Great Early Access Launch, Scaling Up, and Details of the Next Update
Hello everyone!
It has been a month since our Early Access launch, and we’ve finally been able to catch our breath after endless crunches, reflect on our progress, and start planning the future development of The Crust. Despite some initial challenges, the Early Access launch of The Crust went great! We sold 70,000 copies of the game and gathered over 300,000 wishlist additions! We also received an incredible amount of feedback and support from our community, which allowed us to rapidly update and improve the game. Over the past month, we have released 12 patches with bug fixes and several major updates that significantly enhanced The Crust in various aspects. For example, we unlocked the research tree, added a work schedule management mode for colonists, expanded the cargo dock capabilities, introduced new points of interest on the global map, improved the AI and priority systems for robots, added new notifications, and made several QoL and interface improvements. Additionally, we balanced some parameters of the story mode, contracts, and colonists.
We are truly amazed by your incredible support and want to thank you from the bottom of our hearts.
We also have some interesting statistics to share with you:
The average number of unique players per day was 12,978, with a peak of almost 19,000 active players in a single day.
The average playtime per player reached a record-breaking 24 hours, with a significant portion of players spending over 40 hours in the game, and 4% of players exceeding 100 hours, which is impressive considering we’ve just launched in Early Access.
A month after the release, The Crust community on Discord has grown to 14,000 members, and the number of Steam followers has surpassed 37,000. Additionally, we received over 1,000 suggestions for game improvements and hundreds of bug reports, which have been incredibly helpful in reproducing and fixing issues that went unnoticed during closed testing. We read every suggestion, but the sheer volume of ideas requires evaluation and discussion in brainstorming sessions to determine their feasibility and priority in the development plans. You can help us choose the most interesting ones by voting for your favorite idea on the page: https://idea.the-crust.com/ or in the Suggestions section on our Discord server. You can also propose your own idea.
The Early Access launch demonstrated an incredible interest in The Crust and confirmed its great potential, and now we are moving towards scaling up. Today, we have opened several job positions on our website—we are looking for skilled C++ programmers, community managers, and testers. If you have excellent coding skills, can think outside the box, and break existing patterns, visit our hiring page.
[h2]Upcoming Changes[/h2]
Our main focus right now is fixing the remaining bugs and improving FPS. We are aware of issues with colonists getting stuck in elevators, robots stopping, and navigation errors in robots with specific module configurations, and we are already working on them. Some of these issues only occur in older saves, but we will fix those in upcoming updates to ensure full version compatibility. We are also bringing back the saving of filter and distributor priority settings, adding new colonists to the hiring market, and working on other identified bugs and improvements.
Our second major goal is to achieve a significant increase in FPS on large and very large bases. To do this, we had to essentially dismantle the robot logistics and conveyor systems to find optimization opportunities for PC resource usage and prevent a geometric progression of CPU load as the number of production modules grows—and we found them! We have outlined a plan for the new architecture of each system and have already started working on them in separate branches. We will detail the results of this refactoring with FPS improvement measurements in the next developer diaries. In addition, we have already optimized some secondary systems, resulting in a small FPS increase—these changes will appear in the upcoming updates.
[h2]New Content[/h2]
While the development team is working with the hardcode, the content creators continue to create new modules and units. For example, we have completed work on the Harvester for Helium-3 extraction and started creating the model for the thermonuclear generator. We are also preparing two new production modules, one research module, the KS Monument, and a new model of a heavy shuttle. Shuttles will finally have varying arrival and delivery times, as was originally planned. Along with this, we continue to develop the new POI generator and improve the contract system. All of this will be added in a major update in the near future.
We are incredibly excited about the high interest in the game and once again want to express our immense gratitude to our amazing community for your continued support and feedback. As always, we would love to hear your ideas and suggestions — now is the perfect time for them.
