The 18th free Content Patch since we left Early Access is now live for everybody. Check the previous post for pretty video and long-winded descriptions - this post is a little 'listy' Enjoy!

Network fixes

• Network Sun is less... lackadaisical.
• Fixed Network Sync issue with Falcors
• GACs as a network client should no longer offload, causing attached Storage Hoppers to show the wrong number of items.
• Fixed issue with Orbital Strike Controller not saving/loading correctly (and therefore not networking properly!)
• Network Guests will be warned they can't talk.
• A swathe of minor network fixes
• Networking on special conveyor types is now smarter, meaning less sync-vis issues

Room stuff!

• Surface rooms are now at a energy-efficient 20 degrees
• Added 10 new, reinforced, paintable blocks, ALL designed to make your rooms look super-cool!
• InductionChargers now count as valid Floors for Rooms. Let's hope that doesn't mess up the visibility...
• Grommets now support Generator Entities - this means Solar Panels and PTGs will transfer their power through a Grommet to a PSB on the other side.
• This means you can have a nice, neat Coal Enriching room, with Coal going in one side, and Power coming out the other!
• Segments now correctly support multiple rooms.
• Room Controllers now have a nice readout showing you how many machines are in the room. Remember that a Door is effectively 9 machines!
• Added CPH logging ALL bars and ALL ores
• Added readout of above : https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/134073202153357312/405828299521130496/unknown.png
• Added monitoring of 'base material efficiency'. <100%? You're extracting far more ores than you're turning into bars. >100%? Your ore storage is running out! Getting this close to 100% will help you achieve maximum performance and efficiency. How fun.
• Game will track ~45 days of progression.
• Added Configurable base readouts. Supports Ore and Bars. Should be idiot-proof ;-)
• Added Room Lights. Paint option will be Dapper-Only.
• Grass will now only exist on Organic Detritus, and not indoors.
• Configured Basic and Advanced Hydroponic values, disallowed Plants building on normal terrain, allowed on hydroponics, banned all non-plants on hydroponics.

Health and Agriculture stuff!

• Added MK1 Medical Ampule. Requiring 8 plant seeds, this will boost your heal rate.
• Added Agriculture Research
• Added MedBay. Will only work in rooms once complete. Give power; heals you when you're nearby.
• Added HerbiCOR; this FALCOR modification will track down surface plants within a 512m diameter, and will then return it to a hopper.
• All plants can now be harvested manually, for a reward, or via the HerbiCORE.
• Hydroponic Bays should also be available
• Health system reworked. Micro-fall damage is healed quickly. Major damage is much slower, and death damage is almost 10 minutes. Health UI shows the time until you gain +1hp
• Ampule Dispensers now correctly accept Ampules, save, load, and network transmit
• Ampule Crafters now correctly accept any type of Seed and convert into an Ampule. Ampules are automatically upcrafted
• HerbiCores should no longer auto-harvest plants that haven't been scanned.

