Offworld Trading Company has gotten a major patch and a brand new DLC this week, so we’re going to take some time today to break down what we’ve been up to for the past couple of months.

Limited Supply

Limited Supply is our new DLC, and it breaks Offworld’s rules in a way we haven’t done before. Featuring 17 new singleplayer scenarios, LS will allow players to explore what Mars was like in the early days of colonization. Gone are the free markets that rule Mars now, strict contracts and sheer scarcity will determine what (if anything) the player is allowed to buy and sell. Also gone are the modern stock markets. Rather than competing for a monopoly of any given Martian Market, players will initially be simply fighting to survive. Once they’ve proven that they can handle a business on Mars local colonies will begin asking players for help and support as they also try to find their feet. Each location has a different market and unique requirements. Because of this, the 17 scenarios play out like puzzles, with players being asked to find a path to victory despite some difficult restrictions being placed on them.

These puzzles aren’t too difficult at the beginning, but gradually as more and more is asked of the player they’ll begin to be truly challenging. The last few scenarios even take place on Ceres and Io, which everyone knows to be even less forgiving than Mars (these scenarios will be available without The Ceres Initiative and Jupiter’s Forge, though I would encourage you to look into those anyway). Thankfully if it all seems a bit too harsh three difficulty levels are available, so if you think you just need a little more time or maybe one extra MULE you’ll often be able to get just that. Alternatively if things are feeling too easy feel free to try Hard mode, and see if you can truly survive the challenge Mars has to offer.

If you want to find out more about the unique scenarios that Limited Supply offers, make sure to take a look at our news page.

1.18

This patch has quite a bit going on, but we'll focus on a couple key pieces (full notes available here).

Balance

First things first, let’s get right into the meat of what our competitors care about. Not much has changed since our next_version build in terms of balance (see explanations of these changes over at our previous dev journal). Optimizations were toned down a bit, and will take a little longer than seen on next, but overall are still much faster to perfect than they have been before. In addition, debt is now more punishing, with interest rates stacking even higher as corporations fall further into debt. Finally, founding has received a small adjustment in bonus cash awarded. The bonus will be cut in half each time a player founds. This is to encourage players to go ahead and land to start playing the game, rather than simply playing chicken to see how much cash they can squeeze out at the start.

QoL/UI

Lots of little changes have gone in to make competing on Mars just a bit easier. Caves are now protected on found and highlighted like ice, the Scavenger logo has been changed (maybe now they won’t be confused with Robots so much), and the Ranked Queue has seen a variety of improvements. And of course the Infinite Map Challenge is now available in queue, so anyone looking to rank up on the ladder and while playing solo can now do just that.

Finally, modders have been given some new tools to play with. Head on over to the full patch notes for more details.

What’s Next

We’re always looking to improve Offworld in any way we can, and to that end we’ll be looking to improve the new player experience in Offworld. We’re still exploring the options we have for accomplishing this, so we have nothing specific to announce just yet. That said, this is something we’re committed to as we believe we have a great game for people to come to play, but we need to get rid of some of the barriers preventing new competitors from joining our community.

What are you interested in seeing as we head into 2018? Let us know below, and be sure to join us over on Discord to be a part of the discussion.