Hey beautiful people!
A new roadmap is up. Not much has changed since the last roadmap, except for two epic mod releases! Vanilla Weapons Expanded - Coilguns is out, and it's a very accurate remake of the old coilgun mod. I call it a remake, because under the hood, we essentially did the coilguns from scratch!
At the same time, we have also released Vanilla Quests Expanded - Drone Factory, which is an epic questline that will have you free the Tinkerer and potentially allow you to start your own drone army! The mod has been out for a short while now, did you try it? How are you finding it?
At the moment we're pushing hard for a minimum viable product on Vanilla Gravships Expanded. A minimum viable product is essentially a stage in development of a mod where we can put it out for testers to test and give us their feedback and findings. I suppose you could compare it to an 'early access' release, where a group of people tells us if they think we're on the right path.
For minimum viable product, I have the following expectations:
Introduce new weapons, including bigger gravship artillery pieces, warpod torpedoes, compact defensive turrets and gravmines.
Introduce new defensive solutions, such as buildable gravship shield generators, flare launchers, landing scramblers.
Add some new orbital-tech related things: new combat vacsuits, airlock doors, astrorigs to allow you to move rapidly through space, escape pods, vacuum warning lights and so on.
Introduce new insectoids you've already seen before - but this time, with proper events and orbital locations to find them.
Introduce a gravship detection system with some early experimental boss fight - a mechanoid artillery platform.
Introduce some new orbital locations such as gravship husks, derelict gravships and more.
Introduce enemy variants of normally player-buildable structures.
Introduce basic logic for enemy to operate gravship artillery.
Introduce a few new gravcore quests.
After we reach a minimum viable product, we can start pushing the content further. This means adding more quests, adding quest rewards, expanding the enemy gravship content, and ultimately ensuring Chapter 2 serves as a nice continuation to Chapter 1.
Chapter 2 will offer some solutions to problems you've encountered while using Gravships already. For example, buildable shield generators will be a life saver when asteroids come knocking in space. Gravship subarmor will ensure your landings in the mountains never result in any damage.
The idea is that your gravship will evolve with each chapter, because every consecutive completed research project will unlock some new, valuable things for you to build.
I will leave you with a screenshot I made when preparing gravship husk fragments for export!