Edit (August 4th)
Since the announcement we have fixed a few issues thanks to your reports, and also added the full German and Chinese support for the new texts.
See here for a list of fixes.
Original Announcement
Here we are with Update 13! Try it out in the beta branch and let us know what you think. Feedback received in the beta branch for the last 2 updates helped us tremendously, and we're counting on you!
These past couple of months were again divided between working on the upcoming update, and creating content for the full version. This will very likely be the last major update before the full version, which in itself will be a HUGE update (remember, we started working on stuff for the full version months ago).
So, what did we do in this update? Most of our efforts are around making the game more usable, removing what's annoying and making it easier to play. A few new mechanics were introduced as well, and a bit of content. Below are the highlights. The full list, as usual, will be published when we make the release available in the main branch.
Reminder: To play on the beta branch, right click the game in the steam client, select properties, and then select "beta" from the betas tab.
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Trading
Other survivors now roam the apocalypse, and they may stumble upon your colony, providing an opportunity to trade your resources for other stuff that you need.
As part of this feature we removed the scraps cost from almost all crafting and building projects, using scraps as currency instead. Other than removing the annoying scraps bottleneck, you can now purchase stuff that you haven't been able to find, even research materials if you're lucky.
Scrapping
A much requested feature, you can now scrap your unused equipment and get half their costs back.
Rituals
We've done a major rework to rituals balancing and added many new rituals. They are now essential for your survival, specially in the harder difficulty levels (oh yeah, there's now another, harder, difficulty level for those who love a challenge).
Graphics and animations
Many of the combat animations have been replaced with much better looking ones. In addition, we finally replaced those placeholder survivor portraits with new ones. They are still customizable.
Usability Changes
These are too many to list here, but we've been listening to your feedback and implemented many of things that would make your life less painful. You can now automate gathering tasks by setting limits similar to the auto craft feature, a new auto-combat feature will help skip those boring sure-win scavenge runs, fixed problems with being hit when well out of range if the attack cooldown started when still in range, reorder survivors, directly assign crafting tasks, re-roll a single survivor when starting a new game, press C in combat to cancel commands for selected survivors, and more.
Mods and old saved games
Saved games from update 12 should work just fine. Update 12 mods are very likely to work fine as well, though you may want to tweak item values for trading. See the few backwards compatibility breaking changes.