New Big Update: Trains & Trades!

Friends & Soon-to-be-Friends,

It’s Trains & Trades day! How exciting! Well, we’re now going to go through everything we’ve added in. Get comfortable, this post is long – it’s about 3400 words!

The important thing is this: You should be able to continue your save.

Depending on where you are in progression and how much you’ve explored, we might have spawned a new Spark Shrine in the village. Basically, we didn’t want to accidentally delete anything, so if there’s an important building that’s supposed to spawn but in an area that’s already explored, we dedicated a “lost and found” area in the village for them.

Obviously that area won’t be used in a new save, since things would spawn properly.

You might be interested in starting a new save anyway – we’ve integrated a lot of new stuff into the existing progression and you also get to build the village up as you progress, so it feels very different.

Anyway, let’s talk about all of the new features that are in the update!

Trains

Choo choo! We’ve already talked a lot about them in our devlog, but if you haven’t read about them, we now have elevated monorails from Tier 5. This means the actual lines don’t take a lot of room and you can build them above all of your existing buildings, and have the lines go up and down, and even make a corkscrew rollercoaster for your Sparks and items.

The locomotive needs to be fuelled and then you can either have a Spark drive them or you can even drive them yourself! (As a side note, since we’re talking about fuel, we also now have a proper fuel system, but we’ll talk more about that later.)

You can attach wagons to your locomotives and then build train stops to stop the train automatically and wagon loaders for your Sparks to load and unload your wagon! The train stops have different modes, and you can also attach with logic…

Since we have a lot more to talk about, you can read more on how Trains work and how to build your first train network in the devlog, but of course, the game also has new glossary entries for all of these systems to teach you and stuff has been added to the button remapping.

However, to properly show you the potential of the trains, here’s one screenshot that we took from our playtesters – described by the playtester as “Intersection Hell”.

Logic

We now have a binary logic system for further automation. There’s some information here in the Logic devlog. It’s a bit older, but still covers the basics.

The quick explanation is that we have logic wires that exist on a new layer, underneath buildings. Each wire network can hold an on or off signal, and you can use this to turn manage your existing buildings, path addons and the new trains! You start unlocking them from Tier 4.

We tried to make it easy to understand but still powerful. There’s only two different kind of signals: on and off, but you have sensors that are configurable in a lot of ways. So you can have a capacity sensor that watches a barrel and when it’s full, it turns off the signal, which turns off the connected spark slots, which stops that building from working. Or when it’s half full, it turns on the signal, which turns on a connected One Way and the Sparks have to walk a different route. It’ll connect to your buildings, your trains, to nearly everything! The possibility for automation is endless.

We also have a new villager that you’ll get all of this from, the Scientist. She’ll also have a few examples of logic constructions nearby her, so you can get inspired to try out these new tools!

For computer science folks who are dusting off their truth tables, we have also added logic gates, a Data Flip-Flop and a Set-Reset Latch and lots of ways to manage the signal, including a 4 bit ribbon and global wireless senders and receivers.

In fact, two of our playtesters started making analogue clocks? Even though there is a signal-based timer and a counter gate so you can easily make a digital clock. But the heart wants what it wants and we look forward to your magnificent creations.

Biome Variations

We’ve just talked about this one in our latest devlog, but we have a bit more land just outside of the mountains.

It includes some flat lands for building the heart of your future megabase, some resource dense areas, and some combat areas!

These will exist just outside of the mountains and are not really a new biome, just a reshuffling of the existing assets to create some fun new areas. Although we did fit one enemy variation too, the Juvenile Beelephant. They have less HP but they’re aggressive, hang out in gangs and do swipe attacks!

For the combat areas, we wanted to make it a bit easier to find the enemies and provide a riskier challenge but you get a lot more at once and it can make things a little less grindy.

Our playtesters have told us that they like the new areas and tying it all together with trains as you can see from the map below!

Shops

This one we haven’t really talk about much. The lede that we’re burying here is that this is actually the Item Sink feature. In the previous Quality of Life update, we added the ability to delete items, but now you can recycle them!

You’ll unlock the Aetheric Recycler in the Village Monument at Tier 2. This allows you to recycle items into Aetheric Residue in the monument. Basically, items you put in are worth some amount of points and after you’ve reached a number of points, it’ll create an aetheric residue. However, as you create more residue, the number of the points that is needed to create a residue will increase.

Since it burns one by one, it’s a little slow and manual. That’s why you also have the Compressor.

It’s a storage building that compresses items and sends them to the recycler! You can attach these to any part of your base and any overflow can go to the recycler and build up your points for the Shops themselves.

The actual “shop” are two new villagers that are unlocked from Tier 3, the Craftsman and the Tailor. These villagers won’t give you quests but will take your Aetheric Residues for cool stuff.

As you might assume, the Tailor trades you new character customisations!

