Greetings, esteemed colleagues!
Today we’re releasing the first ever Community Update for Abiotic Factor! This is an update we’ve worked on over the last couple of weeks, focusing primarily on community requests and feedback, as well as some bug fixes and preparing the structure for future content in the [REDACTED] Update (arriving sooner than later) and Major Update #1: Crush Depth, arriving this summer.
But that’s later, let’s talk NOW. Community Update #1, what’s that all about, huh?
Criss made another vlog for those interested in bad jokes and great abbreviations.
Dynamic Difficulty for Lone Scientists
We’ve heard a lot of feedback from the scientific community regarding the difficulty (or inconsistent difficulty) of the Facility, particularly for solo players and co-op scientists who find themselves in a pinch while scavenging or exploring alone. We won’t reveal all of the tiny tweaks we’ve made, but entities in general will now react a bit differently when engaging a scientist who is alone, as opposed to fighting multiple scientists at once.
These changes are small, but have a large effect on combat pacing in general. All in all, you will find combat a bit less punishing if you’re by yourself, even in a co-operative server.
Additionally, we’ve adjusted the way enemies spawn around the Facility to result in a slightly less enemy-dense experience for solo players and smaller groups. Some specific spawns will no longer be used if there are less scientists in the game. Unlike the dynamic difficulty described above, this rule will be more global, so we still recommend scientists stick together – there’s safety in numbers!
The Steam Cloud Problem
We have received a small number of reports of people losing their world saves. There’s a few ways this can occur, but it’s largely two types of errors. The first type is a preventable user error, so let’s talk about that.
Sometimes Steam Cloud detects your newer local save is out of date with your older cloud save and asks if you want to overwrite your progress with your cloud save.
Please do not choose to overwrite your save!
If you encounter this popup, please check the timestamp on your save files and choose the most recent one. This is simply how Steam Cloud works, so please be careful as we can not fix this if you do it. Make sure you read the popup in detail and always choose your latest version. Odds are, if you aren’t switching between multiple PCs, you never ever want to sync with your cloud save.
Save Backups
The second type of save loss is world corruption, which is where the new backup system comes in. While we continue to work on the root causes for these corruptions, today we’re rolling out a much more frequent and robust backup system. Here’s how it works:
Abiotic Factor now keeps up to 5 world backup save files in your save folder that can be used if the main save accidentally gets overridden, destroyed, deleted, or eaten by a Peccary. If our system detects your world save has had a problem, next time you run it, the game will ask if you want to use a backup. This will potentially save players quite a lot of time, as we save a new backup every 30 minutes. For further safety, backups are not synced to the Steam Cloud in order to avoid accidental overwrites. In the future we will look at expanding or improving this system as needed.
Dedicated Server Backups
This system also works on dedicated servers. Upon launching your server, a red message will print out informing you if a world save was corrupted and a backup was swapped in its place. Server owners are reminded that we have a nice #abf-server-owners channel in our Discord, and we’re happy to answer questions and help out when we can - as are the other helpful server owners in our community!
As a side note, big thanks to everyone in the community helping answer questions in Discord - it’s a wild place sometimes! Thanks for being part of our community, following the rules, and being warm, welcoming scientists!
Repair & Salvage Improvements
We heard a lot of feedback about how annoying it was to repair and salvage large numbers of items, and we ourselves experienced the pain of having to pull stuff from our chests and fiddle around to just get a quick repair in.
You know how Repair Benches didn’t do the thing? Well now they do the thing! Repair Benches are now able to pull resources from nearby crates if a nearby Crafting Bench has the Item Transporter. Just keep the benches close to each other and you shouldn’t have any problems. We’ve also made a couple more changes worth listing real quick:
- You can now repair or scrap multiple things in a row without having to reselect “Repair” or “Scrap” between clicks. Be careful, this does make it easier to accidentally scrap stuff! Right click or clicking on the button again will exit this mode.
- There is a small UI upgrade for repair/salvage, making the buttons more distinct and harder to confuse. This probably won’t be the last time we improve this interface.
- There are now some sounds accompanying button presses in this UI, whereas before there was only silence.
