Patch Notes 1.91
Hello! This is probably the biggest update yet to Factory Town Idle, and it brings a huge set of changes intended to make the whole experience more pleasant to explore and navigate. Some menus have been arranged into different places, so there may be some adjustment for players used to the old version - but hopefully the quality-of-life improvements added in this version outweigh these temporary issues.
[h2]Combined production panel[/h2]
The biggest change is that all the tabs where items are produced, traded, and sold are combined into one single scrollable menu. Having to constantly change tabs was a drag, and this way an entire production chain from cultivation, harvesting, crafting, markets, and trading can be seen at once.
In this sample screenshot, you can see that the big center panel contains many different sections, each of which can be collapsed or expanded by clicking on the header row. (Control-clicking a header will collapse or expand all similar headers.)
Obviously, combining all these buildings & recipes into a single large list could potentially make finding stuff harder. So I invested a lot of time in adding new ways to search & filter the list so you can easily get to the information you need.
One of the most useful things is that if you click on an item, the panel will filter to all recipes that involve that item. For example, this is what you'd see in a early town where you click on Planks. Note that you can see all recipes in the Lumber Mill and Workshop that produce or use Planks, as well as the General Store where you can sell them. This kind of combined view was not possible when everything was kept in separate tabs:
Alternatively, you can click on any building label and the panel will display just recipes for that building. The example below is what you would see when you click on 'General Store':
This row of buttons on the top of the screen provides one-click filters that replicate the behavior of the old tabs - These buttons will instantly apply a filter for all Harvesting, Cultivation, Prospecting, Market, etc. Trading recipes.
Also, there is a text search bar that will return results from any tab that match the text you entered:
Even with all these filtering options, it's likely that panels will be full of recipes that need to be scrolled. So I added this UI trick where the headers for building or trading categories will be pinned to the top of the scroll view until its contents are fully scrolled off the top of the list. This is especially useful when viewing trading recipes, where you want to scroll far down but still be able to access the Trading Post header to build new posts:
The old panels for Research, Upgrades, and Buildings didn't really fit with the rest of the crafting/selling/trading recipes. They are now located as separate pop-up panels that you can access from the Town Status region. This region also contains info on available land, workers, perk points, and market satisfaction.
In practice you probably won't need the separate Buildings panel very much, because the most useful information related to building construction is now displayed in this pop-up window when you hover on a building header:
The quests panel has been resized and moved to the left, underneath Town Status. Completed quests will automatically sort to the top of the panel. And you can still get a full-size list of quests by clicking on the Quests' panel header.
The inventory panel is still on the left-hand side, although it has been changed to a two-column format to reduce the amount you need to scroll:
Notifications about research and construction completions can be viewed at the far bottom-left, and clicking the button will open a dedicated notification panel that tracks notifications for the current town:
I wanted to make Town Level-Ups feel more rewarding & meaningful. So now when a town gains enough XP to reach a new level, you can click on the XP progress bar (beneath the town name) to collect the rewards for reaching a new level. These rewards now include Land, regular coins, Quest Coins, as well as Town Perk points (instead of being earned on a continual basis). You'll be presented with a reward screen like this:
As for the Clickables menu: It's been removed, because now *every* recipe is clickable. Just click the button with the green crafting arrow and the game will craft the recipe, assuming you have enough inputs & output space. The amount crafted is still affected by the Click Power global perk.
And some further changes:
[h2]Misc Improvements[/h2]
[h2]Balance Changes[/h2]
The addition of Time tokens was a good way to add rewards for idle time in a way that didn’t punish active time, was flexible and avoided delays caused by trying to run tons of catch-up calculations on launch. However they wound up being too powerful, and allowed players to breeze through large sections of the game, causing them to miss the fun & challenge of minmaxing recipes and upgrades. So, many changes have been made to make the progression feel more even, without changing the nature of Time Tokens.
