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