U Have the Power!

It was recently brought to my attention, both here and on AI's Discord, that achievements are currently broken. SORRY! This update fixes them.

I wasn't going to release this yet, but I can't stand idly by while your kills and uniforms and victories aren't being tracked.

But this doesn't sound like a "power", so what's the deal?



"Cyber-Gel", the stuff that keeps your cool-down skills "cool", can now be used as much as you like.



Please note the flip-side of this, which is Gel is no longer automatically used! That means that your cooldowns will start out twice as long. But if you're in a safe situation and you don't *need* that skill again for a while, you get to hang on to your precious gel.


Keyboard players can press (see what I did there?) to use gel. This key is not currently re-bindable, but it's not a default key, either. But if YOU use "U" for something, it will immediately switch to [Control+U] for you to control it ;)

Depending on how many skills are on cooldown, you may be asked a series of questions to use the right gel. Or you can just use the mouse to click the skill in the info-window and the proper gel for that skill will be used:


Why?

[h3]Player agency. [/h3]

Before, "gel" was just a limiting factor. But it wasn't even a complete limit, because you could still use skills, just with longer cooldowns. Now it's up to you. If you want to spend 5 gels to cool down a skill immediately, go ahead! If you just need to do a quick repair on a shipwreck and don't need that skill again, why waste your precious gel on it? You make the call!

But take note: you can only use one gel of each color per turn. So even with unlimited gel, it will take a few turns before you can use those skills again (I was able to teleport again after 8 turns).




I've added a new "sprite layer" to the visual display, above "terrain" and below "monsters": a dedicated space for items and furniture. Items and monsters used to share a layer, which meant that if there was an item and a monster on the same tile, you'd only see the monster. (This was a result of 2006 principles being used in a 2013 design that is beyond outdated in 2021!)

This is more of an internal thing, but it ends up with several tangible benefits:

For one thing, if you occupy the same tile as an item you can't pick up, a bench, or more importantly a transit tube, you can now actually *see it*. Another exciting result is that you can now remember previously-seen items even when they're out of line-of-sight!

So commodities, asteroids, and area-transitions will now remain visible once discovered! Note that when you get back, they might not be there (you don't have current knowledge, only "memory").




A long-time AI player recently said something like this to me: "Oops, I accidentally built a chainsaw", referring to how sometimes you never know what you're going to get when you're crafting. That really spoke volumes to me, so I've made the first change to crafting (there will be more at a later time, allowing you to add specific powers to weapons, among other things.)



For away team ranged and melee weapons, you can now choose exactly what you want. In the future there may be more limitations (for example, you might need to dismantle a cloudgun or eviscerator to know how to build them), but for now, go ahead and build yourself that launcher you've always wanted.




The main focus of the first part of version 1.7 is the Shipwreck Overhaul (you may have heard me mention that before). None of the planned changes are live right now, and they won't be for a long time, because the entire *thing* has to be done before it will work... it can't come out a piece at a time.

So if you want to know more about what's going on with that, you can check out this blog post I wrote last week: "Post-Generation Algorithmic Room Assignment (LOL)"

I did more theoretical work this week (outlined in this Reddit post), and I have plans for a future article in this series, tentatively titled "Teaching Furniture How To Arrange Itself".