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Hello everyone!Thank you very much for playing Update 2.1. We were very happy to see people coming back for the minor update in numbers that exceeded our expectations. Naturally we’ll continue to work to improve the game and therefore the big question is what we’ll be focusing on next.
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[/p][h3]What’s next?[/h3][p]It’s pretty early and not all decisions have been made, but as of now it looks like we’re going to do another minor update focused on terraforming. It seems to be one of the biggest isolated parts of the game that could really need some polish and improvements.
I have previously talked about personal mining drones in a
previous dev blog and the community left lots of feedback, which we evaluated and I’d like to share the results with you:
About 75% of feedback messages liked it.
About 21% of feedback messages had mixed opinions.
About 4% of feedback messages disliked it.[/p][p]
Overall that looks pretty good, but it does tell us that it needs more work. 75% is nice for the first iteration, but we have to aim a little higher. Let’s take a closer look at the most common requests, in order of how requested they were:
Drone Hub building that excavates those areas automaticallyThe most common request was to add a building which automatically excavates the area you mark for excavation. Even though the personal drones are much faster than everything we had before, they are still potentially slow to get rid of a mountain, especially when you need to stay in proximity and wait. To make that possible, we’ll have to cut some corners, similar to the personal drones, they won’t be able to properly pathfind around all obstacles and instead clip a bit (for performance reasons), but I think that should be fine with a building you place temporarily for excavation.
Tunnel boring machineSomething you can place, which then automatically digs in a direction of your choice for a pre-configured distance. While I think it would be really cool to use the upcoming trains for that, I’m afraid they’re too large and many of you would like the option to just dig a 2x2 tunnel or something like that. I think this machine needs to come in different sizes? I’ll be spending some time iterating on this.
Concerns about faster digging filling up the inventoryI have to admit that it caught me a bit off guard how many people raised concerns about the inventory filling up quickly. I don’t have an answer yet, but I’m thinking about it. Of course we could allow a setting/toggle that instantly destroys everything mined, but I wonder if we could actually make use of those blocks. I also believe we should increase the stack size.
Keep the drill/laser instead of replacing itIf we should keep the drill/laser or just go to the new system was one of the big questions, and while not a huge amount of people wanted to keep the drill/laser, it probably makes sense to bring the new system as an alternative. However I believe it should still be available very early or right away so that you can excavate floors for foundations early.
Using the those personal drones for construction/resupplyI’ve been thinking about that, but for now that’s out of scope.
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[/p][h3]Conclusion[/h3][p]We’ll keep working on those things, we do even have a couple other ideas and we’ll keep you up to date how it goes! I know everyone would like to know how long it will take, but it’s too early to talk about that.
In parallel we’re still actively working on trains and the powerplants and we intend to share more information about those soon.
Meanwhile enjoy the game and see you next time,
-mrmcd
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