Greetings, Tinkerers and Tycoons!
Welcome to the Beta Test for Good Company v0.11! With the last major milestone, "Skills & Happiness", we have introduced various new features. The upcoming version of Good Company contains adaptions and refinements for core parts of the game: campaign, challenges, and conveyors. And there's more! (Psst, Splitter and Mergers!) You can find detailed patch notes below.
As always, we are excited to share the beta version with our community before its final release. Check out what Good Company v0.11 brings, share your feedback, and report bugs even the QA couldn't catch!
We're looking forward to getting in touch with you. Thank you for your ongoing support!
All the best,
Your Chasing Carrots
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Patch notes v0.11
Campaign
Since earlier this year, we have been very busy bringing the campaign into the final state. The tutorials were the first step. This time we are updating the whole world map in preparation for the road to the final release, including prepared space for levels to come.
- The order of levels and challenges has been adjusted to fit to the final story line
- There are some branches throughout the story and some levels that can be skipped
- Additionally, there are greyed out placeholders for levels and challenges to come
Level Update: Bet on Bots
Bet on Bots has been rewritten, adding more characters and explanation for policies. The goal in this level is still the same: produce safer Courier Bots and Delivery Drones. But besides only having fuses at your disposal, you can now also apply policies to your work zones.
Inspector Yang is still your main contact person, but more characters are joining the level, either helping you or trying to push you out of business.
New Level: A Happy Workforce
Several months after sustaining yourself on bots, Dr. Kuznetsov has a proposal for you to expand your business. But, as it appears, not every idea is ready for the market yet and your employees don’t take it well when a company on the rise struggles with a new product. Expand across the original borders of the facilities and keep the happiness of your employees high. This level introduces happiness and new buffs to the campaign.
Tutorial Improvements
Thanks to your feedback, we noticed that in some places of the original tutorial things aren’t visualized or explained well enough. Another problem was that players got stuck because they progressed faster than the tutorial expected them to. We fixed and improved on the tutorial levels in these regards.
- Using holograms to display expected placement of objects where it is relevant
- Allow most tutorial tasks to be completed ahead and recognize the progress
- Updated texts to avoid unclear instructions
- Added reactive texts in case something unexpected happens
Challenge Updates: Module Mania, Smart as a Cup & Product Frenzy
We are using tools we added for tutorials to now explain challenges when starting them. Not all challenges have been updated to include this change, but the challenge-line of Module Mania to Product Frenzy are ready!
Also some other general changes have been added. We intend that those challenges will be final with this version.
Challenge Update: Rocketspeed Science
This challenge got a major facelift as when we released it into Early Access, many necessary mechanics changed shortly before we had to finish the challenge. The new challenge is now a Competitor Challenge and not a Production Challenge anymore. You will compete against other characters to see who can reach the highest score.
You are earning trophies for each character you can beat.
- Get a monetary reward for every Data Point you have on a daily basis
- Your score depends on the collected Data Points
- Trophies are earned by beating competitors
- The high score depends on the collected Data Points
- Higher tier Data Points grant a better score
- Business Development with Data Point cost has been added to the challenge
- Challenge is now using electronics over Fuses as main items
- Policies and Skills have been activated for this challenge
- Every employee gets 100 skill points at the end of each week
Conveyor Belts
We have been changing how the Conveyor Belts work under the hood. The main reason to make this change was that previously, every material was simply pushed through the Belt System, not considering if there is any demand, which often resulted in blocked Belts unless they were very well balanced. This has fundamentally changed by only allowing items to be put or pushed on belts if there is storage space at the end of the line, enabling more advanced Conveyor Belt Segments.
Plain Conveyor Start/Ends
Employees will consider how much storage is at the end of the belt when putting items on Conveyor Belts. In case of plain Conveyor Belt Ends, the storage capacity equals to all available shelves that the item put on the conveyor belt.
For this change, we had to remove the Rollerbands from the game.
Automatic Retrieval Segments
It is not necessary to set ratios on Retrieval Segments anymore. Instead, it will automatically detect the required item amount at the end of the belt. This may lead the Automatic Retrieval Segment to empty attached storage in one go.
In case you don’t want this to happen, you can set storage thresholds for Retrieval Segments. Those thresholds define the amount of items the Retrieval Segments won’t touch in case another entity wants to take the item from the storage.
New Segments: Splitter and Merger
Splitters and Mergers were added. Mergers function pretty straightforwardly and merge whatever they can. As mergers have inventories themselves, it will never happen that a segment before will push something a merger can’t take or forward, so mixing items will not be a problem.
Splitters and Mergers both require you to set which items should be handled at what input/output. The system can’t assume to know this.
Limitations
For the Conveyor Belt nerds: You will find that the system has a few limitations, for example you can not have more than 6 different items on one conveyor belt. In a normal case, you won’t be able to configure any input/output of the Belt System with over 6 Items.
Additionally, because the system can always only push items on the belt for which you have storage, the throughput is limited. Please note that Mergers, Splitters and Automatic Storage Segments are in between storage and for every item, they only have 1 stack of space (3 for products).
New Product: Virtual Pet
A new low tier product, the Virtual Pet has been added to the game. Currently, it is only available in the Freeplay and can be designed and produced right off the start.
Unlike the Calculator and the Cassette Player, the Virtual Pet requires higher initial features and has a more steep growth. But the opportunities are greater as well!
With the Virtual Pet being added, we adjusted the Market Tree and added new Company Goals for the Pocket Pet. Fulfilling the Pocket Pet company goals early in the game enables you an additional source for Discovery Points.
Also to complement this, the Calculator passive reward for the first Company Goal has been changed as well and is now rewarding Research Data depending on the Processing Power used in your products.
Quality of Life: Mass Deletion
The deconstruct mode enables you to delete objects in areas. Optionally, you can decide to fire the employees that are working on affected workplaces and also to delete all items in target storages.
No more inventory management after cleaning up a Work Zone!
Insights: Automatic Connection Previews
When placing storage, moving tables and shelves or when changing recipes, you will now be able to see preview lines of what the automatic logistics will be changing in your logistics. We hope that this will improve the understanding of what happens within your company and inform the player of unwanted changes before they happen.