Hello Riftbreakers!
We would like to give you a little sneak peek of one of the quality of life changes we have been working on lately. It is, in fact, one of the most requested changes since the launch of the game. We’re talking about the mass repair, upgrade, and building deconstruction tools. While they may not sound very exciting, we had to solve some interesting issues while working on them, which we will tell you about in this article.
Let’s start with the reason why many players requested these features in the first place. When The Riftbreaker first launched, negative weather effects, such as hailstorms or acid rain, were global, not regionalized. All buildings were damaged because of those events, which was especially painful for players who wanted their bases in pristine condition. Obviously, you could build Repair Facilities around your base, but setting them up takes time and resources. Manual repairs were always instant, but their point-and-click nature has led to negative experiences.
We have the technology.
We realized that we should give our players the ability to repair buildings in a larger area. The idea is pretty simple - select the repair tool, use the mouse scroll to choose the desired size, click once, and have all your buildings repaired in no time. However, since manual repairs were instant, you could easily keep repairing structures under attack, making them virtually indestructible. We needed to make changes to the repair mechanic as a whole. These are the changes we decided to make to facilitate mass repair:
- Manual building repair will no longer be instant. Mr. Riggs will send drones to repair the damaged buildings in the selected area. The drones will repair those structures in a short amount of time.
- The maximum repair time is 10 seconds. The drones will repair buildings at a constant rate, 10% of maximum health per second. If a building is at 50% health, it will take the drone 5 seconds to bring it back to 100% condition. This rate is the same for all buildings, whether it’s a wall or a Fusion Power Plant.
- If a building gets damaged during the repair process, the process is stopped. This is necessary to make ‘cheesing’ attack waves impossible.
- Maximum repair cost stays unchanged - it’s 20% of the original building cost.
These assumptions allow us to keep the mass repair process relatively cheap and quick while avoiding various potential issues.
The game will automatically detect all the damaged structures in the area selected with the repair tool and mark them with a green highlight. Once you give the order to start repairs, the system will try to repair as many structures as you can afford.
Keep an eye on your economy - mass upgrades can be costly!
We decided to give the upgrade and deconstruction utilities the same treatment to keep parity between tools. Once the update goes live, you will be able to use your mouse wheel to increase the area of the selector for these tools. The upgrade tool will highlight all the structures that can be improved and try to make that happen for as many buildings in that area as possible. Obviously, you can still select and upgrade buildings one by one if you’d rather have complete control over the process. The deconstruction tool will simply sell all structures on the highlighted area - be careful what you choose!
Choosing to sell all your defenses instead of repairing them might be a suboptimal move.
The updated versions of these tools are still in development. There are still some aspects that require tweaking and some bugs to iron out. We also want to add a tooltip that will inform you precisely about the costs of the operation you are about to carry out. Plenty of work ahead of us, but there are even more highly-requested quality of life changes coming to you in the near future, including the ‘build max level’ upgrade. We will keep you updated on our progress. The best way to get all the latest news is to join our Discord at www.discord.gg/exorstudios. You can also tune in to our streams - Tuesdays and Thursdays, 3 PM CET at www.twitch.tv/exorstudios.
See you soon!