nah, rn i have talos, laurion, santorini and astrape aviable as a cities; when i try to drive towards strabos, all i can see is a red text saying "Locked (this action cant be performed, beacause it will be added in future update)". therefore im asking when the update release is scheduled? same with the city that will be more on the north, ive forgotten its name, but it was the frozen one. will those two places added in one lore update
Current focus is on fixing/polishing v0.4. After that will be a Steam/UI/UX update. Then I'll look at scheduling the next content update. Though it is extremely unlikely that both locations will be added at once.
Pneuma is the glacier city, in the opposite direction up the river, from Santorini. Its where all the glacier water came from.
Strabo is a tech/research center, to the south of Talos.
Then there is another place "idly" mentioned at the Dam, with the lettering on one of the crates. So there is at least three new locations mentioned in this update.
Plus, another one. All the people seemed to converge on Laurion. Then vanished from there. So, likely there is another town or location that is near Laurion where all the people are. Or along the way, a mass grave site of Rovers that attempted to make it there but ran out of supplies.
This is a known bug - you can't install or remove it after the generator is installed somehwere (you have to loop and do it before installing it on the next loop). Since it's post-EoC, it's fairly low priority, but hopefully I will get to it in the next few days.
So Astrape has power, but limited oxygen. That is fine.
What isn't fine is, that moving the rover into the civilian bay, you can't sit in your rover to passively restore your personal air supply (if you have pressure regulator of course). So you have to remove the rover from the vehicle, enter the rover and do a wait action in there.
Otherwise, you will likely run out of air before other resources, as it takes forever to refill air cannisters.
This is intended. If you had unlimited air from the start then Astrape would be very easy. I'm going to have the electrical discharge destroy your rover's pressure regulator to stop people thinking it's an accident.
Take Vegetables, Warehouse (Astrape) doesn't share any commonality with Take Vegetables from Tram. So it has 2 second base time when I first encounter it, after emptying the Tram vegetables twice fully completely already.
So finally got the mining machine and new engine installed at Santorini.
I noticed when I parked at Compound, I had the option to Park and connect Charger.
But once I had the new engine, I had to park, then Connect charger.
Oversight?
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PS: It is a good update overall, thank you for all your hard work. I don't know if I said that already or implied that, but thought I should say it anyway.
It's a known limitation of combined actions that none of them can be completed more than once per loop. It's on the list to add, but it won't be a small amount of work.
Hi, found your game while scrolling through the Incremental Games Reddit. I've been enjoying the whole past a day!
I did want to note something strange, a bug perhaps? I was the process of trying to travel from Talos to the Dam, but couldn't make it all the way. So I went to Laurion to get more energy and attempt again hoping to try again with a generous 20% boost that is usually associated with reattempting partially tried things.
However when I got back the bonus said 0% for X amount of time, which is kind of weird, but okay. What was weirder was the fact that instead of it taking the standard 4 minutes like normal, on my first try, it instead said something even longer. Somewhere around 4 minutes and 30 seconds? I forgot the exact number, but it was longer than the base 100% which seems unintended.
That is a bug, I haven't had a chance to investigate yet, but it has been happening to a lot of people. Some watched the timer closely and suggested that it skipped some time, so it may not actually take longer. But hopefully I'll find time to fix it today.
Theres probably a lot i could say about this update (Why did i have to finish it so fast (T_T) (well, ACKTUALLY, Im at 99.25% completion, which is almost sadder than 100%)
But I'll just ask a few questions with bonus speculation (Spoilers! duh):
1. Would I be right in assuming the VTOL isn't fully implemented yet? I fixed the power system just to see if it would say anything and nada. Also, it tells me that the motors from the mining machine would be able to fix it, but there's no option to take them. I'm assuming you just haven't implemented that since the rest of the VTOL can't be fixed yet, and so the motors would be otherwise useless. Of course, the propellers and nav unit don't seem to be anywhere yet (Although it's possible I missed them, not likely, but possible.) I'm guessing we might find those at Strabo since it seems to be some sort of Vehicle manufacturing facility.
2. Did I miss figuring out the name of the glacier facility? Because once I saw the crates at Astrape it said that if we looked at the dam grates again, I might figure it out, so I was expecting that to be the fabled last persistent action, but even after collecting all the crates next loop, there wasn't anything. I'm guessing now that is just supposed to be something I figure out irl. (I've forgotten some of the clues so, oh no! I might have to play again! what a terrible fate!) (From what I remember its PNAUMA ??? that seems wrong... oh well)
3. Not really a question, but when parking the rover is Astrape (Pre artifact) The text prompt appears when you cycle the gate rather than when you actually park the rover in there, seems to be misplaced.
4. no more for now, but i may be back with more questions later.
1) You're correct that the VTOL isn't fully implemented. You can repair the power system and use it to charge the power block, but that's all for now.
2) Once you've seen all the dam crates once and the Astrape crates once, you have the full name. The logs around this have a couple bugs in them, so it's not made as clear as it should be yet, but once you've done both you can search the new facility in Laurion.
3) I think this was fixed in the .27 hotfix which went out late yesterday, but thank you for the report.
ahh so that's why you can fix the VTOL power systems. The rover gradually loses all purpose at Astrape. Also thank you, i now know what the last persistent action is.
Also I really wonder what a speedrun of this game would look like when its finished, already there's so much to consider, like which facilities you even go to/finish. Like would it be faster to get the Laurion resource artifact first? or would the Astrape power artifact be enough of a time safe to offset that? (prolly not, but you see what i mean?)
One more question, are you just stranded at Astrape after Santorini explodes? theres not even an option to go to the dam?
Yeah, a fair few people on the discord have been speed running the game so far (mostly trying to reach end of content with fewest loops, or trying challenges like no rover upgrades).
There is a route back to the dam. But for it to be available you have to have driven from the dam to Astrape at least once.
-> Returned to Talos, and found out you can't use the charger there to recharge your battery.
-> An option to state that you've reached minimum safe distance, from the Santorini explosion. That way if you want to leave, before it explodes, you know how far you need to get to avoid the boom.
-> Maybe a way to reinforce your emergency suit with the metal plates, so that you raise your maximum air and water supplies.
Tried driving from Talos to Bridge, skipping Laurion. Got from bridge to Santorini. Power in rover running low. I drive to central compound, nearly out of power. I get halfway through "Park Rover", when I run out of power.
There is no option to get out of my Rover.
There is no option to push my dead battery Rover into the powered Garage.
