As is traditional, the echo patch comes shortly after the main patch (Did I mention it's the 18th free content patch since we left Early Access? I still keep getting asked when we're leaving Early Access). This patch fixes some of the issues that have arisen, and as always, I *just* managed to squeeze in a handful of new things.

• Logistics FALCORS with no specified item now wait 30 seconds, to allow the player to set a filter. This will stop your new HEFC FALCOR legging it and grabbing a Plasma Head!
  
• Hopper-mounted Storage Beacon should no longer incorrectly pester you for power, and should glow appropriately.
  
• Visitors without build permission should no longer be able to die from Cold, Heat, Toxicity, standing in the wrong place or from attrition. Falling very long distances still lethal.
  
• Iron Plates should no longer be a mysterious item for new players.
  
• Biomass and Crystal now stack to 150. If you currently have > 150, you won't lose any, you just won't be allowed to pick up any more.
  
• Crafting Machines will now prioritise Conveyors as offload targets. This means they will ignore any hopper as an offload target, if a valid (full OR empty) conveyor is present. This means you can go GAC -> Add/RemoveHopper -> GAC -> Conveyor without problem.
  
• Perhaps the final fix ever to the 'Losing focus causes your base to not generate' issue. Fabulous mode should now hopefully allow you to create a base *just fine*
  
• You can no longer pause the game during the initial generation sequence, causing issues.
  
• Titanium Bars are no longer used in Crafting - it is ALWAYS Titanium Plates. Get to automatin'!
  
• CryoPlasm will not longer reach fully lethality until the player has at least setup a Frozen-Factory T4 level smelting system.
  
• Fixed issue on Linux where the mouse is detached and can click on Hotbar entries, thanks to MattKlynn for giving me the fix.
  
• CryoMap should now work correctly for network clients.
  
• Logistics FALCOR beacons placed within the Cold Caverns will now only require 8 metres of skyclearance
  
• Objects on blocked conveyors will no longer ever be incorrectly invisible and if I'm wrong, I don't want to be told otherwise.
  
• Tweaked Ore Scanning slightly - should now be faster on larger veins.
  
• All-Ore mode now works, tho it's not very playable.
  
• Doors are no longer silent.

As is traditional, the echo patch comes shortly after the main patch (Did I mention it's the 18th free content patch since we left Early Access? I still keep getting asked when we're leaving Early Access). This patch fixes some of the issues that have arisen, and as always, I *just* managed to squeeze in a handful of new things.

• Logistics FALCORS with no specified item now wait 30 seconds, to allow the player to set a filter. This will stop your new HEFC FALCOR legging it and grabbing a Plasma Head!
  
• Hopper-mounted Storage Beacon should no longer incorrectly pester you for power, and should glow appropriately.
  
• Visitors without build permission should no longer be able to die from Cold, Heat, Toxicity, standing in the wrong place or from attrition. Falling very long distances still lethal.
  
• Iron Plates should no longer be a mysterious item for new players.
  
• Biomass and Crystal now stack to 150. If you currently have > 150, you won't lose any, you just won't be allowed to pick up any more.
  
• Crafting Machines will now prioritise Conveyors as offload targets. This means they will ignore any hopper as an offload target, if a valid (full OR empty) conveyor is present. This means you can go GAC -> Add/RemoveHopper -> GAC -> Conveyor without problem.
  
• Perhaps the final fix ever to the 'Losing focus causes your base to not generate' issue. Fabulous mode should now hopefully allow you to create a base *just fine*
  
• You can no longer pause the game during the initial generation sequence, causing issues.
  
• Titanium Bars are no longer used in Crafting - it is ALWAYS Titanium Plates. Get to automatin'!
  
• CryoPlasm will not longer reach fully lethality until the player has at least setup a Frozen-Factory T4 level smelting system.
  
• Fixed issue on Linux where the mouse is detached and can click on Hotbar entries, thanks to MattKlynn for giving me the fix.
  
• CryoMap should now work correctly for network clients.
  
• Logistics FALCOR beacons placed within the Cold Caverns will now only require 8 metres of skyclearance
  
• Objects on blocked conveyors will no longer ever be incorrectly invisible and if I'm wrong, I don't want to be told otherwise.
  
• Tweaked Ore Scanning slightly - should now be faster on larger veins.
  
• All-Ore mode now works, tho it's not very playable.
  
• Doors are no longer silent.

The 18th free Content Patch since we left Early Access is now live for everybody. Check the previous post for pretty video and long-winded descriptions - this post is a little 'listy'

Enjoy!

• Network Sun is less... lackadaisical.
  
• Fixed Network Sync issue with Falcors
  
• GACs as a network client should no longer offload, causing attached Storage Hoppers to show the wrong number of items.
  
• Fixed issue with Orbital Strike Controller not saving/loading correctly (and therefore not networking properly!)
  
• Network Guests will be warned they can't talk.
  
• A swathe of minor network fixes
  
• Networking on special conveyor types is now smarter, meaning less sync-vis issues

• Surface rooms are now at a energy-efficient 20 degrees
  
• Added 10 new, reinforced, paintable blocks, ALL designed to make your rooms look super-cool!
  
• InductionChargers now count as valid Floors for Rooms. Let's hope that doesn't mess up the visibility...
  
• Grommets now support Generator Entities - this means Solar Panels and PTGs will transfer their power through a Grommet to a PSB on the other side.
  
• This means you can have a nice, neat Coal Enriching room, with Coal going in one side, and Power coming out the other!
  
• Segments now correctly support multiple rooms.
  
• Room Controllers now have a nice readout showing you how many machines are in the room. Remember that a Door is effectively 9 machines!
  
• Added CPH logging ALL bars and ALL ores
  
• Added readout of above : https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/134073202153357312/405828299521130496/unknown.png
  
• Added monitoring of 'base material efficiency'. <100%? You're extracting far more ores than you're turning into bars. >100%? Your ore storage is running out! Getting this close to 100% will help you achieve maximum performance and efficiency. How fun.
  
• Game will track ~45 days of progression.
  
• Added Configurable base readouts. Supports Ore and Bars. Should be idiot-proof ;-)
  
• Added Room Lights. Paint option will be Dapper-Only.
  
• Grass will now only exist on Organic Detritus, and not indoors.
  
• Configured Basic and Advanced Hydroponic values, disallowed Plants building on normal terrain, allowed on hydroponics, banned all non-plants on hydroponics.

• Added MK1 Medical Ampule. Requiring 8 plant seeds, this will boost your heal rate.
  
• Added Agriculture Research
  
• Added MedBay. Will only work in rooms once complete. Give power; heals you when you're nearby.
  
• Added HerbiCOR; this FALCOR modification will track down surface plants within a 512m diameter, and will then return it to a hopper.
  
• All plants can now be harvested manually, for a reward, or via the HerbiCORE.
  
• Hydroponic Bays should also be available
  
• Health system reworked. Micro-fall damage is healed quickly. Major damage is much slower, and death damage is almost 10 minutes. Health UI shows the time until you gain +1hp
  
• Ampule Dispensers now correctly accept Ampules, save, load, and network transmit
  
• Ampule Crafters now correctly accept any type of Seed and convert into an Ampule. Ampules are automatically upcrafted
  
• HerbiCores should no longer auto-harvest plants that haven't been scanned.

• Fixed the DESCRIPTION of the Basic Smelter to correctly inform the player that it is twice as fast as a regular Smelter. Can everyone stop telling me how useless they are please.
  
• Changed most/all recipes that use Copper Bar and Tin Bar to Copper Wire and Tin Plates. Carrying around these bars is about to get really pointless.
  
• Changed Iron Gear self-craft cost to 5 bars per 1 gear
  
• Added Iron Gear auto-crafter, which crafts 1 gear per 1 bar.
  
• Reduced ALL existing recipes that use Gears by a factor of 5 (so 15 gears is now worth 3 gears, and so on)
  
• Changed Lightweight Machine Housing self-craft cost to 12 bars from 6
  
• Added Lightweight Machine Housing auto-crafter, which crafts 1 Lightweight Machine Housing from 6 tin bars.
  
• Removed all performance penalties from Logistics Hoppers. Please, don't treat these as throwaway items! I feel that people over-use Storage Hoppers, when sometimes, you just want 2 of a thing.
  
• Reduced the performance penalty of MiniHoppers from 30 seconds to 5 seconds. These should now be much more useful early-game sources of input and storage.
  
• All MineCart tracks cost 4 Alloyed Blocks, down from 16
  
• Basic Minecarts now cost 8 Alloyed Blocks, down from 64
  
• MK2 PSB upcraft now needs Plates, not Bars.
  
• Virtually all crafting machines now work at double speed, using half power, in Rush Mode.
  
• Sweeping rework of Lithium Bars and Coils. All items of any note now use Charged Lithium Coils.
  
• Spiderbot Power Core removed, replaced with Charged Lithium Coil.
  
• Lithium Coils will also take up 1/5th of the storage room of the previous Lithium usage!
  
• SpiderBot will now use approx 25x more Lithium. However, as you were previously using 1 bar for every 1-2 hours, I don't really think this is much of a problem.
  
• Many T2+ items will now use substantially more Lithium - Lithium is used to approximately 10% of Tin in existing bases, and I would like to address that!
  
• Halved Power usage of Ore Thieves.
  
• MK1 WorkFloor Excavators are now substantially cheaper to run.
  
• RackRailers now use 2 Gears, not 2 Bars
  
• T1 Primary crafting ingredients are now learned at the appropriate time
  
• MK1 LPTs now use Lithium Coils, not Bars. The lithium cost has also been increased as a result.
  
• MK1 PSBs now use Lithium Coils, not Bars. The lithium cost has also been increased as a result.
  
• MK2 PSBs now use Lightweight Machine Housings (Tin secondary crafting material), and Tin cost increased from 5 to 6 bars.
  
• Tweaked CCCCC recipe to be automation-friendly.
  
