Adaptory’s first major Early Access update is now live!!

The Materials Update touches on every aspect of the game, from making the game easier (or harder) with difficulty levels, adding more materials and resource management to the game, refinement and recipes, new buildings and options, and lots of balance and quality of life tweaks; the full patch notes are listed below.

If you previously found Adaptory too easy or too hard, this is the update for you!

Steam should automatically update your copy of Adaptory to the latest version. If you don’t already have the game, our publisher indie.io has included Adaptory in their publisher Steam sale, launching today. Get 25% off Adaptory for a very limited time!

What’s next?

Now that Update 1 is finally out, I’ll be spending today watching streams, celebrating the release, and trying to find any last remaining bugs and balance issues to patch. Please let me know if you plan on streaming Update 1, or if you find any issues!

I’ve learned a lot from the process of developing this update; releasing an Update is quite different than releasing into Early Access, and I’ve taken a lot of notes. I’ve already started production on the second Adaptory update, with a release date TBA, so watch this space – and let me know what you’d like me to prioritise.

What's coming in Update 2, I wonder...?

And if you somehow manage to beat the hardcore difficulty level without cheating, please let me know 😅

Reviews

Thank you very much to everyone on Discord who has helped play and test these unstable versions, and everyone who has sent through feedback, played the game on stream, or left a Steam review since we launched into Early Access. I’ve gratefully read every comment and captured every suggestion.

Reviews are incredibly important to help improve Adaptory’s visibility going forward – so please consider leaving an honest review of Adaptory on Steam. Thank you!

Please consider leaving an honest review of Adaptory on Steam <3

Full patch notes for Update 1 are below.

Release notes for Adaptory 0.17 (Update 1: The Materials Update)

