Hey there, Landlords!
As promised, we're back with the first bigger update for The Tenants - the April Update. We've taken the time to address as many of the most pressing issues as possible with this patch, including the ability to filter phone notifications, adjust wall display settings in renovation mode, and a bunch of necessary balance tweaks. Of course, we've also prepared a variety of new content for you to play around with! We'll go over the bigger changes in more detail now, but feel free to scroll to the bottom of this post if you just want to see the raw changelog.
New furniture and jobs
As we've mentioned in the last announcement, the April Update brings over 250 new items to the game, a number of new jobs, and an Elite Contract to design a climactic Hunter's Cabin. Some of the content will be available for everyone right at the beginning of the game, but we've also introduced 20 new in-game levels that contain the prettiest of the new treasures.
If you haven't joined our official Discord server (available here) yet, consider doing it now, as most of the new items were based on the ideas posted by our fellow community members on the dedicated suggestions channel. This is just the beginning and it goes without saying that we'll keep adding new furniture sets, materials, and jobs throughout the entire development of The Tenants.
Finances panel changes
One of the most important tasks that every landlord has to face is managing their finances properly. Previously, the game did not show all of your properties across all districts in the finances overview panel, as we naively thought it would clutter the screen too much and would only annoy players. It turns out we were wrong!
The finances panel will now show Agent-controlled properties in a simplified manner, allowing you to gauge all of your finances quickly. As a result, the income panel on the bottom will finally consider all of your income sources. Additionally, you'll be able to now pay all the bills with a single press of a new button, and if you're not a fan of constant micromanaging, you'll even be able to toggle on automatic payments.
Smart snapping
We also wanted to improve on the part of the game where players spend the most amount of time in, that is, the renovation mode. We've heard some complaints about how hard it is to smoothly place items next to each other in an organized way. The addition of smart snapping should make this much easier, eliminating the need to yell out in annoyance when arranging those pesky kitchen countertops. In short, while holding the designated key, your item will snap to the closest wall or other furniture in the proximity, automagically predicting where you want it to go. Since this feature is still a bit experimental, we'll gladly welcome all of your feedback!
Save system tweaks
As you may already know, keeping the players' save files intact throughout the whole Early Access development is a tall order, especially when adding so many new features and implementing big sweeping changes to the entire game. Nonetheless, our plan has always been to reach down for the full save wipe only when all other possibilities have been exhausted. And thus, we segue to the corrupted save files problem. Sometimes the game may crash in the middle of a save operation, and the save file becomes irreversibly corrupted. Earlier, we introduced a single save backup that players could try to manually restore in hopes that the previous file hadn't met the same fate. Of course, as it often is with temporary solutions, it was pretty cumbersome to use and didn't always yield positive results.
Now the game will first save your game to a temporary file and will only replace the main save file once it makes sure no issues occurred. Additionally, the game will now store an array of previous autosave files, and in case of an emergency, will automatically restore the last working file. As always, we'll keep an eye out for further potential issues with our new fail-safe system.
Settings app
Many of you have mentioned on the forums, on our Discord server, and even in the reviews, that there are just too many notifications popping up on the screen, even when you have a measly few tenants to manage. We've decided to solve this by introducing a new Settings app for the in-game phone. There you'll be able to select exactly what kind of text messages you want to be notified about. In the future, we'll be adding even more settings to further customize your experience.
Wall display modes
Due to popular demand, we've added a few toggles to the renovation mode UI where you can switch between three different wall display modes:
- Show all walls - all the walls are always fully rendered,
- Smart hide walls - only the exterior walls facing the camera are fully rendered,
- Hide all walls - all the walls are only partially rendered.
Uncle action queue
Another feature that has been greatly requested by the community is the ability to queue actions with Uncle Steve. We're happy to report that it's found its way to the game, alongside other tweaks that should make Steve fans happy.
Balance changes
Balance is something that we will keep working on over the course of the game's development. During the last month, we've taken some time to analyze the in-game economy from multiple perspectives, and with this update, we're launching the first major batch of balance-related changes. First and foremost, we wanted to address the inconsistencies in our financial model, which made the game and the amount of money you could make feel arbitrary and random. Hence, we've rebalanced all property prices, bill amounts, profit margins, as well as reworked many of the in-game algorithms, including the rent calculation algorithm, how tenant ratings work, and the way agents negotiate lease extensions.