There is no option to enter the Santorini, grab a fuel cell, and then go back to the Rover and turn on its generator.
Now I have all my actions as "red" (cannot do), and despite having 11mins till Santorini is destroyed, I'm forced to Loop Now.
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So what is the point of the Talos to Dam route, if you don't actually have the power to make it to Santorini, without visiting Laurion to grab the fuel cells?
This is not a bug, not an oversight. It's an unimplemented feature because of the huge amount of time and effort it would take to implement the ability to:
Get in/out of your rover anywhere
Walk from anywhere to a facility
Enter/leave a facility on foot, despite normally only being able to enter with a rover.
Walk from a facility back to whatever random place you left your rover
Even if you could do all that, Santorini central doesn't have any fuel cells. So you'd have to also be able to walk from central to the quarry and back. All of which is a moot point because I believe you can make it from Talos to Santorini without going to Laurion, you just need more familiarity with the route. And even if you can, it is in fact faster to drive from Laurion, back to Talos then to Santorini than it is to drive straight from Laurion to Santorini.
Well, you could always just "fudge" it. There are times when you can stop an action-midway and do something else. Like, say you hit travel to dam at Talos, and halfway into doing that action, you hit park rover. So you park the rover.
Santorini quarry has a manual entrance, that you can't park the rover into. So you HAVE to exit the rover to walk there. And that is where the fuel cells are.
So you could have, just for Santorini, a walk to Compound that takes 4x as long as driving to the Compound, could be a "hacky" / "duct tape" solution to this problem, for just this one area.
I'm so excited for this update and I haven't even finished all the new content!
I'm sorry I'm not on the Discord, so bugs here may be dupes.
Bugs on my save from the previous patch, which probably won't be present on new saves: when you've found a faster route to Astrape on the old version but not on the new version, there are issues with the combined travel actions "close dam and cross" *from starting side of dam) and "drive to Astrape" (from Santorini quarry compound). Both probably use old versions of the "drive to x" action that have been changed in this new release.
New content bug, Astrape basement: Can't exit to civilian sector from basement even after unlocking the door from that side.
New content bug, Astrape central, after acquiring [spoiler]: text on water recycler still says it's suffering from an issue that should have been prevented.
Proofreading: "detach [spoiler] from reactor" includes one typo of "rector"; text beginning "the physical structure of this" contains what I think is meant to be two text strings dependent on what order you've done other things in, but is currently just placeholder text in brackets.
The new way the tram works (and new things to do on it)
PDA, at least in concept - I am guessing it'll offer us some way to view our notes and a story-so-far, both great, because I've forgotten who [redacted] is... and any writing style could give more hints about the nature of our MC
Depending when you started playing, the bugs you had with old combined actions nay have been fixed by the hotfix late yesterday. The Astrape basement isn't a bug, it's a door you can only open from one side, as is mentioned in the logs and actions description.
I'll take a look at the other bugs though. Thanks for the report, and glad you enjoyed the update 🙂
Ooh thank you. I've now found everything new, I think (and according to my whizzy new PDA whom I shall name Ziggy) (ability to name PDA when? - joking!), and it was so so fun! Also congrats on the Steam thing! I really wanna see this game succeed. It's got a combo of mechanics and flavours I really enjoy.
Pretty engaging, Fun needs a bit more optional upgrade options for some things, and optional locations. Very fun do feel some of the events could be added to your log if you live long enough and maybe some bonuses that open after X time survived. Love to see more content and some more things to do besides solve main puzzles.
Only major complaint is water filter and solar panels feel kind useless currently, especially with there not being more plates anywhere to get both the speed upgrade and solar. Another problem is most of the places you could actually uses the solar panels you cant enter with out the rover and then its a weird super long process of driving it in and out while getting supplies. Also A backpack upgrade feels like it would help so much with a lot of the game and make it less fussy could be a nice side mission to hunt down similar to missing rover.
So if you install the solar panels at Talos, you can also install the ones at Laurion. Not sure if it improves solar efficiency, but didn't attempt it.
each one gives like 0.1 per installed so if you do both you get a nice 0.2 which is not super good but not super bad especially if more become available and we get another 5 plats somewhere. Sadly at current they are mostly useless.
I mean its fine we just have no where it will be out side a while or any trips long enough to get any noticeable gain, and only like one path uses little enough energy to really be effected
I died at Laurion after Santorini exploded (having not visited Santorini at all) and the game used a start message that assumed I had already visited Santorini and learned about Astrape.
There's a bug where if you go to the lost rover during a loop before collecting supplies at Laurion it removes the collect supplies option at Laurion
Secondly if you move the generator into Laurion and then start moving the rover inside there is again an option to move the already moved generator into Laurion
from what i understand time dilation makes it so it takes less time for you the player not the in game character. for example the drive from talos to Laurion in world it could take 2 mins in game but it would only take 30 second of real time
Each completion gives speed boost up to 3x. After that, each completion will give 7% less boost than the previous completion, but will also start giving time dilation. Once time dilation reaches 3x, it also loses 7% per completion.
It seems It comes up when you hit the soft cap, and speeds it up for in RL only so if it say takes 10Sec at your mods and you have dilation 2 it takes 5seconds but eats 10seconds of resorces
It can be completed in 3 loops (after you start it), or 4-5 if you're not a speed runner.
Not affecting fuel is a known limitation of the system (since fuel cells aren't consumed by the player, it uses a different system and will be non-trivial to add to it). It likely will be added, but not sure when.
Oh it took me 7 loops. 4 for the first three layers, and got fourth layer (water) started. Then took 2 more loops to finish water and 1 loop to finish the toxic air.
This was mostly due to resource starvation, so not sure how you could complete it all in 5 loops, without cheating.
How does that work? The power generated by the rover, doesn't transfer to the Laurion station. I've tried. So any power generated, wouldn't do anything. But mostly it wasn't the lack of power that slowed down my progress. It was running out of food/water in those loops, that is why it took me so long. Laurion has no infinite food or water supply, so it is quite easy to run out of those resources there. It does have the water filter device, but that thing is SO DAMN SLOW, that by the time the next water bottle is generated, you'd have consumed more water, than the bottle gives. Its like 2.5 water, and the time to wait to get a bottle you consume 2.6 water.
1.in Talos install solar panel, use artifact on solar panel.
2.drive to Laurion and install generator and water recycler at Laurion (to Laurion), also install the solar panel at Laurion (to the rover) and use artifact on generator.
3.use all fuel cell in generator and charge drone (also install 2 empty power cell) then takes the artifact back to the solar panels.
