Friends and Soon-To-Be-Friends,

We’ve been working on our big August update (our roadmap is here), but we felt that a few smaller features are already ready to be showed off and added to the game now! These are primarily quality of life features, a little bit of rebalancing, and some bugfixes that weren’t breaking the game.

It’s a big list for version 0.1.S20573, so we’ve tried to make it a little easier to read. Let’s talk about all of it properly.

We’ve added a Trash Slot! You can get it by unlocking it from the village monument, it becomes available from Tier 2. You'll be able to retrieve the last trashed item, in case you accidentally threw away something important, and in general, it tries to keep a single stack of items.

(Basically, if you throw away 5 logs and then 10 logs, you can actually get all 15 logs back. If you then add 5 stone, all of the logs are gone though.)

It’s an inventory slot, and it’s BIG.
Big Slots are a new type of inventory slots that can hold ten stacks of a single item!

When you get one, it replaces one of your standard inventory slots. You'll get them by unlocking it from
the monument. For now, you can get three of them and they become available tier 3, tier 5 and tier 7.

We've added two new inventory shortcuts to go along with Sort, “Move All” and “Transfer Same Type”.

• “Move All” just moves all items from one inventory to another and exists in both your primary inventory and other storage inventories.
  
• “Transfer Same Type” only exists in other storage inventories, and basically pulls items that already exist in the storage.

So if you have some wood and some bark in your inventory, and one piece of wood in the storage inventory, you can press “Transfer Same Type” to pull only the wood in your inventory to the storage inventory.

Running out of resources is not what the game is about, but clearly, harvestables such as trees, stones, etc have been respawning a little too fast. Harvestables now take 20 minutes before they roll the 20% chance to respawn.

Enemies will respawn roughly the same as before.

It’s now a little faster for the callback to change from targeting individual sparks to the bigger spark circle. It should feel a little better when you need to get all of your Sparks back.

So for some quests we require you to manually harvest stuff or require parts from enemies. Sometimes it’s because you’ve just unlocked something new and we want you to use some new tools, sometimes it’s to give you an excuse to explore further, sometimes it’s to get you into the combat part of the game. We’ve gotten the feedback that the overall balancing for this has been too tedious and that’s not our aim, so we tried to change that.

To that end: We’ve tried to explain and communicate a bit clearer when we’re trying to encourage you to use new tools. We’ve balanced a few of the quests to need less items. We also swapped when two quests unlock - you now unlock Limestone Harvesting first and then Quartz Harvesting, so you don’t need to manually harvest so much.

If you wanna see the full details, they're here:
[expand type=details]

• Bark Harvesting (Tier 3 - Woodsman) now asks for 15 Loamy Sparks instead of 20 Loamy Sparks.
  
• Vertical Logistics - 2 (Tier 4 - Quartermaster) now asks for 150 Rope instead of 200 Rope.
  
• Delivery Chests (Tier 5 - Quartermaster) now asks for 15 Aetheric Pellet instead of 20 Aetheric Pellet.
  
• Supply Chest (Tier 5 - Quartermaster) now asks for 10 Aetheric Chunk instead of 20 Aetheric Chunk.
  
• Limestone Harvesting and Quartz Harvesting quests (Tier 5 - Mason Sisters) have been functionally swapped - Limestone Harvesting now unlocks first and asks for 200 Pebbles and 40 Path Tiles, while Quartz Harvesting asks for 400 pebbles and 80 Path Tiles.
  
• Mountain Spark R&D - 2 (Tier 6 - Divine Researcher) now asks for 80 Hauling Sparks instead of 120 Hauling Sparks.
  
• Miasma Capture (Tier 6 - Divine Researcher) now rewards you with one Frowl Sac to help you build your first Miasma Collector.
  
• Spark Pen - 2 (Tier 6 - Quartermaster) now hints at using the Boomy Spark and Puffy Spark to help you collect the Coral.

