Hello,
It's time to speak about more Gleba. Some changes, and also something new...

The Gleba problems

In the last few months we have been thinking about how to improve Gleba. There has always been this fundamental problem with a biological-oriented planet - other things you produce in the game tend to not be organic so it doesn't quite fit as easily as a planet based on making more Iron or more electronic circuits.

• It's difficult to integrate the biological production chains into the rest of the traditional factory, as it's mostly metals there.
• Finding useful things to unlock is difficult, especially compared to the metal and electronics based producers like Foundry and Electromagnetic plant.

And during the LAN party we had about a month ago, these problems were only confirmed plus we've realized many more issues in other areas. And seeing people interact with Gleba put a...

Hello,
Today we once again dive head-first into the world of fluids.

Since last time

Back in June, the very same week that we revealed Fluids 2.0 (FFF-416), we were undergoing an in-office LAN party to test the game. As we played, it became apparent that the new system was a little bit too easy. Our Nauvis base had ridiculously huge pipelines that snaked all over the place with little to no thought or structure behind them. We did use some fluid trains to connect particularly distant outposts, but even this was mostly out of habit; a pipeline would have been superior.

...

Hello,
Welcome back to Vulcanus. It's been a while.

You place your new prototype big mining drills, the pinnacle of resource extraction technology, on the closest tungsten deposit to your fledging Vulcanus factory. A few power poles later and they are happily mining away providing a new consistent source of valuable tungsten. A rail ramp and station just about fit in the area too, but without any rail supports in your inventory that line isn't going anywhere soon. Transport belt will have to do for now.

As you're returning to the main factory, placing transport belt to connect this new resource to your base, you feel a trembling from the ground. Big mining drills make a lot of vibrations, but this is on a whole other level. Something else must be going on.

You head back towards the mining site. Across a river of lava you see a truly gargantuan creature snake its way around a volcano. This formidable beast most closely resemble...

Hello,
It's another week! The release is getting closer!

Reactor circuit connection

We added the ability to connect reactors to the circuit network, which allows the player to:

• Read fuel (including currently burning)
• Read reactor temperature

This makes it quite easy to set up a lossless smart reactor, which doesn't insert any fuel unless it is needed.

In some ways, it feels a little bit too easy. The previous solution of people reading the amount of Steam in storage tanks felt like it needed a bit more brainpower and engineering, but it's hard to justify missing capabilities with this reasoning.

Anyway... reading the heat and contents from the reactors may prove to be ...

Hello,
We are a bit busy this week hosting a small LAN party with some fans and community members to playtest the Space Age expansion, so this FFF might be a little bit shorter than normal.

Combat balancing

As with every major update, there are a few tweaks and balancing changes we have made. With new enemies and changes to existing enemies, we took some time to look at the current balancing.

Spawner health increasing with evolution factor

In the early game spawners are pretty tough, you need to take a good bit of time to focus fire them. As the game progresses, biters, spitters and worms all get stronger, but the spawners stay the same.

When the end-game comes around, spawners just melt the first instant you look at them with personal lasers and upgraded ammo. In some ways this is satisfying and gives a feeling of how powerful you have become, but in other ways it is just strange.

So we have...

Hello,
As the 2.0 release approaches, we have been spending time polishing and resolving things which we found during our playtesting.

Resource search

It is the same old story... A feature we've wanted for a long time but was never high enough on the priority list. With more types of resources, it became a little bit more important to have a way to find resources on the map view, and with the new chart search (FFF-400), it was finally time to put it into place.

It took some care to make it work in a performance friendly way. The game doesn't keep track of ...

Hello,
Make Way for the Pentapods!

Last week (...

Hello,
It is time. STOMPY TIME!

If you don't want spoilers on enemies and want to discover them naturally then you might want to skip this one.

Let's continue the story from ...