As we move towards leaving Early Access, we've been changing the focus of the patches just a little; 1.18 is primarily concerned with a better experience for new players.
After languishing in the garage for many months, ARTHER has finally had a major set of upgrades in order to help you survive the rigours of FortressCraft.
His intelligence module has been replaced, allowing him to give you extensive context-sensitive help on progression and the state of your base.
If you're already an expert, then ARTHER has also received the his first two stations. The first is a recharging station, allowing ARTHER to directly charge off of your power grid; this allows you to get back to spelunking quicker than ever. If you're having issues defending your base, then the ARTHER Turret will allow you easily defend large areas against low-level mobs.
New for this patch are the first of the unusual mobs; HiveMinds now spawn in your world; these can then teleport in Mynocks onto your conveyor belts, which will start to steal your resources. Turrets have been added to counter this threat, but you're going to need a more explosive solution to deal with them permanently.
If you venture deep enough, you'll come across entire seas of lava - one of our next goals is to add in machines to deal with management of dangerous fluids.
If for some reason your PC isn't quite up to scratch, then under the in-game Settings menu, you'll find a whole host of ways to customise your visual experience;
Ensuring the game runs well on the widest variety of machines is very important to us, and there's been tons of optimisation work to boot!
New players have also gained a number of advantages - after some full runs of the game's progression, we've tweaked the costs of many of the early machines, so players should be seeing their first quarry within 20 hours (on easy mode!); the new MiniHopper and revamped Logistics Hoppers should aid this!
And all this topped off with a brand-new introsequence for fresh worlds!
For the FULL patch notes, head over here : http://steamcommunity.com/app/254200/discussions/0/530645446306994648/