The first major update for Starground is here, and brings some nice new additions like The Lab dungeon, farming, cooking, special weapons, and more! Not the least of which is:
Modding Support
Starground now has official modding support! Modding is of course in its infancy, but we wanted this added in early so the game can all the more easily grow and take shape alongside the community, without having to rip everything apart to add modding at a later date.
The possibilities there are endless, and we can't wait to see what the future holds!
But don't worry, official content updates will continue for the foreseeable future.
If you'd like more info on how to create mods or install them, check out the Discord or the modding repository here. Official Workshop integration is a top priority following support for this update!
What's New
The Lab
The Lab is a new level to the dungeon on Enceladus! While a ton of work to finish, this new zone has added a lot of new things to the game, including:
Spore, Scourge of the Abyss
Spore is a brand new boss at the end of The Lab, and poses a new mobile threat that differs from Dreadcap's fight.
New Enemies
The Lab comes with all new enemies, ranging from gross spiders, to evil face monsters that will chomp on you.
The Darkness
The Lab is not lit up like the regular dungeon. This poses a new challenge, of not only fighting enemies, but now dealing with the darkness (or taking advantage of it by completely avoiding certain enemies).
You can access this zone by killing Dreadcap in the usual dungeon.
Dungeoning Improvements
New Dungeon Rooms
In addition to a whole new lab level, there are now multiple new special rooms that can appear in both dungeon levels. These can both either be good or bad rooms, that can sometimes prompt players with a decision. More of these rooms in the future will continue to spice up dungeon gameplay and make runs more unique.
Dungeon Minimap
With more rooms than ever and a whole new level to explore, it was necessary to help players find their way through. The minimap is a self-explanatory addition, but a very nice one at that. Navigating should be a bit easier now.
Artifacts
Artifacts are special items that you can find while out dungeoning. These have a wide variety of different effects, with some benefiting automation, some only dungeoning, and some both!
When inside of your inventory, these items apply their effect, aiding you in becoming the most powerful Stargrounder. There are over 7 of these in-game, with more on their way in the future!
Special Weapon Components
Special weapon components are a new sub-class of the regular components we all know and love. These differ in that they provide a special ability you can use with right click (or L2 on controller). They can help with all sorts of situations, like dealing with numerous small enemies, breaking things from further away, and more!
Back at Base
Farming
Farming is finally here in Starground! This addition involves a few new buildings, and a ton of new items.
This introduces the Farm Plot, which can hold a farmable item, and requires water to operate. This water can be gathered through the new Water Pump building, which is vital for farming of course, but can be expanded to be used in other automation recipes.
If you get tired of harvesting things by hand, you can also build the Harvester, which will employ your bee army once again to do your bidding.
Cooking
Farming isn't of much use if you can't do anything with it, so players can now make more advanced food items with the Oven and Grinder!
These food items offer multiple benefits, beyond just healing. Some food items can apply effects to the player when eaten, like Speed, that can aid you in dungeons (and automation).
The Oven takes in various resources to produce items, many of which first require processing inside of the Grinder, a new machine to grind resources into powder for cooking (and automation eventually).
Enjoy!
Stay tuned for more updates on our soon-to-be roadmap, and what else we have planned soon! If you run into any issues with new content (which is expected for such a large update), let me know on the Steam forums, or on Discord.
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 artifacts
- Added the magnet artifact
- Added the lead boots artifact
- Added the preserved clover artifact
- Added the chainmail glove artifact
- Added the grabber artifact
- Added the night vision goggles artifact
- Added the special item pillar dungeon room
- Added the chance shrine room, which has a 50/50 chance for powerful loot, or to spawn enemies when activated
- Added farm plots
- Added the ability to farm trees with apples
- Added water pumps
- Added water
- Added item descriptions for all artifacts
- Added a shadow to item stats text to improve readability
- Added an item tag to denote whether an item is farmable or not
- Added an item stat to show how much it heals when consumed
- Added latvian (Thanks Oviar!)
- Added a blur effect to UIs
- Added Moongrass to the dungeons
- Added modding support
- Added effects from food
- Added pizza
- Added apple pie
- Added moonshroom (as an item)
- Added moonflour
- Added the grinder
- Added ovens
- Added meat
- Added a mod menu
- Added latvian to the game (massive thanks to Oviar!)