[/expand]
We buffed the cannon, elevator and zipline, we noticed that you had to build a few too many. Cannons and Ziplines will now bring approximately 60 items per minute instead of 30 and 50 items per minute respectively, and the Elevator will bring approximately 90 items per minute instead of 60.

We’ve done two changes to the quest flow. Number one, NPCs will let you hand in quests that you are able to complete before they give you a new quest. We’ve seen a few people get distracted because they have to accept a quest before handing in an old one, and it’s clear to us now that this is too disruptive. So now you can always hand in a ready to be completed quest before the game tries to give you a new one.

We also have made now made sure that the villagers will always give you “older” quests first - there was a specific instance where your quest log can have a quest that you are technically not able to do, and while the quest is available in the quest giver, but that can be missed. So now, that can’t happen and the villagers will give you the quests they are able to give you in a linear order.

There’s a lot of stuff to learn in the game and we missed out on some glossary entries that could’ve had a bit more clearer stuff.

We now have an actual clarification on how you equip Sparks. We have a better Hauling Spark explanation. Did you know you can toggle the Aim Mode button instead of the holding the Aim Mode button? We didn’t realise it was so easy to miss, so we added info about the Aim Mode Toggle and Hold in the little popup you get when you first get a Spark.

We saw on social media that someone lost their 40 hour save. They completed the early access content in a single save, only using the autosave. They then started achievement hunting in a new world, but of course, since they only used the autosave, their 40 hour save was deleted.

We want to prevent that, so we’ve added a “save and quit” button that hopefully encourages people to manually save more often, and also streamlines that process.

It’s the lightning round! Here are some bugfixes.

• Fixed build menu not updating if you’ve unlocked something while the menu is open.
  
• Fixed Hauling Spark pick up AI where it would hang around instead of picking up items.
  
• Fixed the build menu not remembering what type of path you used last.
  
• Fixed “Full Inventory” showing up when it shouldn’t be.

We do want to specifically shout out that we've fixed two major desyncs and thank folks who helped us out by playing multiplayer in the Beta branch!

We also squeezed in a Pride flag pattern - as a diverse team with queer people, we wanted to add this one in for ourselves and for all the other queer folks out there. Fun fact: In Germany, Christopher Street Day is what we call pride parades, and it happens all throughout summer! We're based in the Cologne area, a historically queer city, and our pride parade is in late July.

Alright, and now, we're going to go back into working on the August update. If you're looking for more WIP stuff, you can join us in our Discord[discord.com]! We told them a little earlier about when this update would be ready and showed off some of the features there!

Little sneak peek on this month's devlog... We're gonna properly show off our trains! Choo Choo! Look forward to it!

Organisers, Cartographers, and Spark Painters,

Welcome to the June Devlog. This one won't be too long, because we’re very busy currently finalising the small update for July!

We don’t have a specific date yet for the update and we’ll talk more about what’s in it when it’s out. However, here’s three things from the changelist that we can spoil for you: We're adding a Trash Slot, there'll be New Inventory Shortcuts, and even though Pride Month will be over, we’re also squeezing in a little Rainbow Flag Pattern for your poncho. After all, we’re a diverse team with queer team members, and we’d like to let people express themselves in the game.

In general, we think that expression is a pretty important aspect of Oddsparks. And to us, organisation is a type of expression! How one person build and organise their base is completely different to how a different person would tackle the same generated world. For our big August update, (you can check out our roadmap if you haven't seen it yet) we wanted to provide multiple different tools that allow players to express themselves and can help them organise their bases. We’re already planning to add a lot of decorative buildings in the August update for this reason!

A bonus sneak peek at some of our upcoming decorative buildings!By having these kinds of tools, you can better map out your workshops, identify where you are with various landmarks you’ve placed yourself, and generally, make the world look really nice. But decorative buildings while nice, can be hard to fit in. They take up valuable space and that’s where our main topic comes in! Let’s talk about the Colouring Spark (name not final)!


