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

Dear all, we have been working on improvements, fine tuning and bug fixes for quite a while now. This is the basis for us to offer innovative features for Imagine Earth again from now on! We are very excited about this and hope you are too. If you scroll down to the bottom of the post, you will have the opportunity to name your own planet name in the game.

We are always looking to lower the barriers to entry into the game and gather your feedback. The most common criticism is the chattiness of characters, especially that they seem to explain too many details about buildings and tools to players, interrupting the flow of the game. This is also addressed in this update. The player can consciously choose his difficulty level at the beginning of the campaign and also determine the story mode.

Minimalist Story Mode

Now you can choose which difficulty level you want to play at the beginning of the campaign, and we’ve included a reduced story mode that allows you to experience the campaign exclusively with the dialogs relevant to the story.

Building Shader

We have added more contrast to the rendering of buildings and forests. This should make them look more vivid, stand out better against the terrain, and give them more intense color depth and shadows. To do this, we turned up the Ambient Occlusion and made it dependent on the time of day and added an exception for metallic surfaces. Sunlight was made a bit stronger overall and more Exposure was added to the night side. Well, you never think what a well-rounded look causes for work.

New vegetation

There is a new, third vegetation in two of the planet themes. Along with the terran forest and the mushroom forest, it is something between deciduous and flower forest. It is rather slightly alien and exotic. There is not much more to say about it, you just have to see it up close.

Balance of energy production

To some players it seemed as if Imagine Earth was virtually trying to coerce them into using renewable energy sources, yet our goal is to represent global warming authentically and keep all avenues open to the player. In fact, the fossil sources in the game were disproportionately unproductive. Now they produce more, but also the deposits in the earth last longer and allow full productivity until the failure of the unit. After all, the main problem in today’s world situation on Planet Earth is not that coal and gas are all going, but that we can’t burn any more of them without driving global warming to dangerous levels.

Your opinion counts

At this point I’d like to weave in a personal note from the development department. Myself and Martin have been working on this game passionately and dedicated for many years, but currently every update has the stale aftertaste that with every improvement we somehow only create new demands. Some people don’t seem to realize that Imagine Earth is an indie game and already has a lot of features under the hood. If you like it, help us with your feedback and write a review, there is nothing that helps the project more.

Rouno’s optimizations

There is now a lower start and end goal for population growth in this mission so the challenge is not too demotivating. You can now no longer form an alliance with Joe Dectow, and he no longer builds department stores almost exclusively. The landing permit you get after the challenge can now only be used to build up the destroyed colony, which prevents a potential dismantling of the whole colony. All alien NPCs now have greetings out again when you visit their camps, cities or ships. Natives respond more directly to donations.

Uprisings and pandemics limited

We have introduced a limit on negative events, while the emergence of riots in the colony illustrates a dangerous undersupply of the population or the spread of diseases makes too high pollution noticeable, these and similar events should not dominate the gameplay and make it annoying.

Frozen worlds

There is no longer snow on active colony buildings. This doesn’t look quite as great as a completely snow-covered cities, but it’s worth its weight in gold for building recognizability.

World Editor

This goes out to everyone who has already built their own planets with our terraforming editor and shared them via Steamworks. The editor has received a new briefing tab in the setup. In the future, when you create or update new planets, you will be able to write an introduction, mission description or story that the player will see first when downloading and playing the planet via Steamworks. So far you could already upload a script for planets, but the menu structure in Competition and Freeplay could not display it yet.

Modding preview

The briefing is the first step. Soon you will be able to add your own mission objectives, events and dialogs to this script, use characters from the game as voice actors and possibly create your own characters as well as make buildings. And ultimately combine the planets into a campaign galaxy. This will be great, we just have to ask for some patience for this feature….

AI optimization

We also fixed a funny bug: if the planet creator didn’t specify their own faction, the game would assign them an AI faction, which would then blithely mess with players. We’ve also fixed some of the AI’s biggest quirks.

• AI was prevented from actively defending against attackers with items through repairs.
• AI now builds fewer special districts and more normal ones.
• AI now builds its City Centers not so often next to each other.

