Update log
Full FOUNDRY update
The complete published notes, normalized for clean reading and source attribution.
Repeated intro
Hello everyone!
Extracted changes
- Gameplay
- Store
This is episode 100 of FOUNDRY Fridays! Time flies when you’re building the factory (game). Looking back, it’s incredible how the game has progressed over the years. Quite an improvement over our first version on itch, but also over the Early Access launch version from two years ago. From the bottom of my heart, thank you for your support through this journey. There’s a lot more to be done, so stay tuned!
Soon, on April 28th, Update 4 will officially launch and today we’re looking at the new Xeno Power Plant and a few upcoming long distance transport changes.
The Xeno Power Plant
Our new power plant, made out of multiple modular buildings, will unlock new heights of power generation. The whole complex is made up of five different buildings, it can generate up to 360MW of power and it is fueled by new items derived from Xeno-Crystals.
Let's have a look at each of the five new buildings.
The Fuel Mixer
The building that creates the liquid reactor fuel from precursor items and liquids you’ll have to manufacture.
The Xeno Reactor
The central piece of the plant, the reactor burns the fuel and generates Energized Reactor Compound (another liquid).
The Steam Generator
A giant heat exchanger that takes the Energized Reactor Compound from the Reactor, and together with Water, it generates High-Pressure Steam and Depleted Reactor Compound. The Steam goes to the next building, while the Depleted Reactor Compound needs to be looped back to the Reactor.
The High Pressure Turbine
It works just like the regular Turbine, but it is much larger and produces ten times the amount of power. It needs High-Pressure Steam to generate power and produces Exhaust Steam as a byproduct.
The Cooling Tower
And finally, to disperse the Exhaust Steam from the High Pressure Turbine you need the Cooling Tower.
Except for the Reactor and the Steam Generator, which need to be connected in a loop, all buildings are to be connected sequentially. We initially thought about going for a more complex mechanic, but ultimately felt that this would be enough to achieve our goals. Those of you familiar with real life nuclear power plants will certainly see the parallels in the design approach, although in reality you’d have up to three loops instead of just one.
Let’s talk about the configurability of the modular buildings next. One of the key features our modular buildings support, is the ability to make buildings with different properties, depending on which or how many modules you use. However, for the power plant we have kept it straight forward, and there is no module tinkering on any of those buildings. The reason is simple: To modify a building, it needs to be shut down and construction can take several minutes. If the power plant is your main source of power, it is just too frustrating to be forced to shut it down as your factory might spiral into a power blackout. If your construction industry runs out of power, you can’t even finish the construction to get the power back up. We do not want to introduce any catastrophic pitfalls like that.
However we went with a different approach: The reactor can be throttled up or down, in steps of 10%, and this affects both power generation and fuel consumption respectively. For each 10% of reactor utilization, you’ll need exactly one Turbine. This allows you to start with a small power plant of, for example, just one or two turbines,
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