Major update #8 - the Economy update is now available to all players. The focus of this update is the city's economy in the middle and late stages of the game. This update adds new ways of controlling your economy, a lot of balancing, and some new content, as well as a new tribe and other bug-fixes and quality of life changes.
Read on below about some of the changes in this update. You can find the full list of changes on our patch notes page.
Note: due to significant content and balancing changes, as sometimes happens in Early Access updates, saves from previous versions are not supported. If you prefer to continue your previous game, you can still play the older version by selecting one of the previous alpha builds from the betas tab on Steam.
New tribe: The Beavers
The Beaver tribe is a new playable tribe that focuses on building large cities. These guys are all about building stuff on the flying platform, upgrading, and reducing wasted resources when leaving buildings behind.
They start with larger cities and pay less for expanding them further, but they are unwilling to build most buildings outside. You'll need to better manage your limited space and weight, but you will enjoy cities that can hit the ground running and require less re-building after flying to a new area.
Assigning workers
In the economy update, you now have better control over the amount of workers assigned to different buildings and production lines. Previously, you either had the full amount of workers required to keep the building working, or the building was disabled. Now, you can assign less than the full amount, and the building will still be able to function, though at a lower level of productivity.
This new system not only lets you prioritize which buildings and production lines are more important, but also allows fine tuning the rate at which you produce and consume different resources and better balance your economy.
Production recipes determine upkeep
The amount of workers, flux and power that is required to keep a building functioning now depends on the selected production recipe. The same wood warper that only requires a couple of workers to produce the bloodwood planks will now need many more for producing acidwood.
This new system allows for better balancing of these basic resources, making late-game economies more interesting and finely tuned.
Building management window
To better control large, late-game cities, especially now that every building has their own worker count and upkeep, we've added a new building management window.
In this window you can see all production buildings (and other buildings that require upkeep), and you can quickly change production recipes, assign workers, and turn the buildings on/off.
Collectable production recipes
We've added several new production recipes that you need to collect before you can use them. These recipes can not be researched, and the only way to unlock them is by exploring Industrial ruins.
These recipes, for the most part, provide alternative ways to produce the same resources either to increase efficiency or to allow more flexibility based on the resources you have available. These recipes can make a big difference in producing sufficient resources, research and upgrade parts for late-game progress.
More self-sustained cities
Several production recipes were added or modified so that they require only renewable resources. These allow creating production lines that can keep working after flying without having to find new resource deposits and reducing dependency on specific biomes.
For the most part these resources are less efficient (in terms of how many workers/power/flux you need to spend per resource produced) than those that require non-renewable resources, but they are far more dependable and are invaluable to keep frequent-flying cities running smoothly.
Balancing and late-game progression
We've increased the costs of much of the late-game content such as research and upgrades, making the more advanced production recipes and upgraded buildings a meaningful alternative to just building hundreds of basic buildings.
We've also increased the production rates of these resources in mid/late game recipes, and the higher levels of houses & apartments now provide more living space.
Additionally, upgrading production buildings now improves their efficiency (amount of resources produced per worker/flux/power), and they are no longer required for producing advanced recipes, making them nice-to-have rather than must-have, but at the same time making them more valuable to have. Instead, you will have to build separate add-ons that do not increase the building's upkeep, in order to allow that building to produce more advanced recipes.
There are lots of changes to the economy balance of pretty much everything - upkeep, production recipes, building costs, expansion costs, upgrade costs, research, etc. For the most part late-game elements were made more expensive, and also more productive, but there are some exceptions. Namely it is now easier to expand your city late-game, making it more feasible to build huge cities.
Saves from previous builds
As mentioned above, due to significant content and balancing changes we were unable to keep supporting saves from previous builds.
If you prefer to continue your previous game, you can still access the previous build through Steam's beta branches feature.
Future Plans
In this update we continue to progress through our roadmap towards the 1.0 build, but we still have quite a bit to go before we are ready. We've updated the roadmap to reflect these changes.
Know that we are always listening to all feedback channels, and that your feedback is very much appreciated. We invite you to hop onto our discord server and chat with us directly, leave your feedback in the Steam discussion forums, or in-game feedback form.