Improved controls

We made small many control improvements and user interface optimizations, as many newbies were still having trouble getting to grips with managing entire planets.

Improvements

• You can finally blast away giant mountains, just needs lots of ideon bombs and explosives.
• Laser cannons now let asteroids with precious metals through, if no house is damaged by them.
• We have been able to reduce the memory requirements per frame by at least half. Some out of memory problems should be history.
• We optimized the design of the faction and trade menus and threw out unnecessary buttons. Especially important for gamepad control.
  [We have reduced the size of the fossil fields so that you can see more of the landscape.
  [When you log in the Achievements will be reassigned.
• The icon selector was lost for a short time and is now back so you can better distinguish whether you are activating a building’s option ring or a recommended quick action.
• Various improvements to the Tuto mission.
• Mining drones were too high over forests
• Supply pods are closed when they have been emptied.
• Midras speaker has been widened so it is no longer cut off.
• The calculation of deep ocean fields has been corrected.
• Reduced repair speed on uplink and similar units.
• Increased probability that a volcano erupted by Gaia force field will hit its target.
• Removed the player’s faction indicator in the faction panel from Campaign and Endless because it is only interesting for competitions.
  [Hacking Tools – the radius in which you can use them has been increased and is now visualized.
• When too many small lights were in view due to drone processes, light irritation occurred. Hopefully we have solved this satisfactorily now.
• Empty models are no longer incorporated.

Soundtrack sales in this bundle will be donated to plant trees.

Join us on Discord for regular updates on ongoing development and to share your thoughts and ideas.

Fixes

• Forest: Powers overlapped with deletion
• Intro was not played
• Field markers overlapped buildings
• Jungle Planet sometimes had bald spots
• Forest power did not show Gaia particle effect on target field
• Building menu: Selector was out of place
• Faction Speaker and Trader sometimes had truncated statements
• City shows radius incorrectly
• Sometimes placing did not work
• SaveEditorPlanet Illegal characters in path
• ArgumentException TradingOffer
• ArrayTypeMismatchException UpdateFactionAndLiftMeshInstance
• NullReferenceException Producer.GetInfluence
• CityCenter.Main: Could not find node ‘Ufo’
• “.. does not exist in …” – Unity/Xbox IL2CPP strange problem with string constants
• Crash: NullReferenceException CombinedString.Append ToolActionButtonRenderer.GetCaption
  [Crash: NullReferenceException Producer.GetInfluence
• Crash; at string_concat
• Crash in ResxFileResourceManager_GetString
• Workshop: Leaderboard not found == no score yet

There is a call on our Discord server right now. We invite you to suggest names for planets that we can include in Imagine Earth. We are working on a new game mode where you build a main space station while conquering procedurally generated galaxies. So we need names for all these generated planets. Can you think of names of planets from famous science fiction movies, comics and books that people would like to recognize? e.g. we already have Betelgeuse 7, Melmac, Altair, Kepler 186f…. in the game. We are looking forward to your ideas, post them in the General Channel on Discord or here in the forum!

Have fun with Update 1.02 and see you next time,
Martin and Jens

Hotfix 1.02.1

• Fixed ArgumentNullException that appeared during missions
• Re-activated mass-mode for tool ring (alt key) and added it for the gamepad
• Moved “clear/repair/… all” buttons to top of building list columns and also introduced them for upgrades and city leveling
• Fixed position of “open hypergate” button
• Added missing alert for fires on non-colony buildings (e.g. gaian constructs) in your territory
• Gamepad: Added context info for fast ring selection
• Fixed chemical planet getting bonus from forests

Greetings Space Colonists,

we hope you are all well and ready? We have the next update ready for you! While summarizing the new features and changes to the interface, world, and game mechanics, I realized that #65 is probably the most comprehensive update in Imagine Earth’s Early Access history, and will remain so as Imagine Earth comes out in a month and a half as version 1.0 and exits Early Access!

