New Predator - Cougar:
A new predator now occupies the high-grounds of the world. The cougar is rare and presents a greater threat than the other wildlife, being faster and with heightened senses. Players should avoid encounters unless well prepared.
To help balance the early-game, Cougar’s will not enter the world until the player has established a base (placed their BCU). Unless in hardcore mode, where they will be present from day 1.
As with all other predators, Cougars will engage hunters when necessary, and vice versa (so use it to your advantage where possible).
Some tweaks and nerfing may be required, so I’m keen to hear feedback from players. I plan to further build upon the Cougar’s behavior patterns and stats moving forward.
New items and crafting changes:
Butchering Cougars will yield Sinew (yield size is based on animal level). This is used in many existing crafting recipes. It is also used for crafting Rope, which is now used on many of the advanced weapon, armor and base upgrades. The intention is that these are later-game items; harder to obtain, yet not crucial for early-game (so a new player is not expected to hunt Cougar on their first day).
It’s now possible to craft Metal Ingots in the Workbench using Copper and Iron. The aim here is to simplify the higher tier crafting recipes, while allowing a means to process raw materials down into higher value items.
There has been a sizable restructuring to the craft recipe system (across the board). There may well be some imbalance in item requirements, so I welcome feedback and intend to iterate on these changes.
Auto Log Collection:
Logs will now auto-drop into the player’s inventory while harvesting. I understand that some player may disagree with this choice, but I feel it can be too frustrating when dealing with thick foliage.
To balance this change, planks now require 3 logs to craft. This should not impact the grind by much, as players will spend far less time searching for dropped logs.
Other Changes:
- Tightened the spread on the shotgun. This change is subtle, but should make a difference during mid-range combat.
- Fixed bug where starter Canteen’s would sometimes not fill the water meter on plantbeds and animal housing.
- Fixed bug where dying while in shallow water would cause the player kit to not drop.
- Added sound and particle effect for hand-catching chickens.
- Improved player death-ragdoll (no more extended fingers etc).
- Increased texture resolution of animals, players and hunters at close/medium range.
- Smoothed animal movement over angular terrain.
- Fixed bug that was allowing animal attacks to be interrupted/reset during a fight. This may impact balance/difficulty (let me know if things are off).
- Added low-pass filtering to predator idle sounds at distance.
- Added new death camera. Also removed several hud elements during death scene, allowing the player to better assess what happened.
As always, thank you SO much to everyone that has been supporting the project. The feedback (forum comments, uploaded gameplay, etc) has become so essential while working on the game. It really highlights for me how incredibly impactful an early-access community can be for a project, for which I’m so grateful.
Please let me know any issues/thoughts on the update (I’ll be on the forums). Have a great weekend!
*Edit* Hotfix updates (Aug 19th):
- Added ability to optionally disable auto log pickups (it's enabled by default). The option can be found under Options->Gameplay.
- Added chance of sinew spawning in locked crates.
- Dead chickens no longer squawk when picked up.
- Updated ambient environment sounds.
- Updated cougar falling animation (minor).