• MK4 Induction now uses an equal amount of all T2 bars
  
• MK3 Induction now primary crafting materials, not bars
  
• Lift Compressors no longer need a stupid amount of lithium and LWMH instead of Tin Plates
  
• Transport Pipes now use Crystal Clocks and Lightweight Machine Housings
  
• Matter Movers now use Lightweight Machine Housing instead of Tin Plates
  
• All Drill Motors now use Lightweight Machine Housing instead of Tin Plates
  
• Mass Storage block now use Lightweight Machine Housing instead of Tin Plates
  
• MK3 PSBs now use Lightweight Machine Housing instead of Tin Plates
  
• Removed the Titanium requirement from MK4 induction kits, massively increased Lithium to balance. Now only needs 4 inputs.
  
• MK2 Turrets now use Lightweight Machine Housing instead of Tin Plates
  
• MK1+2 Induction Kits now use Lightweight Machine Housing instead of Tin Plates
  
• Forced Inductions now use Lithium coils, not bars
  
• Conveyor Filters now use Lithium coils, not bars
  
• Matter Movers now use T1 secondary materials, not bars.
  
• Suit Heater now uses T1 secondary materials, not bars.
  
• A number of single-craft Suit Upgrades have been made significantly more expensive (Toxic Filter, Head light, Jetpack)
  
• ARTHER upgrades now use Lithium Coils, not Bars.
  
• Refineries now use Lithium Coils, not Bars.
  
• Removed Diamond and Crystal requirement from Teleporters, added GoldWire instead; you should now be able to teleport to/from your T2 base immediately, as opposed to 2 hours later after your Crystal collection is setup.
  
• Ore Extractors now use Gears, not Bars
  
• Servo Motors are now auto-craftable. The recipe is placeholder, and is planned to use Gearboxes and Solenoids in P19.
  
• Power Booster Recipe altered to use Wire, not Coils
  
• MK1 Solar Cell recipe now predicated later on.
  
• MK1 Turrets now use Gears not PCBs. Less authentic, but much more straightforward.
  
• MK2 turrets now use Charged Lithium Coils instead of Charged PCBs
  
• SpiderBot Base now uses Iron Gears instead of Iron PCBs
  
• Slime Attractor no longer uses awkward items
  
• Conveyor Belts now use Plates and Wires instead of the appropriate Bars.
  
• Basic Logistics (Splitters + Filters) now has massively reduced research requirements.
  
• Advanced Logistics (Mass Storage) now has massively reduced research requirements.
  
• Assembly Line machines no longer use Copper Plates, but use Tin Plates instead.
  
• Advanced Conveyor Filter now uses Iron Gears instead of Iron PCBs
  
• Conveyor Filter now uses Lightweight Machine Housing instead of Tin Bars.
  
• Motorised Conveyors moved to Advanced Storage, as they were available far far too early for anyone to use!
  
• Research Assemblers now use Lightweight Machine housings instead of Copper Housings.
  
• Copper Housings no longer used in the game. Left in purely for compatibility with mods.
  
• PTGs now use Lightweight Machine housing and Iron Gears.
  
• Significant rework and breadcrumbing of the first dozen researches or so, making much more logical sense than before.

• I'm pushing to have more bottlenecks removed from Rapid Mode, so players who don't have the time or inclination for a challenge to be able to hammer through and nuke the overminds from orbit. It's important to note that this mode means that your mistakes are trivial; screwing up your logistics or researching the wrong thing won't set you back by many hours.
  
• [Rapid Mode]Un-upgraded Ore Smelters now at 5 second smelt, down from 10
  
• [Rapid Mode]Labs now take 1500 pps to run at full speed, down from 3000
  
• [Rapid Mode] Players now start with a nice selection of Up and Down Slopes.
  
• [Rapid Mode] now mostly drops Pristine Loot.
  
• [Rapid Mode]PTGs now 7.5x faster in Rapid than Normal; this is 3x faster than previously, and should now be able to run a Research Assembler flat out.
  
• [Rapid Mode]Base healing rate 5x faster on Rapid; player is not particularly expected to need a MedBay.
  
• [Rapid Mode]Basic Smelters on Rapid now use up half as much power to heat. They'll *just about* run off of a T0 laser, but a lens or a T1 is recommended!
  
• [Rapid Mode]AutoExcavators now cut through Ore on Rapid mode.
  
• Altered HiveMind growth patterns
  
• Slightly more aggressive surface paging should negate issues with active Hiveminds changing
  
• [NEW WORLDS ONLY]Active Hiveminds will always be MUCH closer to the surface
  
• [NEW WORLDS ONLY]Hiveminds can no longer spawn within +-32 metres of the CPH
  
• [NEW WORLDS ONLY]Player lifts created will now require 3 metres of clearance, not 2. I'm tired of almost bumping my head!

• Monster performance improvements to Storage Hoppers.
  
• Improvement to all Plant rendering speeds
  
• Plant Simulation around 50x quicker on end-game bases with cached segment
  
• Reduced overheads of certain end-game bases from 50ms to 5ms.
  
• Improved CryoLancer render performance
  
• Improvements to grass performance
  
• Many more machines now respect Segment visibility, including
  
• Storage Hoppers
  
• FALCORs (all marks)
  
• WorkFloor Excavators
  
• LPT impact lasers
  
• Torches!
  
• Large performance improvement for end-game bases with intelligent dropping of update cycles for remote or hidden segments
  
• Further improvements to CPU usage of Plants and Grass
  
• Fixed Hopper LOD Issues

• Tweaked Tunnel Nuker spawns to make slightly larger tunnels.
  
• Fixed an ancient bug where high-tier Inductions would cause Smelters to get stuck with 1,2 or 3 of the wrong ore in them.
  
• Added a potential fix for the random crash within PhysX.
  
• MagmaBore now requires 10x the power to pump Magma, except on Rapid difficulty.
  
• Bases external to Cryo no longer work.
  
• ColdCreepSpawners should no longer be able to be entirely embedded by perlin gen (only by evil players)
  
• FALCORs no longer have unlimited Y range.
  
• Fixed 1,000,000 in Creative
  
• SpiderBot base no longer rounds the power inserted to the nearest thousand.
  
• Added an internal concept of CryoThreat; this should mean the Cryo scales to match your base, without overwhelming you at the start, but at the same time meaning you can't just ignore it during your FF playthrough.
  
• Scaling CryoThreat modifies the threshold at which Cryo treats rock/dirt etc as Air.

• Hopper Shift/Ctrl hint dynamically appears
  
• ScrollBars return!
  
• Reduced Surface Brightness by 15%
  
• Reduced Surface Saturation by 10%
  
• This will only affect new worlds, or new areas in existing worlds
  
• Added a tutorial Mission regarding the PaintGun
  
• MatterMovers can now 'mit through grass.
  
• All Thieves should Bloom a bit less now.
  
• Coal Enricher has an animation
  
• Fuel Canisters Crator is much less placeholder
  
• Started to look at correct reflection maps for various areas.
  
• Added cache mode CompressDuringPlayOnly - this will not attempt or require the player to sit through exit compression. Giving a copy of your world to someone? set "cache CompressOnExit" or "cache CompressDuringPlay"
  
• Added (unused) new Transport Pipe Models for a higher tier
  
• Many machines now have fixed and improved animations.
  
• Added Priority Splitter. Sends ALL items right unless the Right is blocked, then sends left.
  https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/134073202153357312/407254222078214154/unknown.png?width=400&height=225
  
• Use this to send resources to places only when you need to, for example, to balance Research Pods vs other uses.
  
• Ore Thief mission priority raised to Critical; now context-sensitive when displayed.
  
• Worms now have 1 hp on trivial mob difficulty
  
• SpiderBot base mission now only appears once you've been defeated at least once.
  
• Fixes to order of Assembly Line, Lab and Research Assembler missions
  
• Items considered 'garbage' are not longer automatically added to your hotbar when picked up
  
• Ore Extractors will no longer incorrectly be in 'Error' state for a long time if it's only offloading items without exiting Out Of Storage state
  
• SpiderBot now gains 500 power per Lithium (Reducing the Lithium Boost from 125x to only 25x)
  
• Improved music
  
• Pick (Middle Mouse Button) now gives much more useful feedback. Try it!
  
• Slopes now considered 'generic conveyors', meaning Thieves can hand off to them
  
• Fixed issue where base scanners didn't work deep underground on dedicated servers
  
• Lights will now return Paste, not Lights.
  
• Further work on turning FortressCraft into some sort of Excel-clone, with smart peak calculation on Bar Graphs
  
• Added cardinal markers for Room Controllers, hopefully making it completely fool-proof!
  
• Additional fix for negative minecart station glow
  
• Surface Map creation is now very slow for the first hour; this should stop players who only play for 15 minutes having too many segments to save out!
  
• Tunnel Nukers are now more erratic and should cause larger explosions inside mountains, giving the mobs a fighting chance at a decent attack pattern.
  
• CryoMap is now super-smart, and uses up no CPU time on new worlds. P17 worlds will still have a chunk of CPU time dedicated to displaying the existing CryoPlasm.

• Major rebalance of lenses. Currently the first 4 tiers of Lens (Diamond, Sapphire, Topaz and Emerald) are mostly available to the player whilst they have T0/1/2 lasers. As these lasers provide very low PPS, a percentage-based increase doesn't give much difference. As an example, a T0 laser with an Emerald in it gains 30%. 30% bonus to 1.16 PPS is 1.508 PPS. In larger Tier lasers, all Crystals provide a wonderful boost - but by the time the player get T2/T3 lasers, the Organic Lenses have far outstripped the lower-tier Crystal ones, and thus are pointless.
  
• T0 - 1.16 PPS with Emerald was 1.5 PPS
  
• T0 - 1.16 PPS with Emerald is now 31.5 PPS
  
• T3 - 320 PPS with Emerald was 416
  
• T3 - 320 PPS with Emerald is now 360 PPS
  
• This should make early-lenses more useful, and means that a T0 Laser with a Sapphire Lens is now a massive 101 PPS - but you will have to put in some manual time searching to get that reward.
  
• Diamond is 15 PPS bonus
  
• Emerald is 30 PPS bonus
  
• Ruby is 60 PPS bonus
  
• Sapphire is 100 PPS bonus
  
• I reserve the right to re-balance these in the future. ;-)
  
• Updated handbook to reflect all of the new LPT changes.