Recipe and Progression changes

• Fixed the DESCRIPTION of the Basic Smelter to correctly inform the player that it is twice as fast as a regular Smelter. Can everyone stop telling me how useless they are please.
• Changed most/all recipes that use Copper Bar and Tin Bar to Copper Wire and Tin Plates. Carrying around these bars is about to get really pointless.
• Changed Iron Gear self-craft cost to 5 bars per 1 gear
• Added Iron Gear auto-crafter, which crafts 1 gear per 1 bar.
• Reduced ALL existing recipes that use Gears by a factor of 5 (so 15 gears is now worth 3 gears, and so on)
• Changed Lightweight Machine Housing self-craft cost to 12 bars from 6
• Added Lightweight Machine Housing auto-crafter, which crafts 1 Lightweight Machine Housing from 6 tin bars.
• Removed all performance penalties from Logistics Hoppers. Please, don't treat these as throwaway items! I feel that people over-use Storage Hoppers, when sometimes, you just want 2 of a thing.
• Reduced the performance penalty of MiniHoppers from 30 seconds to 5 seconds. These should now be much more useful early-game sources of input and storage.
• All MineCart tracks cost 4 Alloyed Blocks, down from 16
• Basic Minecarts now cost 8 Alloyed Blocks, down from 64
• MK2 PSB upcraft now needs Plates, not Bars.
• Virtually all crafting machines now work at double speed, using half power, in Rush Mode.
• Sweeping rework of Lithium Bars and Coils. All items of any note now use Charged Lithium Coils.
• Spiderbot Power Core removed, replaced with Charged Lithium Coil.
• Lithium Coils will also take up 1/5th of the storage room of the previous Lithium usage!
• SpiderBot will now use approx 25x more Lithium. However, as you were previously using 1 bar for every 1-2 hours, I don't really think this is much of a problem.
• Many T2+ items will now use substantially more Lithium - Lithium is used to approximately 10% of Tin in existing bases, and I would like to address that!
• Halved Power usage of Ore Thieves.
• MK1 WorkFloor Excavators are now substantially cheaper to run.
• RackRailers now use 2 Gears, not 2 Bars
• T1 Primary crafting ingredients are now learned at the appropriate time
• MK1 LPTs now use Lithium Coils, not Bars. The lithium cost has also been increased as a result.
• MK1 PSBs now use Lithium Coils, not Bars. The lithium cost has also been increased as a result.
• MK2 PSBs now use Lightweight Machine Housings (Tin secondary crafting material), and Tin cost increased from 5 to 6 bars.
• Tweaked CCCCC recipe to be automation-friendly.
• MK4 Induction now uses an equal amount of all T2 bars
• MK3 Induction now primary crafting materials, not bars
• Lift Compressors no longer need a stupid amount of lithium and LWMH instead of Tin Plates
• Transport Pipes now use Crystal Clocks and Lightweight Machine Housings
• Matter Movers now use Lightweight Machine Housing instead of Tin Plates
• All Drill Motors now use Lightweight Machine Housing instead of Tin Plates
• Mass Storage block now use Lightweight Machine Housing instead of Tin Plates
• MK3 PSBs now use Lightweight Machine Housing instead of Tin Plates
• Removed the Titanium requirement from MK4 induction kits, massively increased Lithium to balance. Now only needs 4 inputs.
• MK2 Turrets now use Lightweight Machine Housing instead of Tin Plates
• MK1+2 Induction Kits now use Lightweight Machine Housing instead of Tin Plates
• Forced Inductions now use Lithium coils, not bars
• Conveyor Filters now use Lithium coils, not bars
• Matter Movers now use T1 secondary materials, not bars.
• Suit Heater now uses T1 secondary materials, not bars.
• A number of single-craft Suit Upgrades have been made significantly more expensive (Toxic Filter, Head light, Jetpack)
• ARTHER upgrades now use Lithium Coils, not Bars.
• Refineries now use Lithium Coils, not Bars.
• Removed Diamond and Crystal requirement from Teleporters, added GoldWire instead; you should now be able to teleport to/from your T2 base immediately, as opposed to 2 hours later after your Crystal collection is setup.
• Ore Extractors now use Gears, not Bars
• Servo Motors are now auto-craftable. The recipe is placeholder, and is planned to use Gearboxes and Solenoids in P19.
• Power Booster Recipe altered to use Wire, not Coils
• MK1 Solar Cell recipe now predicated later on.
• MK1 Turrets now use Gears not PCBs. Less authentic, but much more straightforward.
• MK2 turrets now use Charged Lithium Coils instead of Charged PCBs
• SpiderBot Base now uses Iron Gears instead of Iron PCBs
• Slime Attractor no longer uses awkward items
• Conveyor Belts now use Plates and Wires instead of the appropriate Bars.
• Basic Logistics (Splitters + Filters) now has massively reduced research requirements.
• Advanced Logistics (Mass Storage) now has massively reduced research requirements.
• Assembly Line machines no longer use Copper Plates, but use Tin Plates instead.
• Advanced Conveyor Filter now uses Iron Gears instead of Iron PCBs
• Conveyor Filter now uses Lightweight Machine Housing instead of Tin Bars.
• Motorised Conveyors moved to Advanced Storage, as they were available far far too early for anyone to use!
• Research Assemblers now use Lightweight Machine housings instead of Copper Housings.
• Copper Housings no longer used in the game. Left in purely for compatibility with mods.
• PTGs now use Lightweight Machine housing and Iron Gears.
• Significant rework and breadcrumbing of the first dozen researches or so, making much more logical sense than before.

