Loek Gijsbertse

So this is a big one because we really believe that base building will enable us to really change the universe. The way that players will interact with one another or not want to interact with one another. And it will become hopefully more of the backbone of the game where even if you want to interact with it or not, one way or another, you are always influenced by the gameplay loops of base building. So for example, maybe you're just a small miner and you want to just mine your resources and kind of ship that out and make a nice living out of that. Then for you, it might actually be good to have a small little base close by the mining resources to more efficiently do your gathering of your resources and so on. And the cool thing with base building is that we're trying to keep the possibilities as open as possible so that you can actually choose what you want to do with your bases yourself. So maybe you have these weird bases just tucked away in the universe where it's just like there's no electricity and you just use it to store away some of the stuff you found in the universe. Or maybe it is more of a sprawling trading hub for you and your organization. Or a base just built for the most efficient refining processes or search. Again, the guys know a little bit more about the specific processes. But from a visual perspective, what we're really trying to do is to just give you a beautiful base template that you then can let your imagination all lose. And kind of use it the way you want to use it as a player, even though it might be very different than other players.

Yeah, I think you really hit on it. It's very much a base can be used for whatever you want to use it for. That will provide options for you to do all kinds of stuff with it. And there should be or is likely to be relevant links into pretty much any kind of gameplay that you can think of.

Actually adding to that, it's a growing feature in addition to what we have already, right? So every gameplay loop that we have will also have its representation in the... Not every, but most of the gameplay features that we have will probably have representation in the base building aspect. And the bigger our game grows, the more features I introduce, they will also find a slot in your base.

Even if you don't have your own base, it's still impactful because you'll be visiting the other people who have made their bases and using their facilities. So even if you're not doing the work, it's still an interesting thing for you to use.

I think long time players can remember the very first outpost that ever appeared in 3.0 were almost always up on stilts because they couldn't deform the terrain. How well will our stuff blend in with the terrain? Yeah, so you'll be able to kind of again with the tinting you'll be able to pick certain tint palettes that work better with the biomes that are located. You can also put buildings around trees and stuff. If you put the building on top of the trees it will get rid of the trees with the nice precision placement mode through the construction ER mode. You'll be able to find a nice position and to kind of get some trees to maybe cover a little bit of your building as well. We'll see how that goes. Because we also have the construction drones that need to fly in and out so we'll have to we're taking those things in account. But you'll be able to kind of blend it in pretty well if you want and additionally we'll have some buildings that actually will be able to kind of reduce the signature of your base as well to kind of further kind of hide your base if you want to or in the other way like really make it stand out in the base or in the environment. But yes the idea is that we will have different tint palettes that fit with the different biomes that can be found on the planet.

One would assume there has to be some level of terrain manipulation though. Is that entirely automated by the system or will any of that be in player control?

The idea is that we don't want to fully allow the players to customize the terrain to their liking because that would take away from the value of scouting for a good location. So there will be buildings that will do a very light terrain manipulation just to make sure that the staircases work and so on. But the majority the best solution that we'll provide is the use of foundation tiles, the big concrete slabs that people get to place down and then on those they'll be able to put their buildings down. Those will deform the terrain so if you have a plot of land that is not particularly flat for you to build connectable buildings then the idea is that you would put down a foundation first and then from there on you'll be able to connect your buildings on top of there.