Hello everyone!
First of all I would like to thank everyone who tested out the Technology Tier 2 content on the beta branch. There were a lot of bugs reported in the Discord which helped a ton in stabilizing this release.
The Technology Tier 2 release is finally ready to be released to the default branch. It has been available on the beta branch for about a week now, and after addressing a ton of bugs it is ready for everyone through the default branch.
Unfortunately for this release as well it is not backwards compatible with 0.3.X saves. This mainly has to do with the terrain generation system being rewritten.
Summary
Major Features
- Catador is now available through the Portal
- New Terrain Generation Engine
- Technology Tree updated - tons of new techs and items
- New buildings, including the lava pump, centrifuge and item teleportation buildings
- New enemy on Catador
- New ingame tutorial
- New mineable resources
- Building context menus allow you to disable/enable certain building functionalities
Change List
- Major item routing refactor. Graph recalculations now happen within seconds rather than minutes.
- Minimap + Fullscreen map improvements
- Game now saves over 3 autosaves rather than just 1
- Linux now defaults to OpenGL, see this post for details on forcing Vulkan.
- Performance pass
- The Habitat can now request items
- Terrain Generation toggle for unlimited resources
- Terrain Generation toggle for disabling enemies
- New warning for loading incompatible save files
- Fixed an issue with Cache Chest placement size
- Resources now preview for Miners
There are also tons of smaller fixes and usability improvements.
Catador
Catador has introduced a new liquid for processing: Lava. Lava can be put through the Centrifuge and converted to Sulfur or Silica and is also a component in Rocket Propellant which is made in the Laboratory.
Catador is protected by the Ancient Guardians who are able to float above lava and teleport to targets when attacking. For the time being we have slightly reduced the attack damage and difficulty of the Ancient Guardians as to not be a major hurdle in exploring Catador. In the next major combat refactor this will likely be changed.
New Buildings
The Lava Pump can only be placed in Lava on Catador. It requires the use of some new items to build it, including Heat Shielding, which is also going to be used in space components in a future update.
The Centrifuge is primarily for extracting minerals from Lava. This can be used to create Sulfur and Silica, which go into higher level crafting materials.
The Item Teleportation Hub and Item Teleportation Portal are used to transport items instantly over larger distances. The portals themselves do not require power but the Item Teleportation Hubs require most substantial energy. For this update because there is only one way to make power we are temporarily reducing the power requirement for the Item Teleportation Hub.
Technology Tree Updates
It took me a while to remember where we left off from the previous update. The new tech tree has a ton of new techs, ending with a new building that will remain locked until December. I am not showing off this building in the update as to leave it as a surprise to users.
The new tech tree contains new modules that unlock a ton of new items and 5 new buildings. The Steel Furnace has been renamed to the Blast Furnace because it can now smelt Aluminum. Originally I only was going to make the Steel Furnace produce Steel, at the time I hadn't even started thinking about Technology Tier 2 yet. Instead of making an entire new building to smelt Aluminum I decided to merge the functionality into the Steel Furnace (now the Blast Furnace).
Here is an overview of the new Technology Tree:
As you can see we have expanded past the portal technology into what will become space technologies at the end of the tree. The focus of the modules for Technology Tier 2 is expanding into Catador and preparing for buildings that will be required for Technology Tier 3, which will mostly involve constructing buildings in space.
Known Issues
Currently I know the loading times are pretty bad. I will continue to improve this over the next few weeks and by the time Technology Tier 2 Extended is here this issue should be resolved. If your save file takes longer than 3 minutes to load its likely another issue has occurred.
If you run into any new issues, please post in the Steam discussion or feel free to join the Discord and leave a report in the #bug-report channel. I look at every post on the Steam discussions and every bug report in the Discord server.
Technology Tier 2 Extended
Technology Tier 2 Extended (TT2 Extended) is going to be a minor update coming around October 15th, 2021. This will include all of the content that didn't quite make into this update. This includes a vehicle for helping the player get around the map more quickly and also includes at least one other form of power generation. Its likely TT2 Extended will contain some accessibility improvements like color blind mode.
The roadmap, which outlines the development timeline, has been updated. It can be found here
Conclusion
Thank you again to everyone who has stopped by the Twitch stream and kept me company while I've worked on this update. Also thank you to all of the players who played the beta release, I know it was kind of buggy but without the beta players it would have been much worse.
Thanks again everyone,
- Boppy
Discord: https://discord.com/invite/yY9wHNn
Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/boppygames
Website: https://boppygames.gg