One of the most anticipated stable builds has arrived! This patch introduces two of the most requested features in the community, guards and gates. Like every major stable patch, there's simply just too much to talk about! So check out the extensive change log for details on all the new AI changes, disaster system, building mechanics and tons more!

This patch went a bit off the rails from the original road map. Originally, more towers, and golem upgrades were also planned for this patch, but instead you got a some major performance optimizations and gates instead! But no worries, InDev 28 will focus on cleaning up the last of the defense content that was planned between InDev 26 and 27.

NOTE: This patch also completely changes the Cullis Gate mechanics, Cullis Gates will now destroy any resources, or kill any villager or monsters thrown into it in return for some essence.

InDev 27 Change Log

Guards and Barracks

• New Job: Guards. They will patrol around your village, front lines or the perimeter depending on the time of day and try to work in groups to remove any threats in and around the village. Guards will also automatically "post" themselves at the new Outposts or the Barracks, providing a lookout that will call over more guards if danger arrives.
• Villagers can now "Call the guards" when they are attacked, causing up to the 5 nearest guards to be called over for every one monster in the area.
• New Building: Barracks. This building provides guards, and stores a large amount of equipment for them to use and gives them an alternative place to sleep. The Barracks will also gain a small bow tower when upgraded to maximum
• New Building: Outpost. Adds a small amount of guard slots, and has some storage for equipment. The maximum upgraded version also gains a small bow tower.
• Outposts now take the place of Fire Pits now, providing as much range as the old Large Fire Pit, and should be considered in place of Fire Pits when expanding the village.

Gates

• A new gate system has been added, introducing the first types of gates. The Wooden and Stone Gates. Gates allow villagers, nomads and golems to travel through them, but not monsters. This allows you to make "safe exits" in your village that circumvent your defenses.

Blood Moon

• The Blood Moon is a new lunar event that can happen in the Spring or Autumn (by default) randomly. During a blood moon, it will rain blood, generate red "Fire" lightning and spawn new Blood Slimes in the village!

Disaster System

• Tons of new disasters have been added, that can happen randomly as you play. Some disasters require certain weather conditions.
• Meteor Shower - This disaster can happen at any time, and will rain meteors down from the sky on to your village.
• Electrical Storm - This disaster can take the place of rain or snow, resulting in a massive amount of lightning and thunder, but very little rain.
• Hail - This disaster can take the place of rain or snow, but can only happen if it's cold outside. Will rain down hail onto the village, possibly damaging all buildings and mobs outside.
• Blight - This disaster will eat away at any living plant life in the area, including your farms!
• Earthquake - Shake the ground and damage anything nearby!

Optimizing and Big Fixes

• Fixed a stack overflow error with range map desirability that would cause the desirability to "roll over" on itself, returning back to 0.
• Fixed a few miscellaneous GUI typos.
• Removed some benchmark code from the object overlay system.
• In the rare event a mob is hit by another friendly mob or tower, it will not attack back.
• Fixed missing Abandoned Recombobulator Tower GUI icon.
• Cleaned up some resource placement code, preventing resources from being placed "in air" more than once at the same time.
• Fixed Ice Spray tower damage.
• Fixed some erroneous names in the mob list.
• Pathfinding is now multithreaded, boosting late game performance by offloading much of the pathfinding code to another dedicated thread.
• Village range map system has been sent off to a dedicated thread, reducing overall CPU usage on the main thread and optimizing performance.
• Fixed some response time issues with Twitch integration when Twitch's servers are running slow.
• Fixed some comparator/sorting bugs.
• Mouse wheel scrolling works in the map editor now.
• Fixed some minor tileset flagging issues.
• Fixed a crash bug in the follow mob AI when the path generated was generated before the map was updated.
• Can no longer set minimum Limbo villagers in custom mode to 0.
• Fixed some typos in the custom mode config.
• Fixed a lightning positioning glitch during storms.
• Implemented possible profile deletion bug fix that should do a better job of avoiding "Corrupted Profiles" after a deletion attempt.
• Tweaked the CPU thread pool code a bit, it now threads more efficiently on dual core systems.
• Fixed a bug where sometimes the map editor would not "clean up" the edging of the map correctly when creating a new map.
• Fixed a bug where more workers than you requested would take a job if you assigned too many too fast.
• Fixed a total worker counting error on the bottom pop out GUI when you had more workers than could fit into the box.

