Decorations update
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We are happy to introduce a new big feature: Decorations.
This update is going to add a whole new dimension in your in-game activities. You are now able to generate and collect resources that will allow you to decorate your rooms, creeps, structures and other assets, giving them unique look and individuality.
Pixels
Pixels is a new type of resource that is used to craft decorations. It's an ephemeral resource stored directly in your account, like former Subscription Tokens. You can obtain pixels in three ways:
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Generate 1 pixel using
Game.cpu.generatePixel()method. It will consume 5000 CPU from your bucket. -
Purchase at our official store or Steam Community Market.
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Buy and sell on the in-game market.
With this launch we announce a time-limited promo: you can get 2,000 pixels for free if you simply click on the button above! This promo will last for 30 days.
Decorations
When you collect at least 500 pixels, you can pixelize (craft) a decoration. Just go to the new Inventory section and click Pixelization. You will receive one decoration for every 500 pixels spent. Which decorations you get is fully random based on their rarity and type. Decoration are split into 5 types:
- Graffiti - you can place this image as a graffiti on walls in your rooms.
- Wall texture - you can place this image as a room-wide wall texture in your rooms.
- Floor texture - you can place this image as a room-wide floor texture in your rooms.
- Creep - you can use this image to decorate your creeps (either all of them or using a name filter).
- Badge - a custom player badge that you can set for your account.
Each decoration is an item that is stored in your account for good. You can't lose it or destroy it. But you can convert any decoration to pixels, obtaining 400 out of 500 pixels back.
Graffiti is the most common decoration type, so you probably will need to pixelize/convert several times before you discover something interesting besides regular graffitis. But even graffiti can be more rare than other graffiti, for example some of them will have lighting animation, or even ability to choose custom color. Such rarity features are described in the decoration description. Here is the full table of rarity features:
Graffiti
- Rarity 1: None.
- Rarity 2: Adjustable brightness and lighting animation.
- Rarity 3: Visible on the world map.
- Rarity 4: Visible on the world map. Adjustable brightness and lighting animation.
- Rarity 5: Choose your own color. Visible on the world map. Adjustable brightness and lighting animation.
Wall/floor texture
- Rarity 3: None.
- Rarity 4: Adjustable brightness.
- Rarity 5: Choose your own color. Adjustable brightness.
Creep
- Rarity 4: None
- Rarity 5: Choose your own color.
Badge
- Always rarity 5.
In order to use the decoration, you have to activate it in any of your rooms or globally in your account. You can deactivate a decoration at any moment, and activate again without any limits. All these actions can only be done via UI. Game API doesn't have any information or methods regarding decorations.
Walls, floor, and graffiti decorations will be visible on the new version of the world map. It is already available as an alpha version.
There is a transfer mechanism between your Screeps Inventory and Steam Inventory, so that you can transfer decorations back and forth in order to trade them on the Steam Community Market.
Decoration themes
Besides types, all decorations are split into 7 color themes: Fire, Desert, Nature, Sea, Winter, Alien, Mono. They have no special meaning except specific color. Basically, they are just the names for the colors that are used in the decoration graphic. You can restrict pixelization by a specific theme if you wish to craft only decorations of the specific color to match your existing design. This option increases the pixelization cost from 500 to 2,000 pixels.
Other resources
This update also contains other ephemeral account resources revamp: CPU Unlocks and Access Keys. They are regular tradeable resources, so that now we have 3 account resource types on the market.
CPU Unlocks is a new form of Subscription Tokens. Each CPU Unlock will provide 1 day of unlocked CPU to your account. All existing Subscription Tokens will be converted to 60 CPU Unlocks each automatically upon release.
Access Keys are needed to get access to the upcoming Season World. You will need 5 Access Keys to unlock the first Season. We will announce its launch date later. We will sell Access Keys with 50% discount until that.
You will be able to freely transfer these resources between Screeps Inventory and Steam inventory as well.
Subscriptions
With this update we discontinue all new recurring CPU subscriptions purchases.
If you have an already active recurring CPU subscription, it will be effective indefinitely as long as you wish. But new subscriptions will not be sold. Instead, you can buy CPU Unlocks and programmatically activate them once in a while from your game code.
Lifetime CPU Subscription is still available and is renamed to Lifetime CPU Unlock.
API Changes
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Introduced new property:
Game.cpu.unlocked. It's true when your CPU is unlocked regardless of the unlock method: it may be a recurrent subscription, a lifetime subscription, or using CPU Unlock resource. -
Introduced new property:
Game.cpu.unlockedTime. If your CPU is unlocked with 'CPU Unlock' resource, the value of this property is the unlock expiration time. -
Introduced new method:
Game.cpu.unlock(). It will consume 1 CPU Unlock resource and extend unlock time by 24 hours. -
Introduced new method:
Game.cpu.generatePixel(). It will consume 5000 CPU from your bucket to create 1 Pixel resource. -
All new ephemeral account resources are exposed in the
Game.resourcesobject.
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This post is deleted!
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Some feedback about it.
- Currently there is no way to buy CPU time with market credits. The subscriptions are gone and apparently nobody is selling CPU unlock. Either that or it is pretty hard to find.
- Super nitpicky, CPU time is capitalized in the market but when you click on it it says "Cpu". I know, it bothers me more than it should
Regarding the alpha map view.
- Please update how quickly the mouse wheel changes the zoom, right now it barely moves it.