New features

  • Difficulty levels!
    • Relaxed: for anyone who hasn’t played this kind of game before, give them less stress and more time to explore and learn and understand the mechanics in a much more forgiving (but still challenging) environment
    • Balanced: (this was the default difficulty before) this should always be fun but slightly challenging
    • Difficult: for anyone who found ‘balanced’ easy, this should be possible but challenging
    • Hardcore: the developer isn’t confident this difficulty can be finished
  • Each difficulty level is made up of a number of different settings:
    • Building requirements: how many resources are needed to satisfy essential buildings (such as the transmitter and distress beacon)
    • Explorer death: whether explorers can die from low oxygen, and if death is permanent (dead explorers will still be storable in cryochambers)
    • Explorer speed: how quickly explorers move
    • Event frequency: how often the game tries to trigger random world events
    • Event chance: how often random event tests will succeed, triggering an event
    • Event scale: increases or decreases the size of events that do occur (how many meteors, length of time, etc.)
    • Event difficulty: the distribution of events between generally positive and generally negative
    • Oxygen consumption: how quickly explorers absorb oxygen and convert it into carbon dioxide
    • Oxygen generation: how much oxygen is generated by trees and oxygen candle holders
    • Research cost: how many data chips are required per research node
    • Resources: how many resources are generated in world generation
    • Plant growth: how quickly plants grow
    • Plant death: how quickly plants reverse their growth when they fail to meet growth requirements
    • Stamina consumption: how quickly explorers consume stamina per second
    • Space exposure: how much mass is lost to unblocked space exposure per second
  • New buildings!
    • Gas tank: Can store 250kg of gas, and can be closed manually, or with the circuit network. Can also send a signal to the circuit network
    • Gas refinery: Can refine gases into new materials, based on its selected recipe
    • Glass furnace: Explorers can use this to turn sand and salt into glass (and magma)
    • Grate: Provides foundation to buildings and explorers, but allows liquids and gases to pass through
    • Liquid refinery: Can refine liquids into new materials, based on its selected recipe
    • Liquid tank: Can store 5000kg of liquid, and can be closed manually, or with the circuit network. Can also send a signal to the circuit network
    • Window: Made out of glass, allows light and aurora to pass through while still being impassable to liquids and gases
  • New building category: Resources
    • Moved storage box and big storage box into this category
  • Refining
    • Materials can now be refined using the liquid and gas refineries
    • Added “boil water” recipe, turning water into steam
    • Added “coal liquefaction” recipe, turning coal and steam into crude oil (and more steam)
    • Added “dry ice” recipe, turning carbon dioxide and water into dry ice and steam
    • Added “filter salt water” recipe, turning salt water into water and salt
    • Added “rocket fuel” recipe, turning crude oil and oxygen into rocket fuel
  • Multiple building elements
    • Different buildings can now have different building requirements
    • For example, all tiles and ladders now require a rock material, rather than dirt
    • Some buildings (research analyser, salt lamp etc.) now require more than one element to build
    • Existing saves should be automatically migrated, but you’ll probably want to start a new save, since world generation has been updated to generate much less dirt
    • Updated all biomes to generate iron, more rock types, less dirt
    • Buildings can be built on top of the same building if the new building has a different primary element
    • Your choice of primary element for a building type will be stored in your save file, and reloaded in future saves
    • When the primary element dropdown appears, the total accessible and unreserved mass for that element will also be displayed
  • Some buildings are now retextured using their primary element, giving you a wider palette to play with
    • Tile, ladder, background panel
    • E.g. marble tiles are brighter, basalt tiles are darker
    • What buildings would you like to be retextured next? Let me know!
  • Recipes
    • Buildings that do element conversions and processes (e.g. oxygen generation, oxycan holder) now use recipes
    • Different buildings can have different possible recipes, and you can select the specific recipe for each building
    • Selecting a building will display the current building’s recipe
    • The in-game database will more clearly describe the inputs and outputs for each possible recipe for a building
    • Recipes can be locked behind different research nodes
    • When a building changes recipe, any mismatching solid, liquid, or gas stored masses will be automatically ejected into the world
  • Liquid disintegration action
    • Explorers can now disintegrate small amounts (less than 100kg per cell) of liquids, anywhere in the world
    • This permanently deletes the mass from the world, allowing you to clean up puddles of liquids that might be present
    • This is intended to be temporary until I’ve added more buildings and mechanics to deal with small amounts of liquids, and after work currently planned for Update 2
    • Liquid disintegration is locked behind the new “disintegration” research node, to not overwhelm new players
  • New explorer buffs
    • Above tile: +10% movement speed if directly above a tile (the building)
    • Above window: -10% happiness, -50% movement speed if directly above a window
    • Relaxed: +5% happiness if the world difficulty is easy
    • Nervous: -5% happiness if the world difficulty is difficult
    • Impending doom: -10% happiness if the world difficulty is hardcore
  • Added new “refining”, “tanks”, “disintegration”, and “basic rocketry” research nodes
  • The “sensors” research node now also enables liquid and gas tanks to send signals to the automation network
  • Added a new neutral random event “shock wave”
    • The remants of an ancient and distant supernova are washing a random gas over the planetoid, affecting all unblocked space exposure tiles
  • Added nine new elements: bitumen, crude oil, marble, glass, iron, molten iron, iron gas, rocket fuel, and salt water
  • Added a new music track to play over the initial game tutorial <3

Story

  • The distress beacon now requires oxygen and rocket fuel to launch, rather than water and hydrogen
    • Loading an existing save will automatically replace any stored masses to match

