The Past Weeks

As you might have noticed I haven't written a blog post for a while, despite having promised to do so. We were in the midst of a lot of different things, mostly in the early stages, and it wasn't time to write about them just yet. Because I'm not a fan of writing an empty-shell blog entry, so I decided to skip them.

‍Most of the time was spent on performance improvements. These improvements are critical to support the large complicated bases FOUNDRY will have. We implemented  multi-threading support and some systems already make use of it. Until more parts of the game will use it, the performance boost will be minor, but it's a great foundation for future improvements. This took quite a while since we rewrote it multiple times just to make sure that it fits the needs for FOUNDRY as well as possible. We believe that we have the right system in place now. The upcoming changes will make use of it to the full extent and we will see the final result soon.

‍Next Content Update: Underground Mining

In parallel we worked on our upcoming update "Underground Mining". It was bothering us that we have the voxel-world but didn't make much use of it. We want to let players expand into unknown depths and let them start a mining operation there.

So what is that going to look like? First of all we will depart from the idea of ore-clusters like they are currently mined with the drones, although those will continue to exist for starter-tier mining. Now when you dig deep enough, you can extract ore from any block mined, with different depths having different yields. You're no longer limited in the amount of ore you can extract, as the world is infinite.

Now to the mining itself, we tried to make something that is close to reality. People will start by building a mining depot, which will have a rail track connection. On those rails you may place a "rail miner", a machine that mines everything in front and then automatically places new tracks in front of it to move forward and repeat the process. On the back side of the "rail miner" smaller minecarts will transport the ore rubble to your depot, from where you will need to refine it into usable ores. While it may sound complicated I can assure you that it's actually pretty straightforward and there is no complicated rail track management (no need to place and manage signals).

‍To help your underground endeavor we will provide you with additional stuff like dynamite, item and character elevators and more. Our next blog post will show some other mechanics a bit more in detail, but for now that is all the information we have.

‍A Little Vacation and the Timeframe for the Update

After having worked a lot of overtime since our release happened, our team will now take a few days off and visit the realm of World of Warcraft's new Shadowlands. Our discord response times might be a bit higher :)

We will continue working hard on the update next week. We cannot give an arrival time yet, but we expect it in January.

See you in Azeroth, - mrmcd