Patch Notes

This page lists all the changes we've made to the game on the main branch on Steam. To see the list of changes on the unstable branch see this page.



Build 0.6.300 - The Ashfall Range update

September 29, 2021

The Ashfall Range update brings a new biome, with new resources, equipment, production recipes, enemies, and other content. It also brings modding support, lots of quality of life improvements, balancing tweaks, performance improvements and bug fixes.

Here are some of the larger changes in this update, and the full list of changes can be found below that.

Note: Saves from previous builds are supported, but there may be some balancing or other unexpected issues. You can still play the older version by selecting one of the previous alpha builds from the betas tab on Steam.


New biome: The Ashfall Range

The new Ashfall Range biome is a fiery biome full of ash, fire and molten rock. This is a late game biome that appears in 4-skull difficulty or higher, and it contains a new resource unique to this biome called Liquid Fire.

This new resource comes with new production recipes, some of which create brand new construction materials, and others are alternative recipes for existing construction materials - adding more valid options and freedom when choosing your next landing destination.

Spreadbow, Spreadgun, and higher tier equipment

To better survive in the higher difficulty maps, we added new higher levels of equipment, including weapons and armor.

We also added a new type of weapon that shoots several projectiles in an arc, useful against stronger enemies that are nearby if you can hit them with the entire burst, and also against weaker enemies that are spread out.

Improved Dream Archives

We improved our in-game encyclopedia so it provides more information that is easier to access. You can now see resources in these archives, and for each resources you can see how to get it, and the different uses it has. More resources and uses will be displayed as you unlock them with research.

We also fleshed out the other pages, and improved navigation by adding a filter and sorting the subjects alphabetically.

Modding Support

We now officially support modding for Dream Engines and we opened the Steam Workshop for uploading and downloading of mods.

The current level of modding support lets you change configuration files that determine the game's content, balancing, and many systems. You can also upload custom sprites that can be used for example for adding resources or equipment. All language files are moddable too so you can add community-based translations for the game.

Support for additional modding functionality will be added later down the road if there is demand for it. We'll make a more detailed post about our modding support on Steam in the next few days. For more information, see our Modding Guide

Tier 3 enemy creatures

When you reached 5 skulls or high threat levels, you may have noticed that we used larger & stronger versions of the tier-2 enemies. In this update we added new tier-3 enemies, which will improve the balance and overall feel of the late game.

Balancing and quality of life improvements

Lots of balancing and quality of life improvements were made, most of them based on your feedback. Some of the more important ones:

  • Tiny can now move between buildings.
  • When raids split and attack using different paths, you will now see them all in the minimap.
  • We added fuel caches in some maps as another way to get fuel early on.
  • When buildings are attacked their position will now appear in the minimap.
  • Depleted resources now suffer a larger penalty, but resource nodes start with more resources.
Performance improvements

We've identified and improved some performance bottlenecks, especially in the late game when the map is full of carts travelling to resource drop-offs.

We know we still have more optimizations to do, and will keep improving in future updates. If you encounter a situation where the game's performance is bad, please follow the instructions in this post and send us the save file, it will really help if we can identify those poor performance situations so we can improve and optimize them.

Full Change List

Build 267 to 300

Added
  • Players can now create, download, and upload mods.
  • Steam workshop was enabled for mods.
  • Added a new biome - Ashfall Range, available at map difficulties 4 and above.
  • Added a new resource unique to the Ashfall Range - Liquid Fire, and two additional resources derrived from it.
  • Added additional production recipes for fuel and power based on liquid fire
  • Added alternative production recipes for creating carbonite and dream mixture so players have some more choice.
  • Added a materializer recipe for Cabtus production, which requires an add-on that uses liquid fire.
  • Added a new type of weapon that shoots three projectiles in a fan-like shape (a shotgun like weapon).
  • Added higher tier upgrades to the rapid gun and the new spreadgun so they are better suite for higher difficulties.
  • Added a new higher tier armor to improve late-game survival.
  • Added tier 3 enemies that will be used in higher difficulty maps and raids instead of using stronger versions of the tier 2 enemies like we did before.
  • Added 'Fuel Cache' map traits that can appear in some biomes and always contains fuel, which could help to avoid running out of fuel in early game. This trait appears in the destination selection like others.
  • The Dreamtouched Fields (blue) biome now has its own weather effect, as well as a new weather effect for the new Ashfall biome.
  • Added an additional strip mining technology (but slightly reduced the first one), so the total bonus to resources can reach 25%.
  • Dream Archives now has a Resources tab where you can see more detailed information about all researched resources, including how to produce them and what they are used in.
  • New music track for the Ashfall Range biome (also added to the soundtrack DLC).
Changed
  • Ironman difficulty setting is now off in preset difficulties except for "Hard" and "Dream Plague". This is due to understanding that the game can be long and it can be frustrating for most players when they lose due to a silly mistake and lose all their saves. Those who want a harder challenge can still enable it at any time.
  • Tiny can now move between most buildings.
  • The amount of resources per resource node are now higher, but when they deplete the penalty is more severe - production speed reduced to 35% from the previous 50% value.
  • When a building is attacked there is now an indicator in the minimap in addition to the warning message.
  • When an enemy raid is spread out or splits so that the raiding creatures are far away from each other, additional indicators will appear in the minimap so you can track the entire raid group and not just one part of it.
  • You can now prevent specific harvesters from sending carts to resource drop-offs by giving them rail outputs.
  • Players can now place raw materials in production buildings directly even if the input inventory of that building is full (a way to get rid of materials you picked up along the way).
  • When flying, resources that can't be taken with you will now also be removed from input slots of production buildings.
  • Significant improvements to Dream Archives lets you see for each building what production recipes are available in it, what upgrades and add-ons, for each resource where it is produced, what it is used in, and more.
  • Removed the Upgrades tab from the Dream Archives (you can now see each building's upgrades and add-ons directly in the building's page).
  • Added icons to Dream Archives subject list.
  • Added a filter to the Dream Archives.
  • Dream Archives are now sorted alphabetically.
  • Added some information to raw resource item descriptions regarding where they can be found.
  • Tarbomb turret now has its own explosion effect.
  • The maximum map difficulty is now 8. It was supposed to be so before, but players could manually select higher difficulties even though it didn't have any benefits. Now they can't.
  • Harvesters now send carts to drop-offs at slower rates, which significantly improves performance in large maps full of harvesters. This doesn't affect balancing because a harvester will send all the resources it has in a single cart.
  • Doubled the maximum storage of harvesters output slots so they don't fill up when carts take longer to send as described above.
  • Cabtus food recipe now uses raw cabtus instead of carbon mix, making it less expensive to produce, but it now requires a low amount of purptatoes as well.
  • Slightly lowered the penalties of the Dream Weavers tribe and increased their Flux bonus.
  • Added a tootlip when hovering the cycle counter that explains what a cycle is.
  • Repeating research now contribute to final score.
  • Tweaked the some of the scoring elements, namely reduced the score from research and increased that of city area expansions.
  • Tweaked the Surge ability so it takes much less time to charge and deals damage in a larger area around Tiny.
  • Added a tooltip to the depleted resource warning that appears on top of the harvester which shows the exact penalty of the depleted effect.
  • Renewable gathering infrastructure upgrades now improve materializer production speed as well.
  • Fixed and tweaked some texts to make them clearer.
  • Positive/negative modifier effects now appear red/green all around the game.
  • When "pause in menus" is enabled, the game will now pause when editing the HUD resource tracker.
  • You can now add several resources at once to the HUD resource tracker instead of having to add them one by one.
  • Tweaked appearance of some tooltips to show Building/Crafting costs in a more consistent manner.
  • Minimap trackers for active enemies in raid now appear smaller than the indicator that warns of where the raid will spawn at.
  • Tips are now displayed in the in-game menu (ESC menu) in addition to the loading screen.
  • Added a missing sound effect when scrapping ruins.
  • Crafting recipes from Drep remains now have their own icons.
  • Default key for rotating building changed to 'G' which is easier to use, and the other direction is no longer assigned by default. This helps solve problems with some keyboard layouts (like German), and really there are only 4 rotations so there was no need to rotate to both directions. Still, players can assign the other rotation key if they want.
  • Added a keyboard shortcut for removing entrances/exits (it's not bound to any key by default though).
  • Added a tip that explains that melee attacks hit multiple targets and are great for large groups of close-quarter enemies.
  • Made Atlas turrets and metal walls 10%-15% stronger.
  • Unprocessed resources can now be tracked in the HUD.
  • Reversed order of city weight display so it will show "weight / capacity" instead of "capacity / weight".
  • Uncommon resources (Acid Shards, Crystals, etc) now spawn a few more nodes.
  • Liquid Dream costs a bit more renewable materials, but Nightmare Plating requires one less Liquid Dream.
Fixed
  • Performance improvements to late game especially when there are lots of harvesters and resource drop-offs.
  • Significant improvement to tile screen performance so that it no longer causes the graphics card to work too hard.
  • Improved performance by removing redundant models from the map edges (that were always hidden by fog of war anyway).
  • Fixed a bug that prevented carts from recalculating their route when building/removing buildings that should block them.
  • Fixed a bug in which when a single harvester didn't have a route to the resource drop off, it could prevent other harvesters from sending their resources as well.
  • Fixed a bug that caused some UI elements in the building window (such as the enable/disable button) to disappear on some screen resolutions.
  • Fixed a bug in which expanding the city to include new buildings that were already there did not add their weight until they were moved.
  • Fixed a bug that caused long-range power transmitters to appear "outside of power range" after disabling and then re-enabling them.
  • Fixed bug that could cause cart movement to break when changing which resources a resource drop-off receives.
  • Fixed a bug in which the Smoker item and Tiny's death did not increase/reduce threat level as it should.
  • Fixed a very rare bug in which production would cease in a building if it had to consume two resources of the same type in the same frame (only happened at very high consumption rates such as materializer, and on low framerates).
  • Fixed muzzle flash issue for rapid gun.
  • Removed duplicate choices of the same resolution in the resolution selection drop-down.
  • Fixed issue with player projectiles passing through enemies without hitting them in lower frame-rates.
  • Fixed a small display issue in the purple biome minimap for blocking terrain.
  • Fixed issue where changing a selected subject in the Dream Archives would keep the scrolled position instead of scrolling back to the top of the new subject.
  • The hints that show when building now shows the actual assigned key for rotating a building instead of the default value.

