Hopefully fixed EntryPointNotFoundException: Unable to find an entry point named 'SteamAPI_ManualDispatch_Init' in 'steam_api64'.
Fixed Thera ice fields
Fixed flooding of field on savegame planets
Fixed time speed UI click through
Fixed snow particles remaining when changing the planet
Fixed research point not given for Tuto city level 2 goal
Special thanks to Backgroundc and Wingheart!
Update #58 Asteroids vs. Space Invaders
Wow, update 58 was a tough nut to crack. We did so many things that were not precisely fun to do but necessary for you to have more fun with our global civilization builder. There are also some rather fresh and action packed new features waiting for you. We hope you enjoy and please let us know what you think about the changes to Imagine Earth. Best, Jens & Martin
Galaxy Map for the Hyperspace Gate
The overview of colonizable galaxies is now even more impressive. In the meantime we had moved the additional galaxy with the competition missions into the game mode „competition“, but we now prefer to visualize it as part of the clear part story based campaign. Of course we hope that there will be more galaxies at some point maybe with community generated planets from the workshop.
The Xrathul Bait
The new Xrathul Bait item can be crafted and used to distract invading Xrathul from your base or to directly send them to opposing factions. The honeypot attracts Xrathul who are on the planet. It also increases the probability of new Xrathul coming to the planet by 50%. It spreads Xrathul pheromones and is therefore an irresistible magnet for Xrathul ships, but can of course be destroyed.
Asteroids vs. Space Invaders
Well, you can now throw asteroids on Xrathul ships to totally wreck them. This method or using bombs and ideon bombs to finish them will now result in the giant ship crashing to the ground where you can harvest valuable artifacts from it.
Automation of the Workshop Crafting
Equipment can now be produced automatically as soon as all necessary resources are available. All you have to do is click on the button on the left side of the workshop screen. Automation just rules. The item of which you have the least copies in stock is always prioritized.
Drone Flight Characteristics
Build drones and harvest drones already had a lively way of gathering resources or knocking buildings out of the ground. But their flight behavior was an abandoned construction site for what there was always too little time over several updates. Now they glide wonderfully smooth onto their landing pads and launch pirouettes without any bizarre aerobatics.
The Overtaker
You can now win a competition game by gaining a victory point for taking over a city of other factions. This move is enabled when you buy sufficient shares in an opposing company. We also refined the victory points panel to be more visually appealing on this occasion and it was a good reason to revise the stock market design as well as you will learn here in the following.
Share Market Panel
The stock market is such an important panel for strategic gameplay and still it took as some time to realize we were hiding it in the upper left corner of the user interface to deeply. We have now put the panel on a par with the research menu and the development screen. The big button shows how many shares you still own from your own colony.
Finish Side Quests Later
You can now finish bonus and ideon goals after the mission is accomplished unfinished bonus quests will not fail any longer. For quite some time already you can visit planets that you built up throughout the mission and will find the goals still active so there’s such much to do when you return to your colonies after a while.
Refined Magni mission
A new sub quest to obtain the Xrathul Bait item. Several improvements make it now better understandable what needs to be done to succeed the mission tasks.
UI & graphic improvements
Centered resource and time panels on the top of the screen
Added construct preview images to the build menu
Improved journal layout
Increased visibility of limited city building area
New background for colony rating
Improved layout for victory points screen
Fixed lift animation on Tuto
Improved smoothness of camera animations
Fixed asteroid crater alpha problems
Polishing for fireworks
Added explanation popup for community translated languages
Other improvements & fixes
Keep F8 pressed to hide the UI when you want to create a screenshot
Reload after subscribing to new workshop planets
Keep predefined competitors when playing sandbox or workshop planets
Added more supply capsules to missions
Removed wind park life expectancy upgrade (in favor of new off-shore upgrade)
Fixed pirates getting stuck on unowned warehouses
Refined logic on when and where to display icons on the planet
Fixed fish and oil fields no being correctly displayed
Fixed duplicate impact of epidemics on districts
Improved texts that explain the relationship to other factions
Deep Space Fixes
Hotfix #57.6
It's fixing time again. Many things that make the hangout on deep space colonies much more pleasant.
