Captain of Industry
Patch notes for v0.4.5a
* Fixed alignment issues when copy/pasting a single settlement module.
New features: cut/copy of transports, directional routes, and more!
Happy copy-and-pasting!
~Captain Marek
Changelog
v0.4.5
* Copy/paste and cut/paste tools now support transports.
* Copy and cut tools can now move all selected entities up or down using Q and E keys. This is especially useful for moving transports and retaining walls.
* Logistics assignments are now directional. Import and export can be assigned independently. Please check assignments after loading old saves.
* Area delete tool can now cut transports based on area. You can hold Shift to delete all selected belts in their entire length.
* Fixed all area tools (such as quick build dragged over area) to properly register transports, even if selected only partially.
* Quick build and quick remove now automatically unpause a paused construction.
* Fixed fallback logic for trucks to properly take items back to the shipyard if needed.
* Transport connectors don't get constructed until the first connected entity is constructed. This allows using the cut tool on them (otherwise they get constructed immediately and cut tool would not work on them).
* You can now hold Ctrl when deleting a structure to quickly remove it using Unity.
* Copy using Ctrl + C and cut using Ctrl + X will not immediately select the entity under cursor but just activates the tool. C key (without Ctrl) will still copy the entity under the cursor immediately.
* Increased export priority on fuel stations for fuel to make it the preferred choice for refueling over storages.
* Shipyard pending world map repairs list is now scrollable.
* Added option to temporarily cancel world map repairs.
* Added delete save button to in-game save menu (previously was only in main menu).
* Game speed is set to 1x when the first rocket launch countdown is started.
* Fixed time-lapse rendering that was sometimes producing corrupted images.
* Fixed time-lapse rendering that was not resetting lightning conditions properly.
* Line area renderings (like editing of mine tower area) are no longer shown in time-lapses.
Captain’s diary #25: Release was a great success! We are hiring!
Our first big announcement is that we have sold more than 60,000 copies over the last 16 days. The Steam wishlists have also grown substantially. We are incredibly pleased to see all the interest and want to say huge thanks to our wonderful community for their continuous support and feedback (especially given the world is in difficult times these days). And thanks to our dedicated community, the game is currently translated to 15 languages. As we have stated, we are committed to regularly updating these localizations and adding new ones to ensure people can enjoy the game in their native language.
We also have some cool stats for you. The average time played per player is 21+ hours and 3% of players played for 100+ hours. These are great numbers, given we are just two weeks after the release. We have also reached 7 thousand members on Discord.
The first reported rocket launch from an abandoned coal mine shared by player Torqk 5 days after the release!
All this support and growth allows us to scale our development operations as well, which is super important for the future of CoI. And we will invest into CoI a lot over the years.
Note: This is our first post of Captain's diary here on Steam, but we've been posting them for a long time. If you'd like to read past entries you can find them on our blog.
Development update
Our current mission is to keep fixing any outstanding issues and bugs because although CoI went through alpha and beta stages, many things were added and need to settle. And also, since we got 20 times more players, certain combinations or issues suddenly start to resurface. I want to say huge thanks to folks who file issues on our GitHub together with clear steps and save files. It helps us greatly to be able to instantly reproduce an issue to fix it.
Our other mission is to scale our development effort. This has to happen ASAP. We are working on features and improvements, but we need to increase our throughput. You know, the factory must grow :) In our case, we can’t just build more assemblers :) We have been trying to hire for several months already. However, we are pretty demanding on what we expect from future colleagues as CoI is our baby and also a fairly complex software with lots of proprietary systems in place. It’s an infra we have been building for the last 7 years. In case you are interested or know someone, check out our hiring page.
In the last 16 days we have landed 13 patches. These were lots of bug fixes but also several quality of life improvements or smaller features. Just to name a few: configurable key bindings, option to configure fps limit & v-sync, searchable recipes book, ability to follow a vehicle, ability to rename entities, recipes prioritization. We also did a minor rebalancing - making diseases less annoying and shifting from mortality to health penalty to enable the player to combat them more easily. We have also fixed several hard-locks and improved descriptions and hints.
