Mercury Fallen News

Howdy Folks!

I moved into my new place a couple of weeks ago and things are starting to settle a bit. The new place is great and I have a dedicated space for my office now instead of it being in my living room. Not a lot to go over this time, but I wanted to let you all know I’m mostly back on track development wise. Thank you all for the amazing support and patience. I’m super excited to get back to working on new content.

[h2]Window Sequence System[/h2]
A big part of the new content being added is the mission system. With this new system I also wanted a better way of having full screen notifications when a new mission is added. Given more than one mission can get added at a time, in some cases, I wanted a way of showing windows in sequence instead of everything showing all at once and being a jumbled mess.



After making some modifications to my window panel system I can now queue windows for display instead of having them appear immediately. As a window closes it will show the next in the queue and so on until there are no more left in the queue. This was a simple addition, but cleans things up and should help to provide more information to the player.

[h2]When Is The Next Update Coming?[/h2]
Great question. My goal is to have a version of the next update available on the Experimental branch in about two weeks. This should include the new mission system, story content and a few other user interface tweaks.

Thanks again for all the great support. What content are you most looking forward to?

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Howdy Folks!

We’ve made it through a whole month in a whole new year. Well done! I wanted to talk a bit about some of the new content I’m working on as well as why development will be slowed down for the rest of this month.

[h2]Mission System[/h2]
I had originally planned to implement the mission system in the last update, but combined with the rest of the content it just wasn’t feasible.



The mission system will be replacing and expanding upon the getting started objectives. When I first started working on the mission system I had planned on adding a lot more tutorial based objectives. I scrapped that idea as it felt like the game was holding your hand and overly directing how the player would progress through the content. Tutorial mission objectives will go over the same content as the current getting started guide.

The goal of the mission system is to provide some over all objectives/direction for the player. Aside from the starting tutorial, these objectives will provide story progression. The story progression will add new POI locations and unlock new content for mid to late game play. The next content update will focus on the first chapter of story content.

Missions will be trackable in addition to being visible in the mission section of the facility management interface.




[h2]POI Management[/h2]


A new POI section is being added in the planet map expeditions tab. This will list all discovered POI locations sorted by distance from the facility. Clicking the respective icon will move the camera to that POI location. This will make it easier to see what POIs are available as well as make it easier when planning expedition destinations.

[h2]Personal Note[/h2]
On a more personal note I wanted to mention that I’m moving this month. My girlfriend and I have been planning to move in together over the last year. We’ve found a place and will be moving in a couple of weeks.

As a solo developer my office is also where I live. This is the first time I’ve moved in over 20 years so stress and excitement are high. I’m super excited about the move, but there will be some development slow downs while I pack, move, unpack, move furniture, get setup and all that jazz. :)

So stay safe out there and be sure to follow for more news regarding Mercury Fallen.

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Howdy Folks!

Another day and another patch update. Thanks for the great feedback, suggestions and reports. This is another small patch to address a couple of reported issues.

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[h2]Release Notes[/h2]

• Added Item Storage section to game guide
  
• Updated Harvestable resources section of game guide
  
• Fixed: Some grammatical errors in the game guide
  
• Fixed: Some objects have incorrect selection collider when placed facing east or west
  

Howdy Folks!

Patch update 31.4 focuses on a few reported issues. Thanks for the great feedback and reports. 🙂

Check the release notes below for all the included fixes.

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[h2]Release Notes[/h2]

• Fixed: Colonists stuck in a loop picking up and dropping off seeds when attempting to plant them if a colonist is assigned both the botanist and biologist job roles.
  
• Fixed: Colonists stuck in a loop attempting to harvest crops in some instances.
  
• Fixed: Game crash, in some instances, if returning to the main menu and starting a new game or loading a game
  
• Fixed: Unable to use mouse scroll wheel to scroll global inventory if hovering over an item category header
  
• Fixed: Particle effects not always being properly removed
  
• Fixed: Missing text string for depressed attribute effect
  
• Fixed: Missing text string for motivated attribute effect
  

Howdy Folks!

Patch update 31.3 is now live! This is a smaller update that includes balance tweaks, some changes and a few bug fixes.

[h2]Game Balance[/h2]
It has been expressed to me from many users that they struggle to have enough material to reach the planet surface. This is primarily due to a lack of steel. Unfortunately this is not always consistent due to the procedural nature of the maps. It does happen often enough that I wanted to tweak this a bit.

While users were struggling to produce enough steel, they had an abundance of mineral compound for making structure resin. In this update I’ve added a new item called hardened structure resin. This new item, made in the smelter, requires 5 structure resin and 1 hematite. Steel usage, for surface progression, has been decreased in favor of hardened structure resin. I’ve also increased the structure resin usage for most of the objects in the game.

Thanks for the feedback during the experimental branch. Certainly let me know what you think of the new changes. Check the release notes below for the full list of changes and fixes.

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[h2]Release Notes[/h2]

Balance Changes

• Added Hardened Structure Resin item, recipe and research
  
• Updated many object build requirements to use additional structure resin
  
• Updated several object build requirements to use hardened structure resin in place of regular structure resin
  
• Updated several object build requirements to use less steel
  
• Worker and Driller bot recipes now require iron ingots
  
• Increased surface resource scanner speed
  

Misc. Changes

• Updated the icons for advanced and superior scanner equipment to make them more visibility different
  
• Batteries will no longer be added into the power meter and total stored value if disabled
  
• Improved performance for colonist path validation
  
• Exploration vehicle exploration behavior has been changed so that multiple vehicles won’t follow along the same paths.
  

Fixes

• Fixed: Batteries still providing power even when disabled
  
• Fixed: Surface tile scan overlay not updating without toggling it off and back on again
  
• Fixed: Performance issue if exploration vehicle no longer has any tiles left to explore
  
• Fixed: Error that can occur if Xeno Mold event attempts to spawn at the edge of the map
  
• Fixed: Aquarium has incorrect selection collider