalt
Cobalt is a new metal that you can harvest on Tyria. Unlike copper or iron, this metal is more complicated to process. It first must be grinded into a powder, then smelted in the foundry. This is used for high-strength buildings and other cobalt-related things.
Uranium
Uranium is another new resource found exclusively on Tyria. Uranium is good for all sorts of things, with the main things being power (more on that below), and weaponry. Uranium can be used to assemble nuclear bombs, or can be converted into depleted uranium which will be a part of more powerful weapons.
Nuclear Power
Burners have finally been eclipsed with the addition of nuclear power. This power source is an efficient and more advanced method of powering your industry. Nuclear power consists of two main buildings:
Nuclear Reactor
This building takes in uranium and water to produce steam (for turbines), and nuclear waste. Nuclear waste can be reprocessed into more uranium pellets, or into depleted uranium for other things.
Nuclear Turbine
Turbines take in steam and output 30 SE units. Their byproduct is water from condensation of steam, which can be recycled back into the reactor.
That's the main content for Tyria, with everything else being more behind the scenes, and refactoring to make new content easier to add.
Enjoy!
Let me know if you run into any issues with v0.10 on the Steam forums, or on Discord. I can't wait to push more updates and see what's next for Starground!
Follow Along
Want to follow the development of Starground more closely? Please consider joining the official Discord, or tuning into regular devstreams held over on Twitch.
Full Changelog
Additions
- Added Tyria
- Added nuclear turbines
- Added nuclear reactors
- Added uranium ore
- Added uranium dust
- Added uranium pellets
- Added cobalt ore
- Added cobalt dust
- Added cobalt ingots
- Added recipes to grind ores in the grinder
- Added the Purifier building
- Added steam
- Added mineral water
- Added recipes to the foundry
- Added limitations for which buildings can be underwater
- Added pressure pumps
- Added pressure walls
- Added airlocks
- Added pressure storage interfaces
- Added a tag in the building menu to show whether a building is waterproof or not
- Added depleted uranium
- Added mineral water
- Added gemstones
- Added rain ripples
- Added new music for Tyria (thanks Ace!)
- Added space elevators
- Added Tyrian structure ruins
- Added V2 tesla coils
Changes
- Increased the size of the building menu to have 4 columns
- Moved all region info into a data table, making creating new regions and maintaining older ones much easier
Fixes
- Fixed an issue where tesla coil overlays were offset
- Fixed an issue where "Consumed" and "Generated" were not translated
- Fixed an issue where the power disconnection icon did not appear after a building on low power was disconnected from a network
- Fixed an issue where the CanPlaceLand tag didn't work when CanPlaceWater was true
Optimizations
- Improved performance of sessions with lots of players
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