Upcoming changes
Changes in advanced logistics / custom routes
We have noticed that custom routes are not very intuitive for players. They have been on our radar for some time, but it wasn’t clear what to do about them. We are going to land the first update to improve them. Right now, routes don’t have a direction. When two storages are assigned, they don’t know which one is supposed to be importing and which one should be exporting. This leads to situations where assigning a storage to a mine tower blocks that storage from the rest of the network. So we are going to introduce directional routes. This means that if storage is assigned to receive imports from a mine tower it will still support export to other storages unless export gets assigned as well. This should fix the need for double storage solutions next to each mine.
Improved copy & paste
Those of you who already used copy & paste tools know that they currently do not work on transports. The reason for this is, quite frankly, the complexity of the implementation and our time constraints. However, we also know that many of you would really like to use it. So while we were sending daily patches for the game, we were also working on this feature in a separate branch and it is nearly ready! Below are some examples of how it works.
Example of copy & paste operations. As you can see, it also supports rotation and flipping.
Example of clone and cut & paste used for final position adjustments.
The new tool also supports connecting copied transports to existing ones by placing new connectors.
Tutorials by our community
We understand that some players find the game difficult to navigate. We are collecting feedback and trying to improve everything we can. It won’t be done overnight; it will need time, but we will get there. We have also received feedback that some game mechanics like mining/dumping or initial factory setup are not intuitive for some players. We will be working on improving the overall user experience, but in the meantime, here are some tutorial videos to check out:
- Official mining guide by Charlie Pryor: https://youtu.be/WL8jP9l2Q-0
- Power Generation guide by JD Plays: https://youtu.be/-fjKNaSVFO8
- Advanced diesel guide by JD Plays: https://youtu.be/9IVwchCi-j4
- Initial factory setup by Kibitz: https://youtu.be/is0RNVH58o0
- You can also check out the ongoing tutorial series from Nilaus: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLV3rF--heRVsB28RJj-YryVncr6fBEWBp
It also turns out that sometimes small hints at the right places can do a tremendous job. It is something we are working on as well. When we find that something is not intuitive, we always try to improve it or put it on our list to revisit it. The goal of CoI is for players to have fun and if some things are frustrating, we will deal with them.
We also consider introducing new difficulty toggles to make, for instance, Sailor difficulty more forgiving. But we also stay committed to realism, and CoI will remain unforgiving on higher difficulties.
There is also a little misconception running around on the public forums, which we would like to address. That CoI has finite resources. That’s not entirely true. We have introduced recycling in EA, reducing your consumption margin massively (90%). And also, the game has contracts that can be your end-game goal. Primarily the endgame contracts should provide you with all the resources you need. There are also several renewable ways of generating fuel or things to trade with. It just takes time to get there. But we are happy to get feedback on the contract balance as well. Finally, you can also enable infinite world map resources in the starting options if you are not comfortable transitioning to contracts.
Update on Mystery box
We also owe you an update on the Mystery box from Captain’s Diary #23. You all had wonderful guesses like a captain’s hat, COI merch, vacation package, or even power tools! However, the winner was a member “severalboxes” who correctly guessed that in the box was Lego Bucket Wheel Excavator 42055 - congrats on the COI key! Severalboxes actually told us that the game key was given to their son who was very eager to play COI and is now building some awesome factories. That just warms our hearts!
The mysterious box is now open, but it is unclear when Captain Marek will get enough free time to actually build it, as it looks like a multi-day build.
And that’s all we have for you! Thanks for reading and see you in the next update!
Patch notes for v0.4.4c
Patch notes for v0.4.4b
* Trucks that have no designation for dumping no longer deliver cargo to the shipyard and just report undeliverable cargo.
* Added a new option to discard cargo for unity when the truck has nowhere to deliver it.
* Fixed copy configuration tool that did not apply power generation priority properly.
* Fixed ports icons for turbines, power generators and flywheels that were not showing.
* Added missing research lab and settlement modules recipes to the recipes book.
