During Klei Fest, we’ll have a big burst of content, items, events, sales and interesting stuff happening for all things Klei! And this year’s fest is bigger than ever.
Our focus for the past few months has been on improving performance for both the base game and Spaced Out! DLC. We’ve been tweaking, fixing and changing lots of things: not all individually noticeable, but they add up to a faster, smoother gameplay experience. You’ll also be seeing some new faces at the watercooler.
Highlights include:
Ranching gameplay improvements, including gaining Husbandry experience during Critter grooming
Fixed many Critter bugs
Improvements to UI and Critter performance
Significant memory savings on both new and late-game saves
Added four new Duplicants
Added four new Critter morphs
Added new Overjoyed trait: Yodeler
Added new Stressed trait: Banshee
Added new Clothing Refashionator building that upgrades Snazzy Suits into one of 12 extra-Decor-boosting Primo Garb outfits
Steam Deck compatibility verified
Speeding Things Up
We’ve made a significant reduction to the amount of memory that ONI takes up on your system. Plus, frame times have been reduced—great news for very large bases—and the New Game and Load Game screens now open faster.
Basically, computers that have less memory available to run the game will now spend less time stuttering, leaving you free to focus on mopping up Duplicants’ little “accidents.” Win-win.
Smoothing Things Out
We’ve optimized the background behavior of several UI screens, which helps the game run more smoothly even when the UI isn’t open. (This is one of those things you’ll feel rather than see.) Sneezes and snores also perform better!
There’ve been a number of significant improvements to critter performance, too—most notably in the way they find food.
Bug Fixes
Many bugs were squashed in the making of this update. We now have more reliable Critter sensors! Pacus don’t get stuck in mixed-liquid tanks! Flying critters no longer get stuck in liquid! Duplicants won't get trapped in certain spaces anymore: they’re now able to climb down one tile and jump across a gap to escape. …and lots more!
New Content
Joining base game and Spaced Out! colonies today are four new Duplicants—the first newcomers since the base game launch. They come with one fun new Overjoyed behavior, and one uh, slightly shrieky Stressed behavior.
You’ll also find four new Critter morphs, like a Cuddle Pip whose affectionate hugs boost egg incubation rates and soothe stressed-out Duplicants.
The new Clothing Refashionator building upgrades Snazzy Suits into flashy new Primo Garb outfits—including the pink unitard of Ellie’s dreams.
Summary
A ton of behind-the-scenes improvements mean faster, smoother gaming for everyone. Plus, a new building, new Duplicants, new Critter morphs, snazzier suits and of course, countless bug fixes, tuning, polishing and more!
Huge thanks to everyone who helped us fine-tune things during the testing period. You can post feedback here, or report bugs and other suspiciously strange happenings here.
If your mods are breaking or you need a little extra time before switching over, you can opt in to the temporary Previous Update branch.
We hope you have as much fun with this update as we did!
Hot Lava: Say hello to two new characters:
T. Rex and Venomess - two rocking reptilian members of Mutant Mayhem! A brand new Klei Created map, Rocco’s Arcade is a hotbed of hopping set in a retro-arcade pizza place. Of course with a new map and characters we have two new courses, and plenty of new collectables and accessories!
We have teamed up will a couple of great game studios to publish two new games coming in 2023!
Check them out and don't forget to wishlist them on Steam and show them some love!
Lab Rat
Chump Squad, the developer of Kine brings us Lab Rat. In this satirical adventure a metrics-obsessed AI will monitor, profile, and entertain you as you progress through over a hundred genre-bending puzzles..
Lab Rat even has a demo available now! More details on this game will come in future announcements.
Our friends at Sparkypants bring us Mind Over Magic. Design, build and manage your magic school to explore what lies below. Study lost arcana, grow exotic plants, brew potions, and raise undead servants -- only you can prepare your fragile students to harness their Mind Over Magic.
More details on this game will come in future announcements.
Last year we introduced Klei Fest to take place during our annual Klei Publisher sale. During Klei Fest, we will have a burst of content, items, events, sales, and interesting things happening for all things Klei!
Hot Lava:
Say hello to two new characters: T. Rex and Venomess - two rocking reptilian members of Mutant Mayhem! A brand new Klei Created map, Rocco’s Arcade is a hotbed of hopping set in a retro-arcade pizza place. Of course with a new map and characters we have two new courses, and plenty of new collectables and accessories!
Oxygen Not Included:
Our new content pack called "Fast Friends" includes some big performance boosts in both the base game and Spaced Out! DLC. We also have four new Duplicants, four new critter morphs and a dozen brand new Duplicant outfits craftable at the Clothing Refashionator building.
Don't Starve Together:
The enigmatic Corvus Goodfeather returns with a bunch of new prizes and three new games during the Midsummer Cawnival!
New Twitch Drop Campaign:
We will begin a new twitch Drop Campaign for the Rusty Anchor starting June 2nd.
And more!!
We will also have some big announcements that you definitely don't want to miss, a few in fact.
This is a small hotfix to address some issues with the build menu changes introduced in the recent update, including poor performance when selecting a building and the menu resizing when clicking the Copy Building tool.
We also made some modding changes to better support adding buildings to the game. This may restore functionality to some mods which were adding buildings in an unorthodox way. Lastly we have an announcement to make regarding mod support, see our post here.
Changes and Improvements
All versions
Updated Chinese localizations.
Spaced Out! only
Fabricators which have recipes with seeds as ingredients now include a toggle to forbid the user of Mutant Seeds.