• Many multiblock machines may not receive visual power correctly as a network client, leading connected lasers to show 0 transmitted power. The OET is very bad for this, but T4 batteries are fine. Refineries seem hit-and-miss. (This has been tracked down but not fixed)
  
• Plants have duplication issues across networked games.
  
• Base Scanners can be quite expensive over the network
  
• MedBays don't heal the player unless the player has power.
  
• The Glow of Hopper-based FALCOR beacons is incorrect. You can safely ignore the message about needing power, too.

• Player lifts should no longer be able to get stuck above things.
  
• Fixed a minor annoyance with the Player Shadow
  
• Signs might not be too horrific to look at now.
  
• Fixed Ampule duplication exploit
  
• Plants now harvestable over the internet. As it were.
  
• Slight improvement to startup of Dedicated Servers
  
• AutoExcavators now respect IsSomethingWeDontWantToClearUsually
  
• [Dapper]Added SuperHEIST - puts items into your inventory at a range of 10m as opposed to 5m, at a rate 16 times higher than the base item. Ideal for the creative among you!
  
• Bosses and Heavies will now move faster as your threat increases. This means less mobs in the air, which means less framerate and cpu issues. It *does* also mean that MK3 lasers are somewhat relatively worse than they were vs Missiles in P17.
  
• Fixed a number of Base Scanner issues, improved smoothing.
  
• Fixed instancing on Lasers.
  
• Laser should respect Rooms correctly
  
• Added a Room-based achievement
  
• Many more common machines now have instancing.
  
• Massive performance boost regarding room/non-room rendering. How is there any optimisation left!!
  
• Raised maximum draw distance to an insane 512 metres in 2020 mode
  
• Extended SmartClip in Fabulous mode
  
• Death and Teleport effects are now different
  
• Fixed up a number of 'arriving' graphical issues
  
• A number of polish improvements to the in-shield Tutorial
  
• New Icons!
  
• LightWeight Machine Housing Crafter is no longer placeholder
  
• Changed density of Chromium and Molybdenum spawns, meaning that (at the right depth...) the veins should contain more ore.
  
• Herbicor should no longer get stuck if a plant is stolen from it and there's no closer plants.
  
• Fixed conveyor normalisation issue
  
• Fixed issue where you started in a room with a Base Scanner.
  
• Teleporting is no longer so nauseating.
  
• Teleporters now give a slight visual cue as to where they will whisk you
  
• Plants should no longer 'drop' on game restart when on Hydro bays
  
• Torches should now alter the local heatmap instantly when placed
  
• Grommets no longer use PCBs
  
• Motor Recipes no longer use Bars
  
• MK1 LPTs no longer use Bars
  
• Storage Hoppers no longer use Bars
  
• Charged (Lithium) PCBs no longer used
  
• Organic Recombinator now uses Crystal Clock, not Crystal.
  
• Fixed ancient bug where Power Usage and Temperature Gain were inextricably linked with Smelters. This should mean that Induction kits correctly use extra power and now correctly also allow a Smelter to efficiently smelt-on-demand.
  
• HerbiCors should no longer be able to get stuck in an endless state when the player destroys a plant the HerbiCor is flying towards.
  
• Fixed player Knowledge of Tin Plants, Copper Wires, Iron Gears and Lithium Coils.
  
• Lithium Coil Charger no longer need SpiderBot research.
  
• Significantly more surface-based Research Points available. Get to exploring.
  
• Suit Headlight no longer appears as a craftable item until T2.
  
• ARTHER will no longer trickle in 1 power to your suit; he'll save up at LEAST 8 power UNLESS you're suffering from Hypothermia.
  
• Suit panel now explains how to split stacks
  
• Picking up too much ore will no longer cause an incorrect completion of successive, on-going missions.
  
• ARTHER power bar now glows Cyan on grow and Red on reduce
  
• [Frozen Factory] Cold Caverns have new music
  
• Conveyor Slopes use Wires, not Bars.
  
• Conveyor Slopes now correctly autocraft ups to downs, and vice versa. Only carry around one type!
  
• CargoLift should no longer suffer from 'Perceived value' issues.
  
• Couple of minor fixes to Tutorial issue and Vis issue... fixed?
  
• ANOTHER Fix to Smelters and Manufacturing plants disappearing during startup. Complex threaded race conditions are a ♥♥♥♥♥ to track down and fix.
  
• Fixed airlock vis issues
  
• Fixed Performance issue with CargoLifts
  
• Fixed Performance issue with StockPilers and Mass Storage Input ports
  
• Improved surface performance with some clever code replacing some very dumb code.
  
• Reworked surface clouds + atmosphere
  
• Tweaked progression on some recipes
  
• New players now start with 5 health Ampules. DON'T WASTE THEM. Player also now knows what Ampules are.
  
• Alloyed Space Window is now Craft Anywhere.
  
• Player now knows what paste is.
  
• Items fitted to your Suit now show in the Crafting Panel for Items Carried.
  
• Fixed Ore Thief mission.
  
• Fixed ARTHER message incorrectly showing if your Ore Extractor never leaves 'Out of Storage' mode.
  
• FALCOR Beacons no longer use power when placed on a Storage Hopper (as opposed to no longer using power UNLESS they are placed on a Storage Hopper. Oops)
  
• Fixes to Conveyor Belt rendering issues (missing items, incorrect scrolling behaviour, incorrect forwards)
  
• Motorised Conveyors now have correct Crystal Clock cost.
  
• Fixed issue with Generic Machine Panels being scrolled incorrectly when opened.
  
• Fixed 'negative glow' issue with Minecarts.
  
• Tunnel Nukers can now take out SurvivalInjectionEntities, specifically Rocks, GlowTubes, etc.
  
• Fixed issue where HerbiCors could ignore plants for a minute
  
• Fixed issue where Ore Extractor Do Not Warn might not get saved under some circumstances.
  
• Hydroponic bays no longer work outside.
  
• Fixed a number of icon and text issues
  
• Fixed a number of sky colouring issues
  
• Fixed some room Vis Bugs
  
• [Dapper]Fixed an issue where the CPH would not have your Dapper Skin!
  
• Added support for detection of new worlds vs existing worlds, allowing me to make changes that only apply to NEW worlds
  
• Added ability for GenericAutoCrafters to only allow drop off to unique places.
  
• Increased the number of Pixel Lights, allowing many of the new shaders to provide tight highlights.

The 18th free Content Patch since we left Early Access is now live for everybody. Check the previous post for pretty video and long-winded descriptions - this post is a little 'listy'

Enjoy!

• Network Sun is less... lackadaisical.
  
• Fixed Network Sync issue with Falcors
  
• GACs as a network client should no longer offload, causing attached Storage Hoppers to show the wrong number of items.
  
• Fixed issue with Orbital Strike Controller not saving/loading correctly (and therefore not networking properly!)
  
• Network Guests will be warned they can't talk.
  
• A swathe of minor network fixes
  
• Networking on special conveyor types is now smarter, meaning less sync-vis issues

• Surface rooms are now at a energy-efficient 20 degrees
  
• Added 10 new, reinforced, paintable blocks, ALL designed to make your rooms look super-cool!
  
• InductionChargers now count as valid Floors for Rooms. Let's hope that doesn't mess up the visibility...
  
• Grommets now support Generator Entities - this means Solar Panels and PTGs will transfer their power through a Grommet to a PSB on the other side.
  
• This means you can have a nice, neat Coal Enriching room, with Coal going in one side, and Power coming out the other!
  
• Segments now correctly support multiple rooms.
  
• Room Controllers now have a nice readout showing you how many machines are in the room. Remember that a Door is effectively 9 machines!
  
• Added CPH logging ALL bars and ALL ores
  
• Added readout of above : https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/134073202153357312/405828299521130496/unknown.png
  
• Added monitoring of 'base material efficiency'. <100%? You're extracting far more ores than you're turning into bars. >100%? Your ore storage is running out! Getting this close to 100% will help you achieve maximum performance and efficiency. How fun.
  
• Game will track ~45 days of progression.
  
• Added Configurable base readouts. Supports Ore and Bars. Should be idiot-proof ;-)
  
• Added Room Lights. Paint option will be Dapper-Only.
  
• Grass will now only exist on Organic Detritus, and not indoors.
  
• Configured Basic and Advanced Hydroponic values, disallowed Plants building on normal terrain, allowed on hydroponics, banned all non-plants on hydroponics.

• Added MK1 Medical Ampule. Requiring 8 plant seeds, this will boost your heal rate.
  
• Added Agriculture Research
  
• Added MedBay. Will only work in rooms once complete. Give power; heals you when you're nearby.
  
• Added HerbiCOR; this FALCOR modification will track down surface plants within a 512m diameter, and will then return it to a hopper.
  
• All plants can now be harvested manually, for a reward, or via the HerbiCORE.
  
• Hydroponic Bays should also be available
  
• Health system reworked. Micro-fall damage is healed quickly. Major damage is much slower, and death damage is almost 10 minutes. Health UI shows the time until you gain +1hp
  
• Ampule Dispensers now correctly accept Ampules, save, load, and network transmit
  
• Ampule Crafters now correctly accept any type of Seed and convert into an Ampule. Ampules are automatically upcrafted
  
• HerbiCores should no longer auto-harvest plants that haven't been scanned.

• Fixed the DESCRIPTION of the Basic Smelter to correctly inform the player that it is twice as fast as a regular Smelter. Can everyone stop telling me how useless they are please.
  
• Changed most/all recipes that use Copper Bar and Tin Bar to Copper Wire and Tin Plates. Carrying around these bars is about to get really pointless.
  
• Changed Iron Gear self-craft cost to 5 bars per 1 gear
  
• Added Iron Gear auto-crafter, which crafts 1 gear per 1 bar.
  
• Reduced ALL existing recipes that use Gears by a factor of 5 (so 15 gears is now worth 3 gears, and so on)
  
• Changed Lightweight Machine Housing self-craft cost to 12 bars from 6
  
• Added Lightweight Machine Housing auto-crafter, which crafts 1 Lightweight Machine Housing from 6 tin bars.
  
