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Take care of a colony of space ants, while expanding your station and dealing with threats. The gameplay is in the direction of Dwarf Fortress in the setting of Space Station 13. The game features 2D graphics but 3D gameplay. There's detailed engineering for electricity, atmospherics, liquids and plasma. You'll need to serve the needs of your ants, which have ant-like biology, while protecting them from dangers, keep your production chain running and perform scientific research, all while constructing your space station.

Post news Report RSS Antstation progress week 40

New ways of spawning objects and the first manufacturing mechanics.

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First big progress post in a month! The past week was very productive. I started with fixing feedback from the demo, and then rolled on to new features. I don't promise anything, but I will try to release another build next week.

I implemented two new ways of spawning items, based on feedback from the demo. First of all, you can now drag a rectangular area of an item. This is especially handy for large areas such as floors. You can drag it across Z-levels as well to make a cube area. In addition, you can make a 'hollow rectangle', which is especially handy for walls. Again, you can drag it across Z-levels to make it a hollow cube. Which is, in the case of walls, automatically airtight. Besides walls and floors, I noticed I use them a lot for cables as well. And they work for every spawn mechanic in the game, so not only for every object, but also for assigning rooms and areas.

This gif shows only 2D spawning.

And here you see the basic 3D spawning.

Afterwards I devoted this week to the manufactury system. This entails the production of goods by ants. It's small in scope, but the basics are done. The rest will be variations on these mechanics.

Earlier I covered the catching of meteors. These meteors contain ore (iron ore, copper ore, etc). Ants with the manufactury job mine this ore from meteors using a 'cutter' (not scientifically accurate tool). Meteors devoid of ore are removed. The gif below shows the mining process.

The next step is refining the ore to a bar of the material. This is done in an ore refiner by a manufactury ant. You throw ore in, manufactury ant operates machine, bar pops out. This gif below shows this process for copper and iron ore.


Finally, these bars are processed into complete fabricates. The current processes are:
Iron Bar --> Steel sheet press --> Steel sheet
Copper Bar --> Cable spinner --> Cable coils
Glass Bar --> Glass sheet forge --> Glass sheet
I'm aware the processes are not very accurate, but it works and the rest is tweaking or reflavoring. The gifs below shows all thee processes mentioned above.

I also made a small tweak to the settings.txt file. You can now enter the dimensions of the map yourself. No limit, so don't be surprised if the game runs out of memory if you enter large dimensions. The default is 50 wide by 50 heigh by 20 deep.

Finally, I want to mention that all new art is by myself, trying to copy the earlier heartvine style, so it doesn't turn out particularly good. It's also very gray. It will do for placeholders, though.

Next week, I'll work on implementing, yet to be determined, new features and hopefully finish with releasing a new build. Rsdworker has made some additional videos which I'll add to the post when releasing the new build.

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