Today has been a long long day of bug fixing and balancing.

After many many play tests of the early game, including repairing your ship, rebooting your ship AI, completing new quests, new death rules and mining rules. I finally have the early game in the place I want it. It feels balanced, fluid, there’s very little to no grind and you progress quickly beyond the low tech / stranded portion of the game. The majority of recipes have had their values tweaked. Ore, minibiome, cave, chest and monster spawns have been entirely rebalanced.

I’ve been staring at a lot of these images today:

We’re moving on now to the quest generation system and connecting the new outpost work you’ve seen to the games progression. We’re building the quest system so modders can super easily add their own quests, which can be given by npcs, item pickups and even other quests. The quest system will be built on templates. A super simple example of which would be “Kill monster X and obtain item Y” where X and Y are wildcards specified in a whitelist. The idea now is to fill the game with optional tasks with cool rewards.

We’re going to be coming up with a bunch of quest templates come the morning, so feel free to leave your suggestions!

Supernorn here again, wishing a happy 4th of July to those of you across the pond!

Today I’ve mostly been animating the Treasured Trophies outpost you saw earlier. The tentacles are in full swing, but it’s not quite finished yet. I also mentioned in my last post that I was reworking some of the human armours, including the tiered sets.

Still a bit of a work in progress, but the idea has been to give the human sets a more ‘militarised’ look.  In this example you’ll see the Vanguard and Seeker armour sets have been reworked specifically:

I’ve spent today bouncing around between a number of tasks, so I figured I might as well do the daily update too! My main project has been sorting out a bug with text rendering that caused some labels to be incorrectly positioned, so I fixed that and have been making sure our label anchors act in sensible ways. I’ve also been helping Armagon as he goes through a HUGE list of existing light-emitting objects, cleaning them up and adding scripts to allow them to be toggled and wired.

As for the rest of the team, progress continues on the ship AI and early game tutorial quests, with new AI/quest functionality, quest icons, and a bunch of new quest text. Kyren is doing a major rework of the tile rendering system which should be a big boost to performance, particularly on the ‘neighbor-aware’ tile types such as the pipes used in the new outpost design. Omni is working on fixing bugs in versioned variant handling that were causing some improper data to be passed to and from the Lua API.

The coolest thing I’ve done today, however, is integrating some awesome new changes to the standing turrets made by healthire! In addition to being placeable on walls and ceilings, turrets now have an internal energy pool that replenishes over time, and an inventory slot that you can place any kind of gun in, which will determine the type and damage of the turret’s attack. This should keep them useful at higher tiers and also give you a reason to keep those extra guns you find!