Highlights
Shrines and Mana Boosters
Elemental Mana Boosters are powerful - if you add that upgrade to a building and then supply charged Elemental Crystals, you get 100% output speed to a building. But this didn't mesh well with recent changes to the Mana System, because a building might also consume a charged Crystal as a recipe ingredient.
So I decided to move the Boost functionality out of the production buildings themselves, and into Shrines. Then, the Shrines can fill nearby buildings' boost meters via an area-of-effect ability.
To use this, first apply the Booster upgrade to your building (each production building allows a specific Elemental booster). Then place a Shrine of the matching element nearby, and select the "Transmit Boost" recipe on the Shrine. When you supply the Shrine with the right Elemental Crystal, it will fill the boost meter of nearby buildings. The Shrine will output Depleted Crystals, which you can then send to a Recharger so they can be used again.
(For now, the old method of connecting a pipe directly to a building to fill its Boost meter is still possible, but it's likely I'll make that obsolete in some future patch.)
As a bonus, the Shrine buildings have been updated. They no longer look like mini-temples - instead they each have their own unique shape that should help them be more identifiable.
Auto-disabled Grabbers
Previously, when adding a new Grabber, it would start out fully active and would begin pulling out items before the player had a chance to set a filter. This led to odd workarounds like having to build the grabber away from the building, then set its filter, then move it onto the building.
Now, the game detects if the newly created Grabber is linked to a building that could potentially output more than one type of item. If this is the case, the Grabber starts with an initial "Nothing" filter which will not output any items until a filter is assigned. (You can still use the blank "None" filter if you do actually want to pull everything, or shift-click on multiple specific item icons to select those as well).
Mana, Fluid, and Omni Pipe connectors also use this new process.
You can now also double-click on Pipe Connectors, Rail Stops, Inventory Sensors, and Agent Triggers to immediately open the filter selection window.
Cleaner Item Filter panel
Another nice change is that the Item Filter menu now only displays items that are relevant to its connecting building. So instead of digging through 100 items each time you want to set a Grabber filter, you only need to pick from the 2 or 3 items that the building produces as output, or the storage building is holding.
Smarter Mana Connector behavior
Some additional changes were made to Mana Pipe behaviors, as there were a few edge cases I hadn't taken into account when making the last round of updates. A big one of these was how Depleted Crystals behave. They used to always Bypass any building - but this made setting up Rechargers very difficult, as the player would often want those to Hold at the Recharger's connector if there wasn't spare capacity. This has been resolved so they behave more predictably
Full Patch Notes
Shrine Changes
- Increased Earth and Air Shrine area-of-effect radius
- Fixed bug: Air Shrines were not applying effect on workers that were on Foot Paths or Roads
- Workers can be boosted again by Air Shrines when their boost remaining falls below 20%
- All 4 shrine types now have an additional “Apply Boost” recipe that will fill matching elemental boost meters for any buildings within their Area-of-effect
Mana Pipe Changes
- Removed logic that caused Depleted Crystals to always bypass a building. In order to preserve legacy booster setups, they will still default to bypass if the access type is 'Power In', or if they are at a Mana Connector with no outlets AND the building has a booster meter. But otherwise will act like regular items in a pipe.
- Fixed Mana Crystals being output at a building’s Input node. The only exception to this is if the building produces depleted crystals as a byproduct or has a Mana Booster, as legacy setups require Input Connectors to act as Input+Output. This issue had mainly been affecting Rechargers, causing their charged crystals to be sent out their Input connector.
- Fixed bug: A Mana Connector with input overflow behavior set to Hold was not holding Depleted Crystals
- “Charged Crystal” and “Depleted Crystal” are now filter options when configuring a Mana Connector
- Depleted Crystals will default to Hold at a connector if the attached building accepts Depleted Crystals as input (e.g. Rechargers).
New Features
- Added “Nothing” option to item filters, which will output no items (similar to setting to inactive state)
- When creating a Grabber or OmniConnector (either manually, or via dragging a belt or chute away from a building) if the source building produces 2 or more items, or is a storage building containing 2 or more items, the Grabber will default to the “Nothing” filter. This gives players a chance to configure a filter before items are pulled out of the building. An exclamation point alert will be shown on the block until it is selected.
- Can now double-click on Pipe Connector, Rail Stop, Inventory Sensors, and Agent Triggers to edit their Item Filter
- When configuring the filter on a Pipe Connector or Grabber that is attached to a production building, only the building’s production outputs are displayed in the available filter list
- Added 'Animate Workers' option in the Video Options panel, which turns worker bouncy movement on or off
Balance Changes
- Modified several Trading Post recipes to make them more advantageous, especially ones producing basic goods
- Added new Trading Post recipes that produce Wood Wheels, Conveyor Belts, and Rail Tiles
- Ethers had their consumption times sped up to account for recent change that they can now be produced 4X as fast, but also decreased sell values:
- Changed Fire Ether sell value from 15 Red Coins to 10 Red Coins
- Changed Water Ether sell value from 10 Blue Coins to 6 Blue Coins
- Changed Earth Ether sell value from 4 Purple Coins to 2 Purple Coins
- Changed Air Ether sell value from 20 Yellow Coins to 15 Yellow Coins
Misc Bug Fixes
- Fixed bug: could not use label filtering when filter menu was already displaying a subset of items based on parent object’s fixed filter
- Fixed bug: Packed items would not enter storage buildings with packed item filter