Oddsparks: An Automation Adventure News

We are very excited to finally reveal our official release date:

Oddsparks: An Automation Adventure will release version 1.0 on PC and consoles on the 27th of May!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Early Access has been a great journey! From our start one year ago in April 2024, to the big updates ("Trains & Trades" in August 2024 and "Hot & Cold" in December 2024) and some smaller updates in between. It has been amazing to see the community grow, see all the crazy builds, cozy fan art, constructive feedback and overall love for the game.

So, let's quickly recap what to expect from the 1.0 update:

• New biome: "The Corrupted Ruins" isn't just the name of the 1.0 update, it's also the name of the new biome. The ruins of a long-gone civilization now lie in a gloomy swamp in the North, populated by aggressive slimes and golems.
  
• Base Defense: The new enemies will attack structures built inside the new biome and corrupt them by covering them in purple slime. Corrupted buildings are not destroyed, they are only deactivated until the corruption has been cleansed by the new Scrubby Sparks. You can build walls, attractors, and Spark Cannons to defend your new bases.
  
• Main Story End: Who made the Sparks? And why? You'll finally uncover the mystery of the Sparks and finish the journey that began over a thousand years ago!
  
• Automation Challenge: You'll need to apply everything you've learned in a final isolated automation challenge, while defending your base!
  
• More QoL + World Settings: World Settings allow you to customise your game experience. You want easier or harder fights, reduce building costs, or even abolish them entirely? You can even manage the world generation better with the optional terraforming tool. You'll have lots of different options available before starting a new game and while playing. We've also added more quality of life features. We reworked trains, added a toggle inside filters to reverse them, updated the glossary, and more.
  
• Mod Support via Steam Workshop: We've added tools and documentation to lay the groundwork for future community creativity. This will allow you to go way beyond what we ever imagined the game to be.
  
• Achievements + Community Items: You'll finally be able to unlock Steam achievements and collect/trade cards, craft badges and get rewards like emoticons and profile backgrounds.
  

[h3]Savegame Compatibility[/h3]
We knew if we ever wanted to implement some deeper system changes that would break the save games, this update would be the last chance. And there were some longstanding world generation issues that we wanted to tackle to have better and more reliable results. This means that we will deliberately break savegame compatibility for the first (and last) time during Early Access. So, while everyone will have to start from scratch, you will have a more robust and future-proof world generation.

We'll keep a public "earlyaccess" beta branch, where you'll still be able to play your old saves on the old Early Access version. This branch is already live now, although until the 1.0 release the version will be the same on both "default" and "earlyaccess" branches.

[h3]But wait, consoles?[/h3]
We've said in the past that we wanted to concentrate on PC first and look at consoles after the Early Access phase. But for Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5 there was already significant progress due to our work on the demos.

One important thing is that the console version won't have multiplayer. Unfortunately, console multiplayer has been a lot more work than we were able to take care of. Instead of making everyone wait much longer for a console version, we figured it was better to let console players enjoy singleplayer Oddsparks. For now, we don't have plans to add console multiplayer.

Apart from that, you'll be able to play the full game on PC, Xbox Series X/S or PlayStation 5 on release day.

[h3]What's next?[/h3]
We are almost finished with the 1.0 release and can't wait to share the complete game with the world. If you don't want to wait for the release alone, join us on our Discord to discuss everything Oddsparks!
The release also won't be the end of the journey, but it's too early to talk about what might come after...

For now, we are very excited for all of you to get your hands on the full game. See you in May!

Hello! It’s been a little while, so let’s update you on what’s happening.

Oddsparks 1.0 is currently in the stage of playtesting and bugfixing, and things are going pretty smoothly. We’re currently spending a lot of time going over the whole game! We’re changing some of the earlier quests to make the flow smoother and adding new quests to make some things clearer. We’ve added new functions to old path addons and the trains. We’ve done an overhaul on world generation, the glossary, the damage type system... And that’s not counting any of the strictly new stuff we’ve added, like the final biome and end game challenge!

Reverse settings filters on your spark and item filters and operators for your amount filter!

We want to put our best foot forward with 1.0 and make it a polished game that you can confidently buy and recommend to your friends. We’ve already started working with modders to test out our modding tools and making sure we have good documentation. (And if you’re maybe interested in modding our game early, you can join our Discord and apply there!)

