Hey everyone!

This update includes the first part of the rework for the Laboratory. The old Laboratory had a really messy appearance due to the inconsistent look and feel of the various experiments. Combined with arbitrary balancing and lack of quality of life features in many areas it was a really tedious building to work with.

In the rework we focused on creating a consistent overall style for the UI with a shared header bar that includes the 4 main tabs that every experiment now features:
The experiment, goals, prestige upgrades and help.

• Whenever you can prestige an experiment or claim more goals it will show a visual indicator on the icon of the experiment itself.
  
• The experiments that require you to purchase multiple components now feature a "buy maximum"-button while all other areas with upgrades that can be bought multiple times allow you to right click in order to perform a "buy maximum" operation on that upgrade.
  
• Chosen prestige upgrades can now be viewed in form of a small skill-tree. You can also reset them now at any time which will cause a regular prestige reset but allows you to reallocate them however you want.
  

Why did we replace the old light experiment?
From a technical viewpoint the old experiment was really messy to work with. It used a render-texture and an offscreen camera to render a room outside of the regular scene just to simulate the lighting orb. The experiment was also completely out of our control in terms of how it functions on a lower level since it used the built-in physics of Unity to handle bouncing and collision logic which even caused some weird issues in some cases where the orb glitched through the wall. Additionally the experiment had a very high randomness factor which you would have absolutely no control over no matter how often you upgraded it.

What can you expect from the second part of the lab rework?
Due to time constraints we couldn't finish reworking the exotic experiment for this weeks update but it will definitely be part of the upcoming releases. The same goes for most of the experiment goals. There are going to be many more goals in the future which will be tied a lot stronger to the various values inside the experiments (for example damage boosts that will be directly linked to the current heat in the fire experiment or similar things). We additionally planned to add more quality of life features for the grid based experiments like importing/exporting as well as shortcuts to store specific patterns so you can quickly switch between them (if you have enough resources). And last but not least we plan to add more worker tasks to add even more automation to the various experiments.

Changelog

Laboratory Revamp

The rework for the exotic experiment is not part of this update and will be released with a future update.

• values of all experiments have been rebalanced
  
• replaced the UI to match the new style and for better UX
  
• added UI effects to highlight that an experiment can be prestiged or that it has unclaimed goals
  
• refactored the prestige system
  
• added new prestige upgrades to experiments
  
• prestige upgrades can now be reset
  
• replaced the Light experiment with a new experiment
  
• added new mechanics to gem experiment
  
• lightly changed mechanics of the air experiment
  
• lightly changed mechanics of the electricity experimentlightly changed mechanics of the earth experiment
  
• added new components to universal experimentprogress bars in the exotic experiment now appear filled instead of flickering when they get too fast
  
• buy max options are now available for most upgrades
  
• experiment goals are now based on highest score instead of current score
  
• more complex mutations now yield more points in nature experiment
  
• '+' buttons have been removed for gem/exotic gem amount display
  
• updated help pages
  

New Stuff

• added adventure room coordinates to debug overlay
  
• added tooltip to Blueprint Button in Workshop
  
• added skill 'Science Funds' to Laboratory
  
• added exotic skill 'Fundamentals' to Laboratory
  
• added exotic skill 'Forces' to Laboratory
  
• added exotic skill 'Universal Theorem' to Laboratory
  
• added AI action 'Workers: Toggle Group'
  
• added AI action 'Workers: Pause Group'
  
• added AI action 'Workers: Toggle'
  
• added AI action 'Workers: Pause'
  
• added AI action 'Workers: Assign Group'
  
• added AI action 'Workers: Assign'
  
• added AI action 'Workers: Set Name'
  
• added AI action 'Workers: Set Group'
  
• added AI function 'Workers: Task ID'
  
• added AI function 'Workers: Is Paused'
  
• added AI function 'Workers: Get Name'
  
• added AI function 'Workers: Get Group'
  
• added AI function 'Game: Number of Enemies'
  
• added module 'Rak`s Curse'
  

Changes

• increased heart/bomb drops in Adventure past distance 100
  

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