Hey everyone!
It's been a while - I've been hard at work over on the Alpha build, building new systems, gathering feedback, and moving things along towards the full release. Today I'm sharing a couple of updates, including a hefty update to the demo, and a bit of an update on the plans for release.
The demo update includes a few of the new systems and QoL features that have made it through Alpha testing. There's a new system which can automate purchasing upgrades, a new copy/paste feature, a remastered version of the main menu theme, and a bunch of other changes.
Plot Management
First up, let's talk about the new Plot Management system!
Plot Management is a set of technologies in the General tech tree which allows you to organize your plots into Management Groups. These groups consolidate the floating plot icons, show a bunch of combined production statistics and panels, allow some new behavior rules, and provide the ability to automatically purchase upgrades.
In general, groups are most useful for individual areas or layouts that aim to produce a particular item. Each group declares a "Focus" item, which will be displayed as the groups icon, and will determine what production rates to show in various places in the UI.
For example, if you've got a layout producing Aromatic Vegetables, you can consolidate the plots into one Management Group which displays production status and statistics for Aromatic Vegetables. The group's floating icon will then show the Aromatic Vegetables icon and it will color its ring to display the current production status of all the Packagers producing Aromatic Vegetables. Opening the panel for this group will also highlight the overall Aromatic Vegetable production rates and the value of those produced items.
Automated Upgrades
Once you've made a Management Group, you can also enable certain automatic upgrades for that group. These options will initially allow the group to automatically purchase Plot Level and Worker upgrades, and you can unlock other options for Trucks and Truck Levels. Similar to the existing upgrade purchase buttons when you have multiple plots selected, this system will purchase upgrades all at once in order to maintain even upgrades across all the plots in the group.
There's also an additional tech to add automatic Rank Ups! In order to do so, you'll need to define Crop Rotations to tell the system which Crop to upgrade which fields to when it purchases new ranks. These are defined as looping sequences so that the system can keep purchasing more upgrades.
Having all these upgrades ready to purchase on many different layouts can get pricey. In order to prevent these systems from chewing through all your money, there's a global Budget which allows you to set limits on how much of your money these upgrades can spend on any one purchase. You can also pause individual Management Groups or the whole system at once.
Truck Settings
Lastly, Management Groups also have an option that allows you to constrain types of trucks to only interact with plots within the group. For example, you can constrain the group's Input Trucks so that they only collect ingredients from the other plots in the group, and don't head off to some other layout and "steal" their ingredients.
Copy/Paste
A second large update is the ability to copy & paste groups of Plots and Roads! You can now drag-select areas of Roads + Plots, or select a bunch of specific Plots to copy them! You can then paste the layout with a number of different filters/settings for what data to paste.
By default, almost all data is copied. This includes Plot Levels, Workers, Trucks, Basic Logistics settings, and even Plot Management Groups. Copying a large layout at max upgrades can be pretty expensive, so sometimes you may want to start with no Level/Worker upgrades, and allow the Plot Management to purchase those as you can afford them, etc.
Plot Window Updates
Similar to the Plot Management changes, there have also been a handful of different updates to the Plot Window to support faster upgrades, better stat displays, and better usability!
Most notably, when you select multiple plots, you can now see the entire selections Production Stats. This will give you a high level overview of the total production amongst all Plots in the selection. At the top level, it provides total XP production, net value production, net items produce per second, etc.
It can also either display a summary view of each of the Plots you have selected, or a summary of all production grouped by Crop. This Crop view shows production and consumption statistics for all Plots you have selected, what Plots/Recipes are contributing to production and consumption, as well as the net production rate. This can be useful in identifying bottlenecks and checking if you have enough production of each of your ingredients, etc.
The Trucks tab has also had a similar improvement, so you can now buy Trucks in batches across a bunch of selected Plots all at once!
There are also some other general improvements to this window, such as the ability to change Plot Recipes and Basic Logistics while the plot is still under construction, better default tab selection, some improved vehicle status messages, some fixes to multi-Building Rank Ups, and more.
Tech Scaling Changes
Based on feedback from both the Alpha and the Demo, there have been some significant changes to the the XP requirements for Tech Tree Levels. The earlier levels within the Demo aren't impacted very much, but I want to include them here to be clear on how the scaling is shifting and my thoughts on how the balance should play in the full game.
The largest change is that the exponential growth factor on levels has been significantly reduced. There's also been a linear growth element added in order to keep the earlier levels pretty much in line with where they've been, as I feel they're in a pretty good spot.
So what does this mean?
Levels 1-6 are effectively the same, but have very slightly lower requirements
Levels 7-11 have had their requirements slightly increased.
Levels 12 and 13 are fairly similar to where they were, but requirements past here are significantly smaller than before
By level 27, the XP required per level drops to ~50% of what it was before.
I am pretty happy with how the early game levels feel, but think by the 7-11 mark, you start feeling like you level more frequently than you can really finish getting settled with a new tech or set of crops. As such, there's a slight increase there.
But the late game, things were getting significantly slower. I do think there may be more tweaks here based on future Alpha testing and the full game release. My intention is that things do need to slow down because when you're unlocking very complicated recipes later in the game, you need some time to figure out how to build/approach them. Finding a layout for a 4-item Aromatic Vegetables recipe shouldn't take too long, but setting up a 30 ingredient soup with multiple different steps, and a bunch of different by-products is a different story.
That being said, the existing scaling was too harsh in this sense, so I've pulled back on it. I don't want to make it a slog, but I also don't want you to be unlocking things faster than you can make sense of them, so it's a bit of a balancing act.
Business Tree Changes
Related to the above, the Business Tech Tree definitely had some pretty harsh scaling. While the above changes will help, I don't think it's enough. This tree in particular is also less built out than I would like, and I do have more interesting techs I plan to add to the system, but I do plan them to come a little later and the current progress still felt really slow and the Contracts themselves weren't feeling as impactful as I intended.
Contract Business XP rewards now scale significantly more with your Business level, adding in some exponential scaling.
Contract Bonus XP (Fields/Buildings XP) and Bonus Money now improve by 25% each Business Level, making for much more substantial rewards.
Added a new tech which increases the reward growth rates, which leads to significant increases in rewards as you level up.
Experience Negotiations / Financial Negotiations tech bonuses have increased from 50% per point to 100% per point.
Increased the number of extra Contracts provided by Business Opportunity from 2 per point to 3 per point
UI/UX Improvements
There have also been a slew of other UI improvements and extra features, but a few that I think are worth mentioning:
Allow "deleting" items from Output Storage. Items can either be entirely deleted for a fee or "converted" to Organic Waste for free.
Allow copying from and pasting to Plots that are still under construction
Added rendered "ghost" Crops/Buildings when placing plots so you can more easily tell what you're building (see the Copy/Paste gif above)
Reworked pop up message UI to a "Notification Card" of sorts that is significantly more legible and includes icons etc for better context.
Added a notification + sound when new Contracts arrive
Globalized and updated a lot of dropdown/picker logic for things like Crops/Recipes.
Improved some mouse click logic which should reduce pipette-ing different items than intended etc.
CSV Data
I've had multiple requests, especially from Alpha players, for some way to export game/save data. While I'll probably take a better look at this post-release, I've exposed some of the exports I was already using for development to allow access to a bunch of the game data.
In the in-game menu, there's now an "Export CSVs" button. This will export a bunch of CSVs from your current game into the game directory under Musgro Farm_Data\\DataExport. These include static game data about Crops, Recipes, Buildings, etc, a list of all your current Plots and their storage/stats/upgrades, and the data used to populate the in game Production History.
Performance / Bug Fixes
There have also been a lot of other performance improvements and bug fixes, but this post is already pretty long so I'm just including some high level highlights here:
More of the game simulation now runs in parallel
Multiple "batch" actions now run more efficiently
Rendering of Plot Icons has been rebuilt with better "max distance" pruning etc
Multiple instances of boxing/memory thrashing have been reduced across systems
Release Update
While the Steam page has listed a 2025 release date, I regret to say that the game won't be in a state I'm happy to release before the end of this year. I am planning the first release to be an Early Access release, as I do have a ton more features I plan to add and I'd like to gather a lot more feedback along the way, but it's still extremely important to me that the product people purchase is a full, enjoyable, and polished experience. I don't want to sell a game that feels like an unfinished beta, I want it to feel like something worth your time, money, and attention.
As it stands right now, I still need to add a few more systems that will be central to the game experience, a bunch more recipes to flesh out a "full" game, and some other assorted tweaks and polish that I think are important to smooth day 1 experience. I would rather release a full-er game later than rush through these things and release something that is unfun, clunky, or too short just to get it out.
While my initial plans for a first release had included some of these things, the Alpha builds and feedback have made me realize a few things were more important than I thought. For example, I had been unsure about whether Plot Management would make it into the first EA release, but the scale at which people were building, and the amount of manual labor going into crop rotations made it clear that it was very necessary. As such, some of my priorities have been shifted by recent Alpha feedback, and I think these changes and shifting of timelines really is what's best for the game in the long term.
That being said, I don't think I'm all that far off from a first EA release. It will definitely be coming in 2026, and I do expect it to be earlier in the year, but I can't say for certain until I get a few more things into the Alpha builds and get feedback on them. Once I am more confident in a narrower timeline, I will be sure to let you know.
That's it for now - thank you all for all your support. It's been a wild journey with many really exciting milestones from you all, and I can't wait for the next ones on this journey ;)