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on all these changes. The Suncrash team
Start crafting badges with our new Steam Trading Cards
Citizens,
While we're working on the next major update, we've got a small boon for you - Steam trading cards. In case you're unfamiliar, these are collectable cards that you earn by simply playing the game on Steam, and you can then trade (or buy/sell on the Steam marketplace to/from other players). If you manage to collect the entire set, you'll get a cool badge, experience points for your Steam profile, a few of our unique emojis and a Dream Engines background that you can use for your Steam profile page.
Those of you who already played plenty of Dream Engines should get the card drops retroactively.
I hope you enjoy our artwork, and for us it's back to work on the next update.
Early Access 7 Patch 1
- Fixed an issue where raid position would not update once they started moving. - Fixed the feedback form link so that it will automatically fill the build number.
Just in time for the holidays, we're happy to present you with our latest Early Access build - The Overseer Update. This update focuses on one of the most requested changes since launch - pausing the game and giving you time to think, plan and re-organize.
Making this change was not easy. The way the game was designed, with a character-centered perspective, made it hard to implement and balance something that may seem trivial for simulation/management games.
Read on below about some of the larger changes in this update and for insight on what went on behind these changes and decisions.. You can find the full list of changes on our patch notes page.
Note: the new overseer tools are disabled in the hardest difficulty levels (which you can customize of course), so the more stressed - no time to think - experience still exists for those who enjoy it.
Overseer tools - active pause
One of the things we wanted to touch in this update was the constant, non-stop feeling of urgency. There was not much time to stop and think, and even when you did, there was often a feeling that you are wasting time and should be doing stuff. Re-organizing your base felt like an inefficient waste of time.
We've brainstormed and researched many options to tackle this. One of them was a "stealth mode" in which your city would stop producing, but you could spend time building and re-organizing without having the threat level increase. Another was to have time-off and manage your city while flying from one destination to another. All these and more ended up feeling like they would add more complexity to an already complicated game, and so I decided to go with a more straight-forward and well known solution - Active Pause. The active pause lets you play the game as usual while the game is paused, so time will not advance, but you can still build, craft, change production recipes, move buildings, and so on.
Even this, however, was not as straightforward as I'd have liked, due to the fact that in Dream Engines you interact with the world through Tiny - your steam-bot avatar. When the game is paused, Tiny can't move, so you can't move around the city and interact with the different elements. We had to add another tool for the overseer - the free camera.
Overseer tools - free camera
It didn't make sense to let Tiny move while the rest of time was frozen, so we had to let you move around and manage the city without moving Tiny by introducing the free camera toggle.
When enabled, the free camera will disconnect the view from Tiny, and you can move the view around the map as you build, manage or destroy stuff. A few other changes had to be made when taking this new mode into account - for example, you can now only transfer items to/from buildings if Tiny is near them, whereas before if you could open the building's window you could transfer items.
Other than supporting the active-pause feature, this new tool changes some of the flow of the game. You no longer have to abandon your exploration and move Tiny back to the city every time you want to build a new house. You can now do so remotely, as a real overseer would.
Overseer tools - speedup
The last overseer tool I'd like to discuss is the speed-up button. Previously, the game's pacing was designed so that the time it takes to explore, fight, build, and make use of everything the map has to offer - was more or less in line with the amount of time it would take to exhaust the resources or have the threat level increase to levels you'd be unable to handle.
With the addition of active pause and free camera, a lot of the actions that previously "wasted" time can now happen in an instant, while the game is frozen or without having to walk back and forth. And so, the amount of time that would pass within the game is now a little shorter, when doing the same actions.
For that reason, we wanted to add an option to speed-up time when waiting for stuff to happen, such as waiting for research to be complete, or for resources being harvested. So, there's now a speed-up button that will cause time to pass faster.
The original thought was for adding more robust speed control buttons (so you can play the whole game at x2 speed, for example), but since the game was not designed for that, it caused several issues, technical and gameplay. For example, fighting with Tiny at x2 speed looked bad and was unmanageable. Then, after further analysis, we realized that the whole point of higher speeds is for those periods of time in which you wanted to wait for something to happen. A simple "push to skip time" button did the trick, and there was no need for more robust speed controls. You play at normal speed most of the time, but if you want to skip ahead until that harvester is depleted - no problem, press and hold the speed-up button.
We'll have to keep an eye on how this works and tweak it as necessary, please do let us know what you think.