Fixed a lot of minor issues in the Tuto mission
Improved German translations (thanks Ode2!)
Increased default user interface size & size of icons
Solved Bora mission "bug" by automatically activating quests that have not been harvested for 2 minutes
Fixed counting of victory points for bonus goals
Type button in journal panel is working again and leads to language specific forum thread
Automatically open the city build ring, when clicking on an empty field and having a city landing permission
Fusion plants now also take lithium that has been prioritized
Diplomacy panel opens slower to reduce the likelihood of wrong clicks
Improved visibility of marker rays
Improved sun lens flare
Special thanks to for reporting issues: Jorn, Cratic, brliles3
Graphics Booster
We’ve made a few tweaks for you that improve Imagine Earths terrain, interface and shadow calculation.
HBAO – Ambient Occlusion
First of all, you should notice more beautiful shadows in the game, which give the constructs, forests and objects more depth and also connect them to the environment and connect them better with the terrain. We were really looking forward to this quite classic technique called Ambient Occlusion when we switched from our homemade engine to Unity, but even they still had to integrate it into their brand new Universal Renderline. On the night side of the planet, you can now see by comparison how well the shadows make things more plastic even in the absence of sunlight.
Blueshift in the User Interface
We set out to change from the turquoise UI design to a bluer layout and to unify and standardize the colors in it. This of course serves the purpose of making the Global Colony Management Interface visually less distracting and peaceful. Some game menu elements have already been adapted, but the process is still ongoing.
Planetary Terrain Textures
When moving to the Unity Engine, the textures where displayed in a slightly reduced size, now they can be enjoyed in all their detail thanks to specific adjustment.
Fixed severe Icon Bug
Thanks to our new, automated bug tracking system, it was quickly noticed that many players experienced a bug related to interacting with the new clickable event icons that we have thrown out in the last major update. Problem solved.
35 % Sale until Monday!
In case you haven’t noticed we have the biggest discount sale ongoing on Steam until Monday! Time to grab a unique game about economic growth and climate crisis. If you feel like spreading the news, here is how we put it when trying to describe Imagine Earth briefly in public:
Imagine Earth puts the player in the position of a global economic player. He has to build up and supply his civilization, produce and trade goods into space and compete against other corporations. In order to preserve the environmental quality of life for his inhabitants and to avoid a global climate crisis, he has to find a balance between growth and sustainability.
Thanks for your support! We hope you enjoy the changes to Imagine Earth and let us know what you think about it in the forums.
Stay save, Jens and Martin
#57 Controls Revolution
Dear space colonists, today we present our latest update for Imagine Earth - Planetary Colonization. Many improvements to the global management system allow you to keep track and control your complex and full-grown colonies and optimize the daily colonizing work on new planets. We would be happy if you test the latest features and give us your feedback and that you come to the forums and put your most desired features on the wishlist. Best regards, Jens and Martin.
P.S: We hope that you and your beloved ones are and stay healthy. Take care!
Great List of Constructs
The new building list represents an almost too modest revolution for total control over your global colonies. Here you get an overview of all buildings in your colony. You can sort them by productivity and condition and have them equipped with upgrades, repaired or cleaned. There is also a list of all resources that are located in your area and can be mined directly. In the city list all districts are listed and can be checked for their quality of life.
Release Date
What can I say, the veterans among you may already enjoy this as a running gag, but we have to postpone the final release of Imagine Earth 1.0 once again. We ask for your patience and understanding, as it is our main effort to make Imagine Earth really good and a smooth experience. The port to the Unity Engine went relatively well and was worth the work in every respect, but still took twice as much time as we had hoped for. As is often the case, the devil is in the details and there are a lot of game features that need to be balanced and interlinked.
Long story short: We postpone the release until September 2020. It is of course also in the true nature of this project that a global build-up game with economic strategy and authentic planet and climate simulation is a bit oversized for two developers. But we never lost motivation or faith in the core idea and the idealism that made this project so special for ourselves as well. The new date gives us a very generous amount of time to do fine tuning and add some final features. Of course you will always be able to play all finished progress immediately in early access and we will keep you informed on everything…
Remediation and Maintenance
You wished that we introduce the possibility of automatic cleaning of dirt and automatic building repair earlier in the game. The boss will always bring some construction kits for the cleaning center and the maintenance station at the end of the first missions. So they will also be better introduced by the story.