4.drive to dam and get the 1 empty power cell and 1 power coupler.
5.close dam and drive to Santorini.
6.drive to quarry and call tram (also restock to have max all item and take the environmental suit).
7.drive to central to charge rover (also install the empty power cell) and restock food and water.
8.drive to quarry to take vegetable.
9. drive to central to charge rover (also install the empty power cell) and restock food and water.
10. go to Laurion, put the artifact in the generator and then use all fuel cell and start digging.
at this point you should have 2 water recyclers (infinity water), a lot of energy (if not enough energy than you can put artifact in solar panels after the fuel cell ran out and not park the rover in Laurion and take full power cell the transfer it to Laurion), 5 ration pack, 5 protein bars, 5 basic foods,5 vegetable and that not even count the amount of food you don't take in Laurion.
if you think this have any problem, please let me know
edit: 2,3 loop is just an estimate I seriously don't know this Strat can take the artifact in just 2,3 loop or not
Previously the generator was just a fixed timed event. You put a fuel cell in, it ran for 60 seconds and gave a flat amount of power per second. That worked fine, but was incredibly inflexible. Now, fuel cells have a fuel value, the generator has fuel storage, and burns an amount of fuel per second. This allows for:
Items having different amounts of fuel
Adding multiple fuel items to the generator at once and letting it run for longer
Upgrading the generator to burn fuel faster
Upgrading the generator to burn fuel more efficiently
Upgrading the generator to hold more fuel
Not seeing the time remaining is a known drawback. There is a resolution to it planned, but there wasn't time to implement it yet.
Been waiting for this update and excited as can be for it. Looks like the multi action to drive to Astrape seems to be broken now? Can't do the observe now and have done it before.
There are a few issues in that area. Mostly people seem to be able to progress, they just have to re-do things they'd done before. I'm working on fixing it though.
Yes; the repeating wasn't too onerous at all once I understood what I needed to do, and now I've done the route scouting (which is way cooler the new way) the combined driving to Astrape works fine.
Doing a complete reset of the game, so that I avoid savegame related issues. Some things noticed immediately:
1) If a feature isn't implemented yet, just leave that blank in the PDA or just have the PDA become available once you unlock the Map.
2) The map has a single dotted line to nowhere, when you start out. Only once you reach Laurion, does it update and show Laurion. Doesn't show whereabout the Rover is though.
3) When you reach Laurion, the first time, it asks you to move the generator into the base. But the first time you get there, you don't know of the generator. I'm hesistant to touch the button, until I find the generator though.
4) A lot of the old "blue highlighted" actions from previous version is gone, so now I don't know what is a permanent action or not.
5) You can take non-essential couplers, without lifting the lockdown first. Several are behind doors, that must be accessed after the lockdown is lifted, normally.
-> After a few loops, installing the generator and fueling it, I went back to the rover and I can "Move Generator Into Laurion" without a generator in my rover and it has no extra completion time on it. Didn't touch it though.
-> Sure wish I could repair the food replicator at Laurion with the taken power coupler from Talos.
-> I tried a loop with installing the generator at Talos. I'm now at Laurion and have the above "Move Generator Into Laurion" available, with time speed up, even though its fused into my Rover.
I'm not sure why I thought this would work, but in case it was planned to do, thought I'd mention:
Had the rover with the generator in it. Hooked it up to Laurion charger. When I got the rover to maximum power, I expected the excess fuel would charge up Laurion. It did not. Might be cool if it did.
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Really think that "take empty power cells" from the lost rover, should share time with taking full power cells from the rover. Otherwise it takes forever to "rank up" this specific event.
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After getting the lost rover and heading back to laurion, died at laurion (lack of water). When respawned, I got a message about what I can still achieve at Santorini, and maybe visit Astrape. Issue is, I've not made it to Santorini yet, not even the dam.
- Agreed, though there are two versions of taking power cells - one with tools (in a facility) and one without. The lost rover will share familiarity with the one without tools.
2) That's because you don't know that it's called Laurion yet. You know you want to head that direction, and that's all.
3) Known bug
4) Not sure what you mean. Very few if any persistent actions were outright removed, and all actions which are persistent are still highlighted blue.
5) That's always been the case, and is how combined actions work. If I prevented the combined action being visible until after you lift the lockdown, people might take two of the couplers, then lift the lockdown, then be annoyed that they wasted time taking two of the couplers without getting the speed bonus of the combined action.
#4 = Several of the actions at Talos weren't highlighted in Blue, yet were single one-off actions that would progress over cycles. They might highlight after the first or second death, but first time, they aren't blue. Then all future buttons that are blue are properly highlighted as blue.
That's been the case since persistent actions were introduced. It's because on the first loop you're not in a time loop yet. And at the start of the second, your character still isn't sure if it's a time loop or not.
I had just remember this game and thought "it's been a couple months since I played last, I wonder if there's been an update?" Lo and behold, just ten hours ago there was! Very excited to do another full playthough :>
when I woke up for the fourth loop, it gives me a log about Santorini and Astrape, which I think is where I was before resetting for this update, but this time I haven’t even made it into Laurion yet.
edit for clarity: I saw there was a brand new update (0.4.0) and hard reset. The fourth time I woke up, I got the “there’s probably more for you to achieve at Santorini, but maybe Astrape is the way to achieve it” message, which might be where I was before the hard reset, but after the hard reset I haven’t even heard of Santorini yet.
In v0.4.0, when charging the power block in Santorini, the text suggests that this is "Super Fast Charging", but it's actually 5x slower instead of 5x faster. This means that the fastest charging method is actually to charge it in your rover while the rover is charging from Santorini, but that causes "finished recharging" message spam that blocks waiting.
It would technically be faster to recharge it from the rover/aircraft at astrape since you don't have to travel to santorini and and back but yeah charging directly from santorini shouldn't take more time than from the rover
You can't recharge the rover at Astrape because of the incompatible power systems. It seems difficult to get to Astrape with the rover and enough spare fuel + power to totally recharge the block; it's such a power-hungry process that I'm not sure a full load of fuel cells is enough.
I hadn't considered trying to partially repair the aircraft to use its power systems, though; does that work?
It is possible to reach Astrape with enough power and fuel to recharge it from the rover however after some testing it seems you can't bring enough fuel with you to recharge it from the aircraft
Been checking back intermittently since I completed the 0.3.0 content, pleasant surprise checking this morning to see the new update less than an hour ago! Starting over from scratch to extend the experience, looking forward to the new stuff!
