1. Performance problems. Quite often, clicked galaxies just don't generate, leaving me with an unkillable loading bar on the screen that only game restart fixes (but then the galaxy in question won't be generated, ever). I have a pretty strong config, so hardware is certainly not an issue. The affected galaxies are usually high (1000+) DM ones.
EDIT: once the bug is in, many other galaxies generate but incompletely (e.g. 10 to 20 systems instead of thousands) or even completely empty.
2. Terraforming huge planets (1G+) in insanely high DM galaxies (10k+) still break the game (same thing I mentioned above: costs and XP generation get permanently broken in the universe). Since those planets would be important for further progress (even though their graphics is ugly covering most of the screen and the star itself, not to mention their physical impossibility), it would be great to have some solution on that one.
EDIT2: the inventory looks ugly, too when over 100 slots, but that's a minor cosmetic issue completely dwarfed by the stability and calculation problems. I don't know if those were introduced in the newest release, or it's just me who reached the stage where they are triggered, but I've never encountered a single one of those issues before.
EDIT 3 (I know this is getting a huge wall of text): when terraforming planets in a partially generated galaxy (i.e. a dozen starts instead of 100's or thousands), I noticed two things:
a) auroras blink for a moment, and then disappear. Don't know about their effects, though.
b) all is fine and dandy as long as I stay in the system, but as soon as I go up a level to galaxy view, the galaxy is "generated" again (at least those dozen or so systems), and whatever system I had before, all buildings included, is gone.
Yeah.. I guess I'll have to do something about that. I'm perfectly aware that extremely high DM (or pretty much any other property) would break the game, but I decided to leave most things uncapped for now.
1. There are too many broken megastructures, disabling the terraforming of otherwise valuable planets. Even that aside, it would be nice to have the option (either by default or as a tech) to downgrade and dismantle megastructures (or even gigastructures for that matter).
2. When encountering a level 0 broken megastructure, I can't repair it. The tooltip says I lack the technology, which I clearly don't (unless there is a hidden tech somewhere).
3. The ancient structures on the planets could be upgradeable and dismantleable. Also, the home planet's ancient shipyard seems to give XP to my ships regardless of where they are. Very nice as I hated the previous versions' battle XP grinding aspect, but maybe not working as intended.
As a general summary of the above, I believe that by late game, having become the leading star empire in control of entire superclusters, I should be able to do with structures what I damn well please. :)
1. Yeah I agree, I'll need to tone down their spawn rate, especially space elevators. I'm still thinking about the possibility of dismantling megastructures. I guess it doesn't hurt to add the option and not force the player to explore more after seeing an undesirable megastructure.
2. Normally I addressed this bug in v0.26.1, is it still not working?
3. Yeah definitely. Though I think upgrading ancient structures should at least be gated by dimension stuff. The ancient shipyard as you described definitely isn't working as intended, do you remember how you sent the ships? (standard drive, plutonium drive...)
2. Now it works, I wrote the comment before the update.
3. I believe it was plutonium. Now that I have an advanced game and can easily get to Z/Y money and lvl 100+ using just my home planet, I only bother with standard drive when I forget to change it back to Pu after a game restart (couldn’t you make overlays, drive choices, etc. persistent btw?)
+1: a great QoL upgrade could be a buy all function for mineral upgrades and researches. Late game it involves a lot of manual clicking.
+2 another cool feature for late game would be some overlay(s) that help us navigate between clusters. The ones I personally use the most (for obvious reasons) are no. of galaxies, highest field strength, and above all else, highest dark matter.
Yep I also have these ideas in mind, it's a question of when I'll be implementing them! (though I guess I'll slide the "+1" suggestion into the next minor update as it's very useful with very little programming effort)
Oops, looks like I accidentally broke the game. I discovered an insane system with planet sizes in G kilometers, and thought I'd test if they could house enough buildings to compete with the new, buffed gigastructures. I found that I could upgrade them (i.e. the buy window numbers remained green) past my actual money and energy capacity. When I did, the upgrade happened, but I stopped earning XP. Starting a new universe didn't help, neither did a dimension reset. I don't earn any XP anymore, anywhere. So, now I'm stuck with a broken save I put many hours into. Could you please let me know how I can submit it so that you can take a look and hopefully debug it? Thanks!
You can export your save (hopefully that's still possible) in the main menu and upload it somewhere (Google drive, Dropbox etc.) and I'll take a look! (and try to fix it)
Never mind, the XP issue miraculously solved itself after a couple of game restarts. However, you might want to look into the bug of purchases enabled past money and energy limit. I don't know if the Gkm+ planet size or the high amounts involved (over 1e45) caused it, might want to check both.
Thanks for the improvements, especially the galaxy killer! :)
As for bugs, here's an interesting (and quite old) one: if you take the Solar system via conquer all or fighters (quite possible in later universes where you can build enough on your home planet to reach lvl 60, gather all 4 ships, and then steamroll through your home system), you never get the solar panel. Nix, nada, not a chance.
While pushing toward even stranger universes, I discovered another design glitch. So, as soon as dark matter reaches extreme levels (in excess of 100), converting those galaxies into gigastructures becomes unfeasible due to insane stone requirements.
What do I mean?
As I noticed, max. system size is 50 planets. At my level, the largest planets were between 1.5 and 1.7 Mkm, 2 to 4 of those per system. Based on that assumption, I would have to have PK'd some thousand systems (manually, as there is no auto-PK) to be able to convert an 1000-DM galaxy. Sure, it would have been a powerhouse (meaning my main source of minerals/research wouldn't have been imbalanced terraformed planets or megastructures anymore), but who would do so much manual work?
Besides the necessary late-game rebalancing, a stone-/metal-producing gigastructure would be nice - or the possibility to buy stone. I mean, you can already buy any amount of any material at a fixed price (which is quite unrealistic), so why not stone?