Good Bye Early Access

Who would have thought that, to myself these words seem quite unreal and strange after almost seven years of EA. First of all, thank you for your interest and support over all these years! You have made the continuous independent development of this unusual global building and economic strategy game with environmental and climate simulation possible.

Price Increase

Of course, as we approach the final release of the game, it’s worth mentioning that we’ll be ending the Early Access discount for backers and early birds in a week after update #65. The price of the game will increase to $24.99/€ But this has been thought of for years and is quite common and will not happen before Thursday 4/23/21. Those who grab it by then will save themselves the 25 % increase in the full price. But we’re convinced that after 7 years of 1-2 month updates Imagine Earth has reached a quality, depth and maturity we can be proud of and which justifies a new price. Nevertheless, of course we understand the following question:

What Else is There to Come?

But as you might have guessed, it doesn’t end there. This update boasts an almost endless list of fixes and tweaks, but since the last update we’ve been working on quite a few other innovations besides the ironing. The final release will include a brand-new feature, the World Congress, which forces the various corporations to the negotiating table, where they must work together to negotiate measures against climate and environmental destruction. As a game mechanic, this strengthens the interaction between the corporations and also the already established diplomacy system, since the negotiations have a direct impact on international relations.

Final Release Features

The World Congress

The World Congress is in the making and will be ready for release End of May, it is where the amount of redistribution between sustainable and exploitative corporations will take place in the future. The congress will also be a democratic body in which all factions have voting rights corresponding to their share of a planets population. In the future, taxes on resources and trade will also be decided there, the revenues of which will flow into a World Fund from which important investments can be made. In addition, this body with global authority can also decide on penalties for corporations that have sabotaged or harmed others.

Emissions Trade

We remain committed to delivering an authentic environmental simulation with Imagine Earth. To do this, we have recently revolutionized the emission trade that exists in the game. For this update, we have simply reduced the redistribution, because the previous solution made farming unprofitable. As a result, the game has regulated away the climate problem by making all corporations go bankrupt due to overly high flat fees. For the final release version there will be a new system for trading emission rights, only the share of the world population decides how much greenhouse gases a faction may blow into the air.

Content of This Update

UI Optimizations

• The influence of buildings and other effects they had in a certain radius are now visualized with dashed outer borders instead of colored field markers.
• If one of the groups has not landed yet, it has been shown as failed / eliminated in the Victory Panel so far.
• Show loading animation enlarged and in the center of the screen.
• When you change the game speed, the game fades in time display.
• In the final screen of a failed mission, the title and menu ring were missing.
• Correction: The button for landing permission button activates the placement of City Center again.
• If you now open the research panel or the technology menu, you will receive clear introductory texts that explain the playful function of the interface.
• Navigation panel: Show own cities – No. Cities of other factions: Show names only when hovering.
• Icons of other factions and units are displayed permanently again.
• Quick actions overlay smileys to show quality of life from now on.
• There were just too many smileys over cities trying to visualize the quality of life of balanced districts.
• Unit Uplink: Ads were not centered over them.
• Previously her already 20% field pollution prevented the construction ring from opening on this field.
• Faction and trade panel was re-centered.
• Tool ring closed again for traders when clicked from further outside.
• Fixed 11 different graphic problems on the UI.

World and Balancing

• Towers and research districts now clearly indicate with a bright light if they have active laser or pulse cannons installed for defense.
• Contamination icons are more important than inefficiency icons.
• Repair icons are more important than inefficiency icons. Also so you can see the rebuild tool in case of destruction.
• Strange deductions were displayed in the ring menu for districts with optimal quality of life.
• There is now only a maximum of 3 Xrathul, Assimilators or Pirates at the same time.
• Assimilators now also attackable with fire, but this has only weak effect.
• Prevent the opposing factions from spamming the player with diplomatic messages and alliance offers.
• Warehouses and towers needed a revamp of the method that dynamically lets you drive out of the ground when upgrades are made.
• The same, broken method had prevented missiles from neatly riding up from the silo in the Space Port when they were finished building. Which made them virtually invisible to players, making mission completion visually difficult.
• If you had taken over a faction, a city, so far this collected the victory point for it.
• The mood of the city is now saved.
• Fire particle effect was reduced from 9×2 to 4 emitters. In addition, it now looks visually reduced so that you can still see something on the planet below.
• When jumping to a custom city, do not open the tool ring.
• Damn, all planets had ring?! How long has that been the case?
• Field marker recolored the colors of the other markers every time.
• Oceanic water surface was too crinkly.
• Underwater objects were sometimes faded out too early.
• Titanium mesh was not set directly.
• Titanium asteroids on Tuto removed.
• Some units were rendered gray.
• Camera movements of cutscenes de-jerked.
• Terrain-stoneyness locked icon added.
• Trader spaceships – animation went crazy when hovering.

