As I type this, there’s just about a day left to go on the Stars Reach Kickstarter, which obviously will fund as it’s pulled in well over three times its original ask. And you can particularly tell it’s in the home stretch as pledges leaped up another 30K or 40K in the last day or two – right around the time when all the “remind me later” notifications went off.
Well, all those last-minute pledges have resulted in another boon for the game as another stretch goal has been met. At $650,000 players unlocked the “building systems upgrade,” which as a term sounds rather dull – but the accompanying dev blog suggests otherwise.
“[W]e want to adapt our building system to better embrace and enable the way you’re actually using it,” Playable Worlds says, telling players it will not only fix outstanding bugs (of course) but “lean in” to tester creativity, with more oddball shapes, resizing, colors, textures, unusual angles, and “detail props.”
“[W]e also intend to dramatically change the Instaformer block/wall/floor selections to allow a selection volume instead. (You can drag the selection to any cube-sized volume.) Then add copy/paste to that volume selector (that captures Instaformer blocks and Fabricator primitives and detail props) so you can more easily dupe larger sections of work. We’ll also be adding a way to save and preserve your builds into Blueprints that can be saved for the future or sold/gifted to fellow players. We will also add free rotation as an option while building so that you can smoothly rotate an object to any facing, but be able to ‘toggle the grid’ on/off so you can snap to a facing also, if desired. When coupled with the ability to move Homesteads like Fabricator objects (using the widget to move the Homestead object precisely, even vertically), the builds you make should be astounding.”
In case you’re wondering, there is another stretch goal at the 700K mark: the Stokadi species, which’d be the fourth new species added during the campaign. It’s not impossible that the campaign could pull that off. We reiterate again that all of the stretch goals are slated to join the game eventually; unlocking them merely ensures they’ll launch before or with the launch rather than at some nebulous future post-launch time.
