Captain of Industry News

Hello fellow captains, Captain Zuff here to announce that you can play Captain of Industry anywhere with GeForce NOW starting today!



For those who don’t know about the GeForce NOW service, it allows you to play games on any supported OS such as Windows, MacOS, or just a web browser! This is possible because the game is hosted on a remote machine and enables you to stream the gameplay in real-time with minimal latency. Note that mouse and keyboard support is required to play Captain of Industry.

To start, simply join GeForce NOW and pick a plan. Three tiers of plans are available, including a free one. Keep in mind that you will need to own Captain of Industry on Steam to be able to play it. You’ll be asked to link your Steam account when attempting to launch Captain of Industry for the first time.

Playing in the Chrome browser

Signing in through Steam will also bring over any other COI cloud-synced saved games, so you can even continue where you left off!

Thanks to NVIDIA for adding Captain of Industry to the GeForce NOW library and we welcome everyone who is interested to try it out!

* Fixed blueprint loading that in some cases did not load the library completely.

Captain Zuff here and I’m excited to say that Blueprints have finally arrived with patch 0.4.14. Checkout our Blueprint Update video to see it in action or read on below for more details.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


[h2]Blueprints[/h2]
We’ve marked “Done” on our most community requested feature: Blueprints.

With Blueprints now in the game, you can create, import, and export your favorite factory layouts.

This technology is unlocked by research and can be found after the Captain’s Office.

After building the Captain’s Office and unlocking Blueprint technology, you’ll have access to the Blueprints window which can be opened from the bottom toolbar or by pressing F4.

Click here or press F4 to begin!

Blueprints are created by clicking the create icon and then dragging across any section of your factory you wish to save.

Creating a blueprint is really easy

Once created, give a name to your blueprint. You can also give a description which will appear when hovering over the blueprint.

Descriptions can go into greater detail of what a blueprint consist of

You can also create blueprint folders which can store blueprints and other folders. They can then be easily arranged by dragging and dropping onto other folders.

Create folders by clicking the New Folder button (left). Drag and drop blueprints and other folders onto folders to arrange (left)

To build a previously saved blueprint, select the blueprint and then click the Create button and then place it anywhere on the island. You can also rotate and flip the blueprint just like you can using the Copy and Cut tools.

Placing a blueprint

[h2]Importing and Exporting Blueprints[/h2]
Blueprints are shared via text strings. You can import and export with ease by clicking the appropriate buttons and copying or pasting from your clipboard.

Import blueprints copied to your clipboard by clicking the Import button (left side). Export blueprints by selecting a blueprint and clicking the Export button (right side).

You can also share and import blueprint folders the same way you can blueprints which can also contain any number of blueprints and other folders.

[h2]Sharing your blueprints[/h2]
If you want to share or get blueprints, you can join our discord and chat with fellow Captains. And if you prefer a website, our community has you covered. A member of our discord (captain_of_coit) has launched a website https://captains-haven.org Disclaimer: It’s not a page we officially run and is built solely by the community, but we wanted to highlight it here because we really appreciate it. In fact, the progress done is fascinating, given the blueprints were on an experimental branch for just about a week.


Filip here to share some information on Update 1. I know that many of you are looking forward to the update, and we definitely do as well. Work is going forward, and the date is still set to Q2 2023.

[h2]Save compatibility[/h2]
Update 1 will have lots of significant changes and improvements. Several of the changes are more of a long-term investment (one of them is described below). To make it all happen, we will need to play our EA wildcard and break save compatibility. It was a hard decision for us, and it took several heated discussions, but we agreed that this is the best way forward. There is so much we wouldn’t be able to do otherwise. And several performance improvements could not happen without breaking changes. Lastly, it’s not just about “what we can do” but how fast we can do it. Some changes could be done as backward compatible, but they would take at least twice longer to implement, and that’s an issue as our dev throughput is the biggest bottleneck right now. So with all that, we decided that for the future of COI, it is better if we break the save compatibility from time to time. However, we will never break save compatibility outside of major updates. And it also does not mean that every major update will break compatibility. We will only break compatibility if we have a significant reason to do so.

