Today’s update brings you smarter passengers, mail, GeForce NOW support, and other improvements. Plus, we are happy to announce that we are taking part in the Steam Event, first ever in our history!
Smarter passengers
Passengers were introduced with the Early Access release, and their behavior since then has been pretty simple: they waiting for a bus or train to take them directly to their destination. They don’t want to switch stations, not to mention transport modes (e.g. from bus to train or vice versa).
With this update, passengers are much more smart — they are now aware of concept of switching stations, and even transport modes. And they can do it more than once! Passengers can take a bus, then switch it to a train, then switch again to another bus in order to get where they need. This should unlock you a new level of flexibility when planning your routes.
New kind of freight: Mail
First time since the Steam Early Access release, we’re introducing a new kind of cargo to deliver: mail! Collect it at passenger stations to deliver it to recipients, using intermediate stations to transfer between modes of transport.
Passenger UI improvements
To let you better understand what’s going on with passengers and mail on your transport network, we’ve made several improvements to UI.
First, we’ve updated the passenger and mail popups to be more readable and compact. It now groups passengers by destination, and also highlights unreachable directions, for example, due to lack of transport on a route.
Second, passenger stations now have new labels indicating amount of passenger and mail awaiting on this station.
Last but not least, current passenger coverage is now shown when placing passenger stations. This makes it easier to distribute them and achieve 100% coverage more efficiently.
There is always room for improvement, so we will continue to work on both the gameplay and user interface aspects of passengers and mail in future updates.
Base Builder Fest
We’re thrilled to announce that we’ll be taking part in the Base Builder Fest, starting on January 23! This is the first Steam Event for us and we are really looking forward to see how it will go.
Also, we understand that some of you who don't have the game yet were affected by the recent regional price changes. During the Fest, you (or your friends) will have a great opportunity to get the game for a lower price.
Oh, and by the way, if you like our game and haven’t wrote a review yet: please do that! It helps a lot 💫
GeForce NOW
We are happy to announce that Voxel Tycoon will be available to stream through GeForce NOW in a few months. Play anywhere from almost any device: GeForce NOW instantly transforms your laptop, desktop, Mac, TV, Android device, iPhone, or iPad into the powerful PC gaming rig you’ve always dreamed of.
One important thing though: to get your saves available on GFN, you should have them in the Cloud.
To make this process a bit easier, we’ve added a new toggle to the save dialog, allowing you explicitly put the new save to Cloud.
Of course, you can always toggle Cloud sync from the list of saved games by clicking the cloud icon.
Other improvements
Add buildings to favorites
Building upon the work made in the Minor Update, we continue to make building palette more easy to use when you have a lot buildings from mods. This time, we’ve added Favorites functionality. Buildings added to favorites will be always displayed on top.
Better trailers behavior
We’ve improved the visual appearance of trucks with trailers in tight turns. This should be especially noticeable on road-trains, such is the
Software cursor
The game always used the so-called hardware cursor (rendered by the OS, not the game). It rendered independently of the game and doesn’t get affected by the game performance — so it always moves fluidly even in case of FPS drops.
However, it doesn't respect the game's UI scale (only the OS scale). In some cases this might be a problem. As a workaround for such situations, we've added support for software cursor (rendered by the game). It might be least responsive at times, but it scales with the UI properly. You can toggle it in Settings → General → Use software cursor.
Expand the base game with mods
A friendly reminder: there’re over 200 mods waiting for you in the Workshop, made by talented and creative members of our amazing community. You will find dozens of new trains, cars, buildings, entire supply chains, and even game mechanics which will give you a new perspective on the Voxel Tycoon experience. Give it a try!
What’s next
We continue our work on the rails and roads rework (also known as RRR) which will bring rail crossings, better tools for laying roads and rails, and many other related improvements. We don’t have the timeframe to share yet, but we steadily moving towards it.
Meanwhile, the next updates will bring some interesting features, such as vehicle obsolescence and Contracts mechanics, which will add some new twists to the game.
Thanks for reading, and see you next time, folks 💜