Thanks to all of you, our first public playtest was a huge success. We received a ton of great feedback, plenty of bug reports and a lot of really positive messages. Thank you!

Since then, we've been hard at work adding a variety of new features and improvements, as well as fixing any bugs encountered during the playtest and since. We thought now would be a good time to let you know that we're making good progress towards release, and thought we'd loop you in on some of it.

This isn't an exhaustive list of everything we've been working on, just a few things that we thought might be of interest. As always, keep throwing suggestions our way as we work towards release!

We've added a banking system to the game. Nothing too exciting, but having a means of securing your money allows us to make various improvements across the game without knocking things out of balance. ATMs will be dotted around the map for withdrawals and deposits (the model is still in the works, so we can't show it to you yet, sorry!).

During the playtest, many of you mentioned that running a shop is one of the more enjoyable aspects of a roleplay game, so we're working on a variety of mechanics to give this process some depth.

When purchasing a commercial property, you will be required to select a business type. The business type you select will determine what shop-specific buildables you have access to, what products you're able to order for delivery... and so on.

Your shop will be primarily managed through a buildable point of sale (POS). This is where you'll order shipments of products, process payments, set prices... You'll be able to add custom over-the-counter products to your POS, anything that is available to order shipments of through the POS will automatically be registered as a product.  Customers will be able to pay by cash, or by card. 

We've provided shelves and fridges, allowing you to stock products with full tracking. Items taken from a shelf or fridge can be placed on the counter next to the POS, and marked as "paid" after payment has been made.

Anti-theft gates can be built at the exits of your shop. Anything stocked on a shelf or fridge is tracked - if anyone leaves the store without paying for one of these items, the alarm will blare and the police will be alerted. If the police manage to catch the culprit, and they're still in posession of the stolen item, you'll receive a refund of the wholesale value of the product.  If a customer pays in cash, that cash will be kept in your POS. Make sure to empty it often and deposit the money in the bank, because lockpicks can be used to break into the cash drawer. At the very least, keep a shotgun handy... 

Over time, we will be adding a variety of business types; with some shared mechanics and some mechanics specifically crafted for that business type. Soon, there will be a lot more to sell and to produce, along with mechanics designed to push towards towards making full use of player-run shops.

As a team, we decided we wanted there to be more to your inventory, and more risk to dying, or being arrested. With this update, we have made it to where you drop all cash on death, and everything in your hotbar is fair game to other players. Life is precious - it should feel that way!

We have also implemented a way for police to search players. This can be performed when a player has their hands up, or if the player is handcuffed. This will allow for police to see illegal items you might be carrying!

In addition, we are adding in a personal safe buildable object that you will be able to store items in!

We have added a couple of new apps to the phone! First, we have the messaging app. You can message via the phone, and it will notify them. These are also persisted across sessions:

We also added in a Advertising app, that will allow you to notify all players of your business (for a fee of course). It will be sent as a text message with a handy button to set a waypoint.

And last but not least, is the job finder app. this will help you find the job NPCs for the job you're looking for!

It was brought to our attention during the playtest that the chat wasn't great... and we completely agreed. We've made a variety of improvements based on valuable feedback, including:

The scoreboard was pretty much completely broken during the playtest. It now works! It's much better looking too, have a peek.

Trying to line things up while decorating your property during the playtest was a little tricky. To combat that, we've added toggleable snapping. You can customize the grid size that you're snapping to. We've also made some adjustments to the placement ghost shader, making it a little easier on the eyes.  We've added more filtering options to the building menu, too. This menu will likely evolve over time as we identify pain points while adding more and more buildables to the game. 

Always planned, but wasn't ready in time for the playtest; you can now configure a variety of game-specific settings. You'll still have full access to the s&box settings. We'll continue to add to this over time.

Interaction Improvements
One comment we got a lot was how annoying doors were. We made some changes to the interaction system, and the door interactions (and all others) will now always be in the same order, and a lot easier to work with.

Grief Prevention
We saw the unanimous feedback that things like slot machines shouldn't be accessible from other players when you're the one in that seat. We have made that change for slot machines as well as the weed packaging station to prevent others from stealing YOUR winnings!

UI Sounds
A UI without sounds isn't a very good one. We have added sounds to a LOT of the UI for better and more immersive feedback.

Bugfixes
We very much appreciate all of the bug reports we received! We looked at all of the reports and knocked out a LOT of fixes!