In case you missed it: our DLC expansion, Neo Cosmos, is out now!
It's been two weeks since we've launched the DLC, and the reaction has been really amazing. Thank you all for your support and your feedback. We had been working on Neo Cosmos for a long time in secret, keeping most of the details to ourselves, and hoped that you would find it as fun and surprising as we did while playtesting. Thank you all so much for playing.
Here's a summary of everything new that's happened since then!
Version 2.0.3 (r92) Release Notes
Warning: Gameplay spoilers for Neo Cosmos below!
We have some new Accessibility Features. If you're having a hard time in Neo Cosmos, you can go to the Advanced Options section of the pause menu to tweak some settings.
Hold Tiles: You can now choose from Normal (the usual default behavior), Allow Tapping Ending Tile (tap to end the hold, instead of releasing), and No Holding Required (just tap the beginning and ending tiles instead of holding.)
Freeroam Tiles: You can now choose to be invulnerable during the Freeroam sections. With this enabled, you cannot be destroyed by touching spike balls or lasers.
Custom Level Editor: Minor updates and changes to the editor
Balance Changes: A few changes have been made to Neo Cosmos to make the experience more smooth for the player. In addition, Practice Mode is now available in T3, T3-EX, and T5
New music by DM DOKURO: Our secret minigame now has a new song, by DM DOKURO!
New Localization: ADOFAI and Neo Cosmos are both now available in French and German!
We couldn't have made Neo Cosmos without the help of our featured artists: Canblaster 2K6, Frums, Ash Astral, and DM DOKURO. They worked directly with TaroNuke in composing for the levels, and we really love the tracks they created.
If you'd like to support us and the featured artists, check it out!
We're Working On More Neo Cosmos Content
We have three things we want to note quickly!
1. We are now working on adding more content to be added to the Neo Cosmos DLC! It will take a while, but please look forward to it. We were waiting to see what the reception of the DLC would be, and since so many people enjoyed it, we're happy to keep going and add more to it. These updates to Neo Cosmos will be free content patches.
2. As we announced before, we are going to continue adding to the base game. That means new worlds, new Level Editor tweaks and improvements, new accessibility features, etc. are being worked on for regular A Dance of Fire and Ice as free content patches.
3. We're making a minor price change to the Neo Cosmos DLC. After receiving a lot of really positive feedback from players, and surprise at its price, we have decided to raise the price by $1 USD. If you already own the DLC, this doesn't affect you at all! You don't have to pay anything extra. Thank you for supporting the DLC so early. Consider the earlier price just a "super Launch Discount!"
The sales of Neo Cosmos have allowed us to dedicate the time to adding new stuff to it in the future, so we're really grateful for your support and your interest. There's more to come!
That's all for now! Thanks for playing, and check out the Neo Cosmos Soundtrack if you want to take the songs with you everywhere you go!
Our fans run a Discord server where you can talk about our games and the level editor: discord.gg/rhythmdr
Hello, explorers! A smaller update than before, but an important one nonetheless. With features and changes we hope you’ll most certainly enjoy. To experience this update you have to first switch the Steam branch to “active beta”. You can do so by right-clicking the game in your library and opening Properties. Note this is a beta, so there’s a high chacne of encountering unexpected bugs. Please let us know about them so we can fix them ASAP.
FEATURES
Guitar. Added a guitar with selectable chords to play and relax. Accessible through a new tab in the store: Recreational Goods.
Added proper hand poses for drawers, doors, and physical objects.
AMD FSR is integrated into the game. Players can now choose an upscaling method from TAAU, FSR and DLSS. With a separate sharpness option.
New sounds for all weapons.
Added more atmospheric sounds to locations.
Changes to Pervomay route.
New visuals for backpack and side pouch area indicators.
Discord Rich Presence. Finally you’ll be able to see what your fellow explorers are up to in the Radius just by clicking on their Discord profile.
BALANCE AND CHANGES
New loot places on Kolhoz and Factory.
Reduced amounts of drawers in some shelf types so it's less annoying to search for loot.
Changed bracelet placement in the 1st mission to reduce search time.
Added lighting to buttons on the handheld map.
Grenades no longer explode from the slightest damage.
FIXES
Fixed multiple collision holes players could fall through in Bolotki village.
Fixed ammo stats indicator not displaying the correct amount of protection.
Fixed sounds sometimes not being played if spawned inside buildings.
Fixed BTR engine sounds jittering.
Improved rock collisions on Factory.
Fixed multiple bugs of low objects blocking player path.
It's been quite a while, but am finally back with a major update to Factory Town!
Steam Deck & Gamepad Support
Factory Town can now has official gamepad support! Move around the menus with the D-Pad or left joystick, using shoulder buttons to jump left and right between menu regions or tabs. The world cursor can be controlled by moving the main camera (right joystick), or for more precise movement, navigated in single units with the D-Pad and shoulder triggers to change elevation. (This also works for keyboard users, with arrow keys + Page Up + Page Down.)
The main reason for adding this was so that the game could be played more comfortably on the Steam Deck. As a nice bonus, you can seamlessly switch between mouse mode & gamepad mode, so that Steam Deck users can use the touchscreen or right touchpad when they want to select something with a mouse click, but still use controller joysticks & D-Pad for other navigation purposes.
UI Rework
In order to allow effective menu navigation with a controller, many changes needed to be done to the UI. But a lot of these changes were also needed for better organization anyways.
