Every feature planned for this mod is now built and working: the WarpHog, warp mining/forestry vehicles, the fast locomotive, five speed-boosted trucks, WARP-fueled cargo ships, denser power/steam generation, and the pollution-reversal loop. The last several versions have all been stability and quality-of-life fixes (crash fixes, stuck-vehicle recovery, terrain tolerance) rather than new features.
So now it's a balance question, and that's a direction I'd rather get from the people actually playing it than decide alone. Below is an honest rundown of where the numbers currently sit, followed by the questions I need answered to know where to take it next.
State of balance, as of v14.101.0
Read this as a plain description of what exists today, not a defense of it — some of this is deliberately extreme and was built that way on purpose, some of it just hasn't been revisited since it was first tuned.
Everything unlocks from one research node, early. "Warp Technology" costs 16 months and sits right next to the very first vehicle-unlocking node in the whole tree. There is no tiered gating — a player who beelines it gets the entire mod (teleporting vehicles, 3x power density, pollution reversal, everything below) before they'd normally even have a proper truck fleet.
Vehicles:
- WarpHog, Warp Excavator, Warp Tree Harvester, Warp Tree Planter all teleport to their job/dig/harvest/plant site instead of driving — this is the mod's core gimmick, not a bug.
- The WarpHog additionally gets absolute job priority — it's picked over every other truck for a job whenever one is available, regardless of distance.
- The WarpHog is buildable from every depot tier, including the most basic one (vanilla amphibious trucks require a T2+ depot).
- Five separate trucks (T1/T2/T3 tank/T3 dump/Amphibious) don't teleport, but get a flat 5x speed/acceleration/braking boost over their vanilla counterpart at the same capacity.
- Warp Tree Planter carries 16 saplings (2x vanilla's 8).
- Warp Excavator now ignores terrain slope entirely for pathing (steep ground vanilla excavators can't reach is fair game).
Power & steam:
- WARP Generator (T1/T2) produce 3x the electricity of the equivalent Diesel generator for the same fuel consumption rate.
- The WARP-fuelled Gas Boiler recipe produces roughly 3x the high-pressure steam of any vanilla fuel option.
Fuel production: the WARP Fuel Refinery turns Waste Water + Seawater + Crude Oil into WARP Juice at what amounts to a very favorable conversion given it also throws off Brine, Sour Water, Steam and Sludge as usable byproducts, not real waste.
Shipping: a cargo ship fuelled on WARP Juice completes its round trip in half the normal time, on top of a physical speed boost that turns out to be mostly cosmetic (trip time is dominated by a fixed world timer, not ship speed).
Pollution — the most unusual piece: burning WARP Juice for power/steam gives off a real, purple "WARP Exhaust" byproduct. Venting it at a Smoke Stack doesn't just avoid adding pollution the way clean fuels do — it actively drains the map's air pollution buffer while it runs. Dumping WARP Juice itself at a Liquid Dump does the same thing to water pollution. Both are net-negative pollution sources, not neutral ones — something no vanilla mechanic does.
Net effect: taken all together, this is currently much closer to a "cheat mod" than a balanced addition — one cheap, early node gives instant transportation, triple power density, half-time shipping, and a way to actively erase pollution instead of just avoiding it.
The questions
1. Cheat mod, or blend into the game's own balance?Two real directions, and I'd rather commit to one than leave it half-and-half:
- Keep it powerful, own it. Treat WarpHog as a deliberate "easy mode" / sandbox-toy mod. Minimal nerfs, maybe even lean further into the fun.
- Bring it in line with vanilla progression. Tone down the multipliers, remove or reduce the free pollution-reversal, and generally make it a strong-but-fair option alongside vanilla tech rather than a clear upgrade to everything.
2. Tech tree: one node, or spread through the tree?
- Stay as one node. Simple, and it's already right at the start.
- Split it up. Each vehicle/machine unlocks at a point in the vanilla tree that matches its "tier" — e.g., the WarpHog next to the first truck node like now, but WARP Generator II gated behind whatever unlocks Diesel Generator II, WARP-fuelled cargo ships behind the relevant shipping tech, etc. More work to design, but it'd feel far more integrated and would naturally slow down how fast someone gets the strongest pieces.
3. If balance changes — where specifically? Pick anything from the state-of-balance section above you'd actually want touched. Some concrete candidates if it helps to have starting points:
- Lower the generator/boiler output multiplier (3x) to something more modest?
- Give WARP Juice production a real cost/prerequisite instead of being available turn one (e.g., require Oil Refining or a water-tech node first)?
- Tone down or remove the pollution-reversal effect specifically (keep it clean-but-neutral instead of actively net-negative)?
- Add a real cost or limitation to teleporting itself (e.g., an Upoints cost per warp, a cooldown, or a distance-scaled WARP Juice cost) instead of it being free once built?
- Drop or reduce the WarpHog's absolute job-priority over other trucks?
4. Would a config option make more sense than picking one answer? Instead of choosing cheat-mod vs. balanced for everyone, would you rather have a settings file where you dial the multipliers yourself? That's more work to build and maintain than a single hardcoded balance pass, so it's worth knowing if there's real demand for it before committing to it.
5. Cosmetics vs. power, split apart? Right now the purple paint job, the WarpHog model, and the teleport-poof effect ship bundled with all the performance changes. Is there any interest in being able to take the look without the power (or vice versa), or is that over-engineering something nobody actually wants split up?
6. Anything not on this list? If there's a part of the mod that feels off and isn't mentioned above, say so — this list is what I could think of, not the full set of possible concerns.
Reply with whatever combination of these you've got an opinion on — doesn't need to be all six. The next few versions will be tuned based on what comes back here rather than more guessing on my end.
