“We wasted a lot of time but Minecraft inspired us.” That’s the throughline of a recent update blog and the literal title of a related video from Solarpunk, the Kickstarted survival crafting title that continues to try to showcase progress despite a long span of comm silence and a missed Q1 alpha target.
“First of all, we wanted to apologize for the long wait. We are currently working on so many things at once, that we simply didn’t had the time,” the post opens. “The next devlog should be released much faster.”
After that mea culpa, the post launches into changes to its merchant platform, which will now be without an NPC and instead require players to repair it in order to access important recipes. The merchant platform also has a vending machine that grants access to skins as well as a fabricator to enhance player airships, both of which need to be repaired as well.
The update post also outlines several quality-of-life updates like stack splitting, the ability to drop items from hand or inventory slots, and a quickey that easily transfers items from hotbars, inventory, and storage containers. The devs at Cyberwave have also made a wide assortment of bug fixes as well.
The change to the merchant platform is described as a way to further hammer in the sense of being stranded in a strange world, with games like Minecraft and Raft noted as inspirations for the design shift, while QoL changes are further inspired by the devs’ time playing other survivalboxes. The video waiting below the break shows off where things stands in Solarpunk thus far.
