Captain’s diary #49: Update 3 Release Date Change and New Content!
- zuff35
- Apr 19
- 9 min read
Hey everyone! Captain Filip is back again! Update 3 is getting closer and closer so we have prepared another post for you to reveal more information. We also had to reschedule our launch. So let’s go!
Launch date
I know we promised you that Update 3 is launching on 20th of May. It turned out that day was already busy with launches so, with a heavy heart, we had to move our launch date to 14th of May. We apologize to anyone who expected the update to come out 6 days later.
With that out of the way, let’s discuss the new content! In the previous post we managed to cover a decent portion of the space program and hinted at new production chains but this time I would like to dive deeper into it and also cover other changes we made.
New settlement services
We are adding more options to generate Unity for your industry.
Luxury goods
Currently, gold comes only as a necessary dependency for microchips. We felt that was a bit late. So we moved gold to be available earlier so you can either trade it or produce luxury goods for your people. Luxury goods are made out of gold and a new product called “Imported goods”. Imported goods can be only obtained via contracts (that’s what makes them imported 😉).
The internet
Finally, the time has come for your people to slack off at work and start browsing the internet. We are adding a new settlement module which consumes computing proportionally to your population size and you get Unity as a reward! This will make datacenters even more useful!
New smelting chains
Aluminum
In the previous post I teased you with new end-game chains. And I’m happy to finally show-case them in more detail.
The first one is aluminum. Aluminum will arrive with a new awesome model of electrolytic cell which consumes a humble 8 MW. Since aluminum is more of a late game chain it scales up its ore consumption quite some bit. From 72 bauxite you produce 24 aluminum. We tried to model the energy demands on producing aluminum compared to steel even though we are still far from reality.
Aluminum is used in composite panels, these are the main building blocks for your space program. Composite panels are what you need to launch a rocket.
Titanium
When you come this far in COI that it comes to titanium, you might as well just put COI into your CV by that point. Sometimes content is balanced as a reward that you made it this far, Titanium is the opposite.
In the game we call it Titanium ore but under the hood it’s Ilmenite. You run it though an arc furnace and as a bonus you get molten iron. But that’s not what you are after. The gold here is titanium slag. You take titanium slag and run it through a chemical plant and a distillation tower so you can then reduce it into titanium sponge in another chemical plant and finally smelt it again in an arc furnace to get molten titanium. It takes 48 titanium ore to produce 12 molten titanium.
To make this a bit new and refreshing, you don’t cast titanium directly. You mix it with aluminum to create your first alloy. We just call it titanium alloy. This brings us to our new machine - alloy mixer.
Titanium is necessary to build a more advanced space station that can perform research, it also allows you to build a larger rocket (yes, there will be a second tier of cargo rocket in Update 3). And finally it is now also a prerequisite material in construction of FBR.
Electronics IV
In the previous post I showcased our new Diamond reactor. This time I would like to showcase a new lens polisher which together with the diamond reactor are the building blocks for Electronics IV.
The Electronics IV is made out of diamonds and lenses which are made from sapphire wafers. The wafers are made of alumina in crystallizer. Diamonds are also turned into a diamond paste to polish the lenses. It gives this feeling of high precision electronics which is a great fit for the space program.
Space station parts
Previously we mentioned that there will be a space station. This time, I would just like to show you the recipes for how the station parts are going to be built. The parts get delivered using your rockets.
We have also simplified food packs as they are now going to be needed in crew supplies.
Offices
We are still balancing and ironing things out. But we finally have some office focuses to show you.
Changes in the existing content
Now we made a lot of changes when it comes to balancing and also some changes in the research tree. Most of them are subtle. Close to Update 3 launch we will post the full list, but it’s essentially something like 8 pages of changes. So I’d like to cover the bigger ones here at least.
Goodbye redbrick road
Bricks are going away in Update 3. We hoped they would be a good starter chain before you dive into complex concrete production but they turned out to do the opposite. Especially with the addition of an ore sorter we got into a confusing situation where dirt was both a valuable resource for bricks and waste at the same time which was hard to manage. To replace bricks we are introducing a simpler concrete recipe, think of it as lime bricks. This is also important as in the future updates (not Update 3) we want to make ore sorting mandatory and build mechanics around it. Also maintaining two separate paths in ores management is a pain in the neck, especially if we want to keep improving early game. The key take away we learned here is: Don’t introduce temporary things so players have to learn them in the first hour and then never use them again. But don’t worry, the brick surface stays, it just costs concrete.