• Removed all performance penalties from Logistics Hoppers. Please, don't treat these as throwaway items! I feel that people over-use Storage Hoppers, when sometimes, you just want 2 of a thing.
  
• Reduced the performance penalty of MiniHoppers from 30 seconds to 5 seconds. These should now be much more useful early-game sources of input and storage.
  
• All MineCart tracks cost 4 Alloyed Blocks, down from 16
  
• Basic Minecarts now cost 8 Alloyed Blocks, down from 64
  
• MK2 PSB upcraft now needs Plates, not Bars.
  
• Virtually all crafting machines now work at double speed, using half power, in Rush Mode.
  
• Sweeping rework of Lithium Bars and Coils. All items of any note now use Charged Lithium Coils.
  
• Spiderbot Power Core removed, replaced with Charged Lithium Coil.
  
• Lithium Coils will also take up 1/5th of the storage room of the previous Lithium usage!
  
• SpiderBot will now use approx 25x more Lithium. However, as you were previously using 1 bar for every 1-2 hours, I don't really think this is much of a problem.
  
• Many T2+ items will now use substantially more Lithium - Lithium is used to approximately 10% of Tin in existing bases, and I would like to address that!
  
• Halved Power usage of Ore Thieves.
  
• MK1 WorkFloor Excavators are now substantially cheaper to run.
  
• RackRailers now use 2 Gears, not 2 Bars
  
• T1 Primary crafting ingredients are now learned at the appropriate time
  
• MK1 LPTs now use Lithium Coils, not Bars. The lithium cost has also been increased as a result.
  
• MK1 PSBs now use Lithium Coils, not Bars. The lithium cost has also been increased as a result.
  
• MK2 PSBs now use Lightweight Machine Housings (Tin secondary crafting material), and Tin cost increased from 5 to 6 bars.
  
• Tweaked CCCCC recipe to be automation-friendly.
  
• MK4 Induction now uses an equal amount of all T2 bars
  
• MK3 Induction now primary crafting materials, not bars
  
• Lift Compressors no longer need a stupid amount of lithium and LWMH instead of Tin Plates
  
• Transport Pipes now use Crystal Clocks and Lightweight Machine Housings
  
• Matter Movers now use Lightweight Machine Housing instead of Tin Plates
  
• All Drill Motors now use Lightweight Machine Housing instead of Tin Plates
  
• Mass Storage block now use Lightweight Machine Housing instead of Tin Plates
  
• MK3 PSBs now use Lightweight Machine Housing instead of Tin Plates
  
• Removed the Titanium requirement from MK4 induction kits, massively increased Lithium to balance. Now only needs 4 inputs.
  
• MK2 Turrets now use Lightweight Machine Housing instead of Tin Plates
  
• MK1+2 Induction Kits now use Lightweight Machine Housing instead of Tin Plates
  
• Forced Inductions now use Lithium coils, not bars
  
• Conveyor Filters now use Lithium coils, not bars
  
• Matter Movers now use T1 secondary materials, not bars.
  
• Suit Heater now uses T1 secondary materials, not bars.
  
• A number of single-craft Suit Upgrades have been made significantly more expensive (Toxic Filter, Head light, Jetpack)
  
• ARTHER upgrades now use Lithium Coils, not Bars.
  
• Refineries now use Lithium Coils, not Bars.
  
• Removed Diamond and Crystal requirement from Teleporters, added GoldWire instead; you should now be able to teleport to/from your T2 base immediately, as opposed to 2 hours later after your Crystal collection is setup.
  
• Ore Extractors now use Gears, not Bars
  
• Servo Motors are now auto-craftable. The recipe is placeholder, and is planned to use Gearboxes and Solenoids in P19.
  
• Power Booster Recipe altered to use Wire, not Coils
  
• MK1 Solar Cell recipe now predicated later on.
  
• MK1 Turrets now use Gears not PCBs. Less authentic, but much more straightforward.
  
• MK2 turrets now use Charged Lithium Coils instead of Charged PCBs
  
• SpiderBot Base now uses Iron Gears instead of Iron PCBs
  
• Slime Attractor no longer uses awkward items
  
• Conveyor Belts now use Plates and Wires instead of the appropriate Bars.
  
• Basic Logistics (Splitters + Filters) now has massively reduced research requirements.
  
• Advanced Logistics (Mass Storage) now has massively reduced research requirements.
  
• Assembly Line machines no longer use Copper Plates, but use Tin Plates instead.
  
• Advanced Conveyor Filter now uses Iron Gears instead of Iron PCBs
  
• Conveyor Filter now uses Lightweight Machine Housing instead of Tin Bars.
  
• Motorised Conveyors moved to Advanced Storage, as they were available far far too early for anyone to use!
  
• Research Assemblers now use Lightweight Machine housings instead of Copper Housings.
  
• Copper Housings no longer used in the game. Left in purely for compatibility with mods.
  
• PTGs now use Lightweight Machine housing and Iron Gears.
  
• Significant rework and breadcrumbing of the first dozen researches or so, making much more logical sense than before.

• I'm pushing to have more bottlenecks removed from Rapid Mode, so players who don't have the time or inclination for a challenge to be able to hammer through and nuke the overminds from orbit. It's important to note that this mode means that your mistakes are trivial; screwing up your logistics or researching the wrong thing won't set you back by many hours.
  
• [Rapid Mode]Un-upgraded Ore Smelters now at 5 second smelt, down from 10
  
• [Rapid Mode]Labs now take 1500 pps to run at full speed, down from 3000
  
• [Rapid Mode] Players now start with a nice selection of Up and Down Slopes.
  
• [Rapid Mode] now mostly drops Pristine Loot.
  
• [Rapid Mode]PTGs now 7.5x faster in Rapid than Normal; this is 3x faster than previously, and should now be able to run a Research Assembler flat out.
  
• [Rapid Mode]Base healing rate 5x faster on Rapid; player is not particularly expected to need a MedBay.
  
• [Rapid Mode]Basic Smelters on Rapid now use up half as much power to heat. They'll *just about* run off of a T0 laser, but a lens or a T1 is recommended!
  
• [Rapid Mode]AutoExcavators now cut through Ore on Rapid mode.
  
• Altered HiveMind growth patterns
  
• Slightly more aggressive surface paging should negate issues with active Hiveminds changing
  
• [NEW WORLDS ONLY]Active Hiveminds will always be MUCH closer to the surface
  
• [NEW WORLDS ONLY]Hiveminds can no longer spawn within +-32 metres of the CPH
  
• [NEW WORLDS ONLY]Player lifts created will now require 3 metres of clearance, not 2. I'm tired of almost bumping my head!

• Monster performance improvements to Storage Hoppers.
  
• Improvement to all Plant rendering speeds
  
• Plant Simulation around 50x quicker on end-game bases with cached segment
  
• Reduced overheads of certain end-game bases from 50ms to 5ms.
  
• Improved CryoLancer render performance
  
• Improvements to grass performance
  
• Many more machines now respect Segment visibility, including
  
• Storage Hoppers
  
• FALCORs (all marks)
  
• WorkFloor Excavators
  
• LPT impact lasers
  
• Torches!
  
• Large performance improvement for end-game bases with intelligent dropping of update cycles for remote or hidden segments
  
• Further improvements to CPU usage of Plants and Grass
  
• Fixed Hopper LOD Issues

• Tweaked Tunnel Nuker spawns to make slightly larger tunnels.
  
• Fixed an ancient bug where high-tier Inductions would cause Smelters to get stuck with 1,2 or 3 of the wrong ore in them.
  
• Added a potential fix for the random crash within PhysX.
  
• MagmaBore now requires 10x the power to pump Magma, except on Rapid difficulty.
  
• Bases external to Cryo no longer work.
  
• ColdCreepSpawners should no longer be able to be entirely embedded by perlin gen (only by evil players)
  
• FALCORs no longer have unlimited Y range.
  
• Fixed 1,000,000 in Creative
  
• SpiderBot base no longer rounds the power inserted to the nearest thousand.
  
• Added an internal concept of CryoThreat; this should mean the Cryo scales to match your base, without overwhelming you at the start, but at the same time meaning you can't just ignore it during your FF playthrough.
  
• Scaling CryoThreat modifies the threshold at which Cryo treats rock/dirt etc as Air.

• Hopper Shift/Ctrl hint dynamically appears
  
• ScrollBars return!
  
• Reduced Surface Brightness by 15%
  
• Reduced Surface Saturation by 10%
  
• This will only affect new worlds, or new areas in existing worlds
  
• Added a tutorial Mission regarding the PaintGun
  
• MatterMovers can now 'mit through grass.
  
• All Thieves should Bloom a bit less now.
  
• Coal Enricher has an animation
  
• Fuel Canisters Crator is much less placeholder
  
• Started to look at correct reflection maps for various areas.
  
• Added cache mode CompressDuringPlayOnly - this will not attempt or require the player to sit through exit compression. Giving a copy of your world to someone? set "cache CompressOnExit" or "cache CompressDuringPlay"
  
• Added (unused) new Transport Pipe Models for a higher tier
  
• Many machines now have fixed and improved animations.
  
• Added Priority Splitter. Sends ALL items right unless the Right is blocked, then sends left.
  https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/134073202153357312/407254222078214154/unknown.png?width=400&height=225
  
• Use this to send resources to places only when you need to, for example, to balance Research Pods vs other uses.
  
• Ore Thief mission priority raised to Critical; now context-sensitive when displayed.
  
• Worms now have 1 hp on trivial mob difficulty
  
• SpiderBot base mission now only appears once you've been defeated at least once.
  
• Fixes to order of Assembly Line, Lab and Research Assembler missions
  
• Items considered 'garbage' are not longer automatically added to your hotbar when picked up
  
• Ore Extractors will no longer incorrectly be in 'Error' state for a long time if it's only offloading items without exiting Out Of Storage state
  
• SpiderBot now gains 500 power per Lithium (Reducing the Lithium Boost from 125x to only 25x)
  
• Improved music
  
• Pick (Middle Mouse Button) now gives much more useful feedback. Try it!
  
