Factory Town Idle News

- Fixed bug: Was able to assign production capacity (workers) to market recipes in excess of available capacity to borrow from other recipes, causing available production capacity to go negative

[h2]Misc Improvements[/h2]

• When all production capacity (workers) are assigned at a building, you can now hit the ‘+’ button to assign additional workers to that recipe. - they will be reassigned from other recipes at the same building.
  
  
  
  
  • Some conditions must be met for worker reassignment: those recipes have more than one worker assigned and must be in ‘Auto-assign’ mode. If multiple recipes are available that meet those conditions, worker will be reassigned from the lowest priority recipe, and among those, it will reassign from the recipe with the highest surplus for its primary output item.
    
• When the icon of a locally locked item is clicked on (e.g. in the Research panel) it will open up the guide for the item
  
• A filter of “Increasing” or “Decreasing” on the Inventory panel will be preserved when switching towns
  
• In the item activity tooltip, the Production “Potential” and “% Potential” values will now display the true max potential based on recipe speed and assigned production capacity.
  
  
  
  
  • Previously, this value would not take into account situations when more production capacity was assigned than the output capacity or rate limit could accommodate. This new behavior allows display of "% Potential" values > 100%, and the logic is consistent with the percentage shown on each recipe's output progress bar.
    
• Item activity tooltip for “Consumption” now shows demand more accurately. If the item being examined is the limiting factor in its recipe, its demand is set as its full (unrealized) potential consumption for that recipe. In all other cases, Demand is calculated based on its actual consumption.
  
  
  
  • For example, if making Paper (water + wood), and the recipe would normally consume 10 wood / second and 10 / water second, but the recipe is slowed to 50% of its normal speed because of a lack of Water, then the demand for Water is 10 / second and is being supplied at 50% of its demand. The demand for Wood though should only be 5 / second, and it is being met at 100% of its actual demand. As Water supply increases, the Paper recipe will be able to run faster and the Wood demand will increase correspondingly.
    

[h2]Bug Fixes[/h2]

• The town perk 'Storage Boost' was only assessing ‘Local Consumption’ when deciding how much to increase storage by. This was causing it to ignore potentially large effects of exports, and thus storage was much too small to handle throughput. Now it calculates based on Active Demand and storage expands appropriately. This should resolve some unintended limits on production speed due to insufficient storage.
  
• The bonus capacity given to items based on its consumption rate (to allow greater item throughput than storage would normally allow) was based only on local consumption, not exports. This was also causing unintended limits on production speed due to insufficient storage.
  
• Misleading entry in tooltip for Power made it seem as if it was exclusive to the Desert biome
  
• When ‘Extra Active’ game modifier active, player could still use hotkeys to trigger Turbo and Turbo Max mode. However, they would not function properly
  
• Requirements for Quest “Produce Copper Wire” (that unlocks Power Line) was displaying an obsolete quest as a prerequisite. Now it shows the correct prerequisite quest of “Produce 50K Copper Ingot” which is necessary to make Copper Wire.
  
• If game was quit while ‘Assign Worker’ buttons were highlighted during tutorial, and another game was loaded, they would remain stuck in highlighted state
  

[h2]Auto-Trade Improvements[/h2]
In this update, the Auto-Trade feature has been changed to give players better control of how their trades work, and in general to result in more stable behavior (less flip-flopping between import and export modes)

'Auto' trade mode is now split into 2 options:

• Local Balance: If there's a local deficit of the item, the recipe will Import. If there's a local surplus, it will Export. (This is closest to the current 'Auto' trade mode, so older trades in Auto mode will be migrated to use Local Balance)
  
• Local Fill: If the local town has spare storage capacity for the item, the recipe will Import. Otherwise, it will Export.
  

Note that when these modes are using the fallback 'Export' mode, they will never export more than the local surplus of the item. This is because doing so would cause a local deficit, and thus force it to flip-flop back to Import mode.

[h2]Balance Changes[/h2]

• Added Omni upgrades for Well
  

[h2]Misc Improvements[/h2]

• Improved loading times for large files
  
• Improved inventory filter when Trading recipe selected: now it shows the local inventory and the global trading post storage for the selected item. It can also do this regardless of the active trade mode (import, export, of Off)
  
• When an item filter is applied to the main production list, the relevant trade recipe will be shown whether the trade is importing, exporting, or off.
  

