Friends and Soon-to-be-Friends,

It’s another big update! Like last time, let’s talk through everything we’ve added. Please get comfortable.

What’s important is: You should be able to continue your save. If you reached all the way to the end of the previous version, we had to undo any progress for the Mayor Tier 7 quest because of all of the new stuff we added to Tier 7.

We also haven’t changed any of the old progression (just added one or two new things, but we’ll talk about that later), so feel free to continue your old save!

Also, if you were affected by a bug where you were using a save started from the demo version and the mason sisters are missing, we’re sorry about that! With this update, you can now continue that save.

Alright, let’s talk about the new features that we’ve crammed in!

We have two new biomes past the mountain!

There's the Glacial Plateau in the northwest . It’s a cold and frosty place where snow is eternally falling. You’ll be visiting this place for the precious magical life energy frozen in the extra-pure waters. This place won’t make it easy for you either. The enemies here will freeze you and your Sparks, slowing you down and encasing your Sparks in ice.

Meanwhile, there's the Volcanic Cave in the northeast. It’s a hot and dark cave that you’ll need to carve a space in. You’ll find metal here and as you go deeper, the hotter this place gets. It’s also pretty cramped inside, you won’t be able to build the train in the cave. The enemies and hazards here will try to burn you and your Sparks, so you should keep an eye out for ways to extinguish yourself.

There’s lots of new gameplay, but we won’t talk much about the specifics here. All you need to know is that there are a total of seven new enemies for you to find and fight. Some are easier, a way for you to learn about the new mechanics, but we’ve tried to ramp up the difficulty of other enemies.

Of course, you also get to play with fire and ice with two new big Sparks: Burning Spark and Freezing Spark. These two will help you out and make fighting the new enemies easier by burning and slowing them down, but you’ll have to go deep in the caves and high in the plateau to find them. Good luck with your exploration!

Let’s talk a bit more about that Volcanic Cave. It’s an actual cave where you’ll need to carve out your own space and your Sparks have to dig through the various layers of dirt, rocks, metal, and more! You’ll throw your Sparks and order them to dig a specific way through and they’ll keep going until they find an item or are done with the order.

Different layers will also require different Sparks, so you’ll need to equip various sets of Sparks. You should also be careful because digging out a cave can be quite dangerous! Digging some dirt might cause a small cave-in! An unusual-looking pocket of rock might have some copper, but there could be a hidden lava geyser underneath. And as you get deeper, the place will get hotter and even more dangerous…

Thankfully you’ll get a new Spark to help you out, the Drilly Spark! It’s a one-use Spark that can drill any kind of hard material like Obsidian or Permafrost.

We’ve already talked about Botany in a previous devlog, but to give you a quick explanation, we’re upping the automation puzzle with a new type of recipe that has a progress bar. So you’ll need to complete a single recipe multiple times to get the item. Ten times for smaller plants, but a hundred times for bigger ones - After all, growing a plant takes a lot of time and care!

You’ll grow smaller plants in a Greenhouse. You’ll need to feed them twenty to sixty items in total, and they can take from five to fifteen minutes to finish growing before you can have the fruits of your labor.

However, the big plants only grow in an Arboretum. They’ll need to be fed up to a thousand items in total, and if a recipe takes about five minutes, that means growing a single plant can take over eight hours! Thankfully, they’re fed by a separate building, the Arboretum Feeder, and multiple feeders can connect to a single Arboretum. You can have a large number of feeders and cut the time it takes to grow a plant from eight hours to one hour, or even less. Of course, assuming your production line can handle that many feeders efficiently!

So once you’ve grown the plants, what do you do with them? Well, we have a new Plant Extractor, a workstation with two outputs! With the Plant Extractor, you’ll be creating looping production lines. You’ll bring Coral and Fertiliser to the Greenhouse to grow Coral Seeds and some of those you’ll bring into a Plant Extractor to get Coral back from the Coral Seed, while the rest you use in other buildings or to cultivate other plants!

You’ll also unlock some very special late-game buildings that will make creating your end-game base simpler, but we won’t spoil for you what it is.

We’ve also talked about this in our last devlog! So with names like Volcanic Cave and Glacial Plateau, these biomes are, as to be expected, also hot and cold. This heat and cold is actually great for your buildings!

Almost every recipe has an optimal temperature, somewhere between -5 and +5. They’ve been running at 100% efficiency so far, but if you move parts of your production line to the cave or plateau, or use new buildings like the Heater, Cooler, or Temperature Regulator, you can get your recipes into 125% or even 150%!