The Colouring Spark is a spark with a special interaction. It can be thrown into a new building, the Paint Bucket (again, name not final). If there’s Paint in the Paint Bucket, then the thrown Colouring Spark will pick it up…

And now your Spark Bar has expanded with a new category, just like with the Puffy Spark.

You can swap between the empty colouring sparks and the “full” colouring sparks to pick one of the full colouring sparks and throw it at a building with a roof tile. Now, the roof tiles will be changed to that colour, and it also changes how it looks on the map!

With this, you have another way to mark which Sawbench is doing what, which Shed has what items, and of course, this can also be used for paths and logic wires!


Just like the Puffy, a Colouring Spark will have one “charge” and when thrown onto something that can take that colour, they’ll use it up. They also lose that “charge” if you unequip them.

And because it's fun, they make a small mess when you go up and down places. You don’t use up the paint by doing this.


You’ll have a palette of 8 colours in total - Red, Blue, Yellow, Black, White, Green, Orange and Purple. You’ll also have Turpentine in case you want to remove any colour you've placed.

The primary colours will be made in the Chopper, breaking down common resources like Bark and Quartz to turn into paint. You’ll later be able to mix the primary colours to get the secondary colours in the Stone Workshop. The idea is to have something pretty simple that you also need to automate. We can imagine a few of you dedicating a little side space to make all the colours you need to not just organise but really draw on the map!

That's all for now. If you're looking for more WIP stuff, you can join us in our Discord[discord.com]! We've already shown off a little glimpse at the decorations there a few weeks ago. We hope to talk again very soon about the small July update and show off the stuff we have there.

Warning! The channel we’re about to show you contains video footage of indie games that some gamers will consider irresistible.

Meet Pedro, known as ExileCast, the variety streamer and youtuber with an impressive sense for great indie games, that he uses wisely to deliver the best of the best to his community. If you’re looking for a friendly creator with honest and engaging reviews, letsplays and series, it’s a good idea to join the said community.

ExileCast is an artist as well. He creates a custom thumbnail for each video, putting himself in the universe of the game shown. Oddsparks is no exception! Pedro has been a supporter since the “top secret project” era, and, once the demo was out, made our day with this adorable artwork and video:
That’s it for today! And if you’re streaming Oddsparks or have made a video - feel free to share it in our Discord[discord.gg]!

Last but not least, check out the Oddsparks presskit[//] for logos, transparent promotional images for all your banner needs, and more.

Thanks for testing out our latest beta multiplayer patches!

We've fixed the most occurring desyncs and have pushed it to Beta. If you're playing multiplayer, we'd love for you to update/try out the beta and hopefully it should be a better experience.

If you haven't tried swapping to the new branch and want to try it:

The changes shouldn't break your save but you should keep a backup of your saves just in case. You can find your Oddsparks save files at:

You can access the beta branch by:

1. Right clicking the game in your Steam Library
   
2. Selecting "Properties"
   
3. Going to "Betas"
   
4. Opting in to the "Beta" branch in the drop-down.
   (You may need to update the game and restart Steam.)

Tinkerers, Wayfarers, Spark-Instructors,

Welcome to May's devlog! Thanks to all of your feedback and bug reports, our coders have been working hard on fixing gameplay issues big and small. We’ve also been working on things for the next big update: Trains and Trades! You can click on this thumbnail to check out our Roadmap if you haven’t seen it yet.

While we’re planning to have a big update in August, we also want to take care of things that people have been asking for. We need to figure which balancing and quality of life features we can prioritise - what makes sense for a smaller update and what has to be kept for the bigger update, but rest assured that we’ve been reading everyone’s feedback and are constantly working to smooth out the game.

With that, let’s talk about one of the features for the big update that we’re working on right now, Logic!


So at some point during the game, it’s clear that path addons just aren’t enough. Inefficiencies, especially with overproduction, appear very quickly when you play. What’s a person to do with all these Sparks?