Early Access Patch 4 - Build 267

  • You can now expand your city to areas where you already have buildings without having to move or destroy them, as long as none of those buildings are partially within the expansion area and partially outside it.
  • Tiny can now pass through tiles with rail crossings.
  • The repeating research in the end was tweaked down since it was overpowered. The bonuses it provides are about half the previous ones, and the costs for researching it increase every time the research is complete.
  • Fixed a bug where after switching a map or reloading a saved game, the bonuses from the repeating research were lost until it was researched one more time.
  • Fixed a bug where nightmare reinforcements to turrets would not give any bonuses.
  • Faster global infestation growth from having a large city & infrastructure upgrades limited to a maximum of +70% over the base value. This means that if your city grows very quickly, the global infestation will not increase as much faster than usual as it did before (but it will still increase faster than usual up to the maximum).
  • Fixed a bug where the upgrades layer UI would not refresh if it was open while you upgrade a building through the building window.
  • Made total weight and weight capacity rounding from X.5 to be consistent (total weight always rounds down at X.5, and weight capacity will round up).
  • City information window now displays the current rail speed.
  • Fixed a bug in simplified and traditional Chinese that would break the city information window.
  • Added the ability to bind mouse buttons to keyboard shortcuts, starting from mouse button 4 and onwards (left click, right click and middle click are still hard coded and cannot be re-bound).
  • Made it possible to change the resolution even in full-screen. Choosing resolutions below the desktop resolution may create blurring effects.
  • Added a 240 maximum FPS option, though on the majority of systems the game will not be able to reach such numbers.
  • Using an ability that takes time to charge will now initiate the cooldown as soon as the charging begins. This will prevent players from accidently using several consumables of the same kind while the ability is charging.
  • Flux, power and fuel now slowly drop when over-capacity, instead of immediately dropping. This way if a storage building is temporarily disabled you will still be able to salvage most of the resources if you quickly repair it. This is now similar to how you lose workers when there is overpopulation. The rate at which these resources decrease varies (flux drops fastest, fuel slowest).
  • Loot drop animation a bit faster, and less delay before you can pick them up. Also increased the loot pickup range. This allows more easy scavenging of debris with less delay.
  • Increase of city expansion costs grow slower now at higher levels (more than 20-30 expansions), making the costs more realistic.
  • Fixed a bug where the tips for repairing when activating the repair tool would remain on screen until relaoding.
  • Fixed a bug where you could remove a building add-on after selecting a production recipe that requires that add-on, and it would continue producing it.
  • Fixed a bug in Ironman mode that prevented the game from being saved when there was a backup save file that remained from a previous failed save (can happen if a player terminates the game while it's saving).
  • Increased the amount of cycles worth of threat removed by the Smoker to 20 instead of 10.
  • Text tweaks and fixes.

