Dream Engines: Nomad Cities News

Citizens,

Major update #8 - the Economy update is now available to all players. The focus of this update is the city's economy in the middle and late stages of the game. This update adds new ways of controlling your economy, a lot of balancing, and some new content, as well as a new tribe and other bug-fixes and quality of life changes.

Read on below about some of the changes in this update. You can find the full list of changes on our patch notes page.

Note: due to significant content and balancing changes, as sometimes happens in Early Access updates, saves from previous versions are not supported. If you prefer to continue your previous game, you can still play the older version by selecting one of the previous alpha builds from the betas tab on Steam.


The Beaver tribe is a new playable tribe that focuses on building large cities. These guys are all about building stuff on the flying platform, upgrading, and reducing wasted resources when leaving buildings behind.

They start with larger cities and pay less for expanding them further, but they are unwilling to build most buildings outside. You'll need to better manage your limited space and weight, but you will enjoy cities that can hit the ground running and require less re-building after flying to a new area.




In the economy update, you now have better control over the amount of workers assigned to different buildings and production lines. Previously, you either had the full amount of workers required to keep the building working, or the building was disabled. Now, you can assign less than the full amount, and the building will still be able to function, though at a lower level of productivity.

This new system not only lets you prioritize which buildings and production lines are more important, but also allows fine tuning the rate at which you produce and consume different resources and better balance your economy.


The amount of workers, flux and power that is required to keep a building functioning now depends on the selected production recipe. The same wood warper that only requires a couple of workers to produce the bloodwood planks will now need many more for producing acidwood.

This new system allows for better balancing of these basic resources, making late-game economies more interesting and finely tuned.


To better control large, late-game cities, especially now that every building has their own worker count and upkeep, we've added a new building management window.

In this window you can see all production buildings (and other buildings that require upkeep), and you can quickly change production recipes, assign workers, and turn the buildings on/off.




We've added several new production recipes that you need to collect before you can use them. These recipes can not be researched, and the only way to unlock them is by exploring Industrial ruins.

These recipes, for the most part, provide alternative ways to produce the same resources either to increase efficiency or to allow more flexibility based on the resources you have available. These recipes can make a big difference in producing sufficient resources, research and upgrade parts for late-game progress.


Several production recipes were added or modified so that they require only renewable resources. These allow creating production lines that can keep working after flying without having to find new resource deposits and reducing dependency on specific biomes.

For the most part these resources are less efficient (in terms of how many workers/power/flux you need to spend per resource produced) than those that require non-renewable resources, but they are far more dependable and are invaluable to keep frequent-flying cities running smoothly.




We've increased the costs of much of the late-game content such as research and upgrades, making the more advanced production recipes and upgraded buildings a meaningful alternative to just building hundreds of basic buildings.

We've also increased the production rates of these resources in mid/late game recipes, and the higher levels of houses & apartments now provide more living space.

Additionally, upgrading production buildings now improves their efficiency (amount of resources produced per worker/flux/power), and they are no longer required for producing advanced recipes, making them nice-to-have rather than must-have, but at the same time making them more valuable to have. Instead, you will have to build separate add-ons that do not increase the building's upkeep, in order to allow that building to produce more advanced recipes.

There are lots of changes to the economy balance of pretty much everything - upkeep, production recipes, building costs, expansion costs, upgrade costs, research, etc. For the most part late-game elements were made more expensive, and also more productive, but there are some exceptions. Namely it is now easier to expand your city late-game, making it more feasible to build huge cities.


As mentioned above, due to significant content and balancing changes we were unable to keep supporting saves from previous builds.

If you prefer to continue your previous game, you can still access the previous build through Steam's beta branches feature.


In this update we continue to progress through our roadmap towards the 1.0 build, but we still have quite a bit to go before we are ready. We've updated the roadmap to reflect these changes.



Know that we are always listening to all feedback channels, and that your feedback is very much appreciated. We invite you to hop onto our discord server and chat with us directly, leave your feedback in the Steam discussion forums, or in-game feedback form.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on all these changes.
The Suncrash team

Citizens,

While we're working on the next major update, we've got a small boon for you - Steam trading cards. In case you're unfamiliar, these are collectable cards that you earn by simply playing the game on Steam, and you can then trade (or buy/sell on the Steam marketplace to/from other players). If you manage to collect the entire set, you'll get a cool badge, experience points for your Steam profile, a few of our unique emojis and a Dream Engines background that you can use for your Steam profile page.

Those of you who already played plenty of Dream Engines should get the card drops retroactively.

I hope you enjoy our artwork, and for us it's back to work on the next update.

- Fixed an issue where raid position would not update once they started moving.
- Fixed the feedback form link so that it will automatically fill the build number.

Citizens,

Just in time for the holidays, we're happy to present you with our latest Early Access build - The Overseer Update. This update focuses on one of the most requested changes since launch - pausing the game and giving you time to think, plan and re-organize.

Making this change was not easy. The way the game was designed, with a character-centered perspective, made it hard to implement and balance something that may seem trivial for simulation/management games.

Read on below about some of the larger changes in this update and for insight on what went on behind these changes and decisions.. You can find the full list of changes on our patch notes page.

Note: the new overseer tools are disabled in the hardest difficulty levels (which you can customize of course), so the more stressed - no time to think - experience still exists for those who enjoy it.



One of the things we wanted to touch in this update was the constant, non-stop feeling of urgency. There was not much time to stop and think, and even when you did, there was often a feeling that you are wasting time and should be doing stuff. Re-organizing your base felt like an inefficient waste of time.