- Added Oviar to the translation credits
- Added Unskill335 to the translation credits
- Added the Fountain Wishes track to the space hub
- Added a second dungeon level (not finished yet, but currently accessible)
- Added floor doors that appear when killing bosses
- Added a warning popup to the mods menu
- Added functionality to the mod search box
- Added background blurring to more UIs
- Added a new ModAPI function for syncing inventories with clients
- Added the ability to see player multiplayer IDs in the playerlist when the F3 menu is open
- Added the menu_loaded signal that is emitted when the main scene is instantiated and loaded (accessed in Global)
- Added a new tileset to the lab
- Added glowing lumen orchid decorations in the lab
- Added the carrot artifact
- Added The Face enemy
- Added enemy wandering functionality
- Added special weapon components
- Added the "Exclusive" tag to items
- Added the carrot artifact
- Added the Tesla Core special weapon component
- Added float precision to the player's health bar to allow for non-int damage
- Added the Temple Lab track
- Added NightPotato to special thanks (thanks for all the awesome help with modding!)
- Added Dapal to the translator credits (thank you very much for your help with French!)
- Added the Computer
- Added the Diadematus spider enemy
- Added the Mini Diadematus enemy
- Added the Harvester
- Added grilled cheese sandwiches
- Added moonshrubs
- Added moonberries
- Added sugar
- Added donuts
- Added a 15 second consumption delay for all food items
- Added large crate decorations
- Added test tube decorations
- Added the Spore Scepter
- Added Log #1
- Added damage_taken signal for all entities
- Added player_entered_room signal in Global
- Added Spore boss music
Changes
- Made it so enemies have a small chance to drop rare items
- Made it so items are sorted by artifacts first
- Decreased the chance of decorations dropping hearts and food (new rooms make up for this)
- Made it so the tree of wisdom is now killable
- Updated the sprite for the Dragonslayer
- Updated all translations
- Made an enourmous change to everything in the game by swapping items, buildings, research, recipes, and more over to an ID system (should be virtually the same in-game)
- Unified all recipe selection buildings and their UI together to make them easier to maintain and create
- Made it so furnaces will now set it's filters from recipes instead of being hard-coded
- Made it so any inventory filter with the key FUEL_FILTER will filter to all fuel items
- Made it so mods can no longer override global.gd
- Updated all translations
- Changed the use of mod_initial_load.gd to instead use a script pointed to within info.json
- Changed the version numbering in-game to use a dash "-" instead of an underscore "_"
- Changed warning messages for mod validation
- Made it so mods will now load their scripts into a node as a child of ModAPI
- Changed player artifact checking to use a multiple of a set variable instead of overriding the base value
- Improved the appearance of the dungeon floor door
- Moved enemy spawning loot tables to the global Loot Table
- Moved the Yuck Puddle track from level 1 to the lab dungeon
- Moved boss loot drops to the global loot table
- Made it so the harvester requires the "Advanced Collection" research
- Changed entity health to floats
Fixes
- Finally fixed the strange depth sorting issues with dungeon doors
- Fixed an issue where enemy corpses would remain between dungeons
- Fixed an issue where automaton arm components had 0.5 cooldown
- Fixed multiple issues related to tilemaps and spawning inside of dungeon rooms
- Fixed a long-standing issue where fuel and furnace progress was not perfectly synchronized
- Fixed an issue where items could be stuck behind corpses
- Fixed an issue where the research notification popup was not centered
- Fixed an issue where tall items were behind the item frame
- Fixed an issue where bee sounds were not tied to the SFX bus
- Fixed an issue where numbers in the research menu would be updated incorrectly
- Fixed an issue where modded items could not load defaults
- Fixed an issue where the electric furnace could not take in any ores
- Fixed an issue where mods could not add to loot tables
- Fixed an issue where modded fuels were not accepted by fueled buildings
- Fixed multiple issues with electric furnaces, potentially causing crashes when used
- Fixed an issue where mods with multiple supported versions listed was formatted incorrectly
- Fixed an issue where zooming out had no limit
- Fixed an issue where mod validation was not in the right order
- Fixed an issue where bombs and nuclear bombs were not usable
- Fixed an issue related to recipe building UI multiplayer syncing
- Fixed an issue where the death screen would display item IDs instead of names
- Fixed an issue where the crafting UI flashed the wrong recipe when opening
- Fixed an issue where the toolbench had the incorrect stack size
- Fixed an issue where V2 underground conveyors did not drop their items
- Fixed an issue where healthbars would flicker visible when spawning
Optimizations
- Significantly increased the performance of tilemap autotiling, which increases load times (3x faster on small maps, but over 12x faster on large ones)
- Significantly increased the performance of all logistics
- Significantly improved performance of the audio engine
- Improved the performance of thumpers
Multiplayer Games Night?
Have you already got a group to play Starground online together?
Check out these other online multiplayer offerings from 2 Left Thumbs!
17.waves is a co-op tower defense, with Overcooked-like multitasking.
There's a free demo available now that you can play online!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2369760/17waves_TD/
In the mood for something scarier? Check out the co-op horror roguelike, The Doorway Effect.
Sign up for the playtest, so you don't miss the demo coming later this year!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2326550/The_Doorway_Effect/