The March update, "The Joy Of Work" is now live!
MAJOR PLAYER-FACING CHANGES
- A lot of UI work has been done. A LOT of UI work has been done.
- Completely overhauled farming system
- More economy development!
- Lacquered planks!
- Fixed the spelling of the word "chermistry"
The full change log overflowed the Steam character limit, so the full change log can be found here! We're not even going to try to post it here, it's so long and contains such terrible things that your eyes were not meant to witness. Here is a selection:
UI
- overhauled basically the entire main UI
- changed main window text ticker to have three sizes, default is middle size
- added confirmation dialog on changing work crew times (will add a “don’t show this again” option later
- reorganized colonist list to be more compact, have a bit more functionality, and be more of a “white pages” for colonists.
- alerts now batched by type to cut down on spam. When targets for zoom are batched into an alert, repeated clicks will cycle through zoom targets left click and right clicks swapped on the alerts. this is intentional, and is going to be a little weird for the first bit, sorry!
- alerts corresponding to player choices are now separate from those not. Pop-up events cut back to fall in line with future plans for content.
- alerts now have varying degrees of importance, with pop-out detail windows replacing the huge tooltips which vary in detail and size corresponding to the importance of the alert. more important alerts also have different button art.
- modified work shift box to sync visual refresh with processing of button click
- added more “?” box help windows for various buildings
- cleaned up some building UI styles
- added unique religious doctrine icons
- added skill level and tech modifier display to all workshops’ UI
- tooltips now flip position near screen edges
- moved version number slightly to not cover new UI arrangement
- added more tutorial definitions
- changed +/- in work crew UI to up/down chevrons
- repositioned and fixed tooltips for main menu alerts
- shorted some UI sounds slightly
- tweaked how portraits are handled in work crew UI (unsatisfied with this, more work to come)
- day/night widget now survives save/load, has reliable day count information on it (finally), shows name of current hour
- collapsed work crews now show working status of MC char by highlighting their name tag button
- expand All / Collapse All button now on work crew UI window. Work crews now start all expanded.
- added correct icon when office is complete to completion ticker message
- FIXED: more flickering tooltip issues
- FIXED: we were showing the wrong background size for expanded farms
- FIXED: “chermistry”
- FIXED: bug where shortening the interior pane of a scrollable window to the point where the scrollbar would disappear would not reset scroll position and instead cause elements to be permanently out of view.
Work Crews
- reworked character shift work tests to be less error prone and cut its code footprint significantly
- added floating alert for revolting workcrews
Farming
- overhauled farming system
- hooked up farms to the new UI system like some kind of cyborg. a plant cyborg.
- FIXED: perennial harvest stage calculation off by one
- FIXED: Fishpeople will not attack ungrown crops
Economy
- added Laquered Planks (made in the chemistry workshop and now required for some high end buildings/modules. You can get laquer from beetles, trade, and (temporarily) laquer trees, which will eventually be moved to another biome.)
- Pub no longer requires brewing devices to build (As you can acquired alcohol via trade now)
- balance: rebalanced costs for a number of buildings.
- balance: partial mining/ore rework (Surface nodes yield less ore and are less common. Removed Stone Charcoal Kiln and added iron requirement to Brick Charcoal Kiln. Mining will now always yield at least some coal. More ores are necessary to make metal bars. More bars necessary to make plates/pipes. Regular stone will occasionally produce ore. More ore added to traders. Added “ore trader mission” to stahlmark foreign office events. Rebalanced costs of all metal-costing modules.)
- balance: Quality Food and Premium Food now produce food at a 1:1 ingredients/output ratio.
- TEST: temp. removed flax and cloth from the game (until they tie into more interesting upcoming things)
- balance: trade values of large number of items updated to reflect reworking of ores/metals
- balance: lower-level kilns/ovens don’t require advanced metal parts to repair
- FIXED: many boxed modules took no time to assemble
Events
- added Foreign Relations Correction event
- added ability to attempt to intimidate bandits w/ trained military
- added a bunch of new foreign office options (3 per non-empire nation)
- all remaining instances of losing/gaining “Prestige” have been converted to faction standing
- when trader arrives at trade depot, an alert will be created
- added variant to Novorus Logging Moratorium to reflect conditions if you initiate it while hostile
Characters
- colonists will now flee from fire
- increased delay before colonist waiting for service alerts trigger again
- colonists will wait slightly longer before eating food not suited to their social class (the gross food consumed over time is the same)
- balance: did first revision pass on happiness from ALL memories
- balance: confession now takes less time
- FIXED: colonists would become stuck in graves forever while trying to bury the dead
... and we've run out of room already. Sheesh. You'll just have go to see for yourselves.
The development progress page has also been updated, with exhaustive notes on the status of the project, as well as even more details on the stuff we included above. There are, as always, still pictures of cute animals.
Feel free to discuss the update right here, over on the Steam discussion page, or on our official forums!
Beware the Ides of March! Or, if you were stabbed during the Ides of March, seek medical treatment immediately.
-- Gaslamp Games