Greetings, Tinkerers and Tycoons!

Once again, it is time to reach out to our community, especially to the dedicated feature testers and bug hunters among you. The beta test for Good Company v0.10 is now open for everyone!

Be the first to get your hands on the long-awaited Employee Organization/Skills & Happiness feature + lots of new content + balancing!

As usual, this is an exciting phase. Beta tests with our community so far have helped us immensely in shaping the final form of a major update. Does an interaction feel off? Are there any odd quirks popping up? And, most of all, how does the v0.10 update improve your experience of playing Good Company?

Below, you can find a long list of what is hot and new. Take your time, enjoy the beta test, and be sure to share your findings with us. We are super excited to hear from you!

All the best & happy testing,
Your Carrots

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Update v0.10 - Beta Notes

Important: When starting 0.10 you need to convert your profile and recreating your character. During the early phase of the beta, you won’t be able to convert your profile back into a 0.9 profile. We will add this functionality to v0.9 in an update next week.

Employees

General

This update comes with major improvements that help you better organize your staff. The bigger your company grows, the more important efficient management will get.

Employees wear distinctly colored and designed outfits, depending on their tasks

• Production: dark orange
• Research: white
• Logistics: green
• Couriers: yellow

The new fullscreen Employee Panel keeps track of important details about your staff and helps you manage them (Hotkey: F4)

• On the left, the panel lists all employees, as well as their respective work zone, job, skills, and salary
• You can use multi-selection to assign several employees to work zones or courier routes – or even fire them all at once! (which would be sad)
• The employee list can be filtered for work zone, job, skills, and salary
• On the right, the Employee Panel lists all workplaces in your company:
• You can quick-hire directly from the workplace overview
• Filtering for zone, job, or assigned employees is available
• In the center, you can focus on a detail view for a selected employee:
• This view shows you the buff effects for that employee
• Also, you can have them learn skills and list them in the detail view
• A tooltip for the employee's happiness gives you an overview of positive and negative effects
• Last but not least, the inventory of a selected employee can be monitored in this view

Skills

An essential aspect comes to Good Company. With v0.10, employees will become more experienced while they work, and you can decide for each how you want to develop them.

• Each employee can earn up to 1000 Skill Points while they are actively working
• From a wide variety of skills, you can select up to 5 skills per employee, affecting abilities like efficiency, speed, or luck:
• Skill effects usually accumulate with other skills effects and policy effects
• To have an employee learn a skill, you need to spend Skill Points and Success Points
• Tables now require certain skills to be operated
• Any employee has the required skill if quick-hired directly to a table, but this costs an additional hiring fee
• A new Freeplay session starts with a basic set of skills, more can be unlocked through Business Development
• At a later point of development, Campaign levels will also incorporate the use of skills

Happiness

Another introduction for your employees. The best skills are of no use if your staff isn't happy. And you can influence this in many ways.

• Each employee 'feels' a certain level of happiness, which can vary from 0% - 100%, and is by default set to 50%.
• A whole range of circumstances can increase or decrease happiness:
• Decoration versus machines within an employee's work zone
• The setup of a work zone in terms of space and exits
• Temporary effects from firing people, completing research, etc.
• Employees occasionally show bubbles above their heads, indicating the response to certain changes/events
• The bubble frequency increases, the stronger happiness is changing
• Happiness does not instantly change, it slowly increases or decreases towards a new level
• Based on their happiness, your employees gain modifiers on their work speed
• Production and research employees get additional grand buffs at 80% or more happiness
• Based on their individual happiness, each of your employees contributes with -1 to +1 points to the company-wide Happiness Score
• For every +5 Happiness Score points, the company gains 1 Success Point per week
• There is no limit for the Happiness Score
• Currently, there are no punishing effects for negative Happiness Score in the game

Other Features

New Content

With Good Company v0.10, we will introduce a great variety of new content which is in many parts connected with the new Employee system.

• New Freeplay map
• Now the map Timber Town is available in a Summer version
• New tables in Good Company
• Assembly Table II
• Improves the crafting time of higher tier products
• Can be unlocked through Business Development
• Assembly Station
• Greatly improves the crafting time of higher tier products
• Can be unlocked through Business Development
• Analysis Desk II
• Can sample modules with a higher tier than Analysis Desk I
• Can be unlocked through Business Development
• The previous Analysis Desk II is now Analysis Station
• New policies that directly affect employee happiness
• Bonus Payment raises wages and increases your employees' happiness
• Strict Goals boosts your employees' working speed and decreases their happiness
• This policy is unlocked by the Employee Guidance Project (Business Development)
• New skills being introduced along with the new employee system
• 12 table-related skills
• 28 crafting skills
• 11 assembly skills
• 12 analysis skills
• 11 research skills
• 8 logistics skills
• New buff effects affecting the work output of your employees!
• Luck buff is available for crafting, assembly, analysis, and research
• It has a chance of n% for the work output to be doubled
• Spare Parts buff is available for crafting, assembly, analysis
• This has a chance of n% for an input material to be saved during the crafting process
• New decorations for your Good Companies
• Corporate Flag with your company logo on it
• Corporate Poster with your company logo on it
• 4 Slim Room Dividers
• 2 Bamboo Room Dividers
• A lovely Big Plant

