— Updated passenger/mail tooltip layout: now it groups items by destination and highlights if a destination could not be reached
— Improved station passenger/mail indicators behavior
— Fixed internal recipes shown in the tech tree

— Fixed NullReferenceException introduced with the previous update
— Mail lifetime increased, as well as delivery reward

— Passengers now can switch transport and even transport modes on their way to the desired destination!
— The passenger switching feature is still a work in progress, and it will require some fine-tuning. Please share any feedback with us!
— Along with passengers, there's a new kind of cargo: mail!
— Passenger coverage is now highlighted when placing passenger stations
— Improved the visual appearance of trucks with trailers in tight turns
— Added an explicit toggle allowing users to enable Cloud sync for a new save
— Autosaves now show the name of the world or the original save name
— Fixed replacing some vehicles in the vehicle editor window wouldn't allow you to select a vehicle to replace
— Fixed the camera would go wild after following a vehicle very closely
— Modding: Added Coupling1Offset and Coupling2Offset properties to the .carunit asset, allowing you to fine-tune the trailers' visual behavior
— Modding: Added the Height property to the .carcoupling asset, allowing you to fine-tune the trailers' visual behavior
— Unity updated to 2021.3.16

This is an intermediate update mostly focused on modding improvements, but also has some fixes inside. Check the full changelog if you are really curious.


The recent lock of device inputs/output directions made possible the new feature that was requested by modders for quite some time already. This update introduces support for devices capable of producing more than one product. Even more, products now can have different probabilities of yield.

For example, it is now possible to create a device that will process raw coal and output charcoal every time, but also - with a very small probability - it can output a shiny pricey diamond.

Or, there could be a uranium ore processing device that will yield the regular uranium 99.99% of the time, but also there's a 0.01% chance of outputting some rare isotope.

The main intended usage of this feature is devices yielding byproducts, but we are sure that our awesome community will find many creative ways to (ab)use it!


To accommodate the new feature we had to redesign how product recipes are displayed in the device and recipe picker windows.



The new design allows displaying more than one output product, output probabilities, as well as exact inputs and outputs assignments.

There're also new device indicators that show input and output directions and locations in the world, as well as the items expected to come in and out.

And they are not just here to inform, they are also interactive: clicking on it allows you to configure item assignments.




Our intention was always to make Voxel Tycoon as moddable as possible. But not every type of asset easily supports this.

For example, the currently selected language is loaded just as the game starts. If this language comes from a mod and the player decided to unsubscribe from this mod, from the game perspective an asset required to even show the main menu is just missing, and the game won't be able to start. The same applies to currencies and city names assets, since they are also used in the main menu.

Thanks to the new error handling system, the game is now able to gracefully handle such situations. So, we've implemented the missing parts and now the modding of languages, currencies, and city and people names is finally possible.


It's time to reticulate some splines for some serious §§§



In the process of reworking the device window, we have also touched the devices' internals a bit. Besides other changes intended to streamline devices' logic flow, we have fixed the issue that was in the game from the very beginning: previously, items inside devices were not saved between sessions, and effectively they just got vaporized when you load your game. While it wasn't such a big problem in most cases, it's always better to know that your hard-earned products are safe now.


Continuing efforts on improving conveyor building, we got the bug squashed where the conveyor builder tool was placing double overlapping conveyor pieces in some cases. These double pieces produced weird issues where items can’t pass through otherwise looking alright conveyor junctions.


This is probably the last minor update for the 0.87 version. Stay tuned for what's coming next!

— Devices now can output more than one product
— Devices UI updated to support complex recipes with more than one output
— Fixed electric locos keep playing engine sound on non-electrified rails
— Fixed electrification tool highlight may stay after tool deactivation
— Fixed custom category icons are rendered blue
— Modding: recipe asset changed to support more than one output, also output probabilities can be set
— Modding: Added support for modding locales, names, and currencies
— Modding: Fixed error when generating palette for empty.obj

The 0.87.2 update has just landed! It brings plenty of quality-of-life improvements and fixes to the table.

