Dear Pioneers,
the latest Beta test of our upcoming quality-of-life-update 0.8.0 is out now!
Please tell us what you think on [url= https://discord.gg/X9ChDjXEkr]Discord[/url] or in our Open Beta discussion forum on Steam.
Thank you for your support and have fun testing our new features!
Highlights
Interface:
- Major notification system improvements including a history
- Persistent top bar configuration
- Quick access to road construction mode
Gameplay:
- Threatened state to protect civilians
- Combat luck balancing
Onboarding:
- The first beginner guidance videos have been added
- Many UI enhancements for beginners
Improvements
UI
Top Bar
- Three different default top bar setups to toggle between
- Top bar setups and changes are now persistent between game sessions
- Each top bar setup can be reset back to default
- The full commodity tooltip including history will now already appear when hovering over a commodity in the top bar drop-down interface. This allows to check all information without the need to enable the commodity for the top bar display.
- The numbers in all the drop-down interfaces are now updated while the drop-down is open.
- All items of a category can be enabled or disabled with a single click.
- The top bar layout is only updated once after the configuration changes of a category are finished to avoid misplaced clicks while configuring the top bar.
- Improved the way the top bar distributes the columns between the categories.
- The overall amount of hungry miners is now shown in the top bar.
- The icons for idle units are now changed to clearly relate them to the unit type they belong to.
Notifications
- A notification history is now available by a toggle button. Any notification since game start is still accessible on request later
- New notifications get a brief visual highlight to get more attention
- The readability of notification icons and text has been improved by an additional outline
- The mouse-over feedback of notifications has been enhanced
- The current notification itself is clearly highlighted
- If there is a location related to the notification, it is highlighted in the minimap
- If there is a related object in the game world, it is highlighted in world view
- Notifications reflect their lifetime with a small progress bar until they fade out and move to the history.
- An additional context tooltip explains the functionality of the mouse buttons clicks on notifications
- When the list of notifications changes because a new notification appears or fades, all clicks on notifications are ignored for a very brief amount of time to avoid that the wrong notification is selected or dismissed
Quick access to road construction mode
- Buildings without a road connection now show an alert flag at their connection point
- Clicking on the connection point instantly switches to road construction mode with the building entrance already defined as the first waypoint.
Building construction mode feedback
- If a building cannot be placed at the current position, the reason(s) are displayed directly at the mouse pointer
- For farm fields, the terrain type and the plants which grow best on it are displayed directly at the mouse pointer
Other UI topics:
- Target locations can now be set on the minimap as well as in the game world. This is valid for Focus, Attack, Claim and Patrol points.
- The nutrition and comfort values of individual meal ingredients are now shown in the meal tooltips of taverns, residences and mines.
- All valid ingredients for nutrition and comfort meals are now shown in the meal type tooltips of the tavern.
- When toggling between light settings with Ctrl+L, the name of the setting is now shown for a brief time on screen.
- The construction menu now shows the name of the category currently chosen.
- Hints are shown during the loading screen.
- When an enemy camp is selected all units belonging to it are highlighted.
- When placing a market stall or tavern table, related buildings are highlighted.
- The game language can be changed directly in the pre-game menu via the small globe in the lower right corner.
- The icons of building categories and the icons of some buildings in the construction menu have been improved.
- When hovering over an objective related to a building type, the corresponding build menu category and building type are highlighted in the construction menu to ensure it is easy to find
Gameplay
Threatened state
- All buildings and landscape piles will now switch to a “threatened” state while hostile enemies are nearby
- A building under “threat” will display that state in the world and in the selection
- While under threat, those buildings and piles will not request carriers to travel to them to deliver or pick up commodities and cancel those already on their way.
- This will also help to avoid civilians sacrificing themselves to werewolves
Combat luck balancing
- The chances of winning or losing a combat fight have been adjusted
- Whenever a combat unit of a player won or lost a fight, the chance of winning or losing the next fight for that player is adjusted accordingly to neutralize luck or bad luck within the span of several consecutive encounters.
- This also means that reloading a game state to run a combat sequence multiple times will not lead to remarkably different results any longer.
- There will be more combat system changes coming with the Magic Update, stay tuned
Other gameplay topics:
- Improved movement of units outside the road network to reduce blocking issues in some busy situations
- Optimized road layout around obstacles
Other topics
- Procedural map generation improvements:
- Lakes are much better integrated into the landscape
- More natural shapes of coastlines and cliffs
- More naturally shaped transition zones between terrain types
- New shadow renderer
- Softer shadows and no more flickering
- Adjusted the brightness of the coal signs placed by the Geologist.
- When the game is started on SteamDeck, the default video settings optimized for this platform are selected.
- Improved textures of stone deposits
- Improved look of grassland vegetation
- Audio mixing improvements
Fixes
- Fixed: Sometimes the Explorer would not take the last Ration after the Explorer building was disabled and re-enabled again.
- Fixed: The market stall road connection had a minor visual glitch.
- Fixed: Several very rare crashes were fixed.
- Fixed: Dead Scavs were vanishing immediately when their base got destroyed. That is no longer the case.
- Fixed: Under some very rare circumstances builders were not finishing a construction job.
- Fixed: Underground and surface deposits will no longer spawn under water.
- Fixed: When a deposit is claimed into the player’s territory while a gathering building was paused, the new deposit would not be harvested sometimes after re-enabling the gatherer. This is fixed now.
- Fixed: The construction support grid cells are no longer shown on the territory of other factions.
- Fixed: When buildings of a merged faction got demolished, sometimes white spots of unexplored territory remained. This is no longer the case.
- Fixed: Very rarely the game got stuck in multiplayer ping mode.
- Fixed: Once all 9 nutritious meals were prepared in the tavern, the list of products disappeared.
- Fixed: Rarely a Scav claimer got stuck in an endless loop.
- Fixed: Some buildings such as the Construction Camp had a comfort meal history shown even though their inhabitants do not consume meals.
- Fixed: Improved line break behavior in objective list for objectives with large numbers
- Fixed: “Recruit X unit” objectives now only count recruited units.
Known Issues
- Mining deposits spawn on coast cliffs and are sometimes unreachable.
- Flags that mark buildings as "threatened" are not waving.
- Commodities lying on the ground do not show the "threatened" state.