After the Steam launch, many people got to know about Screeps and supported it financially. We thank all of you who contribute to the project’s development! It was very important for us to have an audience though not big, but such advanced and smart as you all are!

The successful Steam launch increased financial capabilities of the project. As before, our team consists of three people: Artem, Sergey, and Anton, but Artem now works on Screeps exclusively full-time, while Sergey and Anton help with important tasks on an ongoing basis. Now we are completely confident in our abilities to implement the majority of our plans that once seemed to us colossal and unfeasible, but now we have a clear vision of what to do next on the project. So we’d like to share some of our thoughts with you.

Below are some major features and areas that we either work now or will work on within the coming months. The order is not always chronological, but it gives a glimpse on our priorities. 

(Implemented features are colored in gray.)

Market system

The biggest feature to arrive in the coming weeks is a system for trading resources between players. This article explained in detail the way it would function. Aside from evident advantages of organized trade and social features it offers, it also allows to launch the system of Subscription Tokens – special in-game items to pay for CPU Subscription which can be traded on this same market. Each player will have the opportunity to purchase CPU using his or her game resources, thus essentially playing Screeps for free. 

Open source server 

A major milestone that was long awaited, this has been developed for several months to become the next phase of the project development after the market system deployment. We’ll release a game server to launch as a regular Node.js/Electron application accessible to any owner of the Steam version of the game via the server’s IP address. The server can be launched on a local computer in the single-player mode, on LAN to play with friends, or on an Internet server to create a publicly available game world. Unlike the official game server where MongoDB and Redis are used, the open-source version is being developed without external dependencies which allows to run it as a regular desktop app. However, since its code will be fully open, you can always add any customizations according to your needs and imagination. 

This step will include a planned release of the Steam version and closing the Early Access period. 

Better simulation 

The simulation mode hasn’t seen many changes since the early days of the project, so we’ve collected a lot of feature requests that we want to implement in the nearest future. We’ll allow you to save different simulation room states under different names, copy any room from the game world or a replay into the sim, import/export to JSON, playback a single game tick multiple times. Augmenting this with the local server will create new opportunities to debug and test scripts. 

Power Creeps 

This feature has been announced long ago, when the Power resource was first added, but we’ve been having many other important things to do and Power creeps are still on the concept design stage. By the way, it ought to be very well though-out and balanced since this is essentially a system of “heroes” with classes and skills, and they can affect the game balance dramatically. Having immortality and unique abilities, each Power creep will be an important player’s asset along with the Global Control Level that you can’t lose even after a complete failure in the game world. We have to think very thoroughly about each branch of class development so that they allow many equally advantageous lines and interesting dilemmas. 

Aside from some evident areas of Power creeps application (offense, defense, economy), we’ll introduce another one that wasn’t announced before. Here is what it’s about: 

Arena 

Starting from Room level 5, a new structure will be available called Arena. By moving any three creeps close to it, you will be able to teleport them to a special virtual room, separated from the game world and generated exclusively for your matches with other players in the 1 vs 1 mode. The system will pick an opponent for you among other players who have released their creeps onto the Arena, and a duel will begin between them. It will last until either one of the players loses his creeps or the time runs out. This room will be accessible for your scripts in the same way as regular rooms of the game world, but under a unique name. After the end of the duel the winning creeps get teleported back into the Arena structure. All the latest matches are viewable as replays in the special section of your Overview. 

One interesting detail is that you can release to the arena both the regular creeps (for new players) as well as Power Creeps with a special class Gladiator. It will give them some special abilities, and their behavioral logic will prove to be an interesting programming challenge. 

Arena winners will be rewarded with a special Arena Rating which will make a new monthly Top. You can either gain or lose points as an outcome of a match. The system will try to pick opponents for your creeps that best match your rating. 

Aside from simple rating points for wins, there will be a more substantial prize – a new resource called Pixels. 

Pixels & decoration 

Pixels are a resource tied to your account. You can trade it on the market, and it is required to purchase and create special decoration elements for your room. Having a certain amount of Pixels, you can place in your room a flag, tree, pattern, emoticon, inscription, or any other image available in our Pixel Store. You can customize images by size and color thus making any of your rooms visually unique. Such decorations won’t have any functional bearing, but you can customize them via the API for creating tick-based animations. Pixels will be tradeable not only on our in-game market but also the Steam Community Market. 