New tribe - the Teslacrats
You can now unlock The Teslacrats tribe and then select them when starting a new game. These energy freaks have a unique technology that they can research, which allows them to duplicate resources using the power of Tesla. Their ability makes it easier to get some resources, but it's not unlimited. Every time you duplicate resources, the machines become less efficient, and subsequent duplications will cost more energy - unless you give them time to cool down and recharge.
Teslacrats also produce power at a higher rate than others, but being the elitists of the energy producing community, "cheap" power generation methods (those that require no resources) are beneath them, and they do so very inefficiently.
Better automation - the sorter
The sorter is a new building that can be placed on rails that has one input slot and 3 output slots. You can then configure which items would be sent to each one of the output slots, allowing you to sort items out of a rail route into separate routes depending on the item.
This allows for more automation and combining several routes for long transportation and then splitting them back up. As with many other features, we thank our early access players for suggesting this.
More open desert & ashfall maps
We tried to make the different biome maps a bit more unique and not just visually. Desert and Ashfall (lava) biomes are now more open, with less crowded mazes and more building area.
Switching weapon sets
Different weapons may be beneficial for different situations. We've added the ability to set up two sets of weapons for Tiny, and switch between them with a press of a button.
Saves from previous builds
Saves from previous builds are supported and should work fine for the most part, but there may be balancing issues and some of the changes will only take effect when you switch maps. The new overseer tools will be disabled in old saves that had the "Pause in Menus" option disabled.
Future Plans
This update implements some of the features in our roadmap, but also added some major, unplanned features. During the months since the release, we've been constantly thinking about the roadmap, what is missing, and if there is anything that can or should be removed from the roadmap. As such, here is the updated roadmap. This may change even further later down the road as we progress and the situation changes.
Know that we are always listening to all feedback channels, and that your feedback is very much appreciated. We invite you to hop onto our discord server and chat with us directly, leave your feedback in the Steam discussion forums, or in-game feedback form.
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on all these changes. The Suncrash team
Modding Guide & Progress Update
Citizens,
It's been a month since we released our last update which inlcuded modding and Steam Workshop support, and we now have a more elaborate Modding Guide available in our wiki.
The guide now explains in more details how you can modify and create your own content for the game, such as resources, production recipes, crafting recipes, research, and so on.
If you're interested at all in modding Dream Engines, check it out, and if you have any questions you're welcome to ask them in the Steam Workshop forum or in our Discord server.
Update 7 Progress
Obviously, updating the modding guide is not the only thing I've been doing since the last patch. The next update will include some core changes that require quite a bit of re-designing, re-writing code, and a whole lot of playtesting. These changes include more control over production lines, and yes, due to popular demand, I'm now testing an Active Pause system which is made more complex by the fact that it's not very effective if it doesn't come with a free camera mode.
I still have more testing, bug squashing, and some work on other features, not to mention waiting for all the translations and final QA, so it will be a bit longer before the update is ready to be released, but I expect it to be out before Christmas.
I hope you all have a great holiday season
Early Access 6 - Patch 1
Fixed an issue accessing mods downloaded from the Steam workshop.
Dream Engines: Nomad Cities - Update 6 - The Ashfall Range
Citizens,
It's been just over 2 months since we launched Dream Engines: Nomad Cities in early access. Sadly, since that launch, it's been one crisis after another for us at Suncrash (one of which I told you about). It took a little longer than we planned, but I do feel we managed to create a decent update here despite all the difficulties.
I want to once again thank all of you early access players for your very valuable feedback. A lot of the changes and quality of life improvements here are directly related to things we saw and heard from you. Also thank you for your understanding regarding the delays.
Here are some of the larger changes in this update, and you can find the full list on our patch notes page.
New biome: The Ashfall Range
The new Ashfall Range biome is a fiery biome full of ash, fire and molten rock. This is a late game biome that appears in 4-skull difficulty or higher, and it contains a new resource unique to this biome called Liquid Fire.
This new resource comes with new production recipes, some of which create brand new construction materials, and others are alternative recipes for existing construction materials - adding more valid options and freedom when choosing your next landing destination.
Spreadbow, Spreadgun, and higher tier equipment
To better survive in the higher difficulty maps, we added new higher levels of equipment, including weapons and armor.
We also added a new type of weapon that shoots several projectiles in an arc, useful against stronger enemies that are nearby if you can hit them with the entire burst, and also against weaker enemies that are spread out.
