It’s been a busy week already, and it’s only Wednesday!

We’ve completed most of the content and basic configuration for the first few tiers of the new biome and crafting progression, so we’re now working through the game one tier at a time to fix bugs, balance numbers, and generally tie everything together. There are a few more biomes to add (particularly at high tiers) and some exciting things like missions that we’ll be working on as we go along, but this mostly involves intensive playtesting and cleaning up all of the new (and old) issues we discover.

GeorgeV and the other artists continue to add more content, including a few more items to liven up the Garden biome. Armagon is configuring weapons and adding shield generators to dungeons. I’ve been fixing bugs and improving biome configurations. We’ve also gotten a good start on numerically balancing the combat and crafting for tier 1 (and discussed how this will relate to the overall progression). Too many small improvements to list!

Kyren also just finished a revamp of the liquid system. The main visible difference is that liquid is no longer compressible, so the total amounts of liquid in large pools will make much more sense, but the rendering methods are still the same. The more important benefit of this is that large quantities of liquid will now settle much more quickly and won’t lag out servers, so we can now start real work on ocean planets.

We’ll be posting more about Oceans and other biomes soon, once we get into the relevant content tiers, but I did just a bit of preliminary testing with Oceans in the new water system and I’m very excited about the prospect of filling them with life!