Ahoy everyone, Captain Filip reporting for duty and I know that many of you are eagerly awaiting the announcement of the Beta release date. So without further ado, the Beta will be released on 21st of December, 2021! Thank you for waiting and special thanks to all of our supporters!
If you wish to support us you can still do so here. We will be closing the crowdfunding campaign sometime next year.
A new nuclear power plant providing 12MW of power, you will be able to build this in beta, and so much more!
Beta Change log
We already gave you a sneak peek into some beta features in previous editions of captains diary but today we just throw at you the laundry list of all changes since the last alpha patch. Looking back at this, I’m really proud of how much we pulled off in the last two months.
New soundtrack
64 minutes of industrial-themed music!
Maps
3 brand new maps for Beta from advanced to a challenging one.
Ability to parametrize maps from the UI, such as forest size, resources size, cliff height.
Added limestone as a mineable terrain material. It is primarily used for concrete production but has many other uses throughout the factory.
Improved ores deposit shapes to make them easier to mine.
Grass is now generated over flat areas of the rocky terrain for nicer looking maps. Also, many deposits are now partially covered by rock.
Mining and dumping
Terrain designations size reduced from 6x6 to 4x4. This allows greater flexibility when designing mines and allows steeper ramps.
Improved excavators mining logic, allowed mining/dumping across designation borders, and maximized excavator load per dig.
Increased mining speed of plain rock by 30% to make it easier to remove while mining resources.
Game difficulties
It is now possible to choose game difficulty when creating a new game. There are 3 presets and we allow players to create their own unique experience by tweaking any of the existing options.
Priority system
The player can now set a general priority for each machine & building to affect their consumption of electricity, workers, maintenance, and unity. This also affects cargo priority for logistics. Some entities such as storages have dedicated priority configurations.
A dedicated set of priorities for electricity generation. With this system players can now build backup electricity generation.
Vehicles navigation redesign
Our original navigation for vehicles had several smart auto-recovery systems in case vehicles got lost. This turned out to be too tricky to grasp for players and sometimes this system was confused as bugs. We have removed automated recoveries and now we let players deal with it while providing them a recovery action (costs Unity).
Quick-build & trading
Quick-build no longer “cheats” new materials. It was changed to “quick-delivery” so it instantly delivers missing materials that the player already has.
To reduce hard-locks (especially in the early game), the player starts with an already discovered village that enables them to trade important commodities. Added a new building called “trading dock” to facilitate goods delivery and to make trading more discoverable and tangible.
New content
Blast Furnace II (advanced smelting)
Arc furnace I & Arc furnace II
Silicon reactor
polymerization plant (plastic production)
Hydrogen reforming
Power production
Nuclear reactor
Nuclear waste storage
Uranium enrichment facility
Spent fuel storage
HP & LP turbines tier II
Large cooling tower
Gas and electric boilers
Rotary kiln & cement production
Anaerobic digester
Greenhouse II
Ship bridge III
Housing III
Household electronics module for settlement
New early game buildings: Research Lab tier 0, Maintenance depot tier 0 - these help to reduce initial demands in the early game
New products: Limestone, Graphite, UraniumOre, YellowCake, UraniumPellets, UraniumRod, SpentFuel, ToxicSlurry, Ammonia, CarbonDioxide, Cement, PCB, Gravel, Digestate, Sludge, FilterMedia,
Existing chains redesigns
New thermal desalinatior that no longer requires coal but uses steam. It provides the ability to utilize nuclear power or waste steam for desalination.
Crude oil distillation was redesigned to follow more closely real processes. Also, its bi-products can now be burned in a gas boiler.
Introduced sulfur to decouple sour water from acid. Also a sulfur mine was added to the world map. This enables players to scale acid independently of oil production.
Removed acid recycling. Instead, sulfur can be neutralized using limestone.
Advanced smelting enables the addition of extra materials into smelting to increase the efficiency.
Salt can be now produced directly without the need to produce brine, it just takes longer.
Fertilizer production via hydrogen is now much more expensive. But it is still cheap when made from oil chain via ammonia.
Copper electrolysis can work with just water (but yields less pure copper). This removes the oil chain as a blocker for copper production that was causing hard locks.
Redesigned Construction parts: CPs I requires concrete, CPs II requires copper, CP3 III requires steel.
New production chains
Introduced fuel gas that can be made in anaerobic digester. This enables the recycling of sludge from the settlement (makes water treatment even more beneficial). Gas can be processed to diesel via a cracking unit.
Electronics production, household electronics, maintenance II.
Balancing
Maintenance significantly reduced for idle machines & vehicles.
Exhaust scrubber is now more beneficial (more power, more useful resources returned).
Higher settlement tiers come with a slight increase in services consumption.
Maintenance depots now produce more frequently.
Performance improvements
Greatly reduced game save duration (less lag during auto-save).
5x improved rendering performance of terrain designations (was noticeable for large designated areas) and made their bookkeeping 100x faster.
Other changes
World map and weather are now fully randomized (based on a few predefined constraints) and players can configure game seed in the new game wizard.
Added a new edict that increases settlement services consumption for extra Unity.
Fixes
Fixed that shortcuts did not close windows that they opened.
Fixed clipped windows on the main screen for smaller resolutions.
Improvements in pathfinding.
Removed crushed concrete, digging into concrete returns rock instead.
Fixed cloning tool that did not deactivate in some cases.
Recent changes
We have also worked on new models we would like to introduce here.
Arc furnaces
This one took us time to figure out. We wanted to squeeze all of its capabilities into the same layout as blast furnace has to offer in-place upgrades and we managed to do so. There are two tiers. A basic one is used for melting silica quartz. The advanced one requires cooling and is capable of replacing Blast Furnace II and consumes 2MW. However, its cooling capabilities allow to salvage some of the power back. It is also really nicely animated and we hope you will enjoy that!
Trading dock
We have introduced a trading dock. This dock is not for now connected to real ships. But when you buy goods, all the goods end up there. This makes trading more explicit and allows space for future improvements.
And that’s it for this diary post. Thank you for reading, and let us know what you think on our Discord server! Captain Filip out.
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