Astroneer gets colourful with new painting tools
Spacepaints!
I did enjoy Pip's tour of her space base in Astroneer [official site] and I'm quite keen to see what she might do after the explore-a-craft-o-sandbox's recent bug early access update. It adds ways to paint terrain, see, along with new ways to shape it. And sure, I guess it overhauls the research system and fixes bugs and blah blah but the point is: spacepaints. Have a look in this trailer for the 'Augments & Research Curve' update:
Some of those painted bits look lovely. Others are garish but hey, they're your spaceworlds.
Painting arrives through Astroneer's new 'augments', little context-sensitive modules that snap onto objects to change their behaviour. Eventually the augments will work with everything from printers to vehicles, with all sorts of strange and wonderful consequences. To start, though, augments only work with the Deform Tool.
A Terrain Analyzer augment will react to terrain in some way, which for Deform Tool means players can create new terrain in that colour or only remove terrain of a certain colour. Or an Inhibitor augment stops the main function of deforming terrain but still lets it clear surface objects. Combine the Analyzer and Inhibitor and voila, you can paint terrain. Narrow and Broad augments are in too, making deformation nozzles, y'know, narrow or broad.
I'm curious to see how these augments will work on other objects. What would an Inhibitor do to a spaceship? Will a Narrow module on a printer make it create teensy items?
Developers System Era Softworks have also introduced a new Research system. They have diagrams and everything to explain but, basically, they want to make it more fun.
Full patch notes for Friday's update 153 are this-a-way. System Era have since followed that up with a small patch which makes the Medium Printer unlocked from the start, rather than being something that takes research.
Astroneer is £15.99/19,99€/$19.99 on Steam Early Access. Our Graham is into Astroneer too, and The Mechanic has taken a good look at its crafting and inventory.