Blueprints introduced in this update will remain compatible so you can save and carry over your favorite designs! Blueprint compatibility was one of the key design requirements. After the Update 1 is launched, the current EA version will be kept in a separate Steam branch so you will be able to always go back to check out your creations.

[h2]Work on update 1[/h2]
Due to the upcoming terrain editor, we have decided to rewrite our internal terrain representation. This is needed because otherwise, the editor would be hard to use. The current terrain representation was very complex in order to support dynamic terrain unlocking, which is something we won’t need anymore. By simplifying the representation, we get significant performance improvements in rendering and terrain simulation. It’s also one of the major reasons we had to break saves. We will cover the terrain changes in more detail in one of our next blog posts.

Also, thanks to Jeremy, we have an initial version of tree planting. It required lots of thinking because we had two clear requirements: be able to automate it and keep it immersive. We will share more updates on this in our future posts.

We are also looking into new content. We don’t like to promise much upfront, but we have several things in the works, such as new power production items – diesel generator II, two new tiers of nuclear power plants, and reprocessing facility to tackle the spent fuel issue. In fact, the new nuclear chain is so complex compared to the current that many of you will just refund the game once you see it 🙂 But we modeled it based on real-world production. Also, the new tree planting feature will affect our production chains, and there are at least two new machines coming into COI to support it.

There are many things we are working on for update 1, and one of them is a new entity called stacker. The stacker, while connected to a belt, automatically dumps materials onto the terrain. This is part of our effort to expand on terraforming capabilities, and it’s not the only improvement in that area that is coming in Update 1.

New stacker machine in action, waiting for you in Update 1.

I also want to thank all of you for your great support and nice comments under our updates and on Discord; they are always so nice to read and boost the mood. But I would also like to remind everyone that these posts are not meant to be a full list of changes that are coming, so stay tuned for more.


We know that our supporters are still waiting for the t-shirts and posters. Sorry, it’s taking us some time, but we are working on it. We did a few rounds of design, and it just wasn’t where we would like it to be, and that’s why it drags a bit. But don’t worry, we did not forget, it just needs a bit more time in the oven.


Recently we got our hands on an island from a player nicknamed Hob. It’s a really impressive build, so we took the opportunity to showcase a few screenshots here.

Feels nice and organic but, at the same time, very neatly packed and organized.

The depth of the mine gets more visible when you look down at the tiny haul trucks. It also feels so naturally laid out that following a truck driving up & down is a true joy.

Beautifully laid out smelting operations.


We all probably know by now how much haul trucks can carry. But did you know that they can carry an entire cat?



New feature: Blueprints

• Parts of the factory can be now saved as blueprints which are persisted between games.
  
• Blueprints can be exported and shared with other players by copy-pasting strings.
  

Improvements

• Transport construction now locks pillars for already confirmed segments, giving greater control over pillar placement.
  
• Optimized game save encoding resulting in 5-10% smaller save size.
  

Fixes

• Second tier of the Cargo Depot now also satisfies a goal in place of the first tier.
  
• Assignments between entities are now honored when copy-pasting designs.
  
• Increased max area for tools.
  
• Cut and copy tools now correctly copy locations of transport pillars.
  

Balancing

• Reduced the number of workers required in farms.
  
• Added recipes to digest fruit and poppy.
  

Hi Captains, Zuff here and I am thrilled to tell you about our biggest patch yet, the almighty v0.4.13! I have also prepared a TL;DR version of this post in a video form. The full hundred-lines-long patch notes are at the end of this post as always. Let’s get started!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


Before we jump in the new features and changes, I have a quick announcement. We appreciate the extra work some players put into translating the game. Captain of Industry is currently translated to XX languages and the latest addition is Turkish!