I think a way to convert an entire galaxy into stone, materials and metals (a "galaxy-killer") would make the most sense, I'll add that in the next update. I'm not sure about being able to buy stone with money. As it is right now, it makes things a little more interesting in my opinion.
Do you plan to introduce "terastructures", i.e. some sort of mechanism where one can convert an entire cluster and dedicate it to some task the same way gigastructures do with galaxies?
Btw the gigastructure calculation is borked in late game. Once gravity and other parameters are getting high (not very high - about 8 to 10 G is more than enough), converting individual super-/hypergiant stars into Dyson spheres/Matrioshka brains provides more energy/E store/research than converting the entire galaxy into a gigastructure. Even though one can build those an individual megastructures then convert the whole galaxy and retain both bonuses (bug or feature?), the gigastructure should as per formal logic be at least as effective as the sum of all normal and megastructures that otherwise could be built there, right?
Another mostly esthetic mid-/late game stuff: when discovering huge systems (well in excess of 10,000 AU in diameter), it is not possible to zoom out completely, making the outer planets practically invisible and unusable.
Whats the best way to get cellulose because I am having a hard time getting a lot for my teraformed planet farms.I ain't sure if there is a better way to get it other than a planet killer or just mining it which both are either unreliable or really slow.
You can buy them by clicking on the cellulose icon in your inventory, but it's true that there should be better ways of obtaining it passively in the game.
Also, a mostly esthetic one: if you fire an upgraded planet killer, all planets in the system disappear at once - at least visually. They can't be accessed or seen any more, but they remain in the PK's menu and can be harvested. Since I don't think many players would build a PK and then not harvest the entire system, this might not be a crucial bug, but it is a well-reproducible one.
I also got this bug a few times where this would happen but its all kinds of planet killers for me. Idk if the information helped but I wanted to add that.
Hi, I found a bug. I don't know what triggers it exactly, but happened to me twice that after a coal speed-up, my fleet got stuck in an ETA 00:00 stage. The green line remained, the fleet never arrived, I couldn't start the battle, and if I moved the screen, the fleet icon moved with it, too, as though two layers that should have been one got separated.
See here:
This renders my fleet permanently unusable, potentially screwing up my entire universe.
So far, I've been lucky to encounter this in extra universes so that I could just build a new triangulum probe, but if it ever occurs in a primary universe before the gigastructure stage, my entire save will be as good as gone. Hope you can fix this. :)
The only common thing I found is that the bug always seems to occur in universes where time goes faster. Maybe the time factor messes with the traveling time vs. energy/coal formula?
If you were to use the stone crusher like still have stuff in it and not collect it and its at 0:00 then upgrade the crusher.If you collect you get negative materials so now I am just broke.I ain't sure how much it effects the gameplay but I been having some weird interactions in which I can't upgrade stuff but idk how to trigger that.I restarted the game and it work correctly now.
I think it's because I made some balancing changes to how much the initially hidden "Physics" contributes to the OP-meter. After the change, the default values that were previously okay were not anymore, which disables the "Generate starting universe" button.
I changed it so the game doesn't take into account anything that is hidden (the fixed version should be live now, no version number change). Hopefully the fix works!
just started playing it and i'm confused. I didn't start with enough energy to build a power plant and the game doesn't tell me how to get more. Is it something that regenerates over time or is it a starting bug from the new version?
I was referring to the steam engine. it costs 500 and is the only power plant available to build when you start. But you don't start with 500 energy so.....
You should start with buying 5 mineral extractors (until you run out of energy) before you unlock power plants. After that, if you have 8 mineral extractors and 8 power plants, you'll unlock a few more helpful buildings.
Oh I think I see how you got there, you probably started mining before placing any buildings (or less than 5 mineral extractors). I guess I'll have power plants (those that generate energy without costing any) unlocked right at the start.
Hello! I just wanted to say that the energy cap kinda sucks tbh but this game is truly good! I just dont think that the cap is a good idea thats all from me bye!
The energy cap is new to this update, so it's very new and certainly experimental. I'm not sure about removing the cap entirely, but I agree it's kinda low right now.
It will be updated very soon with a few overhauls (no more manual collect, better farming etc.), stay tuned for that! Though this means saves will be wiped, but I hope it will be worth it.
I'll take a look at the fighter bug, though it doesn't seem like an easily reproducible bug..
I would love to see some sort of colonization, Maybe a Dome Graphic, Where civilians are raised and boost production somehow - Then need water and food to upgrade those Colonization Domes.
hello I think this game is very unique and great. i was wondering if you would add moons and if so if they would have thier own viewer or it would be on the same screen as the solar system viewer. so far you're doing a good job with the game.
I just wanted to comment to say I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing, and it's the most fun I've had in ages. I started playing in browser, then downloaded it to PC, then downloaded the itch.io launcher so I restarted 3 times and ended up spending around 12 hours straight just playing. I still have no idea what I'm doing, but I wishlisted it on Steam and cannot wait to start over once again and I NEVER start games over.
This has scratched such a deeply profound itch that I've been trying to reach for ages. Thank you!
You didn't have to restart 3 times lol, you could've exported/imported your save (unless that didn't work, a possibility). Glad this game was fun to you!
Great game, I had a lot of fun playing this after playing Helixteus 2 back in the day, but it does need a little bit of work still.
You might need to rethink the dimensional OP meters/probe points interactions! Once you unlock Universe Value, if you raise the required probe points to ridiculous levels for one of the stats you want to lower (Boltzmann constant seems optimal to me for that, otherwise maybe Difficulty), you get a ton of positive probe points you can then spend to raise your universe value and all other stats to a proportionally insane number and create arbitrarily many dimensional remnants instantly in your 2nd dimension.
