I am back again with another FOUNDRY Friday and today we will be covering two different topics. First we have more information about the upcoming commerce-related content as we will be looking into the galactic market. And right after we will take a look at some changes down on the planet itself where we have added lava caves to the depths!
In case you missed it, you can find the previous three parts of the commerce update preview series here: part one, part two, part three.
The galactic market is a giant space station on the galaxy map, which acts as the galaxy's main trade hub for commodities. It will not be interested in buying your robots. Once you unlock the galaxy view, you will be able to interact with the market. Initially its main purpose is to buy more construction material for the space station, which cannot be made on your own until you reach a later point in the game.
However we’re planning to allow you to trade most other goods on the galactic market as well. It’s something we will have to test quite a bit and might change or limit should it fail to meet our expectations, so take this paragraph as an experimental idea. That being said, I’d like to allow the players to buy pretty much anything that is a raw material or an intermediate good. By intermediate I mean something like machinery parts or electronic components, we would not allow you to buy things like robot arms so that you could just assemble them on the assembly lines.
It’s a bold move, but I think it will play well into player freedom and sandbox experience, which are both parts of the game we are trying to further expand. First of all, it will reduce the profit margin by your robot sales by a lot if you don’t mine and manufacture everything on your own, forcing you to have a lot more robot manufacturing machines. It also presents you with other challenges like space ship logistics if you decide to buy a lot of resources instead of making them on your own. It opens up different ways of playing the game and that seems very exciting.
In the beginning I mentioned you can also sell to the galactic market. In terms of profits it won’t be highly profitable, but it provides an option of selling excess resources and that could be an interesting mechanic. I’m also sure someone will become rich by selling millions of metal plates (or explosives!) instead of making robots, and I find that idea kind of funny.
Mechanics-wise the market offers one-time trades and an option for setting up automatically recurring orders like “buy more ore if stored ore falls below 1000” or “sell plates once more than 500 are stored”. Every trade will require a space ship and keep it busy while it travels to the market and back.
We’ve been showing a lot of commerce-related features in the past weeks, so it’s time to visit the factory and the planet (actually a moon) again. Deep in the depths we have added something very hot: Lava Caves!
Watch: https://youtu.be/h6BDxfKNxlc
Don’t touch the floor. It’s Hot Lava!
Those caves are at the bottom of the playable area and will have some special gameplay attached to them. The way you get down there is through special access shafts, which you can scan for with your handheld scanner. Later you will be able to dig down anywhere once you have researched enough levels of mining force (a research that allows you to break harder rock layers). It’s advised to use the elevator's self-digging feature to dig through those shafts to get down there.
The main purpose of those caves is that you can use the lava to smelt Firmarlite through special smelters that have to be placed on lava. Ultimately we’d like to add more features like heat management and potentially the possibility of your character robot getting destroyed when stepping into the lava. But for now we’re starting with a basic concept as our biggest focus is to make more use of the verticality and voxel world. Players will be able to visit those caves very early (within the science pack two tier), but as of now our plans are to make it optional - depending on the robots you want to make - so that the player can decide.
That wraps it up for today, and as always: We love to hear your feedback and thoughts about those features, please let us know in the Steam comments or come to our Discord.
See you next time,
-mrmcd
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