Friday Blog 209 - Iron Progress

Last Friday Blog mentioned the idea of ‘outposts’. This resulted in massive support: lots of you shared their enthusiasm! That was great to see, and it strengthens our dedication to this plan.
Since then, progress has been good. In the image above, a trap can be seen. Traps were very much work-in-progress two weeks ago, and they’re a lot more finished in our current internal dev build. They are properly reloaded by special colonists, and there are now also variants of traps that can drop items on monsters that pass below them. They’ve also received their own, new 3D model. We’re still planning to update it though.
Zun is now working on a new effect: slowdown. We’re planning to add traps that can drop caltrops, which would slow down monsters. This requires new info to be saved for each monster though. We’re also planning to have other things that can affect monsters for a longer time, like poison. Properly saving these statuses for each and every monster and sending them to each connected player in multiplayer requires a minor technical overhaul, which is happening right now.

The last two weeks also saw the addition of many new icons for 0.9.0-items, and 3D-models for new jobs. We’ve also redone certain old icons that didn’t fit the new style and standards. Here are two screenshots of some of the new content:


Another project was updating the ‘spreadsheet calculator’. Since 0.7.0, we’ve got an internal system that can ‘print’ a spreadsheet with all kinds of data, especially data regarding the total labor cost of items. How many seconds of work are required to make an anvil and all of its ingredients?
0.9.0 adds some major new changes to this process. Some items can’t simply be crafted by a colonist, and have to be purchased from the trader with currency. And the crafting time isn’t static: it decreases when you use better tools. This makes calculating the total cost of a product significantly more complex.
With the new spreadsheet calculator, we now have access to a lot of new data. We’re going to use it to rebalance the costs of in-game items. Until now, it has been the result of ‘guesswork’. That has resulted in some weird things. The Golden Shield costs a lot of time to craft, but it can be sold for 250 coins. But the calculator concluded that the ingredients of the Golden Shield cost 230 coins already! All the work crafting the shield and its ingredients are better spent crafting linen, which can be sold for more coins with less work. Weird things like that will be fixed.

Bedankt voor het lezen :D
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