Hello everyone!
We got quite a few requests in our devlog feedback survey to talk about Fluids! It's a subject we haven't really talked about much before, mostly in passing and progress. So, let's have a look through what we're working with right now!
As always, a lot you’ll see in the devlog is work in progress. The mechanics are there and almost at 100%, but the visuals are in various stages of development.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2162800/shapez_2/
What are fluids?
Fluids are what you’ll use to give shapes different colors. If you’ve played the first shapez, you’ll remember mining colors and transporting them by belt. For shapez 2 though, we wanted something different. Colors have been turned into colored fluids, which you move around through Pipes. This adds some visual variety and a couple of new challenges. In short, coloring shapes should be more exciting!
Gathering & Transporting Fluids
The process of gathering and transporting fluids starts off very similar to regular shapes, though you’ll need the fluid variants of the regular buildings you’d use:
- Fluid Miner instead of Shape Miner
- Fluid Miner Extension instead of Shape Miner Extension
- Pumps instead of Extractors
- (Space) Pipes instead of (Space) Belts
- Fluid Wagons instead of Shape Wagons
All the specialized fluid variants behave the same as their shape counterpart. Pipes have some differences though.
When placing, Pipes currently behave mostly the same as belts. They have the same placement limitations: They can split off horizontally in every direction. We plan to add more flexibility to the pipes, allowing you to branch them off of vertical parts, but this is planned for later.
To get fluids across a gap, you can place a Fluid Launcher. This version of the Launcher will accumulate fluid to create a blob that it will launch to the other side. It can store two blobs-worth of paint, scaling with painting speed. One fluid launcher will be enough to support one full belt of painters.
Unlike shapes and belts however, there’s currently no limit to throughput for pipes. Pipes do not have capacity of their own: if there’s fluid available in the buffer of the output building, it will show the fluid in the pipes. When this buffer is empty, the pipes will be empty as well. Essentially, any paints used by another building will be taken directly out of the Painter buildings. The pipes determine where the building can get paint from.
We plan to make some improvements for this, like a limit to throughput would be introduced to make pipes behave more realistically. However, there is no advanced fluid simulation planned. Adding flow / pressure-based simulation would add a lot of complexity to the game without major added gameplay value. We want you to be able to focus on solving shapes, instead of having to worry about fluids getting stuck in pipes.
Then there’s the Fluid Tank. This building holds up to 1,800 liters and works as a buffer between out- and inputs to make sure the flow continues to flow for a while when your Painters run dry. They give you room for error, but can be optimized out of the system if you’d like!
Painter
To paint a shape, you have the Painter building. This building can paint any shape you send through it, but only the top layer. To paint multiple layers, you’ll need to paint first, stack later. It has a buffer of 20 liters and has inputs on three sides for extra flexibility. Painting a layer uses 10 liters.
In previous builds, we had a Full Painter building that painted every layer of the shapes you run through it. However, we recently removed it as it was not very useful for the challenges we set.
Mixing
With default world settings, you’ll only be able to find Red, Green and Blue fluids throughout your world. To get the secondary colors and the tertiary, you’ll need to mix the fluids. For this, you have the Color Mixer! This building has two inputs next to each other, and one output on the opposite side. Colors are mixed as followed:
- RGB: Additive color mixing, works like light
- RYB: Subtractive color mixing, works like paint
- CMYK: Subtractive color mixing, works like printer ink
- Colorblind: RGB with textures, with additive textures (dots mixed with lines becomes dots with lines)
All three buffers have a capacity of 50 liters each. The ratio is 1:1, so 25 liters of each input fluid makes 50 liters of the output fluid.
Visuals are work in progress
Crystals
Towards the later stages of the game, you’ll start to run into Crystals. We did a deep dive into Crystals last year, though a lot of it is quite outdated by now.
To summarize, Crystals are made by providing fluids to the Crystal Generator. This building will pump the fluid into any Empty or Pin quadrants up until the top layer of the shape you run through it. This paint will then harden into Crystal, matching the color of the fluid used. The problem with Crystals is that when you try to separate two adjacent Crystal quadrants or try to stack it on top of another shape, it will shatter and disappear. You can separate Crystal from a regular shape and stack shapes on top of Crystals, however.
Filling a shape uses 20 liters of fluid, regardless of the amount of quadrants it has to fill.
Both the building and crystals themselves are still work in progress
Other tidbits
The fluids fully support the newly added Color Schemes, including Colorblind RGB!
When generating a new world, you have the option to include secondary and tertiary colors, allowing you to gather them using Pumps. If you choose to include all colors in the world, the Mixer becomes optional. You can also choose to remove primary colors, but some patches of primary color fluids will remain near the Vortex to allow you to progress.
That’s about everything! We hope the new fluids make for a more interesting system than using belts to move colors. Let us know what you think!
See you next time!
~ Tobias & the shapez 2 team
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Check out the previous devlog:
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2162800/view/4173225900655549931