Mana Rechargers
The Shrine buildings have been pretty underpowered, mainly because they fully consume Mana Crystals and those are fairly expensive to make (especially with very high water requirements to get the Mana Shards). So I've added back a highly-requested system from Factory Town 1: Mana Rechargers!
Mana Rechargers take Depleted Mana Crystals, and a little Magic Powder, to produce a regular Mana Crystal again. This saves quite a bit of resources! (You will still need to convert it into Mana Power at a Mana Power Generator)
The Depleted Mana Crystals come from new Shrine recipes:
The water and steam recipes are slightly less efficient than the non-rechargable versions of the recipe (which will remain intact & available), but they more than make up for it with the savings if you recharge the crystal.
Magic Powder is a new recipe available at the Stone Mason. Basically you are grinding Mana Shards into magic dust. You can sell Magic Powder to your townspeople as it does meet some of their need for Magic items. But its primary use will be to power rechargers.
So all together, here's what a Recharger Loop will look like.
Mana Ore is turned into Mana Shards
Shards are forged into Mana Crystals and Magic Powder
Mana Power Generator energizes Mana Crystals into Mana Power
Mana Power is sent to a Shrine, which produces a Depleted Mana Crystal (and some other item).
Depleted Mana Crystal is sent to a Recharger, combined with Magic Powder, to produce a Mana Crystal
The Mana Crystal is sent back to a Mana Power Generator to re-energize
A few other related notes:
The Mana Recharger has 3 production speed ugrades
Mana Crystals AND Depleted Mana Crystals can be transported using Mana Pipes. Previously, only Mana Power could be transported in Mana Pipes.
Doubled speed of items moving through Mana Pipes
Task Config changes
The "Num Attempts" setting needed a couple refinements. Mainly, it wasn't really applicable to several of the "Wait Until..." conditions, so it didn't make sense as a value that could be set alongside everything else
Instead, "Num Attempts" is its own Wait Condition. So now the options are: Max Amount Transferred, Num Attempts, Source Empty, Destination Full, Source Quantity, and Destination Quantity. If Num Attempts is selected, you can then pick the max number of attempts in the numeric entry box just like when you're specifying a quantity.
For legacy maps, if "Max Amount Transferred" was specified but "Use Max Attempts' was off, this is migrated as "Max Amount Transferred" (and thus, has no max attempts limit). If your setting was "Max Amount Transferred" and you DID specify a max number of attempts, that is now migrated as "Num Attempts". Everything else is migrated as-is, except any max attempt value is ignored. My guess was that any combination of "Wait Until Full/Empty" AND a "Max Attempts" specified as well was probably a config error, and therefore those tasks will lose their Max Attempts setting. (But let me know if that's not the case.)
Misc Improvements
Added displacement to grass when avatar walks through it
Improved build preview shader
Added some camera movement acceleration if you're holding the inputs for a little while
Avatar will spawn at the location your camera is looking at when you switch from Free Look back to Avatar mode. If you do not like this, you can turn it off: Options / Interface / "Teleport Avatar to Camera"
Removed Avatar Move Speed perk (all perk points are refunded): because now the avatar can be easily teleported to the camera location, the move speed perk became very low value and often made it hard to precisely control the player
Shift now allows Avatar to sprint (to make up for the lack of speed perk)
Avatar will be able to hop up onto and walk on pipe blocks
Changed icon for Mana Power and Purified Mana
Construction Cost is shown on the tooltip for a Building research, also with an indicator if the item has been unlocked or not
Processing Speed and Productivity Upgrades show an extended tooltip, with an explanation for effects of all levels, and a checkbox to make it clear what the current level’s effect is vs. the rest of the upgrades
When placing a water pump, locations adjacent to the ocean are highlighted and the water pump will turn blue if placing it on an ocean-adjacent tile and is facing the ocean. (previously, this behavior only happened for tiles next to Water Trenches, but pumps are able to connect to the Ocean now that Salt Water is available)
Bug Fixes
Fixed bug: workers would purchase items even if it would exceed their carrying capacity
Fixed bug: avatar would not spawn at the correct height if the game was loaded into free look mode
Pipe Path Planner will not try to attach to elevated or top portions of building if you highlight a building while dragging, instead it will try to attach to the base level just like belts
Fixed bug: avatar’s position was not correctly being shown as ‘on top of pipe’ and instead made it look like they were on the ground
Fixed void obelisk and item generator showing up in non-creative mode when 'show locked' was enabled
Fixed bug: Sandbox maps were starting with a zero max population, instead of a 10 max population
Fixed bug: Sandbox map would start and focus on the first villager that joined, even though it wasn’t running the campaign tutorial
Fixed bug: water pumps wouldn't auto-configure on newly created maps