Early Access Patch 3 - Build 263

  • Fixed a bug where every time Tiny activated emergency teleport, bonuses to maximum population from infrastructure upgrades would get re-added over and over again. This would reset after leaving the map or reloading a save, which would cause a drop in maximum population and people starting to die.
  • Fixed a bug when you had multiple resource drop-offs that accepted different resources, then sometimes the pathfinding for some of the carts would not re-calculate when you build or demolish buildings, causing them to get stuck and after a while really hurt performance when hundreds of carts would get stuck at the same spot.
  • Tweaked map generation so there is a little more building space around the city and clearings are a bit larger.
  • Balanced building upgrades so they are more efficient (less increase in maintenance costs), and no longer less worthwhile than building more buildings of lower levels. Tweaked the price of said upgrades a bit as well to be higher, so upgrading creates a trade-off between high up-front costs, while saving space and weight.
  • Made some advanced recipes for flux, power, research and upgrade materials a bit more efficient and worthwhile.
  • Apartment a bit more efficient now (less food consumption, less weight, a bit more max population - base and upgrades).
  • A bit higher Flux production with all recipes.
  • Incresed Tiny's base speed when not attacking and some of the speed bonuses.
  • 1 Skull maps now always have both featherstone and bloodwood.
  • Fixed a bug where you couldn't move a Materializer if you reached the maximum amount of this building.
  • Fixed a bug that when a building is destroyed in the middle of trying to move it, you could still place it with 0 health after it was destroyed.
  • Made FPS limit configurable (default is now 30).
  • New sound when an attack is preparing, different from the regular alarm (people dying, etc).
  • Made the city info area in the HUD a button so it's clearer that it can be pressed to open the city information window.
  • Added a learning message after the first time that you fly to a new destination, explaining that you can open the city information window that also shows information about current map.
  • You can no longer switch to management mode in the first tutorial mission (the one where you learn the basic controls). Players who accidently switched didn't know they had to switch back in order to complete the tutorial.
  • Text fixes.

Small Patches

Build 261 - fixed a bug that would break the game if a building was highlighted by hovering it in management mode at the time that it was destroyed by enemies.

Build 261 - unlocking the Dream Weavers now requires 3000 flux as noted instead of 3001.

Build 261 - fixed texts and typos.

Build 260 - the "Still Learning" difficulty now has ironman off by default.

Build 260 - minor tweaks to some "Forgiving" difficulty settings making them a tiny bit easier.

Build 260 - preset difficulty levels now have color codes.

Build 260 - added the ability to bind a keyboard key to rotate the camera in addition to the middle mouse button.

Build 260 - added missing texts for zoom in and out key binding.



Build 0.5.259 - Early Access Release

July 14, 2021

The early access release build brings a large content update and lots of polish, UX, quality of life and bug-fixes. We also introduced six new languages.

Below are some of the more significant changes in this update. I hope you enjoy it, and as always looking forward to hearing your feedback. The full list of changes can be found below that.

Note: Since the change is so significant, saves from previous alpha versions are not supported. If you wish to continue your old games, you can still play the older version by selecting one of the previous alpha builds from the betas tab on Steam.

Other than this update we spent a big portion of the last month or two preparing for launch - making a new trailer, reaching out to press and content creators, preparing a game guide, and many other related tasks.

Mid-game economic content and balancing

One of the bigger changes to the game is in the mid-game phase, after you leave your starting map and have gathered plenty of Bloodwood and Featherstone. We've added two new resource nodes - Crystals and Cabtus, both in the desert maps.

We've also added several new refined materials, some are made of a combination of multiple raw resources which can't fly, so they can only be produced in maps that have all these resources present at the same time. We've rebalanced several of the buildings, upgrades and crafting recipes to use these new materials, and we also added multiple recipes to produce Flux, power, upgrade materials, research, etc - all using these new refined materials.

These advanced materials can also be used to build an apartment block, a more efficient version of the house to increase your city's population.

Landing area traits

When you take-off and search for a new place to land your city, the landing area selection has become much more interesting. Other than the new resources, we've also added random map traits to each option. These traits can have various positive and negative effects that will take place during your next landing, and will require you to adjust your strategy and choose your destination more carefully.

Each biome now also has constant bonuses and penalties. For example, the desert map allows your stone worker and harvesters to produce much faster, but on the other hand your purptato farms produce much slower due to the dry weather. You'll need to build more farms or find alternative food sources.

Tribe selection

When you start a new game, you now get to select the tribe that you will be playing. Each tribe has different bonuses and penalties, some of which may significantly change your strategy. You can unlock new tribe options while playing with other tribes.

In this build there are two playable tribes, and we will add more in the coming updates.

Weather effects

To add some more life into the game, we added a couple of weather effects that may occur randomly. These effects do not impact the gameplay, they're just visual atmospheric aids.

Musical scores and audio

Each biome now has its own unique musical score that will randomly play between sets of the more generic ambient music. Alon Kaplan did some great work with these, and we're sure you'll enjoy listening to them while you play.

We've also added shorter musical cues when you leave a map, and when you win or lose a game. Lots of new and changed sound effects and ambient city sound that slowly fades into wilderness ambiance was were added as well.

Spider thing

A new mid-level enemy - the Spider thing - was intorduced. These creatures shoot at a range longer than the previous ranged enemies, and at a significantly faster firing rate, but they come in smaller numbers and are not very hard to kill.

Gameplay changes

Plenty of balancing, bug-fixing, UX, quality-of-life, and gameplay changes have been introduced. A few notable ones include the removal of ammo from ranged weapons, more difficulty customization, a new production layer in the management mode HUD, a city overview window, and the ability to configure the resource panel in the HUD.

