This patch has several new features in it. First of all, deer! I've always wanted to add more animals, so deer are just the beginning - I intend to add more down the line. Their AI is quite similar to the rabbits, which is why I started with them. They're nervous and very fast, but you can creep up on them in bushes. Shoot them in the legs to slow them down a bit. If you can catch them, they'll provide a good food source in those early stages of the game before you've got farming up and running.
Next, leg armor! Ever since launch, many NPCs have been protected with body armor and helmets, but they've always been vulnerable to being knocked over by shooting them in the legs. But not anymore as some characters will have leg armor now, so you'll have to vary up your tactics.
I've also changed the way armor works, a little. Previously when armor was damaged a few times, it disappeared, and was instantly replaced by another piece of armor if you happened to have one in your pocket. I've changed it so the armor doesn't disappear now, and you can't change armor in the middle of combat. Instead, it stays on you and can be repaired afterwards at workbenches. (NPC communities now have workbenches as well.) Idle characters will automatically repair their armor at the nearest workbench.
Why do this? I want to cut down on the amount of busywork you need to do to manage a community, and picking up every piece of armor and helmet you see on corpses, in order to use them as spares, felt like busywork to me. Now, once you've kitted a character out once you can just leave them to it as they'll repair their own armor when it gets damaged. Admittedly it wasn't the biggest problem but I figured I might as well do it while I was adding the leg armor. (Probably the biggest source of busywork imo is collecting gold from corpses, I do aim to address that at some point too.)
The next new feature is these cool blood effects:
Because it's a zombie game.
The rest of the patch is some small tweaks to this and that, Here's the full change list:
- Deer
- Leg Armor
- Armor can be repaired at workbenches, but you can't change your current armor while in combat
- Fancier Blood Effects
- Recover faster from damaged animations
- Aiming penalty when target is moving sideways or away from you
- When highlighting a campfire, workbench, etc, show recipes in a separate section at the bottom of the action menu if you have no ingredients for them
- Need less vodka to make bandages
- Some tweaks to the action menu
- Some crash fixes
The above will be in publicbeta for a time, as usual. I've also moved v135 to the main branch! v135 contains the (optional) new hud layout and optimizations, nicer grass, and some improvements to the action menu.
What's this publicbeta thing?
v136 will be in the "publicbeta" branch for a while, before pushing it to the main game. 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".