You’re also refunded 50% of the build cost whenever you destroy a constructed object. You are refunded 100% of the build cost if you cancel object construction.

Crop Drop-Off

Farmers no longer require the Crop Drop-Off. Instead, they can deposit crops to any object that stores raw food (shelves or refrigerators).

The Crop Drop-Off just felt…weird. It still exists but it’s no longer mandatory.





Default Jobs

Colonists now start with the Laborer, Farmer, and Mechanic job. This reduces the amount of things that new players are forced to do.

You can still assign jobs if you want to, but it’s one less thing you’re forced to do.





Water Recycler

The water system in the game was in a strange spot.

There was: Clean Water, Dirty Water, and Ice.

Clean water is used for cooking, creating Oxygen, and growing crops. Dirty water could be recycled back into clean water. Ice could also be directly converted into dirty water.

In practice, this made either Ice or Dirty Water unnecessary. If you mined enough Ice, you’d never have to place a Water Recycler. Alternatively, you could just recycle all of your water and never ever mine for Ice.

On principal, I don’t dislike this. I think it’s fine to provide the player with a few different options for achieving the same goal.

The issue is that new players are never encouraged to mine Ice—after all, the Water Recycler seemingly provides an endless supply of Clean Water. Eventually, the player would run out of water, they wouldn’t know how to get more, and everyone would die.

So we’ve removed the Water Recycler for now. This will force players to mine for Ice. As a side benefit, it would get the player familiar with the process of acquiring resources from outside the station. If we don’t like this change, we’ll add it back.

By the way, toilets produce Biomass now (previously they were producing Dirty Water).

Passive Biomass

Another complicated mechanic for players is how to acquire Biomass.

Biomass is the “green goop” used to grow new colonists. It’s acquired by recycling organic material, like food.

Unfortunately, in order to get food, you need a Farmer (and a Laborer to actually transports the food).

So before a player could even figure out the Biomass system, we were forcing them to grow a colonist, which have an entirely new set of systems that the player needs to learn.

Our solution was to add an Algae Box. It doesn’t require any colonist interaction at all. This means we can start the player with 0 Biomass, and they’ll actually have time to learn how the storage and pipe system works.

There’s no art for this yet (we’re using an old fish tank model), because we’re playtesting it. If we like how it feels, we’ll add some real art.





Bed Ownership

Beds are no longer automatically “claimed” by colonists.

Previously, once a colonist slept in a bed, they would “own” it, and no colonist could ever use it. The intent was to give colonists a “bedroom”, so that they would sleep in the same area every night.

This was confusing to new players, because they couldn’t figure out why a colonist was sleeping on the floor when there was a perfectly good bed (because another colonist had automatically “owned” it)

The player can still assign beds, but they’re not forced to.





Performance Improvements

I adjusted the back-end of Starmancer so that it could support multiple threads. This allows multiple things to happen at the same time, or for certain processes to occur in the background.

Generating pathfinding routes, for example, could occur in the background. This would prevent any freezing if route generation took an exceptionally long time.

Saving is now at least 10 times faster. Loading is now slightly faster. Placing objects is now slightly faster.



So Long

Sorry that we’ve been so quiet, but we’re back now!

Thanks for reading,

-Tyler











