Hello everyone!

Welcome back to another FOUNDRY Friday. Today I will be writing about the Update 4 progress and its planned release date, the construction drone and some smaller polishing we have added to the game.

We’re happy to announce that Update 4 is scheduled to release on Tuesday, the 28th of April. Due to us having worked on some of the new content (like trains) during previous update cycles, it allows us to go with a shorter timeline between the last and the upcoming update and we’re excited about that.

Overall development progress is going well on several fronts. We’re making solid progress on the new core features, while also adding polish to various existing aspects of the game. As we’re still in Early Access we’re constantly trying to improve existing features as well. We can’t do it all at once, but I think we’re doing a good job of shipping multiple smaller improvements with every update along with the new main features.

Trains being out on the experimental branch has helped us tremendously to find bugs and issues early. Therefore we have decided to bring the modular power plant also to experimental. We will provide more information once we feel the power plant is ready for the public.

We have mentioned it briefly in the last FOUNDRY Friday, but now it is time to take a closer look at our new construction drone. Let’s start with a video:

I think the video is pretty self explanatory. You’ll get a remote-controllable flying drone you can use for factory building. In terms of building it can do everything you can do from first person, but you cannot use it for things like mining. It will unlock as one of the early science pack 1 researches, therefore making it available almost from the start. The drone does not need any fuel, but there is a maximum range on how far you can go with it.

Let’s talk about why we have decided to add it. In short: comfort and usability. Building things from first person isn’t always as comfortable as it can be, and in a game where most of your time is spent on building things we need to ensure it is as accessible and comfortable as possible. Lots of players started building from a flying perspective as soon as they unlocked the jetpack, and that is something we want to allow right from the beginning. The ability to quickly ascend and get a top down perspective makes it easier to see where other machines are or where a certain conveyor belt is going. We believe it will be a great addition to the game.

As a little side note: We’re aware that there are other things we can and should do to improve our building mechanics and we’ll get there. One thing at a time. If you have particular feedback on how the building mechanics can be improved, please let us know in the comments below.

Here’s a small but impactful change, a new animation for building and demolishing machines.

What do you think? Looks good?

We have also started the process of adding more polish on the sound effects side, we have improved a bunch of SFX and are working on improving more. We’re also working on making multiple machines play the same SFX in parallel to sound better. FOUNDRY has a very large amount of sounds, so please do not expect most of them to change with Update 4, but we’re addressing those we believe are the most critical and will continue to do so with future updates. Are there any in particular you believe we should take a look at?


Alright, that concludes this week's blog post. I hope you like the new stuff. We’ll be back in two weeks.

Until then,
-mrmcd



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