Greetings, esteemed colleagues!
For today’s Status Report we’re doing a bit of Home World Q&A! So many questions, so little time. Would you like to learn (and see) more about Home Worlds? Splendid.
Right this way.
Home Worlds FAQ
What is a Home World?
Home Worlds are portal worlds focused on giving you a place to live your cozy scientist life, away from the hustle and bustle of the GATE Cascade Research Facility! You can use this space (as little or as much as you’d like) in the same way you’d use any other base building location in any other portal world. You can craft, cook and grow plants, and time will pass as usual within this space. Speaking of space…
Do Home Worlds have a lot of building space?
Home Worlds will always feature a good amount of open space for base-building. While it will vary from world to world, most will have at least one location we consider “the building spot.” But knowing you folks, we’re underestimating exactly where you can manage to cram in a refrigerator.
Do Home Worlds contain furniture and other items?
Home Worlds will sometimes contain their own unique furniture which you can package up and bring back to the facility, if you’d like! There won’t be any weapons or “useful” items in these places. Unless you consider a different fish variant to be useful. Which you might.
And more to the point, you can bring your own furniture IN, creating and setting up whatever you want, just as you can in other Portal Worlds.
How do I get a Home World?
For now we’ll just have one Home World that will be available on 1.0 launch, and that is the Torii Home World, which can be found as part of the Supporter’s Edition. We’d like to remind all scientists that early access scientists are receiving that entire package free of charge, so at this moment, you don’t have to do anything to get it if you’re already playing! Scientists reading this later (hello future scientist!) may be required to purchase the Supporter’s Edition to access the Torii Home World.
Wow, that’s a very pretty lake, why isn’t the rest of the game this good looking?
how about you shut u–
What kind of content will I miss if I don’t have any Home Worlds?
Out of respect to the scientists who may not have these worlds in the future, we’ve set a few rules for these Home Worlds.
First, if the host owns the Home World (e.g. Supporter’s Edition in this example) then everyone who joins their server will have access to that location and everything within it.
Secondly, these Home Worlds are meant as purely cozy and/or cosmetic spaces to set up your base / farm / art gallery – or whatever you want to use them for. They don’t feature new NPCs or lore. They may feature a meaningful lore location (like Torii) or simply exist as part of one, but that’s about it. These Home Worlds do not fill the same role as gameplay portal worlds which feature story, enemies and other loot.
How will I access a Home World?
The Office Plaza is the hub of early Facility life and one of the most accessible locations for our early game scientists. In 1.0, you’ll find a new teleportation hub has opened up in one of the plaza wings. This gives you access to these locations rather early, if you want to use them.
You can also set up your own portal system to connect to your Home World as well for added convenience.
Do Home Worlds reset like normal portal worlds?
Yes, Home Worlds will reset in accordance with normal portal world rules and their (few) contents will restock. As with any Portal World and base building, the same rules apply to Home Worlds.
Can traveling traders visit my base in a Home World?
They can! It’s a little unnerving the first time but, you know, the more the merrier.
Can my base be assaulted by enemies in Home Worlds?
Home Worlds are peaceful places, but they are still Portal Worlds. In the interest of fairness (and because we can’t control the wild nature of portals!) they will follow all of the same rules as any other Portal World.
Are there cosmetics tied to this Home World?
Just as the Supporter’s Edition is sort of a bundle of Home World, cosmetics and such, we expect future Home Worlds to follow suit on this. Heck, there might even be a suit or two - someday.
Do Home Worlds work on Dedicated Servers?
Yes! Dedicated Servers will simply base the available Home Worlds on the ownership of the Admin scientists. This means server owners will be able to “approve” their Home Worlds for use on the server. As you can see, we’re not being too shy about keeping Home Worlds pretty available. We think it’s more fun this way.
Can I have more than one Home World?
Sure! As you can see, the GATE staff have built quite a few potential portals! Will they all get filled up over time? Maybe. Portals to the Home Worlds you have acquired will be activated in the Office Plaza teleportation hub automatically, as long as the host scientist has it.
Are Home Worlds limited time?
Heck no. Like all the content we’ve added thus far, we aren’t really super interested in gating it by time or anything like that. We don’t have any plans to make any limited time content. We believe games should be enjoyed now, and 10 years from now.
How do I get the Supporter’s Edition? I don’t see it on the store!
If you’ve already been sciencing with us through this Early Access period, the Supporter’s Edition will be automatically teleported into your Steam Library at 1.0! After that point, it will be available on the store page as you might expect.
Does Zag have anything he wants to say about Home Worlds and their design?
Yeah, sure. Let me hand the mic to Zag.
Thanks Criss. We have a lot of really fun portal world ideas and some of them just don’t come up to the bar of “an entire portal world” so we thought pretty hard about how we could turn some simple, more artistic worlds into base-building spaces instead. … Okay, are most of them gone? Good. Look, it’s really simple guys. Sometimes if you don’t let artists stretch their legs a bit and make some pretty portal worlds once in a while they start to gnaw on their cages and bite you when you try to feed them. So, problem solved. -Z
Uhh, thanks Zag, that’s um, very humane of you. … Ahem.
Thanks for coming along with us as we learn about Home Worlds! We’d love your thoughts on what you might want to see in a Home World, what Home Worlds you might want to see in the future and what you think you’d use it for!
And with that, we are heads down as we sprint LIKE THE WIND into our impending 1.0 launch on Steam, Xbox and Playstation! And have no fear, 1.0 may be the end of the main story, but we’ve got a feeling this is not the end of the road. Maybe we’ll be enslaved to Abiotic Factor forever. There are worse fates, we suppose.
See you again soon.
Onward -- to science.
Join the Scientific Community!
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https://store.steampowered.com/app/427410/Abiotic_Factor/