For example, setting 1e12 on Boltzmann modifying cost, which actually decreases the OP meter, then create the new universe, set the Boltzmann constant to 0.9 which gives you like +1e10 probe points you can spend on 1000 timescale and 1e9 on universe value
Also worth noting, when you switch dimensions, you can use the Triangulum probes from your previous dimension's last universe as long as you dont open the first universe after switching dimensions, which is pretty OP considering it allows you to instantly create a universe with timescale 1000 or some other shenanigans to make it to the endgame in 10 minutes, which coupled with the previously mentioned tactic means you get to level up the dimensional upgrades as high as you want.
Similarly, you can use a drive you havent researched in a universe by having at least the Chemical Drives research, then switching to a universe where you have researched any of the other drives, select that specific drive in the ship window, then switching back to the other universe and you can just use that drive.
Also for minor mentions, maybe its on me but setting G constant or dark matter very high (like 100000) makes the game unplayable because with the former, the planets overlap and cover the whole solar system, and with the latter the game fails to generate any solar systems other than your home system, the galaxies end up just being empty which still works for building gigastructures but it's a shame! Also if you send your fleet or upgrade buildings with less than 1 second of time (for the buildings, this is shown when there isnt a time shown even before you have unlocked the automatic build accelerations), there is a chance it glitches out and the buildings never finish and fleets never arrive despite being at 0 seconds remaining, maybe some kind of floating point inaccuracy causing the number to become negative and that causing issues? You cant even accelerate with drives so the ships are just stuck forever in that universe since you cant cancel mid-flight either(?) There might be a bug with the aurora multiplier not affecting the amount of stone from planet killers? Well, in that regards it would be nice to have a gigastructure for just sweeping up a whole galaxy or passive income of stone since the central business system doesnt collect from the mining terraformed planets and going around planet busting one planet after another manually is tiring
I've reached the endgame of this game: Infinity of research points without going out the starting planet in a new universe.
I was playing offline version v0.21.1 . I haven't played higher versions yet, but most of these problems probably still exist.
I've encountered a few problems:
1. Megastructure stage: Terraforming planets for Atom Manipulators or Subatomic Reactors cost way more energy than they should
Normally terraforming planets for a specfic building is equivalent to have X buildings of that level, without any bonus from CBDs. X is the surface area of the planet.
For these two buildings, terraforming for them not only increases the speed of processing by X, but also increases the energy cost by X. X is usually very large, around 10M or even higher. This makes terraforming for these two buildings unusable, as the energy cost is prohibitively high, even with late game megastructures. Even refining stone becomes difficult with 10Mx energy cost.
If you build X of them instead, you will process X times faster than a single building, while consuming the same amount of energy for the same amount of material. If you do put X times more materials into them, you will spend X times more energy.
2. Dimensional stage: Infinite research multiplier way too OP
In my savefile, I increased this factor to 6. This is immensely OP, as I could reach infinity research points on my starting planet, with just 1 miner, 1 storage, 1 generator and 1 lab, all upgraded to very high levels. These buildings are level 1100, and the lab infinite research is level 369. At this level, the buildings cost ~1e130 creds. This makes my lab go over 1.8e308, and creates several NaN issues LOL
While the infinite research itself alone won't break the game, it multiplies with building levels and CBD bonuses, which does break the game.
3. Also dimensional stage: Probe points and Dimensional Remnants
According to the release notes, this seems to be nerfed, so might no longer grow broken.
After putting several dozen hours into this game I'd like to give my opinion on what makes this game enjoyable and how it can be improved.
The early game is amazing while you're first learning about what systems exist and you feel the scope stretch outwards as you grow. There is a curious "I wonder what gets unlocked next" which carries through your mind and keeps you going.
The early-mid game when you are nearing the end of your first universe and start bumping up against the limit of expansion is a bit of a let-down. There isn't much of a reason to scale into clusters and superclusters as the lack of any structures that can be built on those scales makes progress there tedious.
The mid game when you're first creating new universes but have not yet gotten enough dimension remnants to justify creating a new dimension can feel like a slog. The only time you get to experiment with new content is between universes, and that's several hours between. Even when you're able to alter fundamental properties you're really suffering for probe points and I can imagine some players feeling like it's not worth repeating until they unlock dimensions.
The mid-late game when you've finally gotten enough dimension remnants to create a new dimension can be heaps of fun. The players who stick with the game to this point and get the curtain pulled back on the math can see a distant future where they can break this game's mechanics over their knee. If they invest poorly and get stuck repeating the mid game, I can imagine a lot of people quitting here, but those who are able to find an expanding niche to exploit... oh-boy...
The post-late game, when you have invested hundreds of thousands of dimension remnants, are able to complete universes in less than an hour, and can reap exponential amounts of remnants every time you create a new dimension is when this game reaches 10/10 territory. Does having 10000+ universe value (after having reduced the cost of it to the floor) feel broken? Yes. But when you've spent days struggling against the grind the ability to drop so many dimension remnants that you can minimize the building cost down to almost nothing, or make the probe point cost of time speed insanely cheap (zoooom!) or pump pickaxe speed up so high that you can crack a planet in half within the first 5 minutes of a new universe is, in my opinion, where this game really hits its stride. Incremental games like these live or die on whether you're able and how enjoyable they are to break. And this game feels insanely fun to break.
Hey, thanks for your comment, your part-by-part analysis was very interesting to read!
I'm aware of how useless clusters, and especially superclusters, are right now, and I'm still open to ideas on how to make them more interesting. Probably not "terastructures" or "omegastructres" though, I want to be a bit more original than that.
When creating new universes, yeah I need to add more variety, but again, not sure what yet.
When resetting a dimension for the first time, I could include a tip to guarantee faster progress right off the bat, and maybe pointers on how to break the game.
Regarding the post-late game, I thought it was a bad thing that the player was able to break the game (and consequently nerfed it to oblivion a few days ago, probably a mistake), but apparently you say it's really fun, so I think I'll make it a feature, but I'll still make it a biiit slower than what you experienced lol.
