The Base Building update that we’ll release for Techtonica in December (next month, woo!) will feature a lot more than just base building pieces.

We’ve already covered the new Production Terminal, and we’ve shared a lot of the pieces you’ll have at your disposal as well as the intermediates to make them. Today? Today, we’ll talk about the new abandoned facilities that litter the subsurface world of Calyx.

Don’t worry too much about spoilers here. We’re saving the lion’s share of facilities for you to discover as we’re only focusing on one in order to give you an idea of how they’ll all function. We also won’t share any of the core narrative; that will always be the case for these updates.

Ready to learn more about one of the abandoned facilities you’ll unearth with the Base Building update?

Let’s dig in.

Meet the ancient Agricultural Facility…

Farming for food? No, the UNIHAZ suits take care of sustenance needs for Groundbreakers on Calyx. This massive Agricultural Facility was farming for fuel, a demand that far outstripped the need for something to eat.

Something happened here, it seems. Time and the shifting of Calyxian soil have partially fractured and crushed the Agricultural Facility. We’ll share some screenshots and talk about how we pulled off the effect later in this post. We think it looks a bit spooky and very cool.

Damaged or not, it’s clear that the intention was to grow and harvest seeds in this location while using Monorails to distribute the crop to another facility entirely. Those depots look extremely unused, too. Maybe you can do something with them?

The evolution of showcasing decay

We mentioned this last week, too, but Base Building is an opportunity for us and players to put on a quieter type of storytelling. You’ll craft your own stories with the bases you build, and we’ll tell more stories of Groundbreakers past with these aging facilities. (To be clear, we’ll also have more voiced story in this update…)

Telling a story of destruction and decay with these facilities produced some interesting problems for our design team. They had to build these structures, in-editor and in-game, first.

With them built, the structures had to then be broken. An interesting process in and of itself. Andrii, a member of our design team, had to twist and turn individual pieces to a wall, say, collapsing or some scaffolding falling.

Add in a few in-game models and machines, and suddenly we go from a mess of Lincoln Logs to a building that’s falling apart. It also offers a lot of opportunities for players to explore while jumping.

Telling stories while teaching players

While abandoned facilities like this one offer up world-building narrative, they’re also a great resource for scannables and showcasing. All the pieces that make up the massive structures can be scanned and come from the set of pieces you’ll get with the Base Building update.

That’s right! We used the Base Building sets to create these abandoned structures, though we used some developer tools to make them look fractured and broken in order to tell you a story of collapse and decay.

It’s our aim to show you just a little of what’s possible with the tools we give you through these facilities. Of course, we know your work will probably blow ours away.

This is one facility; there are many more

Just to restate! We’ve only showcased one facility buried in the Base Building update. We’ll have others for you to explore for yourself once we release.

When are we releasing the Base Building update? We’re still on track for December. As soon as we nail the date down, we’ll share it with you.

In the meantime, join our Discord, tell your friends to snag Techtonica while it’s still on sale (that ends today, November 28th!), and we’ll see you on Calyx!