But before we will dive into what's inside, please welcome our new full-time team member: @DarkMajesty 🎉

He joined us just two months ago and actually made this update real! While we continue working on long-term tasks like Rails and Roads Rework (also known as RRR) and Contracts Update, we finally have someone who can back us up and help to fill the void between those major milestones.

Alright, now let's get back to business!



Device inputs and output directions are now predefined and can't be changed. This should help new players, as well as raise some challenges to experience players when planning their setups. Let us know what you think!


We are still getting amazed by the creative ways you use decorations to build your beautiful worlds. To free your creativity even further, this update unlocks new degrees of freedom when placing your decorations.

The rotation is no longer fixed to 90° angles.



You can now scale decorations both up and down.



To help you properly align your creations, you can now change the world grid step in settings (10 by default):


Grid step set to 3


Many of you complained that option to rename cities was a bit pricy. We wanted to make renaming a city an achievement, but it become clear that many of you just want to name a city, not a big deal after all!

Also, our algorithm for deciding the price goes a bit crazy over time:


The exact amount of 'game dead' comments we receive every day

So, prices were greatly reduced and made more predictable. But don’t get too comfortable: one of the future updates will bring a company rating, and we plan to tie the ability to rename cities to the level of approval of your company in that exact settlement.


The game now properly supports trains consisting of both electric and steam/diesel engines. Before, such trains could not pass the non-electrified part of the tracks.




When you play with many mods, navigating the builder palette quickly become a complicated task. This is especially true for decorations:



To help you with that, we've completely reworked the builder palette.

Now, buildings are split into categories, which you can navigate on the left of the window.



Modders can use built-in categories or create their own.

Buildings now can be sorted: alphabetically, by price, or by size.



Or you can choose to display buildings only from specific mods.



The new compact view option allows fitting the maximum amount of buildings into view for a quick glance.



The palette also now features text search.



All of these features are available not only for decorations but for any type of building.

And the last thing: to help you keep track of where you've left the window now opens already scrolled to the last built object.


In this update, we've addressed the issue with misdirected conveyors. It was easy to mess it up and make conveyors face each other, blocking the flow of items. It was especially annoying when this happened just inside device inputs and outputs, because it's really hard to stop, making players scratch their heads over why items not going in or out of the device.



We've addressed this in two ways.

First, we've greatly improved the direction auto-detection algorithm which decides in which direction the conveyor belt should move after build.



Second, we've added the easy-to-spot indicator that will pop up in the exact place of misdirection. Even more, just click on it and directions will be fixed automatically.



These changes should greatly reduce the amount of confusion and tedious work manually switching conveyor directions.

Another improvement allows you to build devices closer to each other without the need to demolish conveyors.





Sometimes you want to play a different set of mods or create a vanilla game with no mods at all. It’s already possible by toggling individual mods in the New game window.

However, if you have a really big amount of mods installed, toggling mods back and forth starts to be cumbersome. So we updated the Mods tab with a search bar and Toggle all options.






One-time money spending like laying out a long railroad or building a factory may affect the understanding of your current month-to-month balance. Now you can tune the total display for your needs by choosing what exact budget items should count in total numbers.




When placing signals, there's a new option that will allow you to enable displaying a distance to the closest signal or intersection. Along with the already existing auto-placing feature, this should help to distribute your signals as desired.




When using the electrification tool, non-electrified parts of the track will be highlighted in red. No more trains stuck because of 1 tile missing wires!


Besides the ability to mass send vehicles to depots and mass assign vehicles to a route, there’s a new action to mass-release vehicles from depots.

To accommodate more actions added, we’ve redesigned the actions area - and not only in a visual way. Now send and release actions behave as toggles and can be canceled if required.



Also, we've fixed how vehicles are sorted by their names. Now it should look like a human would expect.



This also applies to route names.


Replacements now can be paused - each separately, or all at once, for more precise control over your spendings.