Name Your Base
You can now name your Crafting Bench! This was a much-requested feature that made perfect sense. You’re out there, you’ve got a lot of benches, and you really want to know which is which. Naming your benches will now help you navigate, and we’ve made some improvements to when and where those bench waypoints show. Currently, the closest Bench waypoint will show, and you can completely turn off Bench waypoints in the Gameplay Settings menu if you’d like. But that’s not all!
Port to Port
Minor spoiler ahead - if you haven’t gotten far in the tech tree you can just scroll on through.
Whatever name you choose for your Crafting Bench will now also show up on the Personal Teleporter, making it easier to juggle your various teleports, because it turns out a lot of you are currently hot-swapping teleporters to get around. We admire this kind of ingenuity and look forward to bringing you the next tier of teleportation in Crush Depth.
Paintable Bag Walls and Storage
We’ve seen your ingenious and inspired bases and fabulous fortifications and it has been brought to our attention that Cement Bag Walls are a pretty popular pick. With how many of these walls are being built we want to give you the ability to put your personal spin on them.
Cement Bag Walls can now be painted and are compatible with all paint colors currently available. We’ve also added more support for Brown paint, and painting Cement Bags brown will make them look more like traditional sand bags.
Scientists will find they can also paint small storage crates, for that extra level of organization. Expect more of this sort of thing in the future.
Sword and [REDACTED]
We hear tell there’s a new decoration hanging on the wall in a furniture-laden land. Don’t forget to bring your sword along.
Bionic Legs
Run, jump and fall your way to new heights! Bionic Legs, equipped as Leg Armor, will increase your ability to pedal those scrawny legs faster and help prevent fractures from a fall. Gravity is still a fickle mistress, so don’t expect to survive every time you fall for her.
Much Ado About Guns
First, we want to remind all scientists that, first and foremost, Abiotic Factor is a game about ingenuity and crafting scientific gadgets to prosper in a harsh and unforgiving Facility. In some cases, guns are available by finding them in the world or being dropped by enemies. We call this class of weapon “Overworld Firearms” and we intentionally treat them very differently than regular Crafted Weapons (including Crafted Firearms) – chiefly in that that we do not currently allow them to be repaired, and while they do pack a punch, many prerequisites must be met to use them effectively.
Largely, this will not be changing, though we are currently investigating a way to make repairs a viable option without creating a very unbalanced power dynamic. More on that later. So, that’s where our heads are at with the design of guns, to help you better understand where we’re coming from. That said…
This update, we've decided to adjust some numbers on guns, reducing effectiveness of the lower-end firearms like the Pistol, while increasing the power of the Military Weapons for those who have invested time in both practicing these weapons and acquiring the necessary Accuracy skill. We expect further adjustments here, and yes, there are definitely some more guns (and crafted guns) on the horizon, but we’re not quite ready to throw those into your scrawny science hands just yet.
Manufacturing Uniform
Some of you noticed that the Manufacturing uniform seemed a bit incomplete. It is no longer incomplete and can be acquired from the same place you get the current clothing. If you’ve already been there, just return and scoop that up (along with an achievement!) If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking!
Platform Cart Recovery
For those of you unlucky enough to have a Platform Cart lost to the void, a pit, or just plain mislocated, Warren has installed a new Cart Recovery button near his station!
About time this guy did something useful. This button can only be operated by the host player, or server admins/moderators. This button will recall ALL Carts currently not being operated or packaged in a container. On use, all cart contents will appear nearby as bags, and the cart itself will plop onto the ground in packaged form. This is all perfectly normal when dealing with teleportation technology.
This is, of course, a temporary measure while we work on some of the larger issues around Platform Carts and their tendency to yeet themselves into the abyss. Such explorers they are.
These were just the major highlights, but if you're looking for the FULL PATCH NOTES, click the highlighted words to the left. That’s the magic of the modern computer!
And as always, please keep submitting your bugs through the in-game links because then we can do more updates just like this.
If you're enjoying your time exploring the Gate Cascade Research Facility, be sure to drop us a review so that others know what they're missing!
Thank you for all your work in the GATE Cascade Research Facility!
Onward -- to science.
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