To show our gratitude we will be giving out Steam gift cards to the most active translators! If you translated a significant amount of strings please expect an email in coming days (the one you registered on Weblate)! Many thanks! And if you’d like to help us with translations, see https://translate.captain-of-industry.com/projects/captain-of-industry/game/


[h2]New map: Insula mortis[/h2]
The works on a new map editor are well underway but we wanted to give you one more map to enjoy before the editor is ready. The new map is called Insula mortis and it is a beautiful group of islands rich in raw resources. To get access to nearby islands you will have to make land bridges by dumping material to the ocean. There are rumors that this island is cursed but our scouts found no evidence of this so it's probably just a legend.



[h2]New mass upgrade tool[/h2]
It’s finally here! With this new tool you will be able to select an area of buildings to upgrade. It works for all upgrade entities, including machines, conveyor belts, or pipes. By the way, this tool was implemented solely by our new team member Jeremy who joined our team in November. If you enjoy this tool in particular (or if you’d like to see it improved), feel free to drop him a line on our Discord!



[h2]New and reworked tutorials[/h2]
Since the game's release back in May, we have been receiving lots of feedback about a steep learning curve and lack of guidance at the beginning of the game. We spent a lot of time and care analyzing the feedback and our solution is two-fold.

First, we implemented a new checklist-based tutorial that will help new players to learn the basic mechanics and progress through the game. This feature is optional and it was designed to be as non-intrusive as possible. Progress in the game is not locked behind any goals, there are no time limits, and every goal can be individually skipped. However, you will get rewards by completing the goals so think twice before skipping them!



Second, we have revamped our existing non-interactive tutorials. Tutorials now use less text and more images to make them easier to read and understand (there are over 170 new images!). Longer tutorials were split to smaller chunks and many new ones were written to cover even more topics. We put an extra effort to focus tutorials on explaining mechanics and features that are otherwise harder to discover by just playing the game.



These tutorial changes were a lot of work but we wanted to get it done before fully switching to the work on Update 1 so that players can have a better experience now, not later.



Pages from a 90-page working document that we used for collaborating on tutorial revamp.

[h2]New chain: Bricks[/h2]
Addition of bricks was actually indirectly caused by the tutorials revamp. When we were writing goals and tutorials for the early game, concrete production seemed like too complex of a chain to set up. Concrete production requires the establishment of two new mines (limestone, and sand), limestone has to be processed to cement, dry ingredients have to be pre-mixed, and then combined with water – what a process!

Another issue with concrete was dependency on slag. It seemed advantageous to make concrete from crushed slag, as opposed to crushed rocks, because slag was just a by-product of iron ore smelting and rock would require a third mine to be set up. However, in that stage players were often still making iron from scrap that is not producing slag. This also made players reluctant to dump slag on the ground, stalling their iron smelting lines by lack of demand for concrete.

To fix these issues, bricks were introduced. Bricks are made using dirt, water, and coal and they are used in Construction parts recipe instead of concrete. The nice thing is that dirt often comes from your other mines so you might not need to even set up a new mine for it.

Concrete can be still used in construction parts as an alternative when it is unlocked later in the game. Note that some buildings require concrete for construction explicitly so it is not possible to progress through the entire game without making it.



[h2]New mods configurator[/h2]
A common feedback from players who are using mods was that it was not possible to add or remove mods from existing games. While the modding community is still very young, we decided to invest in supporting this feature. Note that this will not work with all mods.

Additionally, you can pick mods when starting a new game. This means that you can have many mods installed but only choose ones that you want during a game start. Loaded games will automatically load mods present in those games.



[h2]Further optimizations of transport pillars rendering[/h2]
Our eternal fight for more frames per second was focused this time on transport pillars rendering. The biggest difference was the introduction of LODs (level of detail) so that pillars further from the camera are using simpler models. When the camera is too far away, pillars are not even rendered at all!

We tested this on Neet Engineer's factory where the number of triangles rendered by pillars alone decreased by more than 50% from 5.7 to 3.2 million (his factories are huge!). This did not result in a huge FPS gain on our hardware but players with weaker GPUs, especially laptops, could see some nice boost. Memory consumption was also lowered slightly.


