V0.42

Oy! It's been a while since the last update, and a lot going on since then: a few holidays, and moved with my family into our new house :phew: - but finally got this update to the point where I think it's ready for general consumption :D It'll probably have a few rough edges, but will love to get people's feedback on all the new stuff in it.

So what's in it? Well the bigger new feature as you can probably guess is researching! I've been wanting to add a research aspect to the game for some time, to give the game a bit more progression as to what you're able to craft, add a little more challenge, and provide some motivation/incentive for players to keep exploring.

Scattered throughout the world you'll now stumble grey cubes, these are "Unknown Artifacts". Once you start collecting these, you'll want to build a Research Lab in order to process them to discover what they actually are. You'll then earn Research Samples (points) for discovering them, and you'll use those points to unlock tiers in the tech tree.

The artifacts all still need silly names, right now they're still all just "Artifact 1", "Artifact 2" etc. To come later.

Few more notes on the tech tree. The costs are a work-in-progress, (along with how frequently you find artifacts in the world) - maybe it's too easy? Let me know what you think.

In case you don't want to bother with researching, there's also an option for new games in the World Settings for starting a game with all tech unlocked.

Older game saves (<0.42) will automatically resume with everything unlocked, because it would be annoying to have a big base, but not be able to keep crafting more of the things that you already have in it.

## But wait, there's more...

### Suit upgrade

One of the higher cost tech-tree items is a suit upgrade, that gives you 50% more oxygen and suit power, and with its fancy lighter-weight material, makes you get hungry slightly slower. This will get some unique cool looking character art in a later update.

### Construction Yard

This is a new base module, kind of like a workbench, but is where larger and more complex modules are now made, like habitats, airlocks etc.

### Inventory Reordering

You can now drag and drop inventory items around! Yay! It's not quite perfect (can't have empty slots between items), but still a great UX improvement.

### Buggie Storage

Speaking of inventory stuff... Now you can right click on the buggie to open up it's truck/boot and stick 6 more items in it to take with you on long expeditions.

The new buggie storage is definitely a first pass, just to make sure it's working. What I'd probably like to do next is to add in a few different classes of vehicles. Some might be fast, but have no extra storage, others might be a bit slower, but have storage or have other unique capabilities... something like that.

### Tutorial Updates

Expanded the tutorial a bit to give new players info on dropping items (inventory fills up quick!) and a couple quick notes on discovering artifacts and the tech tree (mainly pointing out that it exists). If you have ideas for gameplay features that you could've used a tutorial note for, please let me know.

### *VERY EARLY* Controller Support

Been slowly starting to add in gamepad controller support to the game. Menus don't work at all yet, but in-game walking around, driving, picking up items, placing bases is all slowly getting there. So far this has only been tested on Linux and Win10 using an Xbox360 controllers. There's still a lot more to do (remapping UI, eating food etc).

### GIF recorder

Added in a great library [https://github.com/Anuken/GDXGifRecorder] for capturing gameplay footage as a gif. Probably mostly useful for me... F9 activates the UI for selecting what part of the screen to capture, F10 start and stops recording.

### Crafting with a full inventory

Lets say your inventory is full, you have exactly 3 plants, and you wanna craft some plant-slop. Before the game would just tell you "too bad, inventory full" - even if crafting the slop, would've consumed all 3 plants and free up an inventory slot. Well now it's smart enough to let you do stuff like that.

### Z-sorting!

Your player sprite now renders properly in front of or behind items as they walk by. Looks way nicer.

### Help with game crashes

Have you ever launched MewnBase, and the window just closes immediately, without any type of error message?  Annoying right? Well now it can be *slightly* less annoying.. by giving you a popup with the crash info, as well as having the messaged put into a log file in your MewnBase folder. Then you can send to me... or slap in the forum, and it'll greatly help me figure out what I did wrong!

### State of localization

It's way out of date now since I paused my Crowdin subscription last summer. Still planning to bring that back at some point to allow for community managed translations, just not sure when.

### Other minor tweaks and changes

* Generator runs for twice as long on the same number of plants.
* Generators are cheaper to craft.
* Probably a bunch that I'm forgetting...

### Fixed bugs

* Fixed regression: power switch appears disconnected when turned off.
* Added more checks when importing an older save into newer version of the game.
* Crafting timer not reset to zero when canceling a build.
* Typos, probably added a few new ones while I'm at it.

### Known bugs still in the game

* macOS hidpi mode for retina displays is still iffy. If you have issues where the game only renders to the lower part of the screen, try using the steps listed on Apple's site for "Opening apps in Low Resolution mode".
* macOS gatekeeper woes (dragging the .app to your Applications folder seems do the trick.)
* Performance with large worlds. There's a lot of memory related things I need to clean up in the next update.

### Things still in progress for a future update

* Rocket ship stuff for faster world travel.
* Baddies that you'd need to defend yourself and base against.
* Steam! Trying to get it up on Steam Early Access this spring. Been testing, and making decent progress on that front.

*Copied from: https://cairn4.itch.io/mewnbase/devlog/25191/v042-research-update*