• Slopes now considered 'generic conveyors', meaning Thieves can hand off to them
  
• Fixed issue where base scanners didn't work deep underground on dedicated servers
  
• Lights will now return Paste, not Lights.
  
• Further work on turning FortressCraft into some sort of Excel-clone, with smart peak calculation on Bar Graphs
  
• Added cardinal markers for Room Controllers, hopefully making it completely fool-proof!
  
• Additional fix for negative minecart station glow
  
• Surface Map creation is now very slow for the first hour; this should stop players who only play for 15 minutes having too many segments to save out!
  
• Tunnel Nukers are now more erratic and should cause larger explosions inside mountains, giving the mobs a fighting chance at a decent attack pattern.
  
• CryoMap is now super-smart, and uses up no CPU time on new worlds. P17 worlds will still have a chunk of CPU time dedicated to displaying the existing CryoPlasm.

• Major rebalance of lenses. Currently the first 4 tiers of Lens (Diamond, Sapphire, Topaz and Emerald) are mostly available to the player whilst they have T0/1/2 lasers. As these lasers provide very low PPS, a percentage-based increase doesn't give much difference. As an example, a T0 laser with an Emerald in it gains 30%. 30% bonus to 1.16 PPS is 1.508 PPS. In larger Tier lasers, all Crystals provide a wonderful boost - but by the time the player get T2/T3 lasers, the Organic Lenses have far outstripped the lower-tier Crystal ones, and thus are pointless.
  
• T0 - 1.16 PPS with Emerald was 1.5 PPS
  
• T0 - 1.16 PPS with Emerald is now 31.5 PPS
  
• T3 - 320 PPS with Emerald was 416
  
• T3 - 320 PPS with Emerald is now 360 PPS
  
• This should make early-lenses more useful, and means that a T0 Laser with a Sapphire Lens is now a massive 101 PPS - but you will have to put in some manual time searching to get that reward.
  
• Diamond is 15 PPS bonus
  
• Emerald is 30 PPS bonus
  
• Ruby is 60 PPS bonus
  
• Sapphire is 100 PPS bonus
  
• I reserve the right to re-balance these in the future. ;-)
  
• Updated handbook to reflect all of the new LPT changes.

• Many multiblock machines may not receive visual power correctly as a network client, leading connected lasers to show 0 transmitted power. The OET is very bad for this, but T4 batteries are fine. Refineries seem hit-and-miss. (This has been tracked down but not fixed)
  
• Plants have duplication issues across networked games.
  
• Base Scanners can be quite expensive over the network
  
• MedBays don't heal the player unless the player has power.
  
• The Glow of Hopper-based FALCOR beacons is incorrect. You can safely ignore the message about needing power, too.

• Player lifts should no longer be able to get stuck above things.
  
• Fixed a minor annoyance with the Player Shadow
  
• Signs might not be too horrific to look at now.
  
• Fixed Ampule duplication exploit
  
• Plants now harvestable over the internet. As it were.
  
• Slight improvement to startup of Dedicated Servers
  
• AutoExcavators now respect IsSomethingWeDontWantToClearUsually
  
• [Dapper]Added SuperHEIST - puts items into your inventory at a range of 10m as opposed to 5m, at a rate 16 times higher than the base item. Ideal for the creative among you!
  
• Bosses and Heavies will now move faster as your threat increases. This means less mobs in the air, which means less framerate and cpu issues. It *does* also mean that MK3 lasers are somewhat relatively worse than they were vs Missiles in P17.
  
• Fixed a number of Base Scanner issues, improved smoothing.
  
• Fixed instancing on Lasers.
  
• Laser should respect Rooms correctly
  
• Added a Room-based achievement
  
• Many more common machines now have instancing.
  
• Massive performance boost regarding room/non-room rendering. How is there any optimisation left!!
  
• Raised maximum draw distance to an insane 512 metres in 2020 mode
  
• Extended SmartClip in Fabulous mode
  
• Death and Teleport effects are now different
  
• Fixed up a number of 'arriving' graphical issues
  
• A number of polish improvements to the in-shield Tutorial
  
• New Icons!
  
• LightWeight Machine Housing Crafter is no longer placeholder
  
• Changed density of Chromium and Molybdenum spawns, meaning that (at the right depth...) the veins should contain more ore.
  
• Herbicor should no longer get stuck if a plant is stolen from it and there's no closer plants.
  
• Fixed conveyor normalisation issue
  
• Fixed issue where you started in a room with a Base Scanner.
  
• Teleporting is no longer so nauseating.
  
• Teleporters now give a slight visual cue as to where they will whisk you
  
• Plants should no longer 'drop' on game restart when on Hydro bays
  
• Torches should now alter the local heatmap instantly when placed
  
• Grommets no longer use PCBs
  
• Motor Recipes no longer use Bars
  
• MK1 LPTs no longer use Bars
  
• Storage Hoppers no longer use Bars
  
• Charged (Lithium) PCBs no longer used
  
• Organic Recombinator now uses Crystal Clock, not Crystal.
  
• Fixed ancient bug where Power Usage and Temperature Gain were inextricably linked with Smelters. This should mean that Induction kits correctly use extra power and now correctly also allow a Smelter to efficiently smelt-on-demand.
  
• HerbiCors should no longer be able to get stuck in an endless state when the player destroys a plant the HerbiCor is flying towards.
  
• Fixed player Knowledge of Tin Plants, Copper Wires, Iron Gears and Lithium Coils.
  
• Lithium Coil Charger no longer need SpiderBot research.
  
• Significantly more surface-based Research Points available. Get to exploring.
  
• Suit Headlight no longer appears as a craftable item until T2.
  
• ARTHER will no longer trickle in 1 power to your suit; he'll save up at LEAST 8 power UNLESS you're suffering from Hypothermia.
  
• Suit panel now explains how to split stacks
  
• Picking up too much ore will no longer cause an incorrect completion of successive, on-going missions.
  
• ARTHER power bar now glows Cyan on grow and Red on reduce
  
• [Frozen Factory] Cold Caverns have new music
  
• Conveyor Slopes use Wires, not Bars.
  
• Conveyor Slopes now correctly autocraft ups to downs, and vice versa. Only carry around one type!
  
• CargoLift should no longer suffer from 'Perceived value' issues.
  
• Couple of minor fixes to Tutorial issue and Vis issue... fixed?
  
• ANOTHER Fix to Smelters and Manufacturing plants disappearing during startup. Complex threaded race conditions are a ♥♥♥♥♥ to track down and fix.
  
• Fixed airlock vis issues
  
• Fixed Performance issue with CargoLifts
  
• Fixed Performance issue with StockPilers and Mass Storage Input ports
  
• Improved surface performance with some clever code replacing some very dumb code.
  
• Reworked surface clouds + atmosphere
  
• Tweaked progression on some recipes
  
• New players now start with 5 health Ampules. DON'T WASTE THEM. Player also now knows what Ampules are.
  
• Alloyed Space Window is now Craft Anywhere.
  
• Player now knows what paste is.
  
• Items fitted to your Suit now show in the Crafting Panel for Items Carried.
  
• Fixed Ore Thief mission.
  
• Fixed ARTHER message incorrectly showing if your Ore Extractor never leaves 'Out of Storage' mode.
  
• FALCOR Beacons no longer use power when placed on a Storage Hopper (as opposed to no longer using power UNLESS they are placed on a Storage Hopper. Oops)
  
• Fixes to Conveyor Belt rendering issues (missing items, incorrect scrolling behaviour, incorrect forwards)
  
• Motorised Conveyors now have correct Crystal Clock cost.
  
• Fixed issue with Generic Machine Panels being scrolled incorrectly when opened.
  
• Fixed 'negative glow' issue with Minecarts.
  
• Tunnel Nukers can now take out SurvivalInjectionEntities, specifically Rocks, GlowTubes, etc.
  
• Fixed issue where HerbiCors could ignore plants for a minute
  
• Fixed issue where Ore Extractor Do Not Warn might not get saved under some circumstances.
  
• Hydroponic bays no longer work outside.
  
• Fixed a number of icon and text issues
  
• Fixed a number of sky colouring issues
  
• Fixed some room Vis Bugs
  
• [Dapper]Fixed an issue where the CPH would not have your Dapper Skin!
  
• Added support for detection of new worlds vs existing worlds, allowing me to make changes that only apply to NEW worlds
  
• Added ability for GenericAutoCrafters to only allow drop off to unique places.
  
• Increased the number of Pixel Lights, allowing many of the new shaders to provide tight highlights.

The 18th free Content Patch since FortressCraft left Early Access will be available early tomorrow morning, but I've spent the ENTIRE DAY assembling this... thesis... inside Valve's post editor, and I'm worried I'll lose it - so you get the verbose patch notes just a few hours early. Onward!

There have been 2 major focii for this patch; Rooms and Progression, along with Base Scanning, Healing, Agriculture, Lenses.

• Added Rooms. Join the public server P18 Room Showcase to have a look
  
• All T1 Recipes reworked. Upcraft everything. Don't keep Ingots in your inventory.
  
• Diamond, Emerald, Ruby and Sapphire lenses now give flat-rate boosts
  
• Be more careful about taking damage, use Ampules to heal yourself
  
• Mini and Logistics Hoppers are no longer slow and horrible, just small.
  
• Added Priority Splitter. Sends ALL items right unless the Right is blocked, then sends left.
  
• Ported game to Unity 5.6
  
• The teleporting blur effect is gone!
  
• Logistics FALCORs are now useful!

The recent negative feeback has been overwhelmingly about the complexity of the game. I initially thought that people liked complex and difficult games, but it seems a large number of Factorio players would much rather than each resource turned into one crafting ingredient; previously, in FortressCraft, there were 9 types of Plate, 9 types of Wire, 9 types of Coil, etc. The sweeping change this month has been to address the complexity, and make the game more streamlined. Overall, it's turned out to make the game much faster and less frustrating to progress through.

To this end, Bars are of virtually zero use, and you will have to use Crafting machines to make almost everything now. This process has been hugely time-consuming, but I would say that the T1 progression (approximately the first 6-8 hours of the game) is now much much smoother. Some T2 work was done, but I will be looking at that as time goes on.