Fixes
All versions
Fixed issue causing build menu building buttons to be improperly sized after activating the “Copy Building” tool.
Fixed issue causing tools drag area tools such as ‘Dig’ to get stuck in drag mode after releasing their button.
Fixed issue preventing gamepads from controlling the Skill Screen camera.
Fixed issue causing performance hitch when selecting a building from the build menu.
Fixed an issue that was causing modded Duplicant personalities to not show up as initial Duplicant choices.
Modding
ModUtil.AddBuildingToPlanScreen now supports adding buildings before or after another building ID.
Some functionality was added to attempt to detect modded buildings added incorrectly and add them through ModUtil.AddBuildingToPlanScreen.
Marked Obsolete
PlanInfo.data – Use ModUtil.AddBuildingToPlanScreen
Personality constructor - without isStartingMinion
ModUtil.AddBuildingToHotkeyBuildMenu – BuildMenu class is not used
We’ve been thinking about ways to create a smoother update experience for players who use mods. We make an effort to avoid breaking mods if possible, but we also need to be able to improve our code and add new features.
In future updates, we’ll be creating a “previous update” branch that offers a grace period for mod developers to update their mods without disrupting gameplay.
There are a few caveats—see below.
For players: “Previous update” branch
Each time we ship a major update, we’ll make the previous update available on a Steam branch. This branch will be available for a limited period of time after the update’s launch and will be removed when a new “previous update” branch is created.
Players can opt in to the “previous update” branch to continue playing while mod developers update their mods, finish the current playthrough, and/or use this extra transition time to prepare their save file for the new gameplay challenges.
Caveats:
Opting in to the “previous update” branch means opting out of all new features, fixes and content contained in the update.
If a mod developer has updated their mod to match the live branch (aka current update) and has not created an archived_versions folder, the mod will be broken in the “previous update” branch. See below for information about archived_versions.
This branch is unsupported. Please do not report bugs or issues related to this branch.
This branch is temporary.
Does this affect the Public Testing branch?
No. The Public Testing branch will still be updated with work-in-progress changes prior to an updates release.
When is this happening?
When we ship our Klei Fest update (tentatively scheduled for sometime in May or June), we’ll open a “previous update” branch to temporarily preserve the content from our February update.
For mod developers: “archived_versions”
We introduced mod support for “archived_versions” a while back. This makes it possible to publish two or more mod versions in the same distribution—the game will dynamically load the correct one.
Archived_versions are intended to allow mod developers to update their mods on one branch without breaking them on another. When an update goes live for everyone, it seamlessly transitions to using the updated version.
Best practice: When updating a mod to support the live branch, we recommend that you include an archived version for the “previous update” branch so that anyone playing on that branch can continue using your mod.
For mod developers: “Obsolete” attribute and modding API
When we preserve old code to maintain mod support, we’ll mark it using the “Obsolete” attribute. This indicates that this code may be removed in a future update. You should see warnings when compiling your mod.
It recently came to light that building mods were not using ModUtil.AddBuildingToPlanScreen because it lacked the ability to insert it before or after a specific building. We added that functionality in a recent hotfix.
While we can’t promise to expand our modding API with every request, we encourage you to let us know in this thread if you feel that something is missing.
Summary
Opting in to the “previous update” branch allows players to continue their games short-term, and our existing archived_versions system allows mod developers to maintain mod compatibility across both the “previous update” and live branches.
There’s a chance we’ll need to make adjustments to this new strategy as things develop, but we’ll make sure to loop you in on any changes.
We hope this will help make future updates easier to navigate for everyone!
It’s been a few weeks since Spaced Out! launched—it’s time to share our roadmap for ONI’s shiny future!
Recap
The DLC’s debut on December 16th marked the end of two busy years spent building and testing new multi-world gameplay, expanded rocketry, new planetoids, nuclear and radiation systems, new critters and lots of other cool stuff.
And of course, our efforts in the final year were propelled by our incredible Early Access community. Thank you for all of your helpful feedback, bug reports and great ideas!
So what’s next?
Roadmap
We’ve got two core projects happening in the first half of the year: tech improvements and a free content update!
After a whirlwind two years, we’re excited to finally have time to dig into the backlog of technical tasks for both Spaced Out! and the base game.
We’ll start by working on highly-requested mod support for WeGame (just launched!) and support for Steam Deck in the coming weeks.
Then the next several months will be all about:
Performance improvements
Bug fixes both old and new!
Building out our collection of developer tools
Streamlining our workflow behind the scenes
While the programmers concentrate on that, the art team is dreaming up an awesome new content update—free for all players of both the base game and Spaced Out!
Some of the ideas we’re exploring for this free content pack include quirky new Duplicants, new critter morphs, and fresh decor and recreation buildings, all designed to expand opportunities for expressive gameplay.
We’re aiming to get this out to you just before summer, in time for Klei Fest.
What about a DLC2?
All we can say for now is that we’re actively investigating possible themes and directions for DLC2. (As soon as we can tell you more about that, we will!)
Summary
We’re hammering away on tech improvements and a free content update while we regroup and begin concepting ONI’s exciting next chapter. This roadmap will be updated in the summer.
We read everything you post to the forums–whether it’s praise, constructive feedback or genius new ways to turn bodily fluids into valuable resources–so keep it up!
It takes a colony to produce ONI. Thanks for being part of ours.
Also: keep an eye out for our 2022 roadmap! It explains what’s happening behind the scenes at ONI, and where things will be going for the next little while. We’ll link to that post here by the end of this week.