Show/Hide Show/Hide

FOUNDRY

 
DevBlog #80 | Foundry Fridays: Timeline & HotfixMay 30, 2025 - Community AnnouncementsHello everyone! Thank you for all the feedback we have received since the last FOUNDRY Friday where we presented our plans for the future and asked for feedback about what the next update should contain. Reading your thoughts is very helpful and helps us prioritize things. Our current plan is to do one more big update this year and potentially one or two smaller updates. The main content for the bigger update is planned to be trains, strong contenders for minor updates are new terraforming features and general quality of life improvements. Please note that things can be subject to change. We wanted to announce our plans early, as we want to be as transparent as possible about the development process, but that includes predictions and estimates which could change. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/ec9560416118f8d3e861b10f8081ed664d3d0d9c.png The plan for trains We intend to bring trains as soon as possible (before the update itself) on to an experimental preview branch where people can try them out and provide feedback. On this branch you should not expect them to make sense in terms of balancing or to be fully functional, but instead as an early preview to gather feedback - especially regarding usability and player comfort. Trains in a 3D world can be a challenge, and we want to get it right before we release them as a full update. I do not yet have a timeline for such a branch, but I’ll keep you up to date. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/bb7f49ca26c50de8fe30d56b49edba0b8174380a.png Upcoming Hotfix & Quality of Life We have been working on a hotfix that improves and fixes many of the reported less critical issues in Update 2. It is now available on the hotfix branch and will stay there for a bit longer before we roll it out to everyone as we still have a few more things to work on. This hotfix also includes a few quality of life improvements: Pressing escape now pauses the game in single player mode. Reworked the freight elevator so that it is able to provide feedback about its state and potential issues. A freight elevator that isn’t set up properly will glow red and looking at it will give you additional information about the problem in form of a tooltip. We plan to address a couple more things that have been pointed out in your feedback, stay tuned! This is it for today, see you in two weeks! -mrmcd Follow us on socials: Discord Twitter Reddit Facebook Paradox Forum Stay tuned for more news! https://store.steampowered.com/app/983870/FOUNDRY/DevBlog #79 | Foundry Fridays: What's next?May 16, 2025 - Community AnnouncementsHello everyone! I want to start with a big thank you to all new and recurring players who are currently playing Update 2 “Galactic Commerce”! We’re pleased to see that the new content sparked a lot of interest and it’s exciting to see new people getting on board daily. Our launch went well with only a few critical issues that we’ve been able to fix quickly. We are still working to solve some less critical bugs and to add polishing based on your feedback, but as of now it looks like we can go back to working on the next content update pretty soon. And that brings us to the big question of today’s blog post! What’s next for FOUNDRY? We have a few big features planned, with some of them already in the works. On top of that we are now carefully evaluating your feedback to see if some new things come up that need to be addressed and prioritized. Below I’ll go over those features. Neither the order of arrival, nor the size of the next update has been fully decided yet. After such a big update, the team and I would prefer more regular and smaller updates going forward. However we need to make sure the updates make sense and provide enough content to make it worth coming back and playing. Also worth noting: The upcoming updates will add to the game and therefore they will not break saves. Trains Our most requested feature, on which we have already been working on. In December we showed an early work in progress teaser, which you can find here. I don’t think there is a lot to be explained about trains, everyone agrees that they are awesome. Place down some tracks, a couple stations and watch your trains move goods around the factory and your mining outposts. They will come in handy for scenarios where you need very high throughput, but even without megafactories they will be useful. Current State: Overall progress on this feature is pretty good and we hope that it’ll be in the next major update. You can expect more train previews and information in the near future. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/7da7ce0663d5800d34c871241ef5bcec0bd8db03.png Advanced Power Plant A complex power plant, made out of multiple modular buildings to satisfy your ever growing need for power. This feature will also contain related recipes and content like the plant fuel production. It would expand the science tier 5 content and we have previously shown parts of it in a live stream and a blog. Current State: We have completed some of the work needed, but there is also quite a bit of work left. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/2bbcf59d84a0625b8b1c4f2bcdcc07796fff0049.jpg Drilling and Terraforming We see a lot of feedback requesting better (and faster) ways to drill and terraform. We do have a couple of ideas to solve this. They range from a larger mining drill area, to shaped charges for precision excavation with explosives, to machines that automatically excavate for you. Current State: We haven’t done any work on this yet, but given it being smaller in scope it might be a strong contender f...Free to Play WeekendMay 15, 2025 - Community Announcements{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/7b018ac8e4e68c56a518e1c0ce8f826794741990.jpg Hello, We are celebrating the release of Update 2: Galactic Commerce with a Free to Play Weekend! Play with your friends and explore the new update and everything FOUNDRY has to offer - together! The F2P ends on Monday, May 19th, at 7pm CEST. If you have missed it, FOUNDRY is also on sale right now. The sale continues until the 22nd of May! Follow us on socials: Discord Twitter Reddit Facebook Paradox Forum Stay tuned for more news! https://store.steampowered.com/app/983870/FOUNDRY/Hotfix #2 is now