Hello everyone!

Today I want to share a new and exciting feature with you: A selection screen for different starting planets. When you start a new game you’ll be able to select one of multiple planets, which feature different resource and biome modifications.

This has been a feature that we somewhat coincidentally stumbled into while we’re working on the commerce update. As you know immersion has always been something we care about deeply and for the new commerce theme (more information in future dev blogs) it is a great fit to let you select the planet you want to start your factory on.

At the current state of development we’re very focused on the core features and changes necessary to get the new update done as soon as possible, therefore I initially assumed different starting planets aren’t going to happen. But as we contemplated the topic a bit we realized that we already have systems to make this work: Our world generation system supports customizable resource settings (density & richness for all ores and liquids) and we have a system we call “biome grid”, which allows us to tell the world generator how biomes are distributed around the world. All we had to do was add support for different presets that can be tied to different starting planets.

We decided to allow the players to further customize the resource distribution settings as they were able before, selecting a planet just applies certain default settings, but you’ll be free to further adjust as you see fit. The biome grids however are static per planet and cannot be changed. The way we are going to utilize the biome grid system is that it’ll allow us to over- or underrepresent certain biomes to give the planet a different vibe. For example to make it into a (mostly) desert or ice planet. So let us take a look at a biome grid:

What you can see here is a grid with different colors per box. One axis represents the temperature and the other axis represents the precipitation (both from high to low), the two metrics used (derived from noise based procedural generation) for the world generator to decide which biome to place. Each grid box represents the biome the world generator will use for the according combination of values. For example when it’s hot and humid we assign the tropical rainforest, while if it’s hot and dry it’s a desert. Having different presets per planet allows us to easily generate a very different planet.

Of course it would be even better to have more differences like different configurations on mountain and river settings, but those are things we view as stretch goals that can be looked at at later times during our Early Access period. For now this is a great feature to increase replayability and player choice for a comparatively low amount of work on our side.

I’m going to conclude today’s blog with two different videos of a desert and an ice planet.

https://youtu.be/Uw1amlfynGo?si=UXy2lNPcaWTevPNY 

Thanks for reading and see you next time,

-mrmcd

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