API versioning 

In your account settings you will be able to specify directly which script API version you want to use. Major API updates will be released alongside new versions, so to avoid breaking changes in your scripts we’ll leave the old version available for some time, while new players will be able to use new capabilities of the new version. It will allow us to implement new interesting features more flexibly and freely. For example, we can use modern ES6 practices when designing game objects. 

Below are some of the features without fully developed ideas, but we’d like to make use of them in the future. 

Achievements 

Quite an evident and desirable thing that yet requires a lot of development efforts. Important milestones in a player’s progress will be highlighted to match specific achievements visible in your website profile and on Steam. 

World events 

Certain events can happen in the world according to our pre-defined rules, for example, the emergence of hidden rooms, big boss creeps with difficult logic (or many special small creeps), unusual game events with their own APIs. Participants will be rewarded with game resources and unique profile achievements. 

Quests 

Along with arenas, we’ve thought of a possibility to build special quest portals to teleport creeps not onto a match arena but into some quest room where you are to solve some room-specific problem and get rewarded with Pixels or other resources. 

Native languages support 

This is possible only on a long-term basis, but we're still contemplating developing separate runtime game servers for the native processing of your scripts written in various languages like Python or Lua. This will also require separate API branches for each language along with the documentation. However, this feature won’t be available on a local server. 

We are sure that all of this will be successfully implemented thanks to your committed support. And, of course, we’ll continue our routine work on improving stability and server performance, fixing bugs and glitches, and adding minor features and updates not listed here. Please share with us what you think about our ideas in the comments below!

We have just launched Screeps on Steam! The game is available on exclusive terms: buying Screeps through the Steam Store, you get lifetime MMO access with the 10 CPU limit. This resource is sufficient to maintain a small bunch of optimized rooms – play as much as you like without ever paying for subscription!

The CPU subscription will be available for order at the Steam store page in the next few days.

We are looking forward to hear your feedback! Please don't forget to write a review if you like the game.

Have fun scripting!

On May 12 an update will be deployed that will introduce some changes to the API which can require adjustments in your script. The changes affect two fields:

1. The underlying data structure in which flags data is stored on the server was revised for optimization purposes, and now the Flag prototype does not have the id property. If you have worked only with properties name, color/secondaryColor, and memory, you have nothing to worry about. Otherwise please change your logic in order not to use the id property. Besides, the constants COLOR_* now represent integer values rather than strings, so if you used their values directly, please make sure to use names of variables from now on.

2. We are considerably expanding the list of prototypes of game objects. Now all the prototypes will be arranged into a hierarchy and inherited in a chain. Here is the tree of prototypes:

You are free to use these prototypes in your scripts:

Game.rooms.W0N0.storage instanceof StructureStorage // true
Game.rooms.W0N0.storage instanceof OwnedStructure // true
Game.rooms.W0N0.storage instanceof Structure // true
Game.rooms.W0N0.storage instanceof RoomObject // true

So, because of this, if you have overrided some properties or methods, you have to check that you are doing this in the right place of the tree.

These changes have already been deployed on the Public Test Realm, so we recommend to go there and check if your script works correctly before the update goes live on the main server.

The campaign is over!

Here are the results:

• 310 backers contributed.
• $11,493 raised.
• 144% of the original goal achieved.
• Valve has approved the release of the game for Steam, and we’ve already started preparing necessary documents. 

Thanks for your support!

All the rewards have been sent out to backers except for codes for accessing Steam and the server. If you haven’t received our email yet (which could happen if you had sent money but had not chosen your perk), please email us at contact@screeps.com.

As for the Steam client and the open-source game engine, their development is under way and we hope to share the first results very soon. Here is the plan:

1. First, we’ll release the game on Steam in the Early Access mode. It will be a fully functional client for the online MMO mode with support for scripts in local files, but without the hosted server.
2. The second step is a private release of the server engine and launching a test version on Steam with its support. Only 310 backers of our crowdfunding campaign will gain access to it.
3. After a month from that, if everything goes smoothly, we will publicly release the game on Steam and the server on npmjs.com (the server source will be available on GitHub).

Follow the news!

