The 18th free Content Patch since FortressCraft left Early Access will be available early tomorrow morning, but I've spent the ENTIRE DAY assembling this... thesis... inside Valve's post editor, and I'm worried I'll lose it - so you get the verbose patch notes just a few hours early. Onward! There have been 2 major focii for this patch; Rooms and Progression, along with Base Scanning, Healing, Agriculture, Lenses.

TL;DR

• Added Rooms. Join the public server P18 Room Showcase to have a look
• All T1 Recipes reworked. Upcraft everything. Don't keep Ingots in your inventory.
• Diamond, Emerald, Ruby and Sapphire lenses now give flat-rate boosts
• Be more careful about taking damage, use Ampules to heal yourself
• Mini and Logistics Hoppers are no longer slow and horrible, just small.
• Added Priority Splitter. Sends ALL items right unless the Right is blocked, then sends left.
• Ported game to Unity 5.6
• The teleporting blur effect is gone!
• Logistics FALCORs are now useful!

[video]https://i.gyazo.com/1161725f5cf5a0cdc3ba0b515272255e.mp4[/video]

Progression

The recent negative feeback has been overwhelmingly about the complexity of the game. I initially thought that people liked complex and difficult games, but it seems a large number of Factorio players would much rather than each resource turned into one crafting ingredient; previously, in FortressCraft, there were 9 types of Plate, 9 types of Wire, 9 types of Coil, etc. The sweeping change this month has been to address the complexity, and make the game more streamlined. Overall, it's turned out to make the game much faster and less frustrating to progress through. To this end, Bars are of virtually zero use, and you will have to use Crafting machines to make almost everything now. This process has been hugely time-consuming, but I would say that the T1 progression (approximately the first 6-8 hours of the game) is now much much smoother. Some T2 work was done, but I will be looking at that as time goes on. For now, with few exceptions, you will ALWAYS want to upcraft your useless Ingots into useful crafting items. Copper Ingots -> Copper Wire Tin Ingots -> Tin Plates -> Lightweight Machine Housings Iron Ingots -> Iron Gears -> RackRails Lithium Ingots -> Lithium Wire -> Lithium Coils -> Charged Lithium Coils. Please do this via automation. Feeding in bars by hand into the start of an Automation run means you'll be wasting time staring at it! T2 materials are 'mostly' improved, but it's much more hit-and-miss than T1. Gold Ingots -> Gold Wire Nickel Ingots -> Nickel PCBs Titanium Ingots -> Titanium Plates I have further plans regarding this, but there's only so much I can achieve by myself in a month! See the Detailed section at the end for specifics. [video]https://i.gyazo.com/eaf5afcace71dad765bb4e97b5868440.mp4[/video]

Rooms

As FortressCraft has grown and grown, I spend large amounts of my time optimising the game. Sadly, the main effect of 'doubling the speed of the game' is 'people build bases twice as large', so to a degree it's a losing battle. At a rough guess, FortressCraft can maintain a base 25 times large in P17 than it could when it left Early Access at the same framerate. However, despite some horribly complex vis systems, people still manage to beat the frame rate into submission. So, what's the solution? There's a few. One of them is a cascading segment-based view system, but that is quite a lot of work, and the end result doesn't change or improve the game, barring the framerate. Patch 18 is in Unity 5.6, giving you access to DX12 and Vulkan, neither of which appeared to substantially improve the drawcall overhead. The solution I've moved towards, and have implemented the first pass for P18, is that of Rooms.

A room is defined as a rectangular area, encased in walls, a floor, a ceiling, a Room Controller, one or more Inner Airlocks, each of which is connected to an Outer Airlock. Inner and Outer Airlocks must have a gap of exactly 3 metres between them.

Once established, a room has one major, MAJOR technical advantage over randomly covering stuff up with walls - if you're outside the room, the inside of the room doesn't render, and if you're inside the room, the outside doesn't render! This can turn an end-game base with half a million active machines from 15 fps to 150 fps. Now, sadly, I find that giving players tools to help themselves doesn't always work. To that end, I hope to move FC towards a much more Room and building-based layout, but for this patch, players will be required to build rooms only for the new Hydroponics and Medbays.