Animation showing three levels of details of transport pillars. Level 0 is the normal model, level 1 has significantly reduced polygon count which is shown when looking from a distance, and level 2 completely turns off pillars rendering when the camera is too far away.

[h2]Refugees balancing[/h2]
This patch brings many balance changes but the most important one is that the world map no longer gives refugees from explorations. This change was made to prevent frustration from bringing new people from explorations while your settlement was already full, making people homeless. To balance this, Beacon is now infinite with diminishing returns.
Key behavior changes
Here are the most important behavior changes from this patch.

Excavators no longer return to the mine tower when mining finishes, unless they are outside of the mine area. This should make mining more efficient, especially when resuming mining after all designations were fulfilled.

Dumping designations are searched based on proximity to the vehicle, not the mine tower. This makes dumping more efficient since vehicles usually drive shorter distances. Placement of the mine tower also makes no impact on dumping operations.

Transport connector now attempts to accept inputs evenly from all connected ports. This means that a connector has an equivalent behavior to a balancer without any priorities or ratio enforcement settings on. This can for example ensure that all products are being conveyed evenly through a congestion.



Transports construction tool now places a connector in places where it makes sense (e.g. two output ports facing the same tile). This simplifies connecting entities that have ports facing each other.



Statue of maintenance now provides maintenance reduction based on the number of operational statues instead of a flat bonus for any number of statues. The maintenance reduction of a single statue was reduced from 5% to 4%, but each additional statue gives an additional reduction which is a half of the previous one. For example, 3 statues give 4% + 2% + 1% = 7% total maintenance reduction now.

It is now possible to flip entities with mechanical shaft such as turbines and generators. This enables more designs when making power plants.



It is now possible to queue any research node and all required parent nodes will be queued before it automatically.

Improved ship surrender logic so that your ship will not surrender if the enemy has much lower HP. This should never happen how:


[h2]Significant bug fixes[/h2]
This patch brings so many fixes, here are the most important ones.

Fixed recycling of gold which was incorrectly returning only 1/3 of the expected value. Are you ready for the extra gold?

Fixed contracts that were in some cases charging more Unity than they should have. More Unity for you!

Transport connectors now return products to the shipyard when destroyed instead of destroying them. No more lost products!

Fixed buried pipes that are no longer destroyed when another transport is built on top of them. Yes, you can bury pipes. No, it is not a good idea.


One last thing. We are completely blown away by all the positive reviews posted on our Steam page recently. During the last 30 days we have received all positive reviews except one! Thanks everyone for this wonderful gift! We read every single review carefully and take notes on what to improve.



And that’s all for today. The entire MaFi Games team wishes you happy holidays and a wonderful New year 2023!



New map: Insula mortis

Improved experience
* Added mass upgrade tool. When an area is selected for upgrade, a popup window can be used to select what entities in that area should be upgraded.
* Added comprehensive checklist-based tutorial that will guide new players though the early game (can be disabled).
* Reworked and restructured tutorials to better explain game mechanics, be more simple to read, and be less verbose.
* Added mods configuration options when starting or loading a game. This also allows you to add/remove mods before a game is loaded. Note that not all mods can be safely added/removed from a save.
* Introduced a new bricks production chain into the game. Bricks can be used as an alternative for Concrete in Construction parts. Bricks are designed to make early game a bit easier.

Performance
* Further optimized transport pillars rendering and added LODs, saving many millions of drawn triangles in large factories.

Balance changes
* World map no longer gives refugees from explorations.
* Beacon is now infinite with diminishing returns.
* Reduced early research difficulties.
* Removed electronics from collapsed radio tower.
* Research labs no longer consume Unity when idle.
* Reduced connector buffer size significantly (size is still based on transporting speeds of connected entities).
* Increased water requirements to make 8 acid from 4 to 6.
* Reduced water yield from cleaning of 24 toxic slurry from 20 to 18.