In fact, if you enjoy the game and would like to help us have a great launch in general, you can give us a positive review on Steam, and tell your friends and maybe your favourite streamer and youtuber about us!

That’s it for the preamble. Things are going smoothly for Oddsparks 1.0, no release date yet but we’re looking forward to announcing something soon.

For now, let’s talk a little about two new features we’re going to have in 1.0!

[h2]Base Defense[/h2]
So Base Defense only happens in the new biome. As seen in our roadmap, we have a new biome called the Corrupted Ruins and in this gloomy biome are not just the broken ruins of the past, but also some rather unusual looking enemies.



These little slimes can be fought relatively easily and drop Corrupted Aether. However, they spawn back pretty quickly and the real issue is that if you start building in the new biome, they will not be happy.

They’ll come to your base in waves and start spreading their corruption. These enemies will cover your buildings in a slime that’ll stop the buildings from working, cover your paths to stop Sparks from walking on them… If you let them, they’ll cover everything in the new biome and freeze your base.



Thankfully, you have a few different tools to take care of them. First, you’ll get access to a new Spark, the Scrubby Spark! These clean up corruption from buildings and the ground, although at some point, they can only take so much. Maybe there’s also a way to clean up the Scrubby Sparks themselves?



Knowledge is power and with the new Hostility Overlay, you can know the danger level of an area if you build there. In general, the corrupted enemies won’t attack you unless you build in these areas and they also won’t attack your base outside of the biome too. However, as you defend yourself, they’ll also grow stronger, so you’ll need to keep up with them and you can keep an eye out with the Hostility Overlay.



And then, of course, you have your new set of base defense tools. To add to the Animal Scarer and Spark Thrower, we now have the Defensive Wall, an Aetheric Attractor, an Enemy Sensor, and a Spark Cannon! The Spark Cannon is an upgraded version of the Spark Thrower, able to aim directly at whatever you want it to.


With it, you can have one cannon that uses Burning Sparks to set the enemies ablaze, another cannon with Stumpy Sparks to pick up the items that drop, and one last cannon with Scrubby Sparks to clean up the corruption, all working in tandem! We won’t spoil how all the different tools work, but we look forward to you playing with them.

[h2]World Settings[/h2]
We also wanted to talk to you quickly about World Settings!

For us, Oddsparks is about solving open ended puzzles your way, and that can be pretty tough to design for. After all, one person’s easy is another person’s difficult, and we wanted to make the game fun for a very broad audience of folks. Because of that, we always knew that we wanted to add World Settings and Mod Support to let you play Oddsparks your own way! But what does that mean exactly for World Settings?



Well, a lot of it is just empowering you to mess around with a lot of stuff! Of course, you can start with parts of the game skipped, but we added a way where you can start a game with automation features unlocked for the folks who already understand many of the concepts.

So for example, you can start the game with the late-game ancient replicas, which functionally means that you’re not location restricted anymore. If you have this world setting enabled, the costs of these buildings also change so that you can use them from early game.



We'll also allow you to change a lot of values and give you access to a whole bunch of fun things. Give yourself a harder challenge by multiplying quest numbers, or by making all of the enemies aggressive and respawn faster. Or you can make the game easier by making fuel slower to burn, making yourself invulnerable to damage or access the Item Cheat Menu where you can give yourself any item for free.

You can play the game in an entirely flat world (the cave walls still exist though) and we even added a terraform tool option in there! (We didn’t want to add it to the default experience, but we know that people are sometimes looking for a more sandbox experience out of Oddsparks and we wanted to give you the option.)



However, you may not be able to earn achievements in a save game depending on the settings. In general, if we feel like something makes the game way too easy, we make it so that you can’t earn achievements, but we're pretty nice about it. You can also change some (not all) world settings while playing, but of course, if you had enabled something that turned off achievements, that save will continue to not get you achievements, even if you turn that setting off later.

Oh, one more thing. Maybe you were wondering what that little eye icon above the World Setting does? Well, it opens up a Seed Preview!



That's it for now. We've already shown a lot of this in our Discord, so feel free to hang out with us there for some more sneak peeks.

