Rewrite Devlog #13

Welcome to what was supposed to be January's devlog, which unfortunately had to be pushed to February, because of health issues.

In January, I was hospitalized with what's called sudden sensorineural hearing loss of uncertain origin in my right ear. The doctors expect the hearing damage to be permanent, although it has improved to an extent since then. Whether it continues improving remains to be seen over the coming weeks to months. Thankfully, I still have one good ear, so I should be able to work on the sound aspect of Alien Horizon without too many issues.

Let's move on to a more cheerful topic and take a look at some minor changes and improvements that are coming in the rewrite, the new version of Alien Horizon that's planned for... well, because of the aforementioned issues, the April release is no longer feasible, as I'm still not back to working at 100%, so let's say summer.

Waking up colonists

In the alpha, a lot of players had trouble remembering which part of the ship to select to access the stasis pod bay and wake up colonists. In the rewrite, there is now a global button for waking up, solving this problem. The UI is much more detailed, allowing more filtering and showing important stats (expertise, gender and age) for each of the colonists right in the list. Just like in the alpha, you can fill available work positions with one click.

The biggest change, though, is that the colony ship now only starts with 240 colonists in stasis and others have to be brought in by finding stasis pods (pictured) in cargo ships. Each cargo ship contains 120 of them (or fewer if it's damaged). They are automatically brought in by logistics vehicles, adding more colonists to the available pool.

Radio towers and cargo ships

Gone are the radio towers that were present in the alpha, replaced by a mobile structure, similar to the mining drill. They function the same - you place one on top of a mountain and it will show the direction to any cargo ships that are in its line of sight, except now it can get to the mountain by itself, not needing to be constructed with construction shuttles. It even has its own solar panels, allowing it to recharge in place, granting it functionally infinite moving range.

However, as these are much easier to work with, allowing repositioning wherever they're needed, unlike the alpha, these will only show direction to cargo ships and not distance. To find the exact position of a cargo ship, you need multiple of these to triangulate it. No need to do it manually, though - once at least two radio towers see a ship and there is enough of a difference in angle, a pin will automatically appear at the ship's position.

Steam post imageYou will also be able to place your own pins on the map to remember where things are or plan for the future.

On the topic of cargo ships, in the alpha, it was necessary to transfer resources from them to the colony in order to be able to use them, either manually or by clicking the autotransfer button every time resources were needed. This process is now fully automated - once there aren't enough resources in the colony that are present in cargo ships, they are ordered on their own, always taking at least a full truckload to ensure logistics time is not wasted. You can still order resources manually by setting a warehouse to demand more resources than are present in the colony.

Exploration time and preliminary report

As mentioned in a previous devlog, exploration of surrounding sectors takes significantly longer than in the alpha. However, the speed of exploration is greatly affected by distance to the nearest survey office, so you can cut the amount of time by building one closer to the explored sector. This isn't always feasible, though, so they can also be partially supplemented by radio towers, giving those another purpose. The effect of radio towers on exploration time doesn't depend on just distance, but much more by their elevation, making it even more important to move them on tops of mountains.

When mousing over a sector to explore, you now get a preliminary report telling you what to expect there - what type of terrain you will encounter and what deposits are likely present. However, this report can be inaccurate, which is represented by the percentage ranges in it, and the deposit information may be wrong, both missing resources that are present or expecting resources that are not there. The accuracy of preliminary report is once again affected by distance of survey offices and radio towers.

Mobile generators

Steam post imageLast but not least, a new structure you can build in the rewrite is the mobile generator. It can burn various resources, most importantly biomass from your greenhouses, as fuel, producing power. Because it's mobile just like the mining drill and radio tower, it can provide power at remote places, rescue stranded drills or just supplement your power grid at night. It also comes with a larger battery. Unlike factories, fueled power plants come with a slider that allows setting their production load, so you can burn the fuel as slowly as necessary.

Fueled power plants were a bit of an afterthought in the alpha, which didn't allow manned power plants to exist (lower productivity would make them more efficient), but now they can, which paves the way for larger more permanent power plants, such as a proper nuclear power plant. Don't expect it in the initial version, though.

That's all for today. If nothing goes wrong, the next devlog is going to arrive in March and should be about changes to objectives and research. You can also hop on the official Discord server to see extra teasers. I hope you've enjoyed this devlog and see you in a month.