Well, that’s where a logic system can come in handy! If you haven’t really played a game with a logic system, it might seem intimidating. Other automation games have logic systems that can handle very complex signals, and while they’re amazingly useful tools, they can be hard to grasp.

We want something simple to understand but still powerful. Something you shouldn’t need an engineering or electronics degree to use. So… we’re going with a Boolean or binary logic system!

In short, you can send either an on signal, or an off signal and use that turn things on and off.

Of course, this is work in progress and some things, such as the visuals, may change.

What kind of things? Well, for a start, turning on and off path addons like the blocker or even the one way. This way you can automatically redirect the sparks in a single network to create different items depending on when you need it. But there’s a lot of things you can turn on/off, including the spark slots themselves. If you want things to run at a slower speed, or just turn off buildings entirely for an amount of time, you’ll be able to do that!

Cool new logic mode so you can see where all the plugs and sockets are.


Some of you might be asking how you can do cool things if the signal system is so basic. Well, we put all of the complexity and power in the sensors!

The sensor will only send an off or on signal, but you can modify it so that it only sends a signal when you want it to. For example, the Capacity Sensor (name not final) can measure how full something is and you can change it so it sends a signal when it’s below or it’s above a certain level of fullness.

Again, all work in progress.

So whether you want to send more sparks to carry stuff and fill up a building when its output is empty or stop the sparks walking all the way there when the output is full, or do either but only for a certain amount, you can set it up how you wish!

You’ll also have access to other buildings like timers and logic gates that can help you create more complex things! With the way our system works, it's not something that you will need to use in the game, but we figured that someone will want it.


For those who have played games with logic and circuit systems, let’s talk about Signal specifics.

So you won’t be managing signal strength in our logic system. You have networks of wires, which exists on a separate layer to the other buildings. A single network can either contain the “on” signal or the “off” signal. This signal is then written or read by any buildings connected to the logic network.

It does mean that there is an important technical limitation - if you use the system to make loops, the low propagation time in the virtual circuit means that it can pretty quickly create invalid conditions. At the moment, we’re currently testing 3 logic step as delay time. So if you want to use loops, you can only really use 3 operators before the network starts flickering like it’s the light show in a rave.

Ultimately, we mostly see the logic system’s primary use case in handling smaller networks. We want you to use logic with the sparks and path addons, and not instead of them. However, we are also planning for tools that allow players to handle multiple bits in a single tile, so when you want to create something complex, it’s not too annoying, and we’d like to also add more complex constructions like latches that can store state information.

We know that this is the kind of system that most players will only use a little of, and some players will use a lot of, and hopefully we can take care of both needs. We can already hear a few of you cracking your knuckles and dusting off your truth tables and are looking forward to the automated monstrosity that you’re planning on creating. We already got the classic seven segment display to test out our basic system!

and a glimpse at our NOT gate!

We'll come back next month with more news of what we're working on for the next update. If you're hungry for more WIP stuff, you can join us in our Discord[discord.com]! We actually already showed off the seven segment display there last week. Talk to you soon!

We're currently testing new changes that should create a more stable multiplayer experience. Once we are happy with these changes, we will put them in the Stable (the steam default) branch for everyone.

The changes boil down to two things:

• Multiple desync fixes.
  
• Better reporting of desyncs.

If you're playing multiplayer and especially if you have been facing any issues, please try it out. The better reporting will make it easier for us to fix any issues you're facing faster.

When swapping to the new branch, the changes shouldn't break your saves. However, we'd encourage you to keep a backup of your saves just in case! You can find your Oddsparks save files at:

You can access the beta branch by:

1. Right clicking the game in your Steam Library
   
2. Selecting "Properties"
   
3. Going to "Betas"
   
4. Opting in to the "Beta" branch in the drop-down.
   (You may need to update the game and restart Steam.)

Friends and Soon-to-be-Friends,

who needs regular TV, when we have Oddsparks streams and videos? Especially that our team can shamelessly watch them at work! 😀 Discovering all the creative, efficient and aesthetic ways people build and automate has become a new favorite part of our jobs, and we’re delighted to recommend some new channels to watch!