For now, with few exceptions, you will ALWAYS want to upcraft your useless Ingots into useful crafting items.

Copper Ingots -> Copper Wire
Tin Ingots -> Tin Plates -> Lightweight Machine Housings
Iron Ingots -> Iron Gears -> RackRails
Lithium Ingots -> Lithium Wire -> Lithium Coils -> Charged Lithium Coils.

Please do this via automation. Feeding in bars by hand into the start of an Automation run means you'll be wasting time staring at it!

T2 materials are 'mostly' improved, but it's much more hit-and-miss than T1.

Gold Ingots -> Gold Wire
Nickel Ingots -> Nickel PCBs
Titanium Ingots -> Titanium Plates

I have further plans regarding this, but there's only so much I can achieve by myself in a month! See the Detailed section at the end for specifics.




As FortressCraft has grown and grown, I spend large amounts of my time optimising the game. Sadly, the main effect of 'doubling the speed of the game' is 'people build bases twice as large', so to a degree it's a losing battle. At a rough guess, FortressCraft can maintain a base 25 times large in P17 than it could when it left Early Access at the same framerate. However, despite some horribly complex vis systems, people still manage to beat the frame rate into submission. So, what's the solution?

There's a few. One of them is a cascading segment-based view system, but that is quite a lot of work, and the end result doesn't change or improve the game, barring the framerate. Patch 18 is in Unity 5.6, giving you access to DX12 and Vulkan, neither of which appeared to substantially improve the drawcall overhead.

The solution I've moved towards, and have implemented the first pass for P18, is that of Rooms.


Once established, a room has one major, MAJOR technical advantage over randomly covering stuff up with walls - if you're outside the room, the inside of the room doesn't render, and if you're inside the room, the outside doesn't render! This can turn an end-game base with half a million active machines from 15 fps to 150 fps.

Now, sadly, I find that giving players tools to help themselves doesn't always work. To that end, I hope to move FC towards a much more Room and building-based layout, but for this patch, players will be required to build rooms only for the new Hydroponics and Medbays.


So, in short; Room advantages - they look cool, they have predictable lighting, they speed the game up, and if you're on the surface, they also make the air warmer.

Do not attempt to enclose your CPH in Rooms. Also be a little wary of making skyscrapers diagonally too close to your CPH. If Rooms take off, I will be revisiting the concept and implementation of the surface attacks.

It's very simple tho; research, craft and place a Room Controller. It will start to search for a regular-shaped room around it. Although the theoretical max size is 128 metres (+- 64 around the controller), this is ridiculous, and I recommend you don't do this.

The Room Controller should guide you through the process. You will need a 3x3x1 or 1x3x3 Inner Airlock flush with one of your walls, and, in front of that, leaving a gap of exactly 3 metres, an Outer Airlock. Done. The Room Controller will let you know if it's having problems. Just remember that the Blue area shows the size of the expected room.

• Inner Airlocks connect room to Outer airlocks, which connect rooms to the outside. The outside can be covered up. This is the only supported paradigm. The airlock->airlock area should be covered, or vis will break. This is Your Responsibility.(Think of Rooms and Buildings - you aren't forced to have all your rooms as little 'sheds' out in the wilderness - just put the Rooms in a Building, or have a nice lobby to go into all the rooms. You are allowed to have Doors without Rooms - you will be warned that these confer NO performace boost)
  
• Room controllers can share multiple segments, and multiple room controller can share a single segment. Really tho, I'd spread it out a little bit.
  
• You CAN leave holes in the floor and the ceiling. If you do this, it'll look stupid. I don't care. Don't build it so it looks stupid. The MAIN thrust of this feature is a player-controlled portalling and occlusion system. This is Your Responsibility. I've erred on the side of allowing the room to work whilst looking broken, as opposed to forcing the player to exactly adhere to every single little sub-requirement.
  
• You cannot put machines into the walls. The exception is the Induction Charger on the floor.

To get things in and out of the room, use Power and Logistics Grommets. These are supported by PSBs and Conveyors.

• A PSB touching a Power Grommet will transfer power to any power-receiving machine directly opposite it.
  
• A Generator (PTG, Solar) touching a Power Grommet will transfer power to any power-receiving machine directly opposite.
  
• A conveyor touching and facing a Logistics Grommet will transfer any items to any machine that normally accepts items from conveyors. Conveyor and Storage Hopper are favourites. This is infinite speed, so you can essentially build room walls straight through existing Conveyor runs without affecting your logistics.
  
• MineCarts can go through walls. It looks stupid and I'd like to address it in the future.
  
• Lasers cannot fire into Grommets. Lasers can receive power from Grommets.

Suggested uses, initially, are for segmenting your base into logical groups; Smelting, Research, Assembly Lines, Sorting, Storage, etc. Putting all of your base into these rooms WILL MASSIVELY IMPROVE YOUR FRAMERATE.

Note : Putting all of your base into one massive room won't achieve anything. This is obvious - right? The current maximum size of a room is +-64m from the room controller, so about 129x129x129 metres. I won't stop you doing this, but if you do, you might have slightly missed the point.

An example here is a simple (too simple) Smelter.

Inside:

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/134073202153357312/402919868854173696/image.png

Outside:
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/134073202153357312/402919941474615308/image.png

Hopefully it's fairly idiot-proof. If not, please start a thread on the forum and I'll try and help out. A much better option is to join the Public server P18 Room Showcase and have a look around.



One of the changes to P18 includes stopping players using the 'deathport' exploit. Players aren't bothering with logistics, lifts or teleporters, and are just dropping down a shaft, grabbing ore, and killing themselves to teleport back to the surface. To this end, the health system has changed. If you take small amounts of damage, you won't see any difference whatsoever. If you receive major damage, it will take quite a while to sell-heal; it's about 10 minutes to recover to 100% health from 1% health, but it's only about 20 seconds to heal from 90% to 100%.

To combat this, the player has a couple of current options. The first of which is the MedBay - this is a cheap machine that MUST be built in a room, and heals you if you stand near it, it heals you. Secondly, there's the Ampules. These work very much like the Power Boosters - stick it in your hotbar and left-click to use it. Different grades of Ampules will give you a different level of healing boost. Right now, the Ampule Dispenser machine must also be built inside a room, and will generate 1 Ampule per 10 seconds. Once it has 5 MK1 Ampules, it'll start to upgrade them to Mk2, and so on. This is designed to be paired with the new HerbiCors, which will automatically harvest plants within a few hundred metres of your base.




Waaaaaaaaaaaaay back in Patch 16, I completely re-did the surface rendering and generation, taking advantage of Unity's new Instanced Rendering system. New for Unity, that is - FortressCraft used Instanced Rendering on the Xbox 360...

The main upshot of that were plants. A lot of plants. Patch 18 adds in the very first start of being able to use the plants.

• There are 7 types of plants, and 7 colours, for a total of 49 possible combinations of final plant.
  
• Plants are currently locked to their spawn colours. Future work will introduce breeding of plants from the current 7 types to the total of 49.
  
• The player cannot plant plants outside, but CAN Harvest them with RMB. Plants outside grow/regrow very very very slowly.
  
• If you want to harvest plants quickly and automatedly, then use the new Herbicors. They will pull in any plants within approximately 256m. Tests have shown that this will net you approx 8k plants (yes, and will speed the game up a bit). The disadvantage is that Herbicors destroy the plants that they harvest, so this is not renewable.
  
• The player can place plants into a Hydroponics Bay, or an Advanced Hydroponics Bay. The plant will then grow much faster, and can be harvested and re-harvested regularly.
  
• As of P18, there is no fully-automated way to renewably obtain more plant material. The ConstructoBots in the Adventures Pack will cover this. There may be other methods implemented to do so.

As of P18, right now, Plants have only one use - any set of 8 of the same plant can be used to make Ampules. The Ampules are planned to rely on specific plants, and I plan to add more effects than 'Faster Health Regen' in the future.




As well as rendering, part of the advantage of Rooms is that I know the player's PC will have plenty of spare grunt to do more complex things. (An example would be shadows-on-lights-in-rooms)

As part of my bid to teach players to be more brilliant at playing FortressCraft, I've implemented extensive monitoring of every ore, bar and all of the power generation of a player's base. The first 45 days of play is recorded (Haven't decided if I'll just write-over the data or stop recording at that point yet). The player is able to analyse this data by placing Base Scanners (name pending) inside rooms. Placing ore, bars or a PSB inside the hopper will then let you monitor only those ores/bars or power.

The Base Efficiency rating is feedback to the player about their relative Ore/Bar production. If your Base Efficiency is less than 100%, this means you are extracting more Ore than you're dealing with (This includes manual schlepping of ore!) - I hope to use this metric to hint back to the player that having collected 30,000 ore really isn't helping them progress.

If your Base Efficiency is OVER 100%, that means you're burning through your ore reserves making bars, and will eventually run out. Balancing this number to 100% means you're making the most efficient use of your automation time.

If you want to monitor something, stick it in a hopper underneath the Scanner. It also supports a hidden hopper behind the screen, if that's your thing.

Things you can monitor!

• All bars!
  
• All ores!
  
• Base Power! (Stored power vs Power capacity) - put a PSB in there
  
• Resin - put a Refined Liquid Resin in there

Currently the first 4 tiers of Lens (Diamond, Sapphire, Topaz and Emerald) are mostly available to the player whilst they have T0/1/2 lasers. As these lasers provide very low PPS, a percentage-based increase doesn't give much difference. As an example, a T0 laser with an Emerald in it gains 30%. 30% bonus to 1.16 PPS is 1.508 PPS. In larger Tier lasers, all Crystals provide a wonderful boost - but by the time the player get T2/T3 lasers, the Organic Lenses have far outstripped the lower-tier Crystal ones, and thus are pointless.

