Iron Log #33 - Now on Steam!

Last week Belts of Iron officially launched into Early Access on Steam 🎉🚀

I want to start off by saying Thank You to everyone that's left a review, bug report, feedback, or message of any kind.

If you haven't yet, you can pick up the game with a 10% discount during launch week, or more if you get it in one of bundles

Belts of Iron

Known Issues

There are a number of issues that I'm currently working on fixing. You should expect an update in the near future that fixes most if not all of these. And please keep reporting bugs so I can fix them.

• Insulated Wires are not actually longer than Copper Wire. Will be fixed in the next update.

• Belts can't be placed under water and then brought out to above the water and vice versa.

• Splitting certain railway tracks with another track causes them to freak out.

• Train derailment sometimes glitches through the terrain and the wagons are lost.

• Unable to join LAN game through Steam.

• Rare multiplayer crash when moving items between inventory slots.

• Research Table not working in multiplayer for some players.

Roadmap

I'd also like to share a list of some high level features I plan on adding during Early Access. But as most things EA this is subject to change and not a final or fixed list.

World Map - Adding a world map has been requested a lot and is one of my higher priority features.

Late Game Content - I plan on adding new production lines in the late game, new module types, and possibly infinite research for the end game.

Drones - While belts and trains are great, drones will offer more flexibility when it comes to item logistics in complex space. The tradeoff will be much lower throughput and higher energy cost.

Production Graphs - A menu that lets you see how much you're producing and consuming over time. Similar to the power network but for items and fluids.

Enemies & Combat - Feedback seems split with half of players wanting more combat and half wanting less or none at all. My plan is to add 3 modes of enemy difficulty when creating new worlds. "Peaceful" would be no enemies or hives at all. "Passive" would be basically what we have now, enemies only attack if you get near them. And "Aggressive" would spawn more enemies and they actively seek out your factories so you need to setup defenses or destroy hives in a bigger radius.

More Foundation Pieces - More building pieces to allow players to express their creativity better. Examples: stairs, doors, ceilings, half walls, windows, more ramps, etc. This would likely come with new types of concrete like “Reinforced Concrete” or “Polished Concrete” with different visuals.

Performance and optimizations - I want to keep on top of performance and optimizations to let players build as much as they want. Obviously there will be some limit but I want to keep pushing it further.

Languages & Accessibility - As the content in game becomes more stable and less likely to change I'll start translating to other languages. Also adding new accessibility options to give more players a good experience.

Quality of Life - Last but not least. There are probably hundreds of small or large QOL features I could add so picking and choosing which ones I can spend time on will be hard so please let me know what you want to see!

There is also a public issue tracker that I try to keep up to date that includes features I'm considering adding, you can see it all here https://beltsofiron.com/issue-tracker

Thanks and keep on building!

~ IronDev (aka builderment-dev)