Behavior changes
* When assigning a vehicle to a building (e.g. mine tower), assign the closest one.
* Excavators no longer return to the mine tower when mining finishes, unless they are outside of the mine area.
* Dumping designations are no longer searched based on proximity to the mine tower but on proximity to the vehicle.
* Refueling trucks now don’t leave fuel stations while the station keeps loading them with more fuel.
* Trucks and excavators now prefer to refuel at the fuel station that is assigned to their mine tower.
* Improved logistics jobs priority system.
* Transport connector now attempts to accept inputs evenly from all connected ports (outputs were already even). This means that a connector has an equivalent behavior to a balancer without any priorities or ratio enforcement settings on.
* Transports construction tool now places a connector in places where it makes sense (e.g. two output ports facing the same tile).
* Statue of maintenance now provides maintenance reduction based on the number of operational statues. The maintenance reduction of a single statue was reduced from 5% to 4%, but each additional statue gives an additional reduction which is a half of the previous one. For example, 3 statues give 4% + 2% + 1% = 7% total maintenance reduction now!
* It is now possible to flip entities with mechanical shaft such as turbines and generators.
* It is now possible to queue any research node and all required parent nodes will be queued before it automatically.
* Improved ship surrender logic so that your ship will not surrender if the enemy has much lower HP.

User interface
* Replaced toggle buttons with checkboxes.
* Improved several dialogs to properly respect the Esc key.
* Total population view moved from the big top left tiles to the main top toolbar.
* Removed custom starving notifications and moved them to the regular notifications.
* Notification dismissal status is now persistent (loads from a save).
* Collapse warning icon on affected building disappears when its notification is dismissed. Notification reappears when more terrain under the affected building is modified.
* Custom warning notifications on storages don't go away until the contents are more than 5% off the target to prevent flickering.
* Message notifications now auto-collapse when there are more than 5 of them.
* Add "delete entire transport" action into the construction toolbox for better discoverability.
* Transport height now shows the correct height when connecting to other transports.
* Remove the top title bar from the bottom toolbar and use tooltips for the items instead.
* When selecting an entity, prefer a vehicle if there are two entities to choose from. This allows selecting trucks clipped inside of buildings.
* Fixed idle non-assigned vehicles that were not properly updated in the UI.
* Fixed an incorrect estimate of water yield in the rainwater harvester.
* Fixed Recipe book that did not show some recipes as locked if the owning entity was locked.
* Fixed hotkey for price tooltip did not work if transport editor was activated via copy tool.
* Fixed missing tooltips in settlement overview, added a link for tutorial about health.
* Product stats titles are now ordered by name.
* Made key-binging tooltips translatable.
* Mining overlay can be now toggled without canceling current selection for building.
* Games can be loaded/saved by double-clicking on existing file names.
* Updated translations, thanks to everyone who is contributing!

Significant bug fixes
* Fixed recycling of gold which was incorrectly returning only 1/3 of the expected value.
* Fixed issue with free maintenance when global maintenance amount exceeded capacity.
* Fixed contracts that were in some cases charging more Unity than they should have.
* Fixed game crash when clicking "continue" for a save file that was deleted in the meantime.
* Fixed terrain rendering that was showing lighter stripes on steep slopes.
* Fixed shipyard collapse that was not properly destroying products, potentially causing the permanent radiation issues.
* Fixed incorrect sun brightness and shadows intensity when a game was loaded during rainy weather.

Transport related bug fixes
* Transport connectors now return products to the shipyard when destroyed (instead of destroying them).
* Fixed buried pipes that are no longer destroyed when another transport is built on top of them.
* Fixed pipe attachment to the pillar that was sometimes incorrectly oriented.
* Fixed spontaneous transport collapse that sometimes happened during flip, connection, or upgrade.
* Fixed transport pillars that were sometimes stuck as a blueprint.
* Construction state of a transport (e.g. ongoing upgrade or construction pause) is now properly preserved when joining it with other transports.
* Fixed construction cubes visualization when transport under construction was connected to other transports.
* Paused transports no longer accept products.
* Transports in clearing mode are no longer moving products and are no longer accepting products.
* Fixed destroy tool that was incorrectly selecting the entire transport when the cursor was previously on any other non-transport building.
* Fixed transport destroy tool that was not showing destroy preview when repeatedly hovered over the same spot on a transport.

