Hello,
It's another week! The release is getting closer!
We added the ability to connect reactors to the circuit network, which allows the player to:
This makes it quite easy to set up a lossless smart reactor, which doesn't insert any fuel unless it is needed.
In some ways, it feels a little bit too easy. The previous solution of people reading the amount of Steam in storage tanks felt like it needed a bit more brainpower and engineering, but it's hard to justify missing capabilities with this reasoning.
Anyway... reading the heat and contents from the reactors may prove to be quite useful when you get to the final planet.
With the ability to set assembler recipes (FFF-394), there was one missing piece of the puzzle related to making a fully automated magical 'craft everything' circuit setup. That was the ability to read what items are missing from the logistic network. So we added that:
It outputs the amount of items needed to satisfy all the logistic requests in the system, including mobile entities like the player and spiders. Importantly (or unfortunately), it does not include items needed to build ghosts (construction requests). This is mostly a technical restraint on our behalf, as logistic networks do not track ghosts in a way that would make it performant to include.
Additionally, we added the ability to read the number of roboports in the network. This can be used for example to automatically top-up the number of robots as you expand your logistic network.
It can be a little bit hard using the logistic network to prioritize things, like "only bring advanced circuits here if we have enough". So we added a way to disable them using the circuit network.
This is for all types of logistic chest, and works the way you expect:
It is common with these circuit network features, that the community ends up doing crazy things we could never think of. So it will be interesting to see what will be possible in 2.0.
We finished up our 5 day LAN party on Monday this week. We'd like to thank everyone who came, it was a really great time and the amount of feedback from all the players was amazing.
During the event we had nearly 900 individual feedback reports, which is a crazy amount. Katya spent her time during the event sorting through the reports as they came in, and raising the biggest bugs and issues to boskid. This is not to mention all the ideas and suggestions we had from talking to everybody.
Some of the teams finished in the 50 hours we played, so we are feeling okay with the overall pacing and progression. There were a few areas that we will have to focus on for the Space Age release, but overall the game seemed stable and fun enough, so there is no worry about keeping to our release date of October 21st.
As always, wire us up to your thought reactors at the usual places.
