Captain of Industry News

Morning Captains! Zuff here bringing you news about the latest patch v0.4.11 that has just landed to the experimental branch! To check out the experimental branch, follow instructions in Captain's diary #27.

Before we go into all of the changes, we want to give a certain person a shoutout:

Some time ago one of our early backers and Discord member, McRib, sent each of us here at MaFi Games personalized COI Mugs with a heartfelt note and some treats. As we all rely on coffee/tea to function day to day so these will be used frequently! We appreciate you, McRib, and all that you do for the community! Thank you!



We are currently focusing on fixing all reported bugs and issues that prevent a smooth playthrough. Before we start working on larger new features, we want to make sure that the current game is bug-free. This results in more frequent smaller patches such as the one today since we don’t want to delay important fixes by implementation of new features. We also have some more performance improvements in works but they will likely be available in the next patch.

Full patch notes can be found at the bottom as always.

[h2]Unlocked buildings are now highlighted before used for the first time[/h2]
Know what you’ve unlocked or haven’t used through the new highlight system! Each building/transport that has not been selected will have a yellow dot in the upper right corner.


[h2]Auto-returning ship[/h2]
It is often the case that once the main ship has no more fuel for exploration, the only reasonable action is to return home. But it has to be done manually. To avoid this micro-management we’ve added a new toggle (on, by default) that will send your ship back to the dock if it has no further options for exploration or movement on the map.


[h2]Gas rotary kiln changed to output CO2 instead of exhaust[/h2]
The Gas Rotary Kiln now outputs CO2 instead of your standard Exhaust. This was an oversight when making the advanced recipes as they were not intended to need exhaust cleaning or provide sulfur by-product. This may require changes across your factories so please adjust accordingly!


[h2]Cargo ship changes[/h2]
[h3]Doubled cargo ship capacity and increased cargo throughput[/h3]
We have double the amount of product a cargo ship can contain while also increasing the throughput when unloading at dock. With this, we’ve also doubled the amount of diesel consumed and increased the world mines’ buffer capacity to accommodate. Larger ships are more fuel efficient.
[h3]Reduce ship speed & save fuel[/h3]
Sometimes, ships deliver cargo too fast and the ship is just waiting to unload in the dock. Turns out that in real life, if you are not in a hurry, slowing down can save a significant amount of fuel. This is why we have added a new toggle that reduces ship speed to 50% but also reduces fuel consumption by 30%. This is a great way to reduce diesel consumption for lower priority routes that do not require quicker delivery.


[h2]Contract balancing[/h2]
Many of you gave us feedback that making a self-sustaining colony in the late-game phases is quite challenging due to the way how contracts are designed. We agree that the contracts needed some work so this patch is rebalancing contracts. The most significant changes are:
Added new contract: consumer electronics -> quartz

Increased profit on copper, iron and quartz contracts
Increased profit on contracts selling coal and vehicle parts 2
You can also see other changes in the screenshot below.

If you have further feedback regarding the changes, please let us know!

[h2]Better explanation of nuclear plant fuel rod consumption[/h2]
New UI changes make it easier to understand how nuclear plants consume fuel rods. We saw a lot of players confused on why their plants were consuming multiple rods without starting since we didn’t explain that 16 rods were required before the reactor would even start. This is now shown in the tooltip that breaks down the information to make it easier to understand.


[h2]Prevention of digging through your retaining walls[/h2]
We’ve heard reports from players who were experiencing excavators digging though and behind retaining walls, rendering them useless in some situations.
A post by reddit user u/clarkinum titled “Why excavators digs through the retaining walls? I build those walls before digging only the right side but land kind of slides anyway”.

To prevent this from happening, mining/dumping designations now cannot be placed on tiles that contain retaining walls and vice-versa. This should help avoid excavators and trucks messing up your neatly placed mine walls! We’ve added a console command

toggle_terrain_designations_over_entities

for power users who wish to disable this restriction.
Designations cannot be placed on retaining walls.

