Big new patch in publicbeta (v155)

So, here's what I've been up to for the last few months! This patch is about a few different things.

Alliances

You can now negotiate an alliance with other settlements, either by getting them to like you, or fear you, or (in some cases) just giving them a lot of gold. If you have an alliance you can tell them to "Follow Me" and get them to help fight on your behalf, and they won't shake you down anymore if they are looters. You'll inherit their enemies and they'll inherit yours. You can use their mine if they have one - this replaces the dialog that let you negotiate mining rights, as it was very overlapping functionality. You can go inside their buildings and take their stuff, but they won't be happy about it and might end the alliance if you do it too much. Or you can give them stuff of course. Making alliances counts towards the progression bar if you are trying to complete the game by taking over the whole area, so you don't have to destroy everyone else.

Diplomacy

Looters will now send out enforcers from time to time to shake down you and the other settlements. The largest looter community on the map will also get suspicious of you as you grow your community and make alliances. They may demand you hand your guns over to them, or they may execute someone as a warning. Communities that are short of food may come asking you for some - you can give them it for free as a goodwill gesture, ask for the normal price, or gouge them for double the price. So with this and alliances my hope is you'll feel a bit more engaged with the communities around you, and they'll feel a bit more active.

You can also now surrender to people you accidentally started a war with. Target an enemy as if to attack them and press H (for Hands Up). They'll take your gold and supplies though.

It's also easier to identify looter communities as you approach them, because they'll have piles of skulls and gibbets outside.

One common slightly cheesy gameplay pattern is that people dump most of their gold in a nearby car before entering a looter base so they don't have it all taken off them. You now have a dialog option to pretend you only have 5 gold on you. (I realized recently that surrendering to people has the same issue though, I will sort that out in a later patch).

Lastly, you can "restrain" community members who are feuding with each other! It works similar to Choke Hold etc - you have to be strong enough. Oh, and you can knock on unknown communities gates to try and get someone to notice you.

Multiple Roles

Long-requested, now implemented, you can assign multiple roles to the same person. When you do a Set Role action it adds it to a list of roles instead of replacing what was there. The roles are performed in priority order from the top of the list. So for example you can set someone to be a Chef with top priority and a Lumberjack below that. As the Chef, if there's food to cook they'll cook it and leave it on the fire until someone eats it. While there's no food or no one has eaten it, they'll chop wood. You can manage the roles' priority order on the character info screen:

As another example, you could also set someone to be a Lumberjack with top priority and a Flint Miner second, and set the Wood limit for your community to be 50. They'll chop wood while the community has less than 50, and then they'll mine for Flint. In other words, they'll do the top priority thing until they can't, then they'll do the next priority thing, and so on. (What they won't do is schedule their time equally between roles or anything like that - just something to be aware of.)

Besides being convenient, this means you can get by with smaller communities than before.

Organization

I've added a dialog called Set Storage Policy that allows you to select what a equipment you prefer to store in a particular building. I've noticed a lot of people try to organize things manually, hopefully this comes as a relief to them.

This replaces the option you had on roles such as Lumberjack, Miner, etc where you could select "Store Supplies Here" to store the output of that role in a particular building. Now they will store it according to what you set in this dialog. But I've also added an Organizer role which will automatically look for stuff that's in the wrong building and take it to the right one. So you can just dump stuff in any building and someone will sort it out. (This is a good use for the multiple roles thing mentioned earlier).

I've also added an Auto Deposit function on the Equipment Policy dialog. It complements the Auto Collect setting I added previously, so for example you can now set people it automatically pick up gold and automatically deposit it in the "Gold" chest next time they are near it.

Constitution and Savegames

When I started the beta for this game I introduced save tokens, but it never really worked out the way I wanted it to. It's supposed to make the game feel more like a story where mistakes, twists and tragedy are part of the plot, and you don't just reload a recent savegame if something tragic happens or you select a dialog choice with unexpected consequences. Instead it mostly just meant that the crucifix save tokens are another resource you have to farm by killing a few zombies from time to time. I didn't feel that it really stopped me from save scumming, most of the time.

In this patch I've changed it so, if you are using save tokens, the game saves automatically to a special "current" save slot (without using up a save token) whenever you open the menu. So whenever you exit the game, it will be saved - but it's always saved, you can't choose not to. Save tokens still exist and allow you to make occasional checkpoints you can go back to, but they are much more rare than they used to be. (I think this system is like the one in Kingdom Come: Deliverance which was a bit controversial. But as before, you can choose not to use it at all when you start your game, or from the F8 debug menu).

One issue with this is that the game is quite unforgiving - characters can die very easily due to small mistakes or accidents. To mitigate this, I've added a new skill called Constitution. A character's constitution skill gives them little extra chunks on their Blood Loss bar. If Constitution is higher than 0, when their blood loss hits the limit, instead of dying, they will fall unconscious and keep bleeding out until they fill those extra chunks. This gives you time to rescue them, more time if their constitution is higher. Constitution also controls their susceptibility to damage (previously Fitness did that) and it slows down the speed with which infection takes hold.

There is one caveat - White Strain and Invisible Strain still have no cure. I am not sure if that's too unforgiving, or if it's good that there's still something that dangerous out there to gives the game more tension.

