In the first half of June 2022 we participated in the Green Gam Jam organized by the UN initiative Playing 4 the Planet. Together with 42 partly big international game studios we tried to do our bit for reforestation and sustaining the world’s forests and raise players awareness for this issue. This is about all we achieved even though we did end up with slightly different solutions for the activation than originally planned.

Our first participation in this game jam among big studios was very exciting and accordingly let us come up with a very ambitious plan. One of four items we had in our activation plan was releasing a new free spin-off version of Imagine Earth on Steam. Unfortunately, the release of a whole new product on Steam turned out to be not so quickly feasible in terms of scheduling and might not even have been most effective activation strategy.

I still like the idea but as a 2 man studio have to concentrate first on finishing DLC and Playstation version. So we decided to alter the free version we already had on Steam – The demo of Imagine Earth which also offers a fully playable planet and since the Green Game Jam has an end screen where you can now choose to buy the soundtrack or the green planet bundle to plant trees with the proceeds. These donation options are now in the game to stay.

Activation Campaign Achievements

• We integrated a new Steam achievement – Players who plant twenty forests on one planet in the game from now on plant one tree in the real world.
• We organized a custom Steam Sale Event during the campaign time to raise awareness for game and demo with a discount and offered to plant ten trees for every copy sold.
• You can buy the official soundtrack and all proceeds will also donated to Eden Reforestation.
• On top of this we parallel participated in the Ocean Day Steam Sale in June 5-8 and donated another 10% of net income to Whales and Dolphins Conservation.

All this enabled us to plant 14,920 trees between 6/3-17 with our partner Eden Reforestation Project. A result that wasn’t possible without your help. As we started to sell the soundtrack for charity shortly after the release in May last year we could already plant a total of 48,940 trees. We’re actually really proud.

Dear planet managers, we really struggled a bit to be able to offer you this hyper-speed optimization of the global management system! The interface is the most annoying part of the game production. Let’s hope that the latest interface optimizations will leave nothing to be desired!

Control optimization

Fast and universal switching between temples, workshops, cities, factions and merchants is finally possible and revolutionizes the navigation in our game.

You can now trade and do diplomacy with all sorts of partners through the interface without having to jump to you with the camera. This way, you are not always pulled out of the local action on the planet because of crafting or item acquisition, and you always keep track of what’s going on.

Takeover through stock trading

A separate stock panel right at the frasction panel, where you can see all the information about a company’s cities and directly buy shares and take over cities. A big button that flashes visibly and visualizes the takeover process.

We built a large popup that solemnly announces that you have successfully taken over a city. And also indicates if you have captured equipment in the process, which means you have taken certain items from the enemy.

We also restructured the stock trading panel so that the player always automatically starts at himself and can more quickly throw some shares on the market to get new capital.

Setup optimizations

The difficulty button has been redesigned to look the same in the setup for new rounds of competitive and endless play as the other options or tabs in the setup menu. The start button has been enlarged.

Also, you can now turn off Gaia Forces and Asteroids in the game for a more realistic gameplay experience that is mainly about global warming and environmental issues rather than futuristic sci-fi elements.

Fossil buildings

Fossil power plants can now drill and exploit deposits in adjacent fields. This keeps them productive longer and means they need to be moved less often.

In exchange, fossil production buildings have again received a malus. It no longer looks in the game as if there would be no problem at all if a certain resource is not available.

This is especially important in the context of the core message of the game. Fossil buildings that just keep on working, that too is unrealistic.

The new taskbar

The taskbar has been made narrower. Options like Research and Technology, which are already positioned in the top left of the interface, are no longer duplicated there.

Gamepad layout

We didn’t spare ourselves and once again tweaked the configuration of the controls. There is a new control pad ring menu with which you can control many things in the game even faster than with a mouse.

In all ring menus, the D-pad or directional pad can now be used to navigate particularly quickly and directly, select a build option or item.

Jumping to an event or an alarm. Has not worked for a while. Is now, however, on the left stick.

Supply capsules

Had literally disappeared from the game. On medium setting, such a vehicle now lands again every 5-10 minutes.

