🚀 Devlog #1 — A Week of Polish, Power, & Plant Life! 🌿

Hi everyone! It’s been a massive week for SolarDrift. I’ve been focusing heavily on making the solar system feel more alive and responsive. Here is the list of new features:

🛸 New Ships & Fixes: I added 6 completely redesigned, animated ship hulls! Plus, I squashed a bug so your custom ship colors finally save permanently.

🏭 Living Buildings: The Smelter, Eden Machine, Auto-Turret, and Cleansing Beacon now feature fully animated pixel-art loops.

🔌 Power Outage Visuals: Cut the power to a building, and it will immediately freeze its animation and turn grayscale. Restore the power, and it springs back to life!

⚡ Massive Optimization: I did a 4-phase performance sweep (event-driven power grids, cached shadows, throttled pathfinding). Big bases that used to chug at 40 FPS now hold a rock-solid 60 FPS! 📈

⛏️ Meatier Mining: Deep cave mining feels much heavier now. I added screen shakes, color-coded screen flashes for events (like gas pocket booms!), and randomized stone-breaking audio. Oh, and space asteroids are now 5 hand-painted pixel-art variants! ☄️

🧑‍🌾 Farming Audio: The Eden Machine sounds like a real farm! Digging, planting, harvesting, and even rustling leaves when you walk over crops. (I also fixed a visual bug that wiped crops on load—your plants are safe!).

🔮 What’s Next? With the performance budget looking great, I am moving on to expanding the cooking system, deepening the Tech Tree, and preparing some alien encounters I can't spoil just yet... 👽

Thanks for following along! See you on the next planet. 🌌