The biggest change is the window that appears when you select an object. Previously, an overcrowded menu would appear in the bottom-right which also overlapped with the top-right menu showing inventory and various configuration options.
Now, the selected object's status menu is movable, re-sizeable, scrollable, and has tabs across the top to navigate different features. Tabbed groupings include production state, recipes, logic connections, inventory, upgrades, labels, water intake, etc. There's also dedicated buttons for rotation, context help, and object deletion, which previously were not included due to space constraints.
Fishery Changes
To prevent players from spamming Fisheries, they used a calculation that linked production speed to the number of connected water tiles. But that wound up being more convoluted than necessary, wasn't totally logical, and still allowed semi-arbitrary placement on any water tile. Fish tiles themselves confusingly didn't have much functionality for this building.
Now, Fisheries act more like other natural resource production buildings (i.e. farms, foresters, mines). For a Fishery to produce fish, it needs a Fish tile within its harvesting radius - just like a Farm needs a crop within harvesting radius. The Fishery will harvest fish from those tiles fairly rapidly, but the Fish tile can deplete. It will slowly regenerate, but players will need to have several fish tiles near a Fishery to sustain rapid production. Fortunately, the player can also place Fish tiles in the same way they can plant crop tiles, so it's possible to expand your fish production over time.
Linked water tiles will no longer have any effect in Fishery performance. However, more water tiles give you more places to place Fish, and placing new Fish tiles is relatively expensive (100 red coins), so it's in your interest to use naturally occurring Fish whenever possible and build near open water.
Legacy maps will contain Fisheries with no nearby Fish tiles, so to prevent immediate halting to production, the game scans for this scenario and automatically adds a few Fish tiles near these Fisheries.
Misc Improvements
Added ability to adjust Steam boosters (0-2) and Elemental Boosters (0-5)
When issuing a command to a worker, item selection panel will appear over a storage building even if it has no items
Selecting a Computational Block, then clicking on blank terrain, will de-select the computational block
A building’s progress towards absorbing another unit of nearby water is saved with the game file, to prevent lost progress
Reduced memory usage for natural resources
The Pipette tool, when used repeatedly on the same block, will cycle between Farm Tile and the crop planted on it (same with Tree Planters and OmniPlanters)
Player can use larger cursor sizes when placing Fish
When a popup option list is shown, entire rest of screen is slightly greyed out to show focus. Clicking anywhere on the background will dismiss the popup menu.
Connecting Computational Blocks now defaults to most common trigger & action types. Further edits can be made by selecting the Computational Block and editing the Inbound or Outbound links.
If a recipe is unable to complete because output storage is full, the associated output item icon is flagged with red text (similar to how missing ingredients are flagged)
Added more intuitive highlights on panel that allows workers to pick up specific items
Changed caption for picking up items from 'deliver' to 'pick up'
Player can specify transfer item at the destination, if they chose 'everything' at the source
Changed ‘Exit to Desktop’ to ‘Quit’
Got rid of Controls sidebar, as it is redundant with action button panel - all actions that previously required hotkeys are now visible buttons
When planting crops, the cursor is no longer blocked by buildings
Invert Camera X & Y are now in the Controls menu, not Interface. They can be set independently for controller vs keyboard/mouse control
Improved display of terrain purchase button
Controls menu now shows icons for controller buttons instead of a text label
Can use Page Up / Page Down to change the height at which a pipe is being placed
Added command “Alt Cursor: Reverse” (default: Shift+Tab) to cycle backwards through alternate cursor options (pipe axis, block type, etc)
Increased opacity of Tutorial panel
Improved reliability of issuing multiple commands to workers
Bug Fixes
Infinite maps would display seams between terrain chunks (i.e. when file saved and re-loaded) due to not storing correct terrain generator settings within the file. Note: previously created maps will still have this bug, due to missing data. But newly created infinite maps will work correctly
Workers would fail to find new harvest target in some cases after their initial target was depleted
Fixed Work Units calculation displaying the wrong value for Workers (was including the Happiness + Global Production Bonus values, when they should have been split out separately)
‘No Path’ alert was not shown for Grabbers that were missing a Chute or Belt path, if there was some other path type under the Grabber block
Clicking the ‘Randomize’ button when editing map seed would not fully update seed display
Fixed hangs/crashes resulting from logic connections missing a target
Splitters with Overflow setting will no longer output items for a direction with a specified output ratio of zero
Fixed campaign maps loading with non-localized / non-standardized names for Trading Post recipes
Fixed extraneous buildings being highlighted as possible targets when specifying worker dropoff behavior
When moving multiple items, the cursor icon now shows inventory bag instead of the arrow historically used for ‘move’ commands
Fixed unexpected Research Menu scrolling when research completed
Fixed some erroneous labels for the biome generation terrain types
Players unable to assign worker harvesting tasks by highlighting depleted (but growing) crops & fish
Buildings with many items to Pick Up would have its item targeting UI overlap the Drop Off items section
Fixed incorrect text resizing on recipe selection buttons
Fixed water clipping through bottom of boat
Fixed production buildings not displaying linked resources if they were also linked to a Town
Copy/paste on rail stops was not causing the copied item filter to be effectively applied immediately
Priority Sorter was not showing its icon on the 2D underground views
In this version goals are clearer, better for new players. I temporary removed some levels, but new ones are coming with the next updates. Also minigames are coming soon int the arcade hall
