Factory Town Idle News

First, a quick but important announcement:

[h3]Factory Town Idle is transitioning from Early Access to a "1.0" Full Release version![/h3]

The launch will happen this Monday, January 8th. I've been working on the game for a year and a half, 9 months of that in Early Access, and I feel it's finally ready for this upgraded status. I will still be making additions and improvements after launch, so it's mostly a cosmetic change, but it's still a meaningful way to tell potential new players that the game is in good shape.

If you've been enjoying the game and all of its updates, I'd definitely appreciate a new or updated review on Steam! I try not to ask for this too often, but it's super helpful going into Launch Day to have some recent reviews up there on the store page.

Special thanks to all the players that have given me feedback here or on the Discord, it's been absolutely essential during the game's development for me to hear thoughts from real players so I can add or fix stuff based on what people want.

Ok with that out of the way, here's the latest patch notes:

[h2]New Trading Capabilities[/h2]
Previously, some items weren't tradeable at all and this made it difficult to fully support some newly created towns. But I also didn't want to increase the pressure on the Trading Post since it's already used for so many things. Similarly, there were some 'support' buildings that added flat bonuses but otherwise weren't very interesting and could be repurposed. So, I've turned these into a variety of new ways to trade special items.

• Mana Pipeline: Trades Mana Crystals and Mana Power between towns. Built with Mana Pipes.
  
• Steam Pipeline: Trades Steam between towns. Built with Steam Pipes.
  
• Omni Pipeline: Trades Omnistones between towns. Built with Omni Pipes (this is a new item, produced at the Machine Shop from Omnistones and Mana Pipes and is sellable at the Hardware store for Purple coins.)
  
• Magma Pipeline: Trades Fire between towns. Built with Magma Pipes (another new item, produced at the machine shop from Steel and Power and sellable at the Hardware Store for Red Coins)
  

In cases where players already had active trades using these items at the trading post, they are granted extra pipelines to support these trades. The pipeline buildings are always unlocked globally once a certain number of the related Pipe items have been produced.


[h2]UI Improvements[/h2]

• Added Skill display back to recipe rows (sorry about removing it!)
  
• To make space for the Skill display, the Pause and Production Limit functions have been combined. They are accessible by clicking on the recipe's production progress bar, instead of having their own icons.
  
• Moved Research / Upgrades / Construction to top navigation panel instead of being underneath town stats. This opens up more room for inventory and quests, and makes the UI similar to the older style which it seems many players preferred.
  
• Inventory Panel will expand its height when fewer coin rows are visible that would otherwise occupy that vertical space
  
• Quests panel has larger default height (shows 4 quests instead of 3)
  
• Moved Quest Coins to the top-right grouping with the rest of the global management buttons (rewards, time tokens, etc)
  
• Building construction progress bars animate more smoothly
  
• Search input field is now hidden by default, can be toggle on by hitting new ‘Search’ button on the main panel header (or using hotkey Ctrl-F)
  
• Removed background images from some parts of the UI so it doesn’t feel like all the background space is occupied
  
• Combined “Housing” and “Support” buildings into “Buildings” navigation category, to save space on the town navigation header
  
• To avoid confusion, the previous “Buildings” panel (which displayed building counts and construction status) is now called “Construction” and its hotkey is C
  
• Increased size of confirm button on reward panel
  
• Small text size animation applied when manually changing assigned production capacity
  
• Rail Depot is now in the “Storage” Category
  
• Town Happiness is now shown as a full progress bar with percent
  
• Available worker count is shown on the House header in main recipe list
  
• Can right-click on building headers to expand/collapse all similar headers (just like Control+left click currently does)
  
• Tooltip guide can alternate which side of the screen it can appear on, based on how far left or right the guide would normally appear on the screen
  
• Clicking a locked item icon will now pin the tooltip guide
  
• Tooltip guide for recipes will show the recipe requirement
  
• Added better indicator of locked state on each Perk
  
• Improved formatting on long time spans
  
• Improved tooltip on rate progress for research and construction
  

[h2]Misc Improvements[/h2]

• Clicking a required research within the tooltip panel will navigate to that research, as well as update the tooltip panel to show that research’s information
  
