Alpha 9 of Adaptory – the UI update – is now live! This is a major release that has updated every single screen with brand new user interfaces that look and feel better. You can download your copy on itch.io now or play the demo on Steam.

If you find any bugs, issues, balance problems or suggestions, please let us know on Discord or by email. A huge thank you to the community testers who have helped test this release, and found some really unusual bugs! ❤️

A refreshed main screen

The main game screen has had a complete overhaul:

There’s a brand new world time clock in the top right, with speed buttons clearly listed. It also shows you the progress of the day/night cycle.

The explorer selection bar now displays their mood as a background colour and progress bar, so you can quickly see if someone is having a bad day.

Building blueprints are now in different building categories, with separate dropdowns for each category (oxygen, power, liquid, gas etc.). Some of these categories will only become available in Early Access. These menus also give us room to add many more building types in future updates.

Selected objects now have different information panels to show different categories of information. For example, if you’re clicking on an explorer, you’re probably more interested to know how they’re feeling, and less who their best friend is, or what material they’re made out of – but it’s still important to know these details sometimes.

User interface design

We’ve worked hard on a brand new user interface design that feels closer to the hand-drawn lineart style of the game. Buttons and dialogs are now rounded, shadows are cleaner, dropdowns are animated and have a scrollbar, text is crisper, rendering is faster, and there’s been lots and lots of other tweaks and polish.

User interface scaling is no longer experimental; whether you’re running the game at 80% or 200% zoom, the user interface should work great. Pressing keyboard shortcuts such as enter and escape now work more consistently across all user interfaces.

In-game database

As we add more content and systems to the game, it’s important to be able to see what everything does. While Adaptory will have a wiki eventually, I think it’s better to have this detailed information available in-game – and in Alpha 9, we’ve added a fully interactive in-game database!

And a lot more

We’ve added a lot of quality of life and user interface tweaks in this release, so the game should feel much more fluid and user-friendly. Please let us know what you think and if you like the changes!

Full patch notes below.

Release notes for Adaptory 0.11 (Alpha 9)

New features

• A brand new user interface design which will take us into Early Access!
• A brand new in-game database showing detailed properties for all materials and buildings in the game
• The top explorer selection bar now also displays their mood as a background colour
• Added new world clock to the top right, which also has game speed buttons
• The build panel is now categorised, with separate dropdowns for each building category (oxygen, power, liquid, gas etc.). Some of these will only become available in Early Access
• Updated transmitter with new art
• Most windows can now be moved by clicking and dragging the header, and closed with enter or escape
• Updated selected object panels:
  • Panels now have tabs with different categories of information
  • Added tooltips to describe the impact of each explorer trait, if any
  • You can now cancel an individual building errand by selecting the errand and clicking the new “cancel build” button

Internal

• Improved performance of all user interfaces and components
• Tweaked text rendering to be slightly crisper
• Fixed small transparent images sometimes having very subtle rendering errors from filtering
• Dropdowns with too many values to fit at once will now display with a scrollbar
• Animated opening and closing dropdowns
• Added inner drop shadow rendering to scrollable areas
• When changing the UI scale, a confirmation dialog now pops up giving you the opportunity to revert the scale back
• Updated some tutorial text to be clearer and simpler
• Added a tutorial step to help the player unpause the game if it was accidentally paused at start
• Improved game startup speed by only generating bitmap fonts on demand
• Changed order of layer overlays, to align with the building category order
• Tweaked right click to close more selected objects and actions, including the move explorer command and any selected overlay
• When dragging an action, right click will now cancel that draggable action
• Renamed artifact item type to artefact
• Explorer thought bubbles are now rendered above solid elements, so you can always see what they’re thinking
• Keyboard input changes:
  • Pressing tilde ~ within the console while the console has focus now closes the console, rather than typing the character
  • Pressing enter in the Save Game dialog is now the same as pressing the Save button
  • Changed the power overlay keyboard shortcut from F4 to F2
  • The numpad enter key now works the same as normal enter
  • Pressing space on a button no longer “clicks” the button, as game pause/unpause should be higher priority. Enter and numpad enter are still keyboard shortcuts to click the button
  • Pressing escape when an overlay layer is open will now close the overlay, rather than opening the escape menu

Balance

• Reduced supply goal slider resolution from 1kg to 10kg
• When opening an explorer’s diary, new entries are no longer automatically marked as read
• The day/night cycle now has an actual night period where sunlight is zero (1/4 of a day)
• Oxygen candle holder buildings are now called oxycan holders
• When a non-solid tile moves (e.g. sand falling), all dig errands attached to that tile are now moved as well
• Increased event budget cost of solar flare event from 1.0 to 3.0
• The salt element is no longer a fixed solid, but loose like sand

Accessibility

• Added “background star movement” option to options panel, which stops the movement of the main menu’s background stars

Fixes

• Fixed a number of font scaling bugs when the UI scale was not 100%
• Fixed a bug where text tooltips would sometimes not be replaced with rich tooltips
• Fixed a bug where if the options dialog was open, escape would instead close the escape menu
• Fixed not being able to subscribe to email updates from the main menu
• Fixed being able to change an explorer’s name to a blank string
• Fixed a rare bug where you could not click on the Close button in Save/Load dialogs that listed a lot of save games
• Fixed a memory leak that could occur when a scrollable user interface was left open for a long time
• Fixed the sound at the start of the game sometimes being played more than once
• Fixed a rare bug where the game would sometimes start paused
• Fixed a rare crash from trying to delete a missing particle effect
• Fixed a bug where a highlighted tutorial area would remain highlighted after clicking “hide all tutorials”
• Fixed being able to unpause the game with space while in the escape menu or other modal dialogs
• Fixed being able to change the layer overlays while in modal dialogs
• Fixed a significant texture memory leak – thanks rhys! 😊
• Fixed the game slowing down if a large number of sounds all tried to play at the same time
• Fixed a bug where mass stored in a build errand would be deleted if the errand was cancelled
• Fixed a bug where the camera would sometimes not center on the crashed ship at the start of a new game
• Fixed a crash if an explorer stood on top of a pile of vacuum
• Fixed a bug where suffocating explorers would not die until their body became visible (e.g. if they were stuck in sand)
• Fixed a bug where digging a solid element would sometimes not visually update