We've brainstormed and researched many options to tackle this. One of them was a "stealth mode" in which your city would stop producing, but you could spend time building and re-organizing without having the threat level increase. Another was to have time-off and manage your city while flying from one destination to another. All these and more ended up feeling like they would add more complexity to an already complicated game, and so I decided to go with a more straight-forward and well known solution - Active Pause. The active pause lets you play the game as usual while the game is paused, so time will not advance, but you can still build, craft, change production recipes, move buildings, and so on.

Even this, however, was not as straightforward as I'd have liked, due to the fact that in Dream Engines you interact with the world through Tiny - your steam-bot avatar. When the game is paused, Tiny can't move, so you can't move around the city and interact with the different elements. We had to add another tool for the overseer - the free camera.



It didn't make sense to let Tiny move while the rest of time was frozen, so we had to let you move around and manage the city without moving Tiny by introducing the free camera toggle.

When enabled, the free camera will disconnect the view from Tiny, and you can move the view around the map as you build, manage or destroy stuff. A few other changes had to be made when taking this new mode into account - for example, you can now only transfer items to/from buildings if Tiny is near them, whereas before if you could open the building's window you could transfer items.

Other than supporting the active-pause feature, this new tool changes some of the flow of the game. You no longer have to abandon your exploration and move Tiny back to the city every time you want to build a new house. You can now do so remotely, as a real overseer would.





The last overseer tool I'd like to discuss is the speed-up button. Previously, the game's pacing was designed so that the time it takes to explore, fight, build, and make use of everything the map has to offer - was more or less in line with the amount of time it would take to exhaust the resources or have the threat level increase to levels you'd be unable to handle.

With the addition of active pause and free camera, a lot of the actions that previously "wasted" time can now happen in an instant, while the game is frozen or without having to walk back and forth. And so, the amount of time that would pass within the game is now a little shorter, when doing the same actions.

For that reason, we wanted to add an option to speed-up time when waiting for stuff to happen, such as waiting for research to be complete, or for resources being harvested. So, there's now a speed-up button that will cause time to pass faster.

The original thought was for adding more robust speed control buttons (so you can play the whole game at x2 speed, for example), but since the game was not designed for that, it caused several issues, technical and gameplay. For example, fighting with Tiny at x2 speed looked bad and was unmanageable. Then, after further analysis, we realized that the whole point of higher speeds is for those periods of time in which you wanted to wait for something to happen. A simple "push to skip time" button did the trick, and there was no need for more robust speed controls. You play at normal speed most of the time, but if you want to skip ahead until that harvester is depleted - no problem, press and hold the speed-up button.

We'll have to keep an eye on how this works and tweak it as necessary, please do let us know what you think.



You can now unlock The Teslacrats tribe and then select them when starting a new game. These energy freaks have a unique technology that they can research, which allows them to duplicate resources using the power of Tesla. Their ability makes it easier to get some resources, but it's not unlimited. Every time you duplicate resources, the machines become less efficient, and subsequent duplications will cost more energy - unless you give them time to cool down and recharge.

Teslacrats also produce power at a higher rate than others, but being the elitists of the energy producing community, "cheap" power generation methods (those that require no resources) are beneath them, and they do so very inefficiently.





The sorter is a new building that can be placed on rails that has one input slot and 3 output slots. You can then configure which items would be sent to each one of the output slots, allowing you to sort items out of a rail route into separate routes depending on the item.

This allows for more automation and combining several routes for long transportation and then splitting them back up. As with many other features, we thank our early access players for suggesting this.





We tried to make the different biome maps a bit more unique and not just visually. Desert and Ashfall (lava) biomes are now more open, with less crowded mazes and more building area.



Different weapons may be beneficial for different situations. We've added the ability to set up two sets of weapons for Tiny, and switch between them with a press of a button.





Saves from previous builds are supported and should work fine for the most part, but there may be balancing issues and some of the changes will only take effect when you switch maps. The new overseer tools will be disabled in old saves that had the "Pause in Menus" option disabled.



This update implements some of the features in our roadmap, but also added some major, unplanned features. During the months since the release, we've been constantly thinking about the roadmap, what is missing, and if there is anything that can or should be removed from the roadmap. As such, here is the updated roadmap. This may change even further later down the road as we progress and the situation changes.



Know that we are always listening to all feedback channels, and that your feedback is very much appreciated. We invite you to hop onto our discord server and chat with us directly, leave your feedback in the Steam discussion forums, or in-game feedback form.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on all these changes.
The Suncrash team

Citizens,

It's been a month since we released our last update which inlcuded modding and Steam Workshop support, and we now have a more elaborate Modding Guide available in our wiki.

The guide now explains in more details how you can modify and create your own content for the game, such as resources, production recipes, crafting recipes, research, and so on.

If you're interested at all in modding Dream Engines, check it out, and if you have any questions you're welcome to ask them in the Steam Workshop forum or in our Discord server.



Obviously, updating the modding guide is not the only thing I've been doing since the last patch. The next update will include some core changes that require quite a bit of re-designing, re-writing code, and a whole lot of playtesting. These changes include more control over production lines, and yes, due to popular demand, I'm now testing an Active Pause system which is made more complex by the fact that it's not very effective if it doesn't come with a free camera mode.

I still have more testing, bug squashing, and some work on other features, not to mention waiting for all the translations and final QA, so it will be a bit longer before the update is ready to be released, but I expect it to be out before Christmas.

I hope you all have a great holiday season