It should be noted that the Rooms are a major, MAJOR change to the feel of FortressCraft. You have the option to opt into P17-Frozen if you do not wish to move to this patch

So, in short; Room advantages - they look cool, they have predictable lighting, they speed the game up, and if you're on the surface, they also make the air warmer. Do not attempt to enclose your CPH in Rooms. Also be a little wary of making skyscrapers diagonally too close to your CPH. If Rooms take off, I will be revisiting the concept and implementation of the surface attacks. It's very simple tho; research, craft and place a Room Controller. It will start to search for a regular-shaped room around it. Although the theoretical max size is 128 metres (+- 64 around the controller), this is ridiculous, and I recommend you don't do this. The Room Controller should guide you through the process. You will need a 3x3x1 or 1x3x3 Inner Airlock flush with one of your walls, and, in front of that, leaving a gap of exactly 3 metres, an Outer Airlock. Done. The Room Controller will let you know if it's having problems. Just remember that the Blue area shows the size of the expected room.

Room limitations!

• Inner Airlocks connect room to Outer airlocks, which connect rooms to the outside. The outside can be covered up. This is the only supported paradigm. The airlock->airlock area should be covered, or vis will break. This is Your Responsibility.(Think of Rooms and Buildings - you aren't forced to have all your rooms as little 'sheds' out in the wilderness - just put the Rooms in a Building, or have a nice lobby to go into all the rooms. You are allowed to have Doors without Rooms - you will be warned that these confer NO performace boost)
• Room controllers can share multiple segments, and multiple room controller can share a single segment. Really tho, I'd spread it out a little bit.
• You CAN leave holes in the floor and the ceiling. If you do this, it'll look stupid. I don't care. Don't build it so it looks stupid. The MAIN thrust of this feature is a player-controlled portalling and occlusion system. This is Your Responsibility. I've erred on the side of allowing the room to work whilst looking broken, as opposed to forcing the player to exactly adhere to every single little sub-requirement.
• You cannot put machines into the walls. The exception is the Induction Charger on the floor.

To get things in and out of the room, use Power and Logistics Grommets. These are supported by PSBs and Conveyors.

• A PSB touching a Power Grommet will transfer power to any power-receiving machine directly opposite it.
• A Generator (PTG, Solar) touching a Power Grommet will transfer power to any power-receiving machine directly opposite.
• A conveyor touching and facing a Logistics Grommet will transfer any items to any machine that normally accepts items from conveyors. Conveyor and Storage Hopper are favourites. This is infinite speed, so you can essentially build room walls straight through existing Conveyor runs without affecting your logistics.
• MineCarts can go through walls. It looks stupid and I'd like to address it in the future.
• Lasers cannot fire into Grommets. Lasers can receive power from Grommets.

Suggested uses, initially, are for segmenting your base into logical groups; Smelting, Research, Assembly Lines, Sorting, Storage, etc. Putting all of your base into these rooms WILL MASSIVELY IMPROVE YOUR FRAMERATE. Note : Putting all of your base into one massive room won't achieve anything. This is obvious - right? The current maximum size of a room is +-64m from the room controller, so about 129x129x129 metres. I won't stop you doing this, but if you do, you might have slightly missed the point. An example here is a simple (too simple) Smelter. Inside: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/134073202153357312/402919868854173696/image.png Outside: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/134073202153357312/402919941474615308/image.png Hopefully it's fairly idiot-proof. If not, please start a thread on the forum and I'll try and help out. A much better option is to join the Public server P18 Room Showcase and have a look around.

Medbay and Health changes

One of the changes to P18 includes stopping players using the 'deathport' exploit. Players aren't bothering with logistics, lifts or teleporters, and are just dropping down a shaft, grabbing ore, and killing themselves to teleport back to the surface. To this end, the health system has changed. If you take small amounts of damage, you won't see any difference whatsoever. If you receive major damage, it will take quite a while to sell-heal; it's about 10 minutes to recover to 100% health from 1% health, but it's only about 20 seconds to heal from 90% to 100%. To combat this, the player has a couple of current options. The first of which is the MedBay - this is a cheap machine that MUST be built in a room, and heals you if you stand near it, it heals you. Secondly, there's the Ampules. These work very much like the Power Boosters - stick it in your hotbar and left-click to use it. Different grades of Ampules will give you a different level of healing boost. Right now, the Ampule Dispenser machine must also be built inside a room, and will generate 1 Ampule per 10 seconds. Once it has 5 MK1 Ampules, it'll start to upgrade them to Mk2, and so on. This is designed to be paired with the new HerbiCors, which will automatically harvest plants within a few hundred metres of your base. [video]https://i.gyazo.com/25eed04ccebe433300d62a3400cd0c39.mp4[/video]