• T0 - 1.16 PPS with Emerald was 1.5 PPS
  
• T0 - 1.16 PPS with Emerald is now 31.5 PPS
  
• T3 - 320 PPS with Emerald was 416
  
• T3 - 320 PPS with Emerald is now 360 PPS

This should make early-lenses more useful, and means that a T0 Laser with a Sapphire Lens is now a massive 101 PPS - but you will have to put in some manual time searching to get that reward, making exploration that little bit more rewarding.

• Diamond is 15 PPS bonus
  
• Emerald is 30 PPS bonus
  
• Ruby is 60 PPS bonus
  
• Sapphire is 100 PPS bonus

I reserve the right to re-balance these in the future. ;-)





I get two main pieces of feedback about the CryoPlasm in Frozen Factory; 1) What CryoPlasm? 2) DEAR GOD WHY HAS MY BASED DISAPPEARED UNDER A SEA OF FROZEN HORROR.

To this end, I implemented a system so I could actually monitor the CryoPlasm growth. I then turned it into a machine and gave it to you.



I then created a number of short animated movies for overnight CryoPlasm growth, so I could analyse when it worked well, and when it didn't work so well.

Based on that knowledge, I altered how the CryoPlasm works.


Now, if you start Frozen Factory, you're not likely to see much issue; the Cryo is much more predictable, and doesn't worry so much about boring through rock to get to you. The 'boring chance' instreases as the Threat goes up.

However, if you are a mid-to-late Frozen Factory playthrough as you update to Patch 18, then you are going to see a massive and sudden jump in the aggression of the Cryo, often leading to it completely swamping basic Lancer defences. If you've been defending 'properly', using Freezon Boosting, terraforming and Dazzlers, and extensive Bomber defence, then you'll be Just Fine.

I mean. Maybe. But be prepared for a much bigger and more exciting challenge than P17!

Also, hey - what happens if you build it on the surface?





A huge 'thank you' to everyone who's bought the Dapper pack in the past. This patch implements 2 new machines and 6 new specific Dapper blocks

• The Super HEIST can inject 16x more items into your inventory at double the range. Ideal for paste!
  
• The Super Construction Paste Grinder is 8x more efficient than the regular one, and also allows you to hook up Coal veins for paste, partly as a 'thank you' to those awesome people, but mostly so their super-pretty bases don't require them to spend ages collecting paste.

This should hopefully allow the more creative amongst you to make really brilliant rooms without suffering too much from a Paste deficit. You also get access to 6 sexy new lights for Rooms.
Room light 1 and 6 are available to everyone in Patch 18 (this includes NON Dapper owners). This is a neutral-coloured strip light, and a 'cross' light. The Cross light reacts to CPH attacks and failure by changing colour. It's therefore classed as Gameplay and not Cosmetic.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/209762729823567874/407228174423031810/unknown.png

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/209762729823567874/407228428647923712/unknown.png

Dapper owners can also paint all 6 lights to their heart's content. Good taste sold separately.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/134073202153357312/407552896759234563/unknown.png

RoomLights now paintable via network and 'pickable' for their colours




And just a little late to be shipped with the patch, but I'll make it available soon - the Dedicated Server configuration tool, by Boronia!

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/134073202153357312/415278867847053323/2018-02-19_17_49_21-Photos.png


And finally, because as you might have noticed, I worked out how to embed videos, here are the 3 new Ore Extractors that are in Frozen Factory.


(MK1)


(MK2)

(MK3)


YES I ACTUALLY HIT THE LIMIT ON THE SIZE OF PATCH NOTES! IN YOUR FACE VALVE! I'll be pushing the final patch live on the morning of the 21st, and that will include the detailed breakdown of everything changed. I seriously have had to split these into separate posts!

The 18th free Content Patch since FortressCraft left Early Access will be available early tomorrow morning, but I've spent the ENTIRE DAY assembling this... thesis... inside Valve's post editor, and I'm worried I'll lose it - so you get the verbose patch notes just a few hours early. Onward!

There have been 2 major focii for this patch; Rooms and Progression, along with Base Scanning, Healing, Agriculture, Lenses.

• Added Rooms. Join the public server P18 Room Showcase to have a look
  
• All T1 Recipes reworked. Upcraft everything. Don't keep Ingots in your inventory.
  
• Diamond, Emerald, Ruby and Sapphire lenses now give flat-rate boosts
  
• Be more careful about taking damage, use Ampules to heal yourself
  
• Mini and Logistics Hoppers are no longer slow and horrible, just small.
  
• Added Priority Splitter. Sends ALL items right unless the Right is blocked, then sends left.
  
• Ported game to Unity 5.6
  
• The teleporting blur effect is gone!
  
• Logistics FALCORs are now useful!

The recent negative feeback has been overwhelmingly about the complexity of the game. I initially thought that people liked complex and difficult games, but it seems a large number of Factorio players would much rather than each resource turned into one crafting ingredient; previously, in FortressCraft, there were 9 types of Plate, 9 types of Wire, 9 types of Coil, etc. The sweeping change this month has been to address the complexity, and make the game more streamlined. Overall, it's turned out to make the game much faster and less frustrating to progress through.

To this end, Bars are of virtually zero use, and you will have to use Crafting machines to make almost everything now. This process has been hugely time-consuming, but I would say that the T1 progression (approximately the first 6-8 hours of the game) is now much much smoother. Some T2 work was done, but I will be looking at that as time goes on.

For now, with few exceptions, you will ALWAYS want to upcraft your useless Ingots into useful crafting items.

Copper Ingots -> Copper Wire
Tin Ingots -> Tin Plates -> Lightweight Machine Housings
Iron Ingots -> Iron Gears -> RackRails
Lithium Ingots -> Lithium Wire -> Lithium Coils -> Charged Lithium Coils.

Please do this via automation. Feeding in bars by hand into the start of an Automation run means you'll be wasting time staring at it!

T2 materials are 'mostly' improved, but it's much more hit-and-miss than T1.

Gold Ingots -> Gold Wire
Nickel Ingots -> Nickel PCBs
Titanium Ingots -> Titanium Plates

I have further plans regarding this, but there's only so much I can achieve by myself in a month! See the Detailed section at the end for specifics.




As FortressCraft has grown and grown, I spend large amounts of my time optimising the game. Sadly, the main effect of 'doubling the speed of the game' is 'people build bases twice as large', so to a degree it's a losing battle. At a rough guess, FortressCraft can maintain a base 25 times large in P17 than it could when it left Early Access at the same framerate. However, despite some horribly complex vis systems, people still manage to beat the frame rate into submission. So, what's the solution?

There's a few. One of them is a cascading segment-based view system, but that is quite a lot of work, and the end result doesn't change or improve the game, barring the framerate. Patch 18 is in Unity 5.6, giving you access to DX12 and Vulkan, neither of which appeared to substantially improve the drawcall overhead.

The solution I've moved towards, and have implemented the first pass for P18, is that of Rooms.


Once established, a room has one major, MAJOR technical advantage over randomly covering stuff up with walls - if you're outside the room, the inside of the room doesn't render, and if you're inside the room, the outside doesn't render! This can turn an end-game base with half a million active machines from 15 fps to 150 fps.

Now, sadly, I find that giving players tools to help themselves doesn't always work. To that end, I hope to move FC towards a much more Room and building-based layout, but for this patch, players will be required to build rooms only for the new Hydroponics and Medbays.


So, in short; Room advantages - they look cool, they have predictable lighting, they speed the game up, and if you're on the surface, they also make the air warmer.

Do not attempt to enclose your CPH in Rooms. Also be a little wary of making skyscrapers diagonally too close to your CPH. If Rooms take off, I will be revisiting the concept and implementation of the surface attacks.

It's very simple tho; research, craft and place a Room Controller. It will start to search for a regular-shaped room around it. Although the theoretical max size is 128 metres (+- 64 around the controller), this is ridiculous, and I recommend you don't do this.

The Room Controller should guide you through the process. You will need a 3x3x1 or 1x3x3 Inner Airlock flush with one of your walls, and, in front of that, leaving a gap of exactly 3 metres, an Outer Airlock. Done. The Room Controller will let you know if it's having problems. Just remember that the Blue area shows the size of the expected room.

• Inner Airlocks connect room to Outer airlocks, which connect rooms to the outside. The outside can be covered up. This is the only supported paradigm. The airlock->airlock area should be covered, or vis will break. This is Your Responsibility.(Think of Rooms and Buildings - you aren't forced to have all your rooms as little 'sheds' out in the wilderness - just put the Rooms in a Building, or have a nice lobby to go into all the rooms. You are allowed to have Doors without Rooms - you will be warned that these confer NO performace boost)
  
• Room controllers can share multiple segments, and multiple room controller can share a single segment. Really tho, I'd spread it out a little bit.
  
• You CAN leave holes in the floor and the ceiling. If you do this, it'll look stupid. I don't care. Don't build it so it looks stupid. The MAIN thrust of this feature is a player-controlled portalling and occlusion system. This is Your Responsibility. I've erred on the side of allowing the room to work whilst looking broken, as opposed to forcing the player to exactly adhere to every single little sub-requirement.
  
• You cannot put machines into the walls. The exception is the Induction Charger on the floor.

To get things in and out of the room, use Power and Logistics Grommets. These are supported by PSBs and Conveyors.

• A PSB touching a Power Grommet will transfer power to any power-receiving machine directly opposite it.
  
• A Generator (PTG, Solar) touching a Power Grommet will transfer power to any power-receiving machine directly opposite.
  
• A conveyor touching and facing a Logistics Grommet will transfer any items to any machine that normally accepts items from conveyors. Conveyor and Storage Hopper are favourites. This is infinite speed, so you can essentially build room walls straight through existing Conveyor runs without affecting your logistics.
  
• MineCarts can go through walls. It looks stupid and I'd like to address it in the future.
  
• Lasers cannot fire into Grommets. Lasers can receive power from Grommets.

Suggested uses, initially, are for segmenting your base into logical groups; Smelting, Research, Assembly Lines, Sorting, Storage, etc. Putting all of your base into these rooms WILL MASSIVELY IMPROVE YOUR FRAMERATE.

Note : Putting all of your base into one massive room won't achieve anything. This is obvious - right? The current maximum size of a room is +-64m from the room controller, so about 129x129x129 metres. I won't stop you doing this, but if you do, you might have slightly missed the point.