WHEN IS 0.4 COMINNGGGGGGGGGG I AM FIENDING FOR MY NEXT HIT OF THIS GAME PLEASE STEAM RELEASE SOMETHING TAKE MY MONEY
On another note I was curious as to is it possible to force the door open, after completing the game I made it my mission to force it open but your water runs out at the same time as the air does and I got it down to just about 5 minutes left or so, with previous 1.2 first time bonus
this was posted two days ago on the official discord:
"So I think I'm pretty safe to say that I plan to do the public release of v0.4 next weekend. Maybe Friday if everything goes very well. There are a few new features and snippets of content which I think will have to wait for a v4.1, but all the major stuff is in, so it should just be a few days to get it stable and polished enough for public consumption"
i managed to get it to like 3:58 left with like 3 tries but it is impossible since you survive 10m 19s every time and if you get the full 1.2x boost it'd be 12 minutes
The tram not giving familiarity is deliberate, as it runs on rails so there's no way that you being familiar with riding it would increase its speed. To make this more immediately obvious, in v0.4 it's been replaced with an event. You perform a very short action to start the tram, then there's a timed event during which you're free to perform other actions within the tram (but no longer have access to actions at your point of departure).
I got to the end of the current content and really enjoyed everything so far. Just a quick question: If you leave Talos after the carbon filters fail and return after some time the air will be refilled, is this an intended feature?
No, once the carbon filters fail, air should stop being generated in Talos until/unless you can find a way to replace them (which is not possible in the current version).
This game is amazing! Ive been playing it for probably 20 hours in the past few days, one small bug is all combined actions will always display 1.1x speed. thankfully the real time is correct
Glad you're enjoying the game! The combined actions showing x1.1 isn't a bug, more of a missing feature. Every combined actions gives a x1.1 speed boost on top of any familiarity the sub actions have, but the combined action itself doesn't gain familiarity beyond that. The next version adds an extra line to the tooltip showing the average speed boost of the sub actions.
If you're having any further issues/glitches, it'd be best if you could post about the on the discord server, as it's much easier to have a back and forth discussion there. I'd be happy to try and help fix whatever issue you're having.
I'm loving the game so far! It melds the dopamine of idle/incremental games with mystery's in a very intriguing way.
I'm a musician/composer and with the planned launch on steam, I was wondering if you'd like help with creating some original music/sound design for the game?
This game is absolutely amazing, from the balance to the story. I'm quite close to the end of current content (v0.3.1) and I've been wondering, is the plan to get a steam or paid release? With the quality of content and apparent length/complexity of 1.0, I wouldn't be surprised. And I'm sure with a bit of extra polish most people (with interest on the genre) would buy this.
Yep! After the next update is released (later this month), I'll be focusing on getting the game ready for Steam, and putting together all the assets that requires.
If I could strongly, strongly encourage one thing for 1.0 or shortly after, especially if you are planning to market it: add pictures. they don't need to be interactive at all, (I would even suggest against making them interactive) they don't even need to be highly detailed, but even a simple background for each location, and a small picture for each action would go a long way towards widening your target audience. just something to consider.
Pictures have the issue of "how do I get them". Midnight Idle (found here on Itch), uses AI pictures quite intelligently, that they don't have the usual issues with them, but people have issue with AI pictures on Steam.
Some people figure out ingenious ways of generating images, like justkevin did with Starcom: Unknown Space, but that requires specialized tools and a lot of patience.
In general, most people either have to get royalty free images or some artist that wants to make a start in game development, to get the images you might need at anything of a reasonable cost. Like, you might think that a wage of $60,000 isn't much per year, but its a lot of money for a small indie to pay for 4 months of effort ($20,000). And as most small indie games, don't easily make $10,000, for their first game, as net profits, its pretty demanding to require images.
i was actually just thinking about this recently after reading palandus's response... while royalty free images would be perfectly fine, there is a lot to be said about the theatre of the mind... if that is what is kept, then the focus should be more with the intent of this being essentially an interactive book, meaning all focus is on the writing and I would say the UI needs to be made better with more options for font size and maybe a small handful of color options to make sure no one has trouble reading stuff... which I know from the roadmap UI is already a work in progress so... will just have to wait and see about that
coming back here way too late - this idea reminds me slightly of how Fallen London uses headers for it's zones. Detailed but contained, sometimes abstract, pieces of art that just give a general idea or vibe as to how this place looks or feels. Something like that could work without spoiling the fun of imagining the specifics of the place.
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when strabo update will be aviable
It came out 7 months ago. Maybe you have to hit "Loop Now" to see it :P
nah, rn i have talos, laurion, santorini and astrape aviable as a cities; when i try to drive towards strabos, all i can see is a red text saying "Locked (this action cant be performed, beacause it will be added in future update)". therefore im asking when the update release is scheduled? same with the city that will be more on the north, ive forgotten its name, but it was the frozen one. will those two places added in one lore update
Current focus is on fixing/polishing v0.4. After that will be a Steam/UI/UX update. Then I'll look at scheduling the next content update. Though it is extremely unlikely that both locations will be added at once.
Is that Pneuma?
As long as the VTOL gets implemented next, that would be nice addition to have.
Pneuma is the glacier city, in the opposite direction up the river, from Santorini. Its where all the glacier water came from.
Strabo is a tech/research center, to the south of Talos.
Then there is another place "idly" mentioned at the Dam, with the lettering on one of the crates. So there is at least three new locations mentioned in this update.
Plus, another one. All the people seemed to converge on Laurion. Then vanished from there. So, likely there is another town or location that is near Laurion where all the people are. Or along the way, a mass grave site of Rovers that attempted to make it there but ran out of supplies.
Pneuma is the crate place.
I apparently can't remove the power artifact from the mobile generator after installing it at Laurion.
This is a known bug - you can't install or remove it after the generator is installed somehwere (you have to loop and do it before installing it on the next loop). Since it's post-EoC, it's fairly low priority, but hopefully I will get to it in the next few days.
So Astrape has power, but limited oxygen. That is fine.
What isn't fine is, that moving the rover into the civilian bay, you can't sit in your rover to passively restore your personal air supply (if you have pressure regulator of course). So you have to remove the rover from the vehicle, enter the rover and do a wait action in there.
Otherwise, you will likely run out of air before other resources, as it takes forever to refill air cannisters.
This is intended. If you had unlimited air from the start then Astrape would be very easy. I'm going to have the electrical discharge destroy your rover's pressure regulator to stop people thinking it's an accident.
