Devlog #16: A toxic city, cracked visors and a better way to build

This round covers 19 October. The ruined city now sits under a green toxic storm that you can only walk into with a gas mask, and that mask's visor cracks as it takes damage. Building got a proper menu, more pieces and its own tool. On top of that we did a big pass on the small things you touch every few seconds: the loot prompt, item wear, the menu tabs and moving stacks between boxes.

The toxic city

The big city is now a gas zone. From a distance you see a beige-green storm wall standing over the towers. Walk closer and the air thickens into a green haze full of streaming dust, the wind picks up and a low hiss comes in.

• A warning banner comes up at the top of the screen as you get close: TOXIC STORM AHEAD, GAS MASK REQUIRED.
• Inside without a mask, the banner switches to TOXIC GAS, NO MASK, OXYGEN DRAINING and your oxygen starts to fall.
• Gas masks protect you. Better masks last longer.
• Step back out and the normal sky and dust come back.

Gas mask visors that crack

Wearing a mask now puts its two-lens visor over your view, with the edges of the mask in the frame. Masks wear out, and as one loses condition the glass starts to crack:

• Three crack stages, from a single spider-web hit to a badly shattered lens.
• The cracks are real glass, not a flat picture: each shard bends the view behind it slightly, the crack edges catch the light, and the worst stage has a dusting of crushed glass.
• A crack sound plays when the glass gets worse.
• You hear yourself breathing through the respirator, and the breathing speeds up when your oxygen gets low. (We haven't done a proper listening pass on the sounds yet.)

Building: a real menu, a plan and more pieces

Building now has its own tool. You hold a Building Plan on your hotbar to build, and put it away to stop. There's no more hidden build key, and the server refuses build requests from anyone who isn't holding a plan.

• The build menu has five tabs: Foundations, Walls, Floors, Roofs and Extras. Keys 1 to 5 pick a tab, the mouse wheel cycles within it, and each tab remembers the last piece you used.
• 12 new pieces, each in all four tiers: triangle foundation and floor, half wall, ramp, railings, window shutters, a roof overhang, gables and roof end caps.
• Doors open and close with E even while you're holding the hammer. To repair or upgrade a door, hit it with the hammer.

Item wear you can see

Anything that wears out now shows a condition bar along the bottom edge of its tile, in the inventory, the equipment panel and the hotbar. It goes from green through amber to red and pulses when it drops under a quarter. A gun's bar is the average of all its parts, so one worn barrel shows up on the whole rifle.

A new loot prompt

The prompt you see when you look at something has been redone in our own style. The name sits on top in our green stencil font, the E sits in the same worn cut-corner square as the inventory slots, and the action sits underneath. When something needs a long press, like the big loot crates, a green glow runs around the edge of the square from the bottom up and meets at the top when it opens.

Other changes:

• Big crates open twice as fast: normal crates take 5 seconds instead of 10, and monument crates take 9 instead of 18.
• The menu tabs (Inventory, World Map, Crafting) now use the same font as the rest of our UI.

Smaller fixes

• Double-clicking a stack in a box or your inventory now moves as much as you can carry, instead of refusing because the whole stack is too heavy. The rest stays where it was.
• Arrows can be crafted by hand from the player crafting menu now (3 wood and 1 scrap makes 5 arrows), not just at a bench.
• The gun and armour Modify windows got the same panel look as the rest of the menus, and the armour preview no longer faces backwards.
• Bow balance: the Scrap Bow does less damage with a wider spread, and the Forged Bow hits harder and more accurately.
• The main menu got a Host Game button, so one player can host and friends can join.

What's next

• A performance pass. We're profiling the game, then cutting work it doesn't need to do every frame (menus restyling themselves while closed, checks that scan the whole world). We'll share the before and after numbers.
• Clothing and armour that wears down from hits, so the condition bars matter on more than masks and guns.
• Door locks, so only you can open your doors.