An alert message will appear if trying to place a wall over a previously designated zone and you will not be able to place the wall there


Discord user bluetanuki999 submitted this lovely piece a bit late but we still feel it’s worth a share:
Abyss by BlueTanuki999

v0.4.11
New Features
* Unlocked buildings are now highlighted in menus until they are selected for the first time.
* Added an option to auto-return the main ship after exploration when there are no more reachable locations to explore.
* Added a new edict that reduces ship fuel consumption by 10%.
* Added an option to make ships 50% slower to save 30% of fuel per trip.

Cargo ships and contracts balancing
* Increased cargo ship capacity by 2x, fuel consumption by almost 2x. World mines buffers were also increased to accommodate.
* Larger cargo ships are now more fuel efficient per trip.
* Decreased total travel duration of cargo ships from 3.3 to 3 months.
* Increased cargo depot modules unloading speed, the highest tier now unloads the ship in just one month.
* Increased profit on copper, iron and quartz contracts.
* Increased profit on contracts selling coal and vehicle parts 2.
* Added new contract: consumer electronics -> quartz.

Other balancing
* IMPORTANT: Gas rotary kiln changed to return CO2 instead of Exhaust.
* Reduced coal consumption of the silicon recipe in the Arc furnace II by 50%.
* Reduced computing consumption of Arc furnace II from 6 to 4.
* Increased the throughput of Chemical plant for graphite production from CO2 by 2x.
* Reduced transports building duration by 80%.

Other fixes and improvements
* Retaining walls are no longer buildable on terrain designations and vice versa. This should prevent issues with mining/dumping over the walls. A new console command `toggle_terrain_designations_over_entities` can revert this change for power users.
* Renamed "Liquid nitrogen" to "Nitrogen tank" as it is a unit product.
* Fixed UI that was not clickable in some cases in windowed mode.
* Transport snapping is always enabled when no transport is selected. This allows snapping to ports and other transports when starting transport construction.
* Fixed that entities with reserved ocean area such as ocean pump/dump could block ship access of the cargo depot/shipyard indefinitely.
* Fixed the "Recover ocean access" action. Note that all ocean areas will be recomputed after loading this game version which may cause entities being newly blocked or unblocked.
* Improved ocean area recovery action that now shows what is blocking the ocean area if the recovery fails.
* Fixed vehicle dust particles that were not emitted properly in some circumstances.
* Increased vehicle dust particles visibility distance and optimized their rendering.
* Fixed buffers clearing to only clear buffers of unassigned recipes that are not used by any assigned recipe.
* Toggling of planning mode no longer cancels the current building session (e.g. cut & paste).
* Fixed that toggling prod. level on world mine did not reduce workers when it had full buffer
* Fixed a rare case where a settlement transformer would not work for settlements with low population.
* Fixed internal buffers in the Maintenance depot that could accumulate large amounts of maintenance.
* Fixed a rare issue with terrain data serialization that could lead to corrupted save files.
* Fixed incorrect shortcuts shown when insta-copying transports.
* Partial execution for recipes was changed to kick in only when no other recipe can be satisfied fully.
* Added UI showing the state of supply of fuel rods in the nuclear reactor.
* Improved error tooltips and other places for colorblind accessibility.
* Excavators no longer forcibly turn on their lights during game pause.
* Updated translations, thanks to everyone who is contributing!

The v0.4.10 is now available on the main branch! To learn more about this patch see your recent blog post: https://www.captain-of-industry.com/post/diary-29

[h2]Performance[/h2]
* Optimized rendering of ports (conveyor/pipe attachment points on buildings) and their highlighting, resulting in 10-50% more FPS!
* Fixed a frame rate drop that was occurring when the transport inspector was open.

[h2]New recipes[/h2]
* Added a recipe to convert meat to meat trimmings (to enable making sausages out of meat).
* Added a recipe to convert vegetables to fuel gas (to be able to get rid of excess).

