Hello everyone!

This is the final dev blog before we release Update 2 “Galactic Commerce” next Tuesday at 14:00 CEST. In this blog I’ll be covering a couple different things related to the update, before I have one more surprise feature at the end of the episode.

On Monday at 18:00 CEST (9AM PT) we’ll be going live on Twitch (Paradox Interactive Channel) and on YouTube (Foundry Channel) to show off various features of the update and to answer your questions. Jump by and let’s have a chat!

This week we have released the second part of our update preview series, made in cooperation with SpectrumDad. This one covers robots, commerce, lava caves and the R&D lab.

In case you missed it, you can check out part one here.

With the new update you will have to restart a new save as too many things have changed to keep the saves compatible. However we do not want to strip you of the ability to keep playing or revisiting your old saves since we know how many of you spent hundreds of hours on a single save.

For this we have introduced the Legacy Version Steam Branch: It allows you to go back to the old FOUNDRY version, which then allows you to keep loading and playing old saves. For details on how it works we have prepared a post on our Steam forum, which can be found here.

In the previous blogs I have covered the galactic market, which allows you to buy and sell items. While that lowers the profit margin of your robots, it does offer an interesting new angle to resource acquisition. Having a shortage of resources? Quickly buy some from the market. Want to skip mining entirely? Expensive, but an option.

However the market only supports solid items, and therefore it didn’t cover one of the most requested things: An infinite Olumite source. To finally address this we have added Olumite barrelling, which allows you to put Olumite into barrels, which are solid items. Later you can empty the barrel to convert it back to its liquid state. For this we have introduced a new machine, the Barrel Filler.

We also have added a bit of additional gameplay around it with things like having empty barrels as an item you need to manage. Re-use them or recycle them back into Xenoferrite Plates. (Or burn them to dust in the Incinerator?) Empty barrels will now be needed for a handful of crafting recipes and things like Portable Fuel will now leave you with the empty barrel after using it at a generator.

And here’s the final surprise for the update: A fully reworked pipe system. We (and the community) were unhappy with the way our pipe system worked since quite some time. Simple questions about throughput could barely be answered without writing paragraphs. What was well intentioned by making it the most realistic it could be, ultimately mostly caused inconveniences.

So we decided to fully redo it and here’s how it works now: The way you build pipes and connect them to machines hasn’t changed, it all looks the same. But instead of pipes holding content individually we now combine them into pipe networks. Each network can only hold a single type of liquid, which makes fluid mixing and mistakes less likely to occur. The capacity of a network depends on the amount of pipes and tanks connected.

Each pipe network has a throughput limit of 36.000l per minute (potentially subject to change, depending on feedback), which is individually tracked for inputs and outputs. That means every second you can add 600l and also remove 600l from the network.

Distance between machines doesn’t matter anymore, however there is a new mechanic we called “network complexity”. Each connected pipe (or tank) adds to the complexity number of a pipe network, and once you have exceeded its limit you’ll only get 10% of the original throughput. It’s not immediately broken, but a pretty severe reduction. To solve this, you need to use pumps to break your networks apart into smaller segments. Pumps will pump the network’s content to another network, but they have the lowest priority compared to all other machines, which means in case of constraints the closest networks will be supplied.

From our initial testing the system works very well and most importantly is easy to understand and monitor. You can now analyze your segments with the tablet, see the screenshot below.

The provided information and history about what happened in the past minute should help a lot when planning pipe systems and it should finally make it understandable without unclear and hidden limitations. Another positive side effect is that this system is significantly cheaper to simulate and therefore will increase performance in your factories.

And finally, pipelines: The game still features the previously existing pipelines, which are like pipes, but a lot larger. They work exactly the same, but they offer a ten times higher throughput limit, which can be very useful. For example you can pump multiple throughput-constrained pipes into a pipeline on one end, have the pipeline go for a very long distance and then split it back up into smaller pipes at the destination. The throughput limit of the regular pipes is pretty generous and probably enough for most bases, but if you want to go big pipelines maybe the solution for various design layouts. For example you could have a central pipeline that spans your factory, which has smaller pipes branch off wherever needed.

I’d also like to mention that we still plan to further improve the experience of dragging pipes. That wasn’t in scope for this release, but it is still on our list. However we did improve belt dragging by quite a bit, if you want to find out more, click here.



And this concludes today's FOUNDRY Friday. Thanks for reading and thanks for sticking with us as we’ve been working on this Update. Everyone on our team worked really hard for the past ten months to get this out to you and we are excited to see your responses. We hope you’ll enjoy it!

See you in two weeks,
-mrmcd



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