Smoothing out the difficulty

Nibblers used to be an early game pain point. They are relatively inexpensive to make and easy to automate, but end up eating a ton of food which can't be automated until much later in the game. This led to people having pens full of hungry nibblers and no easy way to deal with them. These new berry bushes help with that early game pain. They are a reliable source of food without setting up a carrot farming chain. They don't give nearly as much as a proper farm, but keep things moving early on. Also, nibblers no longer need to be petted, they are happy as long as they eat something.

What's coming next?

This update was slow, but development is back on track again! I just moved this last week, but boxes are now unpacked and the development server is online. The big May update has some initial designs, and I'm excited to see how people react to it. I'll have another bugfix/quality of life update before then, though. There are still some VR/controller control issues that really need to be sorted.

v0.1.9 Changelog

New

• Tetar berries
• Some colossal stumps in the forest
• Add vegetation density video option. Changing this should help people with GPU-limited machines. Doesn't affect gameplay, but increase/decreases density of grass, rocks, and little mushrooms
• Add fast pipe texture

Balance

• Nibblers no longer need to be petted
• Fence contract no longer needs slimecuddlers
• Double booster box connection maximum length
• Launchers now constructed with gardeners again

Changes

• Show all future contracts in contract menu
• Show error when unable to connect to Steam
• More consistent menu button coloration
• Increase scroll sensitivity in menus
• Reduce UI click volume
• Add acceleration to controller menu movement
• Slightly lower audio pitch of slime and goo cuddlers
• Remove looping navigation in Library/Help windows

Fixes

• Gatherbots can gather spores
• Construction Cannon shows correct controls
• Construction Cannon works correctly on slopes
• Move Gardener and Goocuddler heart positions
• GooCuddlers no longer give scarecrow research
• Remove player inventory counts from factory recipe picker
• Fix stuck audio loops when deconstructing
• Add missing control mapping names
• Fix some stray lines in the main menu
• Fix fence placement with a controller
• Fix building inspection with controller
• Hide pet counters when contract complete
• All cuddler faces use same shader
• Space elevator launch now respects volume settings
• Prevent objects from generating too close to elevator
• Fix vegetation displacement