Additionally, to reduce the snowballing potential, we've implemented an income tax system. Don't worry though, you won't instantly go broke, as the brackets and rates we've chosen follow a gentle progression curve to make sure the game remains fair.
It's important to note that the playthroughs started before this patch might become even more imbalanced due to the sheer amount of changes. We advise starting fresh for the best experience!
A new batch of player avatars
We wanted to give players more options to express themselves, and thus we've added a big batch of new portraits to choose from. Namely, we've received a lot of requests for more bearded variants and we're happy to respond to the demand ːtt_happyː Check out some of the fresh additions in the picture below.
Full changelog
Content
- Added a new Elite Contract: Renovate the Hunter's Cabin.
- Added 4 new renovation jobs in the Suburbs.
- Added 287 new furniture items (including kitchen countertops, wall cabinets, tv stands, modular couches, new decorations, and many others).
- Added 20 extra player levels (max level is now capped at 70).
- Players will receive some of the new content retroactively by simply loading the game.
General
- Implemented the ability to pay all bills at once.
- Implemented automatic payments, togglable for each property independently.
- Implemented a new in-game phone app, Settings, to allow players to toggle notifications they want to receive.
- Reworked save system to first save the game to a temporary file before overwriting the main save file. Will also keep an array of autosave backups (made every 5 minutes) to restore an older game state automatically, should the game detect issues on load.
- Fixed an issue with player apartments housing 0 tenants sometimes irreversibly bricking the save file.
Tutorial
- Reworked the portion of the tutorial regarding player storage to be more informative.
- Removed the requirement to take out a loan in the Bank tutorial.
Renovation
- Implemented smart snapping, a feature that aids players in furniture placement.
- Implemented the ability to switch between different wall display modes when renovating.
Uncle Steve
- Implemented the ability to queue actions.
- Players can now fully manipulate the camera when in the middle of an action.
- Implemented action canceling when attempting to move during an action.
Balance
- Rebalanced all property prices and bill amounts.
- Some bills will now scale with the number of tenants housed.
- Reworked customer ratings, rent calculation, and agent's rent handling to reduce variance.
- Tenants and job clients will no longer value expensive items as aggressively. Certain items will now hold both a base value and a modifier as per tenant's interests, the pool of which has been expanded to make each archetype more unique. Additionally, each subsequent item rating will be added to the previous scores and an average of ratings will be used to produce the final result. This should make Exceptional ratings more challenging to hit, all the while relying more on matching the right combination of items rather than getting a lot of random expensive decorations.
- Introduced a progressive income tax system.
- Agents will now collect a share of revenue as part of their compensation, on top of the daily rate.
- Toned down global events' frequency.
Camera
- Improved camera collisions with buildings so that it is now much harder to find yourself inside the empty models while moving.
- Tweaked the starting camera position for all properties (better height and viewing angle when entering the property).
- Improved camera interactions with the terrain and a variety of small objects.
- Improved camera targeting when quitting the 'follow' camera.
- Disabled free camera movement in the 'follow' camera.
- Disabled camera movement that could occur when interacting with the UI via left or right mouse button presses.
- Fixed zooming issues in renovation.
- Fixed a critical problem with the camera behaving erratically when moving and rotating at the same time (typically when holding the middle mouse button).
- Fixed a bug with the camera that would sometimes cause it to jump out of the apartment bounds when following a tenant.
- Fixed an issue with the rotate button that allowed for entering building interiors.
- Fixed a rare bug where the camera would display erratic behavior when a lot of control buttons were being pressed simultaneously.
- Fixed an issue with the camera jittering when holding down the drag button (typically the right mouse button).
UI
- The finances overview panel will now display all properties across all districts.
- The finances overview panel will now display projected Agent expenses.
- The Player app will now display player lifetime earnings.
- Added development roadmap to the main menu.
- Fixed a few finances history panel inconsistencies.
All the best,
The Tenants Team