We have expanded the NPC Invaders system. Now, when the threat counter in a room runs out, there is a 10% chance that you will get not only a lone Invader but a whole company of them, from 2 to 5. Each Invader has its own role: melee attacker, ranged attacker, or healer. Ranged attackers are different from melee ones in their behavior: they try to stay at a distance from your creeps. The function of healers is evidently to heal other raid members. Also, some creeps may be boosted with , , , or . Sometimes the total healing effectiveness of such a raid will surpass the damage from several towers, so defense will prove to be very interesting.

These creeps will stop using rangedMassAttack, so in the majority of cases they won’t pose any threat to your buildings except ramparts and walls. The worst result for you would be the death of all your creeps in a room. Certainly, you should try to avoid this to keep your economy stable.

	RCL < 4	RCL ≥ 4
Melee
Ranged
Healer

We are happy to announce that new resources are now available in the game! We have worked on this important milestone for quite a long time. It is intended to introduce much more depth and tactical diversity to the game. Economy is important in any strategy game, and we believe this update fits the Screeps gameplay very well.

New resources

There are 7 new mineable resources in the game now. Each room has some base mineral of a single type that you can mine starting from room level 6.

A proper usage of minerals will allow you to permanently boost individual functions of your creeps up to the 4x effectiveness increase. For example, a creep with 1 CARRY part and the catalyzed keanium acid effect can transfer 200 units of cargo instead of 50. Hence, your creep will need much less energy to carry out its work, and you can use the saved energy for other purposes.

Worth noting is the multi-component ghodium compound which allows to speed up the function upgradeController without increasing the energy usage. Besides, it increases the limit of maximum upgrade per tick for level 8 controllers and, therefore, significantly speeds up your Global Control Level upgrade speed.

Learn more about minerals and boosts

Trading

Since minerals are scattered across different rooms, you will need some means to transfer resources between them and facilitate trade connections. A new structure type serves this purpose: the Terminal. It allows for instant transfer of cargo from one terminal to another (even of another player). Each transaction consumes energy depending on the cargo volume and distance, so it’s vital to place terminals on the world map properly.

Currently we work on the in-game market system which will allow you to create buy/sell orders and thus trade resources with other players through your terminals automatically. Follow the news!

View changelog

Great news Screepers!

We have launched a crowdfunding campaign to rework and open-source the Screeps game engine so that you can create your very own game world with your rules and play with your friends for free!

Here are just some of the perks you’ll be able to get by backing this campaign: 

Hurry up, some of the offers are limited!

The territory settlement has suffered great changes since 2016 began. Some players who control large parts of the five sectors have stopped their scripts and surrendered their territory to others:

Here is how the map looks like at the moment:

Starting from now, we’ll use a new strategy to open Novice Areas. If large free zones inside existing game sectors appear, they will be zoned as Novice Areas rather than just adding new sectors to the map. It will allow for more flexible balancing in settling the game world and prevent the appearance of large empty spaces that would decrease competition for territory.

The main criteria for placing these zones will be the room reservation which became significantly easier after the recent update.

By the way, as the reservation process became easier and you now have to reserve rooms to increase your energy sources capacity, actual domain borders became visible on the map. This simplifies the task of choosing the starting point for novice players. Let’s see the room availability in the Claimable view:

While previously it wasn’t always obvious that placing a spawn in some room would infringe on some large player’s interests, now it is perfectly clear and visual.

The most densely-settled sector, the Screeps metropolis, so to say, is now the central Hernanduer’s[23] location – W5S15. There are only 5 neutral rooms now, and after the NPC Invaders update, it’s likely that only one isolated room will be left, W2S19.

Unlike Hernanduer, many players place their rooms quite far from each other, so to assess their domains, the settlement rank could be useful in addition to visual observation.

As was expected, the expansion leaders are all the same who lead the main tops. In January, NhanHo[25] landed his 4th gold in the Expansion Rank:

Danny’s[15] chart for the last day of the month shows that curve for Hernanduer where he recaptured the initiative to soar upwards in the new season (it is seen in the current chart [link]). His companion in the chart DarkTrooper7[21], on the contrary, fell into coma for a few days but later braced himself and regained control over his territory:

The Power Rank reveals the state of the preparation for the era of heroes. As in the first power season, Hernandeur again tops the rank by piling up literally over 9000K of power in total. We are seriously eager to see the power creeps he’ll be able to create when they appear!

