Hello, everyone!
Update 5 - Badwater has been live for exactly two weeks, and it has attracted more players than any previous Timberborn update. We are overwhelmed by your support and committed more than ever to making the game better. Thank you!
Today’s experimental patch addresses some of the preliminary feedback we received during this two-week period.
It is now easier to customize your game using any of the built-in difficulty levels as a preset. You can also switch droughts and badtides on and off with simple checkboxes, without having to decipher the meaning behind the more advanced parameters.
Subsequent badtides now increase in intensity in a more gradual manner on easy and normal difficulties. The easy mode is now also easier throughout, while the hard mode is harder. We are hoping that these changes will accommodate a wider range of playstyles.
Need a refresher on how to play on the Experimental Branch and access today’s patch earlier?
Follow the instructions found here, and let us know what you think of the changes.
Difficulty settings
- Added the new Customize button to easy, normal, and hard difficulties on the difficulty selection screen. Click it to start a custom game with all settings preset to match the chosen difficulty’s default values.
- Added the Drought and Badtide checkboxes to the custom difficulty. Pair that with the above, and you can quickly start a new game on a selected difficulty level without droughts and/or badtides if your heart desires.
Balance
- The first badtide triggered on a new game on easy and normal difficulty now always lasts only a day. That gives new players a taste of what badtides are before striking with full force.
- The length of a drought or a badtide is now adjusted based on how many times that particular event has struck the settlement already. This should result in a smoother learning curve, since the first badtides will now be noticeably shorter than the droughts the player has already known for a while.
- At the start of a badtide, the contamination of water sources starts at 50% and gradually increases to 100% over 12 hours. Similarly, the contamination starts decreasing 12 hours before the badtide ends - when temperate weather returns, the contamination is at 50%, and then instantly drops to 0%.
- Reparameterized droughts and badtides to make the easy difficulty more approachable, and hard - more challenging. This includes changes to the seasons’ duration as well as to the handicap multiplier and length.
- Plants affected by badwater contamination now survive between 0.2 and 0.3 days (up from 0.1 and 0.15).
- Reduced food and water consumption on easy difficulty to 40% of the default values (down from 60%).
- Updated building: Herbalist. Cost lowered to 10 Planks, 20 Gears (down from 20 Planks, 5 Gears i 5 Treated Planks). By removing the need for Treated Planks, curing the contamination should be as easy (or as difficult) as it is for the Iron Teeth.
- Updated good: Medicine. Recipe updated to 2 Dandelions, 2 Berries, 1 Paper (up from 1 Dandelion, 1 Berry). This is to counterbalance the change above.
Maps
- Updated map: Waterfalls. This beginner-friendly map is now even more beginner-friendly thanks to the complimentary blockages and some other minor layout tweaks. While at it, we removed that weird 1x1 hole.
Misc.
- Added the What’s new window to the main menu for an extra compact (and soon-to-be localized) list of the features found in the most recent major update. In hindsight, we should have called it Update 5 - Badwater & Flippable Buildings, judging by the number of players asking us why we removed the Mirrored Lodge. ;)
- Updated the warning popping up when trying to load a pre-U5 save on the game already updated to Update 5. It now mentions the ability to downgrade the game to an older major version to finish the playthrough without the changes. Here’s how you do that.
- Added the Pause button to Agora (ex-Temple) since it now consumes resources.
Bug fixes
- Zero-length droughts or badtides are no longer possible on the easy difficulty. This change only applies to games started after today’s patch.
- Fixed the Large Water Pump’s collider to make it easier to select an object below the pipe.
- Fixed low FPS when editing old maps.
- Fixed a crash related to the demolishing tool.
- Fixed a crash caused by deleting the map you were working on. Why would you even do that, though?