Friday Blog 198 - An Overhauled Overhaul!

Built by JoeMan

In December, we released 0.8.0, which tried to improve some fundamental systems and fix some flaws. In January and February, we were making huge plans for 0.9.0. We wanted to take our time, add a lot of new content, and introduce awesome new features. We were considering to implement realistic logistics.

This would be a huge change and impact a lot of other systems. We were trying to think through the entire plan. For example: with realistic logistics between colonies, it’s important to spread out resources. It doesn’t make sense for all ores to be present at every location. So resources like iron ore should only appear in certain specific places.

But that means players need multiple colonies when they get into the Iron Age! That’s a lot earlier than currently is the case. So we’ll need to add a lot of pre-Iron Age gameplay to balance things out.

We also added things like support for longer crafting times, which requires a full overhaul of all the crafting recipes. Zun optimized the savegames, which also leads to the requirement for new worlds in 0.9.0 (Disclaimer: Old worlds will always be accessible in old branches / 0.9.0 is a long way out / a converter might appear!). The need for savegame continuity is pretty restricting, and without that need, we have a lot of extra possibilities. We want to use as many as possible of them, to make sure future updates don’t require another continuity-break.

At the end of March, I started moving. It was quite a lot of work, and due to some unforeseen problems I spent nearly two weeks without proper access to the internet. But things are working now :D Things are still a bit Early Access but I don’t mind that too much.

I’ve had a lot of time to think, and things seemed a bit… overwhelming. Update 0.9.0 had become a gigantic overhaul with loads of uncertain but interdependent features, and a three year workload. The plans certainly sounded awesome, but doing it all in one gigantic step started to seem impractical.

So we had a long discussion and decided to change our plans for 0.9.0. It’s still not 100% certain, there are plenty of details to work out, and we’re open to your input! But here are our rough plans.

Update 0.4.0 added a nice progression system. From inventing bronze to smelting iron to producing steel, slings > bows > crossbows > muskets, from slow weak monsters to fast strong monsters. It works very well, and it’s still the core of the game. 0.5.0 and 0.6.0 added ‘branches’ to this framework, and 0.7.0 added multiple colonies to the end of this system. But the ‘spine’ of the game is still the bronze/iron/steel thing (with the related monsters and weapons), added after a couple of months of development in 2017.

We’re considering to refactor that spine. To improve it and to extend it. To make it work with all the other features we’ve added since 2017, and the features we’re planning to add in 0.9.0 (and keeping in mind the features we’re hoping to add afterwards!).

We want to increase the timespan. We’d love to start in the Stone Age and have players invent and use copper tools as a serious improvement above stone tools. Tin should become a rare resource, and to start the Bronze Age, players would have to export luxury goods and import tin.

To decrease their dependence on expensive imports, players should have the