Patch 0.8.0 – New Quality of Life Improvements

Other UI Topics

It is now possible, to set target locations on the mini map as well as in the game world. This includes the Focus, Attack, Claim and Patrol points. This will improve the handling of military actions, especially on bigger and more difficult maps with lots of enemies. (No more need to move the camera to the location of the actions!)

Additionally, the nutrition and comfort values of individual meal ingredients are shown in the meal tooltips of tavern, residences and mines. This will help to follow up on the quality of your meal production.

We also wanted to highlight the new construction menu, which now shows the name of the category currently chosen. What do you think about the new icons? We love the new look!

Threatened State

All buildings and landscape piles will now switch to a "threatened" state while hostile enemies are nearby. Meaning 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 help to avoid civilians sacrificing themselves to werewolves.

No more free snacks for our furry frenemies! Even though we are probably going to miss your screenshots with a map full of werewolves. :)

Map Gen & Shadows

Last but not least, we worked on some pretty cool procedural map generation improvements! Lakes are much better integrated into the landscape. Coastlines and Cliffs have much more natural shapes. And if you look closely, you can also see a more natural shaped transition zones between terrain types. Pagonia gets more and more beautiful and we are absolutely here for it!

We also worked in softer shadows with a new shadow renderer. Shadows will no longer flicker and have a much smoother appearance overall.

This is all for the Dev notes so far. For the full list of features and improvements, read the the patch notes below! We hope you enjoy these improvements in your next game session. Please let us know what you think about the new update here on Steam or on our Discord channel. We are curious what you think!

Pick up the tools, Pioneers!
Your Envision Entertainment Team

Patch Notes 0.8.0

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.
• Top bar commodities sort order within groups has been improved.
• Top bar layout is reset after major gameplay updates which add multiple new commodities

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

Onboarding

• The first set of beginner guidance videos has been added for easier onboarding.
  • Please note that the limited functionality is preliminary, several enhancements and more videos will be available with the Magic Update later this year.

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
  • Landscape piles now have a tooltip which shows content and potential threat status if enemies nearby

• 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:

• Thieves will stop their raid and try to return to their base if their disguise is removed before they stole something. If their disguise is removed after they stole something, they try to return to their base anyway.
• Thieves will no longer scare and chase civilians after their disguise is removed. Bandits will still do that, however.
• 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.
• Fixed: "Recruit 1 Veteran Soldier" counts as solved if the unit was manually recruited before the objective was active.
• Fixed multiplayer join with paused session.
• Fixed loading save while in multiplayer paused mode leaving the player stuck with invalid confirmation window.

Known Issue

• When UI scaling is set to high values the tutorial videos might scale out of the window so that ok button is off screen. In this case pressing Esc (Options button on Steam Deck) will close the video.