The new update is now live! It significantly changes both monster spawning and the stockpile.
In the past, long mazes decreased the total amount of monsters that spawned, while killing them early increased the spawned amount. This has been stabilized. Only the amount of colonists determines the amount of spawned monsters now. If you've got long mazes, you might have to readjust your defenses!
Another change to the monster spawning involves the spawn location. Before this update, monsters only spawned a couple of blocks above and below the original terrain heigth. This mean they would not spawn on buildings made by players, nor in deep tunnels. This has been fixed as well. Monsters might now spawn in locations you aren't used to!
We've also made it easier to adjust the difficulty in existing worlds. There's now a settings icon in the banner tool menu. Click it, and you'll be able to determine the amount of night monsters and the amount of day monsters you want to fight.
Last but not least, the stockpile has been updated. You can now craft items directly from the stockpile. Shift-click to transfer items from the stockpile to the inventory. Control-click to produce a full stack of items.
Because you can now craft items directly from the stockpile, we removed the warning above the stockpile that explained how this works. We slightly changed the place of the stockpile in the menu, and now there's more room for visible items.
We'd love to know how the updated monster spawning affects your world. More or less monsters? Earlier or later in the night? What does your colony look like? Please share your experiences with us in the comments or on Discord!
As always, the update might have unexpectedly broken things that we haven't noticed yet. If anything out of the ordinary happens, let us know!
Next week
We aren't 100% sure what we'll work on next week. We planned to start working on bigger new features, but we might spent one week optimizing the interface. The Yogscast suggested an improved tooltip that includes info on where items are produced, and we think that might be an excellent idea. See the mock-up below.
This mock-up was made with the old stockpile menu. Spot the differences!
Something like this might be very useful, especially when 0.7.0 is ready and all kinds of new blocks, jobs and items are added. Combine the improved tooltip with a search function in the stockpile, a decent loading screen and a nice splash screen, and it seems like a week of work well spent. Your input is welcome too :)
Have fun with the update, and please report problems!