General Updates

• The Business Development now has color codes for specific types of projects
• The item order displayed on shelves or other inventories now corresponds with the respective UI slot order
• All buildable equipment in the Construction Menu now has an improved order

Freeplay Settings

The difficulty presets for Good Company have been restructured in two directions

• The Management Presets contain the standard Good Company balancing with easy/medium/hard settings
• The Production Presets lean towards more leisurely play with Running Costs removed, but are compensated elsewhere
• Please note: [Experimental] or [Cheat] options won’t be affected by any preset
• [Experimental] options will be further tested and might be changed or removed if they don't feel useful
• [Cheat] options make the Good Company significantly easier and avoids the general balancing of the game
• Of course, you can also still use custom settings to adjust the game to your playstyle
• The general options have been changed and expanded on
• Starting Funds: how much money you start a Freeplay session with
• Initial Cost Factor: hiring fees and equipment costs
• Running Cost Factor: wages and upkeep for machines
• [New] Material Costs: buying price for materials
• [Changed] Demands: demands for products and now also for modules
• [Updated] Market Difficulty
• This includes how many product features are expected, feature minima and maxima, that is
• The option also includes selling price adjustments for markets
• Since these factors are dependent on each other, we decided to set them in one option
• [Experimental] Market Phase Amount: adjusts the number of total market phases
• [Experimental] Market Pacing: adjusts the required sales until a market phase can be progressed or progresses automatically
• [Experimental] Automatic Market Progression: markets can progress automatically again
• [Experimental] Additional Market Growth: adds additional market phases for products beyond their default range
• [Cheat] Disable Game Over: removes fail conditions in your Freeplay game
• [Cheat] All Buildings Unlocked: gives you free access to all available facilities

Balancing

• With Good Company v0.10, we are introducing new types of research data
• There are 4 different types of Research Data to be analyzed and used for research
• To yield more advanced data (type II to IV), you need to analyze higher-tiered modules
• Advanced Analysis Desks are required to process higher tier modules
• There has been a general overhaul of the research costs for technologies and Business Development
• Module technologies and Business Development can require different data types to be unlocked
• Research progress has been slowed down a bit, but it's now easier to scale up your research capacities
• With the update, there is a restructured Business Development tree
• All nodes in the tree have been arranged into a new layout, where sections are color-coded for an improved overview
• Employee skills are now available for unlocking in the tree
• There have been slight adjustments to the current Business Development progression
• There are now additional nodes for more specialized unlocks and new tables
• Module crafting times and recipes have been rebalanced
• The basic crafting times have been decreased
• The fastest crafting times have been increased
• Material variety has been reduced in recipes, especially for the early game
• Recipe balancing considers required table skills and additional employee wages
• Machine upkeep is now also considered in the balancing
• Assembly balancing
• Assembly times now strongly depend on the type of Assembly Tables and are never shorter than an in-game day
• Higher-level products require advanced Assembly Tables in order to reduce the base crafting times
• The additional assembly time per module got reduced from 1s per slot to 0.5s + 0.5s per slot
• We made buffs stronger in general
• Buffs from Company Goals have been doubled
• Buffs from Policies increased by ~100%-200%
• Company Goals have been rebalanced
• The Success Point output of general Company Goals has been reduced
• Success Points rewards from product-related Company Goals have been strongly increased
• Passive Success Point rewards from product-related Company Goals have been rebalanced
• Company Goals that required basic Research Data to be generated now evaluate the net worth of the generated points
• Company Goals incorporating specific market phases now have other additional requirements
• This change was necessary to enable a flexible number of market phases
• Markets in Freeplay mode
• The balancing of markets have been changed to enable a more dynamic development
• Many market aspects can be modified through the Freeplay settings
• The demands have been cut back for a few products
• Discovery Points are now earned easier by advancing through market phases
• The total amount of discovery points required for unlocking markets has been increased
• The total amount of earned Discovery Points has been increased, too, with a shift in the relative Discovery Points yield of the sources
• The Freeplay mode now starts with 2 unlocked markets with all required modules available

Bug Fix

• Research data won't overflow at 65536 points, it will now overflow at 4294967296