Just curious, what made you continue playing the game despite the slog you went through after the early game?
Just curious, what made you continue playing the game despite the slog you went through after the early game?
Due to the "Dimensional Remnants" teasing its future unlock on the right-hand side of the universe list I knew there was more content to discover but dreaded repeating a near-identical experience to the previous several hours multiple times to get there. I looked through the game images on the center-right side of the game's itch.io page to see what content I would be missing if I called it quits. The last image has some of the equations from "Modify formulas" and my mind flashed back to an old Flash-based incremental game that I did enjoy playing to completion: Learn to Fly 3.
In that game you were a penguin trying to reach the moon by building elaborate rocketry. It delivered new content through the core gameplay loop (which lasted just a minute or two) by having each iteration reward you with currency used to purchase better parts, which in turn interacted with the environment and the player differently. After the game was beaten there was a New-Game-Plus currency which, like your Dimensional Remnants, altered the equations. I had sunk nearly 100 hours into that game, well beyond its 10 hour single playthrough-time, because I enjoyed the core loop enough to do it one more time and see how much the gameplay had changed. I noticed that the obstacles which the player would struggle to avoid in their first playthrough became practically unnoticeable as you smashed through them with ease after a few wise New-Game-Plus purchases, and there was this feeling of having mastered or overcome a meta-challenge the game was posing: Trivialize the things that were an issue for you earlier. Another good example is in the first Dark Souls, where a demon is a major boss early on in the game, then a standard unit later in the game, and the player gets a feeling of having grown so strong that this previous titan is now beneath them.
Before shutting down Helixteus 3 for good I played just a little bit more into the second universe... just enough to see that, instead of delving into caves, I could simply use a pickaxe and dig deep enough to find a minimal amount of the material required to progress then purchase as much of that material as I needed using dollars - completely skipping over the cave mechanic like it was the obstacles in Learn to Fly 3. I looked back at the image of the equations that the Dimension Remnants could alter, realizing that even if the content was completely identical my power-level relative to the content could change rapidly, and there was a feeling of accomplishment after having "cleared" or "broken" what was a challenge in the previous iteration with ease. I might be able to "break" other mechanics using the equations, I thought, and that promise kept me going though the rest of the early game.
(Granted that promise was eventually rewarded, but I had no way of knowing whether it would be possible in the end-game back when I decided to continue soldiering on.)
Ah I see, so I absolutely have to make sure players don't "dread repeating a near-identical experience", at least until the very end game. "Teasing" that there will be exciting things at the very end game while offering almost nothing new to get there is poor design. I'll shift my focus towards that!
After a (rather long) test drive (until right after the first probe), I can say I'm very impressed with this sequel! Back in the Flash games I've played the two prequels for longer than I'd like to admit. I'll definitely be buying this on Steam when it releases there.
I do like how materials from mining play a much bigger role in progression.
It may be my HX2 fixation speaking, but I wished that building ships was more like building rovers. I don't feel as much of a connection when the ships are practically given to me.
Yeah I agree with the building ships thing, I should add some sort of a menu that pops up right after getting a ship so you can spend some time customizing it.
Sounds like a good idea! Would it be too much to make a separate mode (like the option with whether you'd like to play the story or play the incremental mode) where you can construct new or additional ships via the shipyard (like in the previous games)?
You could possibly gate the ship designs behind unlocking them normally, where it rewards you with the possibility to build it instead of giving you the ship immediately.
A means to balance this ingame could just be to leave the stat multiplier upgrade path out from the shipyard (from the previous games) and replacing it with something like building speed or a way to store ships from your team?
(on a more helpful note; like in HX1, the inventory slots fit outside the window at more than 90 slots. Is it possible to hardcap that like ship dodge/ship crit rate?)
For the separate mode: would building ships be the only difference? I think there needs to be enough differences between the other modes to warrant a completely separate mode
(for the inventory hardcap, sure, I'll put it in one day lol)
Wow, this brings back memories, back from when I played the original Helixteus on Kongregate and lost a day or two of time. Glad to see the series is still going strong. Cheers.
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Two recurring bugs in the new release:
1. Performance problems. Quite often, clicked galaxies just don't generate, leaving me with an unkillable loading bar on the screen that only game restart fixes (but then the galaxy in question won't be generated, ever). I have a pretty strong config, so hardware is certainly not an issue. The affected galaxies are usually high (1000+) DM ones.
EDIT: once the bug is in, many other galaxies generate but incompletely (e.g. 10 to 20 systems instead of thousands) or even completely empty.
2. Terraforming huge planets (1G+) in insanely high DM galaxies (10k+) still break the game (same thing I mentioned above: costs and XP generation get permanently broken in the universe). Since those planets would be important for further progress (even though their graphics is ugly covering most of the screen and the star itself, not to mention their physical impossibility), it would be great to have some solution on that one.
EDIT2: the inventory looks ugly, too when over 100 slots, but that's a minor cosmetic issue completely dwarfed by the stability and calculation problems. I don't know if those were introduced in the newest release, or it's just me who reached the stage where they are triggered, but I've never encountered a single one of those issues before.
EDIT 3 (I know this is getting a huge wall of text): when terraforming planets in a partially generated galaxy (i.e. a dozen starts instead of 100's or thousands), I noticed two things:
a) auroras blink for a moment, and then disappear. Don't know about their effects, though.
b) all is fine and dandy as long as I stay in the system, but as soon as I go up a level to galaxy view, the galaxy is "generated" again (at least those dozen or so systems), and whatever system I had before, all buildings included, is gone.
Yeah.. I guess I'll have to do something about that. I'm perfectly aware that extremely high DM (or pretty much any other property) would break the game, but I decided to leave most things uncapped for now.
