New game+ offers a way to replay the game after completing all currently available content, before more content is release-ready. It resets your game to the very beginning, with additional small perks that can be allocated with DNA points that are earned by completing the current content.
This feature is designed for those of you that are looking for a reason to play the game again, and might not be for everyone. But that should be OK, as it will remain entirely optional. It is only available after completion of currently available content, and merely offers another alternative to simply putting the game down after completion, or overgrinding current content. New content will at no point require new game+ progress, and will be designed and balanced without new game+ progression.
From a technical perspective it can be looked at a little like an optional prestige layer. But it's balanced much closer to a traditional new game+ mechanic, to stay true to the balance of content, with a little better chances. I personally always had a bit of a soft spot for games that offer a new game+ mechanic, and it was always planned for Increlution. Releasing it as experimental at this time is just sooner than originally planned!
So why experimental?
This feature is designed to adapt to new content fairly naturally, and the DNA reward per playthrough is dependent on how much content is currently in the game. However, new content might change the balance in ways that may require new game+ rebalancing too.
To experience new content as it is intended, it is advised to backup your save before trying new game+. That way you can experience it as intended, and swap back to your new game+ save afterwards. Using new game+ progression for new content will be supported too though, it's merely what I'd advise, but you do you!
Does experimental mean I need to switch a branch in Steam?
No. It's available in the main branch right now, just make sure to grab the update! You can access it by reaching the completion message at the end of current content. It's branded "experimental" because it's more subjected to potential changes than most content, and therefore comes with the appropriate warnings to clarify its current state.
So why release it now?
New game+ was always planned, but much later during Early Access. From a roadmap perspective it's a little silly to release it so soon, but inspiration got the better of me! Especially because I felt able to design it in a way that adapts relatively well as content expands, and I liked it quite a bit when I tested it. So I figured I might as well release it already, for those of you that are into this sort of mechanic!
If anything, it should allow for some additional replay value when new content requires a fair amount of time to craft and balance.
Will new game+ be expanded further?
Yes, but not soon. "Penalties" are still planned to combine and create custom challenges for additional difficulty and rewards per playthrough. This part however would create a design constraint on the creative freedom of future content. So for that reason, this won't be added until later.
That said, perks will likely be expanded a little too, as new content introduces new mechanics that might fit into new game+ perks too. And other mechanics might happen too. But a fair amount will be limited to "not forming a constraint on new content creation" until the story is finished entirely.
Other changes in this update:
Reworked how the rendering tasks handle CPU usage, lowering overall CPU usage by approximately 20~40%
Explorations with "stop before completion" enabled no longer trigger automations to survive completion for damage on completion explorations, since they won't complete
Some optional chapter three, four and five explorations now reduce their automation unlock requirement based on an alternative exploration, where they previously didn't
Lowered the automation unlock requirement of a chapter two resource job
Some chapter five explorations now also have the story choice icon in the automations tab where they previously didn't
Slightly reworked how the hiding of tooltips is handled when jobs, constructions and explorations disappear and their tooltip is visible. Aiming to tackle a situation where tooltips could temporarily persist when the action disappeared
Fixed a bug that could cause values in job tooltips to not directly update when completing a specific chapter eight exploration
Fixed a bug that caused reincarnation screen automation unlocks to reset to the default after already being configured, if closing the game when the reincarnation screen was open
Fixed a bug that caused "off" automation jobs to not be properly considered a manual job for the combat safety auto-stalling logic, causing resource automations to trigger too soon in specific situations
Fixed a bug that could cause you to survive fail-damage explorations when you shouldn't, if any food was off-cooldown
So what's next?
I want to get through a little more quality of life and polishing before moving onto the next content. I suspect to do two or three more of those smaller updates before starting on the next content. It's been quite refreshing to work on some other aspects for a while, after working on the last four chapters for over three months. But I have some ideas shaping for the next content that I'm starting to get excited about testing too!
Small follow-up to the player feedback & QoL update
Fixed a missing percentage character in the percentual time-diff option, if the time was slower than the last
Slightly changed the border-color on dark-mode blocks to be a slightly darker shade of white, to make it a little bit softer on the eyes
Fixed the reverseSkillColors launch parameter not working with dark mode
March player feedback & QoL update
Let me start off by thanking you for the incredible reception of the chapters 6, 7, 8 and 9 content update! Far more of you returned to the game than I ever dared to expect, and the game even peaked into the top 250 games with most concurrent players on Steam.