New Item: Propaganda Hack
With the new Propaganda Hack Item you can get the colonists of another faction to revolt. Using the hack will start an uprising in the selected district. This will cause a classic loss of tax revenue and spread to other parts of the city.
New Achievements
Need new challenges playing Imagine Earth? No problem, we have added three new achievements for you to earn. You can complete the mission on Udion Torix or win three competitions on Workshop Planets. One achievement can only be unlocked by building your own planet in sandbox mode.
Interact with Status Icons
This feature is a really practical thing. In the event of a fire, riot, incident or damaged building, you will now have a corresponding icon displayed above the building and you can click directly on it to perform the necessary action such as extinguish or repair. We've also unified how the icons above the buildings and units are displayed in the game.
Revised Gaia Graphics and Story
We have rewritten a part of the background story of Imagine Earth. Whenever you discover one of the Gaianic terraforming constructs like a temple or the citadel, the story of the Gaians continues to be told - an ancient race who were able to use and change the planetary force fields. As the game progresses, we will learn why they have left behind their advanced terraforming technology on so many newly discovered planets.
Note: In the preview version this is work in progress.
No More Research Limitations
Correctly read, we recently realized that we have long since developed our research system so comprehensively that we only need research budgets as a limiting factor in the campaign missions. From now on you can freely research what you need in freeplay and in competition mode. By building City Centers and Research Districts you can increase the efficiency of your research.
Prioritized Mining
One of those options where you wonder why they have not always been there. When all of your harvesting drones are busy, you can use this simple button to specify that the targeted resource be mined with priority, then a drone is removed from the most worthless resource that is currently being mined.
Jump to Native Twin Camps
As you probably know, the Rounosian Natives always live in twin camps. With this new button you can jump between them.
Switch Upgrades of Towers
Finally, it is also possible to convert the upgrades of towers, frontier buoys and research centers. So depending on the threat situation, energy shields, lasers or pulse cannons can be installed.
Domination Victory
You can now also win a competition when all other companies give up their colonies or are taken over.
Gameplay Improvements
Graphic Improvements
UI Improvements
Fixes
#56 - Unity Engine
Finally! There it is, the new version of Imagine Earth using the Unity graphics engine. It took us a while to port all visualizations and UI elements, but the result it totally worth it - especially because we can move much faster now based on a modern graphics engine with a lot of tools and features that make the live a lot easier for us.
Full savegame compatibility
Before we have a look into what is new, we want to point out that your existing savegames will still work. If you experience any problems related to that, please note that we lately moved the savegames to a new directory:
%userprofile%\AppData\Local\ImagineEarth
If you want to try out the old version again after tomorrow afternoon on for comparison, you can do so with the following instructions:
Right-click Imagine Earth in your Steam Library. Under „Properties…“ click „Betas„ Enter the password „oldgameengine„
Ocean shader
A good example for these beautiful opportunities is the new ocean shader that comes with refraction effects for objects that are under water.
Physics based materials & new lightning
The unity engine made it a lot easier for us to add beautiful visual effects. We use physics based rendering for all buildings and world objects, which for example gives rare resource deposits metallic reflections in the sun.
Also each planet theme now has a much stronger colorization and individual look.
Post-processing effects
The game now makes use of an improved bloom post-processing effect and a depth of field filter, as shown in the image below.
There is also an exposure filter that lights the scene up on the night side of the planet.
3D Sound
Finally we have a working solution for the 3D sounds in the world. This feels especially great with the new landing sounds of the trader space ships.
Planetary shield
This is the new style for the planetary shield generated by the great pyramids. The triangle elements randomly move and make it look very organic.
Explosions
I picture says more than a thousand words...
Thunderstorms
The thunderstorm has a completely new visualization and each lightning strike puts the scene into a bright light.
Pollution, snow and more particles
Snow areas now look more natural and sometimes have a decent snow particle effect.