Well that wouldn't make a whole lot of sense.
There is automated farm equipment, that is working when we visit Astrape. Why does the discharge only affect our vehicle, and break stuff?
...well it doesn't break EVERYTHING in the rover either...
FYI, there's another way to restore air in Astrape ...
Take Vegetables, Warehouse (Astrape) doesn't share any commonality with Take Vegetables from Tram. So it has 2 second base time when I first encounter it, after emptying the Tram vegetables twice fully completely already.
Fixed in vNext
So finally got the mining machine and new engine installed at Santorini.
I noticed when I parked at Compound, I had the option to Park and connect Charger.
But once I had the new engine, I had to park, then Connect charger.
Oversight?
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PS: It is a good update overall, thank you for all your hard work. I don't know if I said that already or implied that, but thought I should say it anyway.
For some reason you don't appear able to do a few combined actions multiple times.
It's a known limitation of combined actions that none of them can be completed more than once per loop. It's on the list to add, but it won't be a small amount of work.
Hi, found your game while scrolling through the Incremental Games Reddit. I've been enjoying the whole past a day!
I did want to note something strange, a bug perhaps? I was the process of trying to travel from Talos to the Dam, but couldn't make it all the way. So I went to Laurion to get more energy and attempt again hoping to try again with a generous 20% boost that is usually associated with reattempting partially tried things.
However when I got back the bonus said 0% for X amount of time, which is kind of weird, but okay. What was weirder was the fact that instead of it taking the standard 4 minutes like normal, on my first try, it instead said something even longer. Somewhere around 4 minutes and 30 seconds? I forgot the exact number, but it was longer than the base 100% which seems unintended.
Glad you're enjoying the game :)
That is a bug, I haven't had a chance to investigate yet, but it has been happening to a lot of people. Some watched the timer closely and suggested that it skipped some time, so it may not actually take longer. But hopefully I'll find time to fix it today.
Excited to play the update!!!
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
New Terraformental!!!
Theres probably a lot i could say about this update (Why did i have to finish it so fast (T_T) (well, ACKTUALLY, Im at 99.25% completion, which is almost sadder than 100%)
But I'll just ask a few questions with bonus speculation (Spoilers! duh):
1. Would I be right in assuming the VTOL isn't fully implemented yet? I fixed the power system just to see if it would say anything and nada. Also, it tells me that the motors from the mining machine would be able to fix it, but there's no option to take them. I'm assuming you just haven't implemented that since the rest of the VTOL can't be fixed yet, and so the motors would be otherwise useless. Of course, the propellers and nav unit don't seem to be anywhere yet (Although it's possible I missed them, not likely, but possible.) I'm guessing we might find those at Strabo since it seems to be some sort of Vehicle manufacturing facility.
2. Did I miss figuring out the name of the glacier facility? Because once I saw the crates at Astrape it said that if we looked at the dam grates again, I might figure it out, so I was expecting that to be the fabled last persistent action, but even after collecting all the crates next loop, there wasn't anything. I'm guessing now that is just supposed to be something I figure out irl. (I've forgotten some of the clues so, oh no! I might have to play again! what a terrible fate!) (From what I remember its PNAUMA ??? that seems wrong... oh well)
3. Not really a question, but when parking the rover is Astrape (Pre artifact) The text prompt appears when you cycle the gate rather than when you actually park the rover in there, seems to be misplaced.
4. no more for now, but i may be back with more questions later.
...
Is my autism showing?
No. I tend to ramble a lot too... brevity isn't my strong suit.
1) You're correct that the VTOL isn't fully implemented. You can repair the power system and use it to charge the power block, but that's all for now.
2) Once you've seen all the dam crates once and the Astrape crates once, you have the full name. The logs around this have a couple bugs in them, so it's not made as clear as it should be yet, but once you've done both you can search the new facility in Laurion.
3) I think this was fixed in the .27 hotfix which went out late yesterday, but thank you for the report.
Glad you enjoyed the update :)
ahh so that's why you can fix the VTOL power systems. The rover gradually loses all purpose at Astrape. Also thank you, i now know what the last persistent action is.
Also I really wonder what a speedrun of this game would look like when its finished, already there's so much to consider, like which facilities you even go to/finish. Like would it be faster to get the Laurion resource artifact first? or would the Astrape power artifact be enough of a time safe to offset that? (prolly not, but you see what i mean?)
One more question, are you just stranded at Astrape after Santorini explodes? theres not even an option to go to the dam?
Yeah, a fair few people on the discord have been speed running the game so far (mostly trying to reach end of content with fewest loops, or trying challenges like no rover upgrades).
There is a route back to the dam. But for it to be available you have to have driven from the dam to Astrape at least once.
Some further comments:
-> Returned to Talos, and found out you can't use the charger there to recharge your battery.
-> An option to state that you've reached minimum safe distance, from the Santorini explosion. That way if you want to leave, before it explodes, you know how far you need to get to avoid the boom.
-> Maybe a way to reinforce your emergency suit with the metal plates, so that you raise your maximum air and water supplies.
yea the power system at talos is broken
An interesting bug/oversight.
Tried driving from Talos to Bridge, skipping Laurion. Got from bridge to Santorini. Power in rover running low. I drive to central compound, nearly out of power. I get halfway through "Park Rover", when I run out of power.
There is no option to get out of my Rover.
There is no option to push my dead battery Rover into the powered Garage.
There is no option to enter the Santorini, grab a fuel cell, and then go back to the Rover and turn on its generator.
Now I have all my actions as "red" (cannot do), and despite having 11mins till Santorini is destroyed, I'm forced to Loop Now.
=====
So what is the point of the Talos to Dam route, if you don't actually have the power to make it to Santorini, without visiting Laurion to grab the fuel cells?
This is not a bug, not an oversight. It's an unimplemented feature because of the huge amount of time and effort it would take to implement the ability to:
Even if you could do all that, Santorini central doesn't have any fuel cells. So you'd have to also be able to walk from central to the quarry and back. All of which is a moot point because I believe you can make it from Talos to Santorini without going to Laurion, you just need more familiarity with the route. And even if you can, it is in fact faster to drive from Laurion, back to Talos then to Santorini than it is to drive straight from Laurion to Santorini.
Fair enough. I'll have to keep doing the route more then.
Well, you could always just "fudge" it. There are times when you can stop an action-midway and do something else. Like, say you hit travel to dam at Talos, and halfway into doing that action, you hit park rover. So you park the rover.
