Hey everyone, Stephen here with a quick progress update

We split our time this month between our next major patch (not out yet) and a small quality of life update.
There's no real cohesion here, just a mish-mash of bug fixes, and minor updates.


That's right folks, if you want to decide what feature put into the game next, now's your chance.
We've re-introduced the feature vote. Just log into Atrio, and select the "vote now" button on the roadmap. The top pick will be included in a future update!

New Features

- New Punk Monk Cinematic

What's this?! NEW STORY!?!?
Kind of. When you first meet the punk monk, it's not very obvious as to what the heck is happening. All of our playtests showed that people missed the point of the story (and it was our fault).
So we created a brand new cinematic to make it more obvious what's happening in the plot. It's not really new story, but updated.

- Character can harvest and open menu

We've wanted to do this for maaany many months, and got the chance to squeeze it in. It's mostly useful when you are harvesting a large patch of ore and want to peruse the menu. You can also open the menu mid-run (so long as you are clicking).

- Placing destroys small plants

It's always irked me when i'm trying to create a beautiful factory and a darn glowplants wrecks my flow.
No one wants to stop building, harvest a glowplant, and keep going.
We felt that "auto-harvesting" would be too op. Now, placing a building permanantly destroys plants.
We hope that creating bases will feel a lot more seamless and fun with this change!

- Optimized placing/dismantling

Francois managed to find a way to optimize the placement code. Placing and dismantling should be a bit faster on all machines.

Major Bug Fixes

- The bug that almost killed us

After this last patch, several people reported a bug where the title menu was unclickable.
We started looking into it - after a day, we could reproduce it, but people kept reporting it.
We went through every version of the game dating back to September trying to figure out what was causing the issue (much to our chagrin), but it wasn't happening on our machines. Luckily, the folks in our discord we're incredibly helpful, willing to try out different versions so we could track it down.

After 3 grueling days, and the amazing help of our discord (Especially @Servant) we found the bug - having the game plugged into a subset of Huion drawing tablets. I say subset because Francois has a Huion tablet and wasn't having any issues with his being plugged in!!!

We've implemented a fix but at the cost of 3 days of development. We're just glad it's over.

- Factories stop pulling in items

IF YOU SEE THIS ISSUE, please join the discord!

There's also a bug where the factory randomly stops pulling items in. We spent ANOTHER 2 days trying to reproduce, to absolutely not avail. It's infrequent, but game breaking (and impossible to fix since we can't reproduce it). Instead, we've created a logging system that tracks as much info as possible in case a user out in the wild runs across it.
It would be an enormous help to send us your .log files so we can try and track it down.

Other Bugs

• Discovered backpacks no longer reload in freeplay
  
• Adjusted the build tree so Scrap wires doesn't require Carbon fiber
  
• Fixed a bug where the BackpackSize3 research was unlocked too early
  
• Fixed a bug where the TorchDuration3 research was unlocked too early
  
• You can now replace your dispense chest by placing a new one in different directions.
  
• Fixed a bug where the player would not die from circuit juice
  
• Fixed a bug where loading a main game from freeplay would merge the two modes
  

What's next?

Our next major patch is a multi-mvonth endeavor. We're going to try and release small quality of life updates in parallel to working on the big patches.

Thanks for your patience and happy automating,
Stephen + The Isto Inc Team.