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InfraSpace News

Pipes Update Released!

Hello everyone!

I'm happy to say the wait has ended and as of right now Alpha 10, the Pipes Update, is out!

Pipes, Water, Methane


This is the big news and core of the update: Pipes now open another alternative to truck and train transport.

It's a lot easier to deal with pipe logistics, but you'll pay a hefty price in efficiency since buildings have to bear the cost of pipeline operation. You'll have to decide in which situations it makes sense to use pipes and when to use trucks and trains.



With the pipes update, we also introduce 2 new resources: Water and Methane. Water is an essential resource necessary for survival. In the beginning, you can filter it from the atmosphere, but once you've got enough power, you can operate a ground extractor to get water from the planet's crust.



Methane is found in certain locations on your map or can be produced by processing organic waste from your advanced farms. The main use for methane is power generation, but it also has some industrial applications.

All pipe-able resources can be stored in large tanks which give you some reserves for hard times.



Sandbox Mode


It's long been a communtiy favorite feature and now it's here: Sandbox mode.

What's more, you can select *which kind* of sandbox you want and turn off building costs, citizen needs or research all techs. Further, you can even change this in a running game!

Finally, there are two bonus settings regarding traffic:

You can turn off traffic jams completely *OR* you can enable round trips to make your traffic problems a lot worse. Your choice!



Spaceship & Backstory


The backstory is slowly coming to InfraSpace and your spaceship is the first piece. After a failed warp jump, your damaged ship is stranded somewhere in the galaxy. You need to repair it to get back to earth.

You can already repair all of your ships components, but what happens after that will be revealed during Early Access!



Per-District Production Overview


Another community favorite, this time for hardcore players:
You can now check out the production stats for all of your districts and see if your production is balanced the way you want it to be.



Other News

- Holo Displays are now used for VR-Edutainment Glasses
- Increased max bridge build height by a lot
- Added a tiny train station for those narrow places
- A bunch of fixes

Your Old Save Works


All of your saves should be compatible and even spawn the new methane resource on the ground - no collision issues.

You will need to make sure to provide your citizens with water quickly, but I filled up your habitats and you can turn on sandbox mode to bridge the gap if needed.

If, despite all of that, you want to continue playing an old version, you can do that with the Steam Betas feature.

What Next?


First of all, I'll be watching the forums closely for any new bug reports. If nothing major pops up over the weekend, I'll go through minor bugs from the update and all other reports next week.

Let me know how you like the update and if you run into any issues.

Happy playing!

Friday Dev News #73 - Pipes Update coming next week

Hello everyone,

we aimed to finish the Pipes and Spaceship Update in May, but it looks like we'd be cutting it too close and are going to push it back to next Friday, June 3rd.

The reason is that we probably *could* have rushed to finish it this week barely, but then there'd be a big risk we'd be releasing a buggy mess. So, I think taking one more week to finish it properly is worth it in this case. I hope you can bear the wait!

Additional Info


Since I got some questions about the update, I wanted to give you some gameplay relevant info:

First, there will be 3 resources you can transport by pipe:
  • Oxygen
  • Water
  • Methane


Second, pipe transport is not free. It might seem like an easy solution to build out a pipe system and skip all of the traffic, but the more buildings are connected to a pipe system, the more costly it's operation. Each connected factory needs to keep up pressure in the system and pays for that effort with a 33% efficiency cost.

You can decide whether it's worth it to eliminate the extra traffic or go for faster production instead. The benefits of this tradeoff might change depending on the size and layout of your city and if you already have problems with traffic or not.

Methane buildings


And finally, I always like closing out an update with a couple of screenshots, so here you can see the new methane power plant for electricity generation as well as the methane fermentation plant that gets methane from organic waste:



Happy playing and until next week!

Friday Dev News #72

Hello everyone!

This week, we worked on 3 main components:

1. General Pipe Programming


A lot of this is general work to get the gameplay working, like getting resources into and out of the pipes, but there is one thing I can show you with a screenshot:



You can use different pipes for different resources. Pictures you can see the water supply for the habitats and some methane drills on another pipe system.

2. Art for the Next Update


One of the new buildings is going to be the methane power plant, which Andreas is working on right now:



Also, as a small extra tidbit, check out our simple, but effective water animation :D



3. Experiments


Now that we are more people on the team, we can do a little parallel development. Lasse and Adriana have started experimenting with some stuff for the update AFTER the pipes update. That way we already now what to do exactly after the next release is done. I know you're curious already, but we'll start posting about these once the pipe update is out.

Finally, we're working to finish the update in May - it's going to be exciting.

Happy playing!

Friday Dev News #71 - Pipe Connections

Hello everyone!

It’s been a while, but we’re making steady progress on the pipes update and will be releasing it in 2 weeks from now!

Check out the way buildings automatically connect to your underground pipe system:



Buildings always choose the closest pipe to connect to, so you can precisely select which building is connected to which pipe system.

Meanwhile, Andreas has finalized another batch of production buildings:



You can see the yellow methane driller on the top right and the big pumping station on the left right next to it.

Finally, you will also be able to ferment Methane from organic waste - the fermentation plant is probably our most chemistry-looking building yet:



I hope you can stomach the next 2 weeks until the pipes update comes out - happy playing!

Friday Dev News #70 - Methane

Hello everyone,

we have finished a batch of buildings for dealing with water: These buildings help you filter water from the atmosphere or get it from the ground. Also, you can store any kind of liquid or gas in a tank in order to build up some reserves.



The new pumping station is next on our list - it will help connect nearby buildings to the pipe system more easily:



Methane


And finally, we're introducing a new resource! You will be able to get methane from processing organic waste or drill for the resource in the planet's crust as shown here:



Because methane occurs as a gas usually, you will be able to use the pipe network for methane transportation or keep using the trucks and trains you're used to already.

Happy playing!