Live!May 12, 2025 - Community Announcements{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/7b018ac8e4e68c56a518e1c0ce8f826794741990.jpg Hello everyone! We have a new Hotfix coming your way. Read all about what is included here: Fix for not properly displaying item action hotkeys in localized languages Fixed a desync that could occur when connecting to a server that had power strained fluid consuming buildings Fixed error that could occur when displaying mod comparison frame Fixed dedicated servers not pausing when noone is connected Fixed issue that could prevent you from connecting to a server with high ping Fixed an error that could occur trying to delete an invalid save file Fixed an error that could occur when using the jetpack Fixed an issue that could occur connecting to dedicated servers Fixed a bug displaying text on maximized screen panels Fixed an error that could occur when playing the game in polish Updated localization Loading screen now displays different Foundry tips! Thank you and have a nice day! Follow us on socials: Discord Twitter Reddit Facebook Paradox Forum Stay tuned for more news! https://store.steampowered.com/app/983870/FOUNDRY/New Hotfix is live!May 7, 2025 - Community Announcements{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/7b018ac8e4e68c56a518e1c0ce8f826794741990.jpg Hello everyone! We have released a hotfix since the release of Update 2: Galactic Commerce that was released yesterday, May 6th. Read the full list of fixes below: Updated Russian voice lines Fixed an error that could cause foundry to get stuck on a black screen on launch(if you still have this happen to you, please check your antivirus settings and please let us know which antivirus you use so we can add Foundry to their list of exemptions) Fixed an error that could occur when clicking buttons during galaxy generation Fixed a hang that could occur if you built a loop out of your conveyors Fixed issue where certain planets could be generated with no demands Fix for character color change not working Fixed an issue where the company rank requirements wasn't being properly set when using the spanish(latin american) localization Fixed an error that would prevent you from deleting a legacy_update_1 save file if you first tried to load it Fixed an error that could occur if you clicked to delete a file and then clicked to load a file without closing the delete popup Fixed error that could occur when disabling desync debug data Fixed desync that could occur when bulk demolishing objects Removed company rank requirement for Science Pack 2 Fixed desync that could occur when unlocking ships Fixed save files that have planets with no competitors assigned to them Thank you and have a nice day! Follow us on socials: Discord Twitter Reddit Facebook Paradox Forum Stay tuned for more news! https://store.steampowered.com/app/983870/FOUNDRY/Update 2: Galactic Commerce is LIVE!May 6, 2025 - Community Announcements{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/8f5ed93774a3db9a85e1ee01469a676268971349.jpg Hello Founders! Update 2: Galactic Commerce is now live! This update brings robot production and trading to the forefront of FOUNDRY and challenges you to build bigger and better than ever before, all while mastering the complexities of interstellar trade. Watch the trailer here: Patch notes: Features: Added Galactic Commerce: New Galaxy map: Procedurally generated galaxy on each fresh game start. Unlock galactic sectors and acquire trade licences to sell your robots to planets. Set up and manage supply routes between planets to distribute your robots. Buy and sell resources on the galactic market. Compete for market dominance against other companies.New Space Station Features: Dozens of new station upgrades. Spaceship Management: Buy spaceships of different types and assign them to various tasks. Establish trade routes to the galactic market. Sales Platform: Sell your products to casual customers. R&D Lab: Earn XP and levels on each produced robot and improve your products. Fuel Station: Produce your own spaceship fuel to supply your spaceships instead of buying it from the market.Many new robot types for you to build and sell. Choose your company name and logo. New Company Rank system: Increase your rank based on your lifetime earnings. New Shipping pad buildings to ship items between the space station and the planet. New station terminal building to contact the space station. Keep track of your finances on various accounting-related charts and tables. New feature that allows you to pay back your debts. New onboarding tasks. New quests from C3-BB. New research options to fit the commerce narrative. Countless balancing adjustments.Pipe system 2.0: New and improved pipe flow simulation, including performance improvements. Added new smart conveyor drag mode. Added new starting planet option which affects which biome and resource distribution. Added orbital uplink tool and space laser that can be used to terraform large areas. Added lava caves and lava smelters. Added new Tundra biome. Added new jungle/sandy desert/forest critters. Added new underwater decor/vegetation. Add new freight elevator III/IV. UI Visuals Rework: New Frames + Header Bar Visuals New Button Visuals New Dropdown Visuals New Scroll View Visuals New Slider Visuals Bug Fixes: Fixed data system settings copy not working for auto producers. Fixed lods on several buildings. Fixed issue with smoke sometimes going through floors. Fixed an issue with loaders going to sleep when slots are soft locked. Construction drones now appear as idle when you’re out of materials. Fixed elevator lods. Fixed error that could occur when using bulk demolish when connected to a dedicated server. Fixed blast furnace sometimes not working correctly. Fixed an issue where the character could fall through the terrain and then spawn in the sky. Optimizations: Optimized physics simulation. Optimized particle systems by moving their simul...DevBlog #78 | Foundry Fridays: Update 2 Infos & Pipe System ReworkMay 2, 2025 - Community AnnouncementsHello everyone! This is the final dev blog before we release Update 2 “Galactic Commerce” next Tuesday at 14:00 CEST. In this blog I’ll be covering a couple different things related to the update, before I have one more surprise feature at the end of the episode. Dev Stream on Monday On Monday at 18:00 CEST (9AM PT) we’ll be going live on Twitch (Paradox Interactive Channel) and on YouTube (Foundry Channel) to show off various features of the update and to answer your questions. Jump by and let’s have a chat! Update Preview Video Part 2 from SpectrumDad This week we have released the second part of our update preview series, made in cooperation with SpectrumDad. This one covers robots, commerce, lava caves and the R&D lab. In case you missed it, you can check out part one here. The Legacy Version Steam Branch With the new update you will have to restart a new save as too many things have changed to keep the saves compatible. However we do not want to strip you of the ability to keep playing or revisiting your old saves since we know how many of you spent hundreds of hours on a single save. For this we have introduced the Legacy Version Steam Branch: It allows you to go back to the old FOUNDRY version, which then allows you to keep loading and playing old saves. For details on how it works we have prepared a post on our Steam forum, which can be found here. Barreled Olumite In the previous blogs I have covered the galactic market, which allows you to buy and sell items. While that lowers the profit margin of your robots, it does offer an interesting new angle to resource acquisition. Having a shortage of resources? Quickly buy some from the market. Want to skip mining entirely? Expensive, but an option. However the market only supports solid items, and therefore it didn’t cover one of the most requested things: An infinite Olumite source. To finally address this we have added Olumite barrelling, which allows you to put Olumite into barrels, which are solid items. Later you can empty the barrel to convert it back to its liquid state. For this we have introduced a new machine, the Barrel Filler. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/8fe0bb86dd718484562a8d4f69a73e4bdaae8471.jpg We also have added a bit of additional gameplay around it with things like having empty barrels as an item you need to manage. Re-use them or recycle them back into Xenoferrite Plates. (Or burn them to dust in the Incinerator?) Empty barrels will now be needed for a handful of crafting recipes and things like Portable Fuel will now leave you with the empty barrel after using it at a generator. Pipe System Rework And here’s the final surprise for the update: A fully reworked pipe system. We (and the community) were unhappy with the way our pipe system worked since quite some time. Simple questions about throughput could barely be answered without writing paragraphs. What was well intentioned by making it the most realistic it could be, ultimately mostly caused inconveniences. So we decid...DevBlog #77 | Foundry Fridays: Update 2 Release Date & More PreviewsApr 18, 2025 - Community AnnouncementsHello everyone! Let’s start with the big news right away for those who haven’t heard of it yet. The upcoming commerce update has a release date, and it’s already pretty soon: May 6th 2025. Save the date! If you’re curious about more details regarding the update, I recommend taking a look at the past four dev blogs which were called the “Commerce Update Preview” series: Part 1: General Preview & Game Intro Part 2: Robot Types, Space Ships & Shipping Part 3: Galaxy & Starmap Part 4: Galactic Market & Lava Caves Update Preview Video Part 1 from SpectrumDad We have worked with SpectrumDad to create a two part preview/tutorial video series about the upcoming commerce update. Part one of the video covers the basics and is now available on YouTube: Special thanks to SpectrumDad for making those! R&D Lab Let’s keep going with showing off more new and upcoming features. The research & development lab, in short R&D Lab, is a buildable upgrade for your space station which allows you to increase your robot production proficiency by analyzing the robots you produce. It allows you to gain experience points per robot type for each robot you produce. Each robot has a corresponding level and gaining one will reward you with a “Tech Point”. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/3a8ef2a20c21f72bc1fe18518c696434bf710b21.png You can probably guess where this is going, it’s basically a light version of a skill tree per robot. You can spend your tech points on three different robot improvements. You can increase their quality and therefore their sales price, you can decrease the amount of resources needed to produce them or you can make them lighter (which can be useful to fit more robots into your cargo ships). We would like to add more improvements over time, but it’s actually pretty challenging to come up with those, let us know in case you have some ideas! There are also some minor auxiliary features like focus research which allows you to focus on certain robots to increase their XP gain or to spend Firmarlite on increasing the base XP gain per produced robot. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/2ba55be0e887de4b84625547ea856a66efe66bce.png To keep the balancing stable the unlocked benefits aren’t massively influential but they are clearly noticeable and feel rewarding. Our goal with this feature is to boost long-term motivation and provide immersiveness. It's only logical you would get better at making robots over time, right? We don’t know yet, but I personally feel like this could be an interesting mechanic for other goods as well and not just robots. UI Visuals Overhaul As a surprise change we have been overhauling major parts of how our UI looks. It is something that has been on our list since a while but we never really found the time to do until now. The upcoming update will feature a new and more polished look for various parts of the UI, most importantly the general frames and frame headers, buttons, scroll views, drop downs and sliders. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/2037d4b0...Update 2: Galactic CommerceApr 8, 2025 - Community AnnouncementsHello everyone! Update 2: Galactic Commerce will be released May 6th! It brings robot production and trading to the forefront of FOUNDRY and challenges you to build bigger and better than ever before, all while mastering the complexities of interstellar trade. