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Early Access Update 1.14 - Crafting
December 13, 2020by White Rabbit Games - Tom
GamePatchNote Digest
Desert Skies News — December 13, 2020
Aggregated from Steam, cross-tracked with Battle.net coverage on GamePatchNote.
New Airship Tiles!
There is a lot to build and craft in this update, starting with the first of our new airship designs! Your stylish new airship has doors, windows, trapdoors, ceilings, inner and outer walls and multiple variations for each tile.
New Airship Apparatus!
Aboard your new airship you have lots of new and updated crafting apparatus to build. With the Helm you can turn your burner and engine on or off, set the direction you want to turn towards for easier control, and has a built in compass, wind pointer, burner fuel indicator and engine charge indicator!
Here we have the new look Workbench and the new Artificer and Tesla Workbench apparatus.
Next up the new look Blacksmith and the new Gunsmith and Still apparatus.
And the new look Smelter and Grill, and new Nail Rig and Grindstone apparatus.
We have created five new storage apparatus to display all of the new resources you'll be collecting in style. These containers display your resources out in the open, allowing you to assess your supplies at a glance while adding colour and flair to your airship!
New Tools!
Craft new and updated tools with your new apparatus. Stone, Iron, Gold and Tesla axes and pickaxes each have different properties, and you can now wield the sickle, tap, shovel, flare gun, compass, pocket watch and spyglass! We've also updated the design on the knife, hammer, revolver and lantern.
New Resources
To build and craft all of these new options you'll need to gather new resources from the desert, such as sulfur mines, agave and aloe vera plants, barrel cactuses, meteorites, and saltpeter, as well as the mysterious crystals and goo bulbs.
From these resources you'll gather a lot of new and updated items to use in your crafting.
We've also updated existing resources, mining is a new experience where you search for the weak point on a mine and crack it open with an explosive shower of rock to find the ores inside!
New Seeker Attack!
We've included the first of our planned changes to the Seeker experience in this update. If the Seeker gets close enough to you it will now grab you instead of melee attacking. If you have a knife in your inventory you'll be able to pass a skill check to fight off the Seeker's attack and escape without damage.
We look forward to seeing your new airship designs! With doors and trapdoors you can make all sorts of cool rooms and nooks for all of the new apparatus.
Roadmap
We've posted a new roadmap to our forum that goes into much more detail about the rest of our plans with Desert Skies. Instead of large major updates we're going to be releasing smaller regular updates covering a variety of gameplay. You can also follow us on Twitter @DesertSkiesGame for details of each update as we're working on it.
Detailed Changelog
Airship
- New visual design with our first of the new tile sets - Rickety
- Taller walls with inner/outer wall support (so as we add new tile sets you can build adjacent rooms with different styles).
- New ceiling, door, window and trapdoor tiles.
Airship Apparatus
- Updated visual design for the workbench, grill, smelter and blacksmith.
- New apparatus: Helm.
- New apparatus: Artificer. Craft devices like the compass, pocket watch, spyglass and more.
- New apparatus: Gunsmith. Craft guns and ammunition, including the new flare gun.
- New apparatus: Tesla Workbench. Craft advanced items and tools like the Tesla Axe and Pickaxe.
- New apparatus: Nail Rig. An automated nail crafter for producing lots of nails.
- New apparatus: Grindstone. Sharpen your iron and gold tools for faster harvesting.
- New storage apparatus: resource pallet, resource bucket, small resource bowl, powder basket and rope pole. Your resources are now stored out in the open so you can easily see how much you have, and add some colour and flair to your airship.
Tools
- Stone axe and pickaxe now break over time.
- Iron axe and pickaxe now harvest faster and can be sharpened at the Grindstone.
- New gold axe and pickaxe let you harvest new special resources, and can also be sharpened at the Grindstone.
- New Tesla axe and pickaxe for the ultimate harvesting speed.
- New flare gun for lighting up your surroundings.
- New sickle for harvesting agave and aloe vera, and more plants to come.
- New shovel for harvesting sand, sulfur and saltpeter, and more resources to come.
- New tap for harvesting water in the desert from barrel cactuses.
- New devices: spyglass, compass, and pocket watch.
Other Changes
- New location The Blacksmith, with new wobblehead.
- The Seeker now grabs you when it gets close instead of its previous melee attack. If you have a knife then you'll be able to escape the grab without taking damage if you pass a skill check.
- New resources to harvest from the desert: stone piles, barrel cactuses, agave, aloe vera, sulfur, saltpeter, meteorite, alien crystal and alien bulbs.
- Big performance improvements on large airships especially when taking off.
- Mining has changed, now you look for the weak point on a mine and use your pickaxe to bust it open and find the ores inside.
- All new tool animations with visible player hands.
- Building hammer is now a permanent item and no longer takes up an inventory slot.
- Trees and cactuses now leave behind a stump when harvested.
- Braziers on apparatus like the blacksmith produce charcoal for making gunpowder.
- You no longer have to restart if you die without a sleeping bag (to avoid new player frustration, we'll bring some ruthless survival elements back in as we balance the game with all the new content).
- Biomes rearranged with duplicate locations as placeholders for new locations being developed.
- New outline effect on interactive elements instead of the old glow.
- Locations now have titles when you enter them.
- Clocks in locations tell the time.
- Improved airship avoidance system to stop running into buttes.
- Loot rebalanced to be plentiful, will be balanced in future once new content stabilises.
- Music now plays the whole song instead of only 90 seconds.