Santorini quarry has a manual entrance, that you can't park the rover into. So you HAVE to exit the rover to walk there. And that is where the fuel cells are.
So you could have, just for Santorini, a walk to Compound that takes 4x as long as driving to the Compound, could be a "hacky" / "duct tape" solution to this problem, for just this one area.
I'm so excited for this update and I haven't even finished all the new content!
I'm sorry I'm not on the Discord, so bugs here may be dupes.
Bugs on my save from the previous patch, which probably won't be present on new saves: when you've found a faster route to Astrape on the old version but not on the new version, there are issues with the combined travel actions "close dam and cross" *from starting side of dam) and "drive to Astrape" (from Santorini quarry compound). Both probably use old versions of the "drive to x" action that have been changed in this new release.
New content bug, Astrape basement: Can't exit to civilian sector from basement even after unlocking the door from that side.
New content bug, Astrape central, after acquiring [spoiler]: text on water recycler still says it's suffering from an issue that should have been prevented.
Proofreading: "detach [spoiler] from reactor" includes one typo of "rector"; text beginning "the physical structure of this" contains what I think is meant to be two text strings dependent on what order you've done other things in, but is currently just placeholder text in brackets.
Some of the things I like (spoilers)
Depending when you started playing, the bugs you had with old combined actions nay have been fixed by the hotfix late yesterday. The Astrape basement isn't a bug, it's a door you can only open from one side, as is mentioned in the logs and actions description.
I'll take a look at the other bugs though. Thanks for the report, and glad you enjoyed the update 🙂
Ooh thank you. I've now found everything new, I think (and according to my whizzy new PDA whom I shall name Ziggy) (ability to name PDA when? - joking!), and it was so so fun! Also congrats on the Steam thing! I really wanna see this game succeed. It's got a combo of mechanics and flavours I really enjoy.
Pretty engaging, Fun needs a bit more optional upgrade options for some things, and optional locations.
Very fun do feel some of the events could be added to your log if you live long enough and maybe some bonuses that open after X time survived.
Love to see more content and some more things to do besides solve main puzzles.
Only major complaint is water filter and solar panels feel kind useless currently, especially with there not being more plates anywhere to get both the speed upgrade and solar.
Another problem is most of the places you could actually uses the solar panels you cant enter with out the rover and then its a weird super long process of driving it in and out while getting supplies.
Also A backpack upgrade feels like it would help so much with a lot of the game and make it less fussy could be a nice side mission to hunt down similar to missing rover.
So if you install the solar panels at Talos, you can also install the ones at Laurion. Not sure if it improves solar efficiency, but didn't attempt it.
each one gives like 0.1 per installed so if you do both you get a nice 0.2 which is not super good but not super bad especially if more become available and we get another 5 plats somewhere. Sadly at current they are mostly useless.
Yeah, without it being at least 0.5, the amount of regain just isn't worth the resources or time to install it.
I mean its fine we just have no where it will be out side a while or any trips long enough to get any noticeable gain, and only like one path uses little enough energy to really be effected
If there was not only 20 plates in the whole game it would be a must grab as then we could get both.
"Charge Power Bock" definitely does not complete as quickly as it says it will.
Bug report: Refreshing the page during the "Drive to Santorini" action seems to have halted power consumption from the action.
(I refreshed the page because I died due to having all my water resources set to disable consumption.)
Bug report: no idea how it happened, but now a rectangle showing how much power is left in the rover is permanently stuck to my mouse
unable to get a screenshot :(
Nvm opening the options deleted it
Also had this issue coming back after some form of unfocusing the game.
I died at Laurion after Santorini exploded (having not visited Santorini at all) and the game used a start message that assumed I had already visited Santorini and learned about Astrape.
There's a bug where if you go to the lost rover during a loop before collecting supplies at Laurion it removes the collect supplies option at Laurion
Secondly if you move the generator into Laurion and then start moving the rover inside there is again an option to move the already moved generator into Laurion
Oh, I thought new update would unlock Strabo, not only the other half of Astrape. Hopefully that will be out soon.
Also might be a bug but after recovering the artifact from Astrape, I was able to go back to Santorini after it was destroyed and park, resupply.
So finally got the artifact at Laurion. Its decent, but the amount of loops to get it, was a pain.
However, it doesn't affect the amount of fuel gained / amount of power gained, of fuel cells in the generator.
Also, don't quite understand "Time Dilation"
Sometimes the Time Dilation multiplier increases. Sometimes the normal multiplier increases. Sometimes both increases. Sometimes neither increases.
from what i understand time dilation makes it so it takes less time for you the player not the in game character. for example the drive from talos to Laurion in world it could take 2 mins in game but it would only take 30 second of real time
Each completion gives speed boost up to 3x. After that, each completion will give 7% less boost than the previous completion, but will also start giving time dilation. Once time dilation reaches 3x, it also loses 7% per completion.
It seems It comes up when you hit the soft cap, and speeds it up for in RL only so if it say takes 10Sec at your mods and you have dilation 2 it takes 5seconds but eats 10seconds of resorces
It can be completed in 3 loops (after you start it), or 4-5 if you're not a speed runner.
Not affecting fuel is a known limitation of the system (since fuel cells aren't consumed by the player, it uses a different system and will be non-trivial to add to it). It likely will be added, but not sure when.
Oh it took me 7 loops. 4 for the first three layers, and got fourth layer (water) started. Then took 2 more loops to finish water and 1 loop to finish the toxic air.
This was mostly due to resource starvation, so not sure how you could complete it all in 5 loops, without cheating.
after taking the artifact at the astrape you could easily to done it in just 2,3 loop by use the artifact on solar panels and generator
How does that work? The power generated by the rover, doesn't transfer to the Laurion station. I've tried. So any power generated, wouldn't do anything. But mostly it wasn't the lack of power that slowed down my progress. It was running out of food/water in those loops, that is why it took me so long. Laurion has no infinite food or water supply, so it is quite easy to run out of those resources there. It does have the water filter device, but that thing is SO DAMN SLOW, that by the time the next water bottle is generated, you'd have consumed more water, than the bottle gives. Its like 2.5 water, and the time to wait to get a bottle you consume 2.6 water.
here step by step what I do:
1.in Talos install solar panel, use artifact on solar panel.
2.drive to Laurion and install generator and water recycler at Laurion (to Laurion), also install the solar panel at Laurion (to the rover) and use artifact on generator.
3.use all fuel cell in generator and charge drone (also install 2 empty power cell) then takes the artifact back to the solar panels.
