Electricity in Clonk has always meant taking a power producer, for example a windmill, and linking it to a power consumer with a power line.
While that sometimes led to interesting-looking bases that had the appearance of spiderwebs, those electric lines were not much more than a ressource. The player had to place them in a certain way – usually without a lot of playing room.

In OpenClonk we now have the definition of a base: the area covered by your flags.
The approach for the power is now to throw lines out and have consumers/producers in the same base automatically be linked. Producers increase the power balance of your base and consumers reduce it. Power balance above zero is good, power balance below zero not so much and means one consumer has to be turned off.
Sounds pretty straightforward, huh?

The advantage is now that we can use the concept of “weird lines running through your base” for something more interesting than power lines and something the player hopefully has some fun constructing – (because, hey, weird lines running through the landscape are actually pretty cool).

Two wind generators and a workshop

Hey folks,

Sven2 has reworked the digging system, and the Clonk is a lot more agile in close underground situations now. The Clonk does now not stop digging when he is hindered, for example by an obstacle or undiggable material, when you keep the mouse button pressed. If he is tumbling or falling, he will instantly restart digging, as soon as it is possible.
You can view the topic in the forum here: https://forum.openclonk.org/topic_show.pl?tid=368

The other important change is, that you can now start digging from scaling and hangling. This gives a huge boost in many situations, for example if you are stuck and could not free yourself, you can now just dig yourself out. If you are hangling on a very thin brigde out of loam, you can now dig a few pixels of them out, allowing you to pass through it. But of course, you can not dig vertically in the ceiling, this would be overpowered. All in all, this change is great in my opinion.

The Masterserver is still running and works fine. A very popular scenario, which seems to be the favourite of Sven2 at the moment (maybe because he can test the new digging system there), is “The Cavern“. It is a race from the bottom to the top in a high, but not very wide landscape. It also uses the new checkpoint system for races, which allows scenario developers to create a more complex route, or forcing the players to not always take the straight way.

We also have a screenshot series for you this time, which shows the scenario “The Cavern“. You can see how the new digging system looks like, and, if you have not played OC yet, how it looks ingame.