The apocalypse may be here, but we are surviving, and fighting back.
And now, we finished crafting Alpha 10, codename - "The Professionals", to help us in our fight!
Alpha 10 is now available on the main branch. These past two months were very busy for us. We grew our team, hired a PR firm, created a new trailer, and through this all, we were working on this latest update - Alpha 10. A lot of work for two guys.
Here's some of what's new in alpha 10 and what we've been up to in the past two months. The full list of changes can be found below.
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Survivor Generation
A new survivor generation window will appear before the game starts. You will get a chance to see your survivors, customize them, or re-roll new survivors if you're not happy with what you got.
New Judgment Trailer
Making a trailer that is interesting, captivating, and represents your game well is not an easy task. It took us a while to get everything the way we wanted, but in the end we are very happy with the results. What do you think of our new trailer?
Profession System
Our goal was making survivors more unique, having more effect on your play style. The 7 skill system felt inadequate for the task. All of the survivors had the same skills, and could improve any of them. Traits helped differentiate them a bit, but not enough.
So we scrapped it. Now, every survivor starts with a profession and some skills from that profession. As they perform tasks, they gain experience and earn levels. For every level you can select one of several new skills, depending on the profession.
You can still shape the direction in which your survivor evolves, but they are now more different from each other, adding more variety to the game.
It was a big challenge, designing and implementing this system. Not only did it's code integrate with almost every system in the game, it's effects on the game balance are grand. It took many iterations until we got the balance right, and I'm sure there is still much more we can improve.
Right now there are 4 professions, each has 5 levels, and every level has 2-3 skills, for a total of more than 50 new skills you can choose from. In addition there are tens of possible starting skills. We will be adding more in following updates, more skills, professions and mechanics.
All professions are fully moddable.
New Skills System
In the new system, a survivor either has or doesn't have a skill. Every skill provides bonuses to different stats. Some bonuses require specific weapons to be equipped, so an Occultist, for example, may get great combat bonuses, but only using occult weaponry.
Some crafting and building tasks now require specific skills. For example, to build a guard tower a survivor must have the "Defensive Building" skill. Choose your survivor skills wisely and plan ahead.
These new skills are fully moddable.
Improved world map
The world map is now 4 times bigger, more sparse, with a more interesting layout. The world now has rural areas and cities. Cities are very dense with scavenge opportunities, while rural areas are more likely to have farms and military bases. Explore the map until you find the areas that have what you need.
Scavenge difficulty is no longer as linear as it was. Things still get harder the farther you are from your base, but it's a bit more random, and some locations (like military bases) hold tougher enemies than others (like farms).
We also make sure that resources essential for research are always available in a reasonable distance from the base with enemies of reasonable difficulty.
The world generation algorithm is moddable.
Research materials
Important research subjects now require scavenge-only resources that are used specifically for this purpose. Once you get your hands on these resources you will have to choose how to best spend them, depending on your situation. There should be enough of these to unlock the entire research tree eventually.
New Content
Most of the new content in alpha 10 revolves around the new profession & skill systems. Other than that, there's also a brand new Industrial Area scavenge biome, three new scavenge locations, a new enemy, and a new research subject.
Performance Improvements
Another very important update in alpha 10 is the improved performance and stability. With large colonies, the game could become laggy, and even freeze for a few seconds on some occasions, which would usually result in the operating system closing the game as non-responsive.
All of the performance issues that were reported were resolved, and a few others that we found. There shouldn't be any more performance issues, we've tested with over 50 survivors. If you encounter any, please let us know ASAP.
Additionally, we've improved performance of switching from base to world map, and the UI for sending survivors on missions.
Balancing
There were many balancing changes. Here are a few of the main ones:
- Survivors now eat less often, so they don't have to stop their tasks and go find food so much as before.
- Lots of stat tweaking around accuracy and evasion.
- Custom difficulties now allow to disable base attacks completely, for those who want to focus on building and play in their own pace.
- When a survivor dies you now get their equipment back.
Steam Workshop Support
Support for steam workshop has been added in alpha 10. The workshop itself (on steam) will be in beta for now, but anyone may join the beta program by simply joining this Steam Group. Once joined, you will have access to the workshop page, and be able to upload or download mods. Follow our modding guide to learn how to create and upload mods.
Additionally, you can now mod many new aspects of the game: Items, crafting, research, scavenge, enemies, skills, professions, world map generation, and much more. For more information check out the modding guide.
Previous saves and mods
Due to the change in the skills system, we couldn't support older saved games. You will have to start a new game in alpha 10.
Mods from previous alpha versions may or may not work, we have made some changes to the format of our configuration files. The modding wiki has been updated with all the new formats.
Full list of changes
Mechanics: Changed skill system, skills no longer have levels, a survivor either has a skill or not. Skills now provide a much higher variety of bonuses/penalties.
Mechanics: New profession system where each survivor has a profession and can earn profession levels. You can then choose new profession skills when they earn levels, customizing your survivors to fit your play style.
Mechanics: Some crafting, building or actions now require the survivors to have certain skills to be performed.
Mechanics: New bonuses that only take effect when specific items are equipped, such as bonus accuracy for bows.
Mechanics: Starting survivors are now shown before starting a new game, and you can re-roll or customize their appearance before starting.
Mechanics: Some scavenge loot is now hidden. Mostly scavengeable equipment.
Mechanics: Can only scout empty tiles now. Scouting scavenge locations is now done automatically when the location is scavenged.
Mechanics: In custom difficulty, can now turn off base attacks completely, and/or turn off awareness gain.