Full Change List

Build 221 to 259

Added
  • New mechanic: Map modifiers. Every map now has one of several modifier options which can give dramatic bonuses or penalties.
  • Each biome now has permanent bonuses and penalties depending on the biome.
  • Added support for new languages: French, Russian, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Japanese and German.
  • Added weather visual effects. At the moment they don't have any effect on gameplay.
  • New art when winning the game.
  • Added several pre-defined difficulty presets that will automatically set all the individual settings to cater to different preferences. Manual customization is still possible.
  • Added more difficulty customization options, including an economic difficulty.
  • New mechanic: tribe selection when starting a new game. Different tribes have different characteristics and bonuses that require different strategies. Currently two tribes are available, more will be added.
  • New Enemy: Spider Thing with longer range and rapid fire that comes in small numbers.
  • Added an overview window when clicking the city name or threat level. This shows all the current global bonuses, info about the current map, city levels and perks unlocked with each level, and other general information about the city.
  • When switching from crossbow to rapid gun, the model on Tiny will now change.
  • Added a button for the in-game menu (ESC key) on the HUD.
  • Added three new musical scores by our awesome Alon Kaplan, one for each biome, played randomly between sections of the ambient music.
  • Added musical cue for finishing a map, winning, and losing the game.
  • Added raw resources Cabtus and Crystals.
  • Added a bunch of refined resources, some requiring the presense of several raw resources on the same map.
  • Added new, more efficient production recipes for food, power, flux, research, upgrade materials, and more.
  • Added a new apartment building that is more space and weight effective than the smaller houses.
  • Added a credits screen
  • New "Production" layer in management mode that shows what each building is producing and lets you change it directly on the map.
  • Added city ambiance sound that slowly switches to wilderness when walking away from the city.
  • You can now configure the resource list that appears in the top-left of the HUD.
  • Added the ability to repair buildings.
  • Added a global warning when you don't have enough workers and some buildings are disabled.
  • Added a recurring research at the end of the research tree that you can research again and again (at increasing costs) for additional bonuses.
Changed
  • Removed ammo mechanic. Ranged weapons can now be used without any ammo requirements.
  • Starting map now always has one ruins area.
  • Starting city area and each expansion are now 1 tile longer in each dimension.
  • Replaced executable & steam library icon.
  • Added and replaced several sound effects.
  • Materializer production recipes balanced so they only use Flux and are much more useful, but also added a limit to how many materializers you can have.
  • Last game's difficulty settings are now remembered when starting a new game.
  • Balanced which enemies appear on the map so that resources and farther areas of the map have more and harder enemeis than those close to the city.
  • Reduced amount of small ruins around the large ones, but they each yield more loot now.
  • New window design for production recipe selection.
  • Enemies no longer attack autocarts, neither on rails nor all-terrain carts. They may still attack the harvester buildings.
  • The game now auto-saves before closing with ALT-F4 or returning to main menu.
  • Replaced the Charged Cannon with a Rapid Gun (similar functionality, different name and appearance).
  • We gave our Steambot a name - Tiny!
  • Renamed "Relaxed Mode" because it was misrepresenting the game feel when activated.
  • Stored resources window now has a City tab (that does not include Tiny's resources) in addition to the All tab.
  • Ambiance sound effects now have a separate volume slider.
  • Changed economy balance to use the new resources in several recipes and blueprints.
  • Added an icon on top of raw resources that shows these icons can not fly.
  • Keyboard binding window now has categories
  • Made the resource drop-off and storage building a tier 2 resource instead of tier 3. They no longer require copper and can be built earlier in the game to automate resource transportation from harvesters.
  • Tutorial now teaches rotating camera and resetting to default view.
  • Tuned down the smoke-screen module which was a bit OP.
  • Balanced some ruins crafting costs.
  • Added a grid in management mode so you can more easily tell in which mode you are in.
  • Changed the general warning icon when a building is manually disabled to a more descriptive icon.
  • Each production recipe now shows which categories it belongs to (to more easily figure out which bonuses apply to it).
  • Management mode can now be separated from top-down camera. You can manually switch camera mode and management/combat mode separately (by default they are still connected).
  • Tutorial objective now appears as complete for a second before continuing to the next objective/mission.
  • Situational tutorials are now shown at least once even when the tutorial itself is disabled. If you finish the tutorial you can start a new game with it disabled, and you will still be introduced to new mechanics you haven't enountered yet.
  • Updated and improved the tutorial, and added more situational tutorials.
  • Shift + clicking on a research that is already queued will dequeue it and anything that comes after it.
  • Production recipes that are unavailable due to missing upgrades/add-ons will now have an icon next to them in the recipe selection list.
  • Players can now disable turrets manually again.
  • Reorganized the build info panel so it's more clear where the building costs are and where the maintenance costs are shown.
  • Balanced some maintenance costs.
  • The game will now auto save just before being raided.
  • Some building add-ons now cancel each other and you can't build them together.
  • Default difficulty level is now a little more forgiving, with a recommendation to switch to the challenging difficulty after learning the basics of the game.
  • Separated the raid timer from the threat timer. Bonuses/penalties (such as smoke-screen or dying) that affect the threat level will no longer affect how long between raids.
  • Melee attack has a bit wider AOE now.
  • Harvesters on depleted resources production rate incresed to 50% making them more useful.
  • You now need to expand the city more times in the areas close to the center before you can choose to expand farther away.
Fixed
  • Scrapping a building will now also refund 50% of the add-on and upgrade costs, not just the building itself.
  • Fixed bug that showed wrong resolution in settings after restarting the game.
  • Fixed towers kept shooting at enemies outside of vision range without dealing any damage.
  • Fixed research progress showing 0% for completed research.
  • Fixed an issue where configuring key mapping didn't always work.
  • Fixed issue with AOE weapon explosion particles showing broken building pieces.
  • Fixed bug where a building's production could become stuck when the consumption of raw materials was very fast.
  • Fixed issue in production recipe chooser where costs were not shown for all recipes if the first recipe in the list had no costs.
  • Fixed a bug where building entrances and exits were always shown even when they were behind buildings, after saving a game or grabbing a screenshot.
  • Fixed bug that caused upgrade layer to sometimes show the warnings line even when there was no warnings.
  • Fixed a bug where you couldn't open a resource's UI because there were enemies nearby. You still can't build a harvester, but you can open the UI now.
  • Fixed featherstone icon in destination selection to show featherstone and not crushed featherstone.
  • Fixed had in lower aspect ratios so it doesn't overlap. It does get smaller if the aspect ratio is too low so we recommend 16:10 or higher.
  • Building exits remained when the rails themselves were removed, if the building was in the city and the rail outside - after flying.
  • Fixed an issue when switching from managemenet to combat view and the camera would stop following Tiny for the duration of the transition.
  • Fixed a problem in how the game behaved when placing a long rail line and only having enough Flux for some of it.
  • Fixed a bug when there were very few enemies on the map they could enter the visible area and remain invisible, wreaking havoc on your city.
  • Fixed issue where some building and item icons were blurry.
  • Fixed cursor issue when switching between management and combat mode when the cursor did not have the default cursor icon.
  • Fixed blurriness and other issues with biome images.
  • Loading a game in the middle of a raid will now start the raid music.
  • Fixed an issue with building a rail into a building that doesn't create a crossing like it should.
  • Fixed raiding enemies getting stuck when there were lot of static enemies blocking them outside the view range.
  • Fixed issue in production recipe selection where an upgrade/add-on was missing and the message was not shown correctly.
  • Bonuses that give extra loot from debris/enemies was not working and were fixed.
  • Fixed texts and typos.


Build 0.4.219 - Alpha 4 - Swarms Update

March 13, 2021

The swarms update mainly tackled combat, balancing and performance aspects related to it. We made the combat more fast-paced and with a better flow to it, mainly through the use of weaker, faster enemies that come in much larger numbers. In this update we also added a major UX change that better separates city-management tools from combat controls, allowing us to show more information and simplify the UI for each phase.

Below are some of the main changes in this update. I hope you enjoy it, and as always I am really looking forward to getting your feedback. The full list of changes can be found below that.

Note: Since the change is so significant, saves from previous alpha versions are not supported. If you wish to continue your old games, you can still play the older version by selecting one of the previous alpha builds from the betas tab on Steam.

We also spent several weeks since our previous update working on a demo version that was available for a limited time during the Steam Festival. It is no longer up-to-date, however, and keeping it so would consume additional resources - so the demo is no longer available.

Swarms - faster, better flowing combat

My original direction regarding steambot combat while exploring was to give it a feel of survival - where every shot counts and every hit hurts. But I also didn't want to put too much emphasis on quick reflexes, since this is after all primarily a strategy/building game.