Some glitches/ideas regarding the new features:
1. There are too many broken megastructures, disabling the terraforming of otherwise valuable planets. Even that aside, it would be nice to have the option (either by default or as a tech) to downgrade and dismantle megastructures (or even gigastructures for that matter).
2. When encountering a level 0 broken megastructure, I can't repair it. The tooltip says I lack the technology, which I clearly don't (unless there is a hidden tech somewhere).
3. The ancient structures on the planets could be upgradeable and dismantleable. Also, the home planet's ancient shipyard seems to give XP to my ships regardless of where they are. Very nice as I hated the previous versions' battle XP grinding aspect, but maybe not working as intended.
As a general summary of the above, I believe that by late game, having become the leading star empire in control of entire superclusters, I should be able to do with structures what I damn well please. :)
1. Yeah I agree, I'll need to tone down their spawn rate, especially space elevators. I'm still thinking about the possibility of dismantling megastructures. I guess it doesn't hurt to add the option and not force the player to explore more after seeing an undesirable megastructure.
2. Normally I addressed this bug in v0.26.1, is it still not working?
3. Yeah definitely. Though I think upgrading ancient structures should at least be gated by dimension stuff. The ancient shipyard as you described definitely isn't working as intended, do you remember how you sent the ships? (standard drive, plutonium drive...)
1. Sounds great, thanks!
2. Now it works, I wrote the comment before the update.
3. I believe it was plutonium. Now that I have an advanced game and can easily get to Z/Y money and lvl 100+ using just my home planet, I only bother with standard drive when I forget to change it back to Pu after a game restart (couldn’t you make overlays, drive choices, etc. persistent btw?)
+1: a great QoL upgrade could be a buy all function for mineral upgrades and researches. Late game it involves a lot of manual clicking.
+2 another cool feature for late game would be some overlay(s) that help us navigate between clusters. The ones I personally use the most (for obvious reasons) are no. of galaxies, highest field strength, and above all else, highest dark matter.
Yep I also have these ideas in mind, it's a question of when I'll be implementing them! (though I guess I'll slide the "+1" suggestion into the next minor update as it's very useful with very little programming effort)
Oops, looks like I accidentally broke the game. I discovered an insane system with planet sizes in G kilometers, and thought I'd test if they could house enough buildings to compete with the new, buffed gigastructures. I found that I could upgrade them (i.e. the buy window numbers remained green) past my actual money and energy capacity. When I did, the upgrade happened, but I stopped earning XP. Starting a new universe didn't help, neither did a dimension reset. I don't earn any XP anymore, anywhere. So, now I'm stuck with a broken save I put many hours into. Could you please let me know how I can submit it so that you can take a look and hopefully debug it? Thanks!
You can export your save (hopefully that's still possible) in the main menu and upload it somewhere (Google drive, Dropbox etc.) and I'll take a look! (and try to fix it)
Never mind, the XP issue miraculously solved itself after a couple of game restarts. However, you might want to look into the bug of purchases enabled past money and energy limit. I don't know if the Gkm+ planet size or the high amounts involved (over 1e45) caused it, might want to check both.
Thanks for the improvements, especially the galaxy killer! :)
As for bugs, here's an interesting (and quite old) one: if you take the Solar system via conquer all or fighters (quite possible in later universes where you can build enough on your home planet to reach lvl 60, gather all 4 ships, and then steamroll through your home system), you never get the solar panel. Nix, nada, not a chance.
Ah yeah, right now the game unlocks solar panels after your first manual battle, but I'll also have to make them unlock via conquer all/fighters too.
While pushing toward even stranger universes, I discovered another design glitch. So, as soon as dark matter reaches extreme levels (in excess of 100), converting those galaxies into gigastructures becomes unfeasible due to insane stone requirements.
What do I mean?
As I noticed, max. system size is 50 planets. At my level, the largest planets were between 1.5 and 1.7 Mkm, 2 to 4 of those per system. Based on that assumption, I would have to have PK'd some thousand systems (manually, as there is no auto-PK) to be able to convert an 1000-DM galaxy. Sure, it would have been a powerhouse (meaning my main source of minerals/research wouldn't have been imbalanced terraformed planets or megastructures anymore), but who would do so much manual work?
Besides the necessary late-game rebalancing, a stone-/metal-producing gigastructure would be nice - or the possibility to buy stone. I mean, you can already buy any amount of any material at a fixed price (which is quite unrealistic), so why not stone?
I think a way to convert an entire galaxy into stone, materials and metals (a "galaxy-killer") would make the most sense, I'll add that in the next update. I'm not sure about being able to buy stone with money. As it is right now, it makes things a little more interesting in my opinion.
Do you plan to introduce "terastructures", i.e. some sort of mechanism where one can convert an entire cluster and dedicate it to some task the same way gigastructures do with galaxies?
Btw the gigastructure calculation is borked in late game. Once gravity and other parameters are getting high (not very high - about 8 to 10 G is more than enough), converting individual super-/hypergiant stars into Dyson spheres/Matrioshka brains provides more energy/E store/research than converting the entire galaxy into a gigastructure. Even though one can build those an individual megastructures then convert the whole galaxy and retain both bonuses (bug or feature?), the gigastructure should as per formal logic be at least as effective as the sum of all normal and megastructures that otherwise could be built there, right?
I'm not sure if it will be called "terastructures" (it doesn't sound very good lol), but I will probably introduce these structures too at some point.
Yeah I agree the gigastructures are kind of broken late-game, I'm still working on the formulas as they're relatively new.
Another mostly esthetic mid-/late game stuff: when discovering huge systems (well in excess of 10,000 AU in diameter), it is not possible to zoom out completely, making the outer planets practically invisible and unusable.
Yep I've heard of that bug multiple times, though I myself never reached that stage yet from normal playing, I'll see what I can do!
Whats the best way to get cellulose because I am having a hard time getting a lot for my teraformed planet farms.I ain't sure if there is a better way to get it other than a planet killer or just mining it which both are either unreliable or really slow.
