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Launch Upgrade Now Open for Testing! [346893]


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Hello, fellow colonists!

After much development, we're finally ready to share what we've been working on: the Launch Upgrade! There's a whole lot ready in the hangar, so let's jump right in:

The first major change is the ability to choose which version of the asteroid you’d like to start your colony on. These are all variations on the same basic asteroid template intended to stretch your early and midgame strategies. They also will have different assortments of biomes, which will affect overall resource availability and balance.

This brings us to the meat of the upgrade: New biomes. If you want to play in a world with all three new biomes, try starting on the "Arboria" asteroid! There's new resources, plants, and critters, as well as brand new buildings in the tech tree to make use of them all!

The initial Duplicant selection process has also been streamlined quite a bit to make decisions clearer and require less rerolling time to assemble your ideal starting crew. We've tuned up the Disease system a little, so greater exposures now result in greater infection chances. There's a new system of colony goals known as “Initiatives” to help give the game a further sense of direction, to encourage fresh new methods of play, and to allow you to better compare the successes and failures of one colony to the next.

The mods system has also had some refinement, and tutorials showing will be posted shortly showing off all the new tools.

And as always, there are a great deal of bug fixes, polish, tweaks, and changes in this upgrade. View the full patch notes for every gritty detail!

This is a big one. We've added a lot of new content that will take a lot of playtime to balance, so more than ever we appreciate all your feedback and bug reports. Thank you!

What does this testing branch contain so far?

Here are the changes we've made so far in this Upgrade, loosely categorized:

Spoiler

New and Notable Features

New Buildings

  • Gas Range cooking station
  • Desalinator
  • Ethanol Distiller
  • Rust Deoxydizer Wood Burner
  • Airborne Critter Bait
  • Monument
  • Duplicant Motion Sensor
  • Park Sign

New Critters

  • Pokeshell
  • Pip

New Fauna

  • Arbor Tree
  • Dasha Saltvine
  • Oxyfern
  • Waterweed

New Locomotion, Power, Stress, Insulation, Digging and Modding Tutorial animations New asteroids to colonize

  • Asteroid select screen
  • 9 variant Asteroids
  • Additional start type: Forest
  • World "Traits"

New Game Options screen New foods

  • Spicy Tofu
  • Sushi
  • Improve food with Table Salt

New Biomes

  • Tide Pools
  • Rust
  • Forest

New Colony Initiatives and Imperatives

  • Imperatives are "big goals" for the colony
  • Initiatives are optional goals and checkpoints
  • Colony summary screen

New Space Destinations New Salt Water Geyser New Park and Nature Reserve room types

All other fixes and changes are on the full update page.

Check the patch notes for the most up-to-date changes!

What is open testing?

"Open testing" means players get to test-drive new content early and give us feedback and suggestions before it goes live. Because this is an unfinished and in active development version of the upgrade, it's pretty likely you'll encounter bugs, crashes or balance issues while playing these builds. We'll try to fix any problems that crop up as quickly as we can, but it's possible you'll lose progress in your games while playing on the Testing branch.

Regarding performance, the Testing branch has additional debugging tools enabled to help us track down crashes. This makes the game run more slowly than the live version of the game.

Please also be aware that once a save is loaded in the Testing branch, it cannot be reopened again in the previous Live branch or previous builds.

What do I do if I find a crash or a bug?

Post it up on the Bug Tracker and we'll fix it as soon as we can. If you can attach a copy of your save file to your report, that helps us even more as we can pinpoint the source of problem more quickly.

Do I have to play the open testing build?

Nope! If you'd prefer to only play a stable build, you can continue to play in the current Early Access branch until the game launches in full. Playing the Open Testing build isn't necessary, but it helps us a lot to receive your feedback and reports - if you're interested, try it out!

How do I become an open tester?

There's no sign up or registration for becoming an open tester. If you own Oxygen Not Included and want to join the Testing Branch, all you have to do is play the Open Testing build on Steam or Epic Games Store.

How do I play the open testing build?

You can switch your branch on Steam using the instructions below:

Spoiler

How to change branches in Oxygen Not Included (Steam)

  • In Steam, click on Library > Games.
  • Scroll down to Oxygen Not Included.
  • Right-click and select Properties.
  • Go to the BETAS tab.
  • In the dropdown, select the name of the branch you want to play. In this case, the branch name is "launch_testing"
    • This branch does not require a password.
  • In that same Properties window, go to the Local Files tab and press "Verify Integrity Of Game Cache."
  • Your game will be updated to the the previous branch.
  • Launch and play Oxygen Not Included

How to launch the test version of Oxygen Not Included (Epic Game Store)

  • In Epic Game Store, click on Library.
  • Find the Oxygen Not Included Public Testing tile.
  • Install this version of the game.
  • If it has already been installed, click the gear icon and choose Verify.
  • Launch and play Oxygen Not Included Public Testing!

That's it! We hope you'll enjoy this taste of what's to come, and thank-you for your help testing out the new Upgrade!

 

 

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Yay, 2nd crash 2 seconds into the game. May still need some work... ;)

Also, crash-reporting seems to block. May want to look into that soon or you may get a wrong impression about stability.

Edited by Gurgel
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