[h2]Balancing[/h2]
* Fixed quartz recipe on arc furnace that incorrectly returned hi-pressure steam. It now returns low-pressure (you might need to fix your factory if you use this recipe).
* Increased throughput of mechanical parts from iron in Electric assembly II by 2x.
* Slightly increased fuel gas output from potatoes and wheat to catch up with energy produced from burning those as animal feed.
* Significantly increases yield of animal feed from wheat.
* Slightly increased yield of animal feed from corn.
* Reduced exhaust produced in rotary kilns from the hydrogen recipe.
* Added some starting coal to speed up the early game a bit.
* Trucks no longer consume fuel when searching for dumping locations.
* Excavators now consume only 20% of fuel when waiting for trucks whilst loaded.

[h2]UI, UX, and QoL[/h2]
* Add functionality to search in the research tree.
* Added option to clear products from non-assigned machine recipes (costs Unity).
* Added tooltips to all toolboxes explaining what individual tools do.
* Port previews and transport start-by-hover-over-port ability is now available all the time when the build menu is open.
* Added option to temporarily hide price popup when building (in case it is in your way).
* Vehicle recovery is now always available.
* Copy tools now also copy config by default when copying entities (Ctrl key now disables the config copy).
* Clicking the lock icon in a locked recipe inside of the recipe book now opens the appropriate research node in the research tree.
* Research for the settlement recyclables module was moved to a separate node behind household goods. It is now explained that recyclables come from household goods.
* Increased max size of mining tower areas.
* Increased max size of designation tools areas.
* Added description to the research for large vehicles to explain that glass can be also traded for on the world map.
* Fixed obsolete description for tree harvesting tool.
* Right-click on notifications dismisses them now.
* Notification is now shown if a settlement food module has no product set.
* Settlement food module now provides food even when being deconstructed.
* Ship fuel buffer is now shown only after the shipyard is repaired.
* Waste dump and burner have no longer disabled logistics by default but also they do not select all the recipes anymore. This makes the initial diesel chain easier to setup by allowing transportation of waste water.
* Crushed slag is no longer dumped by default.
* Updated translations, Catalan is now 100% translated! Thanks to everyone who is contributing!

[h2]Other fixes[/h2]
* Trucks will no longer transport small cargo loads during deconstruction projects (unless they are high priority).
* Increased distance tolerance for fuel trucks to minimize issues where fueling trucks cannot reach excavators.
* Trucks will now prioritize refueling instead of getting rid of cargo. This will avoid stuck dump trucks alerting low fuel instead of going to refuel.
* Fixed issues with concrete tiles appearing on the ground when constructing entities that were cut but not pasted.
* Fixed edge cases in which port highlights did not appear properly when opening port overlay right after placing buildings.
* Fixed layers legend view that was in the wrong position before the player opened the entities menu at least once.
* Fixed incorrect maintenance production reporting.
* Fixed consumer electronics edict that was incorrectly boosting household appliances.
* Comma is now supported as a decimal separator in the calculator.
* Ports on non-constructed building blueprints are now shown as a blueprint too.

Hi everyone, Captain Zuff here and in today’s Captain Diary #29 post we have yet another patch full of improvements so let’s get to it.


Today we have released a new patch to the experimental branch where we focused our efforts on some major performance improvements, balance changes, and some much needed quality of life improvements. Full patch notes are at the end of this post.

Discord user ProfitX10 shared this amazing factory with a comment: "Made a colony that is sustainable, I believe mostly indefinitely.". We use it for performance testing since it is vast!


We have also uploaded new strings for translation into our translation tool. Thank you all for your amazing contributions!

First, I will let Captain Marek tell you all about the performance optimizations (it’s gonna get a little technical).