Rapid Mode

• I'm pushing to have more bottlenecks removed from Rapid Mode, so players who don't have the time or inclination for a challenge to be able to hammer through and nuke the overminds from orbit. It's important to note that this mode means that your mistakes are trivial; screwing up your logistics or researching the wrong thing won't set you back by many hours.
• [Rapid Mode]Un-upgraded Ore Smelters now at 5 second smelt, down from 10
• [Rapid Mode]Labs now take 1500 pps to run at full speed, down from 3000
• [Rapid Mode] Players now start with a nice selection of Up and Down Slopes.
• [Rapid Mode] now mostly drops Pristine Loot.
• [Rapid Mode]PTGs now 7.5x faster in Rapid than Normal; this is 3x faster than previously, and should now be able to run a Research Assembler flat out.
• [Rapid Mode]Base healing rate 5x faster on Rapid; player is not particularly expected to need a MedBay.
• [Rapid Mode]Basic Smelters on Rapid now use up half as much power to heat. They'll *just about* run off of a T0 laser, but a lens or a T1 is recommended!
• [Rapid Mode]AutoExcavators now cut through Ore on Rapid mode.
• Altered HiveMind growth patterns
• Slightly more aggressive surface paging should negate issues with active Hiveminds changing
• [NEW WORLDS ONLY]Active Hiveminds will always be MUCH closer to the surface
• [NEW WORLDS ONLY]Hiveminds can no longer spawn within +-32 metres of the CPH
• [NEW WORLDS ONLY]Player lifts created will now require 3 metres of clearance, not 2. I'm tired of almost bumping my head!

Optimisation

• Monster performance improvements to Storage Hoppers.
• Improvement to all Plant rendering speeds
• Plant Simulation around 50x quicker on end-game bases with cached segment
• Reduced overheads of certain end-game bases from 50ms to 5ms.
• Improved CryoLancer render performance
• Improvements to grass performance
• Many more machines now respect Segment visibility, including
• Storage Hoppers
• FALCORs (all marks)
• WorkFloor Excavators
• LPT impact lasers
• Torches!
• Large performance improvement for end-game bases with intelligent dropping of update cycles for remote or hidden segments
• Further improvements to CPU usage of Plants and Grass
• Fixed Hopper LOD Issues

Fixes

• Tweaked Tunnel Nuker spawns to make slightly larger tunnels.
• Fixed an ancient bug where high-tier Inductions would cause Smelters to get stuck with 1,2 or 3 of the wrong ore in them.
• Added a potential fix for the random crash within PhysX.
• MagmaBore now requires 10x the power to pump Magma, except on Rapid difficulty.
• Bases external to Cryo no longer work.
• ColdCreepSpawners should no longer be able to be entirely embedded by perlin gen (only by evil players)
• FALCORs no longer have unlimited Y range.
• Fixed 1,000,000 in Creative
• SpiderBot base no longer rounds the power inserted to the nearest thousand.
• Added an internal concept of CryoThreat; this should mean the Cryo scales to match your base, without overwhelming you at the start, but at the same time meaning you can't just ignore it during your FF playthrough.
• Scaling CryoThreat modifies the threshold at which Cryo treats rock/dirt etc as Air.

