Hi everyone! I'm Pete (my real name is Petri).
The game has been in Early Access for a week now, so here is the first Werk in Progress, a devlog about how things are going and what's coming next.
I'm not sure yet whether these will be weekly reports or just come out when I feel like I have something to say. I guess we'll find out!
Why I'm making FluxWerks
I've played a lot of factory games, and they are great. Still, I always felt that if you took the best and most interesting parts of them, at least to me, and put those together, you'd get a game I would really like to play. So the main goal with FluxWerks is to make a factory game that I enjoy playing myself.
For me, that meant a world that feels at least somewhat alive, with small critters around just for fun and weather that actually also does something.
Obviously the terrain needed to be modifiable, for all kinds of creative building or just for flattening everything out and covering it in concrete because you feel like it.
A major part that goes together with modifiable voxel terrain is, of course, that fluids must flow and heat must move through the ground and into your machines.
I had been doing the same development job for about eight years and was getting tired of it, so I took a huge financial gamble and I quit that job to work on FluxWerks full time.
How the launch went
Sales have been okay, considering there was minimal hype or marketing for the game because I didn't really have the knowledge or resources to do that.
I've already reached my initial minimum goal, which is enough for me to keep working on FluxWerks full time through Early Access. Thank you to everyone who bought the game. You made that possible.
I'm definitely not going to buy a yacht yet and sail away (which is probably good for further development), but that is fine and can wait until after the full release.
Reviews have been mostly positive, even though the game just came out in Early Access and there were, and still are, rough edges and balance issues.
Thanks for the positive reviews. They really help the future of the game, so keep them coming if you like the game. But I do also want to say thanks for some of the negative ones, because they actually include constructive feedback.
I don't mind the negative reviews, but if you leave one, I only ask that you please try to provide some details so that I can actually do something about the issues you are having.
It is great to see that people are having fun with the game already, and some are putting a crazy number of hours into their factories.
FluxWerks also sits at around 27,000 wishlists. Thank you for those too!
Your reports
So far you have sent 167 reports from inside the game, including 54 bug reports, 38 crash reports and 38 suggestions. I go through every one of them, eventually.
A lot of the fixes in the recent patches came straight from your reports, and so do several things in v0.5.18.
If something goes wrong, the best way to tell me is Report a Problem in the pause menu.
It can attach your game log, a screenshot and your current save, which makes a bug much easier to find and fix.
If you'd like me to be able to get back to you, fill in the optional contact field. Suggestions are welcome there too.
Common technical issues
These are the technical problems that have come up so far, and what to try:
- The game freezes and then closes. This is the most common crash so far. It happens when the graphics card stops responding, and I'm still working out what sets it off, so if it happens to you, please send the report the game offers the next time you start it. An up-to-date graphics driver is worth having too.
- Older AMD Radeon cards (RX 400, RX 500 and RX Vega series). On an RX Vega, the whole UI flickered every few seconds, and the -force-d3d11 launch option fixed it. It switches the game to DirectX 11. If you have one of these cards and see flickering, freezes or crashes, give it a try. DirectX 11 is a fallback and less tested, so remove the option again if it doesn't help.
- Intel 13th and 14th generation Core desktop CPUs. Some of these processors have a known stability problem that can make any game crash. If other games crash on your PC too, update your motherboard BIOS to get Intel's fix, and remove any overclock or undervolt. The fix can't repair a processor that is already affected, so if the crashes continue, contact Intel or your seller. If only FluxWerks crashes, please send a report.
- Low frame rate on older graphics cards. The rendering isn't heavily optimized yet, and some graphics settings can make an older GPU work hard. Terrain Details is probably the biggest offender, so it's the first thing to lower in Display & Graphics (in the pause menu). Clouds, Emissive Lighting and the shadow settings can help too. While you're in a game, that menu shows your frame rate live, so you can see what each change does.
- Your PC slows down while the game is in the background. With Run in Background on, which is the default, the game keeps running when you switch to another window or screen, and that can slow down the rest of your PC. Turning off Run in Background (in Settings, under Audio & System) fixes it, with one catch: your factory then pauses whenever you're in another window.
To add a launch option, right-click FluxWerks in your Steam library, choose Properties, and type it into Launch Options on the General tab.
Balance in the later game
The balance gets a bit off the further you get. Ore deposits are small and get used up quickly, and coal and water especially run out fast. Computing demand also gets a bit too much in the late game. Some of you have reported the same.
v0.5.18 makes a start on the water problem with the new Rain Collector, and a Deep Vein Extractor on a Water Vein will pump far more than before. Steam Turbines already give most of their steam back as water (the MK 2 even more), so if you pipe it back into your boilers, you only need to pump in the rest.
A resource rebalance is in the works too, so that ore deposits and oil pockets hold more. I'm also considering an option for infinite ore deposits, for anyone who would rather not deal with running out at all. Computing demand is something I want to look at as well.
Coming in v0.5.18
v0.5.18 comes out later this week, at least on the testing branch. I'm not sure yet if it makes it to the default branch, as there are a lot of changes to test properly.
The main points:
- Work Orders: everything you mark for your nanobots now stays until it's done. Orders wait while they are out of reach or you're short of material, and they are saved with your game. The Work Orders panel now shows each order's progress. B now pauses all orders instead of cancelling them. Ctrl+Z can be used to undo your last mark.
- Keep in Inventory: you can configure how many of each item to carry, and items move between nearby storages and your inventory to match.
- Building tools: Aim Guides show what a new belt or pipe will line up with. Hold Alt with the belt or pipe tool to place a Router. A belt drawn along existing belts now builds over them.
- Rain Collector MK 1: a new building that collects water while it rains.
- Farming Statistics: a new Farming tab in the Statistics panel that tracks each crop.
- Heat and power: bug fixes so that stopped and paused machines no longer give off heat or pollution, and machines slowed by heat or cold use less power and fuel.
- Fixes: crashes when demolishing buildings and when loading some saves, stutter around large factories, inserters moving slower than their tooltip says, and many more.
The full patch notes come with the update.
What comes after that
A short first roadmap. There are no dates yet, and I'll probably do a more permanent roadmap visible on the store page or somewhere else at some point:
- Steam Workshop support for sharing blueprints, and possibly other things later.
- Localization support: I don't have the capacity to support official translations yet, so the first step is to make it possible for the community to translate the game themselves. Possibly via the Steam Workshop?
- Nuclear power, to help with the power needs of the late game.
- A customizable hotbar, so you decide what goes in each slot.
- Better keybindings that allow more combinations, like descending with Ctrl, or using the mouse wheel for something else when you play in first-person view.
- A full optimization pass on rendering, so the game runs better on older graphics cards.
Thanks for playing, and for all the reports and feedback so far.
If you want to talk about the game, get help, or share blueprints or screenshots of your factory, come say hi on Discord. It already has a fairly large community with awesome people, and it's a faster way to get answers from me or other people there.
I do try to browse the Steam forum actively too, but it takes more time there to go back and forth with the questions and answers.
Last but not least, did you know that the game's soundtrack was made by JustWall? You can praise him on Discord and also listen to it at ffm.to/fluxwerks-original-soundtrack
See you in the next Werk in Progress!