The highest military activity of the season was focused in the new sector E15S15 which is completely immersed in fighting. We can hope that future Screeps leaders will emerge from here. And now, as we intended in the previous review, let’s switch our attention to some attacks with towers (which, by the way, prompted us to adjust their characteristics a little):

Suddenly, the world of Screeps has become less safe. It seems that intensive mining and industrial development in once virgin regions shattered the environmental balance and enraged mysterious forces we know little about. The time of peaceful travel came to an end, and since now, everyone should keep on the watch.

NPC Invaders

Every room where energy is mined has an inner counter at approximately 100,000 units of mined energy (plus some random variable). After this counter times out, a new game-controlled creep appears at one of the room exits with the goal of hunting your creeps. It will not touch your spawns, but if a structure gets on its way, it will try to destroy it. This creep can use attack, rangedAttack, and dismantle. It is unable to move between rooms. 

An important feature of these creeps is that they can appear only at exits to neutral rooms. If the target room is under your (or someone else’s) control or it is a reserved room, an invader creep will never appear at this exit. If all exits in the room are of this kind, invaders cannot appear at all.

There are two types of invader creeps:

• Light creeps that appear in neutral, reserved, and claimed rooms under level 3.
   
• Heavy creeps that appear in claimed rooms level 4 and above. 
  

UPD: There is now a chance that you will get not only a lone invader, but a whole company of them. Learn more from this article.

The last 2015 season is over. A new novice sector W15S5 has been opened where about 30 players either walk their first steps or were respawned. Previously (without the 3-room limit), under easy circumstances, very few players were able to capture the “green” sector, but now the adaptation became a real fun and with a company. Empty locations started emerging in the open world in the previously “green” zones: W15N15, W15S25, E25N15. If you feel lack of space in the novice sector with the 3-room limit, it is a good time to think about respawning to the main world.

Here is the current world snapshot:

In the last days of the season, the majority of NhanHo’s[22] rooms either slipped into a coma or were too slow upgrading the controller. As a result, he was displaced from the Expansion Rank 1st place by his all-time companion AzuraStar[22]. At the moment, their synchronous rise continues along the same lines as was seen in December.

Current chart link: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dannyz/screeps.png

Hernanduer[20] has expanded his domain by creating bases in all 4 sectors adjoining his home. He is now by far the first in the new Power Rank: 4M versus 1-2M with others. In fact, he almost immediately set up routine mining when other players just started warming up.

Power is the new game aspect, and many still struggle with discovering and mining power banks. We expect the interest in them will reach a new level after new power creeps are added to the game. Until then, those players who already gather power points create a leg-up for themselves by the time of the launch.

The Power Rank sees the same leaders as the ER Rank, i.e. the energy is spread evenly except for Vision[13] who shifted the accent to power and ended up below the 40th place in ER Rank.
The progress is better seen on the power chart in the same way as ER:

Hernanduer is so actively collecting power that he got surplus of it. For example, there are more than 500k of power in W2S12.

Here are the top power storages: 

• 578 W2S12 Hernanduer
• 473 W1S17 Hernanduer
• 247 W17S26 msvsergey
• 226 W18S22 msvsergey
• 220 E8N2 DarkTrooper7
• 185 W12N7 Vision
• 146 W8S11 Hernanduer
• 116 W4S19 Hernanduer
• 113 W9S19 Hernanduer
• 103 E18N4 DarkTrooper7

Players use virtually the same principle of power harvesting which is logically optimal: the attacking creep (ATTACK) and healing creeps (HEAL) ravage the bank while the carriers (CARRY) which already present on the spot pick up the power and carry it to the processing site. However, DarkTrooper7[20] merely destroys the banks by attacking them with RANGED_ATTACK+HEAL creeps. This is costlier but free of jams and allows to protect the bounty in case of any emergency.

Now check our video of the best battle of the season: chris[10] vs. Pascow[8].

The battle preceded the towers arrival. After they arrived, offence became more dangerous, logic more diverse. The key now is winning over the defending player on long energy expenses rather than just quickly storming his room. We will continue watching how these changes will affect future battles.