Ever thought of automating your process of discovering the best games? There’s a bot for that! Wanderbot, to be precise - the YouTuber with a personal mission to play as many cool videogames as humanly (or inhumanly) possible! Oddsparks has been one of his most anticipated games of 2024, and he couldn’t wait to dive in… and what an exciting dive it has been! Check it out yourself:
Wanderbot’s favorites are indie and roguelike, but he’d try any game that catches his eye. A special guest is likely to appear in his videos, when the game played has a nice story: Wanderbot’s wife Chelle she is, usually analyzing the lore and worldbuilding. Keep an eye on the purple robot in the video thumbnails!

That’s it for today! And if you’re streaming Oddsparks or have made a video - feel free to share it in our Discord!

Last but not least, check out the Oddsparks presskit[//] for logos, transparent promotional images for all your banner needs, and more.

We’ve implemented the missing translations for Tier 2/3 dialogs in the Woodlands. In addition to English and German the whole game is now also fully localized in French, Simplified Chinese and Japanese.

We’ve also taken the time and updated a lot of text issues in the existing texts and layouts. Thanks to all of you for reporting mistakes you found. There are still a few smaller things here and there that will be improved in the future, but the experience should be much better overall.

Other issues that have been addressed:

• Changed Japanese font to make it more readable.
  
• Fixed a crash related to moving sparks around in the spark bar.
  
• Fixed a crash related to loading savegames.
  
• Fixed a crash in the mountains caused by specific map generation seeds.
  
• Fixed animal scarers in certain areas blocking spawning on the complete west side of the map.
  
• Fixed issues occurring when interacting with the inventory during autosaves.
  
• Fixed possible black screen on start for GPUs of the GTX600/700 series.

Friends and Soon-to-be-Friends,

Has it really been just one week after we launched into Early Access? We’ve had a pretty amazing launch and it’s been an incredible experience to see you play and enjoy our game. We've enjoyed so many streams and let's plays, articles and youtube reviews, fan art big and small! We've seen a steam review with already more than 50 hours on record? (Please don't forget to sleep, eat and stay hydrated when playing Oddsparks.) It's been wonderful to see the reception and we want to especially thank you for all of the Steam reviews because they really help us be more visible.

In general, we see this as a really good sign that yes, while our game is in Early Access and there’s lots of things that need more polishing (I’m looking at you, build menu), you enjoy our vision, and the core game really works for a lot of people! Most of our team are deep in working for the next update - and you can already check out the roadmap on the last steam news.

It’s a bit bare, but we don’t like to overpromise. Of course, we have broad strokes for the full game and know what we want to explore. However, until we feel more confident about what we want to show, we’d rather just focus on the next update, and in general, tell you our pace and and how many updates we’re planning.

So let’s talk a bit about some issues our game has and what we’re planning to do with them. That’s the whole point of Early Access, after all. We’ve been looking at every review and read every email, discord messages, steam discussion post and there’s a lot of feedback.

We’ve been doing patches for crashes (you might have noticed), and of course, we’ll keep fixing crashes when we can, but we wanted to talk about a few issues, when and how we’re planning to fix it, and our thoughts behind why this issue popped up and also, when we fix these issues and why.

We figured it’d be interesting for you to know our thought process, so when you see an issue, you can already kind of guess when it’ll be taken care of.

We’ll be patching in the localization as soon as we can - Oddsparks has a surprisingly large amount of text for something that’s not too narrative focused (about 30k words at the moment!), and sometimes things change last minute. In general, we’ve seen that people have been playing well with our core texts translated, but we completely understand that it’s annoying when things aren’t translated. We’ll update it as soon as we can. Likely, within a few weeks.

As we update the game, sometimes other languages may fall behind - but of course, we’ll update the game with the new text and new languages when we can. We want everyone to have a great experience with the game, whatever language you play it in.

