Hello Lunar Pioneers, it's been a while!
The past few months have been kind of crazy for me but now I'm finally able to launch the next major update for the game.
This time I've focused on the late game content, focusing on some big spaceships. But I've also improved the overall user experience and marking feedback.
Pole Gliders
Getting water for your homegrown food and plants has been pretty tedious so far as our station is located near the moons equator. As in real life, we suspect frozen water and gases to be found at the lunar poles. Why only there? Well, the sun is shining at such a steep angle that some craters are always in shadow reaching constant freezing cold temperatures which means liquid and gases freeze and... stay in place instead of evaporating.
You can build huge spaceships to travel to the polar regions and bring back water and frozen gases.
Launchpad
You can now launch spaceships from the Spaceport! Some real life future plans include using the moon as a proxy base to assemble and launch interplanetary spaceships. It's much easier to overcome the moons gravitational pull instead of earths. Plus: The moon does not have an atmosphere which gets in the way when you're traveling as fast as a spaceship.
These big spaceships can be built and launched collaboratively as a community (just as the other spaceport buildings) This time we keep track of the top 3 sponsors for each launched ship so you can show up in the hall of fame.
Achievements
I finally got around to adding some achievements to the game. You can also add them to your profile picture in the community hub. (This also works on the mobile version of the game)
Additionally you can now change your profile picture and background to customize how you show up in the Friends List and Highscore.
Marking Feedback
Many of you were annoyed with the lack of feedback on unknown images as there pretty much isn't any. We can't give you a definitive answer whether you've marked correctly, as the unknown images are... well... unknown. But we are now showing you how other players have marked. This way you at least know if your markings are the same as the others.
Marking History
In the marking panel there is now an image history view where you can see past markings and how you performed. Please note that for existing markings prior to the patch some information is missing as we did not track it yet. But for any future image you will be able to see which craters were correct and how others have marked the same picture.
Marking the Lunar South Pole
Just like ingame, the real life NASA and ESA are trying to reach the lunar poles. As these are areas with high shadow coverage we do not show these regions to new players. But if you have been marking for a while, chances are you'll encounter images from the south pole. This way you contribute even more directly toward our planned real life moon landing.
Greenhouse Limit
Small change, big impact. You can now queue up plants in the greenhouses.
Smaller Changes
- There is now a max queue button in the production overlay allowing you to spend all available resources at once
- Resources in the Spaceport now have a score multiplier attached to them to make hard to obtain resources more valuable
- Some productions now give more output resources
- Astronaut Calculations have been improved
- Buildings now only require astronauts when they are actually producing
- As soon as a building is done producing the astronauts are available again
- Productions will stay active with 0 iterations to go, so you can have buildings dedicated to a certain production without leaving your astronauts occupied
Closing Words
I know it's been a while and the updates have become less frequent. The reason for that is quite simple: We are a publicly funded project and as such our resources are spread thin. You might have noticed I started writing the blog posts in the "I" form rather than the "We" form and that is because the team size has been downscaled to just me (plus the professor overseeing the project) On top of that I'm on 50% part time since December.
All this has been planned beforehand and is fine for everyone. But I hope that explains why progress has slowed down.
Catch you on the moon,
The IMPACT Team