Hello engineers!

Today I'm releasing the initial build for the official Update 1 to the development branch for testing. If you'd like to try out the latest changes, please switch to this branch in steam, and also leave feedback/bug reports in discord or the steam forums. Note the development branch is inherently unstable!

Anyway, here are the major changes to the game for Update 1:

A new type of bot has been added to the game: Supply Bots

These function similar to logistics bots in Factorio. They can take items from networked storage and provider cargo holds, and transport them to the new Requester Cargo Holds. They can be stationed at Construction Towers alongside Construction Bots.

This should add a new logistics options for end game, and help you clean up networked storage holds that are filled up with items.

I plan to add an interface still for requesting and trashing specific items as the player. More to come!

Next up, the Tech Tree UI is finally complete. The new UI panel will show the same grid of technologies to be able to scroll through, and in addition, a tech tree that will show the subtree required for the currently selected tech; it will also let you navigate around the tree by clicking the technology buttons.

Another long requested feature has been implemented: the ability to add blueprints to the hotbar. Whenever you have a blueprint of any kind selected, you can simply click the hotbar to gain quick access to that blueprint.

I've also enhanced the production statistics panel to show graphs for production and consumption over various time windows. This comes with a major performance boost, especially for end game factories, and it also is included in your save game, so your production stats will now persist when loading a game.

Currently, Final Factory runs using delta time, so if your framerate decreases it tries to simulate more time each tick. This is not really ideal, especially for our multiplayer implementation. We've done a major refactor to put FF's simulation on a fixed update.

Currently this mode is still in testing, but you can activate it with the "ToggleRateLimiting" command (we've had this mode in the game for awhile, but for Update 1 we've made major improvements architecturally to support this). You can set your UPS manually with the "setRateLimit" command. This can be used to enhance your FPS, at the expense of your factory simulation rate. Note that the player controller is decoupled from the simulation rate, so you can have a high framerate and responsive player controls, with a slow factory update rate.

We've added language support for Korean, Simplified Chinese, Russian, and Japanese (although only Korean is in the first build)! These translations might still need work and we will gladly take feedback for any translation mistakes!

We've also fixed a bunch of bugs and made some critical architecture changes under the hood for the health of the code base. Full patch notes will be released once Update 1 hits main!

/Slims