• You can now switch to a compressed overview of the tech tree. (Finally. Let me know if you have suggestions for improvement of this new view.)
• The tech tree colours have been adjusted to make it clearer which techs are researchable.
• More gold leaf, for decorating slopes and domes.
• More rivets.
• Gold leaf and rivets (and crows' nests) are now paintable.
• New AI fleet by Proton.
• Can now paste text using ctrl-V.
• More than doubled set of available Chinese characters.
• After they utterly dominated in the tournament, Trained Musketeers bonus reduced from 50% to 25%.
• The screen no longer shakes when combat is paused.
• The landscape around stone guardians has been... altered.

Note that with the new gold leaves, the list of decals is now well and truly overloaded. I will add decal categories for better organisation in the next non-bugfix update. And there's some under-the-hood stuff that's relevant to modders:

• I've hired YellowMiner to clean up and improve graphics. He's reorganised some of the sprite sheets, and more reorganising will follow.
• You can now more fully customize landscape generation, allowing for entirely new landscape types. Here's an example LandscapeType that overrides everything.
• Graphics generation for mods is now about an order of magnitude faster.
• LandscapeTypes can specify which weathers they support. See the new RUINS LandscapeType for an example.
• You can now safely add new TimeOfDay values without causing the game to crash in low graphics mode. Just specify an appearancePostfix value that points to one of the original TimeOfDay values (DAY, NIGHT, DAWN, DUSK, SNOW, RAIN, FOG, STORM), whichever is closest in mood to the new time of day you're adding. See the new SNOWY_NIGHT TimeOfDay in the game data for an example, where the appearancePostfix is NIGHT.
• MonsterNestTypes can now specify what kind of LandscapeType they want to spawn in. See the stone guardians in the game data for an example. Note that this means that when monster nests are occupied by new monsters, the nest's landscape is re-generated.

Yes, all of these new features are currently tragically underused in the game. It's just the groundwork for New Stuff. :) As always, if you want to discuss these changes or the game in general, head to the forums or join our Discord. Note that there was a checksum problem with the update that has now been fixed.

[ 2019-09-25 08:43:14 CET ] [ Original post ]

Design steampunk pixel airships out of functional modules and conquer the skies!

In the game, ships are viewed side-on, and their modules are operated by individual crew members. During combat, players give high-level commands to a small fleet, positioning their ships, ramming and boarding others. Ships and terrain are fully destructible: they can catch fire, explode, break apart, and fall. Players can also compete against one another in Internet and LAN matches.

The ships are highly detailed, teeming with sailors moving around at their individual tasks, like an ant farm or a cut-away drawing. The player's choices in ship layout are crucial, and an important part of the game is exploring the design space of different airships and their matching tactics.