4.drive to dam and get the 1 empty power cell and 1 power coupler.
5.close dam and drive to Santorini.
6.drive to quarry and call tram (also restock to have max all item and take the environmental suit).
7.drive to central to charge rover (also install the empty power cell) and restock food and water.
8.drive to quarry to take vegetable.
9. drive to central to charge rover (also install the empty power cell) and restock food and water.
10. go to Laurion, put the artifact in the generator and then use all fuel cell and start digging.
at this point you should have 2 water recyclers (infinity water), a lot of energy (if not enough energy than you can put artifact in solar panels after the fuel cell ran out and not park the rover in Laurion and take full power cell the transfer it to Laurion), 5 ration pack, 5 protein bars, 5 basic foods,5 vegetable and that not even count the amount of food you don't take in Laurion.
if you think this have any problem, please let me know
edit: 2,3 loop is just an estimate I seriously don't know this Strat can take the artifact in just 2,3 loop or not
Fueling the generator event no longer tells you how much time is remaining? Why? How am I supposed to know how much power I'm getting?
Previously the generator was just a fixed timed event. You put a fuel cell in, it ran for 60 seconds and gave a flat amount of power per second. That worked fine, but was incredibly inflexible. Now, fuel cells have a fuel value, the generator has fuel storage, and burns an amount of fuel per second. This allows for:
Not seeing the time remaining is a known drawback. There is a resolution to it planned, but there wasn't time to implement it yet.
Been waiting for this update and excited as can be for it. Looks like the multi action to drive to Astrape seems to be broken now? Can't do the observe now and have done it before.
There are a few issues in that area. Mostly people seem to be able to progress, they just have to re-do things they'd done before. I'm working on fixing it though.
Yes; the repeating wasn't too onerous at all once I understood what I needed to do, and now I've done the route scouting (which is way cooler the new way) the combined driving to Astrape works fine.
Doing a complete reset of the game, so that I avoid savegame related issues. Some things noticed immediately:
1) If a feature isn't implemented yet, just leave that blank in the PDA or just have the PDA become available once you unlock the Map.
2) The map has a single dotted line to nowhere, when you start out. Only once you reach Laurion, does it update and show Laurion. Doesn't show whereabout the Rover is though.
3) When you reach Laurion, the first time, it asks you to move the generator into the base. But the first time you get there, you don't know of the generator. I'm hesistant to touch the button, until I find the generator though.
4) A lot of the old "blue highlighted" actions from previous version is gone, so now I don't know what is a permanent action or not.
5) You can take non-essential couplers, without lifting the lockdown first. Several are behind doors, that must be accessed after the lockdown is lifted, normally.
Some new stuff:
-> After a few loops, installing the generator and fueling it, I went back to the rover and I can "Move Generator Into Laurion" without a generator in my rover and it has no extra completion time on it. Didn't touch it though.
-> Sure wish I could repair the food replicator at Laurion with the taken power coupler from Talos.
-> I tried a loop with installing the generator at Talos. I'm now at Laurion and have the above "Move Generator Into Laurion" available, with time speed up, even though its fused into my Rover.
I'm not sure why I thought this would work, but in case it was planned to do, thought I'd mention:
Had the rover with the generator in it. Hooked it up to Laurion charger. When I got the rover to maximum power, I expected the excess fuel would charge up Laurion. It did not. Might be cool if it did.
===
Really think that "take empty power cells" from the lost rover, should share time with taking full power cells from the rover. Otherwise it takes forever to "rank up" this specific event.
===
After getting the lost rover and heading back to laurion, died at laurion (lack of water). When respawned, I got a message about what I can still achieve at Santorini, and maybe visit Astrape. Issue is, I've not made it to Santorini yet, not even the dam.
- That's a possible future feature.
- Agreed, though there are two versions of taking power cells - one with tools (in a facility) and one without. The lost rover will share familiarity with the one without tools.
- Known bug, it's on the list to fix.
Okay. Thanks for the reply.
- Known bug, same as before.
- The food synthesiser at Laurion has a lot more wrong with it than just a broken power coupler
- Still the same bug.
Good to know. Thanks for heads up.
2) That's because you don't know that it's called Laurion yet. You know you want to head that direction, and that's all.
3) Known bug
4) Not sure what you mean. Very few if any persistent actions were outright removed, and all actions which are persistent are still highlighted blue.
5) That's always been the case, and is how combined actions work. If I prevented the combined action being visible until after you lift the lockdown, people might take two of the couplers, then lift the lockdown, then be annoyed that they wasted time taking two of the couplers without getting the speed bonus of the combined action.
Fair enough.
#4 = Several of the actions at Talos weren't highlighted in Blue, yet were single one-off actions that would progress over cycles. They might highlight after the first or second death, but first time, they aren't blue. Then all future buttons that are blue are properly highlighted as blue.
That's been the case since persistent actions were introduced. It's because on the first loop you're not in a time loop yet. And at the start of the second, your character still isn't sure if it's a time loop or not.
Ahh, I see. Its a "4th Wall" kind of issue. Wherein the player might realize its a time loop action, but the character hasn't realized that yet.
I had just remember this game and thought "it's been a couple months since I played last, I wonder if there's been an update?" Lo and behold, just ten hours ago there was! Very excited to do another full playthough :>
when I woke up for the fourth loop, it gives me a log about Santorini and Astrape, which I think is where I was before resetting for this update, but this time I haven’t even made it into Laurion yet.
edit for clarity: I saw there was a brand new update (0.4.0) and hard reset. The fourth time I woke up, I got the “there’s probably more for you to achieve at Santorini, but maybe Astrape is the way to achieve it” message, which might be where I was before the hard reset, but after the hard reset I haven’t even heard of Santorini yet.
In v0.4.0, when charging the power block in Santorini, the text suggests that this is "Super Fast Charging", but it's actually 5x slower instead of 5x faster. This means that the fastest charging method is actually to charge it in your rover while the rover is charging from Santorini, but that causes "finished recharging" message spam that blocks waiting.
It would technically be faster to recharge it from the rover/aircraft at astrape since you don't have to travel to santorini and and back but yeah charging directly from santorini shouldn't take more time than from the rover
This is a known bug and is on the list to fix.
You can't recharge the rover at Astrape because of the incompatible power systems. It seems difficult to get to Astrape with the rover and enough spare fuel + power to totally recharge the block; it's such a power-hungry process that I'm not sure a full load of fuel cells is enough.
I hadn't considered trying to partially repair the aircraft to use its power systems, though; does that work?
