Roadmap September 2023 (Patreon)

Hello everyone and welcome to a new roadmap post!

There has been quite a lot of developments over the last few weeks, and I don't really fancy doing a super long breakdown because most of you will skip it to get to the juicy details anyway, so I will keep this one short.

Last month saw the release of Vanilla Vehicles Expanded and Vanilla Factions Expanded - Deserters. Two massive mods that were insanely fun to design and develop.

We have a number of mods currently in testing. Well, two. But two is still a number.

Vanilla Vehicles Expanded - Tier 3 adds 10 new vehicles that the player can find in their wild, wrecked form and restore them to working condition. Upon restoring them, players will get the ability to construct them. Vehicles range from big rig trucks, self-propelled artillery, marshal battle tanks with coaxial machine gun and gigantic cherokee cargo helicopters.

Vanilla Psycasts Expanded - Puppeteer adds a new psycaster path, focused on controlling the minds of the people and creating psychic slaves. Puppetmasters gain percentage of skill xp from whatever xp their puppets get, and at higher level can 'ascend' their puppets and turn them into Psycaster XP. Like a proper D&D Lich Queen.

We're currently designing and developing quite a large number of mods as well. This is the longest stage of mod development and includes anything from writing design docs, drawing art assets, procuring sounds, commissioning art and coding and balancing. Mods currently in development are:

Vanilla Vehicles Expanded - Old War, which adds a number of Tier 4 vehicles inspired by the war of the Ancients. You will be able to find the ancient wrecks and restore them to working condition, but unlike Tier 3 vehicles - you will not be able to then research and craft them. Fear not, however, as Old War vehicles, when destroyed by enemy fire, turn back into wreck form instead of disappearing into a pile of resources. These wrecks can be repaired again!

Vanilla Factions Expanded - Tribals is a new addition to the roadmap and it's a much smaller faction mod than other faction mods. It will allow you to roleplay as a tribe of wild men on their way to becoming a tribe. When starting as wild men, your tech level isn't Neolithic - it's Animal. You have to learn how to make fire, do mining, how to do agriculture, hunt, make tribalwear, make walls and furniture. The game is hard, but we're introducing a new system called Cornerstones, which will allow you to advance through the eras, and with each era finished, you will unlock permanent bonuses for your colony!

Vanilla Psycasts Expanded - Rebalance is a major rebalance of the entire mod. Almost all psycasts get changed one way or another - some receive slight stat changes, other gain new functionality, while others are overhauled! This rebalance also features a lot of changes to the system itself - including an ability to set Max Psycaster level. Among the features I'm most excited about is a rebalance to leveling up - with the removal of Psyfocus gain affecting XP gain, you will no longer snowball into higher Psycaster levels. In fact, you can set your max psycaster level to 6 and have mostly a vanilla-like experience, but with 6 out of 200 psycasts, instead of 6 out of 30.

Vanilla Races Expanded - Fungoid is undergoing heavy development now that Sarg is back from his 45 years long holidays. It's a very cool and horror-themed mod, which means I might actually be able to release it for Halloween!

Vanilla Races Expanded - Lycanthrope has some of it already designed, but still needs to go through further design stages before it can enter proper development.

Vanilla Temperature Expanded is proving to be a very difficult task to properly design so I'm putting it on a sort of backburner for a little while until I clear other major releases. Who would have thought that designing a central heating system can be so hard /s

Vanilla Furniture Expanded - Recycling has quite a bit of content already designed, but knowing VE, I want to blow it up a bit, as in, make it bigger and filled with exciting new content.

Vanilla Events Expanded - Caravan is a very wide mod with a lot of different events, and I just add new events to it every now and then, so until I decide it's enough, it will still be in development. 

When it comes to other important news, we have decided to merge VFE-Ultratech and VFE-Arkology into one Vanilla Factions Expanded - Megacorp. I have already covered the reasons on Patreon, you can read up on it here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/devblog-244-88502677 

That's it for this roadmap post. Thank you all for supporting us and for continuous feedback and nice words. You lot are great and it's a pleasure to make content for you to enjoy.