Navigation

We cleaned up the navigation so that too many enemy cities are no longer displayed around the globe at once.

Optimizations

• In the field ring, the updates of houses, are now displayed on the right and thus it is no longer too long on the left, so that information sometimes hangs pointlessly out of the screen.
• The buttons for diplomacy no longer show all the time, all the details that play a role there. This makes the user interface much narrower.
• Auto-harvesting now also works for temple ruins from which artifacts are harvested.
• When a building ring has a panel open on the left, the building info is displayed on the right.
• In the colony rating screen you can now select the different factions.
• Citys Panel – Merchants, Workshops and Temples now only displayed at cities when hovering.

Bugs

• We have 5 bugs that have been sent to us via Discord.
• Factions often built too many towers next to each other and also liked to place City Centers in clusters or in a pile.
• The controls in the build menu were a bit disjointed.
• The build menu can now stay open with the gamepad, so you can always see your list of strategic items.
• In the Weekly Challenge, the gamepad cursor disappeared until you pressed something.
• “Show Influences” in the Technology panel was not selectable with gamepad.

Greetings, world builders! Recently I had a particularly nice task on the table, but it also made me a little nervous. To finally give you a complete vision of what we want to accomplish next in the evolution of Imagine Earth. You can see the product here, a visually appealing roadmap to the Open Space DLC, which we will finalize by the middle of this year. Many of the game elements, scripts and objects are already created, we often just have to carefully put all the pieces together.

The picture above shows the approximate set of features that the following updates and DLC will contain. We will go into more detail when the time comes.

Here’s what’s happening right now. We are very euphoric about how much better navigating the planet and building your global colonies will work with this fine tuning.

Here I have summarized what we have achieved since the release last year. This graphical reappraisal of the events somehow did me good.

All the achievements we made last year before the big final release would not have been possible without the funding we received at that time and your years of support in Early Access. However, we also learned a lot and were not able to realize some things, which will now be rounded out with the DLC, just as we always wanted to complete the game.

Look forward to when I finish the project story soon. In this entertaining style, it will offer incredible insights into the past and how this project started 14 years ago as a concept of some students.

Thank you for your interest, please share your ideas and thoughts. What have you always wished for Imagine Earth? Best regards, Jens & Martin

Greetings, dear world-builders!

While we are already working on the next big thing for Imagine Earth we have worked on a lot of usability, balancing and performance improvements and decided that this is worth being released in a dedicated update.

Deferred Rendering & Motion Blur

Switching to Deferred Rendering has made our Imagine Earth 10% faster right off the bat while at the same time allowing us to show more individual light sources on the planet.

Motion Blur makes the planet’s rotation look smoother, especially when running a system with fewer frames.

Items & Crafting

We have built a new crafting panel, that automatically buys the needed resources as soon as not all components to create items are available.
While working on this we have also balanced which resources are needed for crafting and reduced what is needed for most of the items.
Honey Pots, which can be used to attract Xrathul, have been optimized in their operation, especially in the probability with which they lead to Xrathul spaceships arriving on your planet.

Planet Generator Balancing

To get better and play worthy planets we had to diligently tweak the generator. In making adjustments, we tried to achieve as even a distribution of field types and rare resources as possible, while also providing local hotspots that make good starting places for your colony. Also we increased the number of mountains and rocks on the planets and placed more Gaian ruins so that there are more artifacts in the game. Under these circumstances it also made sense to regenerate the Weekly Challenge planets. They are still based on the same planet, but the distribution of resources is a bit different now.

Bugs & Fixes

• Dropped Dynamic Resolution
• Removed graphics setting for anti aliasing, because only marginal differences can be seen here based on the rendering techniques of the Unity engine we are using
• Fixed configuration display of polar ice
• Fixed blurred intro
• Workshop Planets File System Windows 7 bug
• Fixed the description of the frontier station
• Navigation: Show only one city of each other faction
• World congress is no longer happening during game over
• When productivity is low because of plague, show the corresponding plague icon

We hope you started the new year safe and sound and are fit for the challenges it brings, because it will definitely not be boring. The Corona virus keeps the world in suspense and mankind has its trouble to organize itself sensibly against it. After that, the even more colossal challenge of climate change is just waiting to be targeted again. But also in the virtual world, in Imagine Earth, new challenges await you in the new year.