So you want to make sure your community members have high Constitution. How do you do that? By giving them good food. Better food will increase their Constitution skill more, while rotten or gross food will reduce it. It will also reduce a little by itself over time. So you now have more of a reason to ensure your community members are well fed, e.g. by raising chickens. There will also be a little trade-off between morale and constitution as some foods like cookies are great for morale, while others are better for constitution. (I think this isn't quite all there yet but that's the idea). I always felt food and farming wasn't relevant enough to the gameplay, so this should help with that.

Another thing I've done to make the game more forgiving is, if you fall unconscious from blood loss and you have no community to rescue you, the screen will fade to black and you will be "rescued" by a nearby settlement. You'll wake up in their base, and if they're looters they will have stolen something, and you'll have lost 1 star of the Constitution skill. You start with 2 stars by default, so it sort of functions like a "lives" system - if you run out then you're really dead.

Lastly, if "you", the main character and community leader, dies, the game doesn't end anymore! Your community can continue without you and there are dialog options to vote for a new leader, who will then become the new "you" ;) So that's a bit more like State of Decay or a Roguelike I suppose.

So those are the main changes, sorry about the wall of text there. To test it I did a full playthrough, which always takes me a really long time as I tend to find bugs or just something I don't like every five minutes. I do think there will probably be a lot of bugs in this because I was still finding them and fixing them up till the end, and every time I fix something there's a danger it will affect something else that I wouldn't immediately notice. But it's time to get it out there as people have been wondering where I've been ;) It's only in publicbeta for now of course, so be aware that it might be more "beta"-y than normal for a while. I do strongly recommend starting a new playthrough for it.

Here's the full changelist:

• Alliances
• Ability to assign multiple roles to the same person
• Added a dialog to choose which buildings people prefer to store different types of equipment. Added an Organizer role which will just go around putting stuff in the right place. (Removed the old way of setting which building to put harvested resources in)
• Added auto deposit if nearby base option to equipment policy
• Looter communities will send enforcers to harass other communities
• Communities low on food can give you quests to find more for them
• Surrender to AI enemies that you provoked a war with, by targeting one and pressing H
• Ability to restrain people who are feuding
• If you carry an unconscious human body to a community they ask you to drop it, but will consider you to have rescued it. But if you pick up a body in their own base they'll consider it stealing.
• Looters have piles of skulls and gibbets outside their bases so you'll have some forewarning that they're going to shake you down if you go there.
• Looters are less likely try to shake you down if they're outnumbered
• Non-looter communities are less likely to have asshole personality flags
• You can knock on unknown communities gates to try and get someone to notice you
• Changed the quest where you have to burn someone's living quarters so you only have to destroy one building instead of all of them, also increased the gold payments for all of those quests
• Added Constitution skill, which lets you fall unconscious instead of dying of blood loss, if it's greater than 0
• If you fall unconscious and have no community members to revive you, other communities will 'rescue' you - this reduces your constitution
• Constitution reduces over time but is increased by eating healthy foods, so there's more incentive to get good foods like meat and eggs
• Can use kiln to bake corn cookies which reduce fitness, and don't help constitution, but greatly improve morale (so there's a trade-off between health and morale)
• Show more info about nutrition and tastiness on food action menu
• Added German and French translations, and updated Chinese
• Split Spanish translation into separate European and Latin American sheets
• Added theoretical support for Ukrainian language, in case anyone is able to work on a translation, and Danish
• Fix for AI getting stuck between retreating to base and attacking if leader of a funeral squad is attacked and starts fleeing
• Fix for Lost Item quest giver continually saying it should be here, if you keep it for yourself
• Fix for action menu going off the bottom of the screen
• Fix for chickens triggering pit traps when you are carrying them
• Fix for miners of poor deposits not eating anything once they start mining
• Fix for NPCs walking a long distance from their base to skin a dead dear
• Fix for ex not being visible in Dark Past quest
• Fix for NPCs getting stuck on traps unable to pathfind over them even if they are aware of them and wouldn't be killed
• Fix for chickens getting stuck continually drinking from bowls until they are empty
• Fix for speech animation repeating
• Fix for raiders sitting in cars or buildings for ages trying to get warm
• Made it possible to clear dead crops
• Made it cheaper to pay for bandaging
• Added memory for feeding human meat to chickens, so people disapprove of the person who did it, not the chickens themselves
• Added dialog to give or sell people water if they are thirsty
• Don't automatically recruit looters who surrender, and enable the options to take their stuff and/or make them run away
• Adjusted skill progression for building things
• When saying something's too heavy to carry, say the name of the thing
• You can now only place mines on rich mineral deposits. (Look out for rocks and boulders with the desired mineral type)
• Make sure chefs in AI settlements have axes, so they don't go wandering into towns to find wood
• Reduce immoral characters preference for human meat
• Allow characters to move while narrating about stuff like a deer they just found
• Can right click on equipment in inventory as shortcut to transfer whole stack without showing the dialog box
• Make cooking pot and watering can at forge
• Fix for not being able to set names of crafting props such as kilns etc
• Show some text when placing a gate to tell you which is Inside and which is Outside
• If an equipment prototype is deleted from a mod, allow savegames to load, just delete any instances of that equipment
• Fix for crash while carrying something in multiplayer
• Fix for crash when deleting a feeding trough
• Fix for crash when savegame is missing thumbnail

What's this publicbeta thing?

v155 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".