Better Dream Archives
We improved our in-game encyclopedia so it provides more information that is easier to access. You can now see resources in these archives, and for each resources you can see how to get it, and the different uses it has. More resources and uses will be displayed as you unlock them with research.
We also fleshed out the other pages, and improved navigation by adding a filter and sorting the subjects alphabetically.
Modding Support
We now officially support modding for Dream Engines and we opened the Steam Workshop for uploading and downloading of mods.
The current level of modding support lets you change configuration files that determine the game's content, balancing, and many systems. You can also upload custom sprites that can be used for example for adding resources or equipment. All language files are moddable too so you can add community-based translations for the game.
Support for additional modding functionality will be added later down the road if there is demand for it.
This subject deserves a separate, more detailed post, which I'll make in the next few days. For more information, you can check our Modding Guide (work in progress).
Tier 3 enemy creatures
When you reached 5 skulls or high threat levels, you may have noticed that we used larger & stronger versions of the tier-2 enemies. In this update we added new tier-3 enemies, which will improve the balance and overall feel of the late game.
Balancing and quality of life improvements
Lots of balancing and quality of life improvements were made, most of them based on your feedback. Some of the more important ones:
* Tiny can now move between buildings * When raids split and attack using different paths, you will now see them all in the minimap * We added fuel caches in some maps as another way to get fuel early on * When buildings are attacked their position will now appear in the minimap * Depleted resources now suffer a larger penalty, but resource nodes start with more resources
Performance Improvements
We've identified and improved some performance bottlenecks, especially in the late game when the map is full of carts travelling to resource drop-offs.
We know we still have more optimizations to do, and will keep improving in future updates. If you encounter a situation where the game's performance is bad, please follow the instructions in this post and send us the save file, it will really help if we can identify those poor performance situations so we can improve and optimize them.
Saves from previous builds
Saves from previous builds are supported and should work fine for the most part, but there may be balancing issues and some of the changes will only take effect when you switch maps.
Future Plans
In this update we implemented some of the features in our roadmap, and we will now start planning our next update and which features it will include. You can probably expect a couple smaller patches as we collect feedback about these latest changes, while we work out which major additions/changes to tackle next.
Know that we are always listening to all feedback channels, and that your feedback is very much appreciated. We invite you to hop onto our discord server and chat with us directly, leave your feedback in the Steam discussion forums, or in-game feedback form.
If you are enjoying the game, please don't forget to leave us a review on Steam. Positive reviews are a great way to support games that you enjoy and developers that you like. It helps our motivation and lets other players know what you like about the game.
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on all these changes. The Suncrash team
Early access progress update
Citizens,
This is an update on our development progress and plans for the near future.
Since we released Dream Engines a bit less than a month ago, we already uploaded 4 updates, some larger and some smaller, all based on feedback we got from our Early Access players.
Since then we've started to work on some of the roadmap features, and wanted to release one large update in August, and another one at the end of September.
Unfortunately, that plan is no longer possible. Due to COVID in the family (everyone is ok, no severe symptoms, thank god!), and the resulting quarantines, I now have to take care of two small children all by myself 24/7, no kindergarten and no help from their mother, for the next couple of weeks. Since I am 50% of the team, and the only programmer, this means that the August update will not be ready as planned.
Under these circumstances, we've decided to skip the large August update, and release the next update towards the end of September as planned, obviously making it a larger one that will include some features planned from both. We may still release smaller patches before that, as necessary.
This next big update is planned to include modding support, new content, balancing improvements, and improvements to the on-boarding (the tutorial and other things making the new-player experience better). In addition, we continue to fix bugs, tweak our systems based on feedback, and improve the UX and general quality of life.
I want to thank all our early access players once again for their support and feedback, and thank you in advance for understanding this delay in updates.
Tomer & The Suncrash team.
Early Access Patch 4
Citizens,
Patch 4 continues to fix and improve based on all the great feedback we received from our early access players. If you have any feedback you want to share, please don't hesitate to post on the Steam Forums or come chat with us directly on Discord.
Thank you all for your feedback, it's been very valuable. If you are enjoying the game and want to show your support, please don't forget to leave us a review on Steam, and let your friends know.
Here's the list of changes in this build:
You can now expand your city to areas where you already have buildings without having to move or destroy them, as long as none of those buildings are partially within the expansion area and partially outside it.
Tiny can now pass through tiles with rail crossings.
