As per usual, I’ve been juggling a few tasks the past couple of days.

Work has continued on the Glitch mission I told you guys about last week, though a gameplay decision that came about midway in its development has made me have to re-think the overall structure a bit. It turned out that having a larger scale structure didn’t necessarily equal more fun for the player. None the less, it’s coming along nicely and I’m looking forward to getting into scripting it. The old structure will likely end up being utilized elsewhere down the line.

As part of our restructure of the tiered progression, the mining experience is currently under the microscope. You may recall some time back, Metadept was experimenting with the matter manipulator as an upgradeable tool. Many who have tried the nightlies have likely experienced this in the form of the completely unbalanced and relatively weak starting iteration. The reason we haven’t addressed this yet is because we decided it didn’t make sense to focus on balancing the tools until we had tackled the larger task of rebalancing all of our tiles.

Every tile in the game has its own set health that governs how difficult it is to break. Since we’re having biomes split up by tier during the initial progression (note that all biomes will be available with higher difficulty levels at the end-game), it meant we needed to balance the large number of materials based on their biome and their place in the overall progression. At time of writing we have 140+ different types of tiles that each needed to be assessed and reconfigured, so most of my time the last couple of days has been tied up with this task. For now it’s looking good, but it’ll likely require adjustments as we test.

In the wake of the matter manipulator becoming the primary mining tool, it bears mentioning that the pickaxes won’t be going away altogether. Instead they will remain in the form of rare drops that, depending on your luck, could end up being one markedly more powerful than your matter manipulator at the time. The trade-off is that they will no longer be repairable, so you’d want to save them for the toughest of blocks.

The next step is going to be balancing the matter manipulator and its upgrades. We’ll be sure to keep you in the loop!