Scrap Mechanic News

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Greetings Mechanics!

Set your thrusters to max, because there's a fully-armed and operational devblog coming your way!

First, we'd like to acknowledge the amazing content coming from the Challenge Builder community. Some of the concoctions you've come up with have truly blown us away. For example, we really didn't expect Challenge Mode to be used to build escape rooms and parkour challenges: those are the sort of surprises that make the long hours building Challenge Mode really worthwhile for us. There are some impressive challenges up on the workshop right now, made by the awesome Scrap Mechanic community. We really encourage everyone to go HERE and try some of them! 
Anyway, we know you're here for some Survival news, and we are ready to deliver! Onwards...


Survival, piece by piece!
Let's start with the necessary but less fun background stuff that we've been working on. When developing a game, it's common to build features and segments separately that eventually must be pieced together. For Survival, we're now starting to weld these elements in to one. 
For example, a seamless transition from the open world into a warehouse, or loading in rooms at the right time and other related optimizations. This has taken a lot of our time these last months and there is still some "knitting" left to do. But it's really exciting to see these elements finally come together for a more cohesive survival experience. 



Tapebots are Tough!
The Tapebots are coming closer! We're currently tweaking their behavior to make sure they're as satisfying as possible to battle. We really want Mechanics to respect the enemies in Scrap Mechanic. The Tapebots will be very dangerous and the players will need to be tactical, creative and show quick reflexes in order to deal with them.
We hope that this less forgiving approach to difficulty will make situations more tense and exciting, as well as a lot more fun in co-op where you and your friends really can work together to take enemies down. So, don't go running into the warehouses spraying and praying... you'll only end up knocked out next to all the great loot!


Upgrade Parts and Components!
In the past weeks we've been teasing some of the new upgradeable interactive parts on our Twitter. Now you can see them in full 3D glory!
Basically, we are working on letting Mechanics upgrade the interactive parts in Survival. These upgrades will allow things like more connections, faster speed, less gas consumption and more! The sounds will also change from level to level. The way you will upgrade these parts is with the new Component Kit found when exploring the world. This new consumable will be highly sought after and something a lot of Mechanics will look for. 


A Big Lift
When we started working on Scrap Mechanic, the lift was only for lifting stuff. But during development the lift had more functions added and overall became more useful, for stuff such as spawning blueprints and a few more new functions coming for Survival.
To match these new features, we've redesigned the lift to fit its uses visually. But on top of that we're also adding a cool new lift remote that the Mechanic will pull up when using the lift. We also might let Mechanics put different cool charms on their remote. We'll see! 


Dress Up
After much toil, we've finally got character customization up and running the way we wanted. It really is a bit of a shock (in a good way) to see our Mechanic in so many different outfits suddenly, running around in the game.
We're sure you'll agree it's a lot of fun to style your mechanic and really make him your own. It was a lot of work, but we think it was worth it. Not only will you try to hunt down useful parts in Survival but also cosmetics to unlock that you can impress your Mechanic friends with. Here are some in-game shots!


Pack Attack
Say hello to Packing Stations! One way to accomplish farmer quests in Scrap Mechanic will be to load up these mobile fruit and vegetable houses, thus making the produce ready for delivery to the farmer hideouts. All Mechanics need to do is drive up to the correct socket and then fill it up until it spits out a packaged crate. But have your lifting creations ready, because they need to be stacked and transported!


Visual Spit 'n' Polish
The eagle eyed among you will notice that we're really pushing the graphics in Scrap Mechanic these days. We want to make sure that by the time Survival comes out, the game as a whole will be a much more visually appealing and moody experience. So here are a few new visual details.


Dynamic lights will now both cast shadows and even take colour into account. We have to be careful with this one, since it's expensive. But we think we can optimize it enough to run well! Here's an example.

We've also gone back and updated a lot of the old parts to make sure they fit the new updated Scrap Mechanic visual style. They really came out nicely! Let's see if you can spot the improvements...

Since metal is something that we have a lot of in Scrap Mechanic, we've also updated that to allow parts to have a nice shiny chrome effect!


Thanks for your support – and for playing!
We will be back soon with more Scrap Mechanic news!


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Hi Mechanics!

It's been a real joy for us to hear about your experiences with the new Challange Mode. We had no idea there was such an impressive amount of skilled mechanics out there that just burned through all 40 challenges in no time!