Compete now in Weekly Challenges, Quarterly Seasons and Annual Rankings. Effective immediately, we have unlocked the official 2022 league. In addition, we would like to celebrate the official top 10 annual winners of the 2021 league. We sincerely congratulate all the participants for enrolling in the Imagine Earth’s internal leaderboards forever.

The Greatest Terraformers of 2021

1st place – Franci0 – 1,457,784
2nd place – KiBou – 1,400,492
3rd place – Wingyl – 1,393,397
4th place – craig.akitt – 933,881
5th place – Critical Floof – 913,485
6th place – Artiss – 863,621
7th place – Roderick – 663,128
8th place – RainbowDesign – 532,542
9th place – missladykayura – 473,274
10th place – martin – 457,000

So in 2022, you’ll be competing with other planet managers not only for overall victory in weekly high scores, but also for the lead in quarterly seasons and the overall year-round victory. By the way, we’ll be playing the weekly missions ourselves for testing purposes, so you’ll have the pleasure of competing against the developers themselves, look for Martin and Jooki in the highscore. If that’s not a special challenge.

Rating optimization
We have also adjusted the rating of the game rounds. It remains exciting, you still can’t save and load, but you don’t have to reach the first place in the competition anymore and the achieved colony rating will be entered into the highscore, so it’s worth the work in any case. Of course you can repeat the challenge the whole week to optimize your score by ceiling, have fun!

Colony rating

We have given the calculation of the value of your global space colony a new balancing. If you sell all your shares, you will no longer end up with a high score of zero, the impact has been reduced to 50%. The quality of life in your colony plays a bigger role, its impact has been increased from 12.5 to 20%.

Asteroids, moons and lens flare

Graphically, Imagine Earth has also stepped up its game again in this release. There are a lot of visual effects to admire. Moons and meteors orbit your worlds and cast gigantic shadows, in broad daylight they darken the landscape.
When you zoom in very close to the planet, the perspective rotates so you’re not always looking at the action from above. Also, the atmosphere on the horizon becomes dense and blurry.

Graphic options

You can now set exactly a target frame rate to better define how much gameplay will hit you on the graphics card.

Automated mining processes

The harvesting drones of the warehouses now start mining valuable resources fully automatically. You now have to disable this instead of activating it individually as before. Simply convenient, we think. This way the warehouses fill up by themselves with valuable resources, which are urgently needed for the production of important equipment.

Landing zone locked

In the future, you won’t be able to accidentally park your landing capsule right next to another civilization, creating a non-competitive launch position for both parties.

Fishing grounds and oil wells
So far, procedurally generated planets, have almost no fishing grounds and oil wells. Sea grass has a higher positive impact on fishing and it has also become more productive in principle. Thus, in the future, the sea will be of higher strategic importance as a place of expansion and a source of food.

UI and control improvements

• Fields where the temperatures are just too hot to grow food well are no longer shown as particularly fertile.
• The display of your cities, top right, is no longer packed with loud icons for bad moods. That was just confusing.
• Tooltips and info in the sales and manufacturing panel no longer overlay the menus, but are displayed outside.
• We reduced the planetary view in menus and overview also reduced the superfluously large distance to which the planet is zoomed out.
• When opening panels like the one for planetary overview or research, the planet in the background is no longer zoomed out.
• Font size on various buttons in the game optimized.
• Tower is upgraded again when you level it up.
• Nitro pumpkin seeds are now also offered by the trader.

Bugfixes

• Game pauses in menus decently again – For example, you could just wait in the win dialog until you lost again.
• Intro skipping can be defined in the config file again.
• UI-Flickr glitch in hyperspace between galaxies is fixed.
• The nice melting of the snow when you turn on the thermo-generator is back.
• In the Biron faction, some of the dialogs in the voice output are no longer mixed up. It makes more sense to talk to them now ;D

Thanks for reading all this and staying excited about the developments of Imagine Earth! Jens & Martin

Dear all, we have been working on improvements, fine tuning and bug fixes for quite a while now. This is the basis for us to offer innovative features for Imagine Earth again from now on! We are very excited about this and hope you are too. If you scroll down to the bottom of the post, you will have the opportunity to name your own planet name in the game.

