Hey, it's patch time! This past month I've mostly been concentrating on the upcoming Story mode but I managed to get in a few new features as well. The biggest is called "Hit the Road". If you have a working vehicle with a full tank of fuel, you can drive to one of the places where roads exit the map and use the Hit the Road option that will appear on the action menu. This means you leave the map behind for good, taking with you just the vehicle and any characters and equipment you have in it, and move to a newly generated map.
Different roads out have different traits - some will have more towns, some more survivors, and some more infected.
Think of it as sort of a New Game Plus feature. People have often asked me for the ability to take their characters to a new map, since they get attached to them but run out of things to do with them once they've taken over a map. Having added vehicles now I thought it would be interesting and logical to tie the feature to them. In order to use it you'll have to fix up a vehicle and get enough fuel, which means growing either maize or sunflowers and building a Still to convert them into large enough quantities of gas or diesel - in other words, you'll have to have progressed pretty far. I will probably also use it as one ending for story mode, where you drive off into a generated sandbox map.
On the new map you won't get the tutorial quests telling to find an axe, etc, but other than that you'll be starting from scratch. The characters you take with you will retain their stats and memories of, and relationships with, each other, but forget stuff relating to people you left behind. They won't go with you if it means leaving their friends and family behind. It'll be the same time of year, plus approx one day. You'll be low on fuel, so if you want to hit the road again you'll need to grow some more crops and build another Still (unless you thought to bring a few full jerry cans with you).
Besides that I've added a horn to the vehicles (press space bar), so you can drive through a town beeping and wake up all the zombies :) I increased your sight range in vehicles so you can see more of what's in front of you, and I increased the draw distance for grass which often looked bad for longer sight ranges. I've upgraded to a more recent version of Unity, which is always a bit nerve-wracking - hope it doesn't cause any weird problems. Based on user feedback I made arrow crafting more generous and lower level zombies a bit less likely to dodge melee attacks, and vehicles can now carry 50% more equipment.
I've made it so you have to go into a building at least once to see what equipment is inside it - always felt a bit weird that you could see everything just by standing near the building and highlighting it. Now the building will say "Not Yet Investigated" and you won't be able to "Take All" until you've entered it at least once. I didn't do this with vehicles or most other props though as I felt that would be making you do too much busywork. And I fixed a bunch of bugs.
Here's the full change list:
- Added Hit the Road feature which allows you to drive to another map, leaving the current one behind forever and just taking the people and supplies you can fit in your vehicle
- Added vehicle horn
- Added Excavator prop (not drivable sorry)
- Added selection box in script editor (hold rmb and drag)
- You have to enter a town building at least once to be able to see what's in it and use the Take All and Scavenge actions
- If an enemy community sees you have pit traps, they will still not be able to avoid tripwires, and vice versa
- Increased sight range a little when in vehicles, also increased the amount of equipment they can carry by 50%
- Increased the default distance grass is drawn to stop the unsightly effect where hillsides on the periphery of your vision are bare, but added a slider in Graphics settings in case you need to reduce it for performance
- Made ammo crafting more generous
- Made zombies a little less likely to dodge melee attacks, especially the lower strains and if you attack their torso or legs. Made NPCs less likely to dodge if you attack them from behind (zombies already never did).
- Updated German, Hungarian, Latin American Spanish, Lithuanian, and Ukrainian translations
- Upgraded to Unity 2023.1.7f
- Fix for chefs getting stuck sometimes
- Fix for NPCs not rebuilding outhouses if portable toilets are destroyed
- Fix for snow on moving vehicles
- Fix for characters involved in repairing a vehicle or capturing a building sometimes wandering miles away to get resources they have in their inventory
- Fix for character briefly standing up after leaving a building crouching
- Fix for not being able to repair wooden chests
- Crash fix
What's this publicbeta thing?
v190 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".