AI Changes

• Golems now patrol around combobulators, recombobulators, and towers.
• Golems will now visit a recombobulator if their health drops below half.
• Fire Elementals are now damaged by water and rain.
• Fire Elementals can now heal.
• Builders now re-run their harvesting task if the harvested material is not something they can use.
• Refining work is now a higher priority on the work AI branch than redistribution, making Carpenters, Stone Cutters and other refining workers more inclined to do their job.
• In the event a path into your village is extremely long, monsters will now consider attacking nearby walls or gates to get in.
• Fire Elementals can no longer cross water.
• Ghosts and Spectures can now walk through walls and small objects.
• Villagers no longer look for bandages or potions when hurt, but rather try to always keep one on hand.
• A new trading AI branch has been added to all villagers, that will allow them to trade directly with one another to get the correct tools, weapons, armor, food or anything else they may require.
• Refiners and manufacturers can no longer assist building projects.
• Nomad spawning no longer checks if they can reach the village on their own. But now requires a larger movement area.
• Slimes are no longer hostile in the daytime.
• Lightning now scares villagers.
• Water Bottlers and Cooks can no longer deliver rations and bottled water to homes or storage.
• Water Masters can now store and redistribute water bottles.
• Villagers can now flee into their home if panicked.
• Changed around Miner, Lumberjack and Crystal Harvestry AI to sort resources evenly, by priority, rather than closest by priority.

Building Changes

• Decreased range of Fire Pits.
• You can now "pull" essence out of essence collectors by hovering your hand over them.
• Nerfed Static Tower slightly.
• Screen no longer shakes when a building is damaged, only when it is destroyed.
• The Cullis Gate has been completely rewritten. You can now drop mobs and resources into it (Including monsters!), sacrificing them for essence. But if you're not careful they can overload and explode into a massive earthquake.
• Reduced the construction costs of all walls.
• Adjusted how buildings gain hit points, so weaker builders are stronger, and stronger buildings are weaker.
• Reduced overall fire damage taken by buildings.
• Golem Combobulators can no longer heal golems.
• Renamed all walls to something more accurate.
• Reduced the storage priority of Ancillaries, Camps and Large Storage to "Very low", putting specialized storage at a higher priority.

Interface Changes

• Removed golems from the population quick tab.
• Added barrack occupancy to various locations on the GUI.
• Lightning rod range can now be selected in the GUI.
• Changed "Total Buildings" in the building drop down icon to the Civic icon.
• Added total ancillaries to the building list panel
• Brought back the mouse on the splash screen.
• Death messages now pop up in the console.
• "Has been completed" and "Has been fully repaired" messages no longer pop up on the console for monster spawners.
• Many of the new disaster and blood moon settings can now be changed in Custom Mode.
• You can now select starting resources configurations in custom.
• Added or updated several of the notification sound effects.

Miscellaneous Changes

• 5 new songs: Winter is Nigh, Gloom, Sorrow, Black Raven and Underworld.
• Spectures renamed to Specters.
• Updated song: Goodbye Retro Sky.
• Reworked Fire Blast spell into a new "Meteor" spell that can generate rock.
• Tweaked and added many new particle effects.
• Essence changes colors when attracted to your hand.
• Specters have been made slightly less resistant to physical damage.
• You can no longer send golems to Limbo.
• "Take From Limbo" and "Send To Limbo" costs reduced.
• The inventory slots have been changed, now mobs can have a new shield slot (Currently unused), and the two item slots have been replaced with 3 dedicated slots of a recovery item, a food item and a water item.
• Thirst no longer goes down when it is raining.
• Lightning now does more damage to mobs, and is percentage based.
• Added a "drop resource on ground" sound effect.
• Decreased durability of tools and weapons.
• Decreased drop rate of items on all mobs.
• Added "Magic" background sounds during a Full or Blood Moon.
• Renamed some of the water tile set phases to something more accurate.