0.8.0: Farming
Hey Drifters,
Farming is here!
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: In patch 0.8.0, The entire food pipeline has been reworked, polluted food is no longer a thing. Fields and Corn have been added, along with a Fish Farm where various fish can be cultivated. Additionally, known features of the game have been improved; the Seaweed Grower now functions as a farm, and overall pacing adjustments have been made.
You might have noticed that the Doctor is useless when there's no pollution, and you're right! We're keeping her in for now as pollution will play a different part in the future. We've also decided not to make the Farmer specialist, as there was too much overlap with the Botanist.
What's next?
The Chef is next on the horizon! We'll be introducing new crops and culinary food. As well as player control over what food your drifters eat :)
We might throw in some small patches inbetween, too. As we're brewing with the idea of adding a biofuel pipeline with the seaweed, and making some changes to weights. More info soon.
Early Access 0.8.0
This patch introduces Crops, Fish Farming and improvements to the Seaweed Grower!
- 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 above change makes the Doctor useless this patch, they will make a re-appearance later.
- The Seaweed Farm now continuously produces seaweed, without needing to refresh the spores.
- New construction: The Fish Farm. Here, you can slot in 'Broodstock' that will lay eggs. These eggs will grow into adult fish when fed, allowing you to harvest them. The Broodstock will remain in the farm and continue spawning eggs until removed.
- 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.
- Added freshwater farming, you can now grow crops! Crops grow by consuming water and can be harvested once fully grown.
- New Construction: Field (1x1 - 5x5)
- New Crop: Corn
- Temporarily added Corn to supermarket landmarks, which can be used to cultivate more Corn.
- With the introduction of fields, we've made water cheaper to produce. This alleviates early game worries, but this ramps up mid-game and end-game with fields.
- Increased yields of Fish Schools and added small variance.
Misc
- Behind the Scenes: Changed how items are handled in the game.
- Selecting drifters in the drifter overview while the 'LevelUp' filter is active now opens the Drifter Expertise page.
- Added various animations.
- Various small fixes and balancing.
Fixes
- Fixed issue where pressing ESC would close a panel and open the main menu at the same time.
- Fixed UI issue where players would select the 'boat' option to salvage a landmark again, it would act as 'swimming' instead.
- Fixed issue where the building panel's scrollbar would often be jittery.
- Fixed issue where weight was not displayed above some buildings.
- Fixed issue where a save game could not be loaded because a building was being removed during loading.
- Fixed issue where the architect mode breaks when attempting to move a building that a drifter was going to.