Friday Blog 214 - Deep Testing

Some new meshes

Zun has been extensively testing the internal 0.9.0 dev build. He too is very happy with the new features and overhauled tech tree! At its core, 0.9.0 is much improved compared to the public 0.8 version. But, before we open up the dev build to a wider audience, we’re going to need a bunch of refinement.

One of the sore spots is the UI. New features often received ugly, bare-bones, rudimentary UIs. They’re useful for testing, but not intuitive and clear. Some older features, like distributing luxury meals, have been scrapped, but their UI is still lingering around and making things confusing. We’re working on fixing that up.

We’ve continued to convert “UI-jobs” into “item-jobs”. What that means, is that instead of using the command tool to place a glowy outline which attracts a worker, you’ve actually got to produce a ‘physical’ item which summons a worker to perform its job. We’ve had ‘cube-blocks’, 1x1x1 cubes which attract a worker to work next to the item, but we’ve now got jobs where the mesh is actually standing on the same block as the worker. For example, the water gatherer is now summoned by physically placing a special bucket-like item on a block, and the water gatherer will then work on top of that block, standing next to the visible buckets.

[Note: we've actually had "colonists working in the same 1x1 area as the mesh" before! The 2015 Greenlight build had it for both miners and guards, and 0.1.0 still had it for archers. That changed later in 2017]

There are a lot of small adjustments we want to make to the tech tree due to Zun’s test. Some examples. Zun quickly recruited a lot of colonists without advancing much in the tech tree. He hit the 100-colonist-limit, and needs 250 ColonyCoins (WIP-name) to increase that limit. Problem: the default ColonyCoin limit is 100, and has to be expanded by building and placing lockboxes.

They can only be built by the engineer, which required some more tech tree unlocking by Zun, but that was hard to do while unable to recruit new colonists. Zun managed to solve the problem by rearranging existing workers, but relatively new players shouldn’t be expected to solve a complex issue like that at the start. We’re planning to fix it by adding the lockbox recipe to the blacksmith at his anvil, which is unlocked significantly earlier than the engineer. We might also make the first colonist-limit-upgrade cheaper than the ColonyCoins-limit.

0.9.0 focuses a lot on the Stone > Copper > Bronze > Iron transition, with each material being more efficient, with Bronze being very expensive but also very powerful and durable, while Iron is cheaper, less amazing but more cost-efficient. Bronze initially requires the purchase of tin, which is very costly.

I wanted to make bronze “continuously important”, so it’s used in expendable items: ammo and tools. But this can become very confusing for players who don’t know exactly how all the mechanics and production streams work. They want to craft something important and permanent from bronze, like a jobblock, but all the rare and expensive bronze ingots they’ve got immediately get turned into bronze tools or bronze bolts, which are instantly distributed or fired away. It also means that guards which rely on bronze ammo are unreliable: if you don't buy tin, they become useless. We’re considering removing expendable bronze items entirely, but are still weighing alternatives.

At first, traps were unlocked in the Iron Age. We wanted to introduce this feature earlier, so you can now build dropper traps in the Copper Age. They have to be built above monsters, which is hard to do at scale without building narrow mazes. As a replacement