Dual Universe’s latest newsletter since its successful Kickstarter funding back in October is out this week. Novaquark tells players that it’s almost finished building its post-Kickstarter crowdfunding portal. Through the end of 2016, players will be able to purchase packs that are similar to those available on Kickstarter, less and excepting a few perks and packages like early bird packages and social goal rewards.
The second phase will kick off next year. “The Founder packs will be removed permanently, and will be replaced by Supporter packs,” the team says. “The Supporter packs will be significantly different and the price of the DACs slightly higher. Don’t worry, they will still be cheaper than after the official release! For those who like in-game pets and didn’t have the opportunity to get one from the Kickstarter, we plan to make a new one available through an add-on.”
Novaquark says updates will slow down a bit as the team works on the game, though it recently released a dev blog on scanning and mining systems in the sci-fi sandbox. While most of it is technical, there are some neat bits for folks already thinking about what they’ll do in the gameworld.
“Interestingly, we imagine that the ‘profession’ of prospector/scanner and the ‘profession’ of miner could very well be separate. Some people will specialize in finding large veins of important materials (and possibly sell the intel about the location), while some others will specialize in mining it, focusing on a mining site for several weeks or months. When you exploit a deep vein, you will need to install things like lifts, vehicles, containers, and clean wide shafts to ease material and dirt evacuation. Maybe even factories close to the vein to transform the ore into pure material. This differs from most other games where scanning and mining are usually very similar and the activity of mining and scanning alternate frequently as you jump from one asteroid to another, or one mining spot to the other.”
