Learning Factory Dev Diaries, March 2023: New Yarn Balls, Subsidizing Research & Harder Challenges From Dr. Katz

Hey everyone! It is well known that the older you get, the faster flies the time. Apparently, a similar principle applies to video games: the closer to release, the shorter the next month seems. Is it the middle of March already? It is. And apparently, we've made a lot of progress.

Blueprints Complete!

If you were not using this mighty powerful instrument before, you should give it a try now! You can now make changes in the Blueprints straight from the Blueprint Library, but what’s even more exciting - you can instantly craft buildings over the Blueprints by pressing ‘Ctrl + click’ (by default) on them. Or even better - you can automatically build stuff around you by pressing just one button ('J’by default)! Just make sure you have enough resources for it.

Visual Update: It Has Begun!

Mark these words: come summer, you will see a whole different Learning Factory! Needless to say, the graphics in the game is far from final: we only have one Sergei, the artist. But his talent is truly unstoppable: he already started polishing key buildings in the game, adding shadows and other very important details. The first subject to transform is, of course, the Yarn Ball Maker - one of the first and most important structures at any stage of your Factory development:

Needless to say, redesigning the Yarn Ball Maker means redesigning Yarn Balls as well:

It took us some time to implement because Sergei has a habit of sometimes going WAY too deep into details. This time he spent hours studying the techniques of weaving in the textile industry, so he could make Yarn Balls look truly realistic (for a game about cats on Mars in the future, yes, why?).

Eventually, the resulting Yarn Balls ended up becoming so realistic, they’d look visually noisy when the camera zoomed out too far… Therefore, we had to postpone implementing them until the next update. But they arrived at last:

Oh, but what about that delicious Yarn Ball with a gold star, on the right? Oh, it’s just a new type of item, combining the softness and playful potential of Yarn Balls with the irresistible vibes of Catnip Algae. We even had to design a special machine for you to be able to craft it:

Gameplay Changes: Sales, Subsidizing & Dr. Katz Requests

We have a confession to make: lots of features we implement on a bi-monthly basis are not listed in these humble Dev Diaries. Mostly because we don’t want to overburden you with too many details - we do make a lot of changes to the game. But the most recent update introduced a bunch of cool new things that are worth mentioning:

There’s now an option to subsidize cat researchers working in Experimental Labs. For a reasonable price, you can make it so the next 100 articles written by a researcher will bring them twice as much experience. They don’t go out of their laboratories much, but they still like money, who knows why! Cats are mysterious.

You can also spend money on upgrading Dr. Katz’s requests (those mini-quests that you see in the upper left corner of the screen from time to time) - the challenge will become harder but the reward will be better, too!

And to earn money to afford these tools, you can turn on Sales pricing mode in a Smart Store! It’s an addition to already existing manual pricing and machine learning pricing. With this thing on, all items in a Store will be sold at minimum prices, but the satisfied cats will become more loyal, which will bring you more profit in the future.

Now What?

Once you get locked into serious feature adding, the tendency is to push it as far as you can. Even with the game’s full release approaching, we still got a couple of awesome things up our sleeves!

One of them is Cat Zeppelins. Like, for transporting cats this time. Once we introduced Cargo Zeppelins to the game, some players started trying to put cats inside of them, though they were never designed for this. Some of the players even succeeded in doing that (which, naturally, resulted in the game crashing). So we thought it was a fine idea. We haven’t heard of any historical cases of cats traveling in giant blimps, so we see it as our chance to finally make things right, even if just in a video game. Cats deserve to be able to fly in airships, dammit!

The other big feature we’re working on is dedicated to those who made the best of the features from the paragraphs above and is now carrying the burden of being filthy rich. The codename of this feature is ‘endless researches’, and it will allow you to invest ridiculous amounts of money to squeeze the game for various benefits for your Factory: increased Hype, increased XP levels for scientists, a chance to craft an additional building while crafting, a speed boost for Zeppelins - you name it! As long as you keep the sweet dough coming.

A Call for the Community: Got Blueprints?

We’re having an awesome activity on our Discord server these days - and you’re invited!

Here’s an awesome trade offer.

We get: Blueprints from your Factories that you consider so cool/useful, that all Learning Factory players must have it

You get: your work added to the global Blueprint Library and your name in the game (in case we and the community find your Blueprint useful). Pictured above is one of the first works by one of our players - check it out in the game now!

How to make a Blueprint:

• Press and hold Ctrl and drag your mouse over a group of buildings/object

• Press Ctrl+S to save the group as a Blueprint in the Library ('B' by default)

• Don’t forget to enter a name and a description of what your blueprint does (this is also where your name will appear if we select your Blueprint for the official list)

• You can also make simple editions to a custom Blueprint in the Library: delete items with the right mouse button, rotate the whole Blueprint, or invert the surface and underground levels

How to share a Blueprint:

• Go to Blueprint Library ('B' by default)

• Find your work there

• Press the arrow icon (‘Export Blueprint’) next to a Blueprint’s name. Or press ‘Details’ and find the ‘Export’ button there

• The Blueprint will be copied to your clipboard as text, you can then paste it anywhere and send it to anyone you want (it will be attached as a text file if you paste it to Discord)

How to import a Blueprint:

• In the Blueprint Library, find the ‘Import’ field in the lower part of the screen

• Paste the text code of a Blueprint you got somewhere

• Hit the green arrow button

Share your work on our Discord server! Or drop them into a text file and mail it to

info@luden.io

See you in a month! Things are about to get exciting as ever as the full release approaches. Glory to science! Glory to KOTOVOD!