We are always looking to lower the barriers to entry into the game and gather your feedback. The most common criticism is the chattiness of characters, especially that they seem to explain too many details about buildings and tools to players, interrupting the flow of the game. This is also addressed in this update. The player can consciously choose his difficulty level at the beginning of the campaign and also determine the story mode.

Minimalist Story Mode

Now you can choose which difficulty level you want to play at the beginning of the campaign, and we’ve included a reduced story mode that allows you to experience the campaign exclusively with the dialogs relevant to the story.

Building Shader

We have added more contrast to the rendering of buildings and forests. This should make them look more vivid, stand out better against the terrain, and give them more intense color depth and shadows. To do this, we turned up the Ambient Occlusion and made it dependent on the time of day and added an exception for metallic surfaces. Sunlight was made a bit stronger overall and more Exposure was added to the night side. Well, you never think what a well-rounded look causes for work.

New vegetation

There is a new, third vegetation in two of the planet themes. Along with the terran forest and the mushroom forest, it is something between deciduous and flower forest. It is rather slightly alien and exotic. There is not much more to say about it, you just have to see it up close.

Balance of energy production

To some players it seemed as if Imagine Earth was virtually trying to coerce them into using renewable energy sources, yet our goal is to represent global warming authentically and keep all avenues open to the player. In fact, the fossil sources in the game were disproportionately unproductive. Now they produce more, but also the deposits in the earth last longer and allow full productivity until the failure of the unit. After all, the main problem in today’s world situation on Planet Earth is not that coal and gas are all going, but that we can’t burn any more of them without driving global warming to dangerous levels.

Your opinion counts

At this point I’d like to weave in a personal note from the development department. Myself and Martin have been working on this game passionately and dedicated for many years, but currently every update has the stale aftertaste that with every improvement we somehow only create new demands. Some people don’t seem to realize that Imagine Earth is an indie game and already has a lot of features under the hood. If you like it, help us with your feedback and write a review, there is nothing that helps the project more.

Rouno’s optimizations

There is now a lower start and end goal for population growth in this mission so the challenge is not too demotivating. You can now no longer form an alliance with Joe Dectow, and he no longer builds department stores almost exclusively. The landing permit you get after the challenge can now only be used to build up the destroyed colony, which prevents a potential dismantling of the whole colony. All alien NPCs now have greetings out again when you visit their camps, cities or ships. Natives respond more directly to donations.

Uprisings and pandemics limited

We have introduced a limit on negative events, while the emergence of riots in the colony illustrates a dangerous undersupply of the population or the spread of diseases makes too high pollution noticeable, these and similar events should not dominate the gameplay and make it annoying.

Frozen worlds

There is no longer snow on active colony buildings. This doesn’t look quite as great as a completely snow-covered cities, but it’s worth its weight in gold for building recognizability.

World Editor

This goes out to everyone who has already built their own planets with our terraforming editor and shared them via Steamworks. The editor has received a new briefing tab in the setup. In the future, when you create or update new planets, you will be able to write an introduction, mission description or story that the player will see first when downloading and playing the planet via Steamworks. So far you could already upload a script for planets, but the menu structure in Competition and Freeplay could not display it yet.

Modding preview

The briefing is the first step. Soon you will be able to add your own mission objectives, events and dialogs to this script, use characters from the game as voice actors and possibly create your own characters as well as make buildings. And ultimately combine the planets into a campaign galaxy. This will be great, we just have to ask for some patience for this feature….

AI optimization

We also fixed a funny bug: if the planet creator didn’t specify their own faction, the game would assign them an AI faction, which would then blithely mess with players. We’ve also fixed some of the AI’s biggest quirks.

• AI was prevented from actively defending against attackers with items through repairs.
• AI now builds fewer special districts and more normal ones.
• AI now builds its City Centers not so often next to each other.

Improved controls

We made small many control improvements and user interface optimizations, as many newbies were still having trouble getting to grips with managing entire planets.