An example here is a simple (too simple) Smelter.

Inside:

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/134073202153357312/402919868854173696/image.png

Outside:
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/134073202153357312/402919941474615308/image.png

Hopefully it's fairly idiot-proof. If not, please start a thread on the forum and I'll try and help out. A much better option is to join the Public server P18 Room Showcase and have a look around.



One of the changes to P18 includes stopping players using the 'deathport' exploit. Players aren't bothering with logistics, lifts or teleporters, and are just dropping down a shaft, grabbing ore, and killing themselves to teleport back to the surface. To this end, the health system has changed. If you take small amounts of damage, you won't see any difference whatsoever. If you receive major damage, it will take quite a while to sell-heal; it's about 10 minutes to recover to 100% health from 1% health, but it's only about 20 seconds to heal from 90% to 100%.

To combat this, the player has a couple of current options. The first of which is the MedBay - this is a cheap machine that MUST be built in a room, and heals you if you stand near it, it heals you. Secondly, there's the Ampules. These work very much like the Power Boosters - stick it in your hotbar and left-click to use it. Different grades of Ampules will give you a different level of healing boost. Right now, the Ampule Dispenser machine must also be built inside a room, and will generate 1 Ampule per 10 seconds. Once it has 5 MK1 Ampules, it'll start to upgrade them to Mk2, and so on. This is designed to be paired with the new HerbiCors, which will automatically harvest plants within a few hundred metres of your base.




Waaaaaaaaaaaaay back in Patch 16, I completely re-did the surface rendering and generation, taking advantage of Unity's new Instanced Rendering system. New for Unity, that is - FortressCraft used Instanced Rendering on the Xbox 360...

The main upshot of that were plants. A lot of plants. Patch 18 adds in the very first start of being able to use the plants.

• There are 7 types of plants, and 7 colours, for a total of 49 possible combinations of final plant.
  
• Plants are currently locked to their spawn colours. Future work will introduce breeding of plants from the current 7 types to the total of 49.
  
• The player cannot plant plants outside, but CAN Harvest them with RMB. Plants outside grow/regrow very very very slowly.
  
• If you want to harvest plants quickly and automatedly, then use the new Herbicors. They will pull in any plants within approximately 256m. Tests have shown that this will net you approx 8k plants (yes, and will speed the game up a bit). The disadvantage is that Herbicors destroy the plants that they harvest, so this is not renewable.
  
• The player can place plants into a Hydroponics Bay, or an Advanced Hydroponics Bay. The plant will then grow much faster, and can be harvested and re-harvested regularly.
  
• As of P18, there is no fully-automated way to renewably obtain more plant material. The ConstructoBots in the Adventures Pack will cover this. There may be other methods implemented to do so.

As of P18, right now, Plants have only one use - any set of 8 of the same plant can be used to make Ampules. The Ampules are planned to rely on specific plants, and I plan to add more effects than 'Faster Health Regen' in the future.




As well as rendering, part of the advantage of Rooms is that I know the player's PC will have plenty of spare grunt to do more complex things. (An example would be shadows-on-lights-in-rooms)

As part of my bid to teach players to be more brilliant at playing FortressCraft, I've implemented extensive monitoring of every ore, bar and all of the power generation of a player's base. The first 45 days of play is recorded (Haven't decided if I'll just write-over the data or stop recording at that point yet). The player is able to analyse this data by placing Base Scanners (name pending) inside rooms. Placing ore, bars or a PSB inside the hopper will then let you monitor only those ores/bars or power.

The Base Efficiency rating is feedback to the player about their relative Ore/Bar production. If your Base Efficiency is less than 100%, this means you are extracting more Ore than you're dealing with (This includes manual schlepping of ore!) - I hope to use this metric to hint back to the player that having collected 30,000 ore really isn't helping them progress.

If your Base Efficiency is OVER 100%, that means you're burning through your ore reserves making bars, and will eventually run out. Balancing this number to 100% means you're making the most efficient use of your automation time.

If you want to monitor something, stick it in a hopper underneath the Scanner. It also supports a hidden hopper behind the screen, if that's your thing.

Things you can monitor!

• All bars!
  
• All ores!
  
• Base Power! (Stored power vs Power capacity) - put a PSB in there
  
• Resin - put a Refined Liquid Resin in there

Currently the first 4 tiers of Lens (Diamond, Sapphire, Topaz and Emerald) are mostly available to the player whilst they have T0/1/2 lasers. As these lasers provide very low PPS, a percentage-based increase doesn't give much difference. As an example, a T0 laser with an Emerald in it gains 30%. 30% bonus to 1.16 PPS is 1.508 PPS. In larger Tier lasers, all Crystals provide a wonderful boost - but by the time the player get T2/T3 lasers, the Organic Lenses have far outstripped the lower-tier Crystal ones, and thus are pointless.

• T0 - 1.16 PPS with Emerald was 1.5 PPS
  
• T0 - 1.16 PPS with Emerald is now 31.5 PPS
  
• T3 - 320 PPS with Emerald was 416
  
• T3 - 320 PPS with Emerald is now 360 PPS

This should make early-lenses more useful, and means that a T0 Laser with a Sapphire Lens is now a massive 101 PPS - but you will have to put in some manual time searching to get that reward, making exploration that little bit more rewarding.

• Diamond is 15 PPS bonus
  
• Emerald is 30 PPS bonus
  
• Ruby is 60 PPS bonus
  
• Sapphire is 100 PPS bonus

I reserve the right to re-balance these in the future. ;-)





I get two main pieces of feedback about the CryoPlasm in Frozen Factory; 1) What CryoPlasm? 2) DEAR GOD WHY HAS MY BASED DISAPPEARED UNDER A SEA OF FROZEN HORROR.

To this end, I implemented a system so I could actually monitor the CryoPlasm growth. I then turned it into a machine and gave it to you.



I then created a number of short animated movies for overnight CryoPlasm growth, so I could analyse when it worked well, and when it didn't work so well.

Based on that knowledge, I altered how the CryoPlasm works.


Now, if you start Frozen Factory, you're not likely to see much issue; the Cryo is much more predictable, and doesn't worry so much about boring through rock to get to you. The 'boring chance' instreases as the Threat goes up.

However, if you are a mid-to-late Frozen Factory playthrough as you update to Patch 18, then you are going to see a massive and sudden jump in the aggression of the Cryo, often leading to it completely swamping basic Lancer defences. If you've been defending 'properly', using Freezon Boosting, terraforming and Dazzlers, and extensive Bomber defence, then you'll be Just Fine.

I mean. Maybe. But be prepared for a much bigger and more exciting challenge than P17!

Also, hey - what happens if you build it on the surface?





A huge 'thank you' to everyone who's bought the Dapper pack in the past. This patch implements 2 new machines and 6 new specific Dapper blocks

• The Super HEIST can inject 16x more items into your inventory at double the range. Ideal for paste!
  
• The Super Construction Paste Grinder is 8x more efficient than the regular one, and also allows you to hook up Coal veins for paste, partly as a 'thank you' to those awesome people, but mostly so their super-pretty bases don't require them to spend ages collecting paste.

This should hopefully allow the more creative amongst you to make really brilliant rooms without suffering too much from a Paste deficit. You also get access to 6 sexy new lights for Rooms.
Room light 1 and 6 are available to everyone in Patch 18 (this includes NON Dapper owners). This is a neutral-coloured strip light, and a 'cross' light. The Cross light reacts to CPH attacks and failure by changing colour. It's therefore classed as Gameplay and not Cosmetic.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/209762729823567874/407228174423031810/unknown.png

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/209762729823567874/407228428647923712/unknown.png

Dapper owners can also paint all 6 lights to their heart's content. Good taste sold separately.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/134073202153357312/407552896759234563/unknown.png

RoomLights now paintable via network and 'pickable' for their colours




And just a little late to be shipped with the patch, but I'll make it available soon - the Dedicated Server configuration tool, by Boronia!

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/134073202153357312/415278867847053323/2018-02-19_17_49_21-Photos.png


And finally, because as you might have noticed, I worked out how to embed videos, here are the 3 new Ore Extractors that are in Frozen Factory.


(MK1)


(MK2)

(MK3)


YES I ACTUALLY HIT THE LIMIT ON THE SIZE OF PATCH NOTES! IN YOUR FACE VALVE! I'll be pushing the final patch live on the morning of the 21st, and that will include the detailed breakdown of everything changed. I seriously have had to split these into separate posts!

If you hate change, and feel that Agriculture, Rooms and Base Graphing is not for you, then please opt into the P17-Frozen branch.

I'm currently typing up what feels like 300 pages of patch notes, and prepping the Staging builds. Watch this space!

If you hate change, and feel that Agriculture, Rooms and Base Graphing is not for you, then please opt into the P17-Frozen branch.

I'm currently typing up what feels like 300 pages of patch notes, and prepping the Staging builds. Watch this space!

Patch 18 fixes and improves CryoPlasm to a great degree. If you have been gently going through Frozen Factory, going 'meh, Cryo? It's not all that', and you haven't been creating strong defences, then you have 2 options.

1) Finish Frozen Factory before Patch 18 lands
2) Prepare yourself for vastly improved Cryo.

Note : This only applies to existing worlds; Cryo now has an internal 'threat' system, so large bases modulate Cryo behaviour, meaning it can't get stuck.

This means that if you go from P17 to P18, you may end up with the Cryo effectively going from the slow and docile start mode to the 'designed for Dazzler and Terraforming' mode!

Patch 18 fixes and improves CryoPlasm to a great degree. If you have been gently going through Frozen Factory, going 'meh, Cryo? It's not all that', and you haven't been creating strong defences, then you have 2 options.

1) Finish Frozen Factory before Patch 18 lands
2) Prepare yourself for vastly improved Cryo.

Note : This only applies to existing worlds; Cryo now has an internal 'threat' system, so large bases modulate Cryo behaviour, meaning it can't get stuck.

This means that if you go from P17 to P18, you may end up with the Cryo effectively going from the slow and docile start mode to the 'designed for Dazzler and Terraforming' mode!