Twice the blocks

Every tile in the game used to be 16 blocks wide, and I wanted more detail than that allows. So I tried 32. The first step only doubled every block of every model, which kept everything working but changed nothing you could see, and I noticed straight away: all I had done was double the pixels. The detail had to be drawn in by hand, model by model.

That raised the real problem. The way models were turned into meshes, every change of color on a surface cost extra corners, so each rivet, knot or line of grain made a model heavier to draw. The answer was a new baker. It now merges faces by their shape alone and paints the colors on from a small texture, one pixel per block face. The detailed log dropped from about a thousand corners to a couple of hundred, and color became almost free.

With that out of the way I went through everything. The log is round now, with grooved bark, growth rings on its cut ends and a knot, and the two ends are not quite the same. Two logs lying end to end looked like one long log, so the ends are bevelled with a light ring of cut wood between them. Planks are real boards with gaps and grain. Every other item got redrawn too: gears with real teeth, lumps of coal and ore, an oil drum, a sheaf of wheat, a bucket of water, a mug of beer with foam and a scored loaf of bread. Barrels, wheels and saw blades are drawn from true circles, and walls, roofs and doors paint their own boards, bricks, shingles and hinges.

The belts went black and red to match the inserters, and lost the little end plates that made a row of them look like separate pieces. Logs also seemed to hop at every seam between two belts. That turned out to be the simulation, not the drawing: belts move their items one after another, so a log rolling onto a belt that had not had its turn yet got moved twice in the same moment. Now it waits for the next one.

I tried a swinging arm as a new inserter. I liked the look far more than my gantry, but the gantry works better on a grid, so I kept how it moves and gave it the arm’s style: a round base, one red column, a red rail and a small gripper. My first go put the column right in the middle, and the logs passed straight through it.

The column moved to the back edge, carrying the rail over the middle on a beam, and now the claw has the middle to itself. The output pile also lost its sign. It can hold anything the factory makes, so labeling it with one item never made sense.

The video at the top was made by the game itself. It works out the route goods take through the factory, from the input pile over the inserters and belts through a cutter to the output pile, and flies the camera along it at belt speed while the whole place runs.