Zentura finally has a one-line pitch: Oxygen Not Included meets Factorio. You're a robot on an island after a plane crash, and the job is to keep the survivors alive until help comes. This week was mostly about making that feel true from the first minute.
Waking up
The game used to start with you standing next to a wreck and nothing else. Now you wake up inside a shack. Every new world opens the same way: black, then your eyes open a crack, close, and open again while the room comes into focus.
If you play the prologue (the walk through the research hall before the flight), the island now builds quietly in the background while you walk. When you go through the hangar door you're already there, no loading screen. Pressing Create World is instant now, too. It used to freeze for about ten seconds before anything happened.
Luna is on her cot. She's hurt, and she spent two days getting you running again. While she worked, the others built a small camp: three log shacks you can walk into, beds, a chest of supplies and a workbench outside.
Luna has health of her own now. She gets better slowly while the camp has food and water, faster with a clinic, and worse when they run out. The rescue at the end of Chapter 1 needs her well enough to travel.
Faces
Survivors don't have detailed faces. Each one has a little pixel emoticon that shows how they're doing: :D when everything's fine, :/ when tired, :( when hungry, -_- asleep. You can read the whole camp at a glance, the way you can in Oxygen Not Included.
They also act more like people. When there's no work they wander over to someone and chat, sit and mend their clothes, whittle, drink, rub a sore shoulder, scratch the days into a post, or just stare at the sea looking for planes. A few earlier animations didn't fit at all (jumping for joy and dancing, on an island after a plane crash), so they're gone. How someone walks depends on their mood: a tired person drags their feet.
They also walk around walls and through doorways now. They used to walk straight through the log walls of their own shacks. To make sure it stays fixed, a test now runs a camp at high speed for most of an in-game day and checks every survivor every frame, legs and arms included, against every block.
A river through the island
Every new island has a Y-shaped river. It starts at a mouth on the coast, runs in past the middle, then splits into two branches that reach the sea on the far side. A big mountain and a small one sit either side of the fork. The crash camp lands near the river mouth, so water is close from day one.
Dig anywhere
Mines used to be fixed deposits. Now you plant a quarry flag wherever you like and survivors dig a real pit beside it, in steps so they can climb out. What comes up depends on where you dig: the beach gives mostly sand, river banks give sand, stone and some copper, and the mountains give rock, iron and tin. The deeper the pit gets, the more ore turns up.
There are no numbers telling you what's down there. The robot's recognition module didn't survive the crash, so all it can say is something like "Hm, the ground looks rocky here and... kinda shiny?" Finding good spots is up to you.
Later on you can research the drill rig. Put it next to a quarry flag, connect it to a windmill or water wheel, and it digs the pit by itself. Put a chest next to it and you have a mine that runs with nobody there. That's the Factorio half of the game: people do the work first, then machines take it over.
Weather you can see
There are blocky clouds now, drifting with the wind. Each part of the day has its own wind, the rain slants with it, and storms bring heavy dark cloud. The sand is a bit warmer too. In full sun it used to glow almost white.
A phone in your hand
When Luna texts you, the phone buzzes. The robot's right hand goes to its pocket and brings the phone up with her message on the screen. You see it in first and third person, and it's the same arm either way. Your left hand keeps working. You can walk, place blocks and punch a tree while you read, and you'll look a bit lazier doing it. You never lose control.