[Devlog] March 2025 - Week 3
Thank you for being here. This is the week 19 devlog post for Cosmic Construct.
- Follow the bluesky account for more frequent updates.
- We now have a community discord server.
- Most importantly, wishlist Cosmic Construct on Steam.
Cosmic Construct is in its In-Development phase. Development phases are as follows.
In-Dev >> Pre-Alpha >> Alpha >> Beta >> Release >> ???
(We will see whatever the post release pipeline is.)
Each week during these devlog posts, we cover development goals set up at the end of the previous devlog. A never ending cyclical chain. (At least until the game is finished. Whatever that means.)
---
Implement suggested quality of life features.
During the previous Demo Day, there was quite a bit of feedback related to the "handholdiness" of the objective system that was implemented between Demo Day 60 and 61.
There were a couple of easy fixes. For example, every clickable element in the game UI has a colored border of some kind. This is not entirely consistent across menus. The main menu had cyan borders for text that is meant to indicate a label. This along with some others have been changed to white. I did this originally for the pawn creation menu, but neglected the main character page for some reason.

Another complaint I received multiple times was the length of Tudi's voice lines. Despite being skippable, not a single player has ever attempted to skip them. Perhaps allowing the player to interact with Tudi during the dialogue voiceline playing wasn't intuitive enough. Regardless, I have changed her voiceline to a single sentence. She now shuts up after about 2-3 seconds.
The most complex fix for this week was getting crafting stations to feel better to use. Before crafting stations would attempt to craft an item regardless if a player could craft one or not. Now the station will decline immediately, preventing the player from having to wait 3 seconds for a craft check to fail.
Not only this, but crafting stations will now automatically craft any item that can be crafted with the contents of the player's inventory. Given them the same rules as pawns with upcycling active. This now means instead of deliberately interacting with the [E] button each time. The player will now have to cancel crafting by walking away from the station.
I also added a popup which will show what items will be crafted when interacting with the crafting station. I still want to retain the player discovery of learning recipes, without including a list of them if I can get away with it. (Of course, if the player base is large enough, there will be a wiki anyway.)

Furthermore, I made some changes to how items are pulled out of storage. When trying to pull out 10 items from the chest, and there not being 10 items to pull, it would just fail. Now the behavior is that it will pull as many items as it can out of the chest. So if you select 10 Logs and only have 7, instead of giving 0 it will give 7.
Another minor change. All "Silk" rank items which deal with cloth have been renamed from "Silk" to "Satin".
Finish structure art for the Cartographer, Greenhouse, Storehouse, and Surveyor
All of the structure art for the 6 new buildings is finished.

From top to bottom left to right.
Add the remaining pawn jobs to the pawn manager.
Draw the new pawn job icons.
I've added 27 new jobs to the pawn manager. Yeah it's a lot. I'm not even sure if this will be the final number of jobs, as I have about a dozen unplanned buildings I still need to work out.

When playing the game the player will not have access to all of these jobs initially. Jobs that pawns cannot take will not be displayed to the player. The player will have to unlock each job by building its relevant structure in the origin map.
This list of added jobs will give me an opportunity to clue you into Cosmic Construct's "midgame" progression systems.
From top to bottom, left to right; we have:
---
As for unplanned content.
City Builder & Colony Sim Fest 2025

