Are blue crystals now redundant in the update?

[Chris]

It seems that instead of using blue crystals they're just stored. Gethering them seems to have no direct effect on the speed at which the bricktron spawn rate increases and I can't seem to find a reliable use case that suggests that they needed at all.

It looks as though spirits from dead bricktrons and enemies increase the spawn rate in survival? And I have not been able to spawn a single additional bricktron in sandbox.

Does anyone else have any thoughts on this glaringly obvious game breaking new feature? Or am I missing something obvious that they just didn't mention in the update?

[RadiclDreamr]

If there are Blue Crystals in your stockpiles, then you can manually move them to the Crystal by selecting a free Brictron and right-click (just a click, not a hold) on the blue crystals. Then right-click again on the main crystal. With each Bricktron you spawn, the cost of spawning more increases, at least in survival mode (not sure about sandbox). Think of it this way: the cost of spawning a bricktron would be 1, and each time you spawn a bricktron that cost increases by 1. And every dead corruptron gives you .25. So to spawn your first bricktron, you would need to kill 4 corruptrons. To spawn your second, you would need to kill 8. Third, 12. etc. (As far as I understand the system at least) Hope this helps. I haven't looked at the tutorials, but this should've all been covered. Even still, keep in mind that this game is still in developement. It will get better soon. :)

[Chris]

Hey, thanks for the information. So I took your advice, and tried doing moving it manually in both survival and sandbox, I thought I'd tried it before but I wanted to verify. The option to drop the crystals into the central crystal doesn't exist in the radial menu. Now I imagine this isn't an intentional feature from sauropod, and I have seen other people mention the same issue with the version 0.4 release. It appears that blue crystals can't be used at all, (at least under windows 8.1, although considering it's unity I can't imagine why there would be descrepencies in game logic between OS's). Anyway, thanks for the tip regarding the corruptron souls and the doubling of the cost, that's clearly why you can get a bricktron or two during the survival mode but only barely.

As a further note, I've also tried the [bleeding_edge] fork, and it seems this issue is also a problem there. Considering you haven't seemed to have encountered this bug I imagine it must not be replicatable for everyone. it does however make it insanely difficult for people who can't use the crystals to make more bricktrons.

And whilst I do appreciate that it is an early access game, the development team need to ensure that, on a professional level, QA targets are met. I appreciate they decided to re-write their entire engine from the ground up and that that may introduce new bugs that didn't exist previously. However something to this degree should ideally have been caught before release as a stable version. If they were working under a publisher, they would have had much tougher standards to adhere to, seriously, publishers are absolute arseholes, you have no idea. As it stands they've been working on this alpha for over 3 years now, I know they got over $700k to initially develop it, but employing a full studio isn't cheap, I imagine they'll hit financial troubles if they keep going at their current rate.

I only say this because I did back it way back when it was a kickstarter and I think it would be cool if they could take it to a full product.

[RadiclDreamr]

Perhaps, I didn't give good instructions XD. You don't use the radial menu at all when manually moving blue crystals. If you select a bricktron and just right click anywhere on the screen (a quick click, don't hold down the mouse button) the bricktron will move to that spot. Like how on other games you would right-click to move your character or interact with objects. This is usually how mouse games operate; left-click to select, right-click to move. Don't hold down the right mouse button over the main crystal, just right click it, like how you would click on the castle story game icon in steam or on your desktop. Short and simple :)
But with all this confusion (not just you it seems), perhaps they should add an option in the radial menu. I hope maybe that explaination was a bit more clear.

[Chris]

I see! Well, that is the weirdest gameplay change I've seen. I've certainly seen no mention about having to now right click to drop blue crystals into the main crystal. I've even went through the tutorial just to see if they mention anything about it, and considering I got everything else fine anyway, that was tedious :P

Anyway yeah, they should mention that, its quite hard doing survival mode with the 6 units you can get at the start :)

[RadiclDreamr]

It didn't used to be that way (probably why it is not in the tutorials). I think they had a problem with the old AI not being able to transport the blue crystals if the crystal was too far away so they enabled the blue crystal to be stored in stockpiles. They've been fixing the AI issue and we will probably soon see this issue of blue crystals in stockpiles be addressed. Also, it is tedious, but you can disable blue crystals from being stored in stockpiles, but you have to do this with each stockpile using the pie menu. Just play around with the game and you'll get used to it and figure all this out. It will get better in time. :)

[Splitframe]

The dial up of the mining task also have the option to only harvest blue cristals if you need more bricktrons. It's still not very fast though.
I use one mine for all 3 types and one only for blue.

[Jamison]

I find that having to manually move blue crystal from a stockpile to the main crystal is a redundant waste of a stockpile and time to manually tell a bricktron to move it. As previously, if the crystal was too far away, they would drop it into the nearest stockpile, which made sense. But even now with a stockpile just as close to the crystal, why not walk ten extra feet, drop it at the main crystal, and continue mining? Also, they never seem to drop orange crystal into barrels.

However, the feature I am most happy with so far is being able to mine only blue crystals. While it does take a long time, I usually send my miners (I almost always have 3-5 at a time) in for only blue crystals when my builders have enough brick stockpile to not be held up waiting for the miners (usually have 3-5 builders as well). This allows me to get about 20+ archers, at least 4-6 knights, and typically between 8-10 workers depending on big construction tasks are. I always play survival.

[Hausser]

FYI, if you hold-right-click your stockpiles, you can untick the blue crystals(you have to do it for every single one), so the only "valid" store for them is your main crystal