Oddsparks: An Automation Adventure News

Friends and Soon-To-Be-Friends,

We’ve been working on our big August update (our roadmap is here), but we felt that a few smaller features are already ready to be showed off and added to the game now! These are primarily quality of life features, a little bit of rebalancing, and some bugfixes that weren’t breaking the game.

It’s a big list for version 0.1.S20573, so we’ve tried to make it a little easier to read. Let’s talk about all of it properly.

[h2]Quality of Life Features[/h2]
[h3]Trash Slot[/h3]
We’ve added a Trash Slot! You can get it by unlocking it from the village monument, it becomes available from Tier 2. You'll be able to retrieve the last trashed item, in case you accidentally threw away something important, and in general, it tries to keep a single stack of items.

(Basically, if you throw away 5 logs and then 10 logs, you can actually get all 15 logs back. If you then add 5 stone, all of the logs are gone though.)


[h3]Big Slots[/h3]
It’s an inventory slot, and it’s BIG.
Big Slots are a new type of inventory slots that can hold ten stacks of a single item!

When you get one, it replaces one of your standard inventory slots. You'll get them by unlocking it from
the monument. For now, you can get three of them and they become available tier 3, tier 5 and tier 7.


[h3]New Inventory Shortcuts[/h3]
We've added two new inventory shortcuts to go along with Sort, “Move All” and “Transfer Same Type”.

• “Move All” just moves all items from one inventory to another and exists in both your primary inventory and other storage inventories.
  
• “Transfer Same Type” only exists in other storage inventories, and basically pulls items that already exist in the storage.

So if you have some wood and some bark in your inventory, and one piece of wood in the storage inventory, you can press “Transfer Same Type” to pull only the wood in your inventory to the storage inventory.


[h2]Balancing Changes[/h2]
[h3]Harvestables Respawn Slower[/h3]
Running out of resources is not what the game is about, but clearly, harvestables such as trees, stones, etc have been respawning a little too fast. Harvestables now take 20 minutes before they roll the 20% chance to respawn.

Enemies will respawn roughly the same as before.

[h3]Shortened Callback Delay[/h3]
It’s now a little faster for the callback to change from targeting individual sparks to the bigger spark circle. It should feel a little better when you need to get all of your Sparks back.

[h3]Quest Rebalancing[/h3]
So for some quests we require you to manually harvest stuff or require parts from enemies. Sometimes it’s because you’ve just unlocked something new and we want you to use some new tools, sometimes it’s to give you an excuse to explore further, sometimes it’s to get you into the combat part of the game. We’ve gotten the feedback that the overall balancing for this has been too tedious and that’s not our aim, so we tried to change that.

To that end: We’ve tried to explain and communicate a bit clearer when we’re trying to encourage you to use new tools. We’ve balanced a few of the quests to need less items. We also swapped when two quests unlock - you now unlock Limestone Harvesting first and then Quartz Harvesting, so you don’t need to manually harvest so much.

If you wanna see the full details, they're here:
[expand]

• Bark Harvesting (Tier 3 - Woodsman) now asks for 15 Loamy Sparks instead of 20 Loamy Sparks.
  
• Vertical Logistics - 2 (Tier 4 - Quartermaster) now asks for 150 Rope instead of 200 Rope.
  
• Delivery Chests (Tier 5 - Quartermaster) now asks for 15 Aetheric Pellet instead of 20 Aetheric Pellet.
  
• Supply Chest (Tier 5 - Quartermaster) now asks for 10 Aetheric Chunk instead of 20 Aetheric Chunk.
  
• Limestone Harvesting and Quartz Harvesting quests (Tier 5 - Mason Sisters) have been functionally swapped - Limestone Harvesting now unlocks first and asks for 200 Pebbles and 40 Path Tiles, while Quartz Harvesting asks for 400 pebbles and 80 Path Tiles.
  
• Mountain Spark R&D - 2 (Tier 6 - Divine Researcher) now asks for 80 Hauling Sparks instead of 120 Hauling Sparks.
  