Complete Playtest

• Mission Tuto: bars in the supply capsule were missing.
• Planet Rounos: Joe Dectow’s AI built strange things and sometimes just didn’t do anything it was supposed to.
• Planet Bora – Planetary shield was displayed above all pyramids.
• Planet Edora – The mission got stuck at the end sequence.
• New dialogs that are important to the story can no longer be pushed away as easily as before. As a result, fewer details and info are now lost unintentionally.
• Completion screens for successfully completed missions no longer overlap.
• Various fixes for bugs in the missions Joma, Lorian and Magni, which sometimes made them rarely or not at all playable.

AI Balancing

• In the future, the AI will be prevented from repeating friend requests. Until now, if you were too nice to them, they would literally bug you with alliance offers.

Game Setup UI

• A faction says “Hello” succinctly when you select them.
• Do not show Speaker in Game Setup Editor menus.
• New yellow Okay Button when you are in the options for setting up a custom game on a single planet for competition and endless play mode.
• The number of research licenses is adjustable.
• We moved the UI a bit to the right, so that you can see the place behind menu and character.
• Minimum and maximum planet temperatures were swapped.

Sound Optimizations

• World Sounds, Spoken Language and UI Sounds are now separate options. So in addition to the music, everything can be beautifully fine-tuned for individualized sonic enjoyment of Imagine Earth.
• Pirates, Xrathul, Uplinks and other merchants now have default greetings that come whenever you click on them.
• “Plink” loading sound built out at the beginning of the game because proven to be annoying.
• Two different, new voice announcements when you launch into the main menu.
• The sound effects in the UI now sound more impressive than ever.
• Volume of speakers turned down so they no longer overdrive.
• Sound overload removed when you first start the custom game setup.

List of building panels

• Cleaning tab – move nuclear contamination to the bottom because you can’t do anything anyway.
• Various Highlight and Comfort tweaks.

Resource panels

• Population dropdown now includes extensive indication of when a new landing permit will be issued.

Fixes

• You could blithely wander around the planet with a tower because you could move it within your own radius.
• It was possible to use the left gamepad stick or the mouse during cutscenes and crash the game.
• Switching to the new Unity version brought illustrious render and shadow effects. Hard to imagine such a thing.
• This was also possible in the planet view of the editor.
• Even with shortcuts you could open unwanted panels.
• If you pressed the restart button on a planet, you suddenly started with a different number of victory points.
• Button hover sound was often played twice.
• Disable UseGuiScale for all fullscreen panels and set optimal size.
• Whenever a faction said something and the speech bubble closed, the speaker and dialog popped up again briefly in the message panel.
• Object shadows (except planet): shadow casting for buildings, etc. can be deactivated.
• Strange striped graphic errors in the terrain display.
• Black holes – alpha color values of transparent terrain layers corrected.
• Planet in the main game menu does not rotate.
• Overglow Sunburn issue after update to Unity 2020.2.7f1.
• Sea surface hidden colony borders.
• Operation of different panels, hovering through on planets.
• UI was lost when loading during a cutscene.
• Quest icons flicker on planet silhouette.
• Space was cut off from certain camera angles.