The repeating research in the end was tweaked down since it was overpowered. The bonuses it provides are about half the previous ones, and the costs for researching it increase every time the research is complete.
Fixed a bug where after switching a map or reloading a saved game, the bonuses from the repeating research were lost until it was researched one more time.
Fixed a bug where nightmare reinforcements to turrets would not give any bonuses.
Faster global infestation growth from having a large city & infrastructure upgrades limited to a maximum of +70% over the base value. This means that if your city grows very quickly, the global infestation will not increase as much faster than usual as it did before (but it will still increase faster than usual up to the maximum).
Fixed a bug where the upgrades layer UI would not refresh if it was open while you upgrade a building through the building window.
Made total weight and weight capacity rounding from X.5 to be consistent (total weight always rounds down at X.5, and weight capacity will round up).
City information window now displays the current rail speed.
Fixed a bug in simplified and traditional Chinese that would break the city information window.
Added the ability to bind mouse buttons to keyboard shortcuts, starting from mouse button 4 and onwards (left click, right click and middle click are still hard coded and cannot be re-bound).
Made it possible to change the resolution even in full-screen. Choosing resolutions below the desktop resolution may create blurring effects.
Added a 240 maximum FPS option, though on the majority of systems the game will not be able to reach such numbers.
Using an ability that takes time to charge will now initiate the cooldown as soon as the charging begins. This will prevent players from accidently using several consumables of the same kind while the ability is charging.
Flux, power and fuel now slowly drop when over-capacity, instead of immediately dropping. This way if a storage building is temporarily disabled you will still be able to salvage most of the resources if you quickly repair it. This is now similar to how you lose workers when there is overpopulation. The rate at which these resources decrease varies (flux drops fastest, fuel slowest).
Loot drop animation a bit faster, and less delay before you can pick them up. Also increased the loot pickup range. This allows more easy scavenging of debris with less delay.
Increase of city expansion costs grow slower now at higher levels (more than 20-30 expansions), making the costs more realistic.
Fixed a bug where the tips for repairing when activating the repair tool would remain on screen until relaoding.
Fixed a bug where you could remove a building add-on after selecting a production recipe that requires that add-on, and it would continue producing it.
Fixed a bug in Ironman mode that prevented the game from being saved when there was a backup save file that remained from a previous failed save (can happen if a player terminates the game while it's saving).
Increased the number of cycles worth of threat removed by the Smoker to 20 instead of 10.
Patch 3 is based entirely on things we learned through early access feedback. It fixes some significant bugs, and includes usability improvements and balancing tweaks.
Changes in patch 3:
Fixed a bug where every time Tiny activated emergency teleport, bonuses to maximum population from infrastructure upgrades would get re-added over and over again. This would reset after leaving the map or reloading a save, which would cause a drop in maximum population and people starting to die.
Fixed a bug when you had multiple resource drop-offs that accepted different resources, then sometimes the pathfinding for some of the carts would not re-calculate when you build or demolish buildings, causing them to get stuck and after a while really hurt performance when hundreds of carts would get stuck at the same spot.
Tweaked map generation so there is a little more building space around the city and clearings are a bit larger.
Balanced building upgrades so they are more efficient (less increase in maintenance costs), and no longer less worthwhile than building more buildings of lower levels. Tweaked the price of said upgrades a bit as well to be higher, so upgrading creates a trade-off between high up-front costs, while saving space and weight.
Made some advanced recipes for flux, power, research and upgrade materials a bit more efficient and worthwhile.
Apartment a bit more efficient now (less food consumption, less weight, a bit more max population - base and upgrades).
A bit higher Flux production with all recipes.
Incresed Tiny's base speed when not attacking and some of the speed bonuses.
1 Skull maps now always have both featherstone and bloodwood.
Fixed a bug where you couldn't move a Materializer if you reached the maximum amount of this building.
Fixed a bug that when a building is destroyed in the middle of trying to move it, you could still place it with 0 health after it was destroyed.
Made FPS limit configurable (default is now 30).
New sound when an attack is preparing, different from the regular alarm (people dying, etc).
Made the city info area in the HUD a button so it's clearer that it can be pressed to open the city information window.
Added a learning message after the first time that you fly to a new destination, explaining that you can open the city information window that also shows information about current map.
You can no longer switch to management mode in the first tutorial mission (the one where you learn the basic controls). Players who accidently switched didn't know they had to switch back in order to complete the tutorial.
