Version 0.17 is focused on two main areas: lighting, and the water cycle.

By "water cycle" here we're not talking about evaporation and condensation, but rather the recycling of water through potable, gray, and wastewater states.

You can check out our to-do list here.

Comments?  Questions?  Suggestions?  Reasons to suspect that alien reptiles based in Roswell shot JFK with a vaccine-laden bullet so they could fake the Moon landing?  Post 'em here!

Andrew Pam, who uses High Frontier on Linux, sent us the screen shot below last night (after version 0.16 came out).



It looks like a flooded cylinder, right?  But the Water Level is clearly set to zero, so that shouldn't be possible.  And then it came out that this design isn't a cylinder at all; it's a barbell.

At this point, we thought we had some really weird Linux bug, perhaps one that made High Frontier unplayable on some machines.  But Andrew helpfully sent us the colony file (as well as doing several other tests we asked of him).  And it turns out, the same colony looks exactly the same on our machines.

Good news: it's not a Linux bug!

Bad news: it's a bug that affects everybody.

Good news: ...but it's easily avoided.

It turns out that this is simply caused by having barbells with a bell radius that's too small.  For version 0.17, we'll fix it so that you can't create designs with a bell radius of under 35 m.  Though even that is just barely playable... we recommend a radius of 50 or more if you want to have a reasonable amount of room.

We've been working for the last month on version 0.16, a major upgrade with all sorts of neat new features.  Well, we finally released it today!

This release is focused on gamification — that is, turning our detailed simulation into a real game that is fun to play.



This includes an achievement system (see above), as well as an economic model (see below).




The Release Notes contain a bunch of other goodies, too: sound effects on various objects in your colony, background music in city mode, grass and trees turning brown when carbon dioxide levels are too low, and much more.

If any of this is interesting to you, we’d love to hear your thoughts about it.  Sign up if you haven't already, and post a comment or two.  We promise we don't bite!

Hi. I'm a Kickstarter backer, and am excited to play this game. I have been trying to figure out how to get the full (not demo) version of the new releases as they come out, but I can't seem to manage to do that without purchasing again. What am I missing?

I don't believe any real people have had any trouble registering for the forum (though most of you are being shy about posting, alas).

However, like pretty much anything on the internet, we do get spammers trying to register to post their spam.  These spammer accounts are generally pretty obvious ("real" name nothing at all like the name in the email address, domain name typically used by spammers, etc.).

I find I have no patience for this, and so when I see these likely spammer accounts, I just delete them.  And usually this is the right thing to do.

However, if you are a real human interested in our topic, and you have any trouble at all registering for the forum — your account is not activated, or appears to have been deleted, or any other difficulty — please just send an email to support at HighFrontier.com, tell me the account name you're having trouble with, and I'll get it fixed up right away.

We do want people to participate in these forums!  Just not spammers.  Spammers suck.

Thanks,
- Joe

For version 0.16 we will be adding a grant system for the construction of colonies, right now we have a base amount that varies based on difficulty and location, and then extra money is provided based on livable area, this encourages small colonies, though built correctly massive colonies can be built even on the more difficult modes.

Our art team has been doing an amazing job with the building models (including some cool new ones that will first appear in version 0.16).  But in playtesting, one problem we've noticed is that we often get undeveloped zones because the buildings simply don't fit.

So we've just asked our artists to develop some building models that make good use of a small footprint.  For inspiration, we're looking at row houses like these, found in many dense cities around the world:

Hi guys,

Earlier this year I was invited to present at the TEDxYouth@MileHigh conference, a TED-associated regional conference in Denver, Colorado.  I spoke about space colonization and High Frontier.

The videos have finally been edited and posted!  Here's the talk:

A group of rocket builders, including some formerly of Armadillo Aerospace, is trying to Kickstart a suborbital rocket company: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/95173281/

We're working on a number of new buildings for the next release, including the cute "Museum of Unfortunate Artifacts" below.