Simulation

  • Increased liquid packet size from 2kg to 5kg (pipes, pumps, vents, filters)
    • Oxygen generator has remained at 1kg/sec water consumption, so one liquid pump can now potentially supply five generators
  • When an explorer is low on oxygen and running to find some, if they pass a location where they can breathe, they will now stop running and breathe that oxygen instead, unless that cell has less than 50g of oxygen (about two seconds’ worth), OR there is a door or hatch occupying this location
    • This should prevent explorers from interrupting a “running to catch breath” errand too early, and prevent them from holding open doors to catch their breath
  • Dead explorers will now automatically be pushed out of impassable tiles
  • Explorers will now not do personal errands in a 1x2 space where the top of the space is occupied by a door/hatch
  • Explorers must now be immediately next to a door in order to lock/unlock it
  • The effects of aurora are now considered blocked by a cell with a light absorption factor greater than 25%, rather than if the cell is currently impassable
  • If an element cell changes phase into a solid, the cell will now turn into a raw item if the cell mass is low (by default, less than 10kg), rather than into a solid tile
  • Oxygen candle holders and planter boxes will no longer be supplied with more than a single unit at a time (oxycan or seed)
    • Previously, an oxygen candle holder could be supplied with up to 500kg of oxycans in a single trip, even though one oxycan is normally 35kg
  • All buildings that now require foundation or ceiling can now also be “buried” in impassable tiles, with a new “buried” overlay icon, preventing them from working

Performance

  • Moved coal generators’ power generation calculations from the element simulation to the building simulation
  • Significantly improved the performance of errand pathfinding for worlds with hundreds of tile or supply errands
  • Improved tile errand simulation performance for worlds with hundreds of supply or storage buildings

Balance

  • Updated world generation
    • Tweaked how resources and plants were generated as part of world generation, to work with difficulty levels
    • World generation can now generate gas pockets
    • World generation can now generate marble, iron, salt, and salt water
    • Ocean biomes can now generate salt water springs
    • Deep biomes can now generate crude oil springs
    • Oddberries will no longer generate within the first 40% of the world
    • Increased the natural spring cycle range from (120 ~ 480 sec) to (600 ~ 2400 sec)
  • Reduced base explorer movement speeds by 10%, just to give everything a bit more space to breathe
  • Reduced base explorer oxygen consumption from 29.7 g/sec to 14.85 g/sec
  • Increased explorer carbon dioxide minimum emission mass from 0 g to 5.9 g
    • This should look more like breathing, and should also result in fewer random carbon dioxide blobs throughout your base
  • Increased tree building mass from 10kg to 100kg
  • Elements can now have multiple element tags (e.g. fuel, rock, metal), although these only impact building materials for now
  • Reduced oxygen generator maximum output storage from 10kg to 2kg per element
  • Reduced tree photosynthesis maximum conversion rate from 500g/sec (previously enough for 50+ explorers/tree) to 40g/sec (still enough for 10 explorers/tree)
  • Reduced tree maximum stored mass from 1kg to 0.1kg (oxygen and carbon dioxide)
  • Increased power generation from coal and coralite by a factor of four
  • Reduced coal generator fuel consumption, and output generation, by a factor of four
  • The automation, computing, and sensors research nodes now also require a working research mainframe
  • Reduced average spring in drought event length from 6.0 days to 3.0 days
  • Reduced average spring in flood event length from 7.0 days to 4.0 days
  • Updated random events triggering and size to difficulty level
    • Random events can now occur based on the total number of tiles dug out, so that long games will continue to have new random events
    • Updated most random events to increase/decrease their scale/size based on the difficulty level (e.g. more or larger meteors, longer solar flare, etc.)
    • Increased the average time for random event tests from 0.06 world days to 0.1 days, before difficulty levels
    • Reduced the global chance of a random event occuring from 100% to 50%
    • “Spring appeared” random event now triggers up to 30 cells away from an explorer (up from 15)
    • Reduced the chance of the “spring appeared” event occuring by 33%
  • Updated how much the internal event budget increases from each type of world action, updated at each random event test (once every 0.1 days)
    • Passage of time: 0 per world day (not changed)
    • Digging: increase from 0.0014 to 0.002 per newly dug tile
    • Total digging: increased from 0 to 0.0001 per total tiles dug
    • Artefacts: decreased from 1.12 to 0.06 per artefacts unburied
  • Increased the standard time taken to complete research to 8 seconds per step (was 4 seconds)
  • Increased minimum time between conversations from 0.01 world days to 0.02 world days
  • Increased the length of conversations from 0.025 world days to 0.03 world days
  • Reduced explorers’ base social consumption from 1% per second to 0.5% per second, so they shouldn’t need to talk as much (they were just a little bit tooooo chatty)
  • Reduced explorers’ base hunger consumption from 0.5% per second to 0.4% per second, so they shouldn’t need to eat as often
  • Reduced explorers’ base stamina consumption from 0.3% per second to 0.25% per second, so they shouldn’t need to go to bed as often
  • Explorers now gain an additional 0.4% stamina per second while in bed, making beds much more effective
  • Increased the stamina gain effect of sleeping on the floor or in a bed by 20%
  • Increased the visual delay between conversation asks and replies from 3 seconds to 4 seconds
  • Reduced the chance an explorer would do an idle wander from 0.1% to 0.05%
  • “Builder” and “hates building” explorer traits are now mutually exclusive
  • Reduced base space exposure loss from 5g/sec to 2.5g/sec
  • Space exposure now also loses mass proportional to the mass in each cell, at 0.25%/sec

