This second update for Trappist adds automated trade routes to the game.

Soon after founding your second colony it’ll become clear that your colonies need to share resources for any of them to thrive. Manually delivering resources between your colonies can become tedious and distracts from growing the colonies.

Designing the UX for this was a bit tricky. The initial design included adding multiple ships to any route, re-ordering trade stops, and explicitly setting the amounts to load and unload. This design works well for many city-builders. For example in Anno 1800, which lets you create complex trade routes to support very large cities.

This would lead to an UI with lists of ships, lists of colonies and a whole lot of buttons. For Trappist I wanted something simpler and more immersive.

In Trappist you can create a trade route just by zooming out to the “strategic view” and a few clicks:

When possible, the game uses the contents of the ships cargo bays and the trade orders of the previous stops to quickly set the right resource. Right-clicking on the cargo bay lets you choose a different resource.

At each trade stop the cargo ship will attempt to load and unload resources so its cargo bay contents matches the orders given for that trade stop.

This UX works well for most routes. And by using the Ark as the central trading hub for all my colonies I can keep everyone in the colonies fed and happy.

The full changelog for the v0.4.0 update:

• Automated trade routes
• Cargo drop pod contents is properly displayed
• Fix potential crash when recycling a space port while a ship is landing
• Some smaller fixes related to cleaning up tween animations