Roadmap June 2022 (Patreon)

Hello folks and welcome to a quick breakdown of the roadmap updated 1st of June, 2022. We will see what mods we released since the last roadmap, as well as what has changed in our future plans! We have some exciting news to if you dare, keep on reading!

Last month we have released Vanilla Textures Expanded - Save Our Ship 2, a full retexture of SoS2 that brings all the textures closer to vanilla and vanilla expanded art style. We have also released a rather large update to Vanilla Factions Expanded - Pirates, adding 5 brand new spacer-era warcaskets and 11 new warcasket weapons, including amazing gravity hammers, warcasket charge lances and crypto cannons that freeze enemies!

One of our artists, The Oracle of Thessia, has sneakily worked on a vanilla retexture to Facial Animations mod (not the same as Facial Stuff, mind you). This has now entered testing and should release shortly. New facial features in vanilla art style, instead of Anime art style, make all the pawns have much more character and allows you to really bond with them. No more faceless pawns. 

We have made some very serious progress on Vanilla Psycasts Expanded. This huge mod adds almost 200 new psycasts as well as overhauls the system completely. You can now earn psycaster XP and use the level up points to choose one or more paths for your psycaster to follow. Then, you spend points unlocking particular abilities - no more random selection! We have already finished work on 120 new psycasts - 12 psycaster paths, and they already went through a round of testing. Whilst we fix bugs in these abilities, we are also working on another 40 psycasts - 4 paths, which will enter testing in the second beta release.

After that's tested, we will have 40 more abilities - 4 more paths, as well as general back-end tasks - such as making sure existing psycasters will correctly get converted to our brand new system.

As I said before, I need to warn you again (before you grab pitchforks): other psycasting mods will not be compatible. That's right. We are ripping out the entire psycasting system from Royalty DLC, and breaking it and bending it to our will. Unless other psycasting mods update and adapt to it, they won't work with us. But fear not, Vanilla Psycasts Expanded has everything you might ever need: hundreds of psycasts, indepth leveling system, enemies using psycasts against you, autocast of abilities and much, much more. You can check out everything that we're adding in the dedicated Patreon post we published not so long ago!

Vanilla Skills Expanded is a brand new mod we are working on, aimed at adding 'Expertise' to your pawns. When they reach 20 in a specific skill, and if they have passion of any kind in it, your pawn can select expertise to gain further stat increases and a brand new stat to level up! You can only have one expertise, and it's permanent. Your chefs might choose to become experts in batch cooking, or in cooking meals carefully. Your soldiers might become experts in close range weaponry, or in long rifles. Your scientists might become experts in research, or in drug making. This mod rewards you for dedicating so much time into your colonists' training.

Not much has changed with Vanilla Backstories Expanded. As I said before, we already have 100s of backstories in, we just need to go over them one more time to see if they are all balanced and fit the rimworld writing style. Then, we need to put them in the game, but that shouldn't be too hard!

Vanilla Base Generation Expanded work is still ongoing. There are extensive changes to our base generation framework so things take time!

Vanilla Vehicles Expanded things are finally on the move. As the Vehicles framework by Smash Phil gets closer and closer to completion, it's about time we start laying out the detail development document. With this mod you can expect numerous vehicles to be added in a cool, unique way into RimWorld. You will build a vehicle workshop, craft various parts, scavenge wrecks around the planet and make various vehicles from motorbikes, pick up trucks to great war planes and VTOLs. 

As the Vehicles Framework will launch without certain features, several planned vehicles will be impossible to be added at first. As such, you can expect Vanilla Vehicles Expanded will get regular updates with new content as the framework evolves.

The rest of the roadmap is currently unchanged. We have stopped work on the faction mods for now to prioritise the release of Psycasts Expanded. It's so big it actually takes the combined might of all of our programmers to do it. The mod is already 80 mb in size!

Thank you all very much for reading!