Thankfully, those 40 were just the beginning. We've only scratched the surface of what we can do with Challange Mode and next up is the Challenge Builder that makes it easy for you and your friends to build and share your own Challange packs on the workshop.

Keep in mind that you have to beat your own challenges to get them approved for sharing on the workshop. This is so we can make sure that all challenges that get uploaded can be completed.

There are already a bunch awesome challenges on the workshop that you can download and play HERE!

While we are at it, work on Survival mode is going great.
We are right now doing work on less interesting things in the background of the game that knits the Survival mode together. But we should be back soon with a new devblog with a lot of new things.

We will be back soon with more Scrap Mechanic new!

For all the latest news, follow us on Facebook Twitter

Updated February 20

• Fixed path issues that happened for users with UTF-8 characters in windows username.
  
• Optimizations to object meshes and textures to save video memory. Mods referencing the old version of these can automatically update to the new ones in the test version of the Mod Tool.
  

Updated February 15

• Fixed a bug where the challenge would not be completed if already inside the goal when activated.
  
• F5 does no longer try to reset the Challenge Builder.
  
• Added a message when starting Challenge Builder, hinting about console commands to enable or disable tools like the spudgun and the pre-built creations in the lift.
  
• Fixed a bug that could happen when using challenge balls as decorations in the challenge.
  
• Fixed a bug that could sometimes cause some creations in the challenge to not be saved.
  

Updated February 14

• Builderbot animation fixes.
  
• Builderbot thruster effect.
  
• Fix for missing creations from previous playthroughs if there is no chest.
  
• Fix for loading previously finished challenges with no player made creations started with the Challenge Starter.
  
• Fixed an issue that could cause some static creations to count as dynamic player-made creations.
  
• Fixed an issue where the build area did not update when welded.
  
• Builderbots can no longer attempt to sit in seats, causing a crash.
  
• Fixed an issue where some chat commands were not working.
  
• 64x64 block building when building challenges.
  
• Starting the game with -dev launch option shows error messages for mods.
  

Hi Mechanics!

It's been a real joy for us to hear about your experiences with the new Challange mode. We had no idea there was such an impressive amount of skilled mechanics out there that just burned through all 40 Challenges in no time!

Thankfully, those 40 were just the beginning. We've only scratched the surface of what we can do with Challange mode and next up is the Challange builder that makes it easy for you and your friends to build and share your own Challange packs on the workshop. It’s up on the test branch right now for testing!

Here is how you enter the test branch:


Keep in mind that you have to beat your own challenges to get them approved for sharing on the workshop. This is so we can make sure that all the challenges that get uploaded can be completed.

While we are at it, work on Survival mode is going great.
We are right now doing work on less interesting things in the background of the game that knits the Survival mode together. But we should be back soon with a new devblog with a lot of new things.

For all the latest news, follow us on
Facebook Twitter

Hi Mechanics!

We have a nice improvement update today with some needed fixes.
For example. The creation that you finish the challenges with will now be saved if you replay that challenge. But there is more! Here is the full list of all the fixes we’ve done!

Update List:

• Creations that beat a challenge will now be saved in the start zone next time the player replays the challenge.
  
• Added more building parts in some challenges to give players more building options.
  
• Music from Creative mode is no longer playing in Challenge mode.
  
• The Challenge mode ball now has an animated glow effect.
  
• F1, F2, F3 now changes hotbar row selection. It can still be changed with Alt+1, Alt+2 and Alt+3.
  
• Popup menus can now be closed with the escape key.
  
• Fixed an issue with the sensor noticeable at high velocity.
  
• The game no longer shows a gray screen when loading up a challenge for the first time.
  
• Fixed some minor issues with the lift and the weld tool.
  
• Fixed a crash that could happen when someone was joining the game while creations were being modified.
  
• Fixed a crash that could happen when joining a game while creations were being modified.
  
• Fixed a crash that could randomly occur for clients.
  
• Made some memory allocation fixes.
  
• Fixed an issue with some DLL files.
  
• Better error checking for mods in the mod tool.
  
• Some new scripting features.
  
• Fixed some texture cache issues for mods that should result in faster load times.
  
• Fixed a crash that happened after the game failed to start because of missing graphics drivers and other graphics related issues.
  
• Fix for shader loading when running the game on Linux using Wine.
  

We will be back soon. Next up! the Challenge builder!

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