For the last few months I've mainly been working on Story Mode, and I've now finished and done a full playthrough of it! - or at last what I'll call a "first pass" of it. If you want to play story mode as a completed final product I wouldn't recommend playing this just yet, but if you want to play an early draft and help out with testing, here it is! :) I'm not quite sure how much I'll add or change of story mode in future, we'll see how it goes.
Reading people's comments about the game, I see a bit of a split between people saying "When is Story Mode coming?" and people saying "It doesn't need a Story Mode!" When I first started making the game I thought Story Mode would be the main thing and I just added Sandbox Mode as a quick way to playtest the game mechanics without having to write a full story. Over time, however, I got to be more interested in procedurally generated storytelling and decided I wanted to spend more time developing Sandbox Mode. Part of the early access pitch was that I would do a Story Mode though, so I figured after 3 years it is Time! But I would say now that I no longer think of Story Mode as the "main" mode - they have about equal status in my mind.
There's been a bit of a blurring between them anyway - you'll see a lot of the procedural quests from Sandbox mode such as the relationship/friendship quests showing up in Story Mode as well. But having a defined map does allow for more realistic and interesting locations, and more complex plots. I also threw in a fun little special feature for Story Mode that would have probably been too unbalanced on a Sandbox map :)
Besides Story Mode I also got stuck for a while trying to do some optimizations. I'm not sure how much difference it will make to the average player in the end but there's quite a few new CPU-side improvements under the hood now, hope it helps. And as usual I've fixed a bunch of bugs. Here's the change list:
- Story Mode first pass
- Optimizations
- Decreased the amount of time and corn needed to make enough biofuel to fill a vehicle's tank, but made sunflower oil take longer so they are more similar to each other. Also increased the beet sugar yield.
- Added Steel Lockbox
- World maps and geological maps will be deleted from your inventory if you take them on Hit The Road, so they don't remove the fog of war immediately from the new map!
- Another fix for chefs getting stuck sometimes
- Reducing Raiders slider (et al) in the difficulty settings will affect their cooldown time, previously it didn't
- Made it possible to hold down button when stamping fences instead of clicking for each tile individually
- AI allies can take food from the player without it being considered stealing, unless it has a Don't Share policy set. But it's still stealing if the player takes equipment from allies without them, as that's too much open to exploits.
- Chefs pick at random between most tasty and most healthy recipe instead of just any available recipe
- Fix for thousands of raider instances being created on the map sidebar possibly due to mod configuration
- Fix for character getting stuck in loop between surrendering and rescuing someone
- Fix for changing names on the character creation screen having no effect unless you press Enter
- Fix for not being able to use the dialog to finish the Rebellion quest if you kill everyone and bring the body of the leader back
- Fix for skill caps not being transferred when you take people to a new map using Hit The Road
- Fix for not being able to manually pour water into an animal feeder bowl
- Fix for farmers not going for the nearest crops, and issues when you have different bases and Always Closed gates
- Fix for hungry chef sometimes not eating the food they just cooked and just staying there continuing to stir it
- Fix for NPCs knowing you skinned a team mate's corpse even if none of them saw it
- Fix for characters getting stuck in a loop auto collecting arrows if they don't have space for them in their inventory
- Fix for characters being able to get into, or repair, vehicles from a long way away if they are moving
- Fix for not being able to bind scroll wheel to target head/legs
- Possible crash fixes and out of sync fixes
- Translation updates to French, Hungarian, Japanese, Korean, Latin American Spanish, Lithuanian, Russian, Simplified Chinese, and Ukrainian
Note for mod-makers and translators: I have taken a bunch of quests from the "Sandbox" mod and put them in a new mod called "Common" which is used by both "Sandbox" and "MainStory" (which is story mode of course). So there are two new mod folders, "Common" and "MainStory". Old savegames and mods should still load fine.
Looking ahead to the next patch(es), the two things I want to focus on are (1) that annoying habit crafters have of stopping crafting because they filled up their inventories with random stuff they can't dump, and (2) morale and opinion balancing.
What's this publicbeta thing?
v193 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".