Hey everyone, thanks for all the feedback/interest in the game so far! This is an update to some core game mechanics + a few miscellaneous quality of life improvements and bug fixes.
Changes to core mechanics
Getting rid of Recycle Points
The problem:
Originally Recycle Points were intended as a way to do two things:
- Keep the pacing of the game up by preventing players from spending too much time in their factory refactoring everything
- Reinforce the roguelike nature of the game of progressively locking you into a build that becomes harder and harder to pivot out of.
Response to this was mixed. Some players were confused by it and others actually spent more time in their factory because they felt like they needed to think too far ahead.
The change:
Recycle Points are now gone, but to keep with the original spirit of them recycling is still not free. Recycling now starts at $2 per part placed in a previous factory session and doubles in price every 10 levels.
Recycle Points may make a reappearance in the future as a challenge mode.
Portal skips
A new game mechanic is Portal Skips. Every 5th portal that spawns will give you the option to skip entering the portal to earn some reward.
A few Portal Skip Reward examples:
- Free Sink
- +100% Fire damage
- +25% Movement speed
- and more!
This gives players another way to earn passive buffs or bypass some of the shop RNG elements while also letting you spend more time in combat to see how well your build is performing
New features
There are a few new totems to discover!
Quality of life changes
- Tunnel belts now highlight their path and display max length when placing or hovering
- Assemblers now display the actual crafting time of the current recipe when hovered over
- Scroll-wheel to rotate parts
- Automatically switches to tunnel belt output after placing a tunnel belt input since they are usually placed in pairs.
Bugfixes
- Fixed recipe book becoming inactive after recycling
- Fixed cursor lag on the factory grid causing misplacing parts sometimes
Future
Metaprogression is still being worked on and we hope to have a sneak peak of that + more recipes and totems for an upcoming Steam NextFest so stay tuned!