Another week has hurtled past as we have been busy working on Fringe Planet. Before we get into the awesome game development news, let us talk about the exciting new newsletter we have made. This week we have added a newsletter sign up page to the site. This is an incredibly interesting development and will allow us to monitor the interest in the game, as well as providing a fantastic way of keep our community up to date with important news. If you haven’t signed up yet, please do! It would make us very happy!

Now onto development news – we have been working on various behind the scenes optimisations and continuing work on saving and loading the world. In addition to that we have been tweaking ore generation. It’s very important for us that each ore feels different to discover. And to that end all the ores spawn in a very different fashion. After playing the game for a while and learning the patterns, if you discover a block of bismunthite, you will likely know the place to dig around it to find more of it. So here is a brief breakdown of the ores, and how they spawn in game:

Ore	Spawning Pattern (click to view in higher detail)	Notes
Lavarite		Lavarite is a unique ore due to the fact that it constantly generates heat – every floating island will have a core of lavarite in the middle, and will often have multiple smaller nodes around it, each one being connected to the central core via small veins. It is possible to mine the lavarite and then place it in the world, but once it has been placed in this fashion it will slowly cool down.
Zinc		Zinc has various uses in crafting and is a relatively common ore which will be found underground through out the entire floating island. It spawns in a quite peculiar shape – some have describe the veins as “insectoid looking” when fully mined.
Bismunthite		Bismunthite is a beautiful looking ore, with many uses when it comes to the more magical side of crafting. It spawns in flat cloud shaped sheets, meaning it is very easy to locate the rest of the ore once you have found some of it.
Iron		Iron is an interesting ore. It spawns as a random collection of nodes and is the only ore than can spawn outside of the ground. We are sure there is a reason for that. Iron is relatively easy to find (even without going underground) and fairly common – which is a good thing as a lot of it will be required for crafting the various components to the machines that you will be using.
Copper		Copper is not as common as iron, but can be found all through the floating islands – it spawns in quite angular looking nodes and is used a lot to build components in the game. It is also an incredibly good conductor of heat, so it may have a uses in building as well. The slight green tinge helps differentiate it from gold.
Silver		Silver is an incredibly useful ore – especially when it comes down to various occult components. It spawns in small spherical nodes which are numerous in number – meaning that you will have to keep searching for new nodes in order to keep making things from it.
Gold		Gold is the final ore that is currently spawning. It is found in much larger spherical nodes than silver, however these nodes are much rarer. Gold is the second rarest ore to be found in the game (lavarite is spawned less, but is easy to find due to the predictable center node). It is used quite heavily in components of all descriptions so it’s important to locate some quickly.

Though there are still balance passes to do, we are quite happy with the way the ores are spawning through out the floating islands – most ores (with the exception of copper and iron) won’t be discovered without some digging, as they will never spawn on an outside edge. We’ve put together a couple of gif cross sections showing “slices” of the floating island and the ores that can be found (black is empty space, white is occupied, red is an ore) :

(from the bottom working up)

(from the side working across)

And finally for one more visualisation, here is an animation of us removing the side of the island slice by slice, exposing all the ores in game.

Thanks for reading this weeks development blog, and we wish you a fantastic weekend!

There is a lot more to read about Fringe Planet… why not try:

• Painting the ores – Dev Blog 75
• Floating biomes – Dev Blog 9
• How to make your own floating island – Dev Blog 28