-------------IMPORTANT INFORMATION-------------
Here's how to join the beta
Official Release Date for 0.7.0:
Friday July 26, 10AM Amsterdam time / 4AM NYC / 1 AM LA / 5PM Tokyo
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We've finally decided on an official release date! 0.7.0 will go live for everybody within a week. We can't wait to see how everyone will respond!

This week, we've done something that we should've done a long time ago. Zun wrote some simple scripts that calculate how much time it takes to create a specific object, keeping in mind the costs of all required ingredients. We found quite a lot of very unbalanced recipes, and we released a big update on Wednesday that overhauled a lot of them.


Old data from before the big balance patch
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In the 'Time/item" column, you can see how much seconds are needed to craft one item. As you can see, some items like the luxury meal and the perpetual stew take an enormous amount of time.

This is mostly compensated in the next column. It shows how many items colonists need to reach 100% distribution of that happiness type. Berries are easy to harvest but colonist need more than 4 of them, while they only need 0.03 luxury meal per day.

In the third column, these numbers are multiplied to show how much effort is required to provide all colonists with each happiness item. The next column shows how much happiness is provided to the colony when the happiness item is distributed sufficiently.

At the end is the most interesting column. It's a division of the two previous columns, effectively showing how much effort is required to produce 1 happiness.

This number is highest for berries. They're barely worth the effort, but that makes sense: they're a very primitive food source, not an effective happiness item. On the other hand: books are a very advanced happiness item, and they have a relatively low "happiness output" as well.

Happiness items that are unlocked later in the tech tree should be more effective. We've done a lot of rebalancing to make the numbers more sensible. But instead of merely looking at the output, we've also looked at the input. What jobs are necessary to produce all happiness items?


On the left the required jobs before the big balancing update; on the right the same but afterwards.
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Chicken meat and eggs require a lot of barley, and for example the luxury meal required three chicken meat and ten eggs. This made barley farming way too important. We've decreased both the required amount of barley, and the amount of eggs and chicken meat required as ingredients. We've changed some other recipes as well. This should make the distribution of jobs a lot more sensible, and make production a lot smoother.


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After some iterations, Zun decided to also count the food values. The higher the number in column H, the more effort is needed for one calorie. That number does not have to be identical: some food items are hard to unlock, other are primarly meant as happiness item. But especially the exotic food items were very unbalanced. Bread was nearly four times more effective than the rice meal. On the other hand, foofoo was even more effective than bread.


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In the end, we settled on this balance. The amount of effort to produce calories and happiness is a lot more consistent now, with better values for items further along the tech tree.



We're working on the final preparations for releasing the update now. We've got to redo the tutorial and manual. We're working on a splash screen with some important info and disclaimers. To make clear you're in a big new update (and that you didn't suddenly lose your savegames), we've changed the background of the main menu. Thanks PatateNouille for letting us use your creation!

We're perfectionists, and 0.7.0 isn't perfect yet. The new features and complexity increase the demand for other new features. Faster ways of transport, better tools for navigation, better ways to manage your colony, tools to remotely manage colonies, more purpose for large colonies. We'd love to add those things, but we can't justify postponing the update any longer. We do want to add these features in future updates!

We're going to film the new trailer next week, so this weekend is your last chance to submit your world to #trailer-worlds-only on Discord.

Bedankt voor het lezen :)

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