The result was some kind of hybrid, where enemies attacked in medium numbers, so there was no intense 1 on 1 combat against strong bosses, but neither were they quick and simple combat encounters. We were not happy with it. I came to a realization that to create proper survival-style combat we'd have to put a lot of resources into combat alone - with many unique enemies, each with a different set of behaviors, and complex AI. This would be almost like making a whole new game, and we prefer to spend the majority of our valuable time and resources on improving the city building aspects, adding more content, and making an interesting world to explore.

So I decided to simplify the combat mechanics, make them faster, simpler, and more rewarding. The solution came in the form of swarms. The vast majority of enemies you will enounter following this update are weak enemies that can be killed with a single hit. They attack in much larger numbers, making the whole fight quicker and more action-packed. Skill is an important factor, if you manage to get yourself surrounded by tens of dream plagues you'll get hurt bad. That said, you don't need to be an expert player in order to fight well, as long as you have decent equipment on your steambot and city defenses.

Combat balancing

With the change from a few stronger enemies to swarms of hundreds of weaker ones, there was a lot of balancing that needed to be done.

Melee was pretty much worthless because you could only hit one enemy at a time, at short range, while being surrounded by tens of them. So we made all melee attacks into area attacks that could hit multiple enemies. This introduced a problem with the special melee weapons that had splash damage - they became unecessary if all melee attacks dealed damage to a whole area.

Heavy crossbows were totally useless, with a very slow firing rate that would hit a single target and deal 10x more damage than was necessary to kill it. So we made them shoot explosive shots that hit several enemies for high damage. The light crossbows were better, firing 5 shots in succession, but even they were a bit too slow for the swarms, so we increased their combo to 10 shots, and slightly increased their fire rate. We also added upgrades that increase ranged attack speed even further.

We faced similar issues with turrets. These had a more interesting solution. We have 3 turrets (wood, tarbomb, and copper tiers). So the basic wooden turret now has slower firing rate but deals explosive damage that can hit several enemies, and kills the weaker ones in a single shot. The tarbomb turret has a very long range, deals even more explosive damage with double the explosion area, but fires even slower - perfect for defending a large area against weaker enemies. The copper tier turret, we gave a single-target attack, but they fire at much faster rates with much higher DPS. The high DPS makes it perfect against bosses and stronger enemies, while also efficient against swarms of weaker enemies due to its high firing rate.

Which brings me to the next issue - with hordes of weaker enemies, at some point, the numbers stop mattering. If there is a choke point that allows a limited amount of enemies to pass through, at some point your defenses with 3-4 turrets can destroy any number of enemies faster than they can pass through. Increasing the amount of enemies makes no difference. So we needed some stronger enemeis to add to the mix, which required a slightly different strategy, and allowed us to better control the difficulty curve. There are now 4 sizes of each enemy - small, regular, large and boss. small, regular, and to a lesser degree large enemies can show up in the map while exploring. Bosses only show up in higher difficulty raids, and can challenge your low-DPS area of effect towers.

This is step one, in future updates we'll add more weapons, defenses and abilities - each better suited against different enemies - which will also consist of more unique types. We'll add special bosses in the map guarding unique treasures, and other goodies to make combat more interesting.

Management mode

There's a lot going on in Dream Engines. You have a city to manage, a world to explore, enemies to fight, and a steambot to customize. Each of these requires different controls, and mixing them all together is a challenge that could get confusing for players. Most city-building games let you left-click a building to open it, but fighting and exploration requires left-click to attack. So, to make things easier and less complex, we decided to separate them.

In comes management mode. Previously, pressing space-bar opened the strategic view, which changed the camera angle and added some info and buttons on the map. Now, space-bar toggles between combat mode and management mode, and each mode behaves very differently.

In management mode, left-clicking does not trigger an attack. Instead, it can be used to open a building's interface, and lets you manage these buildings without having to move your steambot near each building you want to open. Management mode is now the only mode in which you can build, move, and demolish buildings, and we added keyboard shortcuts to select buildings and categories.

In combat mode, left and right clicking are used to attack with your Steambot's weapons. The keyboard shortcuts that would let you select buildings in management mode now let you activate quick-bar items and abilities. Re-using the same keys like this was not possible before when there was a single control scheme.

Ammunition

After a lot of thought and uncertainty whether adding ammunition to the game will make it more interesting or just add micromanagement, we decided to add it in a fairly simplified manner, another small consideration into how you fight enemies with your steambot. Ranged weapons now have an additional drawback compared to melee, in the form of using up ammunition.

At the moment there is only one ammo type used by all weapons, it is a global resource (so you don't need to deal with inventory management), and it is fairly easy to produce. It does cost some resources and Flux, so players will be a bit better off economically if they use less ranged weapons and more melee, but it's not a blocker on using ranged weapons.

In the future, we are considering different ways to expand on this - exotic weapons that are very strong but use more expensive ammo, maybe even some that use ammo which you can only find, and can't produce or craft. Another option is switching ammo for the same weapon, with different costs & beneifts.

The management/combat mode separation also freed up some screen real-estate to show currently equipped weapons & their ammo in the HUD.

Title screen & music

We have a brand new title screen, that comes with a new original music score by Alon Kaplan. This beautiful piece will serve as Dream Engines' main theme.

