[2019] OMG! Open Shop!

Dear Travellers,

Starting today when you gather your Crew and ready up for a trek across the skies, the eagle-eyed among you will notice a brand new option in the main game menu – the Worlds Adrift Item Store!

The Item Store comes alongside a bunch of other fixes (please see the usual tasty patch notes for more on those), but we felt there may be people out there who wanted more info on the whys and wherefores. If that’s you – read on!

First up, it’s important to reiterate that the Item Store is now and will forever be for cosmetic items only – no pay-to-win here, thank you very much.

Our Founder community will remember an early post where we discussed the business model for the game (read here) in which we made that commitment – no changes there.  Beyond cosmetics items themselves, any account services / quality of life items (we hear you on those extra character slots!) will only be added based on your feedback and if it sticks to the no pay-to-win rule. We’ll need your insight on that one when the time comes!

So why now? Firstly – because many of you asked! We’ve been incredibly humbled by the requests from the community to help support Worlds Adrift and its future. It continues to be an amazing, challenging ride and it’s fantastic to see many of you as captivated by it as we are – that’s real ‘roll outta bed fighting’ stuff right there!

On a more technical level – if you cast your memories waaaay back to 2018 (not that far – to the holiday season) you may remember the unique Tarrery Lamp and Kahi outfit you got nicely gift wrapped in-game. The development work we did on those uses Steam’s Inventory Service – the very same tech the Item Store runs on. In short – it was pretty straightforward development and QA wise to spin up. A ‘quick win’ you could say in an ocean (sky?) of technical challenges we love to face and move forward on every day

In practical, ‘who does what’ terms – this means this update was no different for the dev team in continuing to focus on bugs, fixes, and stability. The art team, however, have been real busy, which leads us nicely onto…

In the Item Store today you’ll see a small selection of mainly Clothing items. There’s a single Ship part in there too and don’t forget – you’re buying the actual Schematic for the part so remember to craft some extras for your friends!

So what’s next? The Art team already have some cool ideas for future items – and we’re going to start by adding more Ship items. Remember – the store must not distract our dev team from the more important task of improving the game itself. This means if a new item type needs too much work / new systems (Gliders ftw!) – they’ll be coming further down the road.

We’d really love your feedback on everything Item Store related – items, prices, qualities, and yes any bugs – so please get in touch and let us know! You can find the out of game store HERE

See you in the skies!

Ricardo (Ric)

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