* Added search to the recipe book.
* Made the recipe book window movable.
* Fixed vehicle recovery that did not work when the vehicle was next to a vehicle depot.
* Updated translations, thanks to everyone who is contributing!
Patch notes for v0.4.4a
* Fixed cargo ship that was not departing if all cargo depot modules were preparing to be upgraded.
* If vehicle recovery is not possible, more information explaining the reason is now shown.
* Fixed quick trade that did not remove products from cargo depot modules.
* Fixed dumping that was sometimes ignoring assignments.
* Fixed electric boiler power balance on non-default difficulty making infinite energy possible in some cases.
* Fixed potential issues with keyboard shortcuts defined by mods.
* Updated translations, Korean and Hungarian are now 100% translated! Thanks to everyone who is contributing!
* Added a new console commands 'print_translation_errors' and 'print_translation_warnings' to help translators fix broken translations.
Patch notes for v0.4.4
* Entity names now also appear in some notifications.
* Added save file location path and button that opens it.
* Fixed issue when listing save files but some were not readable (possibly open by another process).
* Fixed excessive food consumption by homeless people.
* Fixed food consumption "overflow" during starvation.
* Fixed chicken farm state when all chicken died due to starvation.
* Fixed loop in logistics in vehicle depot when conveyors were connected.
* Fixed "keep empty" in the shipyard to not cause logistics jobs with small quantities.
* Fixed ID collision in key bindings for camera rotation.
* Added more info to the error message when the game fails to start. This should be especially helpful to mod developers and users.
* We are also working on supporting conveyors during area clone/cut operations, stay tuned!
Patch notes for v0.4.3
* All enabled recipes are now on top of the list, before all disabled ones.
* Removed power requirements from distillation towers, they are now fully powered by steam (steam consumption may be increased in the future). This should allow making diesel even when power is out, making recovery from certain situations easier.
* Added ability to follow vehicle with camera, use button on the top of its inspector window to enable.
* Fixed oil rig production rates estimation.
* Further decreased severity of diseases and increased minimal delays.
* Diseases have now reduced mortality but increased health penalty, so that players can combat them with increased health and edicts (hospitals are still very important to have).
* Fixed asynchronous save that now properly waits for save to finish writing all data to disk before announcing save completion. Also added an error message with helpful info in case save failed.
* Slightly increased camera pan speed (fix from previous change).
* Updated translations, thanks to everyone who is contributing!
Patch notes for v0.4.2a
* Prevented multiple power transformers per one settlement to overproduce Unity. This was also breaking settlement bonus and preventing getting 100% unity for water.
* Fixed dangling price popup when building a transport.
* Prevented animal farms from accepting eggs back (farm rebuild required for fix to work).
* Fixed that world mines and oil rigs ignored "per 60" selection.
* Add more tooltips and hints.
* Camera movement keys (WSAD) can be now properly remapped.
* Added Ctrl + D for demolish.
* Added a camera rotation binding with a default bound to Alt + Q/E.
* Restore +/- keys for changing game speed, camera zoom is now mapped to [ ] and / * keys by default.
* Fixed Ctrl key for alternative transport routing.
Patch notes for v0.4.2
* Added ability to control camera zoom with keys.
* Remove designation can be done with CTRL + left click.
* Demolish can be done with Ctrl + X.
* Transport no longer sets terrain when they are split/merged. This was causing issues when pipes were underground (yes, you can make underground pipes by dumping material over them!).
* Transports no longer snap to non-compatible transports via mini-zipper.
* Add diesel trade to the first village to prevent possible deadlocks when diesel runs out before another village is explored.
* Removed Electronics II from ship costs to prevent potential deadlock when ship was upgraded but no Electronics II source was yet found and the ship could remain unrepairable.
* Fixed Electronics II product model.
* Updated translations, Spanish is now 100% translated! Thanks to everyone is contributing!
We are also working on improving the intuitivity of mining and dumping tools, but it will take us some time. In the meantime, we have partnered with Charlie Pryor who made an awesome mining guide, check it out below!