Hydroponics and plants

Waaaaaaaaaaaaay back in Patch 16, I completely re-did the surface rendering and generation, taking advantage of Unity's new Instanced Rendering system. New for Unity, that is - FortressCraft used Instanced Rendering on the Xbox 360... The main upshot of that were plants. A lot of plants. Patch 18 adds in the very first start of being able to use the plants.

• There are 7 types of plants, and 7 colours, for a total of 49 possible combinations of final plant.
• Plants are currently locked to their spawn colours. Future work will introduce breeding of plants from the current 7 types to the total of 49.
• The player cannot plant plants outside, but CAN Harvest them with RMB. Plants outside grow/regrow very very very slowly.
• If you want to harvest plants quickly and automatedly, then use the new Herbicors. They will pull in any plants within approximately 256m. Tests have shown that this will net you approx 8k plants (yes, and will speed the game up a bit). The disadvantage is that Herbicors destroy the plants that they harvest, so this is not renewable.
• The player can place plants into a Hydroponics Bay, or an Advanced Hydroponics Bay. The plant will then grow much faster, and can be harvested and re-harvested regularly.
• As of P18, there is no fully-automated way to renewably obtain more plant material. The ConstructoBots in the Adventures Pack will cover this. There may be other methods implemented to do so.

As of P18, right now, Plants have only one use - any set of 8 of the same plant can be used to make Ampules. The Ampules are planned to rely on specific plants, and I plan to add more effects than 'Faster Health Regen' in the future.

What effects or uses would you like to see? With 49 plants, I'm not likely to run out!

Base Monitoring

As well as rendering, part of the advantage of Rooms is that I know the player's PC will have plenty of spare grunt to do more complex things. (An example would be shadows-on-lights-in-rooms) As part of my bid to teach players to be more brilliant at playing FortressCraft, I've implemented extensive monitoring of every ore, bar and all of the power generation of a player's base. The first 45 days of play is recorded (Haven't decided if I'll just write-over the data or stop recording at that point yet). The player is able to analyse this data by placing Base Scanners (name pending) inside rooms. Placing ore, bars or a PSB inside the hopper will then let you monitor only those ores/bars or power. The Base Efficiency rating is feedback to the player about their relative Ore/Bar production. If your Base Efficiency is less than 100%, this means you are extracting more Ore than you're dealing with (This includes manual schlepping of ore!) - I hope to use this metric to hint back to the player that having collected 30,000 ore really isn't helping them progress. If your Base Efficiency is OVER 100%, that means you're burning through your ore reserves making bars, and will eventually run out. Balancing this number to 100% means you're making the most efficient use of your automation time. If you want to monitor something, stick it in a hopper underneath the Scanner. It also supports a hidden hopper behind the screen, if that's your thing. Things you can monitor!

• All bars!
• All ores!
• Base Power! (Stored power vs Power capacity) - put a PSB in there
• Resin - put a Refined Liquid Resin in there

[video]https://i.gyazo.com/65cb08f9a90bf129aacdd0b09221c59b.mp4[/video]

Low Tier Lenses

Currently the first 4 tiers of Lens (Diamond, Sapphire, Topaz and Emerald) are mostly available to the player whilst they have T0/1/2 lasers. As these lasers provide very low PPS, a percentage-based increase doesn't give much difference. As an example, a T0 laser with an Emerald in it gains 30%. 30% bonus to 1.16 PPS is 1.508 PPS. In larger Tier lasers, all Crystals provide a wonderful boost - but by the time the player get T2/T3 lasers, the Organic Lenses have far outstripped the lower-tier Crystal ones, and thus are pointless.

• T0 - 1.16 PPS with Emerald was 1.5 PPS
• T0 - 1.16 PPS with Emerald is now 31.5 PPS
• T3 - 320 PPS with Emerald was 416
• T3 - 320 PPS with Emerald is now 360 PPS

This should make early-lenses more useful, and means that a T0 Laser with a Sapphire Lens is now a massive 101 PPS - but you will have to put in some manual time searching to get that reward, making exploration that little bit more rewarding.

