Ahoy! Captain Marek here. Recently, our community was asking about some form of regular updates to know what is happening “under the deck”. We thought that’s a great idea not only to keep you all updated, but also give us some regular schedule for posting updates.
That being said, let me introduce “Captain’s diary” – a regular series of news about the Captain of Industry. From now on, we will be posting new diary entries on Thursdays. To balance the workload, we will start with a bi-weekly schedule but if there is any exciting news, we may add some weekly editions. If you’d like to receive a notification about new entries straight to your inbox, along with some exclusive details, join our Captain’s Club!
Now for the updates.
Kickstarter reward surveys are out!
Kickstarter has finally released the collected funds and we have already sent out surveys regarding your rewards. Please answer it as soon as possible! Unfortunately there were some Kickstarter pledges that did not go through. We are so sorry if your pledge got cancelled. If you still wish to support us, you can do so here. If you want to upgrade your pledge to a higher tier, please check out the FAQ in our discord.
New game content
One of the reasons we could not unlock more content in pre-alpha was that we were simply missing 3d models in order to do so. And we are working hard on delivering these as soon as possible. Here is an update on the first batch we have added in the last few weeks.
Air separator
Splits atmospheric air into oxygen and nitrogen via a cryogenic distillation process. Important for steel & fertilizer production. We love this model!
Settlement power transformer
A module that you attach to your settlement to supply it with electricity. And that gives you more Unity.
Household goods module
Your own fancy store for your settlement where your people get their household goods from :) As always for more UNITAAAH.
Quality of life improvements
We have also been focusing on UI and quality of life improvements. We had so much useful feedback from pre-alpha already that it wasn’t really difficult to figure out what to work on :)
Based on CaptainTech’s feedback we have introduced a new products display where players can pin / unpin products they care about. That helped a lot because we were quite short on space in the top bar.
And since we have more space in the top bar now, we added research & ship status. Which should be helpful as well.
Several streamers have also asked for the option to request a build priority and they have also mentioned that trucks should not start multiple constructions at the same time (they should for instance build one house first before starting building another one). So we did that!
Groundwater changes
We have redesigned groundwater so it is now situated in individual smaller deposits instead of being available everywhere. One advantage is that it requires some extra planning on how to build things around. However the major motivation behind this change was to prevent a situation where the player runs out of water globally on the whole island. That had harsh consequences for beginners as there is no quick remedy (the only option is to wait for rain). However with individual deposits one can quickly start extracting other deposits when the first one runs out. The player also learns during that process that water is something they should care about and explore some water saving possibilities. Also note that the water is still replenished by rain.
Improving performance
Performance is one of the important topics we are addressing before alpha launches. So far, rendering of transported products was sped-up 400x and terrain rendering is now ~35% faster. Optimization is a complex and time-consuming task. If there is some interest, we may expand on the techniques used here in the future diary entries.
Transport building improvements
Our conveyors and pipes have automated path-finding to aid with placing. Unfortunately, our current system has some issues so we decided to rebuild it and make it more intuitive and less restrictive. This work is 50% done and we will write more about this in a future diary entry.
Translations
Finally, two weeks ago we opened a community translation tool and your response was overwhelming! Literally! We had to upgrade our server twice since it kept crashing under the load! Since then, we have added nearly 5000 words to translate and thanks to some incredible work from the community there are 7 languages >15% translated, 3 languages >50% translated, and Dutch is 100% complete. Incredible work, thanks everyone involved and keep up the great work! If you’d like to help, check out this page and get in touch at <#>translations channel at our Discord! All the translations will go directly into the alpha build.
