Hello everyone,
Build 56 has been uploaded.
We have done some quite important changes to the game but they are different to what we said we would be working on in our last update post. Essentially for quite a while we have overlooked the needs of new players. This has to led to a lot of confusion about how to setup an aquarium and keep it from going wrong. In recent weeks we have improved a lot of the help text found in various parts of the game that give explanations about various aspects of the water chemistry and information about fish and plant populations.
That was not enough and what players really wanted was a tutorial and some examples scenes. A full blown tutorial is not possible at this time for reasons I won't go into but we have put together a lot of example aquariums that players can learn from and experiment with.
The aquarium loading browser has been modified to have a separate selection of example scenes. They are separate from your scenes so there is no confusion with names or anything like that. There are eleven examples in total and they are all fairly different from each other. Each of them shows a different way that an aquarium can be set up. Each of them has a different maintenance routine as you might expect. Occasionally you might need to drop a fertilizer ball into the water to keep the nutrients level at a good level for the plants. Other aquariums will have the nutrients levels taken care of via the plumbing system. You will also be able to see various ways to filter waste. It can be done completely naturally using fungi or with a sponge filter in the aquarium or with a filter in the plumbing system. Some aquariums have problems which are immediately obvious when you load them up or they will manifest over time because there is a small imbalance somewhere that was overlooked. It might be an interesting challenge to try out ideas and fix some of these aquariums. Example aquariums cannot be saved over. They are designed purely as a learning feature and you can modify them as much as you like. If you manage to completely screw them up then fear not you can just reload them without fear of accidently saving it..
Heaters:
Heaters are now fixed for good. They operate with a thermostat and will not overshoot their target temperature. They are also more effective in large aquariums so it does not take 50 heaters to heat the largest aquarium in a reasonable time. They have also been re-textured to look better than before.
Similar changes have been made for other plumbing devices. For the nutrients injector players only need to set their desired nutrients level and the device will release enough nutrients over time to get it to that level. However if you have a lot of plants consuming nutrients at a rate that is more than rate that nutrients are being produced it will never reach the target level and players will need to add another nutrients injector or fertilizer ball to keep nutrients from running out.
Similar changes have been made to other plumbing devices and the devices placed in the aquarium like air stones and sponge filters.
There have also been the usual set of bug fixes and tweaks to the maths behind the water chemistry etc.
A lot of these changes were long overdue and obviously what the game has needed for quite a while but when taking into account that I cannot remember the last time I took a proper break it is not surprising that these mistakes have been made.
For the next two weeks I shall be away resting and relaxing my brain, I might even go outside. My colleague will be working on the ever growing list of art content so you can all be assured that work on the game will continue during my brief absence. I will be checking the forums and answering questions every one or two days.
We wish you all a good Monday evening
The Fishery Team