Full Change List

Build 179 to 219

Added
  • We added a brand new animated title screen with new original music by Alon Kaplan.
  • Added short musical themes when winning or losing the game.
  • New 'Management Mode' and 'Combat mode' that allow different control schemes, one for managing the city and one for exploring and fighting.
  • Added keyboard shortcuts for selecting constructions in the build menu.
  • Now showing all keyboard shortcuts on their buttons in the UI.
  • Added an ammo resource that is consumed when attacking with your steambot's ranged weapons. Turrets still produce their own ammo and only require power.
Changed
  • Enemies now have lower health but come in much larger numbers.
  • The same enemy can come in four different sizes. The weaker variants can usually be killed in one or two hits, but the larger ones introduce an extra challenge.
  • Wooden turrets now deal area damage but fire at a slower rate.
  • Significantly increased the range and explosion area of the Tarbomb turret.
  • Atlas Turrets have a much faster firing rate and DPS, but shorter range and will not deal area damage like the other two turrets.
  • Tarbomb turret can now be upgraded like the other turrets.
  • Walls are stronger to make up for the increse in enemy raid sizes.
  • Light crossbows have slightly faster firing rate, and can fire 10 shots instead of 5 in each combo.
  • Heavy crossbows now deal explosive damage in an area around the target they hit.
  • All ranged weapons have longer range. Especially with heavy crossbows enemies can be attacked before they aggro (which will trigger an aggro in them and their neighbors).
  • Melee weapons will now deal damage to all the targets that they hit, and not just one.
  • Melee and heavy crossbows now auto-fire like light crossbows, so you can keep the mouse pressed for consecutive attacks.
  • Charged canon now shoots faster, has a longer combo (20 shots instead of 10), but uses up more ammo per shot - compared to the light crossbow.
  • Melee weapons with splash damage are now very effective against large groups, because they can hit multiple targets and each target hit will also deal splash damage to their neighbors.
  • Difficulty increase of enemies when you move farther away from the city in the map is now more pronounced.
  • Turrets range and attack rate now increases when you upgrade them, and not only damage.
  • Ranged damage and turret damage perks in the infrastructure upgrades window now also increase attack rate.
  • Tweaked enemy drops and drop-rate for different enemy types and sizes.
  • Enemies now have lower aggro range, but a larger aggro neighbor area, and they will now aggro when they are attacked. So when an enemy does aggro, more of its neighbors will join it.
  • Enemies will now chase the player any distance from their original position, as long as the player is within their increased aggro range. Increased aggro range is used for deciding when to de-aggro a hostile enemy and is longer than the range that will cause an idle enemy to become aggresive.
  • Enemies now have separate aggro range for units and for buildigns. Buildings aggro range is shorter so they are unlikely to attack your city after landing.
  • Destroying small resource nodes now drops refined resources instead of raw. These now serve as a quick way to boost your resource stocks and make exploration more rewarding even when you don't have the economic capacity to exploit more resource nodes.
  • Tweaked balance of some building upgrades that were a bit overpowered. Mainly increased their prices and how much they add to upkeep, so that when upgrading many buildings you also need to expand your city and improve your basic (power/flux) economy to keep them active. The main benefits of upgraded buildings are better worker efficiency and saving city space/weight.
  • Flux storage is now limited, so players need to constantly balance their Flux production and spending, instead of stocking up on huge amounts that remain forever.
  • Flux storage capacity can be increased by building storage buildings and upgrading the city core.
  • Fuel storage is now limited, so players can't stock up on infinite fuel supplies and need to constantly keep an eye on it.
  • Flight engines, city core upgrades and storage buildings increase fuel capacity.
  • Slightly increased movement speed of all enemies and the player's steambot.
  • Can now open a building's UI without moving next to it, by left-clickign on it while in management mode.
  • Opening management mode no longer shows the upgrade buttons by default. Instead, there is a layers toolbar that lets you enable or disable it.
  • The toolbar and build interface only show in management mode now.
  • The main toolbar (crafting, journal, tools, etc) was moved to the bottom-center, and the demolish button is now a top-level button.
  • Keyboard shortcuts for building (build rails, copy building) and demolishing now only work in management mode.
  • You can no longer attack with your steambot while in management mode.
  • Quickbar shortcuts only work in combat mode now.
  • Now highlighting buildings and showing their name and level when hovering the mouse over them in management mode.
  • Building windows no longer require you steambot to be near them to stay open. Exploration POIs like ruins are an exception.
  • Building warnings are now visible when showing the upgrades layer (previously strategic view).
  • Improved performance of opening the upgrades layer (previously strategic view).
  • Significant performance improvements in all cases and especially with a large amount of enemies.
  • Reduced slowdown time when attacking by half.
  • Enemies spawn a bit farther away from the city now, so they won't attack immediately after landing.
  • Players can now expand their city area on top of blocked terrain. They still need to remove any of their own buildings first.
  • Improved enemy movement AI so they overlap each other less, and don't keep moving randomly when their way is blocked, but instead queue up.
  • Minimap icons are now darker, and only appear brighter when you build a harvester on them.
  • Can no longer disable some buildings that have very specific functions, such as the flight engine and turrets. This is to avoid players turning them on only when needed and not really having to support their maintenance costs.
  • Increased input storage of buildings with very-fast consumption rate, so that you can supply them through multiple rails. This especially affets the upgraded food plant.
  • Re-balanced glow honey and fuel production so that they produce much slower. The original numbers were done before the outskirts update and were designed for much shorter map durations.
  • Glow honey is now a perishable resource that doesn't fly with you from map to map, so you can't stock up on it.
  • All crafting recipes that required glow honey now use fuel instead.
  • Fuel is now shown in the resource panel (so you can see its production rate and maximum capacity).
  • Reduced amount of purple plants in non-blocked areas, so that they are less likely to be confused with blocked areas.
  • Atlas Bolts (ranged weapon ammo) can now be produced at the wood warper.
  • You now see which weapons you have equipped and ammo for each weapon in the bottom-left of the screen, when in combat mode.
  • Selecting a build category will no longer auto-select a building in that category.
  • Made the placeable folding turret stronger.
  • Increased health of the decoy.
  • Map generation - made the clearings a bit larger allowing for more buildings within each clearing. Build area around the city remains the same, this is only for taking over additional areas.
  • Fuel crafting is now always available in all ruins, at a high price. The previous, more efficient fuel crafting recipe can still be found in some ruins in addition to the one that always appears.
  • Fixed and improved the localization infrastructure for additional language support. The translations and language choices will be added soon.
  • City weight will now remain visible when take-off is charging, so that you can still move things around without going overweight and stopping the charging process.
  • We will now show the leave feedback prompt again even if you already left it, every couple of new builds, so that we can get up-to-date feedback. Of course you're not forced to provide feedback, simply asked kindly.
  • Removed the white particles from the green pools, so they are not confused with destructible objects.
  • Added a destruction effect to destructible resources and debris.
  • Replaced the Smell-ter animation to something more interesting.
  • Area damage stats of turrets is now shown in their stats window when interacting with them.
  • Balanced threat increase so its a bit faster, and gets even faster after you've been in the same map for a long time.
  • Tweaked desert map generation to have less plants and debris in open areas.
  • Improved resolution of desktop icon.
  • Pressing F1 now shows the current tutorial objective again.
  • Incresed text size of windows with long texts (tutorial, win/lose screen, etc).
  • Moving enemies now ignore idle enemies when checking for collisions and movement (this is usually not seen by players). This prevents raid enemies from getting slown down and forming long lines, and they can now move as groups better.
Fixed
  • Fixed bug where raw materials were not removed from the resource drop-off when taking off.
  • Fixed a bug that caused entrance/exit icons to take-off with the city even when they belonged to buildings outside of the city that remained on the ground.
  • Fixed audio in left and right speakers being reversed.
  • Fixed a bug where due to float-point accuracy issues the city would not take-off when the charging bar was full, in some rare cases.
  • Fixed an issue where some texts that were supposed to blink to draw attention didn't.
  • Take-off camera now centers on the city correctly in non-default map sizes.
  • Fixed the minimap icon for acid shards, that was showing copper instead.
  • Fixed a bug where enemeis could be stuck on their way to the city in raids.
  • Fixed issues with ultra-wide screens where full-screen UIs were only shown in part of it.
  • Item selection window will now be closed when you press ESC together with its containing UI (such as the character window).
  • Fixed storage building animation.
  • Fixed typos in tutorial.
  • Fixed bug where completing tutorial objectives would show a milestone achieved message.
  • Fixed issue where enemies would spawn on top of resource nodes.
  • Fixed issue where some buliding types had all the animations of all buildings of that typed synced which looked weird.

