New Crafting UI, Crops, Recipes More

While we were putting a new build up we thought we’d include some fun new content – 2 new crops (tomatoes and sugarcane), 20 new recipes (for the cooking pot, processor and dairy machine), some flower pots that can be crafted on the crafting bench and the wisps/fireflies that make their appearance as night falls.

So let’s talk about some of these changes! The new farming system seems to have been received well and seeing the beginning of some automation in the game has been really satisfying. We still want to add a few more options to the farming menu like selecting whether you want the crop auto harvested or not – this will mainly be useful for decorative flowers and trees you may like to plant and leave in a certain position like the topiary trees.

The new crafting menu is much easier to navigate and the search bar works really well. You can even narrow your selections down by colour which I can see being useful once we add more decorative items to the game.

We still want to add the option to assign a crafter to a machine and also the ability to maintain x stock in inventory to give the system some automation. I’m really looking forward to the day you can set up a factory of workers each returning to their own machine each day to do their set work.

The new cooking menu is much like the crafting menu. You now have a basic description of the meal and can see what it looks like as well as the nutritional rating of the meal. You can see a few of the new recipes here which include chamomile tea (giving a temporary use for the chamomile plant until we implement health), cornbread, molasses and more for you to discover…

Our two new crops are the tomato and sugarcane plants. The tomatoes are the start of some healthy eating crops available for the Kin and sugarcane is another staple crop. We adjusted the growing times of all of the crops so for example growing sugarcane is a long term investment with a payoff at the end while items like carrots and tomatoes grow in a much shorter time frame, much as it is in real life.

Wait for nightfall and you will see lighted insects flitting about the night sky. Based on fireflies, Matt likes to call them wisps, they won’t interact with the Kin at all but add a bit of mystery and light to the night.