Happy Monday!
Affixes/Modifiers have been officially renamed to Foundations, and they are the central feature in the next upcoming patch, planned for February. Today I want to share some of the thought behind Foundations and give some specific examples along the way. Let's get into it.
Adjusting world parameters is common in many automation games, and usually comes in the form of percentage sliders or other forms of scaling and tuning. I think in large part it works well, but I also think MoteMancer is uniquely positioned to change the rules of the world and maintain one of MoteMancer's biggest strengths - continually keeping the logistics puzzle fresh and interesting. Given that freedom to change rules, the main goal of a Foundation becomes making your journey and problem solving unique and personal.
Foundations are rules of the world designed to change what you solve, not just how hard a solution is. The first two sets are super simple:
- Starting Plane - you can do this already through the Gameplay Menu, but it was one of the foundational (ha) ideas that began this feature.
- Shattered Plane - Pick a plane to destroy completely. All research (including combo research), Portals, and Motes of that Element are removed from the playthrough. There will be some recipe changes to accommodate this, and it can even make some runs easier in the right circumstances, but removing Bastions or Void Chests even on its own has pretty far reaching consequences.
After that we get into some of the more holistic categories:
- Entropy - There are many ways to modify Entropy in a playthrough beyond just tuning. My favorite is Ancient Spindles, which will place a giant Spindle structure on every Mote Field at world generation. Spindles prevent Rifts from spawning, but take up a lot of space, so you'll have to puzzle around them for Mote Collection. You can of course destroy them, but you'll quickly find they were placed for a reason... Miasma is another fun Foundation, where the world will be covered in Entropy at the start and you'll have to carve out into the world to build. This was actually one of the initial thoughts for how to interact with Entropy before it evolved to what it is today. This feels more like a challenge mode than the correct baseline experience though, so it belongs here.
- Research - A large portion of your resources and problem solving go into researching new technology and working your way through the research tree. Elusive Knowledge forces you to think more about the logistics side by simply doubling the required ingredients for a cycle. Now even a simple research that needs Elemental Life and a Salt Prism requires two of each - and 4 Pedestals. This makes shared research arrays more demanding especially as complexity grows.
- Motes - Everyone likes to experiment with resource generation. Prismatic Fields is a fun option with a lot of nuance - The simple rule is that each tile will randomly choose between the adjacent motes (Water/Life/Earth for example) rather than a full Mote of Life patch. Early on this means simple collectors will create a sushi belt of motes, but in the mid game, each Elemental Collector only targets its own Motes, so you get pre-filtering but have a new logistic puzzle to solve by arranging the unique collector shapes with each other.
- Structures - These come in a few different flavors. Fling simply doubles the reach range of every Gripper configuration. This is super helpful in some cases, but also completely changes the way you approach others. Weakened Tether creates additional plane blocking rules - in addition to Water, both Air and Life structures will also be blocked on the plane of Fire.
- Global - Other simple rules with far-reaching implications include Naturalist - Flora is indestructible; Phased Pockets - you have a unique Player Inventory per plane. As usual my ideal rules are simple ideas with significant cascading implications.
And lastly this feature allows me to make my favorite game mode - Elementalist. Elementalist simply disallows the building of Salt Slabs (including undergrounds) and Simple Grippers, and grants you access to the start of each elemental research. MoteMancer began this way, but there was so much to learn that Salt became its own 'element' that tied everything together and gave people a clean foundation to build upon. I still like the way MoteMancer evolved, and this feature created a perfect avenue to pay tribute to the original idea.
Of note, while a handful of Foundations are mutually exclusive, most are not. Prismatic Fields + Ancient Spindles. Fling + Shattered Earth + Elusive Knowledge. A quintessential explosion of logistics puzzles with a very high ceiling for mastery.
I'm so looking forward to getting this feature into player's hands. People always tell you to make the game you want to play, and with the addition of Foundations, this is absolutely that game. Automation games for me were always a zen garden of problem solving and just taking time to think in the moment. Just as much planning as playing, reveling in flow.
Thanks for being on the journey with me, back to the lab. 🌿
~CyanAvatar
PS - If you have any ideas for other foundations you'd like to see, do discuss them here or leave a suggestion in game. I'm very much looking forward to the modding community running with Foundations, but I'm also happy to implement community suggestions myself!