[h2]Bug Fixes [/h2]

• When Unlimited Consumption modifier was on, Item production tooltip would always show zeros for item demand / supplied for its market consumption
  
• Last frame’s item demand was not stored in save file, so recipes that targeted demand would not be immediately stable when loading a game
  

[h2]New Features[/h2]

• New Game Modifier: Trading Tokens. In this mode, exporting an item earns 'Trading Tokens' based on the value of the item. Imports require spending these tokens. This system encourages towns to have a balanced import/export scheme. In this mode, there is no maximum storage limit within Trading Posts so that towns can always earn Trading Tokens. This modifier unlocks once the player has reached Town Level 25 at some point in any playthrough.
  
• New Game Modifier: Default Auto-Assign. In this mode, the Auto-Assign feature is always available and is on by default for all buildings (except trading buildings). This modifier unlocks once the player has reached Town Level 25 at some point in any playthrough.
  

[h2]Balance Changes[/h2]

• Added ‘Continue’ button to main menu. (It appears after the player has loaded a save file in this version once, as that info must be stored first before the game knows which file to continue playing)
  
• Game modifiers Easy Mode, Hard Mode, Mild Biomes and Extreme Biomes are now available by default instead of requiring game progress.
  
• In Extreme Biomes mode, Magic Jewelry research is now exclusive to the Magic biome (not the Jungle Biome) because those items are made at the Enchanter (which is only in the Magic Biome).
  
• Magic Potion recipe no longer requires Mana Transmitter research, because in Extreme Biomes mode, Magic Potions can only be made in the Forest biome's Medicine Hut but Mana Transmitter research is only available in the Magic biome.
  
• Magic Medicine research now has Mana Power as an input, to guarantee the player has access to Mana Power which is required for making Magic Medicine items.
  
• Quest that unlocks Steam Pipeline now also requires the player to produce a certain amount of Steam as well, otherwise the Steam Pipeline may be unlocked before Steam can be produced.
  
• Trading recipes for Steam, Fire, Power, and Omnistones default to trade mode “Auto-Balance” instead of “Off”
  
• World Panel icons are not hidden for unlocked biomes when game modifier Extreme Biomes or Mild Biomes is active
  

[h2]Bug Fixes[/h2]

• Tooltip for ‘Excluded’ buildings on World Panel was not localized
  
• Turbo mode timer would occasionally flicker the counter up and down based on odd timing of accruing and spending time tokens
  
• Game could not load files with a period character in the file name
  
• Research and Upgrade buttons were available in the World panel before they were normally unlocked
  

[h2]Game Modifiers[/h2]
When creating a new game, you can now select multiple 'Game Modifiers' that can change the game progression in dramatic ways. Many of them require some game progress to unlock.

• Extra Idle / Extra Active: Changes construction & research speed to support more 'Active' or 'Idle' playstyles. Extra Active mode speeds up construction and research, removes the ability to earn Time Tokens, and increases Click Power. Extra Idle mode increases construction and research times, but increases amount of idle time that can be accrued.
  
• Easy Mode / Hard Mode: These change the rate of coin & XP gain, the strength of many perks, available Land, and natural resource regeneration.
  
• Mild Biomes / Extreme Biomes: This setting will decrease or amplify differences between Biomes. Mild Biomes removes a lot of the penalties from different biomes, and Extreme Biomes adds a lot of additional differences and makes many buildings exclusive to one particular biome or another.
  
• Permanent Perks: This modifier prevents you from lowering the assigned level of a Perk within a playthrough. So you must be extra thoughtful when assigning Perk Points!
  
• Low Population: This modifier decreases the amount of Workers you get per House. This adds extra management challenge as you decide which are the most important buildings to staff.
  
• Infinite Storage: In this modifier, all resources and items have no maximum capacity. All Storage buildings and upgrades are removed. Recipes will not naturally self-limit, since they can not reach saturation.
  
• Infinite Land: Buildings no longer take up land, so you can expand faster.
  
