We are very excited to finally reveal our official release date:
Oddsparks: An Automation Adventure will release version 1.0 on PC and consoles on the 27th of May!
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Early Access has been a great journey! From our start one year ago in April 2024, to the big updates ("Trains & Trades" in August 2024 and "Hot & Cold" in December 2024) and some smaller updates in between. It has been amazing to see the community grow, see all the crazy builds, cozy fan art, constructive feedback and overall love for the game.
So, let's quickly recap what to expect from the 1.0 update:
- New biome: "The Corrupted Ruins" isn't just the name of the 1.0 update, it's also the name of the new biome. The ruins of a long-gone civilization now lie in a gloomy swamp in the North, populated by aggressive slimes and golems.
- Base Defense: The new enemies will attack structures built inside the new biome and corrupt them by covering them in purple slime. Corrupted buildings are not destroyed, they are only deactivated until the corruption has been cleansed by the new Scrubby Sparks. You can build walls, attractors, and Spark Cannons to defend your new bases.
- Main Story End: Who made the Sparks? And why? You'll finally uncover the mystery of the Sparks and finish the journey that began over a thousand years ago!
- Automation Challenge: You'll need to apply everything you've learned in a final isolated automation challenge, while defending your base!
- More QoL + World Settings: World Settings allow you to customise your game experience. You want easier or harder fights, reduce building costs, or even abolish them entirely? You can even manage the world generation better with the optional terraforming tool. You'll have lots of different options available before starting a new game and while playing. We've also added more quality of life features. We reworked trains, added a toggle inside filters to reverse them, updated the glossary, and more.
- Mod Support via Steam Workshop: We've added tools and documentation to lay the groundwork for future community creativity. This will allow you to go way beyond what we ever imagined the game to be.
- Achievements + Community Items: You'll finally be able to unlock Steam achievements and collect/trade cards, craft badges and get rewards like emoticons and profile backgrounds.
Savegame Compatibility
We knew if we ever wanted to implement some deeper system changes that would break the save games, this update would be the last chance. And there were some longstanding world generation issues that we wanted to tackle to have better and more reliable results. This means that we will deliberately break savegame compatibility for the first (and last) time during Early Access. So, while everyone will have to start from scratch, you will have a more robust and future-proof world generation.
We'll keep a public "earlyaccess" beta branch, where you'll still be able to play your old saves on the old Early Access version. This branch is already live now, although until the 1.0 release the version will be the same on both "default" and "earlyaccess" branches.
But wait, consoles?
We've said in the past that we wanted to concentrate on PC first and look at consoles after the Early Access phase. But for Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5 there was already significant progress due to our work on the demos.
One important thing is that the console version won't have multiplayer. Unfortunately, console multiplayer has been a lot more work than we were able to take care of. Instead of making everyone wait much longer for a console version, we figured it was better to let console players enjoy singleplayer Oddsparks. For now, we don't have plans to add console multiplayer.
Apart from that, you'll be able to play the full game on PC, Xbox Series X/S or PlayStation 5 on release day.
What's next?
We are almost finished with the 1.0 release and can't wait to share the complete game with the world. If you don't want to wait for the release alone, join us on our Discord to discuss everything Oddsparks!
The release also won't be the end of the journey, but it's too early to talk about what might come after...
For now, we are very excited for all of you to get your hands on the full game. See you in May!