The Underwell: Tri-Laxian Steel Composite Booster

December 2, 2020

 

 

Hello, engineers, and welcome to our first booster showcase! The Underwell Update contains over 20 boosters. In these blog posts we will be taking a closer look at some of them. A new blog post featuring a new booster or something else will be released every few days to give you something to think about while we get things ready for release. Some of them are minor, easily digestible or simple, while others will introduce entirely new challenges for you to wrap your minds around. We are so excited to share some of these with you.

 

 

The ‘Tri-Laxian Steel Composite’ booster belongs to the first variety. We thought we’d start things off with something cool but simple. We are well aware that Steel is one of the most useful and needed materials in the game, and it is by design. However, sometimes it can get to be a little too much of a bottleneck for other production, so we knew we needed to make something to help you with the shortage.

 

When you apply Tri-Laxian Steel Composite to a building, any steel materials that you create and export from the factory will enjoy a 15% boost in output rate, for no extra substanceuse! As a reminder, these are all of the current materials we have that are made solely from steel and will therefore be affected by this booster: Steel (obviously), Steel Plates, Steel Rods, Steel Gears, Steel Pipes, Steel Barrels, Steel Chains, Steel Springs, and Gas Tanks. That’s a quite a steal! (sorry)

 

Now, some of the quick minded engineers among you may have realised that many of these steel materials are products of other steel materials. Take Gas Tanks, for example. Gas Tanks are one of the most expensive materials to produce at the moment in terms of resources and time needed. This booster can help you produce the large quantity of prerequisite steel materials needed for Gas Tanks at a faster pace. But you can also go one step further and use the booster to boost the production of the Gas Tanks themselves! If you’re lucky enough to have multiple Steel Composite boosters, then you can apply them at the same time on two separate buildings, and with some clever configuration of space efficient production lines, you can potentially compound the benefits of this boost up to 4 times for your Gas Tanks. Which would give you a total boost in Gas Tank production of 75%! I’ll leave that as a challenge for you to figure out.

 

When designing these boosters, we wanted to tie them into the lore of the game to give them some character rather than simply being boring x buff for y time. So we’d like to give you some insight into how this name came to be. First, some background. Tri-Laxian’s are some of the greatest scientists in the galaxy. They also have a unique method of communication whereby they can ‘hear’ each other’s thoughts. One positive of this is that they can achieve levels of collaboration that are simply impossible for other species. However, this also means that the concept of deciding what to communicate and what not to communicate as well as deception is non-existent between Tri-Laxians.

This was a great opportunity to mirror real human history. The original method of producing quality Indian Wootz steel blades was forgotten. There are many theories as to why the art died out, but for whatever reason, with time, the smiths stopped passing the knowledge on to their apprentices. If you’ve never heard about Wootz or Damascus steel, another similar (fictional) example that you might know about is Valyrian steel in Game of Thrones which is notorious for its superior properties compared to ordinary steel. Unfortunately, the secret of forging this legendary steel was lost in the Doom of Valyria.

So, taking this as inspiration, we figured that there could be an ancient steel recipe and production process that was discovered long ago by a great Tri-Laxian scientist which can increase the quality and yield of steel factories. This discovery would have naturally been shared among all Tri-Laxians in proximity without the need of any other form of communication. Consequently, they wouldn’t think to share the method with other species. For this reason, among other nuances of their nature of communication, the process of creating this legendary steel was lost to time.

 

We hope that Tri-Laxian Steel Composite will help you solve your steel shortage issues, and we also hope that you enjoyed this insight into some of the thoughts that went into designing this booster. Feel free to let us know what you think so we can improve the next blog posts to feature more of the kind of content that you engineers want to see and read about most!

Let us know what you think about the booster here: