And welcome to another episode of Regular-but-really-could-have-been-Major-but-it's-too-soon Game Update! I’ve been working away, listening to your feedback, fixing stuff, but also adding stuff too.
Lets get into it.
New drones
I’ve now added 4 new drone types to help with some routine tasks you might face out there while performing your Scavenger duties.
You can now build Water Drones, to help with irrigating crops:
Repair Drones, for fixing up your rig:
Attack Drones to help fight the Entity:
And Heal Drones, to well.. heal you.
Don’t forget you can already build Mining and Fetch Drones too.
Drones will either follow you around and operate nearby to you, or you can build a drone pad on your rig, or a Drone Mast on an asteroid, and they will operate near that area instead, so you can leave them to get on.
Like every item in the game, how to use it is also explained in the tool tip if you hover over the blueprint or inventory item.
New NPC
We’ve added a new character you might encounter in your travels. I’ll leave it to you to find out more about this guy!
Jitter resolved
I was getting some intermittent reports about jitter in the game. With some help from chat in Discord (thanks Matt!), it turns out the physics tick rate was a little low. I’ve bumped this up to 60 fps. The vast majority of players run the game at 60 fps. It now makes the game feel much more smooth. It’s a big improvement!
Note, I’ve yet to have feedback from those of you running above 60 fps. This fix will certainly make the game feel better for you too, but I’m not likely to increase physics up to 144fps or higher as I think it will make for too much overhead. If it doesn’t feel good you can always toggle off v-sync and set your FPS limit to 60 in Options > Graphics, though this may not be necessary.
But either way, you can let me know by pressing F1 in game, or preferably by dropping by Discord if you prefer to discuss even higher physics tick rates.
Misc Fixes
We’ve also done several other miscellaneous fixes and tweaks which you can read about below.
Finally..
We’re just a small team of two devs here, and the idea behind this game was to try and bring something new to the survival genre, both with a full 3D / Mario-Galaxy style zero G environment coupled with a fully developed factory system that works within that.
If you like that we tried to do that, or just enjoy the game, it helps a lot if you leave a review on Steam. So if you were thinking about that, please do!It really helps, especially in these challenging times for game devs.
Build 0.422
-Added 4 new drones: Repair Drone, Healing Drone, Attack Drone, Water Drone with unique livery
-Corrected steel furnace to correctly overflow when stack is full of one item so that it can for example pick up iron and carbon correctly
-Cannot enter build mode while moving at speeds above 2m/s
-Increased NPC frequencies
-Prevent error in menu
-Add new NPC The Grower, with dialog.
-Fix showing quest marker shown logic in some situations incorrectly
-Show correct number signals to investigate on quadrant map
-Misc fixes to pathfinding for drones around space rig and locations
-Increase thrusters 2 and 3 strength
-Fixed quest tracker issue causing bug with new NPC
-Increase physics tick rate to 60fps to potentially address judder during motion at certain fps
-Various tweaks to drone behaviour to better improve pathfinding and chasing behaviour.
-Improved Attack drone behaviour inside Derelicts.
-Attack drones need line of sight of alerted enemies to target
-Increased derelict key spawn rates
-Update recipes for new drones
-Fix bug causing infinite steel stock goals when you have completed the stock questline. Instead it now ends, and no further stock goals.
-Fix null error in tractor beam operation
We'll see you around for the next update scavengers,
Al and Sarah
