Today we're releasing a new free content pack, Bahni's Automation Innovation Pack, available automatically as part of the game! This includes several new sensors and automation buildings, as well as improvements and bugfixes to many of the existing automation buildings. These new tools will let you increase the effectiveness of your automated contraptions, improve your control and awareness of colony operations, and maybe even let you express your creative side.
To help you get started on this computer-controlled journey, we've introduced Sweepy, a sweet robot caretaker to help you keep your floors tidy and dry! Not the brightest little bot, but it'll get the job done.
And of course we're continuing to hack away at bugs and work on performance. In case you missed it, we posted a new Roadmap a few weeks ago that explains what's been happening and what will be happening with ONI over the next little while, please check it out.
Thank you as ever for your feedback and bug reports, we appreciate them so much!
New Features and Notable Changes
New Automation Sensors
Counter Sensor
Timer Sensor
Wattage Sensor
Conveyor Rail Sensors
New Automation Ribbon allows sending up to 4 signals along a single tile
Ribbon Writer and Ribbon Reader convert single-signal wire to ribbon
Mixing single wires and ribbons causes a signal overload
Signal Selector and Signal Distributor for automation routing
New Automation output buildings
Pixel Pack
Hammer
Notifier
Updated artwork for Automation Gates to make their function more concrete
New Sweepy Bot and Sweepy Dock
Liquid Vent, Gas Vent, High Pressure Gas Vent, and Conveyor Chute can now be closed, both manually and by automation
Gas Reservoir and Liquid Reservoir have smart storage functionality
Added an information screen when loading old saves to warn about changes to buildings
Added a Solid Filter building for Conveyor Rails
Signal Switch and Power Switch no longer require Duplicant interaction
Updated Sticker artwork
Critter Sensor now has toggles for detecting Critters/Eggs/Both
Fixes
Buildings
Gas Shutoff behavior is now consistent with Liquid Shutoff
Placing a "replacement" building over a deconstruct will clear the deconstruct
Thermo Sensor now behaves properly when input temperature is equal to the threshold
Virtual Planetarium requires the Astronomy Skill with Planetarium Researching trait. (Previously it was incorrectly set to Advanced Research)
Rationbox and Refrigerator are user nameable
Broken Automation Wires no longer carry an automation signal
Copy Settings on the Critter Sensor now copies Critter/Egg detection toggles.
Liquid Shutoff and Gas Shutoff now properly consume power when set to an OPEN state.
Conveyor Shutoff now consumes power in an OPEN state, not just OPEN+DISPENSING, to align with the Gas/Liquid Shutoff behaviours
Automatic Dispensers now consume power correctly.
Disease Clinic now properly consumes power when actively healing a duplicant.
Fix "ghost" rocket modules appearing for rockets already in space after a load
Doors now properly melt or don't melt in various situations
Remove Disable Delivery button from algae terrarium and rust deoxidizer, disabling the building can be done instead
Logic wires can now be replaced by different materials. Also support logic wires and logic ribbon replacements
Fix solid conduit contents not exchanging heat when the camera was in certain configurations
Duplicants
Fix a crash when duplicants try to eat an invalid amount of food
Duplicants will no longer forget their progress when tuning a power generator, and will be more resilient to changes in the room
Critters
Fix a crash when Pokeshells find an egg to protect
UI
Closing the Automation Overlay with previously-viewed buildings off screen no longer causes them to render behind Automation Wires
Fix Printing Pod now showing one of the victory conditions
Heavi-Watt Wire tooltip is now measured in kW
Fix output ports hover text using incorrect input ports string
Massage Table sidescreen tooltip formatting
Massage Table, Smart Battery, Liquid Reservoir, Gas Reservoir sidescreen tooltips now load correctly the first time
Conveyor Rails are now highlighted when the Conveyor View is active.
Conveyor networks now pulse when hovering a rail in the Conveyor View
Fix Temperature overlay so its tooltips update when F/C/K units option is changed during session
Sandbox tools save settings. Some other small sandbox QOL.