[h2]Performance optimizations of ports rendering[/h2]
As people build larger and larger factories, the game slows down to the point where it is not fun to play. We have analyzed the game on such large factories kindly provided by the community and identified three major offenders. 1) Buildings, 2) transports (conveyor belts and pipes), and 3) ports (transport attachment points on buildings). We have decided that ports will be the ones to tackle first since they were taking 20-50% of the total frame time.

These transport attachment points are called “ports”.

Ports have quite small models but the issue is that there are many, many of them. We have seen factories with more than 30 thousand. Turns out that Unity, our rendering engine, is not that good at handling huge amounts of small objects.

We have had similar issues with transport pillars before and by employing a technique called GPU instancing we were able to increase game performance by 2-3x, this was discussed in Captain’s Diary #15. To briefly recap what GPU instancing is, basically you can ask the GPU to draw a 3D model multiple times by providing the model once together with a list of 3D transformations (position + rotation). The GPU will then “clone” the model for each given transformation, all in parallel and super fast. We were hoping to employ the same technique for ports and be done with it in a few days. Unfortunately, ports are way more complicated.

Ports have not only their 3D models, but also icon + arrow + highlight that can be toggled on or off, independently for each port. This just adds more complexity and we have to apply the similar optimization techniques to each component separately and be able to filter what is being shown.
Additionally, ports need to be able to react to the mouse cursor for starting and snapping while building transports. Unfortunately, GPU instancing cannot solve mouse interactions so other techniques have to be employed.

In addition to GPU instancing, we have also implemented chunk-based rendering. All ports are grouped to chunks of 256x256 tiles and if a tile is not in the camera view, we don’t draw or update it. Based on the camera distance we also switch to simplified port models with much less triangles (this technique is called LOD, or Level of Detail).

An example of how port models get simplified when the camera is far enough.

Long story short, all these optimizations combined reduced the time needed to render all ports by 99%! Seriously, it’s that good! Before the optimizations, ports took around 5-15 ms to render, depending on the size of your factory. Now, they take less than 0.1 ms! Considering that ports took 20-50% of the frame time, now the game is 20-50% faster! Take a look at the benchmark data below.

Before (98,917 game objects)
 19.0 FPS - Without ports
 15.6 FPS - With ports (baseline)
 13.6 FPS - With port highlights
After (75,790 game objects)
 19.0 FPS - Without ports
 19.0 FPS - With ports (baseline)
 19.0 FPS - With port highlights

And that’s not all! Alongside this, we have also removed the FPS drop that occurred when opening the inspector window of any transport where users were reporting 10+ frame drops when just clicking on a transport. Yay!

The best part of this is that many improvements done here will be reusable for future rendering optimizations. We are hoping to look at buildings and transports in the future. If you notice your game running faster, let us know! That’s it from me, back to you, Zuff!

[h2]Balancing with new recipes[/h2]
We’ve added a couple of new recipes that should help with excess food products, more precisely Vegetables and Meat Trimmings.



Vegetables can now be refined into Fuel Gas via the Anaerobic Digester.

Meat Trimmings can now be processed from Meat

[h2]Arc furnace quartz fix[/h2]
The Quartz recipe for the Arc Furnace now properly returns Steam lo instead of Steam hi, this may cause some issues in pre existing saves so make sure you adjust accordingly!


[h2]Other Recipe Balances[/h2]
We’ve adjusted the rates of several recipes to make them more viable in your factories. Mechanical Parts from Iron in Electric Assembly II, Fuel Gas from Potatoes and Wheat, Animal Feed from Wheat and Corn, and others. Check the patch notes for specific changes!

[h2]Fuel Consumption Balances[/h2]
Excavators now consume 80% less fuel while waiting for trucks.

Trucks no longer consume fuel while searching for dumping locations.

[h2]Research Searching[/h2]
Quickly find what future technologies await you using new search functionality!

[h2]Clear stored products from recipes in production buildings[/h2]
For a small Unity cost you can now have clutter free buildings!

[h2]When using the copy tool, building configurations are now copied by default (holding ctrl will prevent this)[/h2]
No more accidently copying a plan without the same settings!

