It's patch time! There's a lot of new dialog in this patch. It's a lot of little things, but probably the biggest addition is that when you ask people "What's up?" they will gossip about the skills of their other community members, telling you how bad someone is at archery or how great they are at construction, for example.
To help you keep track of all this I've introduced the Character Notes/Brain Scan screen. This was a feature in the original Survivalist - if you had a brain scanner, you could see a screen showing people's personality and opinions. I've reintroduced it, but you don't need a brain scanner. Their personality, relationships and skills are revealed as you discover them by talking to people. (If you have a brain scanner, everything is revealed automatically.) It's easiest to explain with a picture:
You can show that screen by highlighting a character and pressing B. I've also tried to make less likely that people will keep repeating the same lines in response to "What's up?", e.g. if you already know someone likes chili, they won't keep telling you that.
Another big dialog change is I rewrote the questions you ask to determine if someone has invisible strain. I wasn't very happy with the writing before. There are more of them now, and they're less waffly, and the responses are more varied so they help you discover people's personalities as well as if they have Invisible Strain. Speaking of Invisible Strain, infected characters can sometimes just silently kill people in your community now instead of biting them and spreading the infection.
Other notable additions
I've tried to increase the difficulty of fighting NPC communities by making looter settlements hire mercenaries from outside the map to come and attack you, if you are at war with them.
You can make people run when doing tasks for you, by ticking an Urgent checkbox on the Role display on the Inventory screen. They'll also take less time to craft and build stuff. There's a trade-off - they'll get unhappy that you're overworking them. But they will also respect you a little bit. You can also toggle this Urgent setting on and off by pressing the Sprint button as they are going about their task.
Here's the full list:
- Added Notes/Brain Scan screen showing the personality, skills, relationships and memories of the person you are talking to, if they are known
- Added dialog in reply to What's Up where people tell you about the skills of others in their community
- Rewrote the Invisible Strain interrogation dialog, and added the option to accuse someone of having Invisible Strain (available once that interrogation dialog is discovered)
- Characters with Invisible Strain can sometimes just silently kill people instead of infecting them
- When you are at war with a looter settlement, they will hire mercenaries to attack you
- When recruiting people from AI settlements, if more than one would be joining you they will ask if that's okay first
- Added surrender dialog for if you carry an unconscious enemy back to your base and bandage them and look after them until they revive
- Dialog for if you try to make an alliance with a community whose leader is dead
- Ask someone who's drunk what's up, they might say something drunk. Ask someone who's bleeding/infected how they're feeling, they should say 'I need bandages/antigen!'
- Added some other bits of gossip dialog, and tweaked some of the existing lines
- Added personality type for liking snacks/sweet food, which you can gift cookies to
- Extortion squads will demand to be let into your gates instead of just overriding the permission state
- Made it possible to open gates of an enemy community if they are all unconscious
- Some tweaks to LeadershipDefeated memory to give morale boosts when you defeat raiders
- Some tweaks to how roles are displayed on the Community screen
- Added Urgent checkbox to roles, which makes them run when they go about the task. Using this makes them dislike you but slightly respect you a bit over time.
- People chopping wood etc to take over a building can take more than one piece at a time
- Fix for refugees having a negative 'LeftCommunity' memory of others from the group after they all join you
- Fix for bandaging sound not playing in multiplayer
- Fix for it being possible to throw things outside the terrain boundaries, which could then cause a crash
- Allow depressed characters to be controlled if there is no leader, so you can choose a new one
- Fix for characters being able to repair or capture buildings outside of their zone
- Fix for glitch when you go unconscious in a building and NPCs rescue you, where you teleport back to the building
- Fix for NPCs declaring war on you when you throw a single snowball at them
- Fix for Stop Role: Supplies command not working
- Fix for an odd bug where you sometimes can't speak to people after an Invisible Strain character is deleted somewhere
- Fix for some Cyrillic characters not displaying correctly
- Fix for same turf war/rebellion/intimidation quest being given twice after change of leader
- Possible fix for multithreading crash
- Made game less likely to crash if a quest in a mod is deleted
What's this publicbeta thing?
v172 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".