Our October Update, "The Memory of Infinite Terror & Malign Vastness" is now on Steam! Notable changes include:
- A much improved colonist information panel that shows you what’s on the mind of your people and how it makes them feel — plus all the game mechanics to do with memories, emotion, madness, and character jobs that back it up.
- Pubs to serve brew, Barbers to heal your wounds (this is the Frontier, after all), and much tinkering with the buildings backend to make workshops & offices stronger, faster, better.
- More, better farming controls and food balancing!
- “Tip Top” exotic caviar!
- A lovely slathering of polish & tooltips all over the UI (and ongoing process)
- Newly re-invigorated stockpiles, again!
- (Continuing work on Secret Things, deep and dark.)
The full change log can be found here, but all of the content that we could fit into an announcement can be found below!
OFFICES
- added first iteration of Public House & associated jobs for workcrew operating the Pub
- added Barber (to heal afflictions) & associated jobs for workcrew operating Barber Shop
- added new step styles determined per-building
- Offices can now do internal “standing orders” to keep the office running when it is not performing an office service (for instance, putting drinks in the Booze Vat for safe-keeping.)
- Barbers, Vicars and Publicans now have “service hours” automatically assigned when they are assigned to the corresponding building, in order to allow better service for clients.
- “office” type buildings display a more descriptive title to text ticker now
BUILDINGS/ECONOMY/STOCKPILES
- “office” type buildings display a more descriptive title to text ticker now
- buildings now have grayed out icons if player doesn’t have minimum construction requirements, tooltips with red text indicate what is needed.
- workshop recipes can now be grayed out or hidden based on whether required modules are present in the workshop. Tooltip changes to reflect what is needed. (roll-out to other workshops in-progress)
- graveyards now have tooltips, as do farms without a selected crop
- balance: changed one overseer to a labourer in all loadouts
- FIXED: engine would draw building shadow when mousing over it during construction mode
- FIXED: modules placed in the corners of buildings such as ovens would cause problematic building geometry and geometry explosions
- FIXED: people will stop trying to find closer crops to haul to stockpiles once they check their first stockpile
- FIXED: issues with various job requirements (require_smart_object and require_container_object) causing various problems with stockpiles
- Rewrote stockpile handling code again to more thoroughly fix everything
FARMS & FOOD
- added “Basic Brew” recipe to breweries (this job ill auto-brew valid ingredients)
- merged Brewery into Kitchen. They have become one! Power overwhelming!
- Farms are now directly assigned work crews. A work crew can work on and operate multiple farms.
- disabled farming Workcrew filter buttons to reflect new assignment control for farms.
- added tooltip text to farm crop information icons
- balance: eating cooked food now totally resets hunger (so you don’t have to climb out of a huge hunger deficit as soon as you start cooking food – when a player started cooking food, colonists would consume more than expected to get their hunger down, so cooking appeared to be an inefficient solution to hunger)
- balance: farming made very slightly easier
- balance: made small tweaks to how long it takes to cook things
- balance: pumpkin is now a mechanically distinct crop from corn and has its own stats
COLONIST MEMORIES & RELATED UI
- performed visual cleanup of character information panel layout & implemented some pretty new UI art
- character ui: memories now have borders to show significance of memories relative to one another
- character ui: made emotion bars longer
- implemented “short term memory” functionality: the most recent memory will always contribute to overall emotional state even if less important than others. If another memory is created, it can push this memory outside of consideration if all other memories are more important.
- balance: performed significant rebalance to the values of most of the memories in the game (includes emotional and madness values)
- FIXED: some memory related bugs
- FIXED: missing memory case for when Fishy individual is attacked by Fishpeople
- FIXED: will no longer receive memories for “murdering” animals (TODO: unless vegan)
NIGHT-TIME, SOCIALIZATION & WORK SCHEDULING
- night has been made lighter (so you can actually see anything)
- sleeping people given smaller sight radius
- if objects are damaged near a sleeping colonist, the sound will wake them up
- balance: sleep time reduced by 25% to make nights more Interesting
- balance: characters now get 3 shifts off by default instead of 2 (to give them more time for non-work actions)
- balance: characters get upset for overwork at 1 fewer subsequent workshifts to reflect the rebalancing of workshifts
- balance: did review & rebalance pass on relative utility of all “social” jobs
CORPSES
- colonist corpses should no longer try to initiate burial job there are still hostiles nearby (note: if hostiles leave and come back, you’ve still got a problem)
- overriding auto-burial of a corpse with manual controls will make corpse will only respond to manual orders for burial/dumping from that point forward
- bandit corpse policy event can have “no answer” selected & will fire no more than once per day
- balance: (all) corpses no longer spawn infinite vermin
- FIXED: performed overhaul of handling of all jobs that affect the corpses of all types of characters (burial, dumping, butchery, dissection, etc)
- refactored details of death script for all agents so that common actions/tagging is all handled by base “agent” class; also cleaned up all searches/jobs looking for corpses to use consistent terminology
The list continues like this for some time, the letters gradually contorting into unpredictable, hazardous shapes, as you begin to utter them aloud. As the last of the incantation is read, you jolt awake from the strangest dream of eyes and mouths that vanishes from your memory so quickly you are left feeling nothing but a sense of unexplained dread. You proceed to the full change log here
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. We changed the format a bit this month to make it a bit more interesting if you wanted even more information than what is included in the post linked above.
Feel free to discuss the update right here, over on the Steam discussion page, or on our official forums!