Here's an overview of Survival Mode for new players:
Survival Mode adds a lot of additional challenges to the core building/exploration-oriented mode, for example:
Slimes spawn on the surface and are more prevalent (more combat)
You need to eat regularly, and can eat raw pixels without having to wait to assemble them into a food item
You need to poop after digesting food (default key: Z, although it will happen automatically if you try to digest with a full bowels)
Some foods are toxic and will damage you when they digest (but you can vomit out the contents of your stomach with the V key)
The Jetpack has a limited duration, short at first, but it gets longer with some special Survival-Mode-only upgrades (which you can start to unlock by the third underground biome) - because of this, there is more of an emphasis on building paths / stairs back to the surface
The player has significantly less carrying capacity
Some amount of materials (not in your HUD bar, and selected at random) drop when you die, so you won't want to die just as a way to warp back to the ship
In Survival Mode, you can consume ANY solid or liquid pixel by pushing 'C' - this consumes whatever is in your current material HUD slot.
The pixels stay in your stomach and are gradually digested in a queue. Hovering the stomach, you can see all of the pixels you have eaten that are yet undigested (and the tooltip will tell you what is in there).Although many materials are edible, there are also many toxic materials, of differing levels of toxicity. The effects of toxicity (or, in the future, nutrients...) are applied when the stomach tries to digest the food, and digesting the food moves the food from the Stomach HUD to the Poop HUD.The Poop HUD adds another mechanic to the game, where you can press Z to poop, dropping the digested pixels back into the world. If the Poop HUD completely fills up and you try to digest again, it will automatically empty all of its contents wherever you happen to be.
You can also vomit by pressing V, if you accidentally eat toxic pixels and you want to get rid of them before they damage you.
This may seem like a crazy level of simulation, but that's what we're all about here. :)
There's a lot more coming soon! Let me know what you think about the new mode and other updates in the Discord Community today!
and if you haven't already please leave me a Steam review, it really helps me a lot!
-Triplejump