OK, so the latest patch has been out for a bit, and is mostly stable. It feels like it’s been awhile since my last dev diary, but apparently it’s only been around 2 weeks? Blame that on mental health and work shenanigans I guess? (That’ll probably be a separate dev diary, but I’m not ready to write that just yet.)
So what’s happening now? First of all, the 1.2 update. The star feature of 1.2 will be… data analysis! Sounds super exciting, right? But really, one feature that was requested by some players was a way to better see what’s going on. Especially in the later game, it was hard to gauge if you had enough of a particular kind of building, for instance, do you have enough magick pepper fields to handle your electricity requirements? The big feature now is a window you can open that will tell you, “yes, you have enough”, or “no, you probably don’t have enough”.
There’s actually four new windows planned. The first one, shown above, is Maximum Production, which tells you the theoretical output of the buildings you have built. This does not take into account how long it takes for your villagers to get there, interruptions from eating, drinking, and sleeping, or if you even have the spare workforce to fill the job. It will, as an example, help you get the right number of farms and windmills to fully supply your bakery.
These windows are unlocked by building the Railway HQ, a further-upgradeable building that represents the railway’s presence in your town. Starting with the Light Industrial Permit (Level 2), each permit unlocks a new level of HQ, and each level of HQ unlocks a new analysis window to help support your administration.
I’ll have more details once I actually build them, but I’ll at least mention the other three windows. After maximum production is Population Statistics. This will have information about how many job openings you have compared to your population, how you are doing with fulfilling their food, water, and shelter needs, etc. Third is Current Production, which shows the actual output of your buildings, allowing you to see the gap between theoretical and actual performance. Finally, there’s Immigration Controls. As some of you have noticed, the game caps out around 120 villagers. It’s a soft cap: you may end up with more thanks to a train with a lot of passengers, but more passengers will stop coming once you’ve reached this limit. Immigration Controls will allow you to change that limit (or remove it altogether).
To wrap this dev diary up, I wanted to add a bit of new eye candy. Somewhat recently (a couple of months ago, I think), Krishna Palacio put together a new Patreon-exclusive pack: Material Piles. I know, sounds fascinating and exciting, right? A big part of this update has to do with resources though, so it was a perfect time to update some of the resource storage graphics! I did modify them a decent amount to fit them into the context of Iron Village, but the core of it is Krishna’s work, so definitely check it out!
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