Meanwhile, the Craftsman trades you blueprints for new decorative buildings, and some very cute decorative plushies of the creatures in the game! These items unlock over time and as you progress, more things will be available to buy.

Decorations

We’ve showed some sneak peeks on this one, but let’s talk properly about those decorative buildings that the Craftsman sells you!

For this update, we have two core “sets” of decorative buildings, the Village set and the Forest set. We’ll add more decorations as we develop the game further! Each set contains:

• two different fences (these are decorative only, does not block any movement)
• a bench
• a lantern (which can be hooked up to logic to turn on and off)
• a pillar
• three plant pots of different sizes (1×1, 1×2 and 2×2)
• a pedestal to showcase items
• a pedestal for Sparks (if you put spark tokens here, it shows an active spark)
• two arches (1×3 and 1×4)
• and a unique building. (A pond for the Village set and a Clocktower for the Forest set.)

The plant pots are actually a whole new special thing, so let’s quickly talk about them.

The plant pots allow you to showcase not just sparks and items, but some of the “objects” in our world. Stuff like trees, flowers, even the little ruins can be showcased via the plant pots.

These work very differently from our other storage buildings. If you place one to four of an item, it’ll showcase the different stack sizes of an item. However, some items are connected to a special table and when you put the 5th item, we spawn maybe a tree in the plant pot, and the 6th, we spawn a bush!

We also have some miscellaneous decorations, which are the Spark Displays. These are just cute little decorative buildings, like a picnic blanket or a café table that has four Spark Slots so you can show your favourite Sparks having a little relaxation time!

Those were the just big features we mentioned on the roadmap, but we added even more stuff!

Arty Spark

We had a devlog about this one, but it’s a new Spark that allows you to colour your paths, buildings, logic wires and more.

You unlock Arty Spark at Tier 4 and you can unlock different paint in the same tier. You’ll need to make paint, throw them in a paint bucket with the paint and use that to colour your buildings.

The idea is to create a side system that you have to automate and allows you to both organise and express yourself. You can’t colour everything yet but certainly all of the important stuff to help you organise your base. At the moment, Arty Spark is only for decoration purposes but we have hopes of fitting in something later that will make you want to keep an army of Arties.

Spark Thrower

That’s right! In Tier 3, you can unlock the Spark Thrower and it throws your Sparks for you.

It can handle one stack of Sparks and will throw them one by one pretty quickly. The Sparks will act the exact same as they do when you throw them. They’ll try to fight, harvest and pick up items and will return back to the throw tower with any items they picked up!

This way, you can now do an early semi-automation of Aether Shards. It is a messy tool, since most Sparks have a much lower item pick up range than their combat range, but we trust that you can figure out how to make the thrower work for you.

Buildable Waypoints

You can now build your own Waypoints! You’ll unlock two different buildable waypoints in the game, one for the Ancient Bases in Tier 3 and one for the Ancient Supports in Tier 5.

They work exactly like the other waypoints and need to be fuelled, but now you can place them freely! You can also flick through the different active waypoints on the map. We actually have some plans to make this even better, but we didn’t have time to do a big rework of the map, so we just squeezed in something to make it a bit more usable for now.

Copy Tool

We now have an area copy tool! You unlock it in the monument at Tier 3. It’s very basic, but it does also copy and paste whatever recipe and other settings the buildings have. We’ll likely expand this feature later.

Fuel System

We already mentioned it earlier, but we now have a proper fuel system. You don’t just have to use Wood and Coal, but everything in between from Leaves to Wooden Panels to Ladders. So anything that burned fuel previously like Waypoints, Furnaces and the new things that burn fuel like the Train is a lot more flexible and you can use whatever you prefer to fuel it!

Village Progression

The village is really important to us. After all, Oddsparks is a game about community and what can be done as a community. Before the update, the feeling that you were helping the village and they were helping you wasn’t really as strong as we wanted it to be.

Now, we’ve changed things a bit – in the beginning, the village is actually run down and empty. It is just a village in the frontier. After you’ve given the items to the Mayor for her quests, she’ll get the village ready and set up a construction site. And now, for the final step. Just throw ten Sparks onto the construction site and watch your Sparks build the village!

Once it’s built, the new villager will move in and ready to give you quests.

It’s not really much of a gameplay change, but we hope that it’s a nice little celebration of you completing the mayor’s quests and progressing through the game. The village also will go through a lot more little changes as you complete quests. We had that in the tiniest version with the Sparks in front of the Quartermaster, but we’ve added more of it to the progression and we’ll add more as we continue developing.

Mountain Dialogues

The villagers now have something to say for their mountain quests! Now that we feel more happy with the mountain progression and that there wasn’t anything missing, we got the dialogues written up to give you more flavour about the characters and the world.

