Hello everyone!

Two weeks ago I shared part one of the Commerce Preview series and our team was very excited to see the positive reactions. Reading your replies gave us further confidence that we’re on the right track even though this meant that we had to delay and adjust our update schedule. Since we get a lot of questions when the update will be released: We’re not fully there yet where we can announce a release date, but we’re planning on doing so in the near future.

Today I’ll continue to share more information about various aspects of the upcoming Commerce update.

Various early to mid game robots, textures are work in progress

Robot Variety

Previously we shared a screenshot of a transportation robot, so I thought it would be a good time to give you a bit of an overview about how many different robots you’ll be able to make and sell.

First of all, our robots are grouped in categories and robots in the same category fulfil similar tasks. Example categories are Logistics, Appliances or Mining. There will be multiple robots for each category, and not every category will have the same amount of robots.

Let’s take a closer look at the Logistics category. We’re starting off with a basic Transportation Bot: It’s cheap, simple to produce and gets its job done, mostly. A great starting point for a new factory. But as you progress you’ll see that there is also a lot of demand for more advanced logistics robots. That is where the Heavy Duty Transportation Bot comes in: A more advanced robot that requires more complex materials (like steel), is a bit more difficult to produce, but ultimately can be sold for a higher price.

While the Heavy Duty Transportation Bot is a clear upgrade, it’s not a replacement for the basic Transportation Bot. The galaxy keeps demanding both (and many more!) robots, depending on planetary needs. This would be the perfect segway to pivot to the star map, but that will be the topic of a future FOUNDRY Friday.

Once you further advance through the game you’ll unlock a flying cargo bot and potentially other variants. A similar trajectory can be imagined for the other robot categories. That might make you wonder how many different robots there will be? Well, I don’t have a final number yet, but we’re aiming for quite a bunch. And here’s the key part: We don’t expect you to make all of them (although you’re welcome to do so if you choose). Our goal is to provide more personal choice and a more sandbox-like playstyle. The game will ask you to make a couple different robots for sure, but ultimately we want you to make your own calls since it’s your factory. Will you be going for product diversity or for big numbers with just a couple robot types?

Shipping Pads

Since there were a few questions about the Shipping Pad, I wanted to share more details about them. To recap, the Shipping Pad is a new building that will be used for all types of item transportation between the planet and the space station (both directions). It will be available in multiple sizes. The building comes with an integrated storage, so it is able to buffer items. For those who previously played FOUNDRY: The existing shipping warehouses are removed, and there is no more downside of placing the shipping pad far away from the starting spawn point.

Once placed you need to configure the direction of transport (planet to station or station to planet) and then assign the item that shall be moved, for example one of the robots. Optionally for fine-grained control you may configure the minimum amount of items to move before a cargo ship will transport any items.

Shipping pads come without an attached cargo ship, those are now managed separately through the space station, see the paragraph below.

Space Ship Management

On the space station you can manage your space ships, for the upcoming update we (most likely) will only have cargo ships, but we have some ideas for other ship types eventually. Space ships are complex objects and they cannot be made by yourself, so they need to be bought.

UI screenshots are work in progress

Once bought there are multiple tasks your cargo ships may handle. One of them is called “Planetary Shipping”, which means it will service your Shipping Pads automatically as soon as the configured conditions are met. They are not assigned to a specific shipping pad, therefore you don’t need a custom cargo ship for each pad. This comes in handy because they need a dedicated space in your station's hangar, which you’ll have to expand gradually as your need for ships increases.

Other tasks your cargo ships can handle are buying or selling commodities (only ingredients, not robots) to the galactic market and distributing your robots throughout the galaxy to your customers. Both of those features we’re going to look into more in detail in a future FOUNDRY Friday.

That is it for today and I hope seeing more details about the upcoming update continues to excite you. I’m looking forward to your feedback which I’ll either address in our Discord or future development blogs.

See you next time,

-mrmcd

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