In advance we want to thank you for patience and say sorry for delay in current update. Our previously expected release date wasn't fulfilled because we stacked more changes over another ones (more details below) because splitting them will cause game logic to fall apart.
At first small recap of our early access
October: Very difficult month dedicated to fixing most of the critical issues and community communication.
November: Situation after release calmed a bit, there was a timeframe for bigger update with new large anomaly that contains more complex interactions and also new content pack.
December: Mostly dedicated to paperwork and solving organization issues. Also first steps in preparations to fulltime development in next months. We also went through issues reports and players‘ feedback more deeply. Thanks to this we have found few things that are needed to be added, replaced, removed or just reworked to be working. And because tweaking single one affected another, we weren’t able finish update in time.
January: Whole month was/is dedicated to finishing scheduled work. Estimated delivery is now during next two weeks (currently we are finishing the final changes and perform internal tests).
So, what exactly will this update changes?
- Pure single player mode that will require no internet access for play. (Detailed description will be shipped with update.)
- Major focus is on another performance optimalizations. Actually we were able to achieve about 10-20 FPS against current version.
- Reworking of inventory and item management. Because there is no need of using detailed quality for every single item, we decided to remove quality of natural resources and stack them by tier. However quality is still in game and used for crafting (and fighting in future), tier is just grouped average value. This allow us to decrease ammount of stored data and increase performance of inventory and crafting. Also, inventories are now much easier to understand and use because there will be no need for opening stacks. In addition, this should fix some issues with missing items in inventory.
- Crafting is currently very complex and one of main attractions of the game. While we want to keep this complexity, we also want to ease its usage. So, we have just added possibility to craft more items in a row and also autofilling required items in craft window.
- Crafting menu was too complex and because many items requires some specific environment (like fire for cooking), we decided to remove these recipes from craft menu and move them as context on these environmental objects.
- Based on previous change, there is also interaction update while using tools. You do not need to have required tool active while crafting, it‘s enough to have it deployed on your belt (skillbars). This should save you same more clicks during crafting.
- Because game was recently played like ‘find a chest’ simulator due to hunt for blueprints, we decided to remove all basic blueprints from the game and allow players to use all of them by default. Also, these recipes are now automatically unlocked with enough skill. Thanks to this, you will never again meet situation when you are missing blueprint for required part for already known and more advanced blueprint. Rare blueprints (cloning station, token, some building parts) will be still random dropped in chests.
- Many minor issue fixes and gameplay tweaks.
All of these changes open new ways for future updates and issue fixes. For example tweaking UI with filtering and searching will require changing internal logic before making visible updates, but now, we are (more than) one step closer.
Thank you for undestanding and patience in waiting for update.
We are still working. Hard.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=610501039&insideModal=0