Improvements

• You can finally blast away giant mountains, just needs lots of ideon bombs and explosives.
• Laser cannons now let asteroids with precious metals through, if no house is damaged by them.
• We have been able to reduce the memory requirements per frame by at least half. Some out of memory problems should be history.
• We optimized the design of the faction and trade menus and threw out unnecessary buttons. Especially important for gamepad control.
  [We have reduced the size of the fossil fields so that you can see more of the landscape.
  [When you log in the Achievements will be reassigned.
• The icon selector was lost for a short time and is now back so you can better distinguish whether you are activating a building’s option ring or a recommended quick action.
• Various improvements to the Tuto mission.
• Mining drones were too high over forests
• Supply pods are closed when they have been emptied.
• Midras speaker has been widened so it is no longer cut off.
• The calculation of deep ocean fields has been corrected.
• Reduced repair speed on uplink and similar units.
• Increased probability that a volcano erupted by Gaia force field will hit its target.
• Removed the player’s faction indicator in the faction panel from Campaign and Endless because it is only interesting for competitions.
  [Hacking Tools – the radius in which you can use them has been increased and is now visualized.
• When too many small lights were in view due to drone processes, light irritation occurred. Hopefully we have solved this satisfactorily now.
• Empty models are no longer incorporated.

Soundtrack sales in this bundle will be donated to plant trees.

Join us on Discord for regular updates on ongoing development and to share your thoughts and ideas.

Fixes

• Forest: Powers overlapped with deletion
• Intro was not played
• Field markers overlapped buildings
• Jungle Planet sometimes had bald spots
• Forest power did not show Gaia particle effect on target field
• Building menu: Selector was out of place
• Faction Speaker and Trader sometimes had truncated statements
• City shows radius incorrectly
• Sometimes placing did not work
• SaveEditorPlanet Illegal characters in path
• ArgumentException TradingOffer
• ArrayTypeMismatchException UpdateFactionAndLiftMeshInstance
• NullReferenceException Producer.GetInfluence
• CityCenter.Main: Could not find node ‘Ufo’
• “.. does not exist in …” – Unity/Xbox IL2CPP strange problem with string constants
• Crash: NullReferenceException CombinedString.Append ToolActionButtonRenderer.GetCaption
  [Crash: NullReferenceException Producer.GetInfluence
• Crash; at string_concat
• Crash in ResxFileResourceManager_GetString
• Workshop: Leaderboard not found == no score yet

There is a call on our Discord server right now. We invite you to suggest names for planets that we can include in Imagine Earth. We are working on a new game mode where you build a main space station while conquering procedurally generated galaxies. So we need names for all these generated planets. Can you think of names of planets from famous science fiction movies, comics and books that people would like to recognize? e.g. we already have Betelgeuse 7, Melmac, Altair, Kepler 186f…. in the game. We are looking forward to your ideas, post them in the General Channel on Discord or here in the forum!

Have fun with Update 1.02 and see you next time,
Martin and Jens

Hotfix 1.02.1

• Fixed ArgumentNullException that appeared during missions
• Re-activated mass-mode for tool ring (alt key) and added it for the gamepad
• Moved “clear/repair/… all” buttons to top of building list columns and also introduced them for upgrades and city leveling
• Fixed position of “open hypergate” button
• Added missing alert for fires on non-colony buildings (e.g. gaian constructs) in your territory
• Gamepad: Added context info for fast ring selection
• Fixed chemical planet getting bonus from forests

Greetings Space Colonists,

we hope you are all well and ready? We have the next update ready for you! While summarizing the new features and changes to the interface, world, and game mechanics, I realized that #65 is probably the most comprehensive update in Imagine Earth’s Early Access history, and will remain so as Imagine Earth comes out in a month and a half as version 1.0 and exits Early Access!

Good Bye Early Access

Who would have thought that, to myself these words seem quite unreal and strange after almost seven years of EA. First of all, thank you for your interest and support over all these years! You have made the continuous independent development of this unusual global building and economic strategy game with environmental and climate simulation possible.

