Hello everyone, it's patch time! This one is mainly aimed at reducing the difficulty of Story Mode, particularly for newcomers. It turns out that if you release a game on Steam you suddenly get a lot more feedback about it, and one of the main trends is everyone saying Story Mode is too difficult. It's supposed to be easier than Sandbox Mode, at least at the beginning, as it's supposed to be the way people get introduced to the game. So, oops.
The biggest change is I've simply reduced the frequency of spawning raiders and suchlike, as I found one of the most common complaints was people didn't have enough time to do stuff as they kept having to defend their base.
Secondly I've stopped your Constitution from dropping over time (in Story and Sandbox) so you can get your recruits up to 1 star more quickly and avoid them dying so often. When I added Constitution originally I thought it needed to drop so you had an incentive to get the better food types like eggs and meat. But you still have that incentive - you'll gain points quicker if you eat better food. And it was confusing for newbies and annoying for everyone else to keep seeing the message saying someone's Constitution has dropped. (A lot of people gave me that feedback in the time since it was introduced so I'm hoping no one will be upset that it doesn't happen anymore).
Besides that I've added a bit more loot early on (e.g. I put a watering can in the Gas Station, as I've seen people thinking they need to fill their farmer's inventory with water bottles), slightly reduced the number of zombie spawnpoints in the early areas, and added more bushes in enemy bases for you to hide in (these won't take effect unless you start from scratch though). I've made the quest arrows on the minimap slightly bigger as I think people sometimes didn't notice them. And I've fixed some bugs that meant traders weren't restocking properly.
Part of what people were complaining about is that the game mechanics aren't all explained enough. This doesn't really address that (which would take a bigger patch with more translated text), but hopefully it gives people more room to discover them in their own time. If you're a new player who found something specific wasn't well explained early on I'd be interested to know what that was, as I might try and add a little bit more tutorially stuff later.
Lastly as well as the difficulty tweaks there have also been some more bug fixes - here's the full change list:
- Don't reduce Constitution over time
- Reduced frequency of roaming hordes, raiders, and especially mercenaries, in Story Mode. Slightly reduced zombie spawn points and looter skill in early areas, slightly increased loot. Also tweaked endgame.
- Added Dead Zone setting for gamepads
- Made quest arrows on minimap slightly bigger
- On XBox if you don't have GamePass show the GamePass sign-up screen when you click Join Game, not on startup
- Fix for Field of View not being saved on XBox
- Fix for We Have Cookies achievement being awarded too soon
- Fix for Place Map Marker button not being changeable in Controls Settings
- Fix for not finding name of community extorting you because you molotoved them during the speech that tells you their name
- Fix for FEMA sometimes not allowing you to surrender, and reduced minimum time between surrender attempts
- Fixes for Lost Item quest in map with no towns
- Fixes for traders sometimes not restocking
- Crash fixes
- Support for Brazilian Portuguese and Persian
- Updated Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Indonesian, Japanese, Latin American Spanish, Persian, Spanish and Turkish translations
EDIT (15th May) - released a hotfix for a crash in the above, so it's now v247:
- Small tweaks to early game hints
- Crash fix
And of course the previous patch, v245, is now on the main branch and XBox.
EDIT (22nd May) - I've now moved v247 to the main branch and XBox, the next patch isn't quite ready yet but I think v247 has been in publicbeta for long enough.
What's this publicbeta thing?
v247 will be in the "publicbeta" branch on Steam for a while, before pushing it to the main game and to XBox. If you want to try the latest features as they come out (and help test them!) it's a good idea to start using this branch. But keep in mind:
- Because it's the bleeding edge it could be less stable
- If you want to be able to play online co-op with someone you'll need to be on the same version as them
- If you go back from the "publicbeta" branch to the main branch you may not be able to load savegames created on "publicbeta".
To use publicbeta, just right-click on Survivalist: Invisible Strain in your Steam library and go to Properties, then Betas and in the drop-down select "publicbeta".