Developer postOriginal post (opens in a new tab)

Patch 1.10 Now Live!

Full Patch 1.10 is now live! Thanks so much for the help from our awesome community on testing it as we got ready to go live. This is a pretty major feature update, definitely the largest that we've done since launch.

We hope you've been enjoying the art update that went out last week ahead of this!

Updates to Predator-Prey Relations!

  • Your predators may now fail hunts! Well, technically the poor little prey animal might be clever and get away, but this makes things much more fair and realistic.
  • You will see an "escape" icon above the prey animal's head when this happens.
  • The chance that a hunt will be successful is impacted by the difference in size of the defending animal to the predator, if the defending animal is tough, and we also made some chance adjustments for if there is an overload of prey (like deer mouse overpopulation), in which case they won't fail hunts bc that would just be silly with 1,000 mice nearby!
  • There is now variation in when a predator will begin a hunt; they used to start at 80%, but now it will be within a range of 65-80%.
  • With the changes above, you should also notice more predators sharing hunts (especially with their children, which have a great chance of hunt failure because they are smaller).

Awww, look how cute the murder-beasts are sharing a kill. Which you'll see happen much more often with this new set-up.

Additional Feature Updates

  • We now have an interface to show you the meat points on a carcass that can be eaten by another predator, and how that converts into detritus if it is not eaten before the carcass decays away.
  • Territories can now cross-breed. Before, when you got down to 1 animal in a territory and it popped up that "Can't reproduce," you basically just started wishing for it to die so you could put something else there. Now, if there is another territory of the same species nearby, they will reproduce with each other!
  • You can now randomize plant clumps during placement by pressing the space bar while in the process of placing plants.
  • You can now toggle territories via a hotkey ("T").
  • Options menu redesigned; should reduce accidentally hitting the wrong button!
  • Added a "Max Time Away" setting right from the biodome selection screen.

    Bug Fixes & Tweaks

    • Lowered leaf count across all plants (to better balance the ecosystem's carrying capacity with all our new changes) and updated their leaf bar values in the AddLife tool to be more accurate.
    • Reduced how much detritus decomposers remove.
    • Increased the level 5 detritus to 12,000 from 8,000.
    • Increased Max detritus to 15,000.
    • Animals no longer walk beyond their territory range.
    • Made starvation rates happen slower in fast forward.
    • Starvation notification prompts at 40% instead of 50% to adjust for more variability in hunting.
    • Changed Ant from a consumer-scavenger to a decomposer.
    • Changed the way that the "This Zone is Locked" is activated to be less annoying as you take pictures close to zone walls.
    • Updated movement speeds of animals.
    • Updated skipping cost of Tyto Coins to be more efficient at higher times.
    • Increased Badger hunger rate.
    • Decreased Frog brood/ reproduction values.
    • Chevrotain maturity increased to 10 months.
    • Lowered Pika brood/reproduction values.
    • Increased the hunger/stomach size of most rodents, so they require more food each time they eat.
    • Fixed a bug where Himalayan tigers weren't eating carcasses.

    More cool things coming soon...

    Just going to leave a teaser here. You guys have been asking, and we've been listening. :)

    Don't worry, we're not adding more fast-breeding rodents to the game.

    --------------------

    Side note: the reason this wasn't up last week is because the dot in this image is our office:

    One of our programmers making an extra backup at the last minute:

    But everything is fine. We survived, just without power about 24h at the office. :P