World Congress & Space DLC

• Open Space Planet Menu.
• AI voice allocation on regularities.
• Use UI speaker with subpanel in voting.
• Open Space game concept – A new company in each round.
• Onboarding of Alex a new member of the Serious Brothers Clan.
• We developed a concept that in Open Space mode you have a space base where you can store items. These can then be taken in limited numbers in the capsule to the planet.
• We got the latest version of Imagine Earth running on Xbox One X and One S and to our delight, it runs very well on these consoles after some tweaks.
• Initial load times and GPU optimized on Xboxes.
• Xbox Achievements built in.
• Xbox Submission build and visualization.
• Created a whole mountain of Xbox Submission icons.

Dear space pioneers, this update means a not inconsiderable revolution for the game. The characters in the game, which we already gave a complete makeover in the last update, learn to speak in this version. That’s easy to say, but it changes the gameplay of Imagine Earth in an incredible way. The talented voice actors we were able to hire give the characters a personality we never thought possible before, and condense the action of the campaign into an unprecedented adventure. We are overjoyed to have successfully completed this elaborate gameplay operation and hope you enjoy it. Replaying the game is more rewarding than ever because of the many improvements we have made in balancing, menus and performance. Give it a try and share your impressions and ideas with us.

You can listen to Alias new voice in the latest official trailer.

Forest Ambient Sound

To increase the atmosphere of the game, we have added forest sounds, leafs rustling in the wind and birds chirping around you when you move the cursor over larger connected forest areas and zoom in on them with the camera. This soundscape will soon be expanded to include civilization noise, sounds from air cars and factories, ship horns and rotors that bring the world to life.

Harvesting Tool

We have revised the multi tools, with which you can perform actions like repairing or harvesting multiple times. Each tool now shows with icons on which fields it can be applied. Upgrading, repairing or cleaning buildings were already there and now we have also combined mining and harvesting operations in one handy tool. It replaces the previous deactivation tool, with which you could temporarily shut down production, because that was very rarely needed.

Technology Panel

Many of you missed the technology panel as it provides such a splendid overview for all available buildings and enables you to install upgrades to all of them. So we put it back in business and enabled gamepad controls as well.

Need for Speed

A lot more performance optimization has been done. More multi-threading to make use of available CPU cores and better distribution of logic calls to get rid of CPU usage peaks.

Cheers to the Winners

We have optimized the Victory Panel to more clearly communicate which faction is ahead in the race for planetary dominance.

List of Buildings

We have further optimized the building list of the global planetary management interface to get a targeted and faster overview of the infrastructure and to be able to react in a comprehensive and far-reaching way.

Everything at a glance

All strategic menus of the game are now united in the message panel, which is uniformly structured in mouse and gamepad control.

Ideon Goals Visualization

The indicator for the completed mission objectives and the Ideon captured on the planet are now also visible during the game.

Share Market Panel

The stock market menu has also undergone a visual overhaul, which is not only pleasing to the eye but also simplifies navigation with the game pad.

New Research Panel

The Research Panel has undergone an update that not only ensures that the upgrade descriptions have now all found a permanent place in the box at the bottom right, so they no longer obscure the navigation in the research grid. The system itself has also changed. To be able to research more than one thing at a time you have to build additional City Centers. Only the amount of research districts now regulates the efficiency or speed of research.

Translations

Big Asian language update! Imagine Earth is now available and playable in a proper simplified Chinese version as well as in Japanese and Korean. Have fun, spread the word.

Interface Changes

• Replaced “Imagine Float” font with “Sansation” for better multi-lingual support
• Gamepad: Display red cursor when something is not possible
• Introduced blur for tool ring when trading with other factions or space traders
• Hide city borders when switching planets
• Planet rotation in main menu
• More visible icons for scrolling in savegame menus
• Display forest debris when damaged by tornado
• Display highlight when game is paused

Fixes

• Renamed Illuminati to Illumati
• Reduced pollution by Fishery and Shellfish farm
• Fixed saving problems for sound settings
• Fertility Gaia power no longer causes creation of a desert somewhere and vice-versa
• Asteroid crater not visible after impact
• Fixed Xrathul vs. AI endless repairing of city centers
• Ideon sold not properly updated
• Each additional spaceport increases frequency of traders
• Don’t let pirates steal Ideon in campaign missions