• Miasma Capture (Tier 6 - Divine Researcher) now rewards you with one Frowl Sac to help you build your first Miasma Collector.
  
• Spark Pen - 2 (Tier 6 - Quartermaster) now hints at using the Boomy Spark and Puffy Spark to help you collect the Coral.
  

[/expand]
[h3]Better Throughput of Vertical Logistics Tools[/h3]
We buffed the cannon, elevator and zipline, we noticed that you had to build a few too many. Cannons and Ziplines will now bring approximately 60 items per minute instead of 30 and 50 items per minute respectively, and the Elevator will bring approximately 90 items per minute instead of 60.


[h2]Communication “Bugs”[/h2]
[h3]Better Quest Flow[/h3]
We’ve done two changes to the quest flow. Number one, NPCs will let you hand in quests that you are able to complete before they give you a new quest. We’ve seen a few people get distracted because they have to accept a quest before handing in an old one, and it’s clear to us now that this is too disruptive. So now you can always hand in a ready to be completed quest before the game tries to give you a new one.

We also have made now made sure that the villagers will always give you “older” quests first - there was a specific instance where your quest log can have a quest that you are technically not able to do, and while the quest is available in the quest giver, but that can be missed. So now, that can’t happen and the villagers will give you the quests they are able to give you in a linear order.

[h3]Gameplay Clarifications[/h3]
There’s a lot of stuff to learn in the game and we missed out on some glossary entries that could’ve had a bit more clearer stuff.

We now have an actual clarification on how you equip Sparks. We have a better Hauling Spark explanation. Did you know you can toggle the Aim Mode button instead of the holding the Aim Mode button? We didn’t realise it was so easy to miss, so we added info about the Aim Mode Toggle and Hold in the little popup you get when you first get a Spark.

[h3]New Save and Quit Button[/h3]
We saw on social media that someone lost their 40 hour save. They completed the early access content in a single save, only using the autosave. They then started achievement hunting in a new world, but of course, since they only used the autosave, their 40 hour save was deleted.

We want to prevent that, so we’ve added a “save and quit” button that hopefully encourages people to manually save more often, and also streamlines that process.

[h2]Bugfixes[/h2]
It’s the lightning round! Here are some bugfixes.

• Fixed build menu not updating if you’ve unlocked something while the menu is open.
  
• Fixed Hauling Spark pick up AI where it would hang around instead of picking up items.
  
• Fixed the build menu not remembering what type of path you used last.
  
• Fixed “Full Inventory” showing up when it shouldn’t be.
  

[h3]Multiplayer Bugfixes[/h3]
We do want to specifically shout out that we've fixed two major desyncs and thank folks who helped us out by playing multiplayer in the Beta branch!

[h2]New Customisation[/h2]
[h3]Pride Flag Pattern[/h3]
We also squeezed in a Pride flag pattern - as a diverse team with queer people, we wanted to add this one in for ourselves and for all the other queer folks out there. Fun fact: In Germany, Christopher Street Day is what we call pride parades, and it happens all throughout summer! We're based in the Cologne area, a historically queer city, and our pride parade is in late July.


[h2]That's all for now![/h2]
Alright, and now, we're going to go back into working on the August update. If you're looking for more WIP stuff, you can join us in our Discord! We told them a little earlier about when this update would be ready and showed off some of the features there!

Little sneak peek on this month's devlog... We're gonna properly show off our trains! Choo Choo! Look forward to it!

Organisers, Cartographers, and Spark Painters,

Welcome to the June Devlog. This one won't be too long, because we’re very busy currently finalising the small update for July!

We don’t have a specific date yet for the update and we’ll talk more about what’s in it when it’s out. However, here’s three things from the changelist that we can spoil for you: We're adding a Trash Slot, there'll be New Inventory Shortcuts, and even though Pride Month will be over, we’re also squeezing in a little Rainbow Flag Pattern for your poncho. After all, we’re a diverse team with queer team members, and we’d like to let people express themselves in the game.

