I’m very happy to launch the latest free update to Adaptory today!
Alpha 12 now has a brand new world generation algorithm for you to play with, and you can now see the Adaptory research tree coming to life. (Most of the content we’ve been adding since Alpha 11 is locked behind Early Access.)
We’re planning to do one final free demo/alpha release before our Early Access launch. You can expect this build to come out in September; if you want to be notified, don’t forget to join our mailing list or follow the game.
Research tree
A preview of Adaptory's new research tree. You'll need to play the demo to see the rest 😁
Data chips have been scattered across the world after your crash landing, and your explorers will be able to research them using the new research desk building to unlock powerful new technologies and buildings.
You won’t need to do any research in the demo – the research desk building isn’t available, so you won’t lose access to any buildings. But you’ll be able to see what research nodes and content is currently in our EA build. More buildings, content, and systems will be added to the tree while we get ready for launch!
World generation
A preview of Adaptory's new world generation, using noise, biomes, and cave systems
We’ve massively revamped world generation to generate more interesting, varied, and challenging worlds.
World generation now uses a combination of perlin noise and voroni points to generate biomes. Each biome has a different palette of elements and features. My goal is to make each world feel interesting and unique, but still conceptually coherent. As your explorers dig down further into the planetoid, who knows what you’ll find?
Cave systems are also now generated, giving your explorers the opportunity to explore further and deeper. World generation now also creates boulders, columns, stalagmites, and stalactites as well, to give the world a bit more depth. (I’ve been playing a lot of Minecraft recently…)
The world generation is still very much a work in progress! I’d honestly love to hear your thoughts because we’ll be iterating the world generation parameters frequently before EA.
Mac Arm64 support
As mentioned in the previous post, arm64 builds are now available for Mac, and are live with Alpha 12! I think this has been well-tested and we’ve worked out all the kinks, and the demo’s ready to play. From our testing, the game should now be approximately twice as fast.
A huge thank you to all of our Mac users on our Discord who have helped with testing and feedback. There probably wouldn’t be Mac support without your help!! Thank you 💖
And more
And of course, there are lots of other improvements in this release, bug fixes, optimisations, and quality of life improvements. I’ve also tweaked some of the game balance, and you now need to fully power the emergency transmitter to finish the game.
The full patch notes are listed below.
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Release notes for Adaptory 0.14 (Alpha 12)
New features
Adaptory is now available on Mac with both x86_64 (Intel) and arm64/aarch64 builds!
If you’re playing Adaptory on one of the new M1 etc machines, the arm64 version should be a lot faster (2x or more) and use less resources
When starting up the demo on Mac, you will now be presented with a dialog of which version you’d like to play
(This is the best solution I could think of because Steam doesn’t provide architecture-specific launch configurations)
Updated world generation
World generation now has more noise, variance, biomes, and cave systems
This is still a WIP and will be refined over the coming releases
Newly-generated worlds are now guaranteed to to spawn at least one brown bernie plant nearby as a source of food
Added boulders, columns, stalagmites and stalactites to world generation
Added research tree
Building categories without any researched buildings are now hidden until researched
In the demo, all available research has been automatically unlocked
Buildings and content that are not available in the demo are shown as previews in the research tree
More buildings and content are going to be added to the research tree before Early Access
Removed support for old .ymlz save files
These old save files were previously deprecated in Alpha 11
The filename for your preferences has changed from %APPDATA%/Adaptory/preferences.yml to preferences.json, and any previous settings may be reset to defaults
Simulation
Coal generators now accept any fuel, and can be configured to select only specific fuels (although coal is the only fuel available in the demo)
Power generation with the coal generator is now calculated from the energy density of the fuel used
Added power generation efficiency attribute to the coal generator
Added a longer delay between creating liquid drops to reduce noise pollution
Changed explorer behaviour with tiny supply errands
Before, any building trying to supply less than 1% of its target supplied mass would be ignored while calculating potential supply errands
Now, ALL buildings are considered regardless of pending mass, but if the mass requested is more than 2% of its maximum storage, OR a potential source item has unreserved mass less than that, then any source item will be a valid supply source for a new supply errand to supply that building
All of this is tricky to parse but basically small items should be cleaned up (so the base doesn’t fill up with dust), while keeping large items mostly intact until they’re required, and preventing explorers from endlessly obsessing over tiny amounts required in coal generators
Transmitters are still exempt from this test, because you need an exact amount to send the distress signal
Items with unit masses can now automatically merge, improving simulation performance of long-term bases
Balance
The transmitter now needs to be fully powered in order to function
Increased the minimum amount of power required for most powered buildings to at least 1%
Explorers should no longer try to idly wander, write diary entries, or eat food at locations with very low levels of oxygen (0.1kg or less)
Doors now take 0.25 seconds to close instead of instantly, allowing animations to play
Reduced the number of alien artefacts generated in new worlds
Accessibility
Added Ctrl+P keyboard shortcut to open up explorer priorities
Added Ctrl+I keyboard shortcut to open up the in-game database
Added Ctrl+R keyboard shortcut to open up research tree
Internal
Improved the performance of rendering water drops
Improved performance of supply errand, item accessibility, and explorer simulations
Save games now keep track of the total playtime for that save, shown in the save/load dialog
Added “not enough power” overlay icon to buildings that require a minimum amount of power
The in-game database for powered building now displays the range of power required for that building to operate
Significantly improved render performance of textures while the game is paused
Added more idle conversations between explorers
Moved light building from “base” building category into “power”
Stored unit masses (such as 1.0000 kg) are now rendered as 1 kg in the building panel
When selecting an explorer’s Errands tab, more details are included for each errand (e.g. “dig out dirt”, “build a ladder”)
When selecting an explorer’s Errands tab, the currently active errand is now labelled
Options that have not been changed from the defaults are no longer stored in preferences.json
When an explorer passes out, an alert message is now displayed
Added wire drag sound loop while dragging wire build errands
Added plant sounds to all plants
Updated mushroom plant art to be more visibly distinctive between growing and waning
Updated power wire art
Updated door animation to be more squishy
Fixes
Fixed a bug where plants could render with the wrong skin immediately after loading an existing save
Fixed the “time of day” tooltip on the world clock only updating when the mouse is moved
Fixed beds clipping with items on the ground when explorers would sleep in the beds
Fixed explorers not correctly taking the time to enter beds after their first successful bed time
Fixed a bug where overwriting an existing save game would set the save game name to the empty string
Fixed a bug where powered buildings supplied with 0% power would still be considered powered
Fixed a bug where explorers, buildings, items and plants could be in the wrong state for one tick immediately after loading a save
Fixed a very rare bug where rendering two onscreen components with the exact same dimensions could cause a crash
Fixed a rare crash where an item could have 0.01g of reserved mass but no supply errands reserving that mass
Fixed initial startup log messages not being written to log (in %TEMP%/Adaptory_*.log)
Fixed the “errands” tab for an explorer saying “there’s nothing for me to do” when the explorer is currently doing an errand
Fixed a crash that could occur when loading a save game with an explorer that was in the middle of facing an idle pose
Fixed a rare crash that could occur when a supply errand had been reserved by too many other tile errands
Fixed overlay icons in the top right going blank if hovered over while selected
Fixed some libraries not being able to log to disk
Fixed the game being able to be paused/unpaused while in the main menu