Greetings Colonists,

Today we are excited to share some information on the upcoming update to crafting! We won't spill all the secrets, but here is some of what you can expect!

Overhauled UI, Functionality First

With our new UI framework, we've done a complete overhaul to the crafting UI not only to introduce the quality of life aspects such as resizeable windows, but a whole host of functionality within the menu itself. We won't cover it all here, but here are some highlights:

All presented work is still under development and subject to change

Above you can see an example of the new crafting tree. Now, when looking at any blueprint in the crafting terminal you will be able to expand every required crafted input ingredient - all the way down the chain. This highlights both blueprints and materials you own, and also those you don't.

Missing an ingredient? A new view (not shown in screenshot) will show you exactly how much of each material you are missing, and allow you to purchase these materials straight from the auction.

For those of you who hoard a lot of blueprints, our current UI wasn't the best when it came to filtering. Our new UI makes sorting, filtering, and searching far quicker and more usable.

Many of you who are all about the data will love our new Session Log outputs (not pictured), where after each crafting session you will have a full raw-text output of every success, near success, failure, values and so on - so you can directly copy and paste it wherever you like.

There's lots more to discover, but we'll leave it there for now.

Operation Clean-up

At the end of last year we talked about ongoing projects looking into items and balancing, and how we are developing internal tools and systems to better balance and maintain our economy and items.

A key part of this is the crafting economy and resources. Over the last 20 years of Entropia, many Blueprints in the game have become "deprecated" in some manner. Typically this is when one or more input ingredients are removed, and are no longer obtainable.

We've identified hundreds of such blueprints that while deprecated, still exist in the economy. This can be very misleading for said blueprint owners, hoping that they might be able to find the missing ingredients somewhere, despite it not being possible. It also can impact new players, who don't have the game knowledge to know if a certain item is obtainable or not. So, for us to properly tackle rebalancing around blueprints and resources, we will be fully removing any blueprints gathering dust that are not possible to craft, and fairly compensating owners in the process this update.

With this out the way, we will be following immediately from this with a clean-up of lootable resources too, removing any resources that do not currently have a purpose in the game today. This will help to consolidate, and ensure that whatever you loot, fundamentally, will always be used in something.

We hope you are as excited as us for crafting getting some love it deserves! And of course, we haven't mentioned everything in this post...and there might just be a few hidden secrets too...what will you discover?