State of Item Transportation and Future Plans,
First off I want to apologize for this announcement coming out after yesterday's update. I know our communication about the game design intent for recent changes hasn't been awesome and that falls on me. I am looking to make some process changes so that we can improve this going forward.
Problems with Logistics in BitCraft,
One of the major selling points of BitCraft is the single non-instance world where distance matters. The reason we don't have a central marketplace in BitCraft is because we think the movement of items throughout the world should be meaningful and provide an activity for players who love the idea of being a merchant who moves items for profit. This profit, however, only exists if moving items across the world is not trivial/instant.
I believe we've made this intent clear across our past blogs and stream Q&As, but I think the state of the game over the last weeks since the housing update has led players to lose sight of that while we were working in the background to address the issues.
Our goal with the house movement changes was to make housing moving with the goal of item transportation not viable. I'm aware that in some cases it was actually made easier and with the hotfix we just released I believe that will be addressed.
Additionally our intent was never that players were transporting raw gathered cargo over huge distances, but that refining outposts/towns would be incentivized to allow the condensing of raw cargo -> items -> packaged cargo to make shipping much more effective. We understand that the cost of setting up these mid tier outposts is too high on the research side and have plans to address this as well.
With that I want to share a bit more about our vision and also what changes are coming down the pipe over the next few weeks.
Vision for the future,
We want merchanting and even the hauling of gathered/processed goods home to your local settlement to be both viable and rewarding. To do this we need to make sure that this is the best way to do logistics and that this "job" in the world of BitCraft is both valued by other players and rewarded by us as the game developers.
What we are aiming to do other the following weeks is:
Remove any unintended mechanics allowing for "cheese" ways of mass moving items,
Drastically rebalance the stats of carts, boats and mounts to make transportation more viable,
Add more packing options to give more items the ability to be shipping easily,
Provide engaging gameplay and rewards for doing the act of hauling (want to save some surprise here, but I think we have something cool),
Reintroduce ways of leveling sailing by actually being out on the ocean sailing,
Other changes which are coming a bit later (likely within next 2 months):,
Gondolas (Basically BitCraft's version of bridges that fit in a 2.5D world) will allow traversal over more complex terrain,
Ability to make more specialized towns/outposts easier so that raw cargo can be refined closer to where it was gathered and package reducing it's size by an order of magnitude or more. Thank you. Game Director: Minch