Changelog

Version: 0.24.0
Date: 2026-08-08
  Major Features:
    - Adds the Replicators, a machine faction that lands on a matter node and builds a working factory on it. Extractors, chemical plants, assemblers, labs, belts, power and turrets, all of it running for real.
    - Their escalation is production. A base mines matter, smelts it into alloy, assembles components, makes its own science pack out of them and researches its own technology tree. Cut the belt feeding the labs and the research stops where it stands.
    - Kill a base and you can have all of it. Looted data buys a technology tree of your own that hands over their extractor, their production chain, their accelerator and their flame turrets, and the matter node the wreck leaves standing is yours to put a drill on.
  Features:
    - Four build stages. The first is a production line, the last is a walled compound, and every stage in between is the same factory grown larger. Each one is unlocked by a technology the base researches itself.
    - Construction robots stamp and revive the new buildings from inside the base, and repair what you damaged. Kill the roboports and the growth stops.
    - Node accelerators feed components back into the ground to raise a node's yield. Destroy them and the base runs its node down.
    - Deployers build walking machines and send them out up to a garrison cap. A garrison that fills up marches, picks an objective, and leaves. A wave that survives long enough founds a base of its own.
    - Their turrets and their walkers deal raw matter, a damage type nothing in the world is built to resist. Their own buildings shrug off nine tenths of everything a factory shoots and a quarter of bullets, so an early raid is a gun turret problem.
    - Three of their technologies never end. Turret damage, rate of fire and walker strength keep climbing for as long as a base is left alone.
    - Bases appear as the map generates rather than on a timer, at a distance from where you started. You find them by exploring.
    - Seven technologies on your own side of the tree, researched out of looted data, two of them endless. They cost a vanilla ingredient the Replicators never spend and three times the matter, because they rearrange matter and you have a box of scraps.
  Features (Space Age):
    - Space Age is optional and detected at load. With it installed, late bases also stand railgun, rocket and tesla turrets and manufacture the ammunition for them.
    - Vulcanus: the bond disruptor, a laser turret retuned to take a Replicator apart at the joins. Double damage to anything they built, and exactly nothing to anything else in the world.
    - Fulgora: the disintegration ray, a tesla turret rebuilt around a Replicator emitter. It chains, and the ground it lands on burns.
    - Gleba: a spidertron rebuilt in Replicator alloy. A fifth rocket launcher, a quarter more room inside, a tenth more health and speed.
    - Aquilo: the chaos missile, which stands Replicators up where it lands, on their own force, hostile to everyone including the player who fired it. And nano artillery, the best shell in the game against a nest and one of the worst against a Replicator base.
  Info:
    - Please note that this mod is still in Beta. It's very mechanically complex, so I might tweak how it works or the base stages themselves. That being said, feedback is greatly appreciated. The mod is generally feature complete, but every graphic in it is a tinted vanilla sprite rather than art of its own. Graphics are not my strong suite, so it might take a while until I can get proper graphics.
    - Two startup settings, both off. Layout authoring mode is a tool for building the faction's blueprints by hand. Not really useful gameplay-wise, but technically, you can use it to tweak how the bases work. Diagnostic commands adds five admin-only console commands for reading what the faction is doing.
    - Every prototype carries the proliferation- prefix, so nothing here collides with an overhaul mod's own names.