Other Bug fixes
* Server racks can no longer be added into non-constructed data centers.
* Fixed vehicle overlay that was sometimes shown for an incorrect vehicle class.
* Fixed wood disappearance when truck overload edict was active.
* Fixed inability to select tree harvesters sometimes.
* Fixed edict panel to correctly show effects of unity-positive edicts.
* Fixed excess consumption of lab equipment on research finish or change.
* Cargo depot modules now have an idle state.
* Fixed that the beacon was not losing progress when paused.
* Fixed buildings highlighting during route assignment.
* Fixed rendering of building ghosts particles below terrain designations.
* Upgrade of machines now properly prunes obsolete product buffers. This means that upgraded Blast furnace II will no longer accept iron ore since it cannot even process it.
* Trucks no longer exceed reservations of other trucks when delivering their cargo
* Fixed unity stats that did not contain items that went over the unity cap.
* Fixed some recipes that were unlocked too early or were not visible in research.
* Fixed that cutting and pasting of a building with vehicles assigned did not preserve the vehicles assignments.
* When people leave due to lack of food, any homeless will now get properly accommodated in their place.

Ahoy sailors, Captain Zuff reporting for our next Diary post. Today we have lots of information about what we have been working on and about the next big update!


Before we get into the game updates, on behalf of the entire MaFi Games team, I would like to welcome Jeremy, our new senior software engineer from the UK. We are so happy to have you join us and help us accelerate progress on the game! Here are a few words from Jeremy:

“Hi everyone! I'm excited to be joining the team and am looking forward to getting stuck in. While I have a background in performance optimization, I'll be working on all parts of the game, from bug fixes to new features. I'll mostly be working in the background so you may not see me pop up in person too often, but hopefully, you enjoy the results of my work!”

And by the way, Jeremy has been recently working on the new upgrade tool.


Past weeks we have been busy planning the next big update as well as prototyping what is feasible to do so that we can deliver on the plan. The community feedback played a huge role in this process and we are thankful for everyone who is sharing it on Discord, Steam, feature requests site, Reddit, and elsewhere!

We have a lot of plans but in this post, I will share a smaller chunk that we are working on right now.

[h2]Terrain graphics and simulation improvements[/h2]
A pivotal change of the terrain rendering tech is the extension of the maximal number of supported terrain textures. Players have been asking why they cannot dump various materials on the ground and one reason was that our terrain supports only 24 different textures. This has been a big limitation and we are working on rewriting the terrain rendering to support up to 256 different textures! This will allow us to add more textures to the game, increasing visual variety as well as allowing players to dump more different materials on the ground. Mods will be also able to take advantage of this by adding new custom dumpable materials.

Adding more textures is not the only terrain improvement. We feel that the terrain looks too plain and is missing visual richness and variety. Our artist Miroslav is hard at work improving existing terrain graphics as well as adding new models such as grass, rocks, bushes, branches, tree stumps, etc. Take a look at a mock scene below!

Comparison of current terrain in the game (top) and our new terrain prototype with new props and textures (bottom).

Close-up of the new terrain prototype including new props.

Close-up of the new terrain prototype with new textures of rock and iron ore.

Another important change we are hoping to implement is improved terrain physics simulation. One issue we are constantly dealing with is that the material collapse angle is the same for all states of a material. For example, a solid rock on a mountain will collapse at the same angle as a mined rock from that mountain. This often results in cascading collapse of entire mountains when they are disrupted by mining.

We plan to separate “solid” materials from “already mined” ones and have different collapse rules for them so that steeper mountains are possible. We are also thinking about mining changes so that tall mountains are not always possible/easy to be mined from the bottom. This will need more testing.

[h2]Rendering improvements[/h2]
This is a big topic, but a long story short is we want to make the game look better and one feature that makes a tremendous difference is anti-aliasing.