Polish and QoL

• Hopper Shift/Ctrl hint dynamically appears
• ScrollBars return!
• Reduced Surface Brightness by 15%
• Reduced Surface Saturation by 10%
• This will only affect new worlds, or new areas in existing worlds
• Added a tutorial Mission regarding the PaintGun
• MatterMovers can now 'mit through grass.
• All Thieves should Bloom a bit less now.
• Coal Enricher has an animation
• Fuel Canisters Crator is much less placeholder
• Started to look at correct reflection maps for various areas.
• Added cache mode CompressDuringPlayOnly - this will not attempt or require the player to sit through exit compression. Giving a copy of your world to someone? set "cache CompressOnExit" or "cache CompressDuringPlay"
• Added (unused) new Transport Pipe Models for a higher tier
• Many machines now have fixed and improved animations.
• Added Priority Splitter. Sends ALL items right unless the Right is blocked, then sends left. https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/134073202153357312/407254222078214154/unknown.png?width=400&height=225
• Use this to send resources to places only when you need to, for example, to balance Research Pods vs other uses.
• Ore Thief mission priority raised to Critical; now context-sensitive when displayed.
• Worms now have 1 hp on trivial mob difficulty
• SpiderBot base mission now only appears once you've been defeated at least once.
• Fixes to order of Assembly Line, Lab and Research Assembler missions
• Items considered 'garbage' are not longer automatically added to your hotbar when picked up
• Ore Extractors will no longer incorrectly be in 'Error' state for a long time if it's only offloading items without exiting Out Of Storage state
• SpiderBot now gains 500 power per Lithium (Reducing the Lithium Boost from 125x to only 25x)
• Improved music
• Pick (Middle Mouse Button) now gives much more useful feedback. Try it!
• Slopes now considered 'generic conveyors', meaning Thieves can hand off to them
• Fixed issue where base scanners didn't work deep underground on dedicated servers
• Lights will now return Paste, not Lights.
• Further work on turning FortressCraft into some sort of Excel-clone, with smart peak calculation on Bar Graphs
• Added cardinal markers for Room Controllers, hopefully making it completely fool-proof!
• Additional fix for negative minecart station glow
• Surface Map creation is now very slow for the first hour; this should stop players who only play for 15 minutes having too many segments to save out!
• Tunnel Nukers are now more erratic and should cause larger explosions inside mountains, giving the mobs a fighting chance at a decent attack pattern.
• CryoMap is now super-smart, and uses up no CPU time on new worlds. P17 worlds will still have a chunk of CPU time dedicated to displaying the existing CryoPlasm.

Lenses

• Major rebalance of 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.
• 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. ;-)
• Updated handbook to reflect all of the new LPT changes.

Known issues

• Many multiblock machines may not receive visual power correctly as a network client, leading connected lasers to show 0 transmitted power. The OET is very bad for this, but T4 batteries are fine. Refineries seem hit-and-miss. (This has been tracked down but not fixed)
• Plants have duplication issues across networked games.
• Base Scanners can be quite expensive over the network
• MedBays don't heal the player unless the player has power.
• The Glow of Hopper-based FALCOR beacons is incorrect. You can safely ignore the message about needing power, too.

