published on July 21, 2025 in devlog
Michi talks about the process of adding new resources to the game
Michi (molp)
Luckily, this week was a quiet one, a welcome change to last week's database outage. I implemented another puzzle piece required for the gateway release: new resources.
There are a handful of new materials that are required to build the various pieces of a gateway. Besides the usual construction materials, the gateways will also require parts made from entirely new resources: Krypton and Rhenium.
Of course, these two materials cannot be found yet, so I had to dig out the world editor, a tool that we use internally to create the universe, its resources, materials, buildings, recipes and a few more things. Since universe restarts are quite uncommon, this tool is pretty bare-bones and working with it is tedious.
In the world editor, resources are distributed not entirely randomly, but they follow a system. Each resource is assigned to one or more slots. A slot has a certain probability associated with it. During a planet's creation, a random process assigns a few slots to the planet. A slot can be active, meaning the planet will have the resource, or inactive, meaning the planet will not have the resource. To add a new resource to the game, we assign it to an empty slot and let the resource generation run again. Every planet with the slot, will then receive that resource. Of course, we can manually tweak individual planets. Using a tool like this saves hours of manual resource distribution.
We also distinguish different zones: zone-0 are faction worlds and planets in faction systems, zone-1 are all planets in a certain distance to faction systems, and zone-2 is everything else.
As always, we'd love to hear what you think: join us on Discord or the forums!
Happy trading!