You can buy them by clicking on the cellulose icon in your inventory, but it's true that there should be better ways of obtaining it passively in the game.
Also, a mostly esthetic one: if you fire an upgraded planet killer, all planets in the system disappear at once - at least visually. They can't be accessed or seen any more, but they remain in the PK's menu and can be harvested. Since I don't think many players would build a PK and then not harvest the entire system, this might not be a crucial bug, but it is a well-reproducible one.
Must be a new bug, my planetkillers seem to work fine, maybe it's related to the previous bug
I also got this bug a few times where this would happen but its all kinds of planet killers for me. Idk if the information helped but I wanted to add that.
Hi, I found a bug. I don't know what triggers it exactly, but happened to me twice that after a coal speed-up, my fleet got stuck in an ETA 00:00 stage. The green line remained, the fleet never arrived, I couldn't start the battle, and if I moved the screen, the fleet icon moved with it, too, as though two layers that should have been one got separated.
See here:
This renders my fleet permanently unusable, potentially screwing up my entire universe.
So far, I've been lucky to encounter this in extra universes so that I could just build a new triangulum probe, but if it ever occurs in a primary universe before the gigastructure stage, my entire save will be as good as gone. Hope you can fix this. :)
Thanks for the report, I think someone else got that same bug too. I'll really have to fix this bug somehow
The only common thing I found is that the bug always seems to occur in universes where time goes faster. Maybe the time factor messes with the traveling time vs. energy/coal formula?
I think I have found a bug
If you were to use the stone crusher like still have stuff in it and not collect it and its at 0:00 then upgrade the crusher.If you collect you get negative materials so now I am just broke.I ain't sure how much it effects the gameplay but I been having some weird interactions in which I can't upgrade stuff but idk how to trigger that.I restarted the game and it work correctly now.
Thanks for the report, I'll take a look at it
Oh okay, I think I know what's going on, I'll try to fix it ASAP
thank you what is it tho
I think it's because I made some balancing changes to how much the initially hidden "Physics" contributes to the OP-meter. After the change, the default values that were previously okay were not anymore, which disables the "Generate starting universe" button.
I changed it so the game doesn't take into account anything that is hidden (the fixed version should be live now, no version number change). Hopefully the fix works!
for some reason im at the new diminson screen and i have my remnants invested but cant gen starting universe
Screenshot?
just started playing it and i'm confused. I didn't start with enough energy to build a power plant and the game doesn't tell me how to get more. Is it something that regenerates over time or is it a starting bug from the new version?
Normally power plants don't cost any energy to build.
I was referring to the steam engine. it costs 500 and is the only power plant available to build when you start. But you don't start with 500 energy so.....
You should start with buying 5 mineral extractors (until you run out of energy) before you unlock power plants. After that, if you have 8 mineral extractors and 8 power plants, you'll unlock a few more helpful buildings.
Oh I think I see how you got there, you probably started mining before placing any buildings (or less than 5 mineral extractors). I guess I'll have power plants (those that generate energy without costing any) unlocked right at the start.
btw how do I get more upgrade pts?
Hello! I just wanted to say that the energy cap kinda sucks tbh but this game is truly good! I just dont think that the cap is a good idea thats all from me bye!
or you can just change the amt of space it gives
The energy cap is new to this update, so it's very new and certainly experimental. I'm not sure about removing the cap entirely, but I agree it's kinda low right now.
This game is awesome, and really refreshing considering the kind of crap published nowadays.
I really hope that it will be updated !
By the way, for some reasons i cannot send my MK1 an MK2 fighters sometimes, it is frustrating as if the game was mistaging MK2 for MK1.
Beside of that, the concept is awesome !!
It will be updated very soon with a few overhauls (no more manual collect, better farming etc.), stay tuned for that! Though this means saves will be wiped, but I hope it will be worth it.
I'll take a look at the fighter bug, though it doesn't seem like an easily reproducible bug..
I can provide you with my save file or stuff like that if you want
I would love to see some sort of colonization, Maybe a Dome Graphic, Where civilians are raised and boost production somehow - Then need water and food to upgrade those Colonization Domes.
hello I think this game is very unique and great. i was wondering if you would add moons and if so if they would have thier own viewer or it would be on the same screen as the solar system viewer. so far you're doing a good job with the game.
I thought about it, but I'm not sure what unique gameplay moons could bring.
Small 5x5 Plots - Storage or something.
I just wanted to comment to say I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing, and it's the most fun I've had in ages. I started playing in browser, then downloaded it to PC, then downloaded the itch.io launcher so I restarted 3 times and ended up spending around 12 hours straight just playing. I still have no idea what I'm doing, but I wishlisted it on Steam and cannot wait to start over once again and I NEVER start games over.
This has scratched such a deeply profound itch that I've been trying to reach for ages. Thank you!
You didn't have to restart 3 times lol, you could've exported/imported your save (unless that didn't work, a possibility). Glad this game was fun to you!
Good to know! Thanks!
Great game, I had a lot of fun playing this after playing Helixteus 2 back in the day, but it does need a little bit of work still.
You might need to rethink the dimensional OP meters/probe points interactions! Once you unlock Universe Value, if you raise the required probe points to ridiculous levels for one of the stats you want to lower (Boltzmann constant seems optimal to me for that, otherwise maybe Difficulty), you get a ton of positive probe points you can then spend to raise your universe value and all other stats to a proportionally insane number and create arbitrarily many dimensional remnants instantly in your 2nd dimension.
For example, setting 1e12 on Boltzmann modifying cost, which actually decreases the OP meter, then create the new universe, set the Boltzmann constant to 0.9 which gives you like +1e10 probe points you can spend on 1000 timescale and 1e9 on universe value
Also worth noting, when you switch dimensions, you can use the Triangulum probes from your previous dimension's last universe as long as you dont open the first universe after switching dimensions, which is pretty OP considering it allows you to instantly create a universe with timescale 1000 or some other shenanigans to make it to the endgame in 10 minutes, which coupled with the previously mentioned tactic means you get to level up the dimensional upgrades as high as you want.
