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.)

You can download the latest demo on itch.io, or play the game on Steam:

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.

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