Engineer Alpha's Log #80: 0.7 Release and Faster Conveyors

Engineer Alpha

An open world survival and automation game. Engineer Alpha combines an infinite editable world, building and connecting of automated machinery, and RPG style player progression.

First thing is that version 0.7 is planned for release on Tuesday the 12th of March barring the finding of any catastrophic bugs. Balancing and changes will still continue to happen even after the release. Now to the far more interesting bit I have decided to increase the throughput of conveyors. in my playtesting I found it too difficult to move a significant quantity of items around especially when it came to things like stone that are in high number. When dealing with things like the output of mining drills it was difficult to get everything out on a single belt and making more than one belt line that could sort was a pain. Currently items on belts have a spacing of 37.5cm or 3/4 of a block. The standard size of an item on a conveyor is 25cm so 1/3 of the space on the conveyor is empty space. In the next build this spacing will be decreasing to 27.5cm so only 10% more than the size of an item. I would consider making it even tighter but things start to look problematic if they get too close. The base speed of conveyors is also increasing from 37.5cm/s to 55cm/s. Now conveyors will move 2, 4, 6 items per second for copper, iron, steel respectively. up from 1, 2, 4. I decided to drop the gains for steel conveyors for now as I have concerns about the visuals of items traveling at the speeds for another doubling. Steel conveyors are largely replaced by tubes for any high throughput situations but they still have their place so it shouldn't be an issue. Hopefully this makes it easier to move things around in your efforts to harvest the entire planet. I am also considering a few other quality of life changes that may make it into Tuesdays build so we will have to see.