We have also used particle effects and the new building shader to intensify the pollution visualization. Thus it's now easier to see which fields have a high pollution and need cleaning.
Forests
Trees in forest now move independently from each other in the wind. Also we have added basic shadows that make the forests easier to see on the night side of the planet.
Other improvements
New Engine Release
Greetings space colonists,
The time has come and the new version with the Unity engine goes online as a standard version of Imagine Earth. For all those who have not tried it yet, a lot of nice impressions and new visual experiences are waiting. The work of the last months was mainly of technical and graphical nature. We want to inaugurate the official, new version on Sunday and celebrate with Writing Bull in his German live stream on Twitch.
The live stream will start tomorrow, Sunday at 15:00 (3pm), Central European Time.
During the show we will press the big red button and the new engine will be unlocked as the standard version on steam. The broadcast is in German, because Writing Bull is one of the most popular streamers for buildup and strategy games in the German-speaking world. We are happy that he discovered Imagine Earth at gamescom in the Indie Arena Booth this year and wants to play it now.
11 Keys Giveaway
If you follow our Twitter account until the show is ending around 6pm tomorrow and subscribe to our monthly newsletter or join the chat on Twitch you can win one of 11 Steam-Keys. The winners will be announced in the stream, but will also receive a prize notification by mail or message. Among other things, the reason for this generosity is, that we want to get our new release tested as soon as possible and are looking forward to your comments, impressions and ideas.
Press this button to subscribe our monthly development newsletter
Retro Times
If you want to try out the old version again after tomorrow afternoon on for comparison, you can do so with the following instructions:
Right-click Imagine Earth in your Steam Library. Under „Properties…“ click „Betas„ Enter the password „oldgameengine„
Update: The old game engine is no longer supported, since the new engine is running smoothly now.
Savegames moved & Steam Cloud Support
Hello lovely space colonizers, a new update had to be done. Some bugs and exotic writing problems in the documents folder of Windows didn't want to stop appearing for some players while being not reproducible by us. We suspect hyperactive anti-virus programs behind it and the like, but now we've rewritten the Imagine Earth method to save your profiles and your savegames to end it once and for all!
Thunderstorms first time with light effecting the terrain
No Savegame Left Behind
Imagine Earth will copy your populated worlds and achievements into a new folder the next time you start the game.
Savegames are now stored here: %userprofile%/AppData/Local/ImagineEarth
As always with our updates, all savegames should still work afterwards, a circumstance that is less self-evident than you might think, or so to say that causes extreme activity at our end ;) Please try if everything still works as usual.
Really intense particle explosions
Steam Cloud Support
On that occasion we added steam cloud support for our game. This means savegames and scores will now be synchronized via Steam.
Depending on the amount of savegames you have and your upload speed this may take a while when starting the game the next time.
Unity Engine Beta
Of course also the new Unity Engine beta version of our game has also undergone some optimizations as we want to change to the new Universal Pipeline of the Unity Engine with the new year if all goes well. If you want to have a look at it, check in the last dev post how easy you can unlock it on Steam. Everything is already in its place and running. https://www.imagineearth.info/alpha-56-preview/
Preview - New Unity Version
Greetings Colony Managers, surely you are wondering what happened to the monthly updates that we used to deliver all the way. The simple reason is that big changes are coming. After 5 years of early access we decided to make an engine switch to Unity before finally releasing the game.
We worked restlessly and after two month the new version is ready to be tested. So to make it short if you're already supporting Imagine Earth in early access we wanted to give you the opportunity to join the preview of the new version.
Why all the work you might ask. Well we simply wanted to make it easier for us to provide you with great visuals and to have a better out of the box stability and compatibility than the community driven Monogame engine, we used before. It also gives us easy portability to other platforms and consoles. New opportunities await us in terms of graphics and shaders so the quality, look and the atmosphere of the game can finally meet the aspiration and complexity of its content that we have created over all the years.
Please help us getting the new baby tested!
Important note: You can always leave the beta and return the the existing version of the game. All savegames will be compatible!
The current version comes with automatic crash reporting. This means that we will receive a technical error report that will help us to find and fix the problem.
Thunderstorms first time with light effecting the terrain
Really intense particle explosions