Mechanics: A single research may now provide more than one passive bonus.
AI: Survivors will now switch between tasks less often to prevent ping pong between tasks.
AI: Enemies will now give higher priority to attacking survivors within their range, rather than chasing others who are outside their range.
Usability: New survivor skills window where you can see a survivor's skills, and a summary of all their bonuses.
Usability: Priorities window - can now sort according to specific task, instead of skill level.
Usability: New level up notifications
Usability: Tired survivors now have a visible negative status effect in combat.
Usability: Clicking ESC in the world map now returns to base.
Usability: Selected survivor info now takes less screen space. Most of the extra information is available when opening the skills window.
Usability: Clicking some warnings will now take you to the correct place (rescue warning will take you to the world map, level up warning to the survivor skills window, etc).
Usability: When manually assigning a task to a survivor, they will now continue to perform the task until it is complete, even after a food or rest break.
Usability: Tasks where a survivor performs less than average now receive a lower starting priority.
Content: Four new professions, and tens of new skills for the new skill & profession system.
Content: New enemy creature: Lich. Tough, ranged, and high damage dealer. Stay away.
Content: Some important research subjects now require special scavenge-only resources to perform. These are instead of other scavenge only raw materials (such as metals that were required before you could build metal mines)
Content: Mutate ritual now switches a survivor's profession (randomly) and resets all skill choices (experience level is kept)
Content: New world map generation algorithm. The map is now made of rural and urban areas, each with it's own density and location types.
Content: World map is now 4 times bigger (64x64 instead of 32x32).
Content: New "Farm" world map location, with high chances of finding food and raw materials.
Content: New "School" world map location, with high chances of finding research materials.
Content: New "Church" world map location, with high chances of finding religious and occult materials and artifacts.
Content: New combat map biome - Industrial Area - with brand new assets such as factories, asphalt and storage tanks.
Content: New research - "Demon Anatomy" that provides bonus to damage for all survivors.
Modding: Steam workshop integration (Steam Workshop webpage is still in beta)
Modding: Activate and deactivate mods from the game UI, instead of having to edit external text files.
Modding: Can now mod enemies, skills, professions, food types, the world map generator, and other general game rules (such as starting items or amount of starting survivors).
Visaul: New survivor animation when performing rituals.
Visual: Improved some survivor animations (building, crafting, unarmed attack)
Balancing: Some tasks now give more experience to some survivors, depending on their profession
Balancing: Reduced how often survivors have to eat. Also reduced food creation rate to make up for it.
Balancing: When a survivor dies you now get their equipment back.
Balancing: Scavenge missions no longer add awareness, while rescue missions add more awareness than before.
Balancing: Now making sure that some essential resources (research materials) are available in decent distances from the base, with decent difficulty levels.
Balancing: Mining minerals now requires a survivor to have a matching skill.
Balancing: Guard tower now requires a special survivor skill to build.
Balancing: Crafting some advanced firearms now requires the survivor to have a matching skill.
Balancing: Crafting some holy or dark occult items now requires the survivor to have matching skills.
Balancing: Crafting medicine now requires the survivor to have a matching skill.
Balancing: Clay can now be scavenged.
Balancing: Tweaked how hit chance and evasion are calculated. Evasion is now subtracted from accuracy, instead of being multiplied. This means that evasion has more effect against low accuracy attackers.
Balancing: Weapon and enemy accuracy were tweaked to account for the new hit chance calculations.
Balancing: There is now a minimum hit chance of 20%.
Balancing: Magic circles and altars can no longer be moved.
Balancing: Starting visible range in world map has been increased.
Balancing: When scouting a world map location (by scavenging), the revealed are is now larger.
Balancing: World map scavenge difficulty is now more varied, and not 100% distance related (while farther away locations are still more likely to be higher difficulty with better loot).
Balancing: World map scavenge difficulty is now affected by location type (military bases tend to have more difficult enemies and better loot than farms, assuming same distance from base).
Balancing: You can now scavenge a larger variety of items, and the amounts better fit their value.
Balancing: Salads are now crafted only at the food table.
Balancing: Survivors now start with 1 skill that matches their profession, up to 2 generic skills, and up to 1 negative skills.
Performance: Fixed issue where crafting many of the same item would create many crafting tasks. New crafting tasks will now be created only one per item, and new ones will be added when the previous ones are assigned to.
Performance: Fixed major performance issues that happened with high populations and lots of tasks.
Performance: Improved performance of switching between base view and world map.
Performance: Improved performance of sending survivors on missions, which would also cause the game to hang sometimes.
Performance: Improved performance of changing equipment from mission launch window.
Fixed: Disabled survivor customization during combat which would cause animation issues if used.
Fixed: After deleting a saved game from the title screen, it wouldn't refresh (so you had to delete it again or open/close the window before the deleted game was gone).
Fixed: Pressing ESC with crafting priorities window open would not close the window and would mess up the game.
Fixed: Crafting priorities window now has a scroll bar when needed (relevant when mods add many new items).
Fixed: Destroying an object that had a task on it (such as a farm) would cause survivors not to perform any tasks.
Fixed: Assigning a task manually would cause it to be performed in the bottom left tile, even if the survivor was closer to another tile.
Fixed: When assigning a ritual task manually, the ritual effect would appear a bit off the center.
Fixed: Error messages were blocking clicks in the area around them.
Fixed: An icon for the "Dark Curse" event was missing which didn't allow you to use the cure unless you had the resources available at the beginning of the event.
Fixed: Several status effects in combat would multiply on each other, instead of the base value (making them more powerful than planned when several were applied together)