Survival Mode is now in the game!
I know what you're thinking - there already was a Survival Mode! Well, that mode is now Normal Mode, and we have a NEW mode called Survival Mode which adds a lot of additional challenges, for example:
Slimes spawn on the surface and are more prevalent (more combat)
You need to eat regularly, and can eat raw pixels without having to wait to assemble them into a food item
You need to poop after digesting food
The Jetpack has a limited duration, short at first, but it gets longer with some special Survival-Mode-only upgrades (which you can start to unlock by the third underground biome)
The player has significantly less carrying capacity
Some amount of materials (not in your HUD bar, and selected at random) drop when you die, so you won't want to die just as a way to warp back to the ship anymore
Overall, this should be an interesting new challenge. I'll be doing a lot of tuning moving forward, so be sure to let me know what you think in the Discord community!
I am particularly happy with the digestion mechanic - in Survival Mode, you can consume ANY solid or liquid pixel by pushing 'C' - this consumes whatever is in your current material HUD slot.
The pixels stay in your stomach and are gradually digested in a queue. Hovering the stomach, you can see all of the pixels you have eaten that are yet undigested (and the tooltip will tell you what is in there).
Although many materials are edible, there are also many toxic materials, of differing levels of toxicity. The effects of toxicity (or, in the future, nutrients...) are applied when the stomach tries to digest the food, and digesting the food moves the food from the Stomach HUD to the Poop HUD.
The Poop HUD adds another mechanic to the game, where you can press Z to poop, dropping the digested pixels back into the world. If the Poop HUD completely fills up and you try to digest again, it will automatically empty all of its contents wherever you happen to be.
This may seem like a crazy level of simulation, but that's what we're all about here. :)
In addition, there are many more quality-of-life improvements, bugfixes, and more!
Added the Mega Multitool! This is an end-game version of the Multitool that automatically picks up the pixels dropped by decrafting (same as the Mega Crowbar mechanic)
QoL: added tooltips with formulas to the Ship Inventory Screen
QoL: when dragging out a line with the Hammer, Crowbar, or Multitool, hide the cursor for better visibility
QoL: made the Gravity Glove pickup/drop a max of 10,000 pixels at a time, so it doesn't accidentally consume or flood the entire world
QoL: took out the Pin Upgrade and just made pinning available everywhere by default
QoL: all types of wire should now allow materials to pass through them, allowing for a lot more build possibilities :)
QoL: if you hold Ctrl while dragging out a shape or line while building, it will now snap to 45 degree angles, allowing for easy straight lines and perfect diagonals. This also works on the squares and circles so you can perfectly scale them with 1 to 1 ratio!
QoL: added info on the Unstuck button to the In-Game Menu Screen's control reference
BALANCE: Using the Proton mode of the Particle Accelerator on Slime (any kind) now creates Ectoplasm
BALANCE: made the cost of the Blender Gun only Steel (previously also required Strontium), and moved it to the top row of upgrades (no prerequisites)
BALANCE: made Pentlandite Powder about 1/4th as heavy as it previously was
PERFORMANCE: made an improvement to a lookup in core sim that should make things more performant
BUGFIX: fixed the issue where the building highlight would disappear when the cursor was near a Switch or other interactable
BUGFIX: the height and width values on the build tooltip were 1 less than the total length; this is now fixed
BUGFIX: fixed the bug where materials would flip upwards through turbines or open doors
BUGFIX: fixed display and aqueous material setup for Water (Carbonated) and Aqueous Ammonia
BUGFIX: Fallen Leaf pixels will now be affected by Sulfuric Acid
BUGFIX: better flag for checking if we’re in a session, to not reenter simulation after exiting the simulation (this is to reduce chances of savefile corruption)
Some quick-fixes after this announcement:
BUGFIX: fixed a bug where the spacebar was allowing infinite use of the Jetpack still in Survival Mode
BUGFIX: fixed the glyph on the Poop HUD to be Z
BUGFIX: fixed lower-left corner HUD for the Mega Multitool
There's a lot more coming soon! Let me know what you think about the new mode and other updates in the Discord Community today!
Join the Community today!
and if you haven't already please leave me a Steam review, it really helps me a lot!
-Triplejump