[h2]Increased Designation Areas[/h2]
Another highly requested feature added today is the increased max size of mining tower and tool designation areas. With almost 4 times more area to designate you can save yourself a lot of micromanaging on big mines!


I am happy to announce the winners of our fan-art contest! We have picked three winners:

First, player WIKUS with an AI-assisted picture of the captain in front of their factory. The captain figure reminds us of Thanos from the Marvel universe. We like to think that it was a play on COI and its balance: "Perfectly balanced, as all things should be".


Second, player Alaska with a hand-drawn piece called “A seed of hope”. We like this piece that captures the notion that players are rebuilding self-sustaining civilization in COI. Also, I can confirm that tree replanting is something we are working on!


Third, player ouTPhaze made a few an AI-assisted pieces but we liked the one below the most. It is quite amazing how AI-made pictures look quite realistic and have strong COI vibes. It is also funny that if you look closer, the picture does not make much sense.


All three winners will get a COI Supporters edition and merch such as a T-shirt or poster once we have some (later this year).

Thanks to everyone who submitted and feel free to keep posting any COI-related art.


Here are some awesome screenshots shared by our community.
Reddit user, AnxietyWeird1091, made their own Hydrogen Battery!

Devlyn’s ‘Factory Life’


Discord user, MrMurry, has used their space well!

v0.4.10
Performance
* Optimized rendering of ports (conveyor/pipe attachment points on buildings) and their highlighting, resulting in 10-50% more FPS!
* Fixed a frame rate drop that was occurring when the transport inspector was open.
New recipes
* Added a recipe to convert meat to meat trimmings (to enable making sausages out of meat).
* Added a recipe to convert vegetables to fuel gas (to be able to get rid of excess).
Balancing
* Fixed quartz recipe on arc furnace that incorrectly returned hi-pressure steam. It now returns low-pressure (IMPORTANT: you might need to fix your factory if you use this recipe).
* Increased throughput of mechanical parts from iron in Electric assembly II by 2x.
* Slightly increased fuel gas output from potatoes and wheat to catch up with energy produced from burning those as animal feed.
* Significantly increases yield of animal feed from wheat.
* Slightly increased yield of animal feed from corn.
* Reduced exhaust produced in rotary kilns from the hydrogen recipe.
* Added some starting coal to speed up the early game a bit.
* Trucks no longer consume fuel when searching for dumping locations.
* Excavators now consume only 20% of fuel when waiting for trucks whilst loaded.
UI, UX, and QoL
* Add functionality to search in the research tree.
* Added option to clear products from non-assigned machine recipes (costs Unity).
* Added tooltips to all toolboxes explaining what individual tools do.
* Port previews and transport start-by-hover-over-port ability is now available all the time when the build menu is open.
* Added option to temporarily hide price popup when building (in case it is in your way).
* Vehicle recovery is now always available.
* Copy tools now also copy config by default when copying entities (Ctrl key now disables the config copy).
* Clicking the lock icon in a locked recipe inside of the recipe book now opens the appropriate research node in the research tree.
* Research for the settlement recyclables module was moved to a separate node behind household goods. It is now explained that recyclables come from household goods.
* Increased max size of mining tower areas.
* Increased max size of designation tools areas.
* Added description to the research for large vehicles to explain that glass can be also traded for on the world map.
* Fixed obsolete description for tree harvesting tool.
* Right-click on notifications dismisses them now.
* Notification is now shown if a settlement food module has no product set.
* Settlement food module now provides food even when being deconstructed.
* Ship fuel buffer is now shown only after the shipyard is repaired.
* Waste dump and burner have no longer disabled logistics by default but also they do not select all the recipes anymore. This makes the initial diesel chain easier to setup by allowing transportation of waste water.
* Crushed slag is no longer dumped by default.
Other fixes
* Trucks will no longer transport small cargo loads during deconstruction projects (unless they are high priority).
* Increased distance tolerance for fuel trucks to minimize issues where fueling trucks cannot reach excavators.
* Trucks will now prioritize refueling instead of getting rid of cargo. This will avoid stuck dump trucks alerting low fuel instead of going to refuel.
* Fixed issues with concrete tiles appearing on the ground when constructing entities that were cut but not pasted.
* Fixed edge cases in which port highlights did not appear properly when opening port overlay right after placing buildings.
* Fixed layers legend view that was in the wrong position before the player opened the entities menu at least once.
* Fixed incorrect maintenance production reporting.
* Fixed consumer electronics edict that was incorrectly boosting household appliances.
* Comma is now supported as a decimal separator in the calculator.
* Ports on non-constructed building blueprints are now shown as a blueprint too.

