Lots of things happened last month so we thought it might be a good opportunity to put together an update for you.
First of all, we have just reached 3,000 members in our Captain Club! That is huge! Thank you everyone for your support and kind words, we really appreciate it.
Advanced tree harvester
Now one of the big things we did was that we have improved our tree harvester animations & behavior. And you can see it in the action right below. This is an advanced machine that speeds up your tree harvesting and makes sure that you will never have a shortage of wood! :)
In the video above you can also see some extra lights we have added. We are now adding more light sources into our scene to make the game a bit more immersive. You can also see new lights on all the trucks below:
Four tiers of farms
Another huge update is farms. You might have seen a little teaser in our trailer. But we didn’t stop there. We made investments into our graphics & models to bring you a great experience. Checkout this video:
Also let me explain a bit about farming in Captain of Industry. There are several stages. You start with a simple farm that just grows crops and relies on rain. The first upgrade is an irrigation system that allows you to supply water and fertilizer. Next two tiers are greenhouses for even better yields. And on a small island that is limited on space and has shortages of water nothing helps more than a good greenhouse.
If you run out of food, there is a limited supply of wild berries that you can collect. By the way, have you seen your new berries model? Definitely progress there :)
We will have a separate post that will explain more about farming and how things like crop rotation, fertilizer, and rain affect your food output.
Rainwater harvesting
Behold! A brand new rainwater collector that is used to … well … to collect the rainwater! :) In the early game this is the only source of water until you research a water pump and later on a desalination plant. We will share more on water management later.
Beacon
Next we have our lovely animated beacon! This is an early game must-have building if you want more people to join your island and help you to run it – these new farms and tree harvesters will not work on their own! In the game you will scale from a humble 60 people settlement to a thousands of people. Now you understand why greenhouses are a must? :)
Blast furnace
Building infrastructure and vehicles requires a lot of iron and steel. In early game you get to build a small blast furnace that is essential for meeting these needs. Below you can see our new model of blast furnace with its upgraded version in the background.
Infinite ocean
A smaller but important update was to our ocean system. The old ocean was only generated to a certain distance from the island and generating it even further might hurt the game performance since it has detailed and animated mesh.
We have extended the ocean to reach much farther but use simpler non-animated mesh. The hard part was to connect these two meshes seamlessly. See the difference below:
UI icons overhaul
Finally, we have also worked on our UI. We did a complete overhaul of our icons for menus & all our products. We tried to put a lot of effort into clarity and these things are never easy. You can see a preview of our UI below with a little teaser on what kind of products you can expect in the game! :)
And that’s it for now! Thank you so much for reading. And if you are not a member of our Captain club yet, feel free to join here and enjoy exclusive updates & rewards. One of our rewards is coming very soon! If you have any questions or comments, catch us on our discord or twitter.