v0.4.0

Version 0.4.0 of Click for Biscuits just went live today!

This update has some pretty hefty new features along with some bug fixes and some smaller content additions. There's some more information about the new features below, but before you continue you should know that there are spoilers ahead. If you want to be surprised by the features that open up as you play through Click for Biscuits you might want to click away now.

First up, a small quality of life improvement: there is now a setting for increasing and decreasing most values in steps of 1x, 10x, 100x, or 1000x! This doesn't apply to every single action (yet), but it does impact all the standard (+) and (-) buttons, so things like assigning cooks and changing exports should be a bit easier now.

Next, the calculation of the flavor value for custom recipes has been reworked and debugged. This calculation is pretty central to the game, since it directly effects the other results of creating custom recipes, but it is also more complicated than it might seem at first. I won't dissect all the details here, but for any ingredient that can be used in a custom recipe there are four different ways it can impact the final flavor value if it is used as a seasoning, which can be mixed and matched. If the ingredient can also be used as a filling or topping there is another set of flavor impacts for each of those usages. This all means that there are a lot of ways for flavor to change based on ingredients -- and while the math isn't complicated there is more of it than you might guess.

The big addition in this release, though, is the Fleet tab; which is actually split into two sub-tabs: the shipyard and fleet management. These tabs let you purchase Foodships which can be sent off to explore the galaxy. This generates Discovery points, which are used to reveal new civilizations to contact. The ships themselves are fairly significant investments, but they also require a captain and crew. You can also recruit specialists to assign to the ships in order to generate additional resources while they are out exploring.

Once you reveal a new civilization, you'll need to try and make contact with it -- that's no small undertaking. You'll need to invest Science into attempting to making contact. Contacting a new civilization will unlock a more complex exports menu, which allows you to decide where individual goods should be exported too. Since different civilizations can have different preferences about the kinds of flavors they enjoy (or don't enjoy) this means you'll need to experiment to discover which foods yield the best results with specific civilizations.

There will be more to do with civilizations going forward -- including unlocking recipes and ingredients based on which civilizations you contact and how you manage your relationships with them. More ship types and specialists (and some general features like renaming your ships) will be coming soon as well!