Hi guys, Today’s update finally sees the introduction of swimmable lakes into the world of Subsistence. It’s been one of the top requested features since release, and will open up a huge range of possibilities for future updates, map expansion and new gameplay mechanics. As well as introducing new scenic locations for base building, and battles with the neighbors.
The water is fully swimmable (which also means by predators and hunters). The new underwater areas introduce a new biome that will soon become valuable areas for specific resource gathering. It’s not currently possible to drink the water, but this will come very soon, so please stay tuned.
Harvest-able Kelp is a new resource that can be harvested on lake beds. Kelp has low nutritional value, but in quantity offers a viable alternative when other vegetables are scarce (or you can feed it to your bunnies). This is another step towards removing the reliance on random chance from crate spawns.
Currently there are 3 new lakes of varying size in the existing play area (the largest of which is found on the north side of the map). It seemed necessary to implement several smaller lakes in the existing play area before further expanding the map.
This means there have been some terrain changes that may impact player profiles. It’s possible you may find you have existing hunter bases submerged in water. If this occurs, you can always reset the hunters on that profile. This seemed preferable to forcing a wipe (which I will always try to avoid).
There has been a lot of work on the AI (hunters and animals), to allow them to negotiate the water and incorporate it into their existing behaviours. Especially to avoid opening up new means of exploits. However the extent of the changes will surely introduce some bugs and oddities, so please do let me know on the forums if you spot anything.
Few other unrelated small tweaks:
- Added 3d bump-mapping to reinforced metal walls and floors.
- Added blood-splatter decals for various surfaces.
- Added fallback if player falls out of world. This is very rare, but has led to a few reports of players losing their gear. Now players will simply respawn with all their gear. I'm investigating the root cause of this.
- Fixed behavior bug where hunters try to harvest invisible trees.
Thank you so much for your patience with this one, I know the wait has been longer than usual. I don’t like leaving such breaks between updates. I’d been putting this off as I knew it would hold-up other features to make it happen. However this now opens up huge possibilities for future updates. Thank you to everyone that’s been supporting the project, and those active in the community and giving feedback on the current state of the game (I welcome both negative and positive). Please let me know if you experience any issues with the update. Have a great week!