It is possible to reach Astrape with enough power and fuel to recharge it from the rover however after some testing it seems you can't bring enough fuel with you to recharge it from the aircraft
Seems like I have the generator on the rover from the start, without needing to "Load Generator On Rover".
Seems like "Move Generator Into Laurion" creates a generator from nothing, but parking the rover in Laurion doesn't (is handled correctly).
Oh that must be what happens I thought it was just part of the new update
LES GOO NEW UPDATE
Edit: THE MAP IS SO SICK
every time I find something slightly different:
WHAT thats different now! woah thats so cool thats so cool thats so cool
Edit 2: Some of the flavor text at Laurion about getting power from the rover's batteries or the generator at Talos is outdated in the new update.
Edit 3: I think what I previously said is part of a glitch where you have the generator in the rover without putting it in.
new update yeahhhhhhhhhhh
Been checking back intermittently since I completed the 0.3.0 content, pleasant surprise checking this morning to see the new update less than an hour ago! Starting over from scratch to extend the experience, looking forward to the new stuff!
Found this game bc a friend was playing increlution
Looked at the store page and saw this mentioned
Love it so far, keep up the good work!~
WHEN IS 0.4 COMINNGGGGGGGGGG I AM FIENDING FOR MY NEXT HIT OF THIS GAME PLEASE STEAM RELEASE SOMETHING TAKE MY MONEY
On another note I was curious as to is it possible to force the door open, after completing the game I made it my mission to force it open but your water runs out at the same time as the air does and I got it down to just about 5 minutes left or so, with previous 1.2 first time bonus
Last I checked it should have been last or this month. The Trello was updated like a week ago or so though so probably just delayed?
this was posted two days ago on the official discord:
"So I think I'm pretty safe to say that I plan to do the public release of v0.4 next weekend. Maybe Friday if everything goes very well. There are a few new features and snippets of content which I think will have to wait for a v4.1, but all the major stuff is in, so it should just be a few days to get it stable and polished enough for public consumption"
i managed to get it to like 3:58 left with like 3 tries but it is impossible since you survive 10m 19s every time and if you get the full 1.2x boost it'd be 12 minutes
I noticed that riding the tram from Astrape to Santorini does not give time reduction per loop like the other loop actions do.
Edit: and that includes other actions at the top of and on the way to the plateau.
The tram not giving familiarity is deliberate, as it runs on rails so there's no way that you being familiar with riding it would increase its speed. To make this more immediately obvious, in v0.4 it's been replaced with an event. You perform a very short action to start the tram, then there's a timed event during which you're free to perform other actions within the tram (but no longer have access to actions at your point of departure).
this game is AWESOME!!! WE, yes, WE love being in a time loop. can't wait for the update!!!!!!!gaaah!!!!!!!!!!!!
PLease keep this up, this was so much fun and i want to know what the story is!
I got to the end of the current content and really enjoyed everything so far. Just a quick question: If you leave Talos after the carbon filters fail and return after some time the air will be refilled, is this an intended feature?
Glad you're enjoying the game so far.
No, once the carbon filters fail, air should stop being generated in Talos until/unless you can find a way to replace them (which is not possible in the current version).
This game is amazing! Ive been playing it for probably 20 hours in the past few days, one small bug is all combined actions will always display 1.1x speed. thankfully the real time is correct
Edit: My game was glitched, it is fixed
Edit 2: its not fixed anymore? I am not sure
Glad you're enjoying the game! The combined actions showing x1.1 isn't a bug, more of a missing feature. Every combined actions gives a x1.1 speed boost on top of any familiarity the sub actions have, but the combined action itself doesn't gain familiarity beyond that. The next version adds an extra line to the tooltip showing the average speed boost of the sub actions.
If you're having any further issues/glitches, it'd be best if you could post about the on the discord server, as it's much easier to have a back and forth discussion there. I'd be happy to try and help fix whatever issue you're having.
I'm loving the game so far! It melds the dopamine of idle/incremental games with mystery's in a very intriguing way.
I'm a musician/composer and with the planned launch on steam, I was wondering if you'd like help with creating some original music/sound design for the game?
Glad you're enjoying the game!
Thank you for the offer, but I'm already working with someone to try and add music to the game.
Ok! I hope it goes well!
This game is absolutely amazing, from the balance to the story. I'm quite close to the end of current content (v0.3.1) and I've been wondering, is the plan to get a steam or paid release? With the quality of content and apparent length/complexity of 1.0, I wouldn't be surprised. And I'm sure with a bit of extra polish most people (with interest on the genre) would buy this.
Yep! After the next update is released (later this month), I'll be focusing on getting the game ready for Steam, and putting together all the assets that requires.
Thanks, glad you're enjoying the game!
really glad to hear that. I love your game.
If I could strongly, strongly encourage one thing for 1.0 or shortly after, especially if you are planning to market it: add pictures. they don't need to be interactive at all, (I would even suggest against making them interactive) they don't even need to be highly detailed, but even a simple background for each location, and a small picture for each action would go a long way towards widening your target audience. just something to consider.
Pictures have the issue of "how do I get them". Midnight Idle (found here on Itch), uses AI pictures quite intelligently, that they don't have the usual issues with them, but people have issue with AI pictures on Steam.
Some people figure out ingenious ways of generating images, like justkevin did with Starcom: Unknown Space, but that requires specialized tools and a lot of patience.
In general, most people either have to get royalty free images or some artist that wants to make a start in game development, to get the images you might need at anything of a reasonable cost. Like, you might think that a wage of $60,000 isn't much per year, but its a lot of money for a small indie to pay for 4 months of effort ($20,000). And as most small indie games, don't easily make $10,000, for their first game, as net profits, its pretty demanding to require images.
I'm not sure; with the huge waits, imagining the scene is a big part of it for me and art would possibly spoil it.
i was actually just thinking about this recently after reading palandus's response... while royalty free images would be perfectly fine, there is a lot to be said about the theatre of the mind... if that is what is kept, then the focus should be more with the intent of this being essentially an interactive book, meaning all focus is on the writing and I would say the UI needs to be made better with more options for font size and maybe a small handful of color options to make sure no one has trouble reading stuff... which I know from the roadmap UI is already a work in progress so... will just have to wait and see about that
coming back here way too late - this idea reminds me slightly of how Fallen London uses headers for it's zones. Detailed but contained, sometimes abstract, pieces of art that just give a general idea or vibe as to how this place looks or feels. Something like that could work without spoiling the fun of imagining the specifics of the place.