Oxygen Not Included Devcast Reveals Disease Rework, Mushrooms, and Quality of Life Tweaks

In Klei’s most recent ‘Rhymes with Play’ devcast they gave a quick preview of some upcoming content coming to the studio’s current Early Access title, ‘Oxygen Not Included’.

Several major changes and tweaks look to be coming to Klei Entertainment’s Oxygen Not Included, as revealed by the most recent developer stream of the game. As with previous streams, the current work in progress stuff isn’t guaranteed to make it to the next rollout for the game, however we can normally take what is shown as a solid showcase of intent for the game’s development roadmap.

Changes shown in the stream included the addition of a timer on the starting point of the game, so that you have an indication of when you are likely to receive your next dupe -the game’s little clone characters. There was also a lot of time spent sharing the reworks on the disease system, specifically the spread of food poisoning which currently spreads from outhouses. The reworks mean that disease can spread through many means, air, breath, touch, and temperature. Diseases then eat away at a character’s immunity until they then go from carrier to sufferer of the illness.

Preventative means are on the way, as well as ways to cure the illnesses. The former is said to include the (currently rather useless) hand wash units.

In addition to the disease overhaul, the foundations of a more diverse farming a food system were shown with mushrooms, which require CO2 to grow, being added to the game, as well as a more visual farming overlay.

It wasn’t just the farming overlay, the water overlay has had some slight changes which ties in nicely to one of the other major additions: manual assignment of drinking water via a pump. This change means that dupes won’t suddenly drink up the water being used to grow algae.

Other changes included keyboard shortcuts for the games priority system, reworked biomes, and discussion of a few new ideas which might make it in with future updates. You can find the upload of the stream below.

Oxygen Not Included is currently in early access over on Steam. You can find it here.