Keep to the Light

Development update. Everything below is built and tested in the development branch, but it is not in the testers' build yet. It is coming in the next test build. Details will change.

In development

Two days ago the sun started to move. Now it matters where you are when it sets.

Something hunts at night

When the sun goes down, something native comes out of the dark. In the open, and out of the light, it is faster than you can run. You can hear it, though, and you can see it coming, and there is time to reach the light. Light keeps it away: the drop pod's landing lights, or a ring of street lights.

A large many-legged native creature with plated, cracked hide, caught in a bright light in tall grass at night. — Caught in the light.

We are not going to say more about it than that.

The survey beacon helps. It picks up movement and shows it on a disc in the corner of your visor, with the direction and distance of whatever is out there. And Melanie starts a countdown to nightfall, which stays in the corner of the screen, so the dark never arrives by surprise.

The same creature low in the grass at dusk, almost lost against the dark meadow. — At dusk it is hard to see.

Light the way home

Light needs power, so there are three new buildings. A solar array makes power by day, a battery bank stores it for the night, and street lights come on by themselves at dusk. Every light and machine in the colony draws on one shared store of power, and when it runs short the lights are kept on first.

There are no pictures of these yet. They will come with the next update.

Delivered from orbit

Prefab buildings used to unfold out of a crate. Now they come from the ship. You set down a landing beacon where you want the building, and the Meridian sends it down inside a heat-shielded cargo shell. The shell burns in through the atmosphere, opens three parachutes, fires its retro rockets just above the ground and opens like a flower where the beacon stands.

High overhead, a cargo capsule comes down under orange-and-white parachutes above a meadow, a drop pod in the corner. — Coming down under its parachutes onto the spot the beacon marked.

A white cargo capsule hangs just above the meadow under orange-and-white parachutes, its retro rockets lighting the grass beneath it. — A delivery from orbit: the retro burn, a few metres above the beacon.

A container that stays

Melanie has kept one 20-foot freight container back in the ship's stores. It comes down the same way, and then it stays for good as storage: open its doors to take things out and put things in. It is a proper ISO container, with corrugated walls, locking bars, corner castings and the Meridian's markings painted on. It can be repainted, from Meridian blue to survey orange and six more colours.

The cargo capsule's petals lie open on the grass, its parachute spread beside it, a drop pod to the right. — Landed: the capsule opens on the grass, its parachute laid out beside it.

The same container repainted bright orange, doors open, in the meadow. — Repainted survey orange: every container can take a colour of your choosing.

Inside is a field printer, a molecular printer that builds things from feedstock cartridges. There are only so many cartridges, so every print is a choice.

A white field molecular printer cabinet with a glass print chamber and a lit screen, standing in grassland. — The field printer: it builds from feedstock cartridges, and there are only so many.

Seeing what you picked up

Whatever goes into your pack now shows briefly on the left of the screen, with its picture and its count, on its rarity's colour: green for common, blue for rare, purple for epic and gold for legendary. Several pickups stack up and fade in turn.