Small Patches

Build 179 - added the missing copper drill blueprint to the research tree.

Build 179 - fixed an issue that would break the game if you take off when there's a cart moving from a city tile to a non-city tile.

Build 178 - fixed a bug that added free expansions again and again every time you loaded a game, for every free expansion that you resarched.

Build 177 - fixed a bug that removed all planned (but not yet active) raids when saving then loading.

Build 177 - fixed a wrong prerequisite for Upgrade Production 2 & 3 infrastructure upgrade perks.

Build 177 - fixed an issue where Upgrade Production perks had a wrong tooltip (and also didn't do anything).

Build 177 - changed costs of building acid shard harvester to starwood instead of copper, since copper is a higher tier resource than acid shards.



Build 0.3.176 - Alpha 3 - Outskirts Update

January 13, 2021

The outskirts update is a significant change in how you play the game. It was mainly directly influenced by feedback we got from alpha players, that there's too much focus on walking around and fighting with your character, while not enough city building. I consider dream engines primarily a city-building game, above the action and exploration aspects, so I spent a hefty amount of time trying to analyze and figure out how we got here, and what can be done about it.

The outskirts is a step in the right direction. The main idea is that you can now build most of the buildings, including your industry, outside of the city (the 'outskirts'), and that you are now able to and even encouraged to take over additional areas of the map, build there, and defend those areas. The main difficulty we faced in that aspect is that every time you fly, you are forced to abandon a good portion of your buildings, which are built outside. So I had to re-balance the entire economy, making basic buildings much cheaper and easier to build, and made map stays longer, to make it worthwhile building outside, temporarily enjoying a stronger economy, and then scrapping some of these buildings before leaving.

This change also puts more emphasis on the need to balance between short-term, cheap constructions outside the city, which you benefit greatly from, but only for a short time, and building within your city or expanding it, for slower, but longer-term bonuses that stay with you forever. It was always our intention for you to make these kinds of meaningful choices, but it was somewhat diminished along the way, and I am happy that it is now much more significant.

Below are some of the main changes in this update, in more detail. I hope you enjoy it, and as always I am really looking forward to getting your feedback. The full list of changes can be found at the bottom.

Note: Since the change is so significant, saves from previous alpha versions are not supported. If you wish to continue your old games, you can still play the older version by selecting Alpha 1 or 2 from the betas tab on Steam.

The outskirts - building outside the city

To make the city-building aspect of the game more meaningful and a part you focus more on, we needed to add more building space, and make the environment you build in have more impact on how you build, otherwise every game can turn out the same. Since the main city area is pretty much static, we turned to the outskirts - building outside your main city platform.

Almost all buildings and infrastructure (like rails) can now be built outside the city. The starting city area is now much smaller, each section you add is also smaller, but also less expensive and available earlier in the game, so long-term you can still achieve large city sizes and take more buildings with you, if you choose to spend your resources on that. Choosing which buildings to take with you when you leave is now a real dilemma, but you can move almost all buildings at any time, including moving them inside or outside your city, so your decisions are not permanent.

To support this change in gameplay, encouraging you to build more without having to feel too bad about leaving things behind (though you can scrap them and get 50% of the building materials back), we had to significantly reduce both the costs and effectiveness of production buildings. The basic production buildings such as wood warpers, farms, flux vats and power generators are now much cheaper to build and to maintain, but also produce less (without upgrades). This encourages you to build and optimize the area outside your city, and take over & defend new areas to expand. Defense costs have also been reduced accordingly to make it easier to defend larger areas of the map.

Raids and threat levels

Our previous balancing was high-pressure & short-time, always giving you the feeling that you need to do something or be left behind. This created two problems with our new gameplay. One, you couldn't afford to spend a lot of time in the city building, planning and re-organizing, because you were always under pressure to explore and gather more resources. The other was that if your stay in each map is so short, then you aren't able to enjoy the benefits of what you build outside before you have to abandon it, and you can't exploit much of the map.

So, while we kept some of this pressure, and you still need to progress fast enough or be unable to handle the swarms of Drep (except in relaxed mode) - we did mellow it down significantly. We increased the amount of time that you can spend in every map before you have to leave. We replaced the 4-threat-levels and the extreme threat stage (which basically meant you had to go or die horribly no matter how strong you were).

Instead, threat levels are now a numeric value, starting at 0, and increasing as long as you stay in the same map. The higher the threat level, the stronger the raids on your city, but there is no hard limit in which you must leave, as long as you still have stuff to do on the map and the defensive capabilities to survive, you can stay. Once you fly away and land in a new map, the threat level will reset according to the new map's difficulty level.

Resource Harvesters

You can now build harvesters from the start, and they are the only way to collect resources from the larger nodes, no more running around punching huge resource nodes. You can still destroy the smaller nodes for some extra resources.

Other than that, you can now build rails to send resources from the harvesters to your industry. Resource nodes also have a much larger yield, so they will last for a longer time, and once they are depleted, they still continue to generate resources, but at a much lower pace.

The resource elevator (renamed to resource drop-off) can still be unlocked to automate delivery of resources from harvesters to your industrial area, without having to build long winding rail tracks from faraway resources. It can now be built outside the city, or you could still build it on the edge of your city if you prefer.

Procedural Map Generation

The map generation algorithm has been slightly changed, making most clearings smaller and having less exits. This means you will need to capture more areas in order to expand (since each area has limited construction space), but also makes them easier to defend. Resources are now also distributed a bit more evenly, and there are less of them (but they lost longer as mentioned before).

Refining

In the outskirts update, you can no longer carry raw resources with you when they fly (they are too heavy or volatile). So just exploring and collecting resources will not do you much good, you must have a strong economy to support a massive industry, and refine as many of these resources before you leave. Currently there is no storage limit, so the more resources you refine the more you can take with you when you fly away.

These include purptatoes, raw copper, bloodwood logs, and raw featherstone (which you can now refine).

Building Add-ons

Building add-ons are a new mechanic. They work somewhat similar to upgrading building levels, but they are not linear and their effect is usually more significant than just increasing production.

The flux vats and power generator are now very cheap to build and produce a much smaller amount of flux/power, but their basic recipe no longer requires any raw materials, so you can just build as many of them as you can afford outside the city. In the long-term, however, you want more productive buildings to take with you, that use less space in your limited city area. So both the flux vats and power generators have add-ons that you can unlock with research, which allow you to use more advanced recipes (using Star-Tar and other new resources) for much higher productivity.

These add-ons are much more expensive than the base building, so they are more suitable for long-term factories that you build in the city and take with you.

New Content

We've added a few new buildings, such as the Stone Worker to process featherstone, and the Atmospheric Condenser that generates a gel substance from smoke, and can be used in more advanced power and research recipes. There's a new long-range power hub, which generates a power area around it, allowing you to build outposts without having to connect them to your main city via a vulnerable line of tesla towers.

