Are you not into trains? (22.08.2025)

Greetings, welcome to another dev diary. Before we move on to content, First I will make few statements, that I have announced on my discord.

Patch, current patch I am working on for Vaults of Knowledge, has grown to enormous scope, so instead of it being 3.5 -> will be 4.0 instead.

More importantly: Patrol Fleet Rework will be delayed to next year together with new crisis, due to need of complete re-design, so it does not feel tiresome, when used alongside Nexerelin, and instead being tied to Vaults of Knowledge, will be to Seats of Power instead.

Anyway, let's move on to today's discussion of dev diary: Trains

Industry Synergies 2.0 and Maglev

This is one of oldest mechanic, existing in AoTD, as was first implemented before split into modules. This mechanic was very vague for a lot of people, and with time and more updates along the way, become more obscure and irrelevant, as industries, that was designed for, mostly vanished.

Now, instead of market condition, synergies will be directly displayed in colony UI and will require additional structure to be constructed : Maglev Central Hub.

Synergies

Urban Throughput Systems

In total : 21 Synergies has been made, compared to 7 existing beforehand. Each one will be unlockable, as you progress with tech tree!

Nothing is happening

To the bone

And yes, your eyes are not mistaking you, you see on both screenshots, that there are not only train tracks, visualizing synergy connection, but also different trains running on those tracks! Feature has been tested, and won't cause trobules with mods, like Grand Colonies.

Long

Synergies are meant to be interesting twist on colony layer, encouraging people to play more around building certain stuff together.

Visuals of Nidavelir

Since Nidavelir was introduced, one of things, that bothered me, was megastructure not displaying in colony menu. After recent discoveries, I was able to display properly ring in dialog menu! And let's say that for restored version, effects are trully impressive! With it, I think grandeour of this megastrcuture will displayed even more!

Nidavelir : Interaction

Nidavelir : Survey

Nidavelir : Restored on Market

Small change to tech tree: On hover tooltips are back!

Introduction of Zoom component in tech tree, has broken many things, due to components getting constantly resized, one of them was on-hover tooltip for reward icons, for each tech. Now, those tooltips finally work properly (pain).

Suffering

Rework of Scientists

With new update, Scientists get rework, as there is going to be more than 1 appearing!. Given, that there was only one effect, now each scientist has two effects, passive and active, where active skill only works, when scientist is Head of R&D. On top of that, each one will have it's own unique salary.

R&D team grows

4.0 Alpha?

4.0 being released officially is still far far away, even with having 3 months ahead of schedule. There are still a lot of sprites not done, weapons not fully made etc etc. Especially, that I want to have all industry art, that has been AI generated replaced fully.

On my discord, which link is on website, I have posted more in-detail what has been done, what its not, and within next week, you can decide if you wanna have 4.0 Alpha released, which will be only available on AoTD discord, or wait for entire product to be done.

That is it for today's dev diary. I hope you all have nice day!

Also orb

Abyssal Synchotron?