Improving Atrio - Pickerpals & pushbacks

As promised in our last post, we've been hard at work to improve the gameplay experience

Gameplay Improvements

1. Pickerpals

• Pickerpals have been updated to pick the plant closest to their base
• Pickerpals walk 25% faster
• Pickerpals range reduced from a 30x30m grid -> 20x20m grid
• Based on our rough measurements, pickerpals collect 1.45x more items per minutre, and produce a more consistent output of items gathered (7 pickerpals gather ~31 bulbs/min)
• Reduced the number of pickerpals in the early supply pods (since they work so much faster)

2. Dispense chest

• Dispense chest outputs up to 32/min

3. Pushback splitters

• When an assembly line is clogged, pushbacks switch to automatically pushing new items every second. When the line begins to move again, they switch back to pushing every second item.

4. Factories

• We noticed some odd bugs where if you placed a factory, smelter, mini deer, electronics factory ontop of core items (like sap, glowbulbs, grav rock etc), the items would "plug up" the factory making it seem like the factories don't work.
• Now, when you place them ontop of core items, the factory will spit them out
• Fixed a bug where you could pipe items into the corners of the factory

Status report

We want to stay accountable for the features we promise to fix, so here's a status report of where we stand:

Gameplay improvements (50% complete)

1. FIXED - The pickerpal RNG & the Fuel depot
2. FIXED - Pushback splitters should be more useful
3. FIXED - Tornatoads should wait if line is full (same with saptaps)
4. IN PROGRESS - Key Rebinding (in settings)
5. TODO - Fast travel kind of sucks
6. TODO - pushbacks should be more readily available

Bug fixes (60% complete)

1. FIXED - Plunger quest dialogue says you have purple batteries, but you don't actually have them
2. FIXED - Electric flowers west of the station don't regenerate
3. FIXED - Factories stop auto pulling items late into the game
4. FIXED - Building an item (or leaving the backpack) under the Iris-Station deletes the Station 4 chip
5. FIXED - Placing factories on top of core items breaks stuff
6. FIXED - Players can die during the punk monk sequence, stopping them from unlocking the blue bar
7. TODO - Players dying on odd spots and their bodies aren't accessible
8. TODO - Deer factories are "vanishing"
9. TODO - Bees not working as expected? (need investigating)