Similarly, you can use a drive you havent researched in a universe by having at least the Chemical Drives research, then switching to a universe where you have researched any of the other drives, select that specific drive in the ship window, then switching back to the other universe and you can just use that drive.
Also for minor mentions, maybe its on me but setting G constant or dark matter very high (like 100000) makes the game unplayable because with the former, the planets overlap and cover the whole solar system, and with the latter the game fails to generate any solar systems other than your home system, the galaxies end up just being empty which still works for building gigastructures but it's a shame!
Also if you send your fleet or upgrade buildings with less than 1 second of time (for the buildings, this is shown when there isnt a time shown even before you have unlocked the automatic build accelerations), there is a chance it glitches out and the buildings never finish and fleets never arrive despite being at 0 seconds remaining, maybe some kind of floating point inaccuracy causing the number to become negative and that causing issues? You cant even accelerate with drives so the ships are just stuck forever in that universe since you cant cancel mid-flight either(?)
There might be a bug with the aurora multiplier not affecting the amount of stone from planet killers? Well, in that regards it would be nice to have a gigastructure for just sweeping up a whole galaxy or passive income of stone since the central business system doesnt collect from the mining terraformed planets and going around planet busting one planet after another manually is tiring
Hey, thanks for your feedback! I'm aware of all the dimension-related issues you mentioned and I'll address them soon.
How Can I Explore/Build On/Mine/Farm On Gas Giant?
You can't, they can only be used to build megastructures or be destroyed by a planetkiller for resources
it still won't save the game. and it gives me 3 errors when i click load save.
having a hard time with the green houses. i have the 2nd level of them and i cannot get them to do anything.
"2nd level" = automated greenhouses?
If that's the case you need to have some cellulose and click on the greenhouse to configure it.
I've reached the endgame of this game: Infinity of research points without going out the starting planet in a new universe.
I was playing offline version v0.21.1 . I haven't played higher versions yet, but most of these problems probably still exist.
I've encountered a few problems:
1. Megastructure stage: Terraforming planets for Atom Manipulators or Subatomic Reactors cost way more energy than they should
Normally terraforming planets for a specfic building is equivalent to have X buildings of that level, without any bonus from CBDs. X is the surface area of the planet.
For these two buildings, terraforming for them not only increases the speed of processing by X, but also increases the energy cost by X. X is usually very large, around 10M or even higher. This makes terraforming for these two buildings unusable, as the energy cost is prohibitively high, even with late game megastructures. Even refining stone becomes difficult with 10Mx energy cost.
If you build X of them instead, you will process X times faster than a single building, while consuming the same amount of energy for the same amount of material. If you do put X times more materials into them, you will spend X times more energy.
2. Dimensional stage: Infinite research multiplier way too OP
In my savefile, I increased this factor to 6. This is immensely OP, as I could reach infinity research points on my starting planet, with just 1 miner, 1 storage, 1 generator and 1 lab, all upgraded to very high levels. These buildings are level 1100, and the lab infinite research is level 369. At this level, the buildings cost ~1e130 creds. This makes my lab go over 1.8e308, and creates several NaN issues LOL
While the infinite research itself alone won't break the game, it multiplies with building levels and CBD bonuses, which does break the game.
3. Also dimensional stage: Probe points and Dimensional Remnants
According to the release notes, this seems to be nerfed, so might no longer grow broken.
All 3 of them are fixed/nerfed as of v0.24, but 2. might still be too OP
for some reason i cannot build on these ash tiles, even though i built on other ash tiles ? am i missing something? (Browser version)
It looks like a bug, sorry
is there a way to delete or bulldoze buildings?
hover over a building and press the x key
tyvm
You can softlock the game in the tutorial if you open up the preference menu when you're asked to build something I think.
does anyone know how to use the other ships you get? I cant figure it out
Can't you use them immediately after you get them?
I dont know how to. Is there like an equip button or something?
The new ships appear automatically in battle without having to do anything. If they don't appear even if you got the message, it's a bug
So a bug, it never saves my game and it does thid for every game i create. i never get to continue the game
If you're playing web version, might be an issue with cookies and stuff.
If it doesn't save on an executable, that's really weird
I installed it on my windows and have autosave on. But when i exit and go to load game it shows that i dont have a save.
Any message in the debug window (the black console window that also opens when launching the game)?
ERROR: Condition "len <4" is true. Returned: ERR_INVALID_DATA
ERROR: Error when trying to encode variant
SCRIPT ERROR: Trying to assign value of type 'NiL' to a variable of type 'Dictionary'
i got these errors when i pressed load game
After putting several dozen hours into this game I'd like to give my opinion on what makes this game enjoyable and how it can be improved.
The early game is amazing while you're first learning about what systems exist and you feel the scope stretch outwards as you grow. There is a curious "I wonder what gets unlocked next" which carries through your mind and keeps you going.
The early-mid game when you are nearing the end of your first universe and start bumping up against the limit of expansion is a bit of a let-down. There isn't much of a reason to scale into clusters and superclusters as the lack of any structures that can be built on those scales makes progress there tedious.
The mid game when you're first creating new universes but have not yet gotten enough dimension remnants to justify creating a new dimension can feel like a slog. The only time you get to experiment with new content is between universes, and that's several hours between. Even when you're able to alter fundamental properties you're really suffering for probe points and I can imagine some players feeling like it's not worth repeating until they unlock dimensions.
The mid-late game when you've finally gotten enough dimension remnants to create a new dimension can be heaps of fun. The players who stick with the game to this point and get the curtain pulled back on the math can see a distant future where they can break this game's mechanics over their knee. If they invest poorly and get stuck repeating the mid game, I can imagine a lot of people quitting here, but those who are able to find an expanding niche to exploit... oh-boy...
