Hi everyone,

I hope you're all doing well. Over the holidays we've still been working a lot on the new engine but it's still taking longer than expected. In this post I'll show some more stuff that will be included in the 0.9.0 update.

You can find these in the wetland biome. They will spread over time, allowing you to also create large artificial sugarcane plantations. They will drop sugarcane stalks that can be used to either plant more sugarcane or for crafting sugarcane syrup. This sugarcane syrup can then be cooked together with slaked lime to make sugar. The sugar can currently only be used to make sugar biscuits which give workers a small mood boost & saturation but I have more mechanics in mind for the feature that also allow mixing drugs with some sugar products.

Please ignore some of the debug highlighting boxes (they will not be visible in-game)

Many items and structures now exist in many different material combinations! For example, you can craft an axe with a tropical wood handle and a head made from any kind of metal (steel, copper, iron, titanium, etc.). Different materials will have different effects depending on the part such as sharpness, durability and hit cooldown.

With the new material system I also wanted to make the tools & melee weapons (pickaxe, axe, shovel etc.) in the game more dynamic. Previously, each tool just had one designated purpose (i.e. wood cutting, rock breaking, digging etc.) but now I developed a new system that is based on 3 main "hitting variables" bluntness, sharpness & pointiness. Materials on the other hand have 3 main resistance values hardness (sharpness resistance), toughness (resistance to pointiness) & flexibility (resistance to bluntness). The formula for calculating hits is

(sharpness / hardness + pointiness / toughness) * (bluntness / flexibility)

An example of a tool high in pointiness wouold be a spear, sharpness would be a knife and bluntness would be a hammer. There are also tools that are very high in two different values like the axe which has bluntness + sharpness or the pickaxe which has high bluntness + pointiness. This makes a pickaxe very effective on a granite rock (low in toughness and flexibility) while a axe is effective on wood (low in hardness and flexibility). The tool type will be one factor in determining its damage variables but its materials will influence it a lot too.

Respectively, I'm also planning on adding a lot more tools. One of them which I have already added is the kitchen knife (mostly used for crafting though). But I'm also planning on adding a machete & gasoline-powered chainsaw later.

This is something I kind of already showed in previous dev diaries (though it wasn't implemented at that point). In the old engine item containers were just a stack of items that you could take the top one out or put one on top (like the carton box with beer bottles). The new item containers will now behave like regular grid-based containers that you can freely place items inside and take them out. This way you won't need huge areas to store goods anymore but can just construct containers in your zones and NPCs will also be able to access them.

That's it for this post though! For next week we're working more on the new volume containers UI & remaking the chemistry system (also with some improvements). Also, we've started remaking the smuggling system in the new engine this week. I've also finished all my semester exams so I'm planning on making more posts here whenever I have new stuff to show or tell.

-Gigicom