Hey everyone, I have a done a patch :) This one is such a mishmash but I guess the biggest new feature is there can be multiple ammo types for the same weapon. For bows you have flint arrows (which are easiest to make), iron arrows (which do more damage), and steel arrows (which do more damage and are better at piercing armor). For assault rifles and sniper rifles I've also added armor piercing ammo. You need both lead and steel to make them, so there's more incentive now to get one of each of the different types of mines.
There's a lot of quality of life stuff, like you can demolish picnic tables and barricades, you can press Tab to switch to the person you're talking to, you can see who is currently assigned to a crafting prop, you can assign one person to make charcoal in multiple kilns, you can stop the minimap from rotating. I gave the character boxes more space on the community screen so it's easier to see people's roles now:
Besides that there's a bunch of bug fixes, and just doing stuff that felt unfinished, like making snowballs and snowmen melt, allowing multiple characters to occupy fire lookout towers, fixing glitches in the way terrain is modified and resetting it if you demolish a trap.
Several translations have been updated. There has been a longstanding effort to translate the game into Russian, which is now finished, so I've added it. I'm going to be sending any income I get from Russian Federation to the National Bank of Ukraine though.
Here's the full list of updates in v178:
- Make it possible to demolish props like picnic tables or barricades using the toolbox
- If you take over a defeated community's gate, or build a new one connected to their fences, the fences will become yours too
- Some fixes to how buildings modify the terrain underneath them
- Reset terrain height when you demolish a pit trap, or a building that construction hasn't started on
- Looters can blow up uncovered traps, otherwise it's an exploit as you could surround your base with them and stop anyone from getting in
- Allow up to 4 characters to occupy the fire lookout tower and weather radar, facing in 4 directions
- Option to stop minimap from rotating
- Stop your character from walking off while you're scrolling the action menu
- Made the character icons on the community screen bigger with their roles always shown on a bottom row
- Put cooking and crafting options for campfires, workbenches, etc on a submenu
- On the action menu for a crafting prop, show all the workers currently assigned to it and allow you to select them
- Allow you to assign someone to craft the same recipe at different crafting stations - e.g. make charcoal using 2 different kilns
- Allow you to click Craft on crafting stations that someone is already using
- Gunpowder is now made at a workbench, not a campfire
- Disabled sunflowers and corrugated iron as they weren't serving much purpose
- If you are facing someone in your own community, pressing Tab (or right stick click) switches control to them. Moved Brain Scan/Notes to RT on gamepads.
- Support multiple ammo types for guns and bows, including armor piercing varieties
- Blunt melee weapons do some damage to armor, some to body. Sharp ones mostly get absorbed by armor but do some damage to body
- Different melee weapons have a different fatigue penalty when attacking, and bows cost some fatigue to aim
- Recipes only become visible once their ingredients have been discovered, and/or you have someone with high enough skill and the required crafting station. You get notifications when this happens.
- Made eating, drinking and opening gate sounds fall off more quickly with distance, so they're less obtrusive in large communities
- Added sounds for planting, watering and harvesting crops
- White markings on edges of roads
- If you leave your damp clothes in a building they will dry over time
- Snowmen, snowballs and snow in containers all melt
- Added Russian, updated French, Italian, Latin American Spanish, Lithuanian, Turkish and Ukrainian
- If you die and replace community leader with someone who is already married, sleeping with or friends with someone, you can trigger the satphone quest with them
- NPCs won't abandon their settlement while their leader is still conscious, as doing so breaks Rebellion/Turf War/Intimidation quests that require you to kill the leader
- Added a Spared Life memory type for when someone surrenders and you let them go without further consequences
- Added a Started Fight memory so people will remember a feud even if they get restrained from hurting anyone
- Added a Died memory type for when someone dies of zombie bites or natural causes like thirst etc
- If you give someone a gift and they like/don't like it, you learn that aspect of their personality
- Allow bunny feeding quest to be finished if either participant feeds the bunny
- Fix for clothes getting wetter than they should while walking across frozen rivers
- Fix for winter food stocks mission paying you too much for food
- Fix for NPCs thanking you for bringing unconscious strangers to their base
- Fix for controlled character often being slow to do things (like rip up clothes) when indoors
- Fix for camouflage icon taking ages to go green when you move away from an AI settlement
- Fix for your characters instantly joining an allied community if you declare war on them
- Fix for biggest looter community extortion squad sometimes getting stuck trying to force other communities to ally with it
- Fix for issue where people kept picking up and dropping bodies in older savegames with square bases, possible fix for bug where the bodies sometimes teleported to the edge of the map in multiplayer
- Fix for situation where someone exited a watchtower surrounded by zombie, also if someone surrenders to you when you are in a watchtower you can answer them without leaving it
- Fixes for opinion graph showing incorrectly on some speeches
- Prevent player from starting war by accidentally punching a chicken to death during fisticuffs
- Crash fixes
That will be in the publicbeta branch, meanwhile I've moved v177 to the main branch so everyone will have diagonal fences and polygonal AI settlements, the Log page and Steam Deck support, the Basket and Checkout on the trading screen, the Character Notes/Brain Scan screen and relationships matter when recruiting, etc.
About six months ago I made myself a list of all the stuff I felt Sandbox mode really needed if it wasn't to feel "unfinished". It wasn't the most glamorous new features, more like a lot of stuff I'd just been putting off like the Log screen, a lot of Quality of Life stuff and so on. Well, with this update I'd say I've now - pretty much - got through that list!
What that means is it's time for a new phase of Survivalist: Invisible Strain development. I need to start focusing more on Story Mode. I always said there'd be a Story Mode and the game won't get out of Early Access without it. It will serve as an introduction to the game (which is still pretty challenging for newcomers) as well as being the best showcase for the role-playing elements and letting me build some more clearly defined environments and characters. Sandbox Mode kind of grew to accommodate its own loose story and I think some of the missions I added (such as relationship quests) will also be side quests in Story Mode. Over the course of making it, I became a lot more interested in procedural story generation. But the intention was always to use Sandbox Mode to get the game mechanics straight and then use that accumulated knowledge to make Story Mode.
Now I say I "pretty much" got through the list, because I've been doing some playthroughs and there are still things that bug me, like the way your crafters can still sometimes end up full of unwanted containers and you have to sort their inventory out for them. The morale system needs some more tweaking, and I feel that your community members ought to do more emergent stuff, like start relationships and friendships with each other as well as "you", the player. I'll be working on those as I go.
There will probably always be more stuff like that cropping up. I haven't got Story Mode all planned out and I think as I work on it, I'm likely to still be adding more features that will be part of Sandbox Mode too. So you'll keep getting updates but they might be a bit further apart.
I also think once this v178 update has bedded down I'm going to be raising the price to $9.99 USD (that's ¥42, or €9,75, £8.50, according to Steam's pricing tool). People keep telling me it's too cheap, and we're living in inflationary times. And as I alluded earlier, Sandbox Mode has come a long way since launch. I'll give some more warning before I do though, so there'll be plenty of chance to buy it before that happens, if you haven't already. And of course there will always be Steam Sales and Weeklong Deals.
What's this publicbeta thing?
v178 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".