Player Customisations

We also added the ability to change your staff sounds, in case you were a bit tired of our Classic Flute. We have eight options in total, ranging from different flute melodies, new instruments like the oboe, clarinet and tuba and a few very normal sounds like “Retro” and the “Dubstaff“.

Some you have to buy in the shops, some are immediately unlocked, some you’ll need to unlock by getting Badges (the in-game achievements).

I’m not going to count how many combinations there are now, but let’s go with A LOT and we’ll add more throughout development too.

New in-game badges

Talking about badges… we added more badges! We’ve just added 22 new badges that hopefully feel rewarding as you play the game. With a few of those encouraging you to explore and learn some of the finer details of the game. Did you know that you can use the Puffy Spark to clean up a mess? Try it out and get a badge.

Supporter’s Pack (coming soon!)

So we’ve heard from a few people that they’ve really loved the game and would like to support us even further! We didn’t want to take too much time from development, but we are working on a little supporter’s pack with a few new customisation options (A cape, a brooch and a crown) and a few decorative buildings (golden statues of the Woodland Sparks).

In general, we don’t want to hide anything super special and cool behind this – the options also will only be visible if you actually buy it, we’re not interested in making you feel like you’re missing content while you’re playing. The supporter pack will be available very soon!

We’re still not done! That was only all of the big things that we’ve just added into the game. Let’s quickly go over smaller things that have been changed and added.

Button Remapping and Controls

Sorry in advance, because this might trip you up a little, but we did change a few default buttons:

• Mouse and Keyboard (General) – Because we really wanted {C} for the Copy Tool, we moved Snap Camera to {X}.
• Gamepad (Build Mode) – We realised we wanted to keep {X} as a dedicated delete button in build mode, and therefore moved Rotate Building to {RB}.
• Gamepad (Map) – Focus Village is now {D-Pad Down} and Focus Player is {D-Pad Up}.Previously they were the other way around. To be honest we’re not sure why this wasn’t the case from the beginning. The village is always “below” you in the map.

In general, we’re still fiddling a lot with our controls. Stuff like the build mode isn’t final at all, and it’s not easy trying to make the controls good while not messing up how you play too much and still having it be flexible enough for the future systems that will end up in the game.

Something nice is that we added a few more buttons to the button remapping system that have not been assigned yet! That means you can assign a button to use the Trash directly, or assign a button for Sort and other inventory shortcuts.

Spark Throwing Behaviour

All Sparks now have a slightly larger item pick up range and the Carry and Hauling have an item pick up range that is the same size as their regular interaction range. This is primarily to make the throw tower a little cleaner.

Quest Overview

The Quest Overview wasn’t giving enough information and now it shows the rewards for quests in future and current tiers, so you can plan your way through a tier a bit better.

Outlines on Opened Buildings

When you open a building’s UI, we now show that building’s outline. It’s so you know exactly which sawbench you’re messing around with in the row of sawbenches!

End of Mountain Aether Production

We’ve buffed the Furnace recipes, while nerfing the Alchemy Lab recipes a little. It should mean that you need less Furnaces and Alchemy Labs for the same amount of Aether!

Pengus Combat Balancing

The Pengus is now a little easier to fight in general, but especially when you’re using the Puffy Spark.

Building Cost Balancing

A few buildings that cost enemy parts (Loom, Alchemy Lab, etc) were creating too much of a grind, so we’ve made those buildings require fewer enemy parts.

New Recipes

A few new recipes that don’t seem very useful, like turning limestone into stone. I wonder what they’re for…

Character Customisation UX

We changed the flow of the character customisation a little. We tried to make it require less clicks by only showing the pop up when you go “back” and not when you apply.

Flair Interaction

We had this very small side feature that was a bit buggy, but we fixed it. So you know how you can pet a Spark by hovering over one in Aim Mode and then pressing {V} on keyboard or {RT} on gamepad?

You can now use it on other stuff too! If you use it on a villager, they have a little wave animation, but mostly it just gives buildings and objects a little wobble. It works on multiplayer, so it’s great as a soft “ping”, if you just want to tell people about this building or that bush. Or you know, you just want to see your sawbench jiggle around while you’re thinking about how to extend your base.

It doesn’t do anything on enemies though. The Spunnies don’t want to be pet, sorry!

You made it all the way to the end! Thank you so much for reading all of this.

As a little surprise, we added a special seed – now, this isn’t for regular play, but for messing around with and while we did try to make sure it works, it might be a bit buggy. We do want to add a proper system for world generation later, but since some of you already have several hundreds of hours and want to play around… Try making a new world with FLAT as the seed. As you might have guessed, it makes a completely flat world!

Join our Discord if you want to talk to folks about your new spaghetti train junctions, your new logic creations, and your beautified bases. We’re finalising our plans for the next update and will come with a new roadmap very soon, but for now, please enjoy Trains & Trades!