• Diamond is 15 PPS bonus
• Emerald is 30 PPS bonus
• Ruby is 60 PPS bonus
• Sapphire is 100 PPS bonus

I reserve the right to re-balance these in the future. ;-) [video]https://i.gyazo.com/e693d01a8dce6da23890fe412f11d31b.mp4[/video]

CryoPlasm

I get two main pieces of feedback about the CryoPlasm in Frozen Factory; 1) What CryoPlasm? 2) DEAR GOD WHY HAS MY BASED DISAPPEARED UNDER A SEA OF FROZEN HORROR. To this end, I implemented a system so I could actually monitor the CryoPlasm growth. I then turned it into a machine and gave it to you.
I then created a number of short animated movies for overnight CryoPlasm growth, so I could analyse when it worked well, and when it didn't work so well. Based on that knowledge, I altered how the CryoPlasm works.

The aggression of the CryoPlasm is based on the size of your base. Think of it as CryoThreat

Now, if you start Frozen Factory, you're not likely to see much issue; the Cryo is much more predictable, and doesn't worry so much about boring through rock to get to you. The 'boring chance' instreases as the Threat goes up. However, if you are a mid-to-late Frozen Factory playthrough as you update to Patch 18, then you are going to see a massive and sudden jump in the aggression of the Cryo, often leading to it completely swamping basic Lancer defences. If you've been defending 'properly', using Freezon Boosting, terraforming and Dazzlers, and extensive Bomber defence, then you'll be Just Fine. I mean. Maybe. But be prepared for a much bigger and more exciting challenge than P17! Also, hey - what happens if you build it on the surface? [video]https://i.gyazo.com/64ced14b4ea06590b1321fbd725fae93.mp4[/video]

Dapper

A huge 'thank you' to everyone who's bought the Dapper pack in the past. This patch implements 2 new machines and 6 new specific Dapper blocks

• The Super HEIST can inject 16x more items into your inventory at double the range. Ideal for paste!
• The Super Construction Paste Grinder is 8x more efficient than the regular one, and also allows you to hook up Coal veins for paste, partly as a 'thank you' to those awesome people, but mostly so their super-pretty bases don't require them to spend ages collecting paste.

This should hopefully allow the more creative amongst you to make really brilliant rooms without suffering too much from a Paste deficit. You also get access to 6 sexy new lights for Rooms. Room light 1 and 6 are available to everyone in Patch 18 (this includes NON Dapper owners). This is a neutral-coloured strip light, and a 'cross' light. The Cross light reacts to CPH attacks and failure by changing colour. It's therefore classed as Gameplay and not Cosmetic. https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/209762729823567874/407228174423031810/unknown.png https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/209762729823567874/407228428647923712/unknown.png Dapper owners can also paint all 6 lights to their heart's content. Good taste sold separately. https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/134073202153357312/407552896759234563/unknown.png RoomLights now paintable via network and 'pickable' for their colours [video]https://i.gyazo.com/f7ceac09b3fb16bbc940d46acdbef80b.mp4[/video]

And finally!

And just a little late to be shipped with the patch, but I'll make it available soon - the Dedicated Server configuration tool, by Boronia! https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/134073202153357312/415278867847053323/2018-02-19_17_49_21-Photos.png And finally, because as you might have noticed, I worked out how to embed videos, here are the 3 new Ore Extractors that are in Frozen Factory. [video]https://i.gyazo.com/16e9b67a89111e3f0f5cac33b399b042.mp4[/video] (MK1) [video]https://i.gyazo.com/d96c23336eedb56bf93217eac76fef23.mp4[/video] (MK2) [video]https://i.gyazo.com/bc59c8d17f439c6bb6d6084e166a5c82.mp4[/video] (MK3) YES I ACTUALLY HIT THE LIMIT ON THE SIZE OF PATCH NOTES! IN YOUR FACE VALVE! I'll be pushing the final patch live on the morning of the 21st, and that will include the detailed breakdown of everything changed. I seriously have had to split these into separate posts!

[ 2018-02-21 20:03:25 CET ] [ Original post ]