Steam's yearly City Builder & Colony Sim Fest is going on. Nice and early into the Cosmic Construct steam page lifetime too. Glad it was at the start of the year. I had no idea.
Originally Cosmic Construct wasn't able to make it into the fest. As it wasn't included in the original game list for some reason. Valve support got back to me... get this... 7 minutes before the submission deadline. I got it submitted 5 minutes before the fest started. Glad Steam was on the ball though, so glad to see.
After just the first day of the fest Cosmic Construct increased its total wishlist count by 20%. Which is a surprisingly large number for such a small game. To be honest with you, I want to keep the wishlist number secret for now, so that the milestone wishlist posts are more of a surprise. Cosmic Construct does have a wishlist goal, and it is ambitious. You can help of course by wishlisting the game. (Oh, and following the game page, you should do that too. For these devlog updates.)
---
This upcoming week (as well as the next 4-6) have some new stuff going on with it, as I don't entirely know what my marketing commitments are. Before June, I have no less than 2 trailers, a demo build, and a virtual appearance to make. This also means Cosmic Construct gets two know trailers and some changes to its seem page.
What I will try to get done this week. It's gonna have a lot of art.
- The structure art for Brewery, Town Hall, Warehouse, and Vertical Farm. (maybe)
- A new fully complete biome.
- Item icons for quite a few new items.
- At least 2 of the new plants. (These take quite a long time, it might not get finished.)
- (If all of the above is done, I'll work on even more of the new plants.)
- Follow the bluesky account for more frequent updates.
- We now have a community discord server.
- Most importantly, wishlist Cosmic Construct on Steam.
Cosmic Construct is in its In-Development phase. Development phases are as follows.
In-Dev >> Pre-Alpha >> Alpha >> Beta >> Release >> ???
(We will see whatever the post release pipeline is.)
Each week during these devlog posts, we cover development goals set up at the end of the previous devlog. A never ending cyclical chain. (At least until the game is finished. Whatever that means.)
---
Implement suggested quality of life features.
During the previous Demo Day, there was quite a bit of feedback related to the "handholdiness" of the objective system that was implemented between Demo Day 60 and 61.
There were a couple of easy fixes. For example, every clickable element in the game UI has a colored border of some kind. This is not entirely consistent across menus. The main menu had cyan borders for text that is meant to indicate a label. This along with some others have been changed to white. I did this originally for the pawn creation menu, but neglected the main character page for some reason.

Another complaint I received multiple times was the length of Tudi's voice lines. Despite being skippable, not a single player has ever attempted to skip them. Perhaps allowing the player to interact with Tudi during the dialogue voiceline playing wasn't intuitive enough. Regardless, I have changed her voiceline to a single sentence. She now shuts up after about 2-3 seconds.
The most complex fix for this week was getting crafting stations to feel better to use. Before crafting stations would attempt to craft an item regardless if a player could craft one or not. Now the station will decline immediately, preventing the player from having to wait 3 seconds for a craft check to fail.
Not only this, but crafting stations will now automatically craft any item that can be crafted with the contents of the player's inventory. Given them the same rules as pawns with upcycling active. This now means instead of deliberately interacting with the [E] button each time. The player will now have to cancel crafting by walking away from the station.
I also added a popup which will show what items will be crafted when interacting with the crafting station. I still want to retain the player discovery of learning recipes, without including a list of them if I can get away with it. (Of course, if the player base is large enough, there will be a wiki anyway.)

Furthermore, I made some changes to how items are pulled out of storage. When trying to pull out 10 items from the chest, and there not being 10 items to pull, it would just fail. Now the behavior is that it will pull as many items as it can out of the chest. So if you select 10 Logs and only have 7, instead of giving 0 it will give 7.
Another minor change. All "Silk" rank items which deal with cloth have been renamed from "Silk" to "Satin".
Finish structure art for the Cartographer, Greenhouse, Storehouse, and Surveyor
All of the structure art for the 6 new buildings is finished.

From top to bottom left to right.
- Bank - This structure will store currency, removing it from the settlement storage, and allow denomination conversion.
- Cartographer - Will give the player an in game map.
- Expeditioner - Passively generates random items found in the maps of discovered biomes.
- Greenhouse - Passively generates random farmable plants.
- Storehouse - Increases settlement storage capacity by 20,480.
- Surveyor - Counts the number of all objects contributing to settlement wealth.
- There are 38 more structures that need art assets finished. 6-8 more of these structure art sessions and all of the required buildings will be finished. (Decor is a whole different beast of course.)
Add the remaining pawn jobs to the pawn manager.
Draw the new pawn job icons.
I've added 27 new jobs to the pawn manager. Yeah it's a lot. I'm not even sure if this will be the final number of jobs, as I have about a dozen unplanned buildings I still need to work out.