Patch v0.4.9 is now available on the main branch (graduated from experimental) with some small fixes. See Captain's diary #28 for detailed description of the changes.

v0.4.9
* Pinned product stats display can be now reordered by drag & drop.
* Added in-game calculator to the search field and game console.
* Logistics improvements:
- Construction/deconstruction jobs are now grouped into batches which drastically reduces trips that trucks have to make.
- Changed logistics rules to allow exporting from storages even if they have an import slider active and the inventory is above the slider amount. Similar behavior applies for the export slider.
- Trucks assigned to storages now have a job priority over non-assigned trucks.
- Added an option to disable import routes exclusivity so that storages with active import routes can also accept products from non-assigned sources.
- Logistics job priority for an entity now reflects the number of pending jobs. This means that vehicles will be more nicely distributed between multiple entities. It also prevents cases where balancing large high-priority storages choked the entire island's logistics.
- Assigning of vehicles (for example to storage or mine tower) now prefers non-paused ones.
- Improved refueling priorities (storage export priority is no longer used to find a fuel source).
- Improved vehicle queueing for storages and gas stations that was causing low throughput. Vehicles can still be served one at a time but they no longer waste time by forming a queue.
- Logistics overview window now shows assigned vehicles to tree harvesting and buildings.
* Cargo ship improvements:
- Cargo ships now depart only when empty and when they can get full load (if possible based on max capacity of the world resource).
- It is now possible to force-depart a cargo ship for emergency delivery.
- Cargo ship UI now shows available quantities to pick up in the world.
- Cargo ship depot modules now show their throughput in the UI.
* Updated Unity to version 2021 LTS. This may help fixing some crashes and issues with compatibility.
* Removed tree animations, resulting in up to 30% increase in FPS (based on the amount of trees on the screen).
* Clicking a machine (to open an inspector) will show its I/O icons and ports like in build mode.
* Added popup window for hovered buildings and machines in the research tree.
* Fixed sorters to be able to match throughput of T3 transports.
* Fixed excavator mining job that could get stuck doing nothing in rare cases.
* Fixed recipes priority for recipes that have the same outputs.
* Allowed dumping of fertilizers (with pollution effect).
* Fixed colors of liquids so that they are more close to their icons colors.
* Fix issue in adopt population button.
* Fix text width in harvest statistics.
* Increase refueling distance when refueling multiple excavators with leftover fuel. This especially affects tier 3 vehicles.
* Chickens cannot be added to a paused animal farm.
* Show products stored in connectors.
* Show fuel consumption for vehicles in Vehicle depot.
* Research lab no longer accepts products when not fully built.
* Increase text contrast in error popups.
* Fixed jerky camera when following a vehicle.
* Updated translations, thanks to everyone who is contributing!

v0.4.9a
* Fixed that mining trucks ignored storage assignment constraints in case their tower had a storage assigned.
* Fixed cargo ships inspector that was "paying unity" while open.

