0.8.0e1: The Farmer
Hey Drifters,
You can finally test out the Farmer!
For the longest time, sustaining a large town with food has been notoriously challenging, often resulting in a ton of unhappy drifters. Additionally, obtaining early-game food has been tricky and came with a needless amount of pollution. In short: the food pipeline just wasn't great. We've been building towards changing it for the longest time, and are ready to roll out the first changes :)
So let's jump into the details: for 0.8, we're changing up our usual workflow a bit and hopping onto Experimental much sooner. While some of the new features are not yet fully implemented, and the UI remains unclear, the most important aspect is that it works and you can play :) Share your thoughts and feedback and we'll iterate upon the patch with quick consecutive patches!
Starting off, the entire food pipeline has been reworked, polluted food is no longer a thing, the Seaweed Grower has been improved to functions as a farm and the Fish Farm is now available to let you grow some fish. Later on, we'll be looking at adding Fresh-water Farming (vegetables) during experimental.
What's next?
This update will be on experimental until all features are properly implemented. After that, The Cook will make it's appearance!
This patch is still in development and can be tested on the experimental branch to give feedback.
This is how you can enable the experimental branch of Flotsam. This will only work when you're not in a game:
1. Open Steam Library
2. Right click Flotsam
3. Select Properties
4. Go to tab 'Betas' at the top.
5. Select 'Experimental' in the drop-down.
Early Access 0.8.0e1: The Farmer
This is an early version of 'The Farmer', featuring the introduction of Fish Farming and improvements to the Seaweed Grower. Some of the new features have not fully been implemented and UI is still very unclear, but consecutive small patches during experimental will quickly tackle these issues. Additionally, we're looking at adding 'Freshwater Farming' (vegetables) during the experimental phase.
- Reworked the entire food pipeline, changing most recipes. Re-balanced pacing of food creation. 'Icky' food is now much easier to produce, while 'Yummy' food requires proper pipelines.
- Reworked Food Pollution. Food no longer has any pollution value. Pollution will be re-introduced later on in a different manner.
- The Seaweed Farm now continuously produces seaweed, without needing to refresh the spores.
- New construction: The Fish Farm. The fish farm will grow fish from egg to adult stages where they will reproduce and create new eggs, then continue to a harvest stage where they can be harvested. It currently only works for Gobblers.
- New construction: The Extr-egg-tor. (temporary) This building will harvest eggs from fish. It currently only works for Gobblers. This building will most likely be removed during experimental.
- New construction: The Animal Chow Grinder. This building allows the creation of various Animal Chow. Various Animal Chow is needed to feed fish in the Fish Farms.
- New construction: The Seaweed Spinner. The Seaweed Spinner now handles Seaweed recipes, while the Chop Shop has changed to handle Icky fish recipes.
- New construction: The Manual Dryer. You can now build a Manual Dryer to dry Wet Wood into Dry Wood. This increases the speed by which you can get Dry Wood in the early game and fixes some of the pacing issues.
- Re-balanced the early game to depend much less on passive buildings. The early buildings had a high dependency on waiting, not allowing direct fixing of problems when they arose. Changes to the Desalinator, Chop Shop and more should now relieve that.
- Removed constructions: Drying Rack (the one slot version), Solar Still, Fish Sticks.
- Behind the Scenes: Changed how items are handled in the game.