So, you’re here now! You’ve landed on the Frontier with your mech, and you’re more ready than ever to start your homestead on this new world. But before you get started, it’s kind of important for you to know HOW you get home-sweet-home set up in the first place! This one’ll be a doozy, as we cover a lot of important aspects on what goes into homemaking on the Frontier. We’ll be talking about your homestead, the building area, how decor actually affects your home, and more! Take a seat, follow along, and get ready to give your patch of planet a makeover.
Interstellar Home Makeover
Building a homestead is an essential part of establishing your presence on the Frontier! It’s your sleeping spot, your processing and assembly area, the starting point of your next adventure, and more. As you farm exotic alien crops and explore an undiscovered wilderness, you’ll return to your homestead and process your findings, including investing in construction upgrades along the way! These upgrades make progression possible; whether it’s expanding your building options or enhancing your mech’s suite of capabilities, investing in your homestead is vital!
Home(stead) Is Where the Heart Is
Where you sleep is what matters most! At the center of it all, the Homestead building acts as the focal point for you to build everything else around. When you construct a building from the Homestead category, it creates a zone around the building, marked by a dashed line. As you add certain decor to this area, you increase a key stat within your homestead: Coziness! Coziness scales based on how much love and care you’ve put into your home, translating into real benefits in the form of buffs. If you can see the zone while you’re building decor, that decor will add Coziness to your homestead! You’re not limited to building in the zone, though, so let the creativity flow!
It’ll Buff Out
Your homestead’s Coziness is represented in “Cozy Levels”, the thresholds that need to be met to benefit from that level’s buffs. These buffs make your work easier overall, providing benefits like higher yields for crops and resources, as well as increased tool efficiency. As your Cozy Level increases, you’ll receive more and more buffs, making your labors a breeze! Each Homestead building has a maximum Cozy Level; to increase the maximum, just upgrade your Homestead, and you’ll be good to go. You’ll need to stop by your homestead every so often to maintain your buffs, so take that time to drop resources off, then keep on exploring!
De-Core Aspects
As we talked about earlier this year, we have a huge variety of decor options to spruce up your home! Potted plants, shrubbery, gazeebos, books, and a boatload of other choices (including a boat) will be at your disposal, so give your home some flair! As you fill out your homestead and discover new materials, you’ll unlock more decor, plus different designs for decor you may have already unlocked.
Mech At Work
Of course, you’ll need somewhere to take your resources and turn ‘em into something useful. Enter: The workshop! The workshop is the gathering spot for buildings, known as Constructs, that process materials or create components for various uses. Similar to the homestead area, the workshop also has an area around it, but swaps out Coziness with increased efficiency for Constructs built in the area. This makes it easy to gather all your Constructs in a single, accessible spot, both on foot and in the mech!
Built to Spec
Constructs are important to every aspect of your life on the Frontier! From manufacturing components to baking critter fodder, Constructs act as the second step to your tasks. Once you’re done with your daily exploring, farming, and discovering, you’ll take your raw materials and process them for other uses! Building new structures, upgrades, feeding critters, you name it, Constructs are the heart of your homestead’s technology. Down the road, you’ll expand your operations by building an even bigger workshop area that holds more Constructs, and even has some space for decor!
Store and Deliver
Now you’ve got all this stuff, and nowhere to put it but the mech, right? Good news, you’ve got options! As you collect resources, raw materials, and other goods, you’ll have access to a number of storage buildings to store them in. Your initial storage buildings will be smaller and easier to build, but as your homestead becomes more advanced, you’ll gain access to higher-volume structures! Combine this with our handy-dandy construction assists (like holograms and grid snapping) to make a tidy, efficient storage area for your homestead!
Fun in the Sun
It doesn’t always have to be about hard work and keeping things neat, though! Take some time to build fun structures, like a ball dispenser, plus some goalposts to go with it! And, as voted on by the community, we’ll be adding target practice structures for you to practice your skills with a mech-sized Big Iron!
Along the Assembly Line
Whew, that was a lot, huh? Well, we know y’all are ready and raring to break ground on your very own homesteads, so we wanted to make sure we covered all the bases! If you’ve been following our updates to this point, future updates from here to our Early Access launch will all be in-depth as we start talking about the core features of Lightyear Frontier. As always, if you have any deep questions you want us to answer on a future development update, ask them on Steam, Discord, or our socials! Stick around, because the nitty-gritty only gets grittier from here!