As a result of that, I've been having a bit of trouble to keep up with all the feedback and suggestions coming in. I appreciate all the feedback immensely. Whether I use it for updates directly, or take it into the thought process to find other solutions to issues that you address. I truly believe that without all your feedback the potential of the game would be far smaller than Early Access allows it to be now!
Normally I aim to respond to as much feedback as I can, but with how much feedback has been supplied by all of you, it's been a bit of a challenge to keep up. So my appologies if it's taken me a while to respond. But ultimately working feedback into updates is the best way to show that your feedback certainly is valuable to me, even when I fail to answer all of it in the level of detail that I'd prefer. So for this update, I decided to focus on implementing as much as I could instead. It's far from all feedback that I have listed, but don't worry, Early Access has only just begun!
Here are todays changes:
Added automation loadouts! Three slots to easily swap between automation setups, and the ability to export/import them to your clipboard
Added a new settings tab with various new options based on player suggestions, and it offers further expansion
Added a dark-mode option
Added default automation priority options
Added an audio-alert option, in addition to the window flash option. Both are individually optional and can either be combined or used separately (or not at all)
Added an UI-scale option, to adjust the resolution auto-scaling, for people that like text to be bigger or smaller than the default
Slightly buffed the chapter 8 meta progression mechanic, from 1%/1% to 1.25%/1%, to keep it as spoiler-free as I can. This also affects how that particular food source at chapter eight scales
New meta unlock progression is now also displayed in the related skill tooltip
The new skill now also displays the amount of artifacts found, aiming to make it a little clearer how to improve the new multiplier
You can now right-click explorations to have them stop right before completion
You can now right-click the clear queue button to retain the currently active action
Added icons for story choices, health decay, inventory size, maximum health gain and unique rewards to the automations tab. Aiming to make it a little easier to find the ones that stand out
The reincarnation screen health icon tooltip now displays your total maximum health gain multiplier, if above one
Added a few time-display options for the story block
Reworked how UI buttons communicate to the game engine, which should remove a slowdown in their responsiveness when the game is open for extended periods of time (mostly reported for the automations tab button)
Slightly reworked a precision check for progress-per-tick, increasing accuracy per millisecond from roughly 99.71% to 99.98% at low multipliers. This should reduce the occurrences of odd time differences between runs
Fixed a bug that prevented food from being eaten before the food cooldown elapsed at least once. This could stall the first eat action after completing a chapter three construction, when it shouldn't
Improved the accuracy of combat-safeties and other minor changes
Improved the accuracy of combat-safeties. They now include food cooldowns into the computation when it's a close call. Tackling the frustration of being forced to stop when you were sure you could make it
Combat safety no longer checks for 25% health, as it no longer has a benefit for the formula and could potentially lead to false-positives with low maximum health
Experience earned now shows decimals in the reincarnation screen tooltip and generation history, if relevant
Slightly changed how the renderer picks up completions of the chapter eight meta-unlock, aiming to tackle displayed values occasionally being out-of-sync
Fixed a bug that caused a late game exploration to remove food resources, when it should only remove construction resources
Corrected some minor textual issues
Third minor update following the new content
Slightly reworked the cap jobs to construction functionality. It now only caps after a completion, so it no longer entirely prevents manual completions in between. This also tackles an extremely rare fatal error
The safety stops for fail-damage explorations now consider off-cooldown food. Making them more accurate if damage is close to your maximum health
Minor bug fixes following the new content
Fixed a bug that could cause low-priority jobs to not always trigger when force-fight was enabled, requiring some manual intervention that it should prevent
Fixed a bug in the warning notifications of damaging explorations, that caused them to assume that when the exploration couldn't run it had to be because of damage, when another requirement could be the reason
Minor update following the new content
The food recovery indicator at the top-right of the inventory now states the total value of your food in the tooltip as well
Fixed one tooltip telling you too late that you'd lose access to a chapter 6 job. It now tells you at the right exploration
Added a --reverseSkillColors Steam launch parameter. Making generation levels blue (the top bar) and instinct levels yellow (the bottom bar). I don't think I need to explain why
Chapters 6, 7, 8 and 9 are now available!
Over three months in the making and finally ready to be played! The new chapters are designed to expand the content in a way where run-based decisions have a bigger impact on progression, throughout these new chapters. Featuring one new skill, used exclusively for a new mechanic that introduces some new rewards that persist between runs.
Thank you for your patience during the long wait, I hope the time it took makes sense when you see all the new content! The branching I wanted to introduce really benefited from releasing multiple chapters at once, as they come with a new form of pathing. I won't spoil too much, it'll make sense soon enough as it gradually unfolds by playing!
