Hello everyone!

Today’s blog post covers three topics, first we are sharing more details and pictures about our decorative object system to provide a better understanding of how creative gameplay will work. Then we look at a new feature we call “Creative Mode”. And finally we have some exciting news for our itch.io alpha preview community.

Decorative Object System

Last week we provided a sneak peek into our new decorative object system. It provides various blocks you can use to build more impressive factories with. Today we’re going to share screenshots of the blocks we have created so far:

The elements above should provide you with a wide range of possibilities, and as time goes on we will add more shapes and objects. All of them can be rotated around any axis to provide the utmost freedom.

By default they are white / light gray and they can be colorized through our new paint roller handheld object:

The paint roller comes with multiple preset colors, but also provides the option to create custom colors to apply to those decorative objects. For now you can only colorize the objects above, but we’re looking into giving more objects support for colorization.

You may ask what about getting creative with voxel blocks? Our decorative blocks are designed to be complementary to the voxel system, and we are still working on adding more regular voxel blocks with different textures to allow for more creative gameplay.

Creative Mode

In future when you start a new game, you will be asked if you want to start the game in “Creative Mode”. If you enable it, you will have access to a new menu which allows you to spawn any item you want - regardless if it is already unlocked through research or not. This is for people who want to focus on creative building or just experiment with different mechanics.

Except the ability to spawn items everything is the same, so you can still conduct research and progress through the science tree with research servers. Some of you may already know our debug menu which allowed for a similar experience. The main reason we decided to make this into a new feature is that the debug menu lets you spawn items or do things which easily can break the game. The Creative Mode UI provides a safe and risk free experience with a better user interface for those who love to tinker.

Next Preview Version + Release Date Trailer Event

For everyone who has previously bought our alpha preview version on itch.io we have exciting news: On Monday (15th of January 2024) at 11:00 AM Pacific Time (20:00 CEST) we will release the next preview version, containing the two features above and the majority of the Science Pack 3 content.

We have decided to launch an event until the end of this month: Use the regular or the creative mode to build good looking factories and send us the savegames. We are going to make a trailer that announces the Steam Early Access launch date, and we are going to use your provided savegames for that. More details on the event and how to provide savegames can be found in our Discord once the event starts.

We’re looking forward to your feedback and your factories!

Enjoy your weekend,

-mrmcd