Titans of Industry: Global Production.

As always, I want to thank all of you who support me in my modding journey. Let's dive into the main topic of this dev diary, which is the 2.2 patch for Vaults of Knowledge, titled: Titans of Industry.

What about Orion Sector? Wasn't this your priority?

To answer this question: yes, Orion is still my priority, and the mechanics I will soon mention were initially meant for the Grave of Colossus module. However, due to the scope and potential of these mechanics, I decided to port them to Vaults of Knowledge and build a new patch around them.

Changes to Items

In the new 2.2 patch, the following commodities will be removed from the mod:

Rectificates

Biotics

Purified Ore

Purified Transplutonic Ore

Polymers

Compounds

Electronic Components

Modular Constructors

From my perspective, these commodities did not stand the test of time and have become redundant. However, Water will remain, as I noticed that many people actually liked that commodity. The 2.2 patch will introduce a new commodity: Advanced Components, which will be crucial in the new mechanic described below.

Changes to tech tree and industries

There are going to be slight changes to tech tree mainly to end tree and mining tech tree, due to removal of ore commodities. Now mining will have two upgrade paths, one relying on Mantle Bore, second not relying at all.

Moreover, due to new mechanic I will be mentioning below, in 2.2 patch all colony items will be also available to be mounted on their upgrades!

Total Overhaul of Custom Production

I was originally working on a complete revamp of how ships are produced for the Grave of Colossus. The main idea was that the first battlegroup would have a wholly different process of building their ships. Then I had the idea to create an entire framework for such a system. This framework fits better with Vaults of Knowledge than Grave of Colossus, so here we are.

A new UI for Custom production!

New Mechanic: Global Production

From now on, the main indicator of production will not be money but rather the amount of resources your faction generates. For ships, weapons, and fighters, you will now need a constant supply of hulls, weapon components, or advanced components for special types of ships.

Global production works like this: From every market owned by the player, it calculates how many units of Global Production the market produces. For example, one supply of hulls produced on the market will equal 100 units of Global Production. Three supplies will equal 300 units, and so on.

Track your production capacity

Production Calculated Daily

You will no longer need to wait an entire month for the completion of a production order. Instead, you will wait a certain amount of time for the item to be produced. For example, a weapon that takes three days to produce will be available in three days, not in the next month.

Special Projects

As you can see in the fourth tab, there is now something called "Special Projects." These are massive, gigantic projects that will consume most of your resources! This system was designed with other modders and me in mind to provide a unique way of building certain ships/weapons/fighters, such as supercapitals or experimental ships.

QoL Improvements over Vanilla

During the development of this patch, I encountered many problems with UI optimization, mainly that it lags a lot when loading many entries at once. This is why I also implemented pagination, so all entries are divided into pages you can access. If your PC can handle more, you will have the ability to display more items per page.

You can always switch to different page.

I also added a search bar for items. I think this will significantly improve the user experience. Instead of scrolling through the entire ship list, all you will need to do is type the name of the item you want!

And now even searching ships via name!

Modding Support

This framework provides support for modders, which does not require Vaults of Knowledge as a hard dependency. All item costs can be overridden by a CSV file if, for example, a certain modder deems a ship too easy to build. It can also be specified that this ship/weapon/fighter belongs to the Special Project category, making their production more complex than normal ones.

How Much Time Do These Patches Take?

This has been a very frequent question lately. For this specific patch, the current amount of time invested is around 230-250 hours. Given that a lot of things needed to be made from scratch, it might seem like a lot of time, actually.

Thank you for your continued support and interest in my mods. Stay tuned for more updates! In next dev diary we will talk about special projects, construction speed bonuses and new hypershunt mechanics!