Other changes:
The combat-stop notification that tells you there's something less lethal you can do, now gives an example of something you can do. To prevent confusion with small oversights
The maximum recovery value per second of your current food supply is now displayed in the inventory
You can now right-click jobs to run them once. For those that wanted picture-perfect manual finetuning
You can now shift+click explorations to bypass combat safety checks for the most part. It still automates to stall, but won't stop for manual jobs or constructions. Allowing you to end runs faster and skip the repetitive loop that bothered some players in some stages of the game
The reincarnation screen now also displays skills that didn't improve their instinct in the current generation
The inventory is now visually ordered by [food > food resource > construction resource], rather than just [food > resource]
Times between 10 and 1 seconds now also display milliseconds, to be slightly more detailed about speed improvements at lower numbers
Automation unlock progression in the menu tab is now shown after encountering an action once, rather than completing it once. Takes one run to populate data. The reincarnation screen still only shows progression after one completion
The automations menu tab now includes information about damage effects such as combat for explorations, to provide a little clearer information in preparation of runs
The manual paused state is now stored in your save, so exporting a save or closing the game will retain that state
Added the total experience earned per skill to the reincarnation screen tooltips and generation history tab
Added an icon to the reincarnation screen that allows you to see the main screen when hovered, to see the exact point where your run ended
When automations trigger to stall combat, low priority jobs are now also triggered if nothing else can
Health decay now properly updates its number when switching explorations if the game is manually paused
Reduced the automation requirement for dig copper from 250 to 200 completions
Skill levels now display their full number above 1000, instead of being formatted the usual way. They now use comma separation for readability
Skill multipliers below one now display an additional decimal, mostly for something that would be a spoiler
The reincarnation skill improvements now properly size if no instinct levels went up (only really happened with over-grinding after game completion)
Reworded/expanded some tooltips to help with common confusions
Skills now display slightly more consistent early game, if unlocked once but not leveled up yet
The cap jobs to construction option is now enabled by default for new saves
Reworked how the inventory and queue scrollbars are introduced, to keep positioning of content a little more consistent
Fixed a rare bug where capping jobs to construction requirements could conflict with combat stops
Fixed a rare bug where a skill would appear below the reincarnation screen time-spent-bar in specific number rounding situations
Fixed a rare bug where job progress could reset if switching queued items caused the construction cap to be below current progress
Fixed a minor bug that could queue an action twice in a row if only one action was queued
Fixed a bug that could cause the fatal error screen to not properly include your save-code
Fixed a bug in the combat safeties that could cause them not to stop for less-dangerous explorations in specific situations
Fixed a bug that could cause numbers in tooltips not to be properly formatted when hovering queued actions
Reworked some internal handling of content-data. Initially useful for me during content creation, but it's also a step towards hopefully supporting custom-story mods somewhere down the line
Constructions now properly disappear from the queue when completed, if another action was instantly auto-queued
Constructions that were still in the queue after completion no longer auto-queue their resource jobs
Fixed a bug that caused the "save & exit" button not to exit when Steam Cloud was disabled
As a last note I want to thank all of you for the enthusiasm, feedback and support that the game has already received so shortly after launching into Early Access. You've been absolutely incredible in helping me take this passion project to the next level!
From a roadmap point-of-view, this might have been a logical moment to increase the base price of the game a bit. That may still happen when the game has expanded a bit more (for players that haven't gotten the game yet), but I've decided against that for now. Instead, if you do feel like the game would be worth more to you, I would like to ask you to consider gifting that difference to charity instead. There are some real heroes that have a far better use for it due to how all that's happened recently.
Cheers, have fun! This is far from the last update, but I certainly can't wait to hear what you all think about it!
Gniller
November 10th update
The action container menus (left column) now have their own scrollbar when content doesn't fit your screen size, rather than requiring the entire window to scroll
Added a health per second indication to the inventory food tooltips
Chapter four constructions now hide when leaving chapter four, if they can't be completed anymore
The game finished message now also triggers the window flash, if enabled
Fixed a rare bug where automation for required resources would not trigger if a construction was started when said resources were already empty, but it could continue construction for a short time
Fixed food cooldowns displaying an incorrect value until unpausing when launching the game in a paused state
This will probably be the last minor update for a bit. It's time to fully focus on the next chapter!
Small bug fixes update
"Cap jobs to construction requirement" now only applies if the next-queued action doesn't require another resource that the same job provides. Fixing a "looping queue" bug
Fixed a bug in the "cap jobs to construction requirement" that could make it cap to a queued construction that was already completed
Changed the taskbar flash behavior on MacOS to be more noticeable, because the single jump was too subtle compared to other platforms