Glass changes
We received lots of feedback that glass production should come before large vehicles. In Update 3 we did exactly that.
We also finally implemented our original vision of glass production which is that the early glass maker will produce half of its glass broken (no slag anymore) and you need to recycle it back into the furnace. The tier II will no longer give you double the glass but instead will not break your glass anymore :) This is to model the complexity of glass production and that the long machines are really necessary in the real world.
Furnace changes
The first big change is that Arc furnace I, will be more useful. Currently it is only able to produce silicon. We extended its recipes so it is able to perform all the recipes the Blast Furnace II can. However, it has throughput of Blast Furnace I (but efficiency of BF II). The reason is that it would draw too much power too early on. It still has to draw quite some power as the iron / copper smelting are the benchmark. So we had to bump it from 3 MW to 4 MW. But as a relief it can now smelt 50% more silicon - the reasoning is that silicon requires less energy to melt than iron. The benefit of this is that you can decide whether you want to go the electric way sooner or maybe using electricity for scrap or only for some resources.
With that we are also making Advanced Smelting available more early as we think it was taking too long to get to it.
We are also changing the ores required. It used to be 8 ore => 8 iron for BF I and then 8 ore => 12 iron for BF, this changes to 10 => 8 for BF I and 8 => 8 for BF II. Similarly for copper. We also made silicon more demanding, it takes 12 quartz to make 8 silicon. This seems there will be more ores in transit but purely out of coincidence you are getting trains and bigger maps!
And since we are talking about silicon. We changed microchip recipes so that 1 microchip costs 2 quartz instead of 1.5 but also only 0.5 gold instead of 1. We increased the production from 8 to 12 microchips per minute and the tier II microchip machine now makes 36 instead of 16 microchips per minute (3x more than microchip maker I). This should make microchip production less tedious and allow for more scale in the late end-game. With that we also doubled the output of the datacenter (but also increased power consumption of it, but maintenance III only slightly).
Recipes changes
We have removed iron from vehicle parts and increased mechanical parts requirement accordingly and we are also adding an alternative recipe for Construction Parts I to take steel. This should allow you to completely ditch iron in the mid-game. In fact, in future updates we want to remove iron from COI entirely, maybe only keeping it in molten form as an intermediate product.
We are also going to make sure all the recipes are available in all advanced assembler tiers. So if there is something that was missing in Robotic assemblers it should no longer be the case.
Research changes
Research labs used to be a bit cryptic. Each research had a “difficulty” value set and this internally determined how long it takes to research. This all goes away. Research nodes now clearly show how many research points they take.
Research labs generate research points, but pre-Update 3 upgrading them only increases their output by a little bit. This was punishing, as researching early nodes with advanced labs was consuming more expensive equipment and took only a bit faster. We changed this so that labs now scale their research output linearly, which means that the basic lab gives 3 points per minute whilst the final tier gives 48 points. We also balanced the research nodes so that they account for the increase.
With all these changes you can now easily calculate how long a particular research would take and how many resources it would consume.
Vehicle limit & path finding changes
While we were slagging off on working on trains, Marek implemented improvements in our path-finding. Such as that large excavators and haul trucks can drive under belts. Thanks to this we can also allow you to build transports 1 tile higher without it being confusing. So you can now go to height 5 instead of just 4. Some folks have already noticed this in one of our previous screenshots, good catch! This support was needed for taller train ramps (they can go much higher).
And while Marek was there, he also improved the performance of path-finding. He managed to squeeze an extra 40% of performance out of it. As a result we are going to increase the vehicle limit quite a bit. Currently it sits at 180 but we are going to allow something close to 400, some portion will come from late game incremental research.
Level crossings
Many of you were asking questions about how vehicles will be able to cross train tracks. Initially we were planning to provide higher ramps, similar to the existing ramps for conveyor/pipe avoidance, but they needed to be high and took too much space, making vehicle-rail crossings difficult. So we ended up implementing fully functional level crossings that can temporarily stop vehicles when a train is crossing the road! Just make sure your trains don’t block the crossing for long periods of time to avoid traffic jams.
Maps
With new features and optimizations in Update 3, all of our maps are getting a revamp to make them larger and more fun to play on. All except one, Insula Mortis will be unfortunately retired but we will upload all legacy maps to the COI Hub.
The New Haven, our most popular and most beginner friendly map is going to be much larger and offer more interesting interactions with terrain.
And there is more! We’ve made a brand new map celebrating the Update 3 and especially trains. Once you look at the map, you will understand why trains will be very useful on it. Here it is:
And here's a flyover of the new map!
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