Firstly, the loot tables and spawn chances for urban and wild areas have been overhauled. For the player, this means you might notice some things spawn more or less often in certain places than before. As an example, stones now spawn in Underbrush which makes it easier to create campfires.
Appropriate items now have the Herb tag, and you can dry herbs for long term storage with a bit of string. Herbs are required for a lot of the new craftable brews.
Brews provide various benefits, and they can become quite powerful if stacked together. Of particular note are the Brawling and Bird's Eye brews which give bonuses to accuracy in combat. Brews tend to use more stomach capacity than consuming food items. This means you might have to decide whether consuming a brew or eating food/drinking is more important in certain situations, since your stomach can only hold so much at once.
Food is reworked for a more standard hunger filling from each meal. I noticed not many people pay attention to how much needs recovery each food type provides, so now all the base foods are a standard 8 hours of hunger to make things easier.
Poison can be treated with Violet Tea now, and combined with the relatively early ability to craft a Healing Brew it should make poisons more manageable.
There's also a new Rations Maker you can add to your settlements. This settler will take your dirty or clean water and food, cook it all up and package it into convenient Rations.
Unrelated to food, you can now gain XP from many more higher level actions. This means you can focus more on building, farming, mining or the various aspects of settlement management in the late game instead of feeling like you need to go kill stuff/search sites just to increase your level.
There's also a new "Auto Equip" feature where if an item breaks, you'll automatically equip any items of the same type if available in your inventory. This is most convenient for thrown stuff during battle, no more having to dig through your inventory for another grenade every time you throw one. You can disable certain items from auto-equipping as well if desired.
What's next?
I'll be working on adding variety to combat terrain, which is the next most requested item based on feedback. Maybe it will have more large scale features, like grouped trees with open terrain in between or hills cutting across the middle of the map. This is quite a large task and I'll have to test to see what works.
Also will be playing around with changes to combatants and weapons, like maybe poison or flaming crossbows and see if it's any fun.
Full change list for v0.643:
- Overhauled loot tables for most sites
- Added Wild Violet and Violet Tea and status effects from consuming
- Added Herb and Brew tag to appropriate items
- Added Dried Herbs item and crafting from existing herbs with string
- Added Rations Maker site
- Added Emu Eye and harvesting from Emu corpses
- Added Healing, Kombucha, Brawling and Bird's Eye Brew, crafting recipe and status effects from consuming
- Added Mixed Salad and Perceptive status effect from consuming
- Innkeeper no longer sells bread, but trades brews instead
- Scavengers have a chance to get molotovs
- Reduced chance of Bandits getting dynamite
- Increased lifetime of molotov before exploding
- Rebalance hunger recovery from all foods
- Rebalanced number of Underbrush sites spawning in each terrain type
- Reduce crater sites in Bushland
- More crater sites in Ruined Village, Town and Large Town
- Removed Medium Meal and Filling Meal tags, replaced with Dangerous Food and Clean Food
- Move Lemon Tea and VitaMight Bread out of crafting menu into ingredient's actions list
- Reduced health decrease from poison status effect but increased its longevity and added walking and searching speed impact
- Changed Pond site water collection to match Well site water collection
- Lake terrain has a chance to spawn multiple Pond sites
- Scrapping houses can be done regardless of site condition, but makes the house completely disappear now
- Removed Edible tags from drinks
- Doubled Ration requirement for feeding Settlers
- Zoomie and Nose Wiggle buttons now highlight their state
- Many construction/farming/harvesting/crafting actions now provide xp
- Add background for all damage labels during combat
- Add to tooltip if doing action destroys site
- Bandit burrows use Find Rate Wild and Scavenger dens use Find Rate Urban now when being searched
- Changed all item equip times to 2 minutes
- Changed Alcohol Mash image to be more consistent with other processing images
- Changed farms from needing Water tag items to needing Water Source tag tools
- Changed some perk images to be more identifiable
- Changed how health recovery modifiers work to be similar to stomach recovery
- Reduced influence of nearby Bushland on Snake den and Emu nest strengths
- Added chance to spawn tin cans on mammal corpses
- Fixed most missing loot from gang hideouts
- Fixed "Nothing Found" label misaligned
- Fixed Inventory modes checkboxes allowing two modes at same time
- Fixed "Not Enough Ammo" not making proper sound
- Fixed Oscar's quest location being a Town instead of a Village
- Fixed Shrine quest not removing materials for monument
- Fixed Wrench using wrong hit animation in combat
- Fixed missing player icon in battle history log when player being attacked and using custom gang image