In general, we think that expression is a pretty important aspect of Oddsparks. And to us, organisation is a type of expression! How one person build and organise their base is completely different to how a different person would tackle the same generated world. For our big August update, (you can check out our roadmap if you haven't seen it yet) we wanted to provide multiple different tools that allow players to express themselves and can help them organise their bases. We’re already planning to add a lot of decorative buildings in the August update for this reason!

A bonus sneak peek at some of our upcoming decorative buildings!

By having these kinds of tools, you can better map out your workshops, identify where you are with various landmarks you’ve placed yourself, and generally, make the world look really nice. But decorative buildings while nice, can be hard to fit in. They take up valuable space and that’s where our main topic comes in! Let’s talk about the Colouring Spark (name not final)!

[h3]Paint By Spark[/h3]

The Colouring Spark is a spark with a special interaction. It can be thrown into a new building, the Paint Bucket (again, name not final). If there’s Paint in the Paint Bucket, then the thrown Colouring Spark will pick it up…


And now your Spark Bar has expanded with a new category, just like with the Puffy Spark.

You can swap between the empty colouring sparks and the “full” colouring sparks to pick one of the full colouring sparks and throw it at a building with a roof tile. Now, the roof tiles will be changed to that colour, and it also changes how it looks on the map!


With this, you have another way to mark which Sawbench is doing what, which Shed has what items, and of course, this can also be used for paths and logic wires!

[h3]Painting Charges[/h3]

Just like the Puffy, a Colouring Spark will have one “charge” and when thrown onto something that can take that colour, they’ll use it up. They also lose that “charge” if you unequip them.


And because it's fun, they make a small mess when you go up and down places. You don’t use up the paint by doing this.

[h3]Colour Palette[/h3]

You’ll have a palette of 8 colours in total - Red, Blue, Yellow, Black, White, Green, Orange and Purple. You’ll also have Turpentine in case you want to remove any colour you've placed.


The primary colours will be made in the Chopper, breaking down common resources like Bark and Quartz to turn into paint. You’ll later be able to mix the primary colours to get the secondary colours in the Stone Workshop. The idea is to have something pretty simple that you also need to automate. We can imagine a few of you dedicating a little side space to make all the colours you need to not just organise but really draw on the map!

That's all for now. If you're looking for more WIP stuff, you can join us in our Discord! We've already shown off a little glimpse at the decorations there a few weeks ago. We hope to talk again very soon about the small July update and show off the stuff we have there.

Warning! The channel we’re about to show you contains video footage of indie games that some gamers will consider irresistible.

Meet Pedro, known as ExileCast, the variety streamer and youtuber with an impressive sense for great indie games, that he uses wisely to deliver the best of the best to his community. If you’re looking for a friendly creator with honest and engaging reviews, letsplays and series, it’s a good idea to join the said community.

ExileCast is an artist as well. He creates a custom thumbnail for each video, putting himself in the universe of the game shown. Oddsparks is no exception! Pedro has been a supporter since the “top secret project” era, and, once the demo was out, made our day with this adorable artwork and video:
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
That’s it for today! And if you’re streaming Oddsparks or have made a video - feel free to share it in our Discord!

Last but not least, check out the Oddsparks presskit for logos, transparent promotional images for all your banner needs, and more.

Thanks for testing out our latest beta multiplayer patches!

We've fixed the most occurring desyncs and have pushed it to Beta. If you're playing multiplayer, we'd love for you to update/try out the beta and hopefully it should be a better experience.

If you haven't tried swapping to the new branch and want to try it:

The changes shouldn't break your save but you should keep a backup of your saves just in case. You can find your Oddsparks save files at:

%LOCALAPPDATA%/Oddsparks/Game

You can access the beta branch by:

1. Right clicking the game in your Steam Library
   
2. Selecting "Properties"
   
3. Going to "Betas"
   
4. Opting in to the "Beta" branch in the drop-down.
   (You may need to update the game and restart Steam.)