Price Increase

Of course, as we approach the final release of the game, it’s worth mentioning that we’ll be ending the Early Access discount for backers and early birds in a week after update #65. The price of the game will increase to $24.99/€ But this has been thought of for years and is quite common and will not happen before Thursday 4/23/21. Those who grab it by then will save themselves the 25 % increase in the full price. But we’re convinced that after 7 years of 1-2 month updates Imagine Earth has reached a quality, depth and maturity we can be proud of and which justifies a new price. Nevertheless, of course we understand the following question:

What Else is There to Come?

But as you might have guessed, it doesn’t end there. This update boasts an almost endless list of fixes and tweaks, but since the last update we’ve been working on quite a few other innovations besides the ironing. The final release will include a brand-new feature, the World Congress, which forces the various corporations to the negotiating table, where they must work together to negotiate measures against climate and environmental destruction. As a game mechanic, this strengthens the interaction between the corporations and also the already established diplomacy system, since the negotiations have a direct impact on international relations.

Final Release Features

The World Congress

The World Congress is in the making and will be ready for release End of May, it is where the amount of redistribution between sustainable and exploitative corporations will take place in the future. The congress will also be a democratic body in which all factions have voting rights corresponding to their share of a planets population. In the future, taxes on resources and trade will also be decided there, the revenues of which will flow into a World Fund from which important investments can be made. In addition, this body with global authority can also decide on penalties for corporations that have sabotaged or harmed others.

Emissions Trade

We remain committed to delivering an authentic environmental simulation with Imagine Earth. To do this, we have recently revolutionized the emission trade that exists in the game. For this update, we have simply reduced the redistribution, because the previous solution made farming unprofitable. As a result, the game has regulated away the climate problem by making all corporations go bankrupt due to overly high flat fees. For the final release version there will be a new system for trading emission rights, only the share of the world population decides how much greenhouse gases a faction may blow into the air.

Content of This Update

UI Optimizations

• The influence of buildings and other effects they had in a certain radius are now visualized with dashed outer borders instead of colored field markers.
• If one of the groups has not landed yet, it has been shown as failed / eliminated in the Victory Panel so far.
• Show loading animation enlarged and in the center of the screen.
• When you change the game speed, the game fades in time display.
• In the final screen of a failed mission, the title and menu ring were missing.
• Correction: The button for landing permission button activates the placement of City Center again.
• If you now open the research panel or the technology menu, you will receive clear introductory texts that explain the playful function of the interface.
• Navigation panel: Show own cities – No. Cities of other factions: Show names only when hovering.
• Icons of other factions and units are displayed permanently again.
• Quick actions overlay smileys to show quality of life from now on.
• There were just too many smileys over cities trying to visualize the quality of life of balanced districts.
• Unit Uplink: Ads were not centered over them.
• Previously her already 20% field pollution prevented the construction ring from opening on this field.
• Faction and trade panel was re-centered.
• Tool ring closed again for traders when clicked from further outside.
• Fixed 11 different graphic problems on the UI.

World and Balancing

• Towers and research districts now clearly indicate with a bright light if they have active laser or pulse cannons installed for defense.
• Contamination icons are more important than inefficiency icons.
• Repair icons are more important than inefficiency icons. Also so you can see the rebuild tool in case of destruction.
• Strange deductions were displayed in the ring menu for districts with optimal quality of life.
• There is now only a maximum of 3 Xrathul, Assimilators or Pirates at the same time.
• Assimilators now also attackable with fire, but this has only weak effect.
• Prevent the opposing factions from spamming the player with diplomatic messages and alliance offers.
• Warehouses and towers needed a revamp of the method that dynamically lets you drive out of the ground when upgrades are made.
• The same, broken method had prevented missiles from neatly riding up from the silo in the Space Port when they were finished building. Which made them virtually invisible to players, making mission completion visually difficult.
• If you had taken over a faction, a city, so far this collected the victory point for it.
• The mood of the city is now saved.
• Fire particle effect was reduced from 9×2 to 4 emitters. In addition, it now looks visually reduced so that you can still see something on the planet below.
• When jumping to a custom city, do not open the tool ring.
• Damn, all planets had ring?! How long has that been the case?
• Field marker recolored the colors of the other markers every time.
• Oceanic water surface was too crinkly.
• Underwater objects were sometimes faded out too early.
• Titanium mesh was not set directly.
• Titanium asteroids on Tuto removed.
• Some units were rendered gray.
• Camera movements of cutscenes de-jerked.
• Terrain-stoneyness locked icon added.
• Trader spaceships – animation went crazy when hovering.