[h2]Bug Fixes[/h2]
[h2]Additional Hotfixes 1.91p, 1.91q, 1.91r[/h2]
Whew! I hope you like these changes, if you run into any particular issues please let me know and I'll do my best to fix them up.
Hoping to launch into 1.0 early next year, so the game is getting close to being ready! Thanks for everybody that provided feedback so far, it has been a huge help in finding the right path for the game.
[h2]Combined production panel[/h2]
The biggest change is that all the tabs where items are produced, traded, and sold are combined into one single scrollable menu. Having to constantly change tabs was a drag, and this way an entire production chain from cultivation, harvesting, crafting, markets, and trading can be seen at once.
In this sample screenshot, you can see that the big center panel contains many different sections, each of which can be collapsed or expanded by clicking on the header row. (Control-clicking a header will collapse or expand all similar headers.)
Obviously, combining all these buildings & recipes into a single large list could potentially make finding stuff harder. So I invested a lot of time in adding new ways to search & filter the list so you can easily get to the information you need.
One of the most useful things is that if you click on an item, the panel will filter to all recipes that involve that item. For example, this is what you'd see in a early town where you click on Planks. Note that you can see all recipes in the Lumber Mill and Workshop that produce or use Planks, as well as the General Store where you can sell them. This kind of combined view was not possible when everything was kept in separate tabs:
Alternatively, you can click on any building label and the panel will display just recipes for that building. The example below is what you would see when you click on 'General Store':
This row of buttons on the top of the screen provides one-click filters that replicate the behavior of the old tabs - These buttons will instantly apply a filter for all Harvesting, Cultivation, Prospecting, Market, etc. Trading recipes.
Also, there is a text search bar that will return results from any tab that match the text you entered:
Even with all these filtering options, it's likely that panels will be full of recipes that need to be scrolled. So I added this UI trick where the headers for building or trading categories will be pinned to the top of the scroll view until its contents are fully scrolled off the top of the list. This is especially useful when viewing trading recipes, where you want to scroll far down but still be able to access the Trading Post header to build new posts:
The old panels for Research, Upgrades, and Buildings didn't really fit with the rest of the crafting/selling/trading recipes. They are now located as separate pop-up panels that you can access from the Town Status region. This region also contains info on available land, workers, perk points, and market satisfaction.
In practice you probably won't need the separate Buildings panel very much, because the most useful information related to building construction is now displayed in this pop-up window when you hover on a building header:
The quests panel has been resized and moved to the left, underneath Town Status. Completed quests will automatically sort to the top of the panel. And you can still get a full-size list of quests by clicking on the Quests' panel header.
The inventory panel is still on the left-hand side, although it has been changed to a two-column format to reduce the amount you need to scroll:
Notifications about research and construction completions can be viewed at the far bottom-left, and clicking the button will open a dedicated notification panel that tracks notifications for the current town:
I wanted to make Town Level-Ups feel more rewarding & meaningful. So now when a town gains enough XP to reach a new level, you can click on the XP progress bar (beneath the town name) to collect the rewards for reaching a new level. These rewards now include Land, regular coins, Quest Coins, as well as Town Perk points (instead of being earned on a continual basis). You'll be presented with a reward screen like this:
As for the Clickables menu: It's been removed, because now *every* recipe is clickable. Just click the button with the green crafting arrow and the game will craft the recipe, assuming you have enough inputs & output space. The amount crafted is still affected by the Click Power global perk.
And some further changes:
[h2]Misc Improvements[/h2]
- Added new Global Perk: Market Sell speed (so that construction of new markets is no longer the bottleneck)
- New Building: Caravan. Permanently unlocked after building certain amount of Trading Posts. Is an early stage building that boosts trading speed and should be useful for getting new towns started with imports.
