Hello everyone!

Two weeks ago I asked you about your thoughts regarding making robot production more prominent and adding deeper commerce features. We received a lot of feedback and I want to thank everyone who contributed. We’ll further refine the plan based on the feedback to ensure the best possible path forward. 

I’ll get back to you on that topic in the future, but for today it’s time to talk about a few other things we’re currently working on. We’ll start with one change that has already shipped two days ago, and the other things will become available in future updates - most likely with the first big content update.

Cargo Ship Changes

Last Wednesday we shipped - pun intended - an update that changes how cargo ships behave. Instead of them waiting at their start pad until the target pad becomes empty, they now take off immediately once their take-off condition is met and queue in the sky at the target pad. On top of that we increased the speed of the cargo ships by 25%. Given that cargo ship throughput was one of the most called out issues, we wanted to ship this change as soon as possible. We’ll now evaluate feedback and if necessary make further improvements to the system.

Cargo Ships for Liquids

I initially thought that pipelines are good enough (and realistic) for long distance liquid transportation, but due to heavy community requests we have decided to add tanker cargo ships that are able to transport liquids.

Ore Customization

For future game starts you’ll be able to modify settings about the ores. There will be options to adjust the richness of ores (the amount of items per ore patch/vein) and the frequency (how many ore patches/veins will be spawned in the world). This will allow you to adjust the game experience to your liking. Gradually we will expand this customization system with other settings (an example could be the amount of lakes or mountains), but for now we’re sticking to ores and reservoirs.

Better Escalators

Our current escalators are fun and they are useful to move a little bit faster while walking on them, but let’s be real about it, for fast travel they weren’t fully worth it compared to the jetpack and its speed upgrades. The intent was always to provide a tool to allow for locomotion infrastructure- and they need to move you at a useful speed for that to work. So we added two more tiers and made them fast, really fast. Looking forward to your reactions

Balancing Improvements

Some of you set down with the calculated and correctly pointed out that advanced energy items (like fuel rods) aren’t as valuable as they should be. Therefore we’ll make it a priority to improve item fuel values for the next bigger update. 

Besides that we continue to monitor other balancing values and may adjust numbers where needed.

FOV Improvements

We were surprised at how many players chose to play at high field of view. Playing on a high FOV introduced a few issues with the visuals of the handheld items. We have improved how those are rendered and they should look better in future. This also allows for an even higher maximum FOV setting.

Thank you for reading,  those are just a few things about what's coming for the next update and we’ll expand the list on future FOUNDRY Friday posts. As you can see many of those things are based on feedback, therefore our whole team would love to hear all sorts of suggestions about what you’d like to see added to the game.

See you next time,

- mrmcd

Check out the Roadmap to find out about other planned features!