Plans for 0.4 (or 1.0?)
The biggest barrier to automation in 0.3 is the bare materials. Right now the only way to get the most useful materials (copper and iron) is to mine manually, or build a giant tunnel bore that filters out rare resources, and a way to transport them to your base (if your base is stationary).. Such a machine is very "end game", so that means you are stuck doing the most tedious task for most of a playthrough.
Exploration is pointless right now. Its possible to build vehicles, road factories, tunnel bores, etc, but hardly any reason to, other than to just reach more natural terrain for more veins.
The major 0.4 feature: creature spawners and creature-to-ore machines.
It would be easy just to make veins more rare and have every vein drop infinite resources, but slapping a few blocks on a vein to extract the materials isnt interesting. Learning the intricacies of a creature and how to kill it and collect the resources is.
Making creature spawners immobile and in randomly generated clusters also incentivizes making vehicles and long pathways.
Adding creatures also means a lot more traditional things like health, weapons, death.
Pictured: Creature spawners (pink) and creatures in a generated maze. Very early in development.
This means a lot of the back-end has to change for Roody:2d. Adding death means adding corpses, and looting your deceased corpse. Adding another interface that could store blocks (others are hotbar, backpack, and entire world) prompted a almost full rewrite of all those systems.
For various development reasons, the console and input systems are being overhauled. 0.4 will probably have the settings menu temporarily disabled, and replaced with a file you can edit with any text editor. Those menus will be brought back in a later update if not released in 0.4. The 0.3 options and keybindings are stored in simple binary files, so they are "fragile" to any changes. These text files should be more robust to future updates.
All these changes might be worthy of a 1.0.0 Beta (once bug free), but we'll see about that.
Comments
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Could you add blocks that lets signals cross without interference? Something like bridge block but for signals.
I have gotten this block recommend many times, but it's just compacting what is possible with like 8 blocks into 1 (for binary signals). Convenient, but not "2d".
Bridge block compacts like, I don't know, 20 - something blocks into 1 and makes it a lot more consistent. It also gives a lot more flexibility for container-extruder structures but just being an optional tube extension. Probably my least favorite block, but at least it's interesting.
Not having an easy wire crosser is what differentiates Roody:2d wiring from other wiring systems. A cheap difference that makes a lot of unique problems. Maybe those unique problems aren't fun in the long run, and more convenient wiring features will be added.