This past week I have been adjusting how all the machinery in the game lines up with each other. If you were observant in past versions you noticed that providing machines like the Stirling Engine provided the exact amount of power that consumers would need. This led to a rather uninteresting gameplay experience where you would just set down a pair of machines and connect them together and everything worked just fine.

So of course, I wanted to change this and there are two initial directions you can go; a consumer requires more power than a single provider can give or a provider gives more power than a consumer needs. I have gone in the direction of a provider gives more power than needed. This is due to the fact that if you connect things 1 to 1 they still work just not perhaps in the ideal way and as we are still in the early game things should be easy to make work the first time.

This also led to another change in how machines work. Previously if a machine like the power hammer was given an input with a higher speed than was required its craft speed would scale linearly with the input. E.g., an input of 2rad/s could give a craft speed of 1 while 4rad/s would give 2. This presents problems as it makes it so the best solution is always run every machine at max speed and never add more until what you have is maxed. Different solutions (add more machines or increase the speed of what I have) should be viable in different situations (I have excess materials or I have excess energy). Craft speed now scales with the square root of input speed. So in the previous example an input of 4rad/s would now only give a craft speed of 1.4, 100% more in for 40% more out. I have started with a simple square root as it is the easiest starting point but if things would be better with a cube root or 1.5 root or whatever I will make changes as necessary. If you are at all confused by this don’t worry as I have added a crafting speed indicator to all crafting machines that can scale so you can see how changes in input affect the machine.

There are of course many other bug fixes and balance changes this week as well as changes to the workbench recipe organization, quick pick action and crane movement (acceleration now included!). I also updated how shafts load so that if multiple are placed next to each other they will always load in the same way they were saved, please be aware this may cause some unintended behavior loading any old shafts from before todays update.

The current goal is to have a stable release of Version 0.3 for July 18th.