Last week, we started a discussion about replacing the old science system. We gave you a choice: would you like to see the old system with the scientist and technologist, or a new system based on counters? We argued in favor of the latter.
A majority was in favor of the new system, but there was quite a lot of opposition. A common reply was "neither, why can't you mix the systems and have the benefits of both"?
At first, we though this was unwieldy and hard to create. Well, Zun continued his work on the new system and last Saturday, we had a useable system. But it wasn't fully finished yet. It was... a mix. Exactly the kind of mix that many of you proposed.
So that's what the current system looks like. The UI has been enhanced a bit, it now also displays which technologies a recipe unlocks. And the counters are integrated in the old science system, that still includes scientists and technologists. Science unlocks can now require a combination of both ingredients and "counters" like "total amount of colonists"!
One of the reasons why we wanted to fix the system before last weekend was the Yogscast. They've made dozens of videos about Colony Survival, and last week we received a message from them. They wanted to livestream the beta! We allow everyone to share videos of the beta if they make clear that it's a work-in-progress that changes rapidly, so of course they were allowed to do so as well. They've played the beta for five hours last Saturday, and have uploaded the footage to YouTube:
https://youtu.be/m4iE0-IHrKk
There weren't many technical problems and they seem to have enjoyed the update quite a lot, so that's good news for 0.7.0.
An issue we've pondered about this week is the workbench. Some jobblocks have only a few recipes of which many items are crafted, like bronze arrows, bullets or gunpowder pouches. But the workbench has dozens of recipes, many of which are seldomly crafted. It has become quite cluttered, and can be hard to understand and confusing. When we proposed changing that, the reply on Discord was enthusiastic!
But we're not sure how to fix that. Transferring all the seldomly required recipes to a new job would create a pretty useless job, especially for smaller colonies. We could split the workbench in two jobs that both have an even mix of common and rare recipes, but it's hard to think of an intuitive split that makes some sense from a real-life perspective. If you've got a good idea, please share it with us in the comments or on Discord!
Last but not least, we've spent a lot of time this week fixing the food system. In the past, there were only a couple of food items, they had a "food value" and they were consumed automatically based on a set food consumption per day.
0.7.0 contains a lot of new food items, and "food value" became pretty confusing. It's now measured in calories. 2000 calories per colonist, per day is now the standard food consumption. But players can adjust this in the happiness menu, by distributing more or less food items. Distribute more than 2000 calories and colonists will be "well fed", leading to extra happiness. The reverse is also true.
These systems were quite glitchy at the start of the week. The statistics regarding food in the top-right corner of the screen were incorrect, and colonists consumed less food items than the happiness menu indicated. It was a lot of work to diagnose the exact problem. It has mostly been fixed now. The only "problem" left is good news for the colonists: they don't seem to starve anymore when they receive very low amounts of calories. We'll "fix" that (:
In general, progress is going pretty much according to schedule and we expect to release 0.7.0 in 3-5 weeks!
Bedankt voor het lezen :)