So for example, anything made in the Aetheric Distiller has an optimal temperature of +3. They work best in a warm environment to get rid of excess moisture. Meanwhile, the Furnace has an optimal temperature of -3. It heats up so much that it works best when it’s in a cool environment.

Of course, it also goes the other way. Running a recipe at the wrong temperature is a quick way to get it working at only 75%, 50%, or even all the way down to 0% efficiency. You also can’t just stack the heaters and coolers. You need to use both the land and your new buildings to be able to optimize recipes that want to be in extreme temperatures! Thankfully, the new Temperature Overlay makes checking this easy.

To help you manage your efficiency, there’s also one new Spark: the Handy Spark. which is an upgrade to the Crafty Spark! With this new Spark, you’ll be able to offset some of the efficiency losses when working in non-ideal conditions and reach an even higher efficiency than you weren’t able to before!

There are a lot of quality-of-life features that we’ve added to the game!

We’ve made it so Ancient Containers are now destroyable with Impact damage, like the Rocky Spark. So from around tier 4, you’ll be able to destroy any that are in your way!

We’ve been a bit unhappy with the build menu, especially with the “last five buildings” history, since it doesn’t really allow you to get a good muscle memory going with the game. We’ve decided to change this by having Build Presets!

Unlocked at Tier 1 in the Monument, you can now create your own collection of your most used buildings and tools and quickly swap between them as you build. Hopefully, this makes building a lot faster and easier.

We also swapped the location of the recipe and the build menu bar. We did it for a few reasons but it means that changing the height of train tracks on the gamepad is now way easier and more intuitive!

Before we get to the actual feature: We’ve changed it so that now, you cannot unequip your Active Sparks if any of them are affected by status effects, like Stun. It was a bit of a gameplay loophole that we know folks have been using and we’ve decided to finally close that loophole so that this feature would work as intended.

Because after you’ve unlocked the three Spark Slots, what’s next is the ability to juggle multiple Spark Loadouts! At Tier 7, you can unlock a Spark Loadout, a new set of three spark slots. You can only have one set out at a time, but you can quickly swap between the two loadouts so you can better organize your Sparks.

You can fill and swap between the loadouts in your inventory, but you can also quickly swap between them in Aim Mode, as long as none of the Sparks are affected by a status effect!

You can now change the zoom level of the minimap to see more (or less). It doesn’t affect how much of a new area is uncovered, so it’s mostly useful to see more when you’re in already explored areas.

More than one quest can now be pinned! It’s very basic, where a new pinned quest is pinned underneath existing pinned quests. You won’t be able to scroll through the pinned quests, so we’re just going to let you pin too many quests at once and you can figure it out for now.

You can now use the copy tool to paste recipes into existing buildings!

So let’s say you built a bunch of sawbenches but ah! You forgot to pre-set them to the right recipe. Well, you can now set just one of them to the right recipe, copy that building, and then just paste that recipe right on top of the other sawbenches. Saves a lot of clicks.

We’ve overhauled the monument unlock screen where you unlock new monument upgrades so it’s easier to navigate through them. We also overhauled the monument overview screen so that the quests are categorized by tiers. It even checks what item you have in your inventory and tells you which monument unlocks you can take care of now!

We’ve also grouped the badges to make them easier to navigate through!

We made the Quest Overview screen a bit better. You can now see the details of a recipe in the quest overview before you unlock it. This means you should be able to understand better which quest you should do first!

We want to do more updates to the glossary screens, but for now, we added on every item entry which recipes use that item. Now you can see how to make the item and where it's used!

We wanted to smooth out starting a new game and basically cut it down so that you’ll need fewer clicks to just start a new game. This one is kind of hard to explain through text, but you can just play it and see.

Let's talk about the stuff we didn't mention in the roadmap!

We’ve done some Spark AI changes, specifically for when you harvest. There’s no change for when you target a specific object (e.g. a tree), the Sparks will do as they have been all this time. However, to make harvesting a bit smoother, we’ve made two changes:

The first is that the Sparks won’t try to harvest infinite resources unless you’ve targeted it. We’ve also extended this to a few other things, like the Spunny Warren. This should mean that the Spark Thrower is a little less annoying to use and that harvesting in general feels a bit nicer.

The second one is a big change! Previously, when a Spark was thrown on the ground, it harvested the first thing it saw and then immediately came back. We've now changed it so that when you throw a Spark without targeting anything, it will harvest until it finds an item, and then comes back.

This is similar to the behavior we’ve implemented for digging and we feel it makes clearing areas a bit nicer and easier. We've also changed Rush to do the same.

