Morning Captains! Zuff here bringing you news about the latest patch v0.4.11 that has just landed to the experimental branch! To check out the experimental branch, follow instructions in Captain's diary #27.
Before we go into all of the changes, we want to give a certain person a shoutout:
A big thanks to McRib!
Some time ago one of our early backers and Discord member, McRib, sent each of us here at MaFi Games personalized COI Mugs with a heartfelt note and some treats. As we all rely on coffee/tea to function day to day so these will be used frequently! We appreciate you, McRib, and all that you do for the community! Thank you!
Patch v0.4.11
We are currently focusing on fixing all reported bugs and issues that prevent a smooth playthrough. Before we start working on larger new features, we want to make sure that the current game is bug-free. This results in more frequent smaller patches such as the one today since we don’t want to delay important fixes by implementation of new features. We also have some more performance improvements in works but they will likely be available in the next patch.
Full patch notes can be found at the bottom as always.
Unlocked buildings are now highlighted before used for the first time
Know what you’ve unlocked or haven’t used through the new highlight system! Each building/transport that has not been selected will have a yellow dot in the upper right corner.
Auto-Returning Ship
It is often the case that once the main ship has no more fuel for exploration, the only reasonable action is to return home. But it has to be done manually. To avoid this micro-management we’ve added a new toggle (on, by default) that will send your ship back to the dock if it has no further options for exploration or movement on the map.
Gas Rotary Kiln Changed to output CO2 instead of Exhaust
The Gas Rotary Kiln now outputs CO2 instead of your standard Exhaust. This was an oversight when making the advanced recipes as they were not intended to need exhaust cleaning or provide sulfur by-product. This may require changes across your factories so please adjust accordingly!
Cargo ship changes
Doubled cargo ship capacity and increased cargo throughput
We have double the amount of product a cargo ship can contain while also increasing the throughput when unloading at dock. With this, we’ve also doubled the amount of diesel consumed and increased the world mines’ buffer capacity to accommodate. Larger ships are more fuel efficient.
Reduce ship speed & save fuel
Sometimes, ships deliver cargo too fast and the ship is just waiting to unload in the dock. Turns out that in real life, if you are not in a hurry, slowing down can save a significant amount of fuel. This is why we have added a new toggle that reduces ship speed to 50% but also reduces fuel consumption by 30%. This is a great way to reduce diesel consumption for lower priority routes that do not require quicker delivery.
Contract Balancing
Many of you gave us feedback that making a self-sustaining colony in the late-game phases is quite challenging due to the way how contracts are designed. We agree that the contracts needed some work so this patch is rebalancing contracts. The most significant changes are:
Added new contract: Consumer electronics => Quartz
Increased profit on copper, iron and quartz contracts
Increased profit on contracts selling coal and vehicle parts 2
You can also see other changes in the screenshot below. If you have further feedback regarding the changes, please let us know!
Better explanation of nuclear plant fuel rod consumption
New UI changes make it easier to understand how nuclear plants consume fuel rods. We saw a lot of players confused on why their plants were consuming multiple rods without starting since we didn’t explain that 16 rods were required before the reactor would even start. This is now shown in the tooltip that breaks down the information to make it easier to understand.
Prevention of digging through your retaining walls
We’ve heard reports from players who were experiencing excavators digging though and behind retaining walls, rendering them useless in some situations.
A post by reddit user u/clarkinum titled “Why excavators digs through the retaining walls? I build those walls before digging only the right side but land kind of slides anyway”.
To prevent this from happening, mining/dumping designations now cannot be placed on tiles that contain retaining walls and vice-versa. This should help avoid excavators and trucks messing up your neatly placed mine walls! We’ve added a console command `toggle_terrain_designations_over_entities` for power users who wish to disable this restriction.
A Late Fan-Art Entry
Discord user bluetanuki999 submitted this lovely piece a bit late but we still feel it’s worth a share:
Changelog for v0.4.11
New Features
Unlocked buildings are now highlighted in menus until they are selected for the first time.
Added an option to auto-return the main ship after exploration when there are no more reachable locations to explore.
Added a new edict that reduces ship fuel consumption by 10%.
Added an option to make ships 50% slower to save 30% of fuel per trip.
Cargo ships and contracts balancing
Increased cargo ship capacity by 2x, fuel consumption by almost 2x. World mines buffers were also increased to accommodate.
Larger cargo ships are now more fuel efficient per trip.
Decreased total travel duration of cargo ships from 3.3 to 3 months.
Increased cargo depot modules unloading speed, the highest tier now unloads the ship in just one month.
Increased profit on copper, iron and quartz contracts.
Increased profit on contracts selling coal and vehicle parts 2.
Added new contract: consumer electronics -> quartz.
Other balancing
IMPORTANT: Gas rotary kiln changed to return CO2 instead of Exhaust.
Reduced coal consumption of the silicon recipe in the Arc furnace II by 50%.
Reduced computing consumption of Arc furnace II from 6 to 4.
Increased the throughput of Chemical plant for graphite production from CO2 by 2x.
Reduced transports building duration by 80%.
Other fixes and improvements
Retaining walls are no longer buildable on terrain designations and vice versa. This should prevent issues with mining/dumping over the walls. A new console command `toggle_terrain_designations_over_entities` can revert this change for power users.
Renamed "Liquid nitrogen" to "Nitrogen tank" as it is a unit product.
Fixed UI that was not clickable in some cases in windowed mode.
Transport snapping is always enabled when no transport is selected. This allows snapping to ports and other transports when starting transport construction.
Fixed that entities with reserved ocean area such as ocean pump/dump could block ship access of the cargo depot/shipyard indefinitely.
Fixed the "Recover ocean access" action. Note that all ocean areas will be recomputed after loading this game version which may cause entities being newly blocked or unblocked.
Improved ocean area recovery action that now shows what is blocking the ocean area if the recovery fails.
Fixed vehicle dust particles that were not emitted properly in some circumstances.
Increased vehicle dust particles visibility distance and optimized their rendering.
Fixed buffers clearing to only clear buffers of unassigned recipes that are not used by any assigned recipe.
Toggling of planning mode no longer cancels the current building session (e.g. cut & paste).
Fixed that toggling prod. level on world mine did not reduce workers when it had full buffer
Fixed a rare case where a settlement transformer would not work for settlements with low population.
Fixed internal buffers in the Maintenance depot that could accumulate large amounts of maintenance.
Fixed a rare issue with terrain data serialization that could lead to corrupted save files.
Fixed incorrect shortcuts shown when insta-copying transports.
Partial execution for recipes was changed to kick in only when no other recipe can be satisfied fully.
Added UI showing the state of supply of fuel rods in the nuclear reactor.
Improved error tooltips and other places for colorblind accessibility.
Excavators no longer forcibly turn on their lights during game pause.
Updated translations, thanks to everyone who is contributing!