Changed many elements' default temperatures to 300k - this should only be relevant for sandbox tool defaults
Fixed several issues with sandbox temperature tools relating to user temperature unit selection
More buildings are brought forward into Overlay space in the Gas / Liquid conduit overlay
Many buildings (e.g. Gas Filter, conduit sensors, etc) are now selectable from the Gas/Liquid overlays directly with a single click rather than requiring the overlay to be closed to interact
Fixed issue with formatted text where multiple copies of identical strings were not being properly formatted
Added proper sorting and also categorization to the filter sidescreen
Changed the default rotation of the Memory Toggle to match the other Automation buildings
The "Copy" building button now copies the rotation of the selected building
Audio
Add a cooldown to some building noises to fix noisy bases
Automation sounds recover to full volume more quickly
Strings
Automation inputs/outputs now show the proper localized strings
Updated Chinese, Korean, and Russian translations
Change "Forever" string on the recipe select screen to be localized properly
Frontend and Backend
Updated the link to the newsletter to use the new Klei Account system
Only test for writeable save paths on Windows
Cap max number of logs to 10 million - this should prevent hard drives from filling up with enormous log files
Simulation
Fix "Flaking" bug. Tiles and doors will no longer partially melt when they get too warm
Fix solid conduit contents not exchanging heat when the camera was in certain configurations
Fix cases where doors would technically be melted but the building wouldn't go away
A bug causing the Automation Overlay to only update on every second automation tick has been fixed. It should be easier to see and debug rapidly-switching circuits now
Loading a sim cell with a mass larger than a million tons will cap to that max. Fixes crashes in some saves where masses were so large it was creating invalid temperature calculations
Performance
Auto Sweeper caches target positions
Performance savings for triggering sounds
Reduce a tons of memory spend on Line of Sight tests. On one save, this cut down on 965MB of allocations during load
Reduce memory allocations from testing the areas around buildings and other objects
Load optimization saves 10-15% of load time
Reduce memory allocations from reports during loading (~200mb in large colonies)
Reduce filesize usage from reports
Reduce memory allocations loading up animations (~300mb)
Reduce memory allocations from buildings during load (~300mb in large colonies)
Improve speed of saving reports
Improve speed of saving buildings
Improve startup times of some UI elements
Performance improvement to adding and removing animations
Reduced memory allocations loading and saving state machines. This reduces the save file size as well
Loading a sim cell with a mass larger than a million tons will cap to that max. Fixes crashes in some saves where masses were so large it was creating NaNs in temperature calculations
Improve Animation lookup times during load
Optimize auto-wrangling setting on Critter Dropoffs
Reduced memory allocations in Conduit system and the PokeShell's egg protection behaviors
Save 3-4% frame time with proper caching for Errand offsets
Modding
Fix hard crash when new elements are added to the game
Fix the weird and unnecessary warning when checking for the ModLoader.dll
Each mod gets its own uniquely named Harmony instance for better dependency management. (Name is <id>.<platform>)
Don't eat exceptions during Mod DLL loading
State Machine Exceptions are now logged through a non-generic method, making hooking the exception easier
Further fixes for the crash caused by duplicate pipes/wires on the same cell
Fixed the main menu to show the message of the day and patch notes
Updated main menu with a link to the {LINK REMOVED}NEW SOUNDTRACK
Hotfix 394616 (2/13/2020)
Low-Res texture mode works correctly once again. Those who have been experiencing out-of-memory crashes should make sure this is enabled, and those of you who previously enabled it will once again receive the benefit. :) (This is located in Options > Graphics > Low Resolution Textures)
We haven't posted a roadmap since before launch, so it's about time we got you up to speed on what the future holds for ONI.
Recap
Oxygen Not Included dug its first lump of asteroid in a prototype over 5 years ago. Since that time it's had tens of thousands of additions and changes, from tiny tweaks to game-redefining sweeps. Systems have been added, systems have been removed, systems have been ripped up and rebuilt. With your help in Early Access, we guided the game from a basic thermal sim to an elaborate asteroid-spanning, fart-collecting epic!
Post-launch, we took time to recover and focused on bug fixes and performance for some time, while we figured out what was next for ONI. We feel like the game still has lots of room for growth and improvement, and there are so many ideas we'd like to try out!
So after a season of prototyping and planning, here's what we're up to:
DLC
Most of the team is hard at work right now building a DLC for ONI!
This DLC is going to be quite sizable, including new game systems and many refinements on the base game. Because we're introducing new systems, we want to take our time to test and iterate our ideas -- and throw out things that aren't working. This approach means that we can't predict when the DLC will be ready, but if everything goes well we'd like to have something to show during the summer, and the release would follow in the autumn after further testing and refinement.
We had ideas for new systems that we thought would be interesting to add to the game for a while, but because of the incremental nature of Early Access as well as the complexity of the game for new players, we decided not to to make these part of the base game. Putting new features into DLC allows us to more deeply integrate new systems, as well as give new players (or anyone!) an easy way to opt in to additional challenges and facets.
Overall we want to emphasize quality over deadlines, so this represents our plan at this moment. If the timeline changes, we will let you know!
Ongoing Updates and Bug Fixes
While all that happens, we want to make sure we're not ignoring you in the community, and continue to tend to the released version of the game. A portion of the team will still work to address bugs, take in feedback, and make sure the ONI that you are playing today constantly grows and improves.
As well, we want to periodically put out new content into the game in the form of free packs. The first of these was Meep's Recreation Pack in December, and there's another one going into public testing next week!
Performance
We know that ONI is a beast of a game, and we think we can still get some significant performance improvements out of it. Improving performance gets more challenging as we make progress, and all the obvious and easy things have been done now. We’re now at the stage where we come up with ideas, run experiments, and if the experiment is successful, try to work it into the game without breaking the gameplay.
