Sorry regular readers, the first part is meant for people who just learned about the update because of the visibility round :)
We released multiple patches this week and we hope all major bugs have now been patched out of update 0.6.0. Here's a reminder of the new content:
- Official OS X support
- Diggers: colonists that can remove all blocks in a selected area https://youtu.be/koa_E3jkuVM
- Builders: colonists that can fill an area with a specified block https://youtu.be/6bIVUv1_xf0
- Special diggers: colonists that remove only the specified block from a selected area https://youtu.be/2xCoeuGH3lI
- A new setting in the graphics menu that allows you to dramatically extend the view range
- Hold CTRL to crouch and not fall of edges
- Hold CTRL to recruit 15 colonists simultaneously
- And many other small changes, visit the changelog for a complete overview!
If you'd like to know what happened in previous updates, here's a short summary with links to previous Friday Blogs for more info:
- 0.5.2: Stairs
- 0.5.0: Lanterns, herbs, new jobs and new cosmetic blocks
- 0.4.0: New ores, metals, weapons, guards, monsters and science
- 0.3.0: The science system, technologists & tailors
- 0.2.0: Berry farmers for quick and easy food, more complicated but also more effective bread production process
We now return to your regularly scheduled programming
We've released three patches this week: 0.6.0.2, 0.6.0.3 and 0.6.0.4. The first patch fixed the builder menu. It was very often a bit broken. The icons didn't spread like they should and sometimes it didn't load all the blocks it should.
0.6.0.3 makes sure loading chunks close to the player has priority over loading other chunks. We sometimes encountered a problem where a chunk close to the player wasn't loaded in time, resulting in some annoying problems like blocks not disappearing properly. It also fixes a minor problem with the builder; they sometimes placed blocks in the wrong location.
The last fix in 0.6.0.3 concerns the science menu. It sometimes didn't load properly. But 0.6.0.3 actually seemed to make the problem worse instead of better! We quickly released 0.6.0.4 to fix the issue properly.
We're now pretty confident that 0.6.0 works as intended. That's why we've decided to start our first visibility round. Steam gives developers the ability to request some extra visibility for their games, primarily intended to be used after updates. We haven't used a single visibility round for previous updates and we believe this is the right time for our first one. Visibility rounds have to be attached to announcements, so that's why this Friday Blog started with info that must be familiar for regular readers :)
We hadn't updated the trailer on the store page since releasing the game back in June either. We've worked on a new trailer and uploaded it to Steam yesterday! Here it is:
https://youtu.be/GbHFdB3yJmY
Common requests
Last week, we announced our plans for the next couple of months. Many people responded with suggestions for other new features. Thanks for your input! It's great to know what players truly desire. Many suggestions are definitely on our roadmap, others are less feasible.
- A better UI to keep track of production. We definitely want to add this; we love statistics in games. The production statistics in Factorio are one of the best examples of great in-game statistics that we know of, and we want to add something like it!
- Steam Workshop support. We want to start by adding support for sharing worlds on the Steam Workshop, and we'd love to add mod support to Steam Workshop as well.
- Better co-op gameplay. Many people would love to share a colony with friends, instead of building separate colonies. We've already announced that we'll work on multiple colonies per players, and we think we can add multiple players per colony.
- PvP. The PvP feature we like to add will probably not be very advanced, and it'll be easy to toggle off. But we're interested in a simple PvP feature where players can add their own soldiers to the monster horde that attacks other colonies.
There are other common suggestions that sound great, but that we probably will not implement in the near future:
- Significantly changed water physics. Our current water spreads down and to the sides infinitely. That might be slightly unrealistic for smaller lakes, but it makes a lot of sense for oceans to work like that. It makes it easy to fill moats and canals. The current system has drawbacks, but every other possible system has drawbacks as well. Terraria has awesome water physics that allow you to drain lakes, but 3D water physics are a lot harder to compute than 2D water physics. We don't know a single game with fully realistic dynamic 3D water physics, but we'd love to be proven wrong :)
- Melee guards. We understand the appeal, but they'll be hard to add in practice and require a lot of new system to function properly. Colonists and monsters currently move through each other. Melee guards obviously have to block monsters and make them "queue" realistically. We'd also need fight animations and balance it properly. We consider the feature very hard to add. If they're properly balanced, they won't really change the way the game is played, meaning our effort is pretty much wasted. If they do radically alter your defenses, they're probably overpowered, breaking the balance of the game. Both options seem far from ideal.
- Colonist happiness. It would be great to add a system where your colonists need certain items to stay happy. We've got a lot of ideas for a system like that, but they'll take a long time to add and they'll change the core mechanics of the game. We're pretty certain that we won't work on such a feature before leaving Early Access. We hope this last bit wasn't too disappointing :) Please keep posting suggestions, we definitely keep track of which features are often demanded, liked and disliked. Last week, we asked for specific suggestions: Suggestions for new guards and what resources they could need from other biomes are very welcome. The most detailed response was given by Xolotle in the Steam Forums. Summarized, he suggested adding obsidian/volcanic glass, resulting in very powerful weapons that punch right through armor, and Greek fire made from pitch. These kind of suggestions are very useful in the short term for the biome&guards update and have a big chance of being added in 0.7.0! Bedankt voor het lezen en alle suggesties!