Currently, we use the “deferred” rendering pipeline in Unity. It has many advantages such as efficient rendering of lights, or powerful post-processing features. However, one thing that it cannot do well is anti-aliasing (smoothing out jagged edges). Unity implements a technique called “temporal anti-aliasing” that renders each frame slightly differently and averages consecutive frames in time. This technique helps but does not work very well. We were experimenting with a different rendering pipeline called “forward” that does support multi-sample anti-aliasing (MSAA).

The decision on the rendering pipeline is not easy and there are always trade-offs. From our initial testing, the MSAA is such a big visual improvement to the game that we are considering removing lights (currently only used on vehicles) and switching to the forward rendering pipeline. This is a relatively big undertaking since many of our custom rendering code was assuming deferred renderer, but we think it is worth the result.

Comparison of the deferred rendering with temporal anti-aliasing (currently used in the game) and the new forward rendering with 8x MSAA.

From the comparison above you can see that the MSAA does a much better job of smoothing out the jagged edges on the models, especially in the distance. Also, you can see that the grass on the terrain is visible much further since most of the grass blades have sub-pixel size which is not possible to be rendered with the deferred renderer.

Another benefit of MSAA is that it produces “stable” images that do not change over time. A big disadvantage of temporal AA used by the deferred pipeline is that small objects and edges tend to flicker. This is part of the algorithm that reduces aliasing, but it can be very distracting to see flickering, especially when the camera is not moving. This is especially visible on bright objects such as molten metals where the flicker can be much more apparent. This issue is not present when using MSAA.

Unwanted flicker caused by the temporal anti-aliasing of the deferred renderer. This issue is not present when using forward rendering with MSAA.

Models improvement
We are also working on improving some of our 3d assets. This is going to be a continuous effort but we hope we are up to a great start.

New tier II excavator model compared to the old one. You can hopefully tell which one is which!

[h2]Map editor[/h2]
Terrain and rendering improvements lead us to the biggest and most complex feature that we are working on – the map editor. While we have a simple editor that was used to make existing maps, we cannot simply make it available to all of you since it is using Unity Editor UI. It is also very hard to use, even for us, and we wanted to offer more powerful tools that are easy to use.

Another big issue is backwards/forwards compatibility. Currently, maps are represented via code (maps are procedurally generated) and the representation is relatively brittle. Sometimes we need to do manual changes to the existing maps source code to keep them compatible. This obviously would not scale to community-made maps. We would hate to do some changes to the game that would obsolete all maps made by the community.

The solution here is two-fold. First, design a new map representation that will be as robust to game changes as possible. Second, create a new editor that uses the in-game UI that handles editing of the new map representation.

Making a COI map editor has an additional complication that many other games do not have to deal with: What is under the terrain surface matters. COI has a fully dynamic layered terrain and resources are often underground. This means that the editor has to support this. We are still not completely sure how to implement this but we have ideas to try. We will definitely give you an update on this topic as we work on it.

Another close-up of the new terrain prototype.

[h2]More music[/h2]
We are also happy to announce that our artist Ondrej has been working on another 30 minutes of music for the soundtrack. We have nearly 80% done!


We also plan to implement tree replanting, better product visualization on conveyor belts, improved unit storage visualization, and hopefully add a few more machines for more processing capabilities. We will cover these areas in more detail once we get closer to working on them.


It is hard to predict exact dates as we are diving into significantly large areas. We aim to deliver the update in Q2 2023. We will also drop at least one medium-sized update this year that has some nice improvements and bug fixes.


We also have a few changes that are coming before any big update arrives. These are bug fixes but also a new tutorial system with goals and active tracking of player progress. We hope we will be able to improve the initial experience when folks are learning the game. This update should arrive in a couple of weeks.

Example of the new tutorial system that we are working on.


This is all we had for you for now but don’t forget, this is just the first wave. There are more features coming in Update 1 and we will keep you updated as we get to work on them.

Thank you for your continued interest and support and let us know your thoughts on Discord, Steam, or Reddit!