v0.4.9b
* Fixed a case where power generators could get stuck in a state where they are consuming mechanical power but not producing electricity (if there were not enough turbines to power them fully).
* Hide port icons and arrows in the balancer UI.
* Fixed transports copy-paste that was not copying settings such as construction pause.
* Fixed cases where deliveries to building constructions could get stuck.
* Fixed farm yield estimates that did not take empty fields into consideration.
* Fixed a rare issue where quick-deliver could take away more products than it should.

v0.4.9c
* Actually fixed farm yield estimates that did not take empty fields into consideration (this time for real).
* Fixed console command for taking screenshots "capture_and_save_screenshot" that failed when given a custom screenshot size.
* Fixed that some unlocks in research did not have a proper popup.
* World resources are now unlimited on Sailor difficulty by default.

Hi everyone, Captain Zuff here again with another Captain’s Diary for update v0.4.9! This update brings many great features and fixes, including dragging and dropping inventory items, an in-game calculator, and massive improvements to the logistics system.

Maddprof has mastered the “Art of Terracing”


Note: Full patch notes are at the end of this update.

Today we are launching the v0.4.9 patch to the experimental branch. For details on how to join this branch, please check out our previous Captain’s Diary #27.

One of our biggest updates yet, v0.4.9 brings a lot to the table in terms of Quality of Life and Logistical Optimization. We’ve received some amazing feedback from the community and we’ve made some highly requested changes to our logistics systems. Check out the big features below!

[h2]Upgrade of Unity rendering engine[/h2]
As you might know, we use Unity as the rendering engine for COI and until now we were running on version 2019 LTS (long-term support). To get access to all the latest and greatest features and fixes, we have updated Unity to the latest version 2021 LTS. Yes, the “2021” version is the latest, published a few months ago. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ We hope that this will also resolve many problems including some rare crashes and compatibility issues that players were reporting.

[h2]Drag and drop of pinned product stats[/h2]
A highly requested feature, you can now drag and drop pinned product stats on the right side of the screen to your liking!


[h2]In-game calculator[/h2]
Do all your maths without taking your eyes off the screen! Use the search bar for computing simple algebraic expressions. This is useful for not having to pull up the calculator on your phone or alt-tabbing to see how many more assemblers you need to build. You can also use the in-game console for this by typing equals sign, e.g. “= 1+1”.


[h2]Disable exclusive import toggle[/h2]
We have introduced a new toggle in storage UI that allows you to disable exclusive imports when import routes are present. This means that you can have a storage accepting deliveries from all trucks even when the storage is a target of an import route. This is extremely helpful for example when you want to assign a mine tower to a storage but keep the storage accessible to all other trucks when needed (like when you unassign a full truck from a mine tower).


[h2]Vehicle queuing be GONE![/h2]
No more truck blobs and staggering of vehicles when trying to access a single building. While the buildings will still only serve one vehicle at a time, the others won’t be trying (and failing) to form a queue and pausing while navigating. Instead, all vehicles will go toward their destination building and wait by it for their turn. This speeds up jobs throughput across the board.


[h2]Batch Building[/h2]
Trucks can now complete several construction jobs in a single trip! This is extremely useful for small belt segments that previously required lots of journeys involving small quantities. What would take 20 trucks can now take 2!


[h2]Inputs/outputs shown when selecting a building[/h2]
See what could possibly be missing when selecting a building now that input and output nodes are shown.


[h2]More detailed tooltips in the research tree[/h2]
See more details when hovering over buildings and machines icons in the research tree.


[h2]Fixed sorters throughput[/h2]
Sorter throughput will now match the speeds of the belts attached to them. Before, using a sorter could create a choke point in your transport line, but no more! If they are attached to a T3 belt they will have the same throughput as a T3 belt!


[h2]Fuel consumption details in the vehicle depot[/h2]
Now you can see the difference in fuel consumption rates for vehicles at the depot. Finally, you can know why you’re running out of fuel so quickly after building 12 large haulers. You can also use this information to get a rough estimate of how much diesel you’ll need to produce to keep up with demand.


