Playing the game during the past few weeks felt like playing a scrappy tech demo. It was fun to see the new jobs and items, but it didn't feel like a game. But this week, playing the most recent dev branch actually felt like a fun and immersive experience again! We've made many changes to the tech tree, crafting recipes and food/happiness values. Balancing the production of happiness now feels like the fun challenge it ought to be. Recruit a bunch of colonists, and the total happiness level drops, while the amount of happiness items needed by your colonists increases: providing everyone with a piece of cake everyday requires more cake when you've got 100 colonists compared to 50 colonists. Fiddling with the sliders and checking your production chains to rebalance happiness works perfectly now. One major change is the removal of nearly all seeds & saplings. Having to buy wheat seeds at the shop if you wanted to expand more rapidly was an interesting mechanic when the game lacked content in June 2017. But the game now contains a lot more content, and 0.7.0 adds a lot of new seeds & saplings. Barley seeds, cabbage seeds, olive saplings, and in a similar vein, chicken coops for chicken farmers and beehives for beekeepers. Instead of cluttering the stockpile with additional items and expanding unnecessary mechanics, we've decided to remove the requirement for them entirely. Colonists can just plant wheat and cabbages and all the other crops and trees now, even if they lack seeds or saplings. We believe it improves the game, but we love to have your opinion!
Another new job is the "water pump operator". 0.7.0 adds two new jobs that need to be placed next to water: the fisherman and the water gatherer. Fish isn't fundamental to your colony, but water is. Instead of forcing players to start a colony next to lakes or oceans, we decided to add a new job block that can also turn empty buckets into buckets filled with water: the water pump. It can do the same thing as a water gatherer, albeit slower. Here's a complete list of changes to the dev branch this week:


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