Habitopia – 10 Ways to Improve Habitarium

Item bag improvements

Don’t you think it’s great that you can put your full storages (or semi-full storages) back into your item bag without really losing the resources? I certainly do. Of course your resources ‘on hand’ will be listed as lower, but when you put the storage back ‘on the field’ your resources will reflect the additional resources of this storage as well. This means that you could keep harvesting forever and ever without having to spend resources to make more room in your storages. However, this does mean that your item bag will get cluttered with full, empty, partially filled and even unbuilt storages. It would be nice if somehow storages could be marked. This does save some time when finding that one empty storage you already build but put away for safekeeping. Now you have to either drag all storages out on the field to search for that one empty storage, or you would have to mark them yourself using the paint bottles, which can become a hassle if you have a lot of storages. Also the number of storages in my item bag is increasing every hour and my item bag is getting more cluttered at the same rate. Instead of having each building displayed separately, identical items could be stacked. So you don’t have 18 storages, but rather 1 pile stacked with a number 18 on it. This would be especially useful for the egg section of the item bag. Then the amount of eggs for all nine different egg types are sorted, which simplifies egg management significantly.

Max Level XP bar

When leveling up you can see how many experience points you have earned so far, but more importantly, it also shows how many experience points you still need towards the next level. When on max level, this feature is gone. Why? I would like to know how many more experience points I need to gather until the next purple gem will appear. Also, when leveling up you’ll see a total experience points that are added with each game update every thirty seconds or so. When on max level, this feature is also gone. So there is no way of knowing how fast my little friends are working. Sure they work hard, but we can’t give proper recognition for their hard work, because we simply don’t know just how hard they work.

Rotating and moving structures, decorations, and resource tiles

Yes, we all know that houses face left and nests, storages, hospitals and barracks face right. This fact can be highly irritating when arranging your Habitarium in a nice and organized way. Solution for it all, make the structures rotatable. That way we can let those hospitals face left if we please. This also holds for decorative items. And personally I’d love the possibility of moving around my resource tiles. For example have all resource tiles of one resource grouped. Or to be able to move that big lake a little to the right perhaps. Or maybe those trees that are blocking my view. Think of all the nicely organized Habitariums that would come of these changes.

Overview of your P3s and their attributes

Perhaps this is the most wanted improvement of all. As said earlier, with more and more P3s to manage in your Habitarium, things can become harder to manage. If you have placed one type of P3 to harvest one type of resource on one spot, like I have, then picking up that one P3 that is tired is a difficult task. It is not simply clicking on the P3 and getting the right P3. No it is more likely that you’ll have to drag a lot of P3s to another spot to be able to get that one tired P3. If only we had an overview of all P3s and their attributes. That way we could scan the overview and search for sleepy, hungry or ill P3s and instantly pick them up and place them in a house, hospital or barracks. This breakdown could also show how many P3s you have of each species and each type, so you can easily replace a P3 that has died of old age or enemy attack.

Soldier – area assigning

Maybe my soldiers are just really stubborn or it is actually a part of the game, but my soldiers seem to linger on the left side of my Habitarium and harassing the wood harvesters in the process. Not that this is a huge deal, it isn’t. But a disadvantage of this is that all my soldiers are on the left side when pests come invading my Habitarium. And you can guess where most of the pests arrive. Yes, right, you guessed correctly. So, with all the soldiers on the left and most of the pests on the right, those pests are having a great day. It would be great to assign a soldier to a specific area. Giving them the task to monitor a certain area, maybe dividing the screen in four quadrants or something. It would also be great if those soldiers are more intelligent. If a pest would go to the nearest attacker no one is fighting instead of all six soldiers going to the same pest, wouldn’t that be a dream coming true.

Barracks automatically ejecting soldiers when attacked

This basically speaks for itself. I think we can all agree that so far we didn’t notice the advantages in having a barracks. And for that cost, you would think there would be some advantage in having that building, upgraded and all. Well, I can think of a nice advantage and a good reason to have a barracks. Wouldn’t it be great if you can store all your soldiers, the warriors and defenders of your colony, in the barracks and as soon as pests come invading your territory, the soldiers would automatically go out onto the battle field and attack those nasty pests. Afterwards you can put them back into the barracks again. It also keeps your soldiers from harassing your workers, being in their way all the time. Or it prevents your soldiers from lingering on the left side of your Habitarium because the climate is so nice there.

Bigger screen size and lower quality options

The game field is getting bigger and bigger and it doesn’t fit in the game window anymore. Of course there is always the option of zooming out, but then your little P3s are too small to micro-manage. It would be great if there was an option for bigger game fields, like there is for normal Flash games, small, normal, large, etc. I’d like to see those little creatures up close and still be able to see the entire playing field. It would also be nice to have different quality options. Habitarium can become quite demanding on a computer’s processing capabilities if you leave the screen open. Maybe with lower quality options available, the game will be little less lagging.

Locking the game screen

Don’t you just hate it when you have set the game screen in such a way you can see the most of your Habitarium and then as you are busy dragging P3s to their homes, instead of the P3 dragging to the home, your screen starts to move. I do! It would be nice to be able to lock the game screen. This definitely keeps your game screen from moving all over the place.

Pause button

Being addicted as we are, we want to play Habitarium each day, but there are times that this just isn’t possible. The way the game is built now, this would mean coming back to a Habitarium of dead P3s and broken structures. It would be nice to actually have a pause game option. That way we won’t gain or lose anything during our absence. Our moods would definitely be better on vacation knowing that nothing bad is happening to our little P3s and their living environment. And yes, there is already an NC item to be able to freeze your game for you, but not all of us are able to buy neocash. We would like to see this be a feature for everyone, even if we had to buy this feature with in-game resources.

Other game play improvements

It would also be great if you could still see what type of egg your nester is incubating, even if you have reached maximum population. At the moment this is not shown and the only way to find out is going through all the eggs in your item bag. The second item bag improvement would be quite useful here too.

The gifting and fixing options for neofriends is a really nice feature to the game. I totally understand that this option is restricted so you don’t fix everything for your friend or feed all their P3s. However, the option is now set to once every 24 hours. It would be better if this is set to once every neoday. Basically this isn’t all that different, but I don’t keep track of the exact time I helped a friend. But in the game as it is now, I would have to remember that for all my neofriends, so I can help them out again the next day.

You might think that Habitarium and harvesting resources was just a fun game; you are wrong. It’s professional business, you know. And since you want to know exactly how many resources you can expect within a certain time frame, it is nice to know just how many harvesters you have per resource. So a toggle or an overview with the number of harvesters would be a nice addition.

This was only a small list of improvements that I came up with. I am sure that there are more things that could be improved or added in Habitarium. The goal of this article was just to inform and amuse you and maybe even TNT staff members tasked with improving Habitarium. If only one of these features would actually be implemented, that would be really great. Who know what will happen in the world of Habitarium.