Accessibility

  • Added small icons to all elements and item types in the resource counter
  • Updated the cell information tooltip (element, mass, temperature, lux, etc.)
    • The tooltip now scales to UI scale %
    • The tooltip now hides when another tooltip is being displayed from an overlay layer
    • While dragging a build, the total building requirements for that build will be displayed
  • Added “no light” overlay icon and tooltip for trees and solar panels without light
  • Added lock or unlock selected building keyboard shortcut (default L)
  • Added toggle selected building keyboard shortcut (default T)

Quality of life

  • The detailed information box in the build panel is now collapsable
  • Build errands that are accessible, but don’t have enough materials available to supply them, are now rendered in red
  • Added “suppliable” property to a pending build errand’s panel
  • Added “accessibility” property to a building that has a pending errand, in the selected building’s “properties” tab
  • The mass, temperature, and element in liquid and gas pipes is now immediately visible with a tooltip in the liquid or gas network overlay
  • Selecting a bed will now display e.g. “Frank’s Bed” or “Unassigned Bed” in the selected building panel
  • You can now hide the “research finished” CHARLI notification until the next research node is finished
  • Added “blocked by high pressure” overlay icon for springs that are blocked (e.g. by another solid tile)
  • If the overlay layer has changed from selecting a building in the build panel, the overlay layer will no longer be reset when selecting context-specific “deconstruct” or “cancel” world actions
  • Explorers who are in danger (less than 40% oxygen) now have a red border in the select explorer panel (at the top of the screen)
  • When on a supported overlay layer, context-specific errands (build, deconstruct, cancel) are now rendered on top of other errands, making them easier to see
  • Errands and buildings can now be marked as low priority, and these errands will be done last
    • Added keyboard shortcut for low priority, default Ctrl+Shift+P
  • Added new option, “Automatically open all CHARLI events”
    • For experienced Adaptory players who have seen all of CHARLI’s helpful tips, this can reduce the notification noise
    • CHARLI will no longer show messages for tutorials and guides completed in other save games
    • Important events, such as story events and random world events, will still appear
    • This is turned on by default, but if it works really well, I could make it turn off by default?