We wanted to add this last big update! We didn’t have time then, but we managed to squeeze it in this time. You can use the Arty Spark to paint the enemy!

The Arty Spark will try to use up its paint charge when it hits the enemy. Once an enemy has been hit five times with paint, it’s stunned for a few seconds. All the paint on the enemy then disappears and it’s temporarily invincible to being hit by paint.

It’s balanced in a way so that it’s not overpowered and isn’t always the best thing to do, but if you’re finding a fight very difficult, it might be worth it to bring a stack of paint-filled Arties to stun the enemy at its most annoying moments.

We have some new smaller gameplay stuff that isn’t part of a specific feature but is important to mention.

Just like how we now have a two-output building, we also have a three-input building to make the automation puzzle a little more difficult. It’s the new Spark Workshop, the building where you’ll be making the new Sparks!

And we also added a random output building! We’ve added Geodes in the game, which you can find in the Volcanic Cave and you can put them into the Geode Breaker. Each type of geode will give one of three items when they’re broken, and you’ll need to keep the output clear so it can keep working on opening new geodes.

In the Volcanic Caves are Giant Ore Deposits where you can get Copper. However, the Ore Miner has a diminishing rate of production. What it means is that when you build the Ore Miner, it starts with a high harvest rate and then it reduces over time. You’ll need to build more and expand, or figure out new ways to create the new resource. Don’t worry, it’s still an infinite resource, so you’ll always have some but it might not be enough.

And we added a small selection of Accessibility options. These exist both in their appropriate tab and in the Accessibility tab to make it easier to find them - so for example, Misophonia mode can be found in both the Audio tab and in the Accessibility tab.

You can now change the intensity of the in-game screenshake.

We got some feedback about how the beelephant’s munching noises were a little much for some people, so we added Misophonia Mode that turns off specific sounds, such as the beelephant eating. If there are more sounds in the game that you feel should fall under this setting, feel free to reach out to us so we can add them.

Since we now have dark areas in the game, we’ve also added a Gamma Slider so you can make things a bit brighter if it looks too dark in the caves.

We’ve changed very little of the existing game.

• We’ve changed the Delivery Chests, Big Crates, and Big Barrels to now use Big Slots. When you migrate the save, any items that didn’t fit will just drop in front of your house in the village. Delivery Chests and Big Barrels now have 4 Big Slots, and Big Crates now have 2 Big Slots.
  
• Alchemy Lab costs 2 Squilican Tubes to build instead of 3 Squilican Tubes. You’re going to be building more of them and we don’t want you to have to grind too many Squilicans.
  
• Rock Terons will now drop 2 or 3 Rock Teron Shells instead of 1 or 2. Again, we’ve put a bit of a bigger importance on the Furnace, so we want to make it less grindy.
  
• And as we said earlier, we completely changed the Tier 7 mayor quest.

Let's quickly go through what bugs we fixed!

• Cargo loaders will now only connect with train wagons if the locomotive is stopped by a station.
  
• We also worked on the autosave and some loading issues. Hopefully, it’ll hang a bit less!
  
• Fixed a bug where minimap, compass, and tagged quest can disappear after opening the Map while you're on a train.
  
• Fixed a bug where copying the counter gate wasn't copying the values properly.
  
• There was also the bug mentioned up top where if you started a demo save before the 27th of November, that save wasn’t actually compatible with the full version of the game because the Mason Sisters weren’t spawning.

If you’re keen-eyed, you might notice that a few things are not mentioned and that's because these weren't added this time. So in this update, there are no new decorations, customizations, or badges. This particular update has been more work than expected and we really wanted to get it out before the year was ending. This has meant that we set aside a few things for later, including the winter seasonal event.

As you play, you might even notice that the new quests don’t have any dialogues, like the state of the Mountain quests before the Trains & Trades update! We feel like even with some of these touches missing, you can still have a really fun experience with the core features that are in this update. We look forward to adding these very important touches in for the next big update (our 1.0!!), if not earlier, but we’re first going to enjoy the winter/New Year break.

We really want to thank you for supporting us as we continue developing Oddsparks. Mixing up two genres in a way that makes the game more approachable but still interesting hasn’t been easy! As we’re shaping up the final version of the game and creating the ending, we’re going to do some overhauls. We’re going to comb through our game, and all of the different systems, and spend a lot of time making sure that everything feels as good and well-rounded as it should be for the 1.0 version of the game!

All of your feedback has been super helpful for us (please keep sending us more!), and we hope you have a lot of fun with the Hot & Cold update. We look forward to seeing your new cave and plateau bases, and seeing the spaghetti mess of a path network you make as you grow your big plants.