I’m very happy to launch the latest free update to Adaptory today! Alpha 13 features CHARLI, your adorable helpful tutorial and guide. There’s also more unusual buildings and objects to discover, and plenty of tweaks and polish to the demo.

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

We’re also excited to share that Adaptory will be part of the ANZ Indie Showcase 2025, and our dear friend Zeppy will be streaming Alpha 13 live! Set your reminders, because Jevon will be hanging out in chat tomorrow 😊

CHARLI

Introducing the brand new Computational Holographic Assistant for Resources, Logistics and Information – also known as C.H.A.R.L.I., as your helpful guide and tutorial to Adaptory:

CHARLI is introduced at the start of the game and gives you information, guidance, goals, and background information as you play through the game. If you’re very experienced, CHARLI can be minimised at any time, but otherwise they’ll just hang out in the top right corner, giving you guidance and help. Our new animator Kat did an amazing job animating CHARLI and I can’t wait to get more of her animations into the game 😊

CHARLI being helpful

We’ve also rewritten the entire introduction and tutorial sequence in Alpha 13. The tutorial is now more flexible, with multiple steps and stages, based on what is actually happening in your game. We’ve tested the tutorial in many different scenarios, and hopefully all of the bugs are ironed out, but please let me know if it breaks!

Mysterious alien ruins and artefacts

What have we found?

While the planetoid you landed on initially appeared to be deserted, as you dig down deeper, you will start discovering evidence of an ancient civilisation. With research, you might be able to gain knowledge from these abandoned artefacts to look after your crew and ultimately resume your journey home…

(Ancient civilisation buildings and artefacts will only be generated in new save files.)

Better control over prioritisation

I’ve tweaked explorer priorities to make a bit more sense, to be more controllable, and with better defaults:

  • If two possible errands have an identical priority across all priority categories, they will now fallback to the left-to-right order listed in the priorities dialog.
  • Explorers will now prioritise toggle errands over build errands, and build errands over dig errands.
  • The “go to bed” errand has been moved into Personal, but explorers will still run to their assigned bed if they’re close to passing out.

This should improve explorer behaviour for large bases, and this should also improve your ability to configure who does what, and when.

Explorer prioritisation has been improved in Alpha 13

A lot of polish and tweaks

This release also has a lot of tweaks and improvements suggested by players at Gamescom and PAX West, and by our amazing community. Thank you very much for all of your feedback and ideas! These include:

  • The breathability overlay (F1) now also shows areas of unblocked space exposure
  • Added “edge offset” option to increase the horizontal padding of user interfaces for ultrawide monitors
  • Added option to show or hide the UPS/FPS panel
  • Improved performance of user interface rendering by up to 50% by using runtime texture atlases
  • Improved pathfinding performance
  • Fog of war is now revealed as an ellipse, rather than a square
  • Fixed looping sounds not restarting when a save file is loaded
  • Fixed the user interface not working correctly in Turkish locales

The full patch notes are listed below.

What’s next?

Importantly, this is planned to be the final demo update before Early Access, so that we can put all of our efforts into polishing our EA release. The specific launch date for early access has not been announced yet, either. Watch this space!

The unstable demo build will continue to be updated for our community testers, so we can have an updated demo at launch; if you’d like to continue playing the latest features, test improvements, and generally contribute ideas and feedback for the development of Adaptory, we’d love to have you join the community testers group on Discord 😊

Release notes for Adaptory 0.15 (Alpha 13)

