As promised last week, the dev build now has a functional Iron Age! Playtesting it has legitimately been a lot of fun. Currently, the Iron Age is also the first time players are able to unlock and use traps. We’re seriously considering introducing this new feature earlier in the game.
The Iron Age is now the most advanced age in 0.9.0. It’s the hardest to unlock, and producing enough iron to unlock traps and to craft a bunch of them is relatively difficult. I was surprised by the amount of miners and smelters I had to unlock. At first, I wanted to ‘fix’ that, to reduce the costs of the crafting recipes. But then I realized that this is exactly what we want to encourage. We want players to build big colonies and to recruit a large number of colonists, and these accomplishments should be meaningful.
Outposts
With the Iron Age unlocked and many dozens of colonists working on trap-production, I now had an overcrowded fort with many beds crammed into underground rooms. I barely had space left above ground to place new jobs. But while looking at the surrounding area from the walls of my fort, I felt a strong desire to “make it habitable”. Why should I build such a crowded place for the colonists when there is so much empty space around me?
...because that’s how the game works. You’ve got one banner, and you stick with it until you’re pretty much at the endgame, and then you can start over in a very distant location. But then I remembered the server that I shared with Vobbert and Zun many years ago, in a certain other voxel game. We did explore that world and we spread out our buildings, but our settlements were all connected by roads and bridges and pretty much within viewing distance of other settlements. We didn’t concentrate everything in a 200x200 area (the current core CS gameplay), nor did we go 10 miles in a random direction and build a new settlement in a fully isolated area (what 0.7.0 adds to CS).
At the start of this year, we did consider making CS more like that, with multiple settlements relatively nearby. We considered semi-realistic logistics to be a core part of that, and we couldn’t think of a system that we could both A.) develop in an acceptable timescale, and B.) make fun and intuitive to use for players.
But… is semi-realistic logistics actually a core requirement for ‘outposts’ gameplay? Imagine you’re able to build outposts with their own ‘secondary banners’, their own jobs, their own colonists and their own beds, in viewing range of your first and main colony. A small village focused on mining next to the mountain, a fishing town next to the sea, a farming outpost in the middle of a plain. But the tech tree and stockpile are completely, automatically connected to your main colony. The iron ingots of the mining village are instantly usable at your main colony, and the same is true for the wheat harvest of the farming outpost. Sure, it wouldn’t be very realistic, but wouldn’t it be a lot more fun than being forced to stay within a small safe zone in a nearly infinite world, or to be forced to use complex, tedious trading/logistics UIs to connect multiple colonies?
We’ve discussed it and we’re highly enthusiastic about the “outpost-plan”. We’ve already got support for multiple colonies, so it wouldn’t require enormous amounts of development time. But we do expect the results of it to be pretty enormous. Using the resources of your main colony to transform an empty patch of nature into a new settlement seems like very fun and satisfying gameplay. We’ve noticed that a lot of longtime players already used mods or cheats to achieve something like this; they dislike being constrained to a relatively small area, and want to spread their mini-civilization over a larger area.
But we’re not instantly going to develop this feature, so this is your chance to give us your feedback! Are you highly enthusiastic about this, and do you totally not mind us expanding 0.9.0 a bit further with this? Do you believe this new feature won’t be very helpful? Or are you sick and tired of us constantly moving the goalposts and do you just want 0.9.0 to be released yesterday? Let us know and we’ll consider your input!
During the next week, we're probably busy working on refining the content that was recently added. The traps are still work-in-progress, and a part of the new 0.9.0 content is still lacking icons, models and balance.
Bedankt voor het lezen :D