• Improved description of Crafting speed perk so it is more clear that it applies only to recipes in the ‘Crafting’ category
  
• Changed icons for some town perks to better match the associated panel
  
• Changed sprite for General Knowledge Tome
  
• Changed sprite for Mana Crystal natural resource
  
• If tutorial pointer finger is highlighting a building ‘add’ button, and that building is hidden by an active production filter, the pointer finger will instead highlight the production filter button
  
• If tutorial finger is highlighting a button on a recipe production row, and that row is hidden due to its building header being minimized, the pointer finger will instead highlight the building header expand/collapse button
  
• When an building cost item is locked, it will show a more detailed tooltip when hovered to give player a way to find out how to obtain it
  
• Upgrade ‘Workers per House’ is now accessible from the House building’s upgrade panel
  
• Upgrade ‘Research Speed’ is now accessible from the School building’s upgrade panel
  
• When mass-expanding header sections, the list will scroll to the last header you clicked on to prevent it from going off-screen due to section expansion
  
• Navigation button for Trading filter appears as soon as Trading Post is available to build, otherwise it can be hard to know how to build a trading post
  
• When the upgrades panel is closed, any text search filter will be removed
  

[h2]Balance Changes[/h2]

• Biomes must be unlocked in order Plains > River > Forest > Mountains > Jungle > Desert > Snow > Magic. However, if a player already has a town started in one of these biomes it will remain unlocked.
  
• Demand for different goods will have more variance in how they scale with Town Level. Basic Goods will scale much slower then advanced goods. However, scale effect based on number of houses has increased. In general this means there is more demand for all items.
  
• To limit the effect of this increased demand on high-end towns, the power of the Goods Consumption perk has decreased by 50%.
  
• Doubled baseline sell speed on basic items, so that early towns can keep up with this increased demand without needing to build too many Markets
  
• Town Trading Speed and Global Trading Speed perks now apply to all trading recipes, not just Trading Post recipes
  
• Added more levels to the Construction Speed town perk
  
• Increased duration & cost for more end-game recipes and research
  
• Research for Fire/Earth/Water/Air temples now require Mana Temple to be researched first
  
• For simplicity and consistency, town perks “Cultivation Productivity” and “Prospecting Productivity” are now “Cultivation Speed” and “Prospecting Speed”. Instead of increasing the number of items produced, they increase the recipe speed. 5 more levels have been added to each.
  
• Previous production tab called “Research” is now called Knowledge, to help differentiate it from the Research tab
  
• Slightly increased xp requirements for skill level gain, so they don't rise excessively fast in the early game
  
• OmniTemple has been moved to the Knowledge tab, since it produces items consumed by research recipes
  
• Added 5 more levels to Global Market Speed perk
  
• Added new Town Perk “Knowledge Speed”. Increases speed of all Knowledge-related recipes, that is, recipes produced by Study, Tech Lab, Mage Tower, and Omnitemple. Note that these recipes no longer benefit from “Crafting Speed” perk as they are not classified as Crafting recipes.
  
• Increased skill gained from manual recipe clicks by 8x
  
• Upgrades panel unlocked after 5 research, instead of 10
  
• Can earn Red Coins from level up rewards
  
• Prospecting Speed perk unlocks with Quarry, not Mine
  
• Knowledge Speed perk requires a Study to be built before it can be used
  
• Increased max workers on Forge research to 10
  
• Increased General Knowledge Tome costs in many research recipes
  
• Research Speed upgrade is now unlocked based on global research completed, so it is more easily available in new towns that need help speeding through early research
  
• Removed ‘Power Line’ research. Now, Power lines are unlocked globally with a quest to produce a set amount of Copper Wire. This quest is automatically marked as complete if the player has built any Power Lines in any of their towns.
  