Also, replacements now will preserve the vehicle’s cargo where possible, and we’ve fixed annoying notifications spam happening when a vehicle can’t find a depot for replacement.


Previously, if a mod breaks the game while it loads to the main menu, the game will just be stuck forever, until you unsubscribe from the problematic mod. And you are left to wonder which of your 100 mods collection is the bad one.

Now the game will detect such problems, and then show you a detailed dialog, letting you know what was happen, and suggesting actions based on context.



For example, it will allow you to just disable the problematic mod and restart the game, or go to the Workshop page to let the mod author know that there's a problem.

By the way, the in-game bug icon got a promotion! Now, if an unexpected error will occur during play, the red banner will be displayed. Click on it will open a new developer console.



Yes, the game now has a developer console, which could be toggled at any point with <kbd>Ctrl + `</kbd>. It displays game logs in real-time and also will accept user commands in the future.



You can also disable the bug banner reappearing from there for the current play session.



There's a new `.categories` asset that is used to organize buildings in the builder palette. Feel free to assign built-in categories to your assets, or even add your own categories. Also, let us know if you think some new categories should be added to the base game.


The direction of device inputs and outputs now should be explicitly set in assets. Please update your mods or they won’t work as expected.


You can now choose what pack to load in Asset Editor to significantly improve load times.




`.decoration` assets now can be animated in the same manner as devices or mines.




Previously, buildings technically could have not only point lights, but also spotlights. However, there was no way to set the direction where a spotlight is pointed, which made them pretty useless. Now, this is fixed.




Joining trains, road vehicles can emit smoke now.


This update is the minor one, but it brings a lot of useful improvements and fixes. We've covered the most important changes here, and if you want more, check the full changelog for this update.

In the meantime, we keep working on new gameplay features, and we hope to present them to all of you soon. Thank you and see you next time!

— Fixed stations appear as destroyed in UI in some cases (https://github.com/voxeltycoon/issues/issues/983)
— Fixed incorrect signal distance calculations
— Fixed vehicle stats are no longer displayed when hovering over a vehicle preview in the tech tree window (https://github.com/voxeltycoon/issues/issues/982)
— Fixed UI displays incorrect stats and console spamming warnings for electrified trains
— Routes now sorted by name in human-like manner
— Set correct default currency and names assets for es, pl, sv, and tr locales
— Added Clear button to console
— Modding: Building liveries now can have different displayed names: use uri#livery_name:DisplayName format
— Modding: Added backward compatibility for Liveries2 property of the .conveyorconnector asset

GAMEPLAY
— You can now rotate and scale decorations — it's time to get creative!
— Inputs and outputs in devices are now fixed
— Made renaming cities significantly more affordable
— Trains that have both electric and diesel/steam engines now able to move on non-electrified rails

