January and February Dev Update
Welcome to the development update for January and February! If you hadn’t worked it out already, we have moved to a bi-monthly development update for Nestables as less new features are added and more time is spent on polishing and bug fixes. We hope you enjoy reading the progress from the past two months!
Development Progress
Fertiliser Mechanics
Compost and synthetic fertilizer can be applied to growing crops, increasing it’s yield and reducing the grow time. To apply compost / fertiliser, you click an existing growing crop. This will open the fertiliser UI which works in much the same way as planting seeds does.
Up to 6 fertilizers can be applied to a growing crop. Compost add 25 yield to a plot but also increases the growth time by 30 minutes which is optimal for fast growing, low yield plants. Compost is created in the compost bin from food scraps (generated by eating food), harvest waste (generated by harvesting a plot), cooking waste (generated by cooking food) and from foraging for rotting leaves and mushrooms. Synthetic fertilizer increases yield by 20% and decreases the growth time by 20%. It is created in the furnace from ore, sand and clay. It’s best used on slow growing, high yield plants or after several composts have already been applied.
Decoration Effects
Last month, we talked about how significant improvements had been made to the decoration placement system in Nestables. You can read more about that here. This month, attention turned to applying effects for the decorations placed in your Nest.
Each decoration has a unique effect which impacts any nearby Nestable. The full effect of the decoration is felt on the block it is placed. There is a 50% effect on any block which is a direct neighbor, 25% for diagonal neighbors. More than one decoration can be placed on a single block but with diminishing returns for every successive addition.
Bug Fixes / Other Development Progress
Foraging mechanic implemented. Mushroom pick ups on swamp biomes generalized so that they can appear in any non water block but their content is dependent on the biome the block is in. Generally they can provide rotting leaves and rotting mushrooms for composting, edible mushrooms for cooking and a biome dependent resource.
An animation has been added for foraging / collecting loot.
A number of bugs have been fixed including:
- Fixed placement of Nestable eggs from breeding
- Fixed issue with some decoration props not returning to inventory
- Fixed bugs with various different UI
In other good news, most of the team is back now from other work commitments / holidays over the Christmas / New Year. So it will be a productive few months for the development team!