• Added new speed upgrades for Power Line, Steam Pipeline, Mana Pipeline, Magma Pipeline, and Omni Pipeline
  
• Increased resource regeneration rate of Rock, as it was too easily becoming a negative value in early towns
  
• Added early-game quest to ‘Build 10 Houses’ as a bridge between the 1 House and 15 House quests
  

[h2]Bug Fixes[/h2]

• Fixed overflow error when calculating very long time durations
  
• 'Add Production Capacity' button was not greyed out when research was already at max capacity
  
• When attempting to assign more production capacity to a research than was allowed, the research header was flashing as if there wasn’t enough schools. Instead the current/max label will flash
  
• Recipes that produce Knowledge Orbs (i.e. Omnitemple recipes) were not producing any XP
  
• ESC key was not always removing the top-most dismissable window
  
• “???” was appearing in tooltip for Power production, due to Solar Power recipe being available but non-productive in biomes other than Desert
  
• Tutorial pointer finger would appear above pop-up menu panels
  
• Skill tooltip was not updating every simulation tick
  
• All numbers in the thousands were being displayed as rounded to the nearest 10
  
• Automatic Assignment is unlocked at town level 10, but it was shown in the level 11 rewards
  
• Perk labels would not reload when language option changed
  
• Quest to make Wool Cloth to unlock Hat was visible before Wool Cloth was unlocked
  
• Unlocked Markets with zero items to sell did not have correct display on their headers
  
• Cost displayed on Construction Details panel would not immediately update after Construction Cost perk modified
  
• Clicking quickly to fast-forward the town level up reward animations would sometimes result in particle effects that were too large
  

[h2]Misc Improvements:[/h2]

• Added buttons on top of Inventory panel that let you choose between the old 1-column or more compact 2-column layout
  
• Added new icons for many storage buildings
  
• Removed background tint that would be applied based on active biome
  
• Time Management button will flash when game speed is paused, to help prevent confusion if players accidentally turned on Pause mode
  
• Increased duration of silence between background songs
  
• Decreased contrast of building section header backgrounds for better readability
  

[h2]Bug Fixes:[/h2]

• Manual recipe production was applying skill gain bonuses twice
  
• Manual recipe production skill gain was calculated based on potential production instead of actual production (i.e. ignoring production decreases due to limited input availability or output availability)
  
• Changing towns while quests panel was minimized, and then maximizing the quests panel, would only display a partial list of available quests
  
• Error causing failure when applying Language settings
  

Hello! I've been writing some background music for this game for the past few months and it's finally ready to share, so I added it to the game in this patch. If it's not your thing, you can turn it down in the Options panel : )

I've also made a lot of significant rebalancing in this patch. Based on player feedback plus my own playthroughs, it seemed like a lot of the game was trivial to progress through. It could be completed in a (dedicated) weekend when it's meant to take weeks or even months. Upgrades and research could be purchased and completed without really any thought as to how much they cost. As a result, progression wasn't really rewarding.

So I've made a lot of changes to try and fix this. Mostly, upgrade and research costs have been increased to better match the available resources at various points in the game. You will likely have to choose which upgrades you want to spend you money on. Research duration has increased, and perks that sped up research have been nerfed a bit. Quest Coin rewards have also been reduced. In sum, the pacing of the game has been slowed down in a way that I believe makes the game more strategic & interesting. There should still be plenty to do while the game is open, but it won't feel as rushed.

You are definitely encouraged to make use of Turbo Mode (fast-forwarding the simulation based on Time Tokens you've accrued while idle, via F3 and F4 keys) to complete any construction or research that is bottlenecking you.

As always, the game is a work in progress so if you think I've gone too far please let me know and I'll keep working to get the balance right.

Ok here's the full patch notes:

[h2]Features / Additions[/h2]

• Added 7 original background music tracks
  
• Added ‘Music Volume’ to settings Panel
  
• Added new hotkeys: Left and Right bracket for Previous / Next Song
  
• Added new ‘Biome Unlocked’ animation
  
• Increased framerate from 40 fps to 60 fps
  
• Added new global perk: Trading Speed (works in addition to Town Perk Trading Speed)
  
• Added new Research: “Enhanced Market Construction”. It is unlocked after Magic Construction Research is completed. It is now responsible for unlocking Market Construction Cost upgrades. (This was done to prevent those upgrades (which cost Purple Coins) from being made available before Purple Coins could be earned)
  

[h2]UI Improvements[/h2]