So while every person working on Oddsparks have about 200-500 hours clocked in Steam on the game, the collective amount of hours that the game gets played when it’s live absolutely surpasses the amount of hours we’ve spent playing and testing it. We never saw this bug before and, of course, it makes the game unplayable. So we’ve been trying to fix it as soon as we can - in fact, it's already been fixed since Tuesday!

In general, bugs that hugely affect gameplay are a high priority for us. We’ll try to fix these things as soon as we can. Of course, we first have to figure out why, fix it, test the fixes for stability, so it can take a few days.

Sometimes, when you’re developing a game, you get blindspots. We didn’t realise just how much people would get tripped up with the delivery chest! At some point in the game, you need to unlock and build the delivery chests, but we didn't make it explicit. We did a “quick fix” right before release, but it doesn’t help that it was only changing the quest text last minute. This meant that while people playing in English got a hint, people playing in other languages did not. Sorry about that!

But since we saw a lot of people getting tripped up by it, we’ll be making it significantly more obvious by asking you to build the delivery chests as part of first few quests that need them.

Design “bugs” like these are usually not high priority for us, but it depends on how badly they affect gameplay. We’ve seen multiple bug reports and questions about this issue, and when you didn't realise that you need the delivery chest, this bug is a blocker, so we’ve also prioritised it, and it’s on a similar level to the Disappearing Teleporters bug and was fixed on Tuesday.

This feature will come with the next big update in August! We already knew before release that we’d need an item sink or trash can feature. After all, Oddsparks is a game where you start with infinite resources and at some point, you just have too much stuff. However, we focused on a few other things first, especially because we wanted something a little more interesting than just to throw away stuff. So the feature will come in August with some fun bells and whistles.

In general, design issues that are not game blocking are tackled either in small updates in-between the big updates, or if they’re a bigger feature, in a big update. This is also often the case with some visual bugs. We’ll try to tackle them all as we continue developing!

We really want to shout out our Discord[discord.com] and the wonderful community that's grown with us. Now that a lot of people are joining with the game released, everyone is sharing so much stuff with such kindness. We love seeing people answer and ask questions, share builds, seeds and tips and tricks. We also see that a wiki is also being started!

We especially want to shout out and say thanks to each and every person writing out all the bugs that they're finding and working with us to answer problems about any issues that they face. It really helps us so much in making the game better!

We don't always have time to respond (We have a game to make! It's already hard enough not to just spend a lot of time watching people play.) but there's a few of us taking notes and seeing what we can do to make the game better and what we should do next.

For now, here's a few very cool things we wanted to share with you.

2-bit adder by Tsukaiyo
We're adding Logic in the next update, but we've seen folks already started to use Sparks to figure out how to make logic stuff themselves! It's still in progress, but here's a 2-bit adder that was shared in our discord. It's still some ways to go, but we look forward to someone recreating Doom in Oddsparks.

Retired Save by *&
*& showed off an amazing and annotated retired base in our Discord. Just like other automation games, if you want Maximum Efficiency, the bottleneck will end up being your CPU. However, if you want to try, there's nothing stopping you from building a base with literally thousands of Stumpies! You just... might not get a lot of frames per second in those areas anymore and might need to retire your base.

Aether Shard generator by Grand
So yes, there is a way to infinitely generate Aether Shards with just automation later in game. For proof, here is a screenshot showing off Grand's Aether Shard generator that's working at 100% efficiency, able to create 168 shards per minute!

We had to lower the quality of some of the images to make them fit Steam News, but you can find them at our #base-showcase channel!

As a final thing, we do want to say that while we love seeing people push our game to the absolute limits, we feel just as happy with people celebrating their little wins. We love seeing small spaghetti-pathed workshops that aren't particularly efficient, and just seeing people's delight at tackling a puzzle they perhaps never would have thought they could do. We're super happy to see folks who've never tried out this genre enjoy Oddsparks. We've even heard that people are playing our game with their 9-year-old!

Thank you so much for joining us in our Early Access journey, and we'll talk more very soon!