Hello,
Today we have another dose of anti-frustration improvements for you.

Spidertron RTS tool

Lets be honest, the Spidertron selection and control in 1.1 is a bit janky. As fans of RTS games, we know we can do better, and its not like we're reinventing the wheel here.

So we have rebranded the 'Spidertron remote' as the new 'RTS Tool', and the control should feel very intuitive.

• It is activated using the ALT + A hotkey.
• Left click and drag to select Spidertrons.
• Right click to command Spidertrons to go to location.

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The RTS tool remembers the last selection of Spidertrons, so pressing ALT + A again will have the previous group of Spidertrons already selected. Another detail is that...

Hello,
When playing with trains, you tend to spend a lot of time building train stops. In my latest playtesting, I noticed a few annoyances and pain points, which we will go in to today, along with some other improvements for 2.0.

Train stop GUI showing on the way

The Train stop GUI got a new lick of paint for the 2.0 update. Generally this was to make it conform to the typical layout of the entity GUIs, but I also took the opportunity to add a feature we were missing a little bit, that is the 'Trains on the way' tab.

Now you can tell which trains are coming to this specific stop.

Train naming and train limit

There is an important order of operations when setting up a new train stop, and if you do it wrong, you can lead yourself to an unpleasant situation:

...

Hello,
if we have any circuit lovers reading, this is another dose of facts for you.

Radar transmission networkkovarex

It might be useful sometimes, to send circuit signals over long distances. I personally never used it for anything, but when we were playtesting a while ago, Boskid insisted that we include circuit wires into our rail blueprints, because you never know when it might be useful.

I felt uneasy about it, because it goes against the coding principle of "write it when you need it", as it adds a bloat for something which might not even be useful later. But I understand, that if it actually becomes needed, it would be way harder to fix later.

This is how our rail system looked "just in case".

To avoid this dilemma, we added a long requested feature of wireless circuit transmission using Radars.

...

Surprise! There are 5 new planets in the expansion.

The first planet you arrive on is a strange new land, rich with iron, copper, coal, stone, oil, and uranium. Everything a starting factory needs and more. There's also water, fish, grass and trees. Yes, this is a fertile land, and we will thrive. We will rule over all this land, and we will call it... "This Land" "Nauvis".

So yes, the new planet Nauvis is similar to the 1.1 version of the map, but there are some substantial updates. Hopefully this is a surprise for you, because updates to the base map weren't planned at all. It just got harder and harder to not make changes after getting more experience with the other planets and seeing things that were missing or broken.

For clarity, these changes affect the 2.0 version in gener...

Hello,
Is it me you're looking for?

The UI searchkovarex

When it comes to UI, one of the things we are proud of is the standard search feature in every window where it's even remotely relevant. It all comes nicely together. You stop thinking about it, and press the CTRL + F shortcut to search whenever you look for something.

But once we got really used to it, we suddenly started to want to search even when not in some window, but just in the game itself. This combined with the fact, that the most frequented question in multiplayer games was, "Hey, where do we make X please?" (especially once planets were added).

Which lead us to the most obvious complementary feature:

The map searchkovarex

Why not extend the searching to the whole map as well?

We were not sure about what exactly should be searchable, so we just started from the most obvious, the production search. ...

Hello, It's Earendel back for another electric adventure.
You got your first look at Fulgora in FFF-398. (If you haven't read that already please read that first.) Now let's take a look at the new planet's mechanics.

Lightning storms

Every night on Fulgora brings an immense lightning storm. Lightning hits things at random based on material and height. If you're wandering around in the middle of nowhere expect to get zapped a few times. It can kill you and wreck your stuff so look for shelter when it starts getting dark.

Mp4 playback not supported on your device. Damage and frequency boosted for demonstration purposes.

Ruins provide init...

Hello there,
Where shall we go today?

Welcome to Fulgora

You land on an unfamiliar planet, a lifeless and desolate place. The thin air is freezing cold but bone dry. A distant sun twinkles in the dull purple of the sky. Wispy clouds race by as a gale whips up sand that grates against your armour.

As you look around, you find yourself in a desert with endlessly snaking dunes of dust-like sand. The dust almost seems to hover as though gravity were overwhelmed by static electricity. As you press forward, you pass peculiar pillars of fused sand and metal. The sand gives way to rock as you find yourself on the edge of a wind-swept plateau.

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Standing on the cliff-edge, you see similar landforms ...