Another new addition is a building repair kit, a consumable that lets you repair all buildings around your character, useful in a tough fight.

Full Change List

Build 161 to 176

Added
  • Added several "Free Expansion" nodes to the research tree, which allow you to expand your city once for free for each node researched.
  • New atmospheric condenser building that creates a gel-like substance from smog.
  • Some buildings can now get add-ons that unlock certain production recipes.
  • Added a new stone worker buildings to refine raw featherstone into a usable variant used in construction.
  • Added a long-range power hub that lets you transfer power from the city to faraway locations without having to connect them through a line of teslas. Perfect for creating a defensive outpost away from your city.
  • Added new, more productive production recipes for power, flux, researcg, and upgrade parts.
  • Added a cheap copper-tier add-on for flux and power generators that significantly increases production using the basic recipe, to allow for scaling late-game.
  • Added a building repair kit that you can craft and then use to immediately repair all buildings around your character.
  • Added a copper recipe to the materializer (requires research).
  • Added a warning when one of your buildings is under attack.
  • Added a warning when there is an active research lab but no research subject selected.
Changed
  • Starting city size is much smaller, but you can expand it earlier and more often (in smaller increments). Expansion is now unlocked when you reach a certain city size instead of by researching.
  • Almost all buildings can now be built outside the city.
  • Rails can now be placed outside the city.
  • Modified map generation to have more "islands" but smaller, and wider paths between them.
  • Wood and stone harvesters are now available from the start, and can send carts via rails. You can no longer harvest larger nodes by attacking them.
  • Increased the yield of each resource node and reduced amount of nodes on each map.
  • Resource harvesters now continue to produce after a resource node is depleted, but at a much slower (20% of the original) pace. Maintenance costs and workers are also decreased by 50% when this happens.
  • Balancing - made most buildings much cheaper and weight a bit more, making building them outside and abandoning them more acceptable.
  • Balancing - most production recipes now produce at a much lower rate, requiring you to build more of them.
  • Balancing - re-balanced the entire economy to encourage building more stuff, making space and weight a much more significant resource, and spending much more time building and optimizing your city and its surroundings.
  • Starwood now requires an add-on to produce, making the cost of setting up starwood production a little higher.
  • Reduced materializer costs and increased output a little bit, to make them a more valid option for cities with strong economy.
  • Removed all research that is no longer relevant following the above changes, such as harvesters that are now available from the start, and city expansion. Added several other research nodes instead.
  • Updated all infrastructure upgrades that increased resource drops from destroying nodes to more relevant bonuses such as refining speed or resource yield when harvesting.
  • Flux vats and power generators can now be built without research, and they have a basic recipe that does not require any raw materials and very low upkeep. You are encouraged to build as many of these as you can afford.
  • Flux vats and power generators now have more expensive add-ons that you can research and build to use more efficient recipes that do require raw materials. These are more worthwhile to carry with you when you fly away.
  • Most raw resources can no longer be carried with you when you fly away. You will have to refine as many as you can before leaving.
  • There is no more "extreme threat" in which you must fly away or continuously suffer from impossible raids.
  • Threat levels are now numerical and not limited to just 4 values. They continuously increase as long as you stay on the same map.
  • Map difficulty now determines the starting threat level, instead of always starting from low threat.
  • Threat levels are now the only variable that determines how strong a raid will be, map difficulty no longer affect this (except that they determine the starting threat level).
  • Global Infestation levels now increase faster or slower, depending on several stats such as infrastructure level and population size, relative to the current infestation level. If you are very advanced for the current infestation level, it will increase faster, and vice versa.
  • Resource drop-off building (previously resource elevator) can now be built outside the city and receives raw materials from harvesters, to reduce the need of building rails from faraway resource nodes.
  • You can now choose which resources each drop-off building will receive. They no longer share storage like the resource elevator did.
  • Added an additional upgrade layer to most buildings. Made the first upgrade levels a bit weaker but cheaper.
  • Some building upgrades or add-ons now increase the amount of workers requried.
  • Changed some stat modifiers like production speed to be exponential instead of additive. For example, two 100% bonuses will now result in 4x increase (base x 2 x 2) instead of 3x (100% + 100%). Combat stat modifiers remain additive.
  • Made refineries such as the wood-warper upgradable.
  • Drep remains processing and debris now give refined resources instead of raw.
  • Added info about workers and maintenance costs in the construction UI building info window.
  • Changed UI when building things, blocked areas are now highlighted while available areas remain clear.
  • Not all expansion slots will be available on each map now (some will be blocked by the terrain), but there are always at least a few that are not blocked.
  • Resources harvesters now have some maintenance (flux, power, workers).
  • Recipe drop-down now shows the actual recipe instead of just an icon for the produced item.
  • High priority warnings/notifications will now appear before lower priority ones such as milestones / research complete, even if they were queued earlier.
  • You are no longer automatically attacked after landing in a difficulty 4 or higher map. Instead, you will now be attacked upon landing if you didn't defeat a single wave in your previous map. This is to prevent you from moving from map to map never having to survive any attacks.
  • Updated tutorial, videos and loading hints for all the new changes.
  • In strategic view, when using the demolish or move tool, the upgrade buttons become semi-transparent and disabled so you won't accidentally upgrade a building you're trying to destroy.
  • Replaced the rail cart asset for Tesla Cells.
  • Added some particles to destructible debris so they're easier to tell apart from non-destructible objects.
  • Creating exits from non-storage (mainly production) buildings will now automatically select 'Send All' option instead of showing a popup, which is what you want in 99% of the cases. If you do want to select a specific item, you just need to attempt to create another exit on top of the existing one, which will let you modify the existing exit.
  • Disable buildings now stop their animations (but particle effects continue, so this is not final yet)
Fixed
  • If your city becomes overweight while the take-off process is charging, it will pause and restart once your weight issue is resolved. There is no need to pay the fuel costs again.
  • Fixed a bug when you didn't have enough funds to build an entire rail section, then it wouldn't let you build the output.
  • Rails can now pass through gates.
  • When scrapping a building, the partial cost of upgrades and add-ons are also returned now.
  • Right clicking will now close the construction menu even when there is no building selected.
  • Fixed a bug where removing rails and then rebuilding it in another direction would reconnect any rails previously leading to it.
  • Fixed some issues with right clicking to close the inventory window.

Small Patches

Build 161 - fixed a bug that messed up the rail build system when enabling target marker.

Build 161 - fixed a bug with the stats of Starwood Repair Kit 2.

Build 161 - fixed some missing or wrong texts.

Build 161 - production buildings will now send output even when disabled (storages still won't).

Build 161 - can now place items in output slots of production buildings.

Build 161 - demolishing a building now shows the explosion visual effect.

Build 160 - fixed a bug where the Materializer couldn't send Featherstone through rails.