• Can right-click on priority, production limit, pause, and auto-assign buttons to clear the setting
  
• Trading Post category headers (Unique Import, Metals, etc) have an additional slight indentation so they are easier to distinguish from the Trading Post building headers
  
• Menu panels World, Town & Global Perks, Buildings, Upgrades, and Research will block cursor from interacting with background while active
  
• Hovering over the ‘info’ button on a building header will show the tooltip details, instead of requiring a click
  
• Added tooltip when hovering pause button
  
• Tooltip panels for items now show full details of producing & consuming recipes
  
• Tooltips for Research that unlock Buildings now directly show the details of the unlocked Building
  
• When zero production capacity is available for a building, that number is highlighted in yellow
  
• Repositioned many items in the main production list panel so they can be more aligned with their headers
  
• Production Limit configuration is now a distinct button, instead of requiring a click on the production progress bar (which wasn’t visibly intuitive)
  
• Skill display region has been removed from the recipe display rows, as it was taking up lots of space for something that was minimally useful. You can view skill level & skill XP by hovering over the recipe’s production progress bar along with all its other speed modifiers & stats
  
• Right-Clicking on a recipe row will open a new panel with detailed access to pause / priority / production limit configuration options
  
• Clicking on Pause button will show a small pop-up window with options (Default/Inherit, Pause, and Play) instead of cycling through
  
• Upgrade costs >= 1000 coins are rounded to the nearest 2 significant digits
  
• Improved overall formatting on Tooltip panel
  
• Changed default icon when recipe not in paused state
  
• Clicking on Level Up Rewards after reward boxes begin shaking will cause them to immediately open (revealing their contents) instead of dismissing the reward window. Clicking after the contents have been revealed will dismiss the reward window
  

[h2]Balance Changes[/h2]

• Aqueduct is now a Harvesting building, instead of a Support building that passively harvests water. Players will automatically be assigned maximum production capacity for any Aqueducts they have already built.
  
• Aqueduct Effectiveness upgrade now applies a boost to the Aqueduct Harvesting recipe
  
• New Omni upgrade for Aqueduct Speed
  
• Water Wheel and Solar Panel are now Production buildings, each with a recipe that generates power for free, instead of buildings that passively generate power in the background. Effectiveness upgrades now apply to these power recipes. Players will automatically be assigned maximum production capacity for any of these buildings they have already built.
  
• Reduced Quest Coin rewards from reaching new town levels
  
• Reduced the amount of automatically completed research when starting in new biomes, to reduce visual confusion from having lots of unlocked but not yet usable buildings
  
• Default trading mode for non-unique items is now ‘Autobalance’ instead of ‘Export’
  
• Increased cost of several Town Perks (if this increased cost would result in negative Town Perk Points, players are allocated enough new Town Perk Points so their balance is no longer negative)
  
• Added max production capacity for non-infinite research. The more complex the research (longer duration), the more production capacity allowed.
  
• Added small linear increase to building construction time based on number of buildings created, so that the Construction Time perk has more usefulness
  
• Increased threshold of required upgrade purchases for unlocking new levels of ‘Upgrade Efficiency’ upgrade
  
• Modified cost and duration of several research recipes and upgrades
  
• Reduced effectiveness of Research Speed Town Perk and Research Speed upgrade
  
• Quests to level up River and Forest to unlock Mountains and Jungle have had the required town level increased from 15 to 20
  
• Fish Oil is unlocked with a Recipe Quest (requires Basic Medicine as well as access to Fish) instead of being its own research
  
• Cash Register per-level requirements changed from “Spend X [coin type]” to “Produce X [coin type]” and requirement values greatly increased
  

[h2]Bug Fixes[/h2]

• Building rows were not displaying recent upgrade icon, or displaying highlight if upgrades was available
  
• Tooltip for trading post global storage was clipped off screen
  
• Pinned construction details panel would remain visible when town changed, resulting in mismatch between displayed building and active town
  
• Research that required specific natural resources to be unlocked would always load with zero production capacity assigned
  
• Inconsistent scroll wheel behavior on pinned item tooltip panel
  
• Clicking on background of Level Up rewards panel would not advance the animation to the next phase
  