New features

  • CHARLI
    • Rewrote introduction and tutorial sequence
    • Added guide for helping stranded explorers
    • Added guide for building your first bed when you have a sleepy explorer
    • Added guide for reading your first diary entry
    • Added guide for building and connecting power wires and liquid pipes
    • Added guide for building your first oxycan holder
    • Added guide for accessing the breathability overlay
    • Removed old alerts panel
    • Removed “tutorials enabled” options
  • World features added to in-game database
    • Added “space exposure” as the first documented world feature
  • Distress transmitter sequence updated
    • Once the transmission is sent, the transmitter does not require any additional transmitite
    • The transmitter can now be deconstructed after the transmission is sent
    • A “ready to transmit” bouncing overlay icon is also shown when ready
  • Added mysterious alien buildings in world generation
  • Added explorer conversations when uncovering artefacts for the first time
  • The breathability overlay (F1) now also shows areas of unblocked space exposure

Simulation

  • If two possible errands have an identical priority across all priority categories, explorers will now fallback to the left-to-right order listed in the priorities dialog
    • For example, explorers will now generally prefer to do building over digging, and digging over supply
    • “Go to bed” errand has been moved into personal, although this has not changed any behaviour; explorers will still prefer going to bed if they’re about to pass out
  • Explorers will now prioritise toggle errands over build errands, and build errands over dig errands
  • Fog of war is now revealed as an ellipse, rather than a square
  • Added “stranded” debuff when an explorer can’t access the distress transmitter
  • Reduced frequency of object emissions by 50% to reduce visual and aural noise
  • Fixed a bug where liquid drops dissolving into a tile could incorrectly merge with another drop within the same tile
  • Fixed a bug where a liquid pump could get stuck in a flickering loop of blocked/unpowered while blocked
  • Improved pathfinding performance
  • Explorers will no longer idly wander for 5 seconds after being told to move somewhere
  • Increased explorer conversation length from 0.02 world days to 0.025 world days

Balance

  • Updated world generation to create a more consistent and configurable balance of plants, world features, buried resources, and general world debris
  • Buried artefacts are no longer generated in one of the first tiles your explorers will likely dig up

Accessibility

  • You can now click anywhere within the Resource counter to toggle visibility
  • Added “edge offset” option to increase the horizontal padding of user interfaces for ultrawide monitors

Internal

  • Slightly improved rendering performance of gas and liquid layers
  • Improved performance of user interface rendering by up to 50% by using runtime texture atlases
  • Improved performance of rendering explorers
    • The game now requires a graphics card that supports 4096x4096 textures
  • Updated nekohtml, CSSBox, jstyleparser libraries
  • Improved startup performance when loading the story database
  • The distress transmitter can no longer be used multiple times per game
  • Added “new game” and “main menu” buttons to the “everyone is dead” dialog
  • Buried buildings, plants, and explorers are now also rendered with a buried item texture
    • Partially buried buildings and plants are no longer listed in the tooltip when a cell is hovered over
    • Vastly improved buried object textures
  • Added “blocked” overlay icon to liquid pumps when the liquid network is backed up
  • Added option to show or hide the UPS/FPS panel
  • Reduced vertical whitespace in the options panel
  • Made solar flare overlay icon more easily understandable
  • Added more information about plant growth mechanics in the growth tooltip

Fixes

  • Fixed the play/pause sound sometimes playing while starting up a new game
  • Fixed postcard seeds not setting explorers’ genders
  • Fixed looping sounds not restarting when a save file is loaded
  • Fixed a memory leak that could occur when multiple games were started in a single session
  • Hopefully fixed the user interface not working correctly in Turkish locales
  • Fixed a rare bug where the game could crash when loading or starting a new game
  • Fixed a crash when explorers would try to talk about a meteor shower that had occured in the past
  • Fixed a crash that could occur when an explorer tried to pick up an item that had a tiny fraction more mass than the usual unit mass of that item
  • Removed duplicate “light sensitive” trait
  • Fixed 3D spatialisation not being updated for moving objects that have a sound loop (such as meteors)
  • Fixed a crash that could occur when trying to supply two storage boxes with one item, and one of the boxes was almost full or almost empty
  • Fixed mouse cursors not being reset between new games
  • Fixed space exposure not applying on the crashed ship top wing
  • Fixed some repeating textures and overlays having seams at certain zoom levels