Internal

  • Updated CHARLI to Update 1
    • Added new “building materials”, “complex buildings”, and “previous tutorials” guides
    • Refreshed tutorials with a couple more steps and images to help new players
    • For tutorials highlighting areas in the game, each point is now highlighted separately, rather than a single area showing the maximum bounds of all highlighted points
    • Fixed long-running world events (solar flare, meteor shower, etc.) not re-opening CHARLI the second time
  • In-game database improvements
    • Added “growth test every”, “test success”, and “test failure” properties for each plant type
    • Buildings and explorers now displays effective rates for e.g. oxygen consumption
    • The element list now includes separate sections for each element type (e.g. rock, metal, fuel)
    • Each item type now also lists the type of items it is (e.g. food, seed, fuel)
    • The difference between coal and coralite power generation is now clearly listed in the in-game database page for coal generator
    • Added in-game database page for relic items (a generic page)
  • Tooltips and dropdowns can now align bottom and/or right to the mouse cursor when they appear, so that they are not clipped off the edge of the screen
  • Updated “base” building category icon
  • Added particles to springs when liquid is emitted
  • Added new “locked by circuit” overlay icon to buildings
  • Updated pending and unconnected circuit network points in the circuit network overlay to be more readable
  • The selected building panel now displays maximum storage for all input and output slots for every building (pipes, tanks, etc.) without needing to refer to the in-game database
  • The circuit network overlay now displays visually distinct icons for “read” and “write” points
  • Added tooltips to circuit network overlay
  • Improved performance of circuit network overlay renderer
  • Increased the minimum rendered size of liquid/gas packets from 0% to 20%, so tiny packets are still visible (and not 1px)
  • The liquid/gas packet renderer is no longer affected by world light levels, so the network and packet contents should be easier to see
  • Renamed “spring in drought” to “reduced spring” to make it clear the spring is still creating elements
  • Selecting a research node in the research tree no longer lists the research nodes that it unlocks, because this information is already shown on the tree
  • The select explorer panel now shows what explorers are doing with an icon (sleeping, eating, having a tantrum, etc.)
  • Bitumen is a valid solid fuel for coal generators, with more than twice the efficiency of coal, but does not naturally generate in world generation
  • Cleaned up the text in the tile information tooltip
    • Added “(missing resources)” if not enough resources are available for a build errand
  • Increased the number of FMOD channels to improve the sound quality for saves with hundreds of active buildings
  • The selected characters’ errands panel now says “supplying coralite to coal generator” rather than “to 26,30”

Fixes

  • Fixed spring amplified event not triggering as frequently as intended
  • Fixed an explorers’ research speed sometimes using their digging speed instead
  • Fixed a bug where liquid or gas packets in the network would sometimes be able to merge with mismatching elements already present in a blocked vent
  • Fixed automation networks layer sometimes not updating when a building changed the signal it was sending to a network with no other network components
  • Fixed a migration bug where old save files could add or remove too much stored temperature when the internal storage of a building had changed
  • Fixed liquid and gas pumps absorbing from the environment at 100% efficiency when the building was underpowered
  • Fixed world generation generating collections of background bricks floating in space exposure
  • Fixed world generation generating “bricks” buildings in solid elements
  • Fixed some large animated buildings not being rendered at the edges of the screen if placed on a chunk boundary
  • Fixed a bug where pending building errands would not immediately visually update when their accessibility changed
  • Fixed the bottom-right world actions panel breaking layout at 130% UI scale
  • Fixed pending connection tooltips and icons (liquid network source, power network connection, etc.) sometimes getting in the way of a pending build command, causing flickering
  • Fixed background bricks being unexpectedly deconstructed when building a tile or ladder above it
  • Explorers who are in the process of dying can no longer absorb oxygen, as it’s confusing
  • Fixed a bug where if an explorer was assigned to a cryochamber, but the errand was somehow removed or cancelled, the explorer might not be supplied to that cryochamber
  • Fixed buildings locked behind research (like the light) being buildable before research was unlocked by using the keyboard shortcut (O), or by selecting the duplicate button in the selected building panel
  • Fixed explorers talking about past aurora in the present tense
  • Fixed a visual bug where inoperable solar panels (e.g. solar flare, no foundation) looked like they were generating power
  • Plants can no longer self-seed behind large buildings
  • Fixed oddberries trying to self-seed on the ground; they now self-seed on the ceiling, as long as they’re in a one-tile gap
  • Fixed a visual bug where selected springs could say they were creating a negative amount of mass
  • Fixed a pathfinding bug where explorers low on oxygen would sometimes select a far-away target with little oxygen to catch their breath if the oxygen level within a 10-cell radius was always less than 1kg