- Right now it doesn't display the creeps, I wonder how will that work once the map gets updated. I assume after a certain zoom the creeps will display but would be nice to have some indication, like a "click" so you don't have to be fiddling with the zoom to find that sweet spot. I very rarely zoom out more than the amount which displays the creeps.
- Pretty sure you guys know this, but the power enabled map mode is missing.
- Not sure if that is a good idea, but you guys can do some internal testing. I feel like the player control indicator should be semi transparent so you can see the base behind it. I find myself all the time alternating between none and player control. Also I find the none view so beautiful. Maybe have a almost fully transparent control indication in the none view? Anyway, thanks!
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@zortea said in Decorations update:
Please update how quickly the mouse wheel changes the zoom, right now it barely moves it.
Exactly, very annoying. Also what was seen in the first moments:
- drag scrolling is too slow, it doesnt follow cursor movement
- settings button does nothing
- scroll zoom doesnt work in firefox at all
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"Alpha" means it's far from ready yet. We're not gathering feedback on it yet at the moment, it's just an early preview for those who are curious. It will be polished a lot during the next iterations.
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@zortea you can get the units to display if you set the units=false in the url to true, this requires you to use the web version of the client though
I also had trouble clicking a room to access it
double clicking would select the tooltip text instead
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Sounds fun!
I am assuming decorations crafted with a specific theme (for 2000 pixels instead of 500) will still only give 400 pixels back if you convert them back to pixels, is this correct?
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@artch Oh yeah I understand, just providing suggestions for the polishing process.
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All existing Subscription Tokens will be converted to 60 CPU Unlocks each automatically upon release.
So until this happens, I'm apparently SOL? I'm stuck without an active subscription and a missing Token from my Steam inventory? Because this was released without any warning?
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@wall_e Please email us at contact@screeps.com regarding this issue.
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Seems like there was a quite significant increase in the price for Screeps? Before a subscription token was being sold for on average 20M credits which makes it up to 333K per day. Now each CPU unlock is being sold for 940K! Almost 3 times increase, it would have been nice to have been upfront about this price increase as I assume many of us carefully budget the credits. Am I missing something?
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@Zortea I imagine many people who were selling subscription tokens before are now using that value to buy pixels instead, so I would expect a sharp price increase on the market in the short term. Perhaps it will settle down a bit later but I imagine prices will be generally higher as a result of this feature. That's kinda the whole point
@artch great job with this! I think this is a great idea to allow a bit more personalisation and potentially bring in some more income for screeps. Allowing pixels to be generated from the CPU bucket is a really nice touch that helps make CPU purchase more worthwhile at lower levels.
The new map looks like it's going to sort out the performance issues when trying to scroll around the whole map, which is nice. The search is a nice feature too. One request - can you make it so that ctrl/shift-clicking on a room will open that room in a new tab as expected for normal links? It would be nice to be able to look at a room without losing your place on the map.
Similarly, on the inventory page, ctrl/shift clicking on a room link should open that room in a new tab. It kindof does at the moment, but sometimes it also does something on that page, like when clicking a room link in the decoration box, it still opens the popup. I've found the best way to make this work as expected in these kind of web apps is to make everything links and have your link click event handler just ignore events with ctrl or shift held.
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@artch said in Decorations update:
With this launch we announce a time-limited promo: you can get 2,000 pixels for free if you simply click on the button above! This promo will last for 30 days.
What button? I clicked on the picture and it redirects me to my Screeps inventory with 0 pixels.
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Ok. I got my free 2000 pixels. I noted my 2 sub tokens are gone, replaced with 120 mini-tokens. There are 2 new methods in Game, "Game.cpu.unlock()" and "Game.cpu.generatePixel()."
Ok, that's self explanatory. As a grandfathered in Steam sub user, I still have an active sub... it will auto-renew on 8-2-2020 if I do nothing. Ok. Fine. My plan was to use one of my tokens before then, extending it to 10-2, then again before that ran out.
All very fine and good. Here's my problem:
I can't tell what my sub status is from the API. Ok... This isn't the worst thing, I could just automatically pop a mini-token once every 24 hours, incrementally extending it even though the cut off is still over a month away, or I could start doing that at a point closer to the date.
But I have no apparent way to determine what the remaining time is. I can't send myself a message reminding myself to get more time, or that I'm going to run out tomorrow. I don't want to just dump the mini-tokens in, I want to "Ride the buffer" of whatever duration I set, like (If time left < 1 month... pop token.)
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@zortea This is my fault, had old code that would increase the price too much! Increase in price is due to users, isn't due to devs.
@Wall_E You need to transfer items in inventory to steam inventory via inventory screen.
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@smokeman did you see Game.cpu.unlockedTime?
I think this should give you your remaining time, at least when using CPU unlocks.
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@likeafox Oh really? Since it doesn't say who is the player dealing the CPU/Subscription order, I assumed it was dealt by the mostly by the highway terminals defined by the devs. OK lets see how the price adjusts over time.
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@nobodysnightmare That's the time until your CPU fullUnlock RETURNS after it lapses. It's undefined if you either have time, or are subbed.
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The "Alpha" map being absolute junk aside (very haphazard use of the term Alpha but whatever)
The floor/wall textures make some rooms literally painful to look at. Everything else is cool and lets the player customize, but the ability to change floor and wall textures doesn't seem like it was very thought out.
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A small suggestion:
make pixels into 100x or 500x packs in the steam market. Instead of selling one by one, because the minimum price for community transactions is 0.01$.
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Would also love to see my structures in the Choose room dialog, makes it a bit hard to recognize my rooms when its only displaying the terrain in the selection dialog