We look forward to announcing things soon!

Half a year ago, we released the Supporter Pack as a way for players who really like the game to express their support and get 3 exclusive customization and 5 decoration items as a bonus.

We are very thankful to anyone who purchased this cosmetic DLC and to celebrate the first 6 months, we decided to add a lot more items:

• The Royal outfit got 4 extra items (trousers, skirt, boots and staff).
  
• A new Corrupted Aether outfit has been added (5 items).
  
• 13 new Spark statues for all remaining Sparks have been added. You might even spot a new Spark that will be part of the upcoming 1.0 update (The Corrupted Ruins)!
  

The price of the Supporter Pack has also increased, but if you have purchased it before, you’ll get all these extra items for free!

Get the Supporter Pack here:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3073500/Oddsparks_An_Automation_Adventure__Supporter_Pack/

[h2]Multiplayer Bugfix[/h2]
We also released a new patch with a fix for a bug that would break multiplayer sessions. This fix should prevent the game from desyncing when refilling Spark loadouts.
[h2]What’s next?[/h2]
We are working on the 1.0 release with full steam, polishing systems, implementing new features and addressing your feedback. You are always welcome to join our Discord where you might even get some sneak peeks on what’s about to come.

Wall-builders, Historians, and Spark-Researchers,

It’s another roadmap update! Let’s talk about our upcoming 1.0 and what we’re planning to put into the game. We hope you look forward to our big 1.0 update, titled “The Corrupted Ruins” that we’re planning to release on Spring 2025!


Let’s talk quickly about what those features mean!

[h3]New Biome: Corrupted Ruins[/h3]
We have a new biome that’ll round out our 1.0, and it’ll have new enemies that will actually go out of their way to attack your buildings! They’ll also spread corruption, making your buildings unusable. Thankfully, you’ll have a new Spark to help you clean things up and get things back into working order.

[h3]Base Defense[/h3]
And you’ll also get new tools to help you defend your base from the new enemies to stop you needing to clean up in the first place. We’re expanding your defense kit - you’ll build walls and automated defenses to take care of enemies before they reach your base.

[h3]Main Story End[/h3]
We’re also wrapping up the main story. Who made the Sparks? Why were they made in the first place? We’ve been keeping things only in bits and pieces, but you’ll finally get to uncover the mystery of the Sparks and finish the journey that began over a thousand years ago!

[h3]Automation Challenge[/h3]
But you can’t just have the story ending without a cool final boss! This is where you take everything you’ve learned from the game and apply it into the final automation building and throughput challenge. Of course, you’ll also have to tackle this while defending your base.

[h3]More Quality of Life + World Settings[/h3]
Of course, we’re always looking to make the game better. We’ve reworked the train system so you can move the tracks, we’re reworking the glossary so you can go through the information easier, and see about adding screens to make managing your base a bit easier.

We’re also going to add a world settings screen and figured you’d be excited to know about it early. You’ll get an easy way to change your game experience. Do you want the combat to be easier? Or maybe you’re looking for more of a challenge? Maybe you want to just start a little faster, with a few things already unlocked? We’re working on it so you can enjoy Oddsparks how you want!

[h3]Mod Support[/h3]
And as we’ve already talked about from our first roadmap, we plan to add tools and documentation to help you, our wonderful members of the community, create mods and bring new experiences to Oddsparks!

[h3]What about consoles? What about after 1.0?[/h3]
So we are also working on the console release, but we don’t have any news to reveal yet. Don’t worry, the moment we have something, we’re going to shout about it everywhere we can. And after 1.0? Well, this isn’t the end of the road - so stay tuned for more info and updates.

Also, some of you who are very keen eyed might notice that Oddsparks now has some Steam Achievements! We've added them for testing purposes, but since we're in Early Access, we can't actually test them in Steam unless they're in the live version. So, with the aim of preventing a lot of questions about how come a steam achievement didn't unlock, we wanted to say that you currently cannot unlock Steam Achievements. They'll, of course, be available in 1.0.

If you’re interested in seeing more into what will be in our 1.0, we’ve already started showing off some stuff in our Discord, so feel free to join us there. We’ll talk again soon!

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