[h2]Trees rendering optimizations[/h2]
We have been having issues with the performance of tree rendering for some time now. This has become only worse after we upgraded to Unity 2021 where tree rendering became even slower by 20%.

After extensive investigation, we have revealed that tree animations were the culprit of the poor performance. By removing the animations, we saw up to 30% higher FPS on maps with lots of trees. Trees slightly moving in the wind look nice, so we decided that the performance penalty was not worth it and opted for the increased rendering performance for now.
Screenshot from profiler that shows the speedup obtained by removing the tree animations. The horizontal axis is time, and the vertical axis is FPS (frames per second), lower is better. The New Haven map went from 60 to 80 FPS!


We see a lot of great factories and screenshots every day and here are a few we’d love to showcase:

Yandersen is on a terraforming rampage! They are completely terraforming the whole island!

Vaquinha has created an extremely clean Main Bus, but what else they’ve done is quite impressive: They’re storing all of their mined minerals above ground for…future mining.


In the previous Captain’s Diary we have started a fan art contest and while we have received some nice entries, we decided to extend the deadline for another two weeks to allow more people to join. Share your fan art (drawing, meme, etc.) with COI theme to #fan-art channel on our Discord server to enter the contest. COI Supporter edition + t-shirt prices are still on the table! Here are entries from players “Alaska” and “Wikus”:

* Pinned product stats display can be now reordered by drag & drop.
* Added in-game calculator to the search field and game console.
* Logistics improvements:
  - Construction/deconstruction jobs are now grouped into batches which drastically reduces trips that trucks have to make.
  - Changed logistics rules to allow exporting from storages even if they have an import slider active and the inventory is above the slider amount. Similar behavior applies for the export slider.
  - Trucks assigned to storages now have a job priority over non-assigned trucks.
  - Added an option to disable import routes exclusivity so that storages with active import routes can also accept products from non-assigned sources.
  - Logistics job priority for an entity now reflects the number of pending jobs. This means that vehicles will be more nicely distributed between multiple entities. It also prevents cases where balancing large high-priority storages choked the entire island's logistics.
  - Assigning of vehicles (for example to storage or mine tower) now prefers non-paused ones.
  - Improved refueling priorities (storage export priority is no longer used to find a fuel source).
  - Improved vehicle queueing for storages and gas stations that was causing low throughput. Vehicles can still be served one at a time but they no longer waste time by forming a queue.
  - Logistics overview window now shows assigned vehicles to tree harvesting and buildings.
* Cargo ship improvements:
  - Cargo ships now depart only when empty and when they can get full load (if possible based on max capacity of the world resource).
  - It is now possible to force-depart a cargo ship for emergency delivery.
  - Cargo ship UI now shows available quantities to pick up in the world.
  - Cargo ship depot modules now show their throughput in the UI.
* Updated Unity to version 2021 LTS. This may help fixing some crashes and issues with compatibility.
* Removed tree animations, resulting in up to 30% increase in FPS (based on the amount of trees on the screen).
* Clicking a machine (to open an inspector) will show its I/O icons and ports like in build mode.
* Added popup window for hovered buildings and machines in the research tree.
* Fixed sorters to be able to match throughput of T3 transports.
* Fixed excavator mining job that could get stuck doing nothing in rare cases.
* Fixed recipes priority for recipes that have the same outputs.
* Allowed dumping of fertilizers (with pollution effect).
* Fixed colors of liquids so that they are more close to their icons colors.
* Fix issue in adopt population button.
* Fix text width in harvest statistics.
* Increase refueling distance when refueling multiple excavators with leftover fuel. This especially affects tier 3 vehicles.
* Chickens cannot be added to a paused animal farm.
* Show products stored in connectors.
* Show fuel consumption for vehicles in Vehicle depot.
* Research lab no longer accepts products when not fully built.
* Increase text contrast in error popups.
* Fixed jerky camera when following a vehicle.
* Updated translations, thanks to everyone who is contributing!