The going is slow, but we're still hammering away at it, and look forward to releasing performance improvements to you as they happen!
In Summary
All in all, ONI is still fully in development, even if we've been pretty quiet from the outside! We're balancing live support with DLC development, and working to ensure that the DLC makes the game better and not just bigger.
We love this game and we're so glad that you love it too! Thank you so much for all your support and input over the years, and we look forward to working on ONI together with you from here into the future!
The soundtrack to Oxygen Not Included is now available! From Feb 11th - 14th SAVE 20% with the Steam Soundtrack sale!
It's the official way to unwind as your space colony teeters on the brink of disaster. Featuring the original atmospheric music composed and arranged by Vince de Vera, this OST contains all of the game music, and a couple of extras, in both FLAC and MP3 formats.
Purchasing the soundtrack on Steam also entitles players to free updated of any additional tracks we may add to the game, or in our animated shorts in the future.
We hope you enjoy these chill lofi dupe hop tunes while studying / chilling / surviving / thriving. ♥
In the most recent patch, we upgraded the version of Unity that the game is running on, which resulted in the .net runtime being upgraded as well.
The most acute result of this is that any mod solutions will have to be updated to target the 4.0 framework. (In Visual Studio, this is in the project properties, Application > Target Framework.) This will fix compilation issues caused by the patch.
The framework upgrade was an unintended side-effect of upgrading Unity, and we didn't do a good job of notifying you in the mod community what was going on. I'm sorry about that. Hopefully we don't have an upgrade like this again, but if we do I'll be more attentive!
Hello friends! We've got a patch to fix a number of bugs that came up over the holidays. As well, we've made the game fully compatible with MacOS Catalina. Thanks as always to those who played the game on the testing branch -- this was a bit of a gnarly one -- and we appreciate your bug reports and feedback!
Fixes and Changes
Update to Unity 2018.4, updated .net Runtime and API to 4.X
Important note: While Windows Vista was not supported according to our minimum requirements, it was still possible to run the game on Vista up until now. After this update, the game will not run on Vista
Modders: The .NET runtime has been upgraded to 4.0 from 2.0. You will need to change the target runtime in your mod projects in order for them to compile after this update.
Fix crash when Duplicants are using the Ice Fan
Automation sounds should recover to their full volumes more quickly now
Balloon Artists will now attempt to set up their balloon stand at the Printing Pod if there is no valid recreation room.
Balloon Artists now need less space to set up a balloon stand.
Can now set the priority on buildings with a "Drop All Workable" chore.
Preventative measure to stop NaN masses from getting set on food
Fix for saves that already have NaN masses stored
Completing the building of Small buildings is no longer super loud.
Fix a lot of instances of sounds being played at incorrect coordinates, leading to an uneven mix with unintended loudnesses.
Fix Ghosts Of Gravitas achievement being awarded inconsistently
Various typo fixes
Fixed Sun Lamp sounds
Fixed bug where wires could not be drawn starting over the ports on Transformers
Fixed crash when multiple Pokeshells were looking for eggs to guard.
Conducting heat via loose ore should respect insulation of the tile the ore is resting on
Took out the eyelashes in the Stinky eye set for the overjoyed reaction. They snuck in there undetected before.
Fixed issues causing the new game cinematic sequence behave oddly. The cinematic should now show the Duplicants exiting the portal, zoom in, and display the introduction message. After closing the message the first timelapse is taken.
Fix for issue preventing the Printing Pod side screen from showing checkbox for 'leave' victory condition
Fix Pips getting stuck when rummaging for seeds
Rocket landing notification renamed, uses the correct rocket name, and dismisses itself shortly
Fix for a crash related to Duplicants finding the right item to fetch. This will also correct many instances of dupes fetching items of the incorrect priority
Solar Panels removed from Power Station description. Solar Panel functionality is unchanged, as they can't be tinkered
Fix crash when objects in Incubators are destroyed
Fix crash when dupes with balloons enter rockets
Adjust some inconsistent buttons orders on building status - Some buttons will move around, but Deconstruct will usually be in the top-left position
Fix obscure crash by preventing access on potentially destroyed buildings
Fix saves that have two pieces of pipe or vent on the same cell
Fix steam overlay on MacOS Catalina
MacOS builds now automatically choose between Metal and OpenGL graphics, this should prevent the fullscreen glitches on Catalina
Remaining MacOS notarization issues have been resolved.
Updated strings for MacOS Chinese, Korean and Russian
With Meep's Mandatory Recreation Pack - we expect that you all have plenty of time to chill out and relax, right? Nothing to stress about. Everything is going to be O.K..
Oh, hey. While you have all that time to spare, maybe take a moment to nominate Oxygen Not Included for a Steam Award?