The machines in Zentura never looked like they belonged in the same world as the terrain. The ground is blocks, the trees are blocks, and then a sawmill would show up as a smooth model from somewhere else.
So now the machines are blocks too. Each world block gets cut 32 times along every edge, and machines are built out of those little cubes. I tried 4, 8, 16, 32 and 64 before picking. At 32 you can still see it's made of blocks, but a saw blade has teeth and a water wheel is actually round.
All 56 machines and buildings have been redone this way: the windmill, the water wheels, the forge, the kiln, houses, fields, pumps, the steam engine and the Great Signal. The parts that turn still turn. The sawmill blade spins at whatever speed its shaft is giving it.
A few other things changed this week.
- Survivors no longer start the game exhausted. Before, they'd sleep through most of the first day and research took forever.
- Luna now runs the work rota. If two people are on a job at one machine, she puts them on shifts, one by day and one by night, so the machine keeps going. Out gathering wood, they work together.
- On Easy and Normal, nobody dies from hunger or thirst any more. They collapse and spend two days in bed. On Hard and Expert, death is still permanent.
- A windmill can now drive a sawmill that survivors keep fed with logs. The planks pile up in the chest while you're off doing something else. This is the first time the game does what it's supposed to do: a machine takes a job off a person.
I also have a bot now that plays the game from the crash onwards, the way a player would. It chops trees, digs, crafts, builds, researches, sets up the windmill and the sawmill, then saves, quits and loads to check nothing got lost. If anything breaks, it stops and tells me exactly where. It's already caught a bunch of things I would have tripped over myself.