Hello Riftbreakers!
Every couple of months, we try to highlight the best mods published by The Riftbreaker community. Sometimes, these are highly complex mods that add tons of new technologies that require new resources. One such mod is WirawanMYT’s Expanded Arsenal, which allows you to create an incredibly complex factory full of interlocking elements you need to maintain. Other times, mods like Frognik’s MegaPack turn The Riftbreaker upside-down and only use the game as a basis to create something entirely new. Today’s mod firmly belongs to the first category. Let’s look at Killtech’s Rift Exploration Defense Industry mod, which is still in development but already bears a lot of promise.
The mod we're talking about today adds dozens of new buildings and technologies, increasing the complexity and challenge of playing the campaign mode by an order of magnitude.
Rift Exploration Defense Industry (REDI) is a massive mod that completely overhauls the game’s economy and warfare. It changes the existing resource economy and adds a whole to of new elements on top of it. The mod is intended to give you a more significant challenge, making energy, ammo, and resources more scarce - not an easy task by any stretch. Killtech enjoyed the vanilla Riftbreaker gameplay, but there were some aspects that they didn’t like that much. They compiled these into a ‘to-do’ list and aimed to fix these issues with the REDI mod. The REDI mod introduces changes in the following areas of the game:
- The production chains of resources play a more significant role, especially in the later stages of the campaign. New resources and dedicated buildings have been added.
- Higher-tier weapons are now less powerful and need ammunition that is more difficult to produce.
- Building upgrades are no longer no-brainers. Sometimes, you need lower-level buildings to keep the higher-level ones operational. Other times, level 2 and 3 buildings come with their own drawbacks, like the requirement for additional piping.
- Resource Outpost missions provide more challenges, and the resources from those are necessary to build and maintain the economy.
Let’s see what they did to improve on these aspects of the game. Remember that the mod is still being actively developed, so not all features are in their final form yet. Treat it as an appetizer for things to come! It is also meant to be played in Campaign mode - Survival playthroughs are not really possible without cheats due to limited time.
To be honest, even with cheats and unlimited time, building up a base utilizing all features of this mod could take DAYS.
The mod introduces several new resources into the game. Ammonium is a rare resource that is required to produce ammunition. It has its own production chain with custom-made buildings. You can find deposits of this resource scattered on the surface of Galatea 37. Petroleum is a liquid resource that can be converted into carbonium. It can be extracted from underground deposits using the Gas Extractor building introduced in World Expansion III. Since it is an underground liquid vein, it gives you potentially infinite carbonium in the game's later stages. There is also an additional plant-based reagent that is required to process the more advanced resources. It also comes in liquid form, introducing yet another piece to the puzzle of creating a sustainable economy.
Basic resource production is actually quite simplified - one factory can mine all variants of resources. There is also a separate building for drilling underground resources.
Killtech completely redesigned the way ammo is produced. Instead of manufacturing ammo packs that feature everything you would ever need, ammo is now made in specialized buildings, one for each type present in the game. In total, there are three tiers of 5 different types of ammo. Best of all - higher-tier ammo requires the lower-tier product as a resource. This means that upgrading buildings is no longer a no-brainer. Upgrade too many of your level one factories, and you’ll starve your level twos. This increases the complexity by orders of magnitude and brings the logistical challenge of The Riftbreaker to a whole new level, making ammunition a luxury.
Mr. Riggs can block tower projectiles. Towers can also block each other. Placement matters a lot!
The scarcity of ammunition is not the only aspect of the changing combat system. Superior and Extreme weapons have been nerfed quite significantly. Killtech doesn’t want you to become a one-robot army. You will have to utilize defensive towers of many types to beat the hordes of creatures attacking your bases. Towers have received some changes as well. Not only are there more variants available in the game, but they also often require pipe connections. On top of that, towers can block each other from shooting at the target, making placement critical.
Glorious pipe spaghetti, and this is just one side of a very small base. Imagine this in late-game.
That’s a ton of pretty fundamental changes. The mod alters even more aspects of the game (for example, a rare, one-in-a-hundred weather event that causes all the natural disasters to happen all at once); however, we won’t list them all now. Killtech has compiled their own list on the mod’s mod.io page. Go visit it at this link: https://mod.io/g/riftbreaker/m/rift-exploration-defense-industry.
What made this mod catch our attention is not only the sheer complexity it introduces. It is also the creative use of the assets that were already in the game. Adding so many new production tiers required Killtech to create new buildings. Instead of creating new models from scratch, they utilized the elements of already existing models and stacked them on top of each other to create completely new constructions. For example, the top part of the Liquid Material Storage stacked on top of the Gas Filtering plant makes for a great Bio-Cobalt Refinery. And we do not even want to guess what the Nitrification Plant is constructed from. The creativity just oozes from these contraptions.
The number of buildings Killtech could create by mixing the in-game assets is mind-boggling.
REDI mod also adds entirely new features. The best example of this is the Fire Control Station. It is a building that acts as a supplement for your existing defensive towers. The station disables all towers within its radius of operation if there are no enemies present in its radar range. Once an enemy unit comes close to the base, the Fire Control Station will automatically enable the towers. It is a brilliant way to save energy without the need to micromanage each building individually.
The research tree is expanded with all sorts of new tech, and your Communication Hubs will now require water for cooling. It's not going to be easy to discover it all!
The mod is still in a very early version, but it already bears a lot of promise. We highly recommend checking it out, especially if you are looking for an increased challenge that doesn’t necessarily involve chucking five times more creatures at your base. If you are a fan of pipe spaghetti, fragile production chains, and having to plan your base in a spreadsheet before actually committing to anything, then you will feel right at home. Again, you can find the mod by following this mod.io link:
https://mod.io/g/riftbreaker/m/rift-exploration-defense-industry
Killtech is an active user on our Discord (https://www.discord.gg/exorstudios), so if you have any questions or suggestions or would like to say ‘thank you’ - drop in and give them a shout!
See you next time!
EXOR Studios