Roadmap August 2024 (Patreon)

Hello everyone and welcome to a brand new roadmap breakdown.

I use these posts to keep you up to date on our progress and development of each mod, but remember to check out our development blogs on Patreon to read indepth explanations for different approaches in different mods!

We have been quite busy these last few weeks, and I am very proud to announce that Vanilla Factions Expanded - Insectoids 2 will be releasing in a few days. I don't want to give you specific timeline because there might be last-minute additions, but the mod is pretty much done, tested, working well, infographics and screenshots are all made, and overall it's probably one of our best mods yet - and possibly the perfect remake.

As a final reminder: If you were impatient and run the 1.4 Insectoids mod on your 1.5 save, it will not be safe to replace it with Insectoids 2. Your save will break. If you're still on 1.4 and enjoying Insectoids 1, it's also not safe to just swap it to Insectoids 2. Your save will also break. You will need to add Insectoids 2 to a save that never, ever had Insectoids 1.

This in turn means that my gaze now befalls on Vanilla Factions Expanded - Medieval 2. While not as extensive of a remake as Insectoids 2 (which quite frankly had f*** all content so we needed to come up with a lot for it), Medieval 2 will integrate the best features from both Medieval and Vikings. It will also include some new content too. I'm very excited to add a brand new travelling merchant faction that operates on barter economy - your silver will be of no use, so prepare to sell 5 pigs for a brand new bionic arm. Or something like that.

We have released Vanilla Weapons Expanded - Bioferrite recently, allowing you to craft some cool new weapons with even cooler new abilities. Make sure to give it a shot if you own Anomaly DLC.

Last week we have also launched Vanilla Vehicles Expanded - Upgrades, a mod adding many cool new upgrades to all the tier 1 vehicles. The upgrades are quite significant too - you can add additional armor to your vehicles, slap some offroad tires on them, extend their cargo space and so on. Really exciting stuff. I also plan to expand it with more upgrades in the future: primarily upgrading all the Tier 2 vehicles. I will probably be releasing the upgrades one by one.

Vanilla Vehicles Expanded - Imperial vehicles is temporarily on hold while I design a cool system for Aerodrones. After all, these are unmanned, but that doesn't mean they fly by themselves. I think it'd be cool if someone had to sit at some console to steer one.

Vanilla Exploration Expanded is a mod I really want to finish as soon as possible, as I think it'll add even more to the cross-map exploration, combined with Insectoids 2 world map infestation, and vehicles. There are heaps and heaps of graphics already done for it, we just need to start putting them in the game. I'll get my best man on it. XRUSHHA! Where are you my beloved!

There is also a new mod on the horizon, one that I think will improve the Anomaly experience greatly. Vanilla Anomaly Expanded - Insanity is our first swing at improving the DLC content, and it's a mod that adds a system inspired by the work of H.P. Lovecraft. Sanity is a new need that will be directly affected by interactions with the unknown, and will eventually lead to your colonists becoming insane. It's a vast mod that touches many systems in the game, because I didn't like the idea of low sanity becoming a mood debuff. I want true insanity. Paranoia. Scratching your eyeballs out. True lovecraftian collapse of a human psyche.

As you can see, we have our work cut out for us. In the meantime, all mods are receiving regular bug fixes thanks to our new bug reporting procedures. It's very easy for us to access the required logs, reproduction steps and categorize bugs from trivial to critical. I hope we can keep delivering the best possible content for you so that you may sink 1, 2 or 3 thousand hours into this game.

Catch you all very soon!