I hope everyone's Wednesday is as exciting as ours is today, because we finally have all the details finalized for our new cargoes and can share all the details with you! We think you'll be just as excited after reading through all the changes we have planned. Say hello to our revamped cargo flowchart!
This might look daunting at first glance, but I will walk you through all of the changes. We have seven new cargoes, five new buildings, and a bunch of new cargo / simulation interactions that will really add a lot of interesting decisions to gameplay! Firstly, two big changes we're making to existing systems, the first is that we are removing two seating types and leaving only a single seating type, passengers just weren't as interesting as we expected so we are simplifying that portion of the game significantly. We will be adding Goods storage (for Consumer Goods, Luxuries, and Medicine) along with Isolation storage (for weaponry, xenobiologics, and genetic material) The addition of these cargo slot types will result in much more interesting decisions than deciding between seating class type for passengers. In addition to removing two passenger slots we are also making it so that raw materials, rare resources, dilithium crystals, and luxuries diminish as they are harvested. This will change the game in drastic ways and make the game even more dynamic then it is. For example, no longer will there be an ever-lasting source of rare resources on the moon to fuel your machinery production. After a few decades you may need to look elsewhere for rare resources. The first new cargo type is Stellarium, this is an extremely rare element only found in very specific environments in the galaxy (will not spawn in your starting system / Sol) and is used in highly efficient fusion power generation which begins phasing out conventional power generation methods usually about 25-50 years into the game. Because of this, you will need to transport Stellarium to all high and medium population planets to satisfy their ever-growing demand for power. A Stellarium mine is required to extract this resource. Luxuries is the next new cargo type, this is a moderately rare resource found in random locations throughout the galaxy that requires no building to harvest. All populations want luxuries so this is a good source of easy income (until the resource is depleted of course). In addition to populations directly wanting luxuries it is used in weaponry production. This will especially be important when (in a future version) wars rage between factions and no luxuries are flowing because the weaponry industry is using them all. In this way we hope to simulate the drag on civilian production during a large interstellar war. Since we've already touched on Weaponry I should also mention that it requires a Factory produce along with rare resources. However, the really interesting thing about weaponry is that security forces require it to maintain their operations. If weaponry should ever run out on a planet, all security stations essentially "shut down" on that planet. You can imagine how detrimental this could be if it happened on a place like Earth that provides over half of the security of the Sol system. Shipping lanes would very quickly be heavily infested with Pirates. Therefore it will be very important to keep your security stations stocked with weaponry at all times! Next on our list is Robotics. Robotics will give a boost in production to Food, Water, Raw Materials, and Luxuries. The ability to boost production of these cargoes has been requested many times, so this should be a welcome addition! This cargo is similar to Machinery in many respects, it has a maximum amount and is required for a planet to reach it's maximum possible production capacity. However, it's also quite different since the amount needed on a planet is variable based on the population of the planet and it also is "used up" over time. Robotics requires a Robotics Factory along with machinery and consumer goods to produce. It should open up some very interesting strategies! Moving way over to the right in our picture above is Genetic Material, Xenobiologics, and Medicine. I will discuss these together since they are very interdependent. High habitability planets (besides Earth) will provide genetic material (alien lifeforms basically) which are not harvestable until the planet reaches 100% development, they will diminish rather quickly also. These need to be delivered to a planet with a Xeno lab built on it. Xenobiologics production is increased every time a unit of genetic material is delivered to the xeno lab, meaning you can create a truly massive xenobiologics facility if you wanted to. This is then used in the production of medicines (which also require a small bit of food to produce) at a Medical factory. The amount of Xenobiologics needed to produce one medicine increases with the amount of xenobiologics created galaxy-wide. Medicine is used on all planets to increase birth rates, but is especially useful on low-habitability planets where medicines will be in very high demand to fight off very high mortality rates. To prevent Robotics and xenobiologics becoming weaponized, robotics factories are not allowed on the same planet as weaponry, nor are Xeno labs allowed on the same planet as weapons factories. Also, the interstellar governing agencies have also ruled that Xeno labs are not allowed on planets with habitability higher than 10% to prevent possible contamination of large populations or native species. In addition to all these changes, there is BIG news on the multiplayer front... We have solved the stuttering that clients experience and expect this fix to be in patch 0.3.0 as well. There are also a number of other small bug fixes and improvements to come. We are beginning to throw thousands of new lines of code at Unity so we can get this huge patch out to everyone as quickly as possible! That being said, don't expect it for at least another 3 weeks which puts us solidly at mid-March for a possible release timeframe. These are huge changes as we want to take our time with them and do it right. Thank you all so much for your patience! Sorry for the huge amount of text, hopefully it was interesting to read of all the new features though =) Let us know what you think below! Thank you all for your continued support.