Complete Playtest

• Mission Tuto: bars in the supply capsule were missing.
• Planet Rounos: Joe Dectow’s AI built strange things and sometimes just didn’t do anything it was supposed to.
• Planet Bora – Planetary shield was displayed above all pyramids.
• Planet Edora – The mission got stuck at the end sequence.
• New dialogs that are important to the story can no longer be pushed away as easily as before. As a result, fewer details and info are now lost unintentionally.
• Completion screens for successfully completed missions no longer overlap.
• Various fixes for bugs in the missions Joma, Lorian and Magni, which sometimes made them rarely or not at all playable.

AI Balancing

• In the future, the AI will be prevented from repeating friend requests. Until now, if you were too nice to them, they would literally bug you with alliance offers.

Game Setup UI

• A faction says “Hello” succinctly when you select them.
• Do not show Speaker in Game Setup Editor menus.
• New yellow Okay Button when you are in the options for setting up a custom game on a single planet for competition and endless play mode.
• The number of research licenses is adjustable.
• We moved the UI a bit to the right, so that you can see the place behind menu and character.
• Minimum and maximum planet temperatures were swapped.

Sound Optimizations

• World Sounds, Spoken Language and UI Sounds are now separate options. So in addition to the music, everything can be beautifully fine-tuned for individualized sonic enjoyment of Imagine Earth.
• Pirates, Xrathul, Uplinks and other merchants now have default greetings that come whenever you click on them.
• “Plink” loading sound built out at the beginning of the game because proven to be annoying.
• Two different, new voice announcements when you launch into the main menu.
• The sound effects in the UI now sound more impressive than ever.
• Volume of speakers turned down so they no longer overdrive.
• Sound overload removed when you first start the custom game setup.

List of building panels

• Cleaning tab – move nuclear contamination to the bottom because you can’t do anything anyway.
• Various Highlight and Comfort tweaks.

Resource panels

• Population dropdown now includes extensive indication of when a new landing permit will be issued.

Fixes

• You could blithely wander around the planet with a tower because you could move it within your own radius.
• It was possible to use the left gamepad stick or the mouse during cutscenes and crash the game.
• Switching to the new Unity version brought illustrious render and shadow effects. Hard to imagine such a thing.
• This was also possible in the planet view of the editor.
• Even with shortcuts you could open unwanted panels.
• If you pressed the restart button on a planet, you suddenly started with a different number of victory points.
• Button hover sound was often played twice.
• Disable UseGuiScale for all fullscreen panels and set optimal size.
• Whenever a faction said something and the speech bubble closed, the speaker and dialog popped up again briefly in the message panel.
• Object shadows (except planet): shadow casting for buildings, etc. can be deactivated.
• Strange striped graphic errors in the terrain display.
• Black holes – alpha color values of transparent terrain layers corrected.
• Planet in the main game menu does not rotate.
• Overglow Sunburn issue after update to Unity 2020.2.7f1.
• Sea surface hidden colony borders.
• Operation of different panels, hovering through on planets.
• UI was lost when loading during a cutscene.
• Quest icons flicker on planet silhouette.
• Space was cut off from certain camera angles.

World Congress & Space DLC

• Open Space Planet Menu.
• AI voice allocation on regularities.
• Use UI speaker with subpanel in voting.
• Open Space game concept – A new company in each round.
• Onboarding of Alex a new member of the Serious Brothers Clan.
• We developed a concept that in Open Space mode you have a space base where you can store items. These can then be taken in limited numbers in the capsule to the planet.
• We got the latest version of Imagine Earth running on Xbox One X and One S and to our delight, it runs very well on these consoles after some tweaks.
• Initial load times and GPU optimized on Xboxes.
• Xbox Achievements built in.
• Xbox Submission build and visualization.
• Created a whole mountain of Xbox Submission icons.