- Added hotkey navigation for panels
- ESC key closes top menu or resets active panel filters
- Fixed some icon blurriness
- Changed several icons
- Quests that check for building counts will check counts across all towns, not just the active one
- Can use Control + Left and Right arrow keys, or mouse forward/back buttons, to cycle between active towns
- Upgrade button on building section headers will flash if an upgrade is currently available and affordable for that building
- Can click and hold on building header add / remove buttons to trigger multiple add / remove actions without many clicks
- Harvesting recipes are labeled based on the item produced, not the resource harvested
- Notification sound and text appears when quest ready to claim
- Notifications stay on screen for longer
- Highlight image around buttons is re-used for better performance (fewer image objects need to be created)
- Slight animation applied to highlight image when fading out
[h2]Balance Changes[/h2]
The addition of Time tokens was a good way to add rewards for idle time in a way that didn’t punish active time, was flexible and avoided delays caused by trying to run tons of catch-up calculations on launch. However they wound up being too powerful, and allowed players to breeze through large sections of the game, causing them to miss the fun & challenge of minmaxing recipes and upgrades. So, many changes have been made to make the progression feel more even, without changing the nature of Time Tokens.
- Town Perk Points are now earned as rewards from from leveling up towns, not on a continual basis from earning XP. Existing counts of Town Perk Points are unaffected.
- Leveling up towns also earns quest coins
- XP can be earned from harvesting, crafting, and cultivating items. This change was mode so that early towns can level up easier, that towns don’t suffer a penalty for exporting, and that overall there’s less of a dependence on market throughput.
- All XP level requirements have increased greatly, so that this new automatic source of XP doesn’t cause all leveling to become trivial.
- Creating buildings and completing research no longer earns XP, as it was a trivial amount anyways
- Magic Biome is now unlocked by a single Quest to level up Desert and Snow biomes, instead of requiring two different quests.
- Mountains biome has 2x productivity for all Machine Shop recipes
- Increased strength of Natural Resource Regeneration perks
- Reduced strength of early levels of harvesting speed perks (since Town Perk Points are available much sooner)
- Increased cost and duration of many research recipes and upgrades
- Lowered strength of Sell Value perk
- Lowered strength of Max Time Tokens perk for early levels, while keeping the same strength for higher levels. Otherwise, early game players could fast-forwards through most of the early game.
- Lowered XP value for high-end crafting & market recipes
- Increased cost of many early levels of town perks, since they are now available from the first town level (if this would result in negative perk balance, extra perk points are granted until balance is zero)
- Increased strength of Goods Consumption Boost perk, so that players aren’t as constrained by market demand as long as they’re able to produce a lot of items
- Automatic production capacity assignment unlocked at Plains level 10 instead of 11
- World panel unlocks at Plains level 15 instead of Plains level 12
- Several upgrades for Production Capacity now require Blue Coins instead of Red Coins, so there is something to use Blue Coins for as soon as they’re available
- Increased cost and effect of Market Consumption upgrades
[h2]Bug Fixes[/h2]
- Fixed issue where rapidly switching increment delta while clicking could result in removing buildings that were in use, causing negative production capacity
- Tooltips for hovering Auto-assign, Trade Mode, and Production Limit buttons would be missing in some cases
- Tooltip and popup window offsets were calculated incorrectly when canvas scaled due to resolution that was not 16:9
- Dragging modal panel borders when resolution is not 16:9 was causing menu to change its anchored position on screen
- Was greatly undercounting the stat for “Sell X items at Y market” requirements, causing various quests to take longer than necessary
[h2]Additional Hotfixes 1.91p, 1.91q, 1.91r[/h2]
- Fixed missing tooltip on top-right main game menu button
- Fixed costs for buildings missing ingredients when switching towns while an increment multiple was active
- Fixed the Power trading recipe missing from Power Lines in Trading Panel
- Fixed trading post 'trade mode' showing as default 'Export' even when a value was specified
Whew! I hope you like these changes, if you run into any particular issues please let me know and I'll do my best to fix them up.
Hoping to launch into 1.0 early next year, so the game is getting close to being ready! Thanks for everybody that provided feedback so far, it has been a huge help in finding the right path for the game.