• Infinite Consumption: There is no limit to how much you can oversupply a Market. This allows you speed up progression quite a bit if you can keep your production running.
  

Feel free to mix & match these as you want! Let me know if you have ideas for additional modifiers.

[h2]Simplified Research Tech Tree[/h2]
As the game was developed, new tech was added and removed quite a bit. As a result the tech tree that linked all the research together was a bit of a mess. Besides cleaning it up to make it easier to follow, I also needed to make sure that new restrictions on buildings in the 'Extreme Biomes' modifier didn't cause any necessary tech to get blocked.

The full details of all the changes are too numerous to mention, but the most important points are:

• Most research that simply unlocked new recipes were converted to Quests (e.g. Reinforced Plank, Copper Wire, Paper, Quartz). Players that previously produced these items will have these new Quests automatically marked as 'complete'.
  
• Basic Logic, Intermediate Logic, and Advanced Logic were removed. Related dependencies were merged into Study, Tech Lab, and various Tome researches.
  
• Magic Construction has been merged into the Enchanting research.
  
• Many cases where a research was required as a prerequisite instead simply requires access to the research's input items.
  

[h2]Unlimited save files[/h2]

• Instead of 5 slots to pick from, you can now have an unlimited number of save files.
  
• When creating a new game you pick whatever file name you want.
  
• When loading, you will see a list of all the files you've created. Files created in versions prior to this update will be called "slot1", "slot2", etc.
  
• When in a game, you also have the option to "Save As" under a different file name.
  
• You can right-click on a row in the file browser to view an option to delete the selected file.
  

[h2]Balance Changes[/h2]

• Infinite Research “Omnitemple Speed Boost” is now “Knowledge Speed Boost” and it boosts all Knowledge recipes by 25% per level (including Omnitemple recipes)
  
• Capped all research and construction costs at 10^300, to avoid overflowing the data types used to store costs
  
• Polished Stone is now made from Quartz instead of Refined Stone Brick
  
• Quest that unlocks Polished Stone now requires Quartz production instead of Refined Stone Brick production
  
• Quest for Berry Cake no longer unlocks until the player has access to Berries
  
• Quartz recipe requires 8 Stone instead of 10 Stone
  

[h2]Misc Improvements[/h2]

• Added Brazilian Portuguese localization
  
• Changed icons for knowledge tomes so the tiers are easier to tell apart
  
• If a biome is locked, but its required quest is complete (but not claimed), clicking the “Create” button on the World panel will automatically mark the quest as complete
  
• Unmet requirements with item / research tooltips will display highlighted in red
  
• All tooltips on research ingredients will show the full tooltip guide for the item
  
• Tooltip guide for Coins shows which stores produce the coin type
  
• Menu that appears when right-clicking an item icon will show an Info button at the top that will open the tooltip guide for the item
  
• Game menu dismisses automatically after ‘Save’ clicked
  
• Tutorial pointer finger will no longer appear if the player has reached level 10 in any of their previous save files
  
• More details about recipe speed / productivity modifiers are shown in the tooltip for recipe progress
  

[h2]Bug Fixes[/h2]

• "NaN" would appear in very large construction costs
  
• Tooltip panel would occasionally show items in the wrong order
  
• Skill gain was being undercounted during Fast-forward (turbo) mode
  
• Recipe speed modifiers were not being counted when calculating skill gain
  
• Skills will now gain as many levels as they need to during a single simulation tick, rather than being limited to one level up per simulatio tick
  
• Removed redundant building requirements from harvesting / farming recipes
  
• Fixed tooltips for Harvesting buildings showing excess line listings for each item harvested
  
• No reward was displayed when completing research “Ether Bonus: Earth Power” or any research that boosted cultivation / prospecting
  
• Item icons in tooltip guide would not always show the items’s name in a text tooltip when hovered
  
• IndexOutOfArrayBounds error was possible when returning to the main menu after launching with music turned off
  
• (Hotfix 1.3.0h) Fixed German localization missing many terms
  
• (Hotfix 1.3.0i) Fixed new natural resources appearing with "NaN" quantity when unlocking during gameplay