Lost Legends Expansion - Jan 2024 Dev Diary

A lil somethin somethin: You can find the details for this event on the announcement page here.

Hello and happy new year!

Today I wanted to show off some terrain stuff which will be in the next update as well as some of the other improvements.



Terrain and Cave Generation
The game's terrain gen has taken up a lot of my focus, and I'm super proud of where it's at. With all the biomes, plants and animals in the game, it's an extremely laborious process to work on improving terrain. And it's a big reason why this update has taken so long. But, it's juuuust about done. Let's dive into some things to look forward to.

First off, caves.



The new generation system has a robust set of tools for generating unique and diverse caves (when I say caves, you can assume I include dungeons as well). This is something I'm working a lot on because I want players to have more things to find while exploring underground. That was a big reason for increasing the depth of the world to 256. Caves will vary depending on two main variables: the biome, and the depth. Caves near the surface will be a bit smaller, and have fewer threats and rewards. As you get closer to bedrock at the bottom of the world, the caves will increase in size and complexity. As well, you'll find more interesting entities and items. Big underground lakes with fish. Web-filled spider dens. Tomek mining away. That sort of thing.



As for the overall terrain generation, I've been tuning it like mad. I want players to experience a unique landscape each time they start a new map. A large amount of effort has been put into each biome's features and shape. Mountainous terrain have towering, snow capped peaks with wide, flat valleys. Islands have sandbars and lagoons and deep ocean trenches. You can choose from the hilly landscape you are used to, or flatter plains to work with more open areas.



This is all combined with the new simulation stuff I've built for plants and animals. So, you'll see huge trees, and expansive vegetation that has grown untouched since the Fracture.

Our Ol' Friend, UI! Better Notification Previews You know I'm always trying to improve the game's UI. I've updated the notifications to provide more info for important messages in the game. This is to communicate exactly what you are missing instead of a generic, "Missing item!" notification. For example, when you don't have enough of an item when you are building things, it shows you what blueprint, and what item:



These will appear in the top-left of the screen for various things which, in addition to missing items, include enemies sighted, dying/hungry/thirsty entities, new discoveries (caves, items, tech), and all manner of important info.

Now, I know some people probably don't want to see all these things, so you can also disable them from the notification settings window. From here you can also enable the ones that are disabled by default.

Selected Blueprint Preview I've also added--not sure why I didn't ages ago--the feature which shows what you are currently going to place as a job.



This is especially handy when you want to rotate things before placing them, or just want to see what they look like without needing to be built.

Tooltips Always adding more info to the tooltips. I've added a bunch more descriptions and surfaced a ton of item, plant, entity, and block info. Added artwork for each biome, and am just adding the additional info for them now to show things like fauna, nations, and other tile features.





Tuning I'm testing out having entities live longer. Many have mentioned that they'd like this and I'm going to see how that feels. So, instead of a human living 60-100 game days, they'd live 60-100 game years. Essentially, you'd probably never see your settlers die of old age, unless they were old when they arrived. But, I'm curious how different this will play. As well, the Ardyn would age per day, instead of per minute (how everyone else ages in the old version).

I'm honestly not sure which is best and I might have the option to select either when starting a new game. On one hand, short lifespans means you get to see a settlement progress at a super fast rate, but lose their individual progress quickly. On the other hand, with long lifespans, you get to have settlers keep their levels and skills for long periods but you might never see them get old, and never see their children grow up. It's a tricky little design challenge, and I'd like to put it into the beta to get some feedback on it. Either way, I can easily change between one or the other depending on which is the most fun. :)

Concluding Thoughts I'm in the middle of about five different big-ish tasks, and 100 small-ish tasks. Some of the big ones being UI screens and game content. I'll be honest, it's tedious stuff. I'm trying to juggle all these things as best I can but it takes a long time to finish out each one. So, thank you for waiting, and providing all your extremely kind and supportive messages. I know it seems like this will never come out, but I swear, I am close. You are all amazing and I appreciate you!