The post-late game, when you have invested hundreds of thousands of dimension remnants, are able to complete universes in less than an hour, and can reap exponential amounts of remnants every time you create a new dimension is when this game reaches 10/10 territory. Does having 10000+ universe value (after having reduced the cost of it to the floor) feel broken? Yes. But when you've spent days struggling against the grind the ability to drop so many dimension remnants that you can minimize the building cost down to almost nothing, or make the probe point cost of time speed insanely cheap (zoooom!) or pump pickaxe speed up so high that you can crack a planet in half within the first 5 minutes of a new universe is, in my opinion, where this game really hits its stride. Incremental games like these live or die on whether you're able and how enjoyable they are to break. And this game feels insanely fun to break.
Hey, thanks for your comment, your part-by-part analysis was very interesting to read!
I'm aware of how useless clusters, and especially superclusters, are right now, and I'm still open to ideas on how to make them more interesting. Probably not "terastructures" or "omegastructres" though, I want to be a bit more original than that.
When creating new universes, yeah I need to add more variety, but again, not sure what yet.
When resetting a dimension for the first time, I could include a tip to guarantee faster progress right off the bat, and maybe pointers on how to break the game.
Regarding the post-late game, I thought it was a bad thing that the player was able to break the game (and consequently nerfed it to oblivion a few days ago, probably a mistake), but apparently you say it's really fun, so I think I'll make it a feature, but I'll still make it a biiit slower than what you experienced lol.
Just curious, what made you continue playing the game despite the slog you went through after the early game?
Due to the "Dimensional Remnants" teasing its future unlock on the right-hand side of the universe list I knew there was more content to discover but dreaded repeating a near-identical experience to the previous several hours multiple times to get there. I looked through the game images on the center-right side of the game's itch.io page to see what content I would be missing if I called it quits. The last image has some of the equations from "Modify formulas" and my mind flashed back to an old Flash-based incremental game that I did enjoy playing to completion: Learn to Fly 3.
In that game you were a penguin trying to reach the moon by building elaborate rocketry. It delivered new content through the core gameplay loop (which lasted just a minute or two) by having each iteration reward you with currency used to purchase better parts, which in turn interacted with the environment and the player differently. After the game was beaten there was a New-Game-Plus currency which, like your Dimensional Remnants, altered the equations. I had sunk nearly 100 hours into that game, well beyond its 10 hour single playthrough-time, because I enjoyed the core loop enough to do it one more time and see how much the gameplay had changed. I noticed that the obstacles which the player would struggle to avoid in their first playthrough became practically unnoticeable as you smashed through them with ease after a few wise New-Game-Plus purchases, and there was this feeling of having mastered or overcome a meta-challenge the game was posing: Trivialize the things that were an issue for you earlier. Another good example is in the first Dark Souls, where a demon is a major boss early on in the game, then a standard unit later in the game, and the player gets a feeling of having grown so strong that this previous titan is now beneath them.
Before shutting down Helixteus 3 for good I played just a little bit more into the second universe... just enough to see that, instead of delving into caves, I could simply use a pickaxe and dig deep enough to find a minimal amount of the material required to progress then purchase as much of that material as I needed using dollars - completely skipping over the cave mechanic like it was the obstacles in Learn to Fly 3. I looked back at the image of the equations that the Dimension Remnants could alter, realizing that even if the content was completely identical my power-level relative to the content could change rapidly, and there was a feeling of accomplishment after having "cleared" or "broken" what was a challenge in the previous iteration with ease. I might be able to "break" other mechanics using the equations, I thought, and that promise kept me going though the rest of the early game.
(Granted that promise was eventually rewarded, but I had no way of knowing whether it would be possible in the end-game back when I decided to continue soldiering on.)
Ah I see, so I absolutely have to make sure players don't "dread repeating a near-identical experience", at least until the very end game. "Teasing" that there will be exciting things at the very end game while offering almost nothing new to get there is poor design. I'll shift my focus towards that!
After a (rather long) test drive (until right after the first probe), I can say I'm very impressed with this sequel! Back in the Flash games I've played the two prequels for longer than I'd like to admit. I'll definitely be buying this on Steam when it releases there.
I do like how materials from mining play a much bigger role in progression.
It may be my HX2 fixation speaking, but I wished that building ships was more like building rovers. I don't feel as much of a connection when the ships are practically given to me.
Yeah I agree with the building ships thing, I should add some sort of a menu that pops up right after getting a ship so you can spend some time customizing it.
Sounds like a good idea! Would it be too much to make a separate mode (like the option with whether you'd like to play the story or play the incremental mode) where you can construct new or additional ships via the shipyard (like in the previous games)?
You could possibly gate the ship designs behind unlocking them normally, where it rewards you with the possibility to build it instead of giving you the ship immediately.
A means to balance this ingame could just be to leave the stat multiplier upgrade path out from the shipyard (from the previous games) and replacing it with something like building speed or a way to store ships from your team?
(on a more helpful note; like in HX1, the inventory slots fit outside the window at more than 90 slots. Is it possible to hardcap that like ship dodge/ship crit rate?)
For the separate mode: would building ships be the only difference? I think there needs to be enough differences between the other modes to warrant a completely separate mode
(for the inventory hardcap, sure, I'll put it in one day lol)
I haven't worded it as well as I should have - sorry about that.
How about making it a prompt, just like the one asking you whether you'd like to play with/without the tutorial at the start of a new game?
Yeah, that could be a possibility, I'll think about that
Wow, this brings back memories, back from when I played the original Helixteus on Kongregate and lost a day or two of time. Glad to see the series is still going strong. Cheers.
Glad to hear that! Hopefully this third iteration doesn't disappoint (it's still in development, but yeah)