Sorry for the delay, my routine was a bit messed up from the baby and the Coronavirus. Violet is totally healthy and fine, by the way.
Cheater
For any of you alpha testers, you can type “cheater” into the build menu to get 10,000 credits.
This didn’t need to a gif
Fire
Fire has a chance to spawn when objects break. There’s also a small chance for fire to spawn when a colonist fails to craft something (like incubating a mysterious egg).
Fire heats up rooms and consumes oxygen. To put it out, vent the atmosphere.
Colonists can’t walk through fire.
It spreads to adjacent floors, but at a slow rate. Fire spreads almost instantly through pipes with fuel in them.
Fire only spreads through walls when there’s a fuel pipe present
Internally, fire uses the exact same system as the blood splats. It’s a system where we can spawn effects and a floor (or wall) with a free slot can accept it. The floor is responsible for correctly positioning the fire based on both the floor’s and the fire’s size.
Debris
Objects have hitpoints, can take damage, and eventually die.
Objects take damage from fire and failed maintenance.
When an object dies, it gets replaced with a “destroyed” version. This is a useless object that must be manually deleted. Destroyed objects do not refund any credits.
Nectar Edible
Nectar is now edible.
It improves morale, boosts movement speed, increases skill experience, and reduces need drain rate. It’s similar to force-feeding Spacerock, but with none of the cons.
The intent is that Mysterious Eggs and Nectar will be valuable to the player even once they’re rich and have everything they want.
Find Core Button
We added a “Find Core” button to the escape menu. It repositions the camera on the Starmancer core.
This is useful if you decide to explore the infinite void around your station, and get lost.
Blocking Objects
You can’t place objects on top of other objects (duh). It was sometimes difficult to figure out if an object was intersecting, especially if you were placing an object on the far side of a wall.
So we’re now coloring objects red if they’re intersecting.
Right now, this is the exact same material that’s used for deleting objects, if we have time, we’ll make something slightly different. From an implementation standpoint, every object already has a visual effect assigned for when it’s marked for deletion, so re-using the delete material for something else was cheap.
New Items
We added a lot of new items.
We wanted some interplay between the different jobs/departments, but we didn’t want to force the player to micromanage every colonist.
As a reminder, here are the 4 main jobs:
Botanist: Grows crops and processes alien remains
Chemist: Converts items into chemicals, used directly or as reagents.
Engineer: Maintains the station and creates physical items.
Doctor: Creates medicines
Biowaste
The toilet wasn’t being used for much (after we removed dirty water), so colonists will now produce Biowaste when they urinate/poop.
Disgusting colonists just got a whole lot more disgusting
Only 1 Biowaste is created when colonists urinate on floors, but 3 is collected if they use a toilet. This is supposed to incentivize the player to place toilets, but probably you sick freaks will prefer seeing poop everywhere.
Unstable Solution
By combining 1 Fuel and 1 Biowaste, your chemist can create Unstable Solution.
Unstable solution automatically decays into an Extract after a few hours. The specific extract is selected based on the condition of the room that the Unstable Solution was placed in.
Blue: Cold room
Red: Hot Room
Stellar: External room or room with no atmosphere
Black: Dark Room (all the lights are off)
White: Default
Each extract type is used for different recipes.
When your assistant is an incompetent buffoon
The intent is to provide the player with a reason for using many neglected game mechanics: doors, atmosphere, wall vents, airlocks, heaters, and oxygen recyclers.
Mutagens and Pheromones
Mysterious Eggs can now be incubated into Mutagen (in addition to Nectar). This is much less risky than creating Nectar. Mutagens are used by the Doctor to create permanent colonist buffs for attributes like: movement speed, sleep rate, and max health.
We also added a new raw resource to Asteroids, Larva Husk, these can be incubated to create Pheromones. Pheromones are used by the Engineer, Doctor, and Chemist to create mood altering items, like a nanobot that makes a colonist hate everyone.
Nanobots
The Engineer creates Bot Parts out of Metal and Silicon. Bot parts are combined with pheromones and extracts to create temporary and permanent colonist buffs.
A few of the nanobots:
Relationship Reset: Erases all colonist relationships
Health Regen: Permanently boosts health regeneration rate (until that colonist dies)
Liquidate: Poisons the colonist, killing them very quickly. The body is immediately destroyed and ready for regrowth.
The Engineer can also create Empty Capsules used by the Chemist.
Capsules (pills)
(this isn’t implemented yet)
The Chemist combines Empty Capsules with pheromones and extracts to create temporary colonist buffs. Like a caffeine pill that reduces how much sleep a colonist requires for 24 hours.
Mutagens
The Doctor combines Mutagens with pheromones and extracts to create permanent colonist modifiers.
There are mutagens that permanently modify: Needs, Movement Speed, Max Health, Carry Capacity, and Skill Experience Rate.
You can stack all items as much as you want to create a super colonist. It’s possible to create an indestructible colonist if you stack enough Health Regen Nanobots.
That’s All
It’s been a crazy few weeks for me, so again, sorry for the delay with this post.
Thanks for reading!
-Tyler
