Road to Alpha 8: Development Update IV news

Hi Galactic Survivalists!

The Alpha 8.0 Experimental version is already shimmering on the horizon - time to update you on our progress again!

1. Solar System Generator
The "SSG" is making good progress. The most recent version now includes a full preview for planets, orbits and the solar system!



For planets and orbits, we not only added indicators of ore deposits/asteroids and POIs, but you can now also see all NPC spawn points as well!

2. Planets
In the past week we made three major improvements:

2.1 New terrain with considerably increased view distance

We still have to decide about the actual view distance from a gameplay perspective. As you can see, the new terrain would allow for a VERY huge view distance)

2.2 Red and green wall removal
We improved the removal of the red and green walls (still needs testing). In the below screenshot, we are in the far north (actually the sun never sets here) beyond the former red wall and we are looking north. Pre-Alpha 8, this area was blocked. If you continue in this direction you will actually cross the north pole.

2.3 The outside view of the planets in the orbit now looks much better

...and also the 3d planet map has better visuals:

3. New food and item drop system
As promised, we can now have a more closer look on the new food and item-drop system, you will test in the upcoming Experimental version.

3a. New item drop groups
As explained in the last dev blog we changed the single-purpose food & item drops system into a basic set of groups.

- PlantProtein
- NaturalSweetener
- Grain
- Berries
- Fruit
- Mushroom
- NaturalStimulant
- Vegetables
- Spice

Each harvestable plant in the game, that is relevant to a food item or meal, will drop an item that is named like one of these groups. For example: Corn and Wheat plants will get you GRAIN.

There are other plants, that did not see a change yet, like Varon Root still drops Varon Roots, but this might change as we explore categories and new food groups in the future! We are of course open to any suggestions on that matter. ;)

3b. Alternative ingredient crafting
In addition to these first set of groups (might be expanded in the future as we add more plants and planets!) we still have a few collectibles

- Egg
- Milk
- Meat

There is a slight change as well - or better: new alternatives. Having those is often a key, for example if you are in desperate need of a collectible and you simply cannot find it or you ran out of ammo in the c(h)ase for meat.

Whatever the reason is, we thought it is a good idea, to add a few test cases in Alpha 8, like being able to craft Meat and Milk from PlantProtein, Vegetables (Starch!) and Water. Pretty much like it is done already today in the real world. Of course this is the 25th century way doing it. There are a few more recipes added like this (like PlantProtein can be extracted also from Vegetables, etc).

Eggs are the only exception from this new rule, as there is no logic replacement for them yet. As an alternative to hunting the dinos, we added little nests you can pick up the eggs from.

As a side effect, we now can officially claim that you can fill your food bar without having to HARM A SINGLE ANIMAL in the game. :D

Final word on the new food and drop groups: Bear with us that we do not reveal all the recipes yet, as they might still change, but as we said, you can now also SELF-GROW ALL of the ingredients you need for any food item in your growing plots!

We also made sure the categories are that flexible, so we can have all the ingredients dropping from wild plants - at least for the starter worlds. The plants dropping for example BERRIES of course might be different on a temperate world compared to an icy or desert world.

Full overview of the items, currently needed to craft all the new food AND medical templates:

4. Status effects and their remedies

While the change of the food and drop items is pretty straight forward, the new status effects and the medical items needed to cure them, have seen a nearly full rework for 8.0.

Before you look at the full overview screenshot below, which contains nearly all status effects that can affect your player avatar (We just left out a few that are still work-in-progress or questionable if they will make it into 8.0), a quick info about the new status effects.

4a. Staged effects
In the old system, most of the status effects were isolated and had only very few connections like the Parasite 1-2-3 stages. This is now more of a standard.
- There are up to THREE stages to each status effect
- The Stage-1 effects are fairly easy to cure
- The following stages are more demanding and show more severe effects (also spawning side-effects)
- The initial status effects have a fairly long duration. The duration is significantly reduced with each stage, what means: if you do not take care early on, you can be in serious trouble soon.
- There are a few "terminal diseases" that will not convert to another effect (Stage 3) and are very deadly (WiP Rule-of-thumbs: you can currently survive up to 100 real time seconds from full health)
- The individual diseases of stage 1 and 2 are not that deadly as in 7.x, but certain status effects will start other effects or if you cure them, they will fall back to a lower stage instead of being fully healed.

4b. Branches and medical items
To handle the medical items typology, needed to cure the new diseases, we split the status effects into few very distinct "branches", which are colored accordingly in the overview below.
- Antibotics
- Antitoxin
- Antiparasite
- Antiradiation
- Bones
- Temperature

Except for temperature (which is cured by food, beverages and so on), each branch also represents the medical item you need. Example: For the "Antibiotics" branch, you use Antibiotic Ointment, Pills and Injections.

Speaking of this, the STAGES have a simple and straight-forward logic which type of medical item is used for any status effect:

Stage 1 = Ointments
Stage 2 = Pills
Stage 3 = Injections



4c. New medkits
As we want to offer alternatives here as well - and in order to not overfill the inventory in mid- and late game - we also added three types of Medkits that are subsummizing the effects and medical items for each stage of a branch.

That means:
- With one of these kits, you do not need to carry around pills and injections and ointments for a branch, but just one kit.
- Each kit is also offering a considerable health-points boost
- Each kit does not cost the same amount of ingredients as the individual remedies combined would cost you, but is up to 50% more efficient!
- In return, the crafting of medical kits takes much longer.

The new medkits are set up as follows: (Work-in-progress!)

- Trauma Kit = addresses all status effects coming from the Antibiotics and Bones branch
- AntiToxin Kit = takes care of the Antitoxin branch
- AntiParasite/Radiation Kit = combines anti-radiation and parasites remedies
- Regeneration Booster = this not a real kit, but it is an easier-to-craft (compared to the kits) and non-perishable way to carry around a specialized "health points regeneration"-item.



Any ideas for better kit-names? Send us your suggestions! :)

Yours,
Empyrion Dev Team