The Techtonica Alpha was released to the first, small wave of Alpha Groundbreakers on July 19th, 2022. Over the last two weeks, the Fire Hose team has kept a close eye on the incoming feedback on our public Trello board as well as on videos and streams shared by Alpha Groundbreakers and Calyx Creators alike.

For Alpha 1.1, which is live now, we identified and made updates to three core points of Groundbreaker feedback.

🏭 Patch Notes in Brief 🏭

• Added options to disable/enable some in-game graphical elements, including:
  • High Res Textures
  • Anisotropic Textures
  • Ambient Occlusion
  • Bloom
  • VSync
• Corrected Echosketch zoom scroll speed to match player’s pace
• Added UI elements to better communicate the cancel/stow command

Detailed changes for Techtonica with Alpha 1.1

New Graphics Options

First, we added a small set of graphics option toggles to the settings menu.

To support large-scale factories built below the surface of Calyx during the Alpha, we put the lion’s share of running Techtonica on the GPU. This makes running the game efficiently more difficult for Groundbreakers with lower-end GPUs.

As we announced in our recent Discord AMA, Alpha 1.1 includes options to disable/enable some graphic features, which should slightly improve performance for some Groundbreakers. We’re working on a much larger slate of performance improvements that we’ll release once ready.

Fixed Echosketch Zoom Speed

Groundbreakers who unlock the Echosketch (including those on our own team!) all say the same thing: “looks cool; why does it take so long to scroll in and out?” No more! Alpha 1.1 includes fixed scrolling zoom speed in the Echosketch to match the scrolling pace set by Groundbreakers like you.

Q to Stow/Cancel

Groundbreakers have done a whole lot of building in Techtonica so far. Unfortunately, the UI never did a great job showing them how to cancel a build while in build mode. Now, whether Groundbreakers are getting ready to place a drill or turn a Conveyor Belt, they’ll see that pressing Q will cancel that process, rather than having to navigate to another tool or object on the toolbar.

Pressing Q stows active equipment like the M.O.L.E. or Analyzer, closes build mode for machines, or reverts to the last rotation in build mode for Conveyor Belts. That last one is useful for the intrepid spaghetti artisan.