Other

• Player lifts should no longer be able to get stuck above things.
• Fixed a minor annoyance with the Player Shadow
• Signs might not be too horrific to look at now.
• Fixed Ampule duplication exploit
• Plants now harvestable over the internet. As it were.
• Slight improvement to startup of Dedicated Servers
• AutoExcavators now respect IsSomethingWeDontWantToClearUsually
• [Dapper]Added SuperHEIST - puts items into your inventory at a range of 10m as opposed to 5m, at a rate 16 times higher than the base item. Ideal for the creative among you!
• Bosses and Heavies will now move faster as your threat increases. This means less mobs in the air, which means less framerate and cpu issues. It *does* also mean that MK3 lasers are somewhat relatively worse than they were vs Missiles in P17.
• Fixed a number of Base Scanner issues, improved smoothing.
• Fixed instancing on Lasers.
• Laser should respect Rooms correctly
• Added a Room-based achievement
• Many more common machines now have instancing.
• Massive performance boost regarding room/non-room rendering. How is there any optimisation left!!
• Raised maximum draw distance to an insane 512 metres in 2020 mode
• Extended SmartClip in Fabulous mode
• Death and Teleport effects are now different
• Fixed up a number of 'arriving' graphical issues
• A number of polish improvements to the in-shield Tutorial
• New Icons!
• LightWeight Machine Housing Crafter is no longer placeholder
• Changed density of Chromium and Molybdenum spawns, meaning that (at the right depth...) the veins should contain more ore.
• Herbicor should no longer get stuck if a plant is stolen from it and there's no closer plants.
• Fixed conveyor normalisation issue
• Fixed issue where you started in a room with a Base Scanner.
• Teleporting is no longer so nauseating.
• Teleporters now give a slight visual cue as to where they will whisk you
• Plants should no longer 'drop' on game restart when on Hydro bays
• Torches should now alter the local heatmap instantly when placed
• Grommets no longer use PCBs
• Motor Recipes no longer use Bars
• MK1 LPTs no longer use Bars
• Storage Hoppers no longer use Bars
• Charged (Lithium) PCBs no longer used
• Organic Recombinator now uses Crystal Clock, not Crystal.
• Fixed ancient bug where Power Usage and Temperature Gain were inextricably linked with Smelters. This should mean that Induction kits correctly use extra power and now correctly also allow a Smelter to efficiently smelt-on-demand.
• HerbiCors should no longer be able to get stuck in an endless state when the player destroys a plant the HerbiCor is flying towards.
• Fixed player Knowledge of Tin Plants, Copper Wires, Iron Gears and Lithium Coils.
• Lithium Coil Charger no longer need SpiderBot research.
• Significantly more surface-based Research Points available. Get to exploring.
• Suit Headlight no longer appears as a craftable item until T2.
• ARTHER will no longer trickle in 1 power to your suit; he'll save up at LEAST 8 power UNLESS you're suffering from Hypothermia.
• Suit panel now explains how to split stacks
• Picking up too much ore will no longer cause an incorrect completion of successive, on-going missions.
• ARTHER power bar now glows Cyan on grow and Red on reduce
• [Frozen Factory] Cold Caverns have new music
• Conveyor Slopes use Wires, not Bars.
• Conveyor Slopes now correctly autocraft ups to downs, and vice versa. Only carry around one type!
• CargoLift should no longer suffer from 'Perceived value' issues.
• Couple of minor fixes to Tutorial issue and Vis issue... fixed?
• ANOTHER Fix to Smelters and Manufacturing plants disappearing during startup. Complex threaded race conditions are a ♥♥♥♥♥ to track down and fix.
• Fixed airlock vis issues
• Fixed Performance issue with CargoLifts
• Fixed Performance issue with StockPilers and Mass Storage Input ports
• Improved surface performance with some clever code replacing some very dumb code.
• Reworked surface clouds + atmosphere
• Tweaked progression on some recipes
• New players now start with 5 health Ampules. DON'T WASTE THEM. Player also now knows what Ampules are.
• Alloyed Space Window is now Craft Anywhere.
• Player now knows what paste is.
• Items fitted to your Suit now show in the Crafting Panel for Items Carried.
• Fixed Ore Thief mission.
• Fixed ARTHER message incorrectly showing if your Ore Extractor never leaves 'Out of Storage' mode.
• FALCOR Beacons no longer use power when placed on a Storage Hopper (as opposed to no longer using power UNLESS they are placed on a Storage Hopper. Oops)
• Fixes to Conveyor Belt rendering issues (missing items, incorrect scrolling behaviour, incorrect forwards)
• Motorised Conveyors now have correct Crystal Clock cost.
• Fixed issue with Generic Machine Panels being scrolled incorrectly when opened.
• Fixed 'negative glow' issue with Minecarts.
• Tunnel Nukers can now take out SurvivalInjectionEntities, specifically Rocks, GlowTubes, etc.
• Fixed issue where HerbiCors could ignore plants for a minute
• Fixed issue where Ore Extractor Do Not Warn might not get saved under some circumstances.
• Hydroponic bays no longer work outside.
• Fixed a number of icon and text issues
• Fixed a number of sky colouring issues
• Fixed some room Vis Bugs
• [Dapper]Fixed an issue where the CPH would not have your Dapper Skin!
• Added support for detection of new worlds vs existing worlds, allowing me to make changes that only apply to NEW worlds
• Added ability for GenericAutoCrafters to only allow drop off to unique places.
• Increased the number of Pixel Lights, allowing many of the new shaders to provide tight highlights.