Greetings, esteemed colleagues!
As you all know so terribly, terribly well, the Crush Depth update arrives this summer. But it IS already summer, you say? Well well. Then it must be close. With summer in full swing, why not take a dip into this Crush Depth preview to cool off?
New Sectors
Two major new Sectors are on their way, and at least a Portal World, maybe two. Maybe three. It’s hard to say, but we won’t.
Security
Are you finding this Status Report hard to follow? Well, get used to it, bucko, because the dim lighting in Security Sector is bound to make your navigation difficult. IS-0059 isn’t bound to make it any easier.
Previously, we’ve teased a small sampling of the Security Sector and that image was mostly a black blob. Here, have a second one.
We hope you aren’t afraid of the dark, but we’re confident you will find your way to the light once again.
GATE Security Crates
Speaking of Security, we know you’ve been eyeing these large, chunky crates.
Luckily, Warren has finally followed through on something (for once) and opened up a new trading post. You’ll find he has a few things available for purchase, but that’s all we can say about that right now. He’s got a gun, after all.
The Hydroplant
Perhaps when you explore enough of this concrete superstructure, you’ll be bold enough to strap on the new Rebreather and slip into those murky depths. You never know what’s waiting for you in those dark waters. Maybe some food or weird alien technology or seaweed or something.
Voussoir
Need to cool off further? Take a trip into the snowy mountains of the Voussoir Facility! Though this brisk vacation may not be as relaxing as you’d hoped.
With the new temperature system, we’d recommend grabbing (or crafting) some cozy gear to keep you warm from head to toe! We’ve completely reworked the temperature system, making it both easy to understand, and fun to counteract.
Lasers
Power and defense all in one!
Power your home, from near or far – just watch where you step. We’re excited to see what crazy stuff you can come up with using the laser system. We just build the thing. You’re the ones who put it to use. … After you also build it because this is a survival crafting game.
Fishing
The Research Division has gone fishing. Literally. We’ve done a bit of work on fishing but since it’s not quite ready to show, here’s a little debug nonsense for you to stare at. We’re spending a lot of time getting the feel right, and we’re trying to keep the fishing activity as in-world as possible.
We also hear rumors of a Fishing Skill with unlockable perks – but that sounds like a whale of a tale, if you ask us.
The Chef’s Counter
We’ve also moved a lot of food recipes and fish butchery (is that a word?) over to the Chef’s Counter, a split-table which can be crafted fairly early on to fit nicely into your base and help bring out the worst food-obsessed habits from the chef-oriented scientists of your group.
What Grows Beneath
We aren’t quite ready to show it all off, but a few new plants are hitting the waves… and caves. This appears to be some kind of psychedelic rice. What new dishes could be in store?
Storage by Tag
We’ve made a major change to certain inventories. Zag says it’s for the good of the gameplay balance. I say it’s because he HATES us. By us, I mean the cool scientists. Supposedly this “big brain game designer” feels that certain “containers” are “overpowered” and thinks by restricting items by tag we will expand our bases and not “just use refrigerators to store everything.”
Sure Zag, whatever you say. Now certain containers can only hold certain types of items. This currently only applies to the Fridge, being able to only hold food (or mostly food) items, and the Med Kits only able to hold Medical Items.
Radial Wheel Improvements
In news that makes it feel like Zag does actually care about us instead of wanting to watch us pack-rats relentlessly suffer, there are now a bunch of new easy-to-use radial wheels coming in Crush Depth.
- When accessing Charging Stations, you can hold interact to bring up a wheel of all the available chargeable items in your inventory and place the one you want.
- When holding down the Flashlight action, you can bring up a radial wheel to toggle which flashlight you want instead of having to cycle through the available options.
- Holstering has had the same treatment. If you want your weapon, your shield, or neither, you can hold the Holster key to bring up a wheel to select your desired state.
As before, you’ll still be able to tap the action to cycle through these things, but this should bring a nice massaging effect to your experience. This is also a good time to remind you that you also already have a Medical Wheel, if you hold the Health key (X by default.)
But wait, there’s more!
We were going to say a lot about the following features, but we’re just so gosh-darn busy these days that we don’t want to stop and talk about it. We just want to CREATE. And we still have a lot left to do. Here is a small sampling of some other things on the way in Crush Depth… And we assure you, this is not all.
The SUV
You All Guessed It: The Moisture Teleporter
Carbon Structures
Scoped Weaponry
Performance Note
We also want to take a moment to address some performance concerns. We are on top of it. We’ve spent an enormous amount of our time this update overhauling a few areas of the game (specifically Labs) and planning ahead with some of the new sectors (Hydroplant in particular, which is quite massive in scale.) In Crush Depth, these areas will do a lot more loading and unloading as you move about the space, for much greater efficiency.
We expect some hiccups along the way, since we’re technically pulling levels apart and putting them back together. We expect a few oddities with existing saves using those areas (nothing catastrophic - most likely just some duplicate/respawned objects) and you may see some visual changes from this, changing how some areas might look from a distance. It is an ongoing process, but we’re really happy to report we’re seeing improved performance in these areas. We’d like to do this with more areas as we go along - we’ll keep you posted.
We’ll talk more about this on release day, and set some expectations or let you know if there’s anything to watch out for. We don’t expect many bumps here, but we’re entering our larger internal testing phase now and should iron out the kinks in no time.
You said summer and it’s already summer!
Yes. These things are both true. We will leave it up to the scientific community to do the math here. We trust that you can do it.
One last foggy fact...
Dr. Thule has been making improvements to the Facility’s ventilation system and claims he can “control the weather.” What the heck does that mean? That man is losing it, I tell ya.
That’s all for today, folks. Thank you for checking out today’s preview of our upcoming summer update; Crush Depth. If you missed the first installment, please check it out right here. Please continue leaving us excellent feedback, good reviews, and do not fall asleep during IS-0059 sightings. If you do, you may end up in Anteverse 39, and we aren’t sure if you can make it back. Or if you’ll even want to.
Onward -- to science.
If you’ve been enjoying your time at the GATE Cascade Research Facility and are able to safely paddle through the muck to the Steam page, please leave us a review!
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