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/cf564d1fb7df36a8b67feec2a7e64d80e1bcf8d1.jpg We have previously talked about what is to come in this update in our previous DevBlogs. You can find more in-depth information in our Commerce Preview (1-4) DevBlogs. Here is a summary of all the things you will experience in the new update: Diversify your product lines and choose from multiple new robot types to sell on the open market. Focus on cuddly service bots, hulking transportation droids or deadly war machines and unlock further options through research. Your space station is your trading hub; you’ll sell your goods to the rest of the galaxy from here. Deliver products from the moon’s surface using transport ships that travel to and from the station using the new Shipping Pad building. Sell robots in exchange for Firmarlite, the precious metal that serves as the galaxy’s currency. Use it to craft new robot parts or upgrade modules for your space station. Galactic trade lives in the Star Map, a procedurally generated, infinitely replayable map packed with sectors and planets, each with their own specific product demands. Buy larger transport ships to deliver products in greater quantities, unlock new trade opportunities by purchasing Star Map upgrades or invest in an orbital terraforming laser to resculpt your moon’s surface quickly, but perhaps not neatly. Carefully plan your factory’s expansion to meet the demands of the market, and take advantage of bonuses to maximize profits. Bring in the big bucks by acquiring trade licenses to connect new planets to your ever-expanding network. Turbocharge your revenue and outperform your rivals to reach the top of the galactic sales leaderboard. You’ll need a distribution network capable of snaking its way through the stars to supply distant sectors. Buy and manage a fleet of spaceships to support your trading vision. We hope that you are just as excited for Update 2: Galactic Commerce as we are. Keep an eye on our YouTube in the following weeks as we willl reveal more details about the upcoming update! As always, we would love to hear your feedback, ideally in the Steam comments below or over at our Discord. Follow us on socials: Discord Twitter Reddit Facebook Paradox Forum Stay tuned for more news! https://store.steampowered.com/app/983870/FOUNDRY/DevBlog #76 | Foundry Fridays: Galactic Market & Lava Caves (Commerce Preview 4)Apr 4, 2025 - Community AnnouncementsHello everyone! I am back again with another FOUNDRY Friday and today we will be covering two different topics. First we have more information about the upcoming commerce-related content as we will be looking into the galactic market. And right after we will take a look at some changes down on the planet itself where we have added lava caves to the depths! In case you missed it, you can find the previous three parts of the commerce update preview series here: part one, part two, part three. The Galactic Market The galactic market is a giant space station on the galaxy map, which acts as the galaxy's main trade hub for commodities. It will not be interested in buying your robots. Once you unlock the galaxy view, you will be able to interact with the market. Initially its main purpose is to buy more construction material for the space station, which cannot be made on your own until you reach a later point in the game. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/2b91794724682979ce772c3c587852da3aa0bdb3.png However we’re planning to allow you to trade most other goods on the galactic market as well. It’s something we will have to test quite a bit and might change or limit should it fail to meet our expectations, so take this paragraph as an experimental idea. That being said, I’d like to allow the players to buy pretty much anything that is a raw material or an intermediate good. By intermediate I mean something like machinery parts or electronic components, we would not allow you to buy things like robot arms so that you could just assemble them on the assembly lines. It’s a bold move, but I think it will play well into player freedom and sandbox experience, which are both parts of the game we are trying to further expand. First of all, it will reduce the profit margin by your robot sales by a lot if you don’t mine and manufacture everything on your own, forcing you to have a lot more robot manufacturing machines. It also presents you with other challenges like space ship logistics if you decide to buy a lot of resources instead of making them on your own. It opens up different ways of playing the game and that seems very exciting. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/f177d8472af0235ddcbfdc5643b1f6435301c985.png In the beginning I mentioned you can also sell to the galactic market. In terms of profits it won’t be highly profitable, but it provides an option of selling excess resources and that could be an interesting mechanic. I’m also sure someone will become rich by selling millions of metal plates (or explosives!) instead of making robots, and I find that idea kind of funny. Mechanics-wise the market offers one-time trades and an option for setting up automatically recurring orders like “buy more ore if stored ore falls below 1000” or “sell plates once more than 500 are stored”. Every trade will require a space ship and keep it busy while it travels to the market and back. Lava Caves We’ve been showing a lot of commerce-related features in the past weeks, so it’s time to...DevBlog #75 | Foundry Fridays: Galaxy & Starmap (Commerce Preview 3)Mar 21, 2025 - Community AnnouncementsHello everyone! Welcome back to the third iteration (part one, part two) of our Commerce Preview series. This time we’re covering the galaxy map, where you’ll be selling your robots. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/98c368e0effb2e00a03d1bad9baedc388441b8da.pngTo honor our publishing partner we did the most Paradox thing we could think of: Adding a strategy map. Before we jump into the details of star map related gameplay, I want to alleviate any concerns about FOUNDRY turning into a different kind of game: Almost all your playtime continues to be about first person factory building. The star map is a complementary feature that adds a meta level of gameplay so that your factory serves a bigger purpose, but it doesn’t take away from the core gameplay. While it has some active gameplay choices, ultimately it wont confront you with any large difficulties as you might expect from strategy games. The Galaxy Let us begin by talking about how the galaxy looks and what it holds for you. First of all, our galaxy is procedurally generated, which means every game will be different as you play in a unique universe. Each galaxy is made of roughly a thousand planets, which are grouped together by sectors. Unless you want to play for a really long time, you won’t be interacting with all of them, but I believe that a large universe is important for it to feel authentic and alive. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/26a7fe54b5224950c6a6877d4238dd55ff2a587b.png Visually we decided to depict the planets without planetary systems and the stars they naturally orbit. That means the map view is not astronomical but instead abstracted for your convenience. There are many different planet types, and the type of each planet has influence about its properties and demands. There is also quite a bit of background information about each planet, for example which faction it belongs to, how it’s governed, dominant industries, properties like day length or gravity and some more. Internally we use that data to generate planet demands, but they are not relevant to the gameplay itself. Sectors are groups of planets, and their distinctive shapes help you navigate the map. Sectors are connected to each other by hyperlanes, which will be relevant for gameplay. As you explore the galaxy you will have to follow those lines. Galactic Commerce Now that we know how our galaxy looks, let us explore how you supply it with robots. Our previous blogs already covered space ships and the sales platform, which allows you to sell robots to casual customers passing by. But that demand is limited, and they also pay less than what you can get for your robots on planets. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/e37e0fda45cfaff0e6e27e8242030e2dba47b085.jpg Your space station, which acts as your gateway to the stars, is within your own starting sector. You will have to unlock one of the adjacent sectors to get started. Unlocking a sector requires certain space station upgrades to be built. The further you upgrade the station, the...DevBlog #74 | Foundry Fridays: Commerce Preview 2Mar 7, 2025 - Community AnnouncementsHello everyone! Two weeks ago I shared part one of the Commerce Preview series and our team was very excited to see the positive reactions. Reading your replies gave us further confidence that we’re on the right track even though this meant that we had to delay and adjust our update schedule. Since we get a lot of questions when the update will be released: We’re not fully there yet where we can announce a release date, but we’re planning on doing so in the near future. Today I’ll continue to share more information about various aspects of the upcoming Commerce update. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/3d2598d4b63669dda7a526267a3dcb857a48510c.pngVarious early to mid game robots, textures are work in progress Robot Variety Previously we shared a screenshot of a transportation robot, so I thought it would be a good time to give you a bit of an overview about how many different robots you’ll be able to make and sell. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/02fd5590446c2606c6abb4b44855578a87157a0e.png First of all, our robots are grouped in categories and robots in the same category fulfil similar tasks. Example categories are Logistics, Appliances or Mining. There will be multiple robots for each category, and not every category will have the same amount of robots. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/e4c9a98c44c98fe798d67eacc9776276d3bc0aa7.png Let’s take a closer look at the Logistics category. We’re starting off with a basic Transportation Bot: It’s cheap, simple to produce and gets its job done, mostly. A great starting point for a new factory. But as you progress you’ll see that there is also a lot of demand for more advanced logistics robots. That is where the Heavy Duty Transportation Bot comes in: A more advanced robot that requires more complex materials (like steel), is a bit more difficult to produce, but ultimately can be sold for a higher price. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/3ce13bd3c8788693349f28124efcde049bafa5ed.png While the Heavy Duty Transportation Bot is a clear upgrade, it’s not a replacement for the basic Transportation Bot. The galaxy keeps demanding both (and many more!) robots, depending on planetary needs. This would be the perfect segway to pivot to the star map, but that will be the topic of a future FOUNDRY Friday. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/5f84c7caf27aa445fb1ffe2d1e3e0bd79082d1e6.png Once you further advance through the game you’ll unlock a flying cargo bot and potentially other variants. A similar trajectory can be imagined for the other robot categories. That might make you wonder how many different robots there will be? Well, I don’t have a final number yet, but we’re aiming for quite a bunch. And here’s the key part: We don’t expect you to make all of them (although you’re welcome to do so if you choose). Our goal is to provide more personal choice and a more sandbox-like playstyle. The game will ask you to make a couple different robots for sure, but ultimately we want you to make your own calls since it’s your factory. Will you be going for...DevBlog #73 | Foundry Fridays: Commerce Preview 1Feb 21, 2025 - Community Announcements{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/c503a10e597d9239ef6375005e459e8babefa299.png Hello everyone! Today we are going to take a look at some of the new commerce features we have been working on over the past months and how the early game is changing. As a reminder, we are making those changes to give the factory (and the game overall) a more motivating and less linear goal to work towards. These new features complement the existing research progression and give that game a more unique feeling. In case you want a more detailed recap about why we’re making those adjustments to the game, check some of our other dev blogs here and here. Adjusted Setting We have modified the onboarding loop and the overall setting, you’re no longer the clueless robot trying to figure out what went wrong with the initiative to build a large factory on the planet. Instead you have just acquired a derelict space station and colonization rights on the resource rich moon the station orbits. Your intent is to set up an intergalactic robot manufacturing company. You’re still assisted by Carl and C3-BB who will help you get started. Your immediate goal is to build up the most critically required machinery to start making simple robots, repair the most broken parts of the station and begin selling your first product. Oh and did I mention that you’re in debt? What mattered most to us is that the new theme is a key part of the game from the very beginning. It won't take you countless hours to finally make and sell a robot, instead you will accomplish this by the end of the tutorial - which is slightly longer than before, but not by a lot. We always planned to focus on commerce to give the player a good reason to build the factory, but our previous game loop brought those key mechanics way too late. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/39f6615c28ac86416d7a290b1e06c4b96914bed8.png Onboarding and Tutorial Tasks The onboarding tasks are similar until you build the beacon to call down C3-BB at which point new mechanics are introduced. You’re immediately tasked with making contact with the station and analyzing its status. We’ve reworked the space station management UI. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/759e903dd20fec9fc6042867e2b0aa780c1b6d8f.pngUI screenshots are work in progress This is the main hub for all things related to the space station and it comes with new features and greater depth. Initially, you’ll only be able to open this management console from a building, but as you progress, a remote view will be unlocked. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/baa7a5763aba743eea4bf36108465fed21d808da.png The following tasks will be a mixture of introducing space station features, such as building and upgrading parts, and continuing to build up your factory so that you’re set to make your first very simple robot. Since robots are sold through your station, the final missing link is to get your products up there. For this, we have introduced a new building which we call the Shipping Pad; it is more flexible and replace...DevBlog #72 | Foundry Fridays: Different Starting PlanetsFeb 7, 2025 - Community AnnouncementsHello everyone! Today I want to share a new and exciting feature with you: A selection screen for different starting planets. When you start a new game you’ll be able to select one of multiple planets, which feature different resource and biome modifications. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/83d49cc22d6a0387bc190f7e5d28c3ddec56dcbc.png This has been a feature that we somewhat coincidentally stumbled into while we’re working on the commerce update. As you know immersion has always been something we care about deeply and for the new commerce theme (more information in future dev blogs) it is a great fit to let you select the planet you want to start your factory on. At the current state of development we’re very focused on the core features and changes necessary to get the new update done as soon as possible, therefore I initially assumed different starting planets aren’t going to happen. But as we contemplated the topic a bit we realized that we already have systems to make this work: Our world generation system supports customizable resource settings (density & richness for all ores and liquids) and we have a system we call “biome grid”, which allows us to tell the world generator how biomes are distributed around the world. All we had to do was add support for different presets that can be tied to different starting planets. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/1fd882bb0cee80e48d2d9421732706fe7fb1f79e.png We decided to allow the players to further customize the resource distribution settings as they were able before, selecting a planet just applies certain default settings, but you’ll be free to further adjust as you see fit. The biome grids however are static per planet and cannot be changed. The way we are going to utilize the biome grid system is that it’ll allow us to over- or underrepresent certain biomes to give the planet a different vibe. For example to make it into a (mostly) desert or ice planet. So let us take a look at a biome grid: {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/62e62839e89325433fab825092c3b2b912f62042.jpg What you can see here is a grid with different colors per box. One axis represents the temperature and the other axis represents the precipitation (both from high to low), the two metrics used (derived from noise based procedural generation) for the world generator to decide which biome to place. Each grid box represents the biome the world generator will use for the according combination of values. For example when it’s hot and humid we assign the tropical rainforest, while if it’s hot and dry it’s a desert. Having different presets per planet allows us to easily generate a very different planet. Of course it would be even better to have more differences like different configurations on mountain and river settings, but those are things we view as stretch goals that can be looked at at later times during our Early Access period. For now this is a great feature to increase replayability and player choice for a comparatively low amount of work on ou...DevBlog #71 | Foundry Fridays: Keeping It CoolJan 24, 2025 - Community AnnouncementsHello again! My name is Jason, the art director of Foundry. In this week’s ‘Foundry Fridays’ dev diary, I’m showing progress on a new biome. This choice to go with a cold climate biome was only natural 🙂 We wanted an environment that was an opposing counterpart to the rocky desert biome. There is still some work to be done on tuning density and variety of vegetation for biomass resources, but we’re happy with how it’s turning out so far and makes a great addition to the other current biomes already in the game. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/f551a1fa87d5a7f96fa61f3c39762fcd0414d2a7.jpg I love how the water all of a sudden looks very cold when next to snow covered terrain. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/644e4ea9137dbd3efb5dcaff09f2ca6c7046cd15.jpg {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/c16048d381785dcc0acc8d3e93369b50cde5c081.jpg {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/cef287baa062a4805a722663aee88e926b309e2c.jpg {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/3332f66a6588a45edb4625b5d08cb2ef85b8a5cb.jpg Breaking It Down Here are some of the rocks and vegetation used to generate the biome. Trees look thick and tough to withstand the cold temperatures. Rock pillars' shapes are sharp and sheer to contrast against the rocky desert counterparts. Winter flowers add accents of colour to the frosty white surroundings. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/c576501feef5cf7111213ff2b4133ba37ebf9665.jpg {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/287a4828906f5e43a727379ddb81bb352ccdb999.jpg {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/b6fd5e7cbae1d748a200fe1399c25ec6ed0e436a.jpg Stay tuned to see more of this little guy hobbling around the snowy landscapes 🙂 {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/3938f031e17a5e9024968cbde88310d09d576edc.jpg So there you have it. Short and sweet. Until next time! Jason Follow us on socials: Discord Twitter Reddit Facebook Paradox Forum Stay tuned for more news! https://store.steampowered.com/app/983870/FOUNDRY/DevBlog #70 | Foundry Fridays: Scaling (the performance of) the factoryJan 10, 2025 - Community AnnouncementsGreetings Founders! From all of us at Foundry, we wish you all a happy new year. As some of you may know, we’ve been hard at work at expanding the gameplay side of Foundry. For example, with the recently announced trains we want to allow the player to make factories that span the entire map. But as the factory expands, we have to make sure that it runs properly for our players, even on portable devices like the Steam Deck. While going through some save files from users that had reported performance issues, we came across a particular condition that would make the game’s performance come to a crawl. By profiling it, we discovered that the game would sometimes spend up to a third of the time that it took to render a frame just on the screen panels of machines. Here’s a screenshot of the mere 27 FPS within a base that definitely needs some performance improvements. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/31ca898e9e18cabeeed8a80b3a95dc4c262eee27.jpgThe benchmark place, where performance goes to die… For the screen panels we already had some optimizations in place to not update the text or contents of the screen panel every frame, but rather periodically. This load balancing trick is used in many systems throughout Foundry, and it prevents the game from suddenly having large stutters when you move around your camera or a power outage hits your base. However, even though we update the contents of the screens only every few frames, Unity will still have to render each of the 36 screens in the above screenshot one-by-one, each consisting of multiple steps. This is unlike the 3D geometry of the buildings, which are rendered using GPU instancing which makes it cheap to render either 10 or 100 buildings on the screen. To address this, we thought that it’d made sense to only re-render the screen panels when the screen contents get rendered. Since our screen panels already uses Unity’s UI system and it would take a long time to make a comparable UI system, we opted for trying to get Unity’s UI to rerender periodically. However, to do this we need to take full control over Unity’s UI rendering and replicate how Unity renders the UI of the screens ourselves. After having done exactly that, the game is now able to render all the screen panels of all the buildings in the world to this single texture. By only updating a single screen per-frame, we avoid the large cost of having to re-render hundreds of individual widgets of the screen panels. And to avoid losing responsiveness when a user wants to read or interact with the screen, the game will only use this optimization at far away distances at various smaller resolutions. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/3e89e0e48fdce1fb8e89ae9327580cbd0d6819e1.png An example of how the various screen panels are all tightly packed into this texture The last step is to replace the regular screen panel rendering with the versions that are drawn inside this texture atlas cache, as we internally refer to it. Using the same GPU instancing that we use...DevBlog #69 | Foundry Fridays: Merry ChristmasDec 27, 2024 - Community AnnouncementsMerry Christmas from the FOUNDRY-Team! Follow us on socials: Discord Twitter Reddit Facebook Paradox Forum Stay tuned for more news! https://store.steampowered.com/app/983870/FOUNDRY/DevBlog #68 | Foundry Fridays: Power Plant PreviewDec 13, 2024 - Community AnnouncementsHello everyone! A few blog posts ago we promised to show a new modular building on the next FOUNDRY Friday and instead covered a different topic in the following post. Since we received a few “reminders” I wanted to address this grave injustice and hereby finally show the work in progress art of the new power plant! {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/85e2a5080c764eac3c1dab3dc5768f7f99a43c65.jpg What you can see is a power plant that is made out of several different modular buildings. I once mentioned that one of the main motivations for modular buildings was that in reality it’s more likely to have a single large machine than hundreds of small ones working in parallel. A power plant made of multiple such buildings is the next logical step. We’re trying to make those objects - especially once combined - feel like real buildings. In fact, some of them are so massive you can enter them. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/1dab1368828e72bd55923f832287a67475773107.jpg Its functionality is inspired by real life nuclear power plants, although a bit simplified. We haven’t yet decided if we’ll theme it as a nuclear plant or if we’re going to come up with a more sci-fi-ish design. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/9b2f61c0a47359b4121597effdc0337ebee70359.jpg Your task is to build those buildings and properly connect each of them. As we are still working on this I won’t go further into detail but instead share screenshots. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/f08d81aab16ffda52d12de0dcbe63723bc2f1dff.jpg {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/84807bc6348323423228ddc7362d742fc853de24.jpg {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/3a44c94d51ec65b500e2b086cf7cf9fb304bcfa9.jpg {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/2684c137e1c6ac40775d6d00cc26dcf55fd59fff.jpg {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/f75aca0b1948f1fa501489b13f4b8431568ce654.jpg {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/6b971a550e39898481700a8989d5454343266c78.jpg {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/ff838633c3711ff828dcc24297b732f06eab4cea.jpg {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/0fae2cfe9d86d68a02906bf21fe9c16d8795b766.jpg {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38913947/f853c4c84a65b3265eab45539b1978686e254c4a.jpg Please note that things are subject to change as everything is work in progress. See you next time, -mrmcd Follow us on socials: Discord Twitter Reddit Facebook Paradox Forum Stay tuned for more news! https://store.steampowered.com/app/983870/FOUNDRY/ DevBlog #67 | Foundry Fridays: Update 2 TimelineNov 29, 2024 - Community AnnouncementsHello everyone! We’re writing today's FOUNDRY Friday to provide news regarding the next big release, referred to as Update 2. As you may know, we originally planned for the 2nd update to arrive at the end of this year. After analyzing player feedback and survey results, we have decided to adjust the timeline and move Update 2 into next year. The main reason for this decision is because we want FOUNDRY to provide a great and unique gaming experience and we believe to make this work we need an even bigger update. Because of the scope of the changes, breaking it into incremental pieces would have been difficult and slowed development. This means that instead of getting a smaller update at the end of this year, we will instead deliver a much larger update next year, addressing many of the suggestions our active community members shared with us during these months. What will Update 2 be about? Many of our players have mentioned that a more meaningful purpose for building a factory would make the game more interesting for them — Update 2 solves this by letting players explore commerce and robot production of all kinds. After all, what’s a factory if you aren’t building something? We’ve been talking about this in several past FOUNDRY Fridays and you can read about that here and here. We believe our work on this feature drastically improves the core of the game. Alongside that, we will also focus on new features, buildings, recipes and space station content — everything to make the game longer, deeper and more engaging — we will gradually share more details as we work towards Update 2. And finally we will keep working on game performance, optimization and QoL features so that your factories will run smoothly while looking great. We would like to express our gratitude to everyone who has been talking to us on Steam, Discord and socials, and participated in our surveys — you are shaping this game with us and your input is what is helping us deliver the best possible version of FOUNDRY. It is a bit too early to have a specific date, but we’ll be transparent about our progress and what we’re working on in future FOUNDRY Fridays, and we will inform everyone as soon as we have a release window for it. Join us on the upcoming livestream To talk about Update 2, the new timeline and to answer your questions we will be hosting a livestream on Wednesday, the 4th of December at 18:00 CET / 9 AM PST. Tune in to share your feedback and get in touch with the developers! See you next time, -Foundry Team Follow us on socials: Discord Twitter Reddit Facebook Paradox Forum Stay tuned for more news! https://store.steampowered.com/app/983870/FOUNDRY/ DevBlog #66 | Foundry Fridays: Streaming ProxiesNov 15, 2024 - Community AnnouncementsHi there. Today I want to talk a little bit about the work that we're doing to try and improve streaming performance in Foundry. Current System Similar to many other Unity games, Foundry is built in Unity and most entities in our game are represented by GameObjects. Some of the performance challenges that come with using game objects include: - You can only create/destroy GameObjects on the main thread. - You can only enable/disable GameObjects on the main thread. - GameObjects and their components are dynamically allocated meaning that their memory is all over the place and not cache friendly. - GameObjects use a lot of memory. Option A: Object Pooling One of the solutions many games use is object pooling. This is when you preallocate pools of gameobjects and just enable/disable them as they come into streaming range. We actually use this already for some portions of the buildings but there are several challenges with using this strategy for all the objects in the game: - It's difficult to choose how many of each item to have pooled. If we want perfect pooling, we would need to have enough gameobjects in the object pools to handle the player walking in any arbitrary direction and we only have a little bit of time on the main thread available to grow those pools when necessary. - GameObjects use a lot of memory. If we needed to have a significant amount of objects pooled, the memory costs would grow quite significantly. - It is still quite expensive to enable/disable objects, especially ones with deeper hierarchies where unity has to iterate the hierarchy and enable/disable all the components. - Implementing game object pooling is fairly simple to do but converting all the game code to work with object pooling can be quite difficult and lead to very subtle bugs, not just for all the existing code, but for any code that anyone on the team writes in the future. It effectively would add a 'development tax' to all current and future development on the project. Option B: Unity ECS Another solution games will use is Unity's ECS system. Though using Unity ECS would solve many of our issues, the main issue with the unity ecs system is that Foundry was in development for many years before the 1.0 release of Unity ECS and switching the entire game would require a significant rewrite of the entire game. It would be possible to use it for only certain systems but this would mean we would have two entity systems which would add significant complexity to the game. So instead of rewriting everything to use Unity ECS, we're working on incorporating some of the ideas behind it into our own code. Option C: Streaming Proxies The solution we are currently prototyping is to take parts of our own code and make them more data oriented and have it stream in separately from the unity GameObjects. These objects that stream in separately are called streaming proxies. These proxies are data oriented and stream in exceptionally fast. The idea is that most of the world you se...

Meta