Power Era has begun!

This is it. It’s happening. Power Creeps are here. A whole new Power Era in Screeps!

It’s been a long road indeed. The Power resource was introduced to the game in December 2015. The plans for development of the new Power Creeps concept were announced at the same time. Since then, we’ve heard numerous opinions, deeply analyzed all comments, suggestions and concerns of our community. The concept was changed, readjusted and reworked several times. This wasn’t the only reason of the delay of the release: since 2016 we’ve been focusing on other areas of the project that have more to do with optimization and reworking of the game engine than the game content itself. This was because the release of the game on Steam in 2016 resulted in the influx of players we weren’t ready for. However, a great deal of game content has been developed too: minerals, NPC invaders, market system, nukes, room visuals, world shards, tombstones, tunnels, events log. All these things were developed after we had announced Power Creeps, and we believe we didn’t spend time in vain but managed to improve the game in many aspects.

But now we are excited to announce the final release of the Power Creeps system in the game! We started its public beta on February 1, 2019 on the Public Test Realm, and after 1.5 months we can say it’s polished enough to go live.

What is power?

Power is an end-game mechanic opening a whole new trek in the development of your colony: towards increasing its effectiveness rather than the size of colonized territory. This is how its contents look like:
  • You mine a special resource called “power.”
  • Mined resource is processed in 8-level rooms and increase your account Global Power Level (GPL).
  • GPL allows for creation of Power Creeps — special hero units — and development their levels and skills (so called “powers”).
Read more about power mechanics in the documentation.

For now, the first (and likely the main) class has been developed and launched – Operator. All its superpowers are functional and ready to use. All but one (OPERATE_FACTORY) – we’ll leave a small intrigue to elaborate on later on our forum. Stay tuned!

Want to try it but don’t have sufficient power level? We have a surprise for you: you can instantly upgrade your Global Power Level to 3 right now! The only condition is having at least one Power Spawn in the game. The promo is active 30 days after the release, so Jump into Power Era now!

API changes

  • Introduced new object prototype PowerCreep and static method PowerCreep.create.

  • Added global properties Game.powerCreeps and Game.gpl.

  • Added property RoomObject.effects.

  • Added property StructureController.isPowerEnabled.

  • Increased code limit size to 5 MB for IVM users, since the Power Creeps feature introduces a new major coding challenge. Legacy shared VM limit remains at 2 MB.

  • Introduced new global object InterShardMemory. It supersedes RawMemory.interShardSegment which is now considered deprecated.

  • Some more optimizations of native PathFinder (driver#34 by laverdet).

  • Improvements in private server launcher, new configuration options log_console, log_rotate_keep, storage_disabled, restart_interval (launcher#6, launcher#4 by ags131).

  • POSSIBLY BREAKING CHANGE: optimized RoomPosition internal representation from an object with two numbers and a string to a 32-bit number (engine#87 by laverdet). List of known breaking changes:

    • Object.create(RoomPosition.prototype, ...) - please use new RoomPosition
    • Object.assign({}, rp) - properties on RoomPosition are no longer “own properties” so they won’t be picked up by functions that filter on own properties
    • rp.x = -1; rp.y = 50 - invalid values are no longer supported on RoomPosition
    • rp.roomName = 'e1s1' - lowercase room names will be converted to uppercase

This update is supported in private server version 3.3.0.


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