Update #8 - Major Overhaul: Scholars and Design Table Rework

Hello everyone, and welcome to a new blog post for the upcoming update! It's the biggest update since the early access release, so your feedback will be very welcome as always :) I'm curious if you guys think I'm solving the right issues, or if you want me to focus on some different area. In fact, it'd be really great if you could leave a Steam review, letting me know what you think. I work on this game alone, and I read through your Steam reviews to know what to prioritize!

What I Wanted to Solve

• Blacksmiths were working at design tables, which were entirely unrelated to crafting items. Because of that, they had either a useless stat for crafting, or a bunch of useless stats if they were working on design (why do you need good woodworking if your only job is designing)
• It was way too easy to focus on one blueprint and upgrade it to legendary quality even in the early game, while everything else was common quality
• The planning for the design tables was very boring. You just buy a bunch of tables, place them where they don't bother anyone, and you hire a bunch of blacksmiths who work on generating design points. The only relevant trait was a bonus for design points.

Introducing Scholars

To solve these three issues, I decided to split the design into a new worker type - scholar. Now, blacksmiths can focus on crafting items, and scholars can focus on generating design points.

Instead of design speed stat, blacksmiths now have a walking speed stat, which was also highly requested, and scholars have walking speed, design speed, and collaboration bonus (I'll come to that later).

Design Point Scaling

This solved the first issue, now let's move on to the second one :)

Design points needed to upgrade a blueprint were increasing very slowly. Here is an example in the old system:

Rarity UpgradeCost (Points)
Common → Uncommon100
Uncommon → Rare200
Rare → Epic400
Epic → Legendary800

If you had four blacksmiths generating 200 design points per day, you would only need 7.5 in-game days to upgrade a blueprint to the maximum quality.

In the new system, price increases by a factor of 4, not 2, so it goes like this:

Rarity UpgradeCost (Points)
Common → Uncommon100
Uncommon → Rare400
Rare → Epic1600
Epic → Legendary6400

As you can see, for that same team, you would need 42.5 in-game days. I know it sounds unreasonable now to need that many days just for a single blueprint, because we have about a hundred blueprints in total, so you would need to play the game for months to upgrade everything, so, let me explain how I solved the third issue and this one together :)

Making Design Tables Interesting

Since thinking of layout for design tables was too boring, and I wanted to change that scaling mentioned above, I decided to add depth here. You can now unlock six different upgrades, which significantly boost the design points generated. You need to think about how to make the design space inspiring for scholars so that they work better! You can buy plants for them, add light, buy chalkboards and bookshelves, and so on. I don't want to spoil too much. All these things increase their productivity level, and they are not just a decoration; scholars actually use some of them, so their time is not spent exclusively at the design table.

Besides that, you also need to think about how to group them. When two design tables are adjacent, scholars working there will activate their collaboration bonus, which also speeds up the design process.

Additional Fixes

• Mastery tree no longer breaks in Thai language
• Steam Cloud now works properly on MacOS
• Smelters' pricing was rebalanced

I look forward to hearing your thoughts because, as you can see, it helps me understand the issues and think of solutions for them :) Thank you for playing, and until next time!

~Luka