• Chute and Harvesting Speed perk were being applied twice to harvesting recipes
  
• level-up reward values would sometimes initialize at higher values before it ran the reveal animation, so it would appear to be counting down instead of up
  
• Claiming level-up rewards from the World Panel would earn coins for the town displayed on the main interface, not the town that rewards were claimed for
  
• Using ESC to dismiss a pinned modal menu would leave it in pinned state, so it would be unintentionally default to pinned state the next time it was shown
  
• Trading Post category headers for Unique Resources were not correctly showing label indicating whether they were unique Imports or Exports
  
• Changing a recipe or research’s priority when no production capacity is assigned would prevent auto-assignment of production capacity on that recipe or research
  
• Some requirements that involved numbers over 10 Billion were being displayed as a rounded down value (e.g. 99B instead of 100B)
  
• Cultivation / Prospecting tabs weren’t unlocking immediately when Farming / Quarry research completed
  
• Calculation error was causing first 10 skill levels to advance too quickly
  
• Inconsistent display of decimal numbers
  

[h2]Balance Changes[/h2]

• Added new quests to reach various town levels in specific biomes. These quests provide a new item ‘Reward Booster’. Each Reward Booster will increase the min and max random ranges for Quest Coins received from the Daily Reward chest
  

[h2]Misc Improvements[/h2]

• Added permanent display for Coins, removed them from the Inventory panel
  
• Left-side Inventory and Quests panels are now collapsible
  
• Clicking on header label on Inventory section will open a new pop-up inventory panel
  
• Notifications moved to the top header, to give more space to inventory & quests on the left hand side
  
• Hovering over Town Experience progress bar will show XP and time until next level
  
• Global utility buttons moved to new topmost header (along with notifications), so that the town navigation buttons can be wider and have labels
  
• Can click the item icon on a inventory list item to apply it as a filter to the main panel without also activating / pinning the item’s production tooltip
  
• Moved ‘Cotton Cloth’ recipe above ‘Shirt’ recipe
  
• Added icon to ‘Adjustment Factor’ button
  
• Changed several icons
  
• Added extra tint and texture to production category headers, to help distinguish from building headers
  
• When an item filter for ‘Power’ is applied to the main production panel, Water Wheel and Solar Panel will be potentially visible due to their passive production of Power
  
• Added ‘Claim All’ button back to main menu’s quests panel
  
• Launch menu buttons animate size when hovered
  
• Added 2 more save slots
  
• Rearranged UI layout of town status panel in top-left
  
• Changed resolution of UI background sprites to reduce blurriness
  
• Changed appearance of save slot buttons
  
• Added ‘Controls’ panel that lists useful hotkeys
  
• Renamed ‘Production’ panel to ‘Crafting’
  
• Town XP rate is now shown near the Town Level progress bar, instead of taking up space in the inventory bar
  
• Closing the Level Up rewards panel before animations are complete will no longer play the reward gain sound effects after the panel closes
  

[h2]Bug Fixes[/h2]

• Tooltip for unlocking Magic biome was only showing the Snow biome level requirement, not the Desert biome level requirement
  
• Automatic Assignment for Research was getting unlocked at town level 11, instead of town level 10 (the rest of the panels unlocked Automatic Assignment at level 10)
  
• Production adjustment delta would sometimes revert to low values when current capacity was high and adjustment factor > 1
  
• Confirmation panel when deleting town slots was showing the wrong slot number
  
• Switching trade mode to ‘off’ would cause some item icons to be resized incorrectly in that row and elsewhere in the UI
  
• Upgrades button would stay selected after the Upgrades panel was closed
  

• Removed obsolete Clickables option from cost icon right-click menus (which would result in the old clickables menu appearing and being unable to hide it)
  
• Selecting a recipe filter no longer shows all other recipes that share inputs and outputs with the selected recipe - instead it just shows the recipe you selected
  
• Selecting an inventory item will also apply a filter on the main panel based on the selected item
  
• Fixed bug: Market and Trading filters would appear as "Item" filters on the main panel instead of "Markets" or "Trading"
  
• Fixed bug: Locked items were appearing in pop-up navigation menu when right-clicking an item icon