When playing the game the player will not have access to all of these jobs initially. Jobs that pawns cannot take will not be displayed to the player. The player will have to unlock each job by building its relevant structure in the origin map.
This list of added jobs will give me an opportunity to clue you into Cosmic Construct's "midgame" progression systems.
From top to bottom, left to right; we have:
- Blacksmith - Which crafts items that use the Forge.
- Finisher - Which crafts higher rank non-magical basic items.
- Chemist - Which operates the Centrifuge consuming Research to create items.
- Sericulturist - Who keeps and rears Silkworms to create Silk.
- Weaver - Who creates cloth items with the Loom
- Tailor - Who creates cloaks with dye and cloth.
- Bookbinder - Who creates Signatures, and Blank Books.
- Author - These pawns will write books, a very slow process.
- Librarian - Stores and lends books to pawns.
- Brewmaster - Brews beer and grain spirits.
- Server - Which serves customers at the guild hall and other structures.
- Butcher - That raises mobs and produces their goods.
- Retail - Who mans registers at stores, and shops.
- Hospitality - Who maintains Hotels, Resorts, and Casinos.
- Teller - That manages and handles currency at a Bank.
- Moneyer - Who mints currency for the settlement.
- Treasurer - Who taxes and values property of the settlement, generating revenue.
- Auditor - Performs audits of all assets to determine their efficiency. (Is actually the trigger for all map production, and is an excuse to allow 100 million map titles to be calculated.)
- Cartographer - A cartographer must be assigned for the map to be updated.
- Expeditioner - Does the exploration to produce materials for the Expeditioner building.
- Surveyor - A surveyor must be assigned for the survey count to update.
- Professor - Teaches pawns magic.
- Researcher - Produces Research, an item which has various functions.
- Astronomer - Used the observatory to produce various items.
- Curator - Tracks all achievement counts and specific milestones. Shows what items the player is missing.
- Councilman - A councilman must be assigned for territory expansion and taxation.
- Judge - Makes a judgement when crimes are committed by pawns.
- Man that is a long list. Imagine, I have to program all of this. (Its not as bad as it looks actually, it's just the pawn state machine.)
---
As for unplanned content.
City Builder & Colony Sim Fest 2025

Steam's yearly City Builder & Colony Sim Fest is going on. Nice and early into the Cosmic Construct steam page lifetime too. Glad it was at the start of the year. I had no idea.
Originally Cosmic Construct wasn't able to make it into the fest. As it wasn't included in the original game list for some reason. Valve support got back to me... get this... 7 minutes before the submission deadline. I got it submitted 5 minutes before the fest started. Glad Steam was on the ball though, so glad to see.
After just the first day of the fest Cosmic Construct increased its total wishlist count by 20%. Which is a surprisingly large number for such a small game. To be honest with you, I want to keep the wishlist number secret for now, so that the milestone wishlist posts are more of a surprise. Cosmic Construct does have a wishlist goal, and it is ambitious. You can help of course by wishlisting the game. (Oh, and following the game page, you should do that too. For these devlog updates.)
---
This upcoming week (as well as the next 4-6) have some new stuff going on with it, as I don't entirely know what my marketing commitments are. Before June, I have no less than 2 trailers, a demo build, and a virtual appearance to make. This also means Cosmic Construct gets two know trailers and some changes to its seem page.
What I will try to get done this week. It's gonna have a lot of art.
- The structure art for Brewery, Town Hall, Warehouse, and Vertical Farm. (maybe)
- A new fully complete biome.
- Item icons for quite a few new items.
- At least 2 of the new plants. (These take quite a long time, it might not get finished.)
- (If all of the above is done, I'll work on even more of the new plants.)