IMPROVEMENTS
— Builder window: Improved with categories, search, filtering, sorting, and view options
— Builder window: Scroll to last placed building on open
— Conveyors: Improved conveyor direction prediction logic — now it should require much less manual direction changes
— Conveyors: Mismatching directions will be highlighted with special indicator, clicking on it will automatically fix direction
— Conveyors: Devices now can be build closer to each other without need to demolish conveyors
— You can now choose what budget items should contribute to displayed total
— Fleet window: Added ability to mass release vehicles from depot
— Fleet window: Added ability to mass cancel send to depot
— Fleet window: Vehicles are sorted by name in the way human would expect
— New game window: Added search by mods
— New game window: Added ability to toggle all mods
— Mass replacement: Added ability to pause/resume and remove all current replacements
— Mass replacement: Added ability to pause a replacement
— Mass replacement: Replacement will preserve cargo if possible
— Mass replacement: Reduced notification spam if vehicle can't find a depot for replacement
— When placing a signal, distance to closest neighbors will be shown
— Added highlight of non-electrified parts of the track when using electrification tool
— Added option to configure world grid step
— Added possibility to rename depots and labs
— Added hint for supporter (yellow) drivers, mayors, etc.
— Hitting F1 now will leave indicators on screen and hide other UI, to hide indicators too hit F1 again
— Clicking on the current research name in the Lab window will reveal the research in the tech tree
— Vehicle units which is not compatible with the current consist won't be hidden but instead grayed out with informative message
— You can now teleport to the passengers destination by clicking on their icon in the station window
— Passengers weight reduced from 1t to 150kg
— Hotkeys on loading screens are now reflect user changes to bindings
— Loading screens now show arbitrary messages instead of listing loaded assets
— If game fails to load to main menu because of a mod, the mod will be automatically disabled, and game will be restarted
— New asset load error window added providing extended info and actions based on context (like Verify files integrity or Go to Workshop page)
— Added debug console ( Ctrl + `)
— New red banner will be shown at the top of the screen on critical errors, clicking on it will open the console
— Improved windows auto-layout to prevent them from being partially obscured by other UI as much as possible
FIXES
— Fixed coupling issues with DB ICE 3 and other MUs
— Fixed flipped engine with tender are displaying incorrectly
— Fixed task units can't be changed after other units were removed and task became locked to unexistant unit
— Fixed Plant trees tool always places only the first possible decoration for this biome
— Fixed game freezes when selling huge amount of vehicles at the same time
— Fixed modern vehicles can be sent or copied to tier 1 depots
— Fixed vehicles can be replaced to modern ones in tier 1 depots via mass replacement
— Fixed 0-sized buildings can be placed in closed regions
— M1 players: please give this build a try and let us know if there're memory leak problems or crashes

MODDING
— You can now choose what pack to load in Asset Editor to significantly improve load times
— Added .category asset which is used by builder to categorize builings
— Decorations now can be animated
— Spot lights now can be rotated
— Added smokes support for trucks and buses
— Conveyor max length now can be set in asset
— Direction of devices inputs and outputs are now strictly set in assets
— Asset URIs are no longer case sensitive
— Fixed rare case where StorageNetworkBuilding siblings not marked dirty on built (thanks Nebruzias!)
— 0Harmony.dll updated to 2.2.2
— Added Font Awesome 6
— Unity updated to 2021.3.9

Just in case you wonder, the next update is just around the corner.


Progress on the update so far

Actually, the main issue that is blocking its release is an annoying bug in the version of Unity engine we are currently using. This bug completely breaks UI and there's no easy workaround known, so we have to wait until Unity guys fix it.

Good news are that they are aware of this issue and already working on a fix. We expected it to land during next two weeks.

Just as the fixed version of the engine become available, we'll be able to push the next update to the beta branch. Of course, we will let you know about it with a separate announcement. Stay tuned!

It's been a whole year already since the Voxel Tycoon arrived to the Steam Early Access.

Wow!

We remember that mix of excitement and fear boiling inside our souls on the day when we hit the Release button like it was yesterday. And we are not sure what of those feelings were prevailing at that moment!

Fortunately, you liked what we've created. You gave us amazing reviews, bringing the Voxel Tycoon to the Very Positive overall review level. You wrote a ton of helpful feedback on our bug and suggestion trackers. You made guides and videos to help other players. You created lots of creative mods, expanding the game with new content and gameplay. You helped to make the Voxel Tycoon what it is today.

Thank you very much for that 💜

However, our ride is far from over. There're a lot of things yet to be done on the way to the full release (aka 1.0). And we hope you will find it joyful to experience this adventure together with us.



Not bad, but not enough. We want to do more in the Year 2.


The second year of the Voxel Tycoon Early Access promises to be more feature-rich and productive. Hopefully, over time we gain a better understanding of how to properly manage the development process. The hustle and bustle of the release have settled down, and now we can speed up our work without compromising quality.

In the coming months, you can expect the release of features that were discussed in the previous post: the demands rework (aka Contracts) and the vehicle obsolesence. And later this year we expect to introduce the long-awaited rails and roads rework, including level crossings. Of course, this is not everything that we've prepared for you in the Year 2, so stay tuned!



Hello World!