Making a game may be harder than surviving the apocalypse... But just like in Judgment, in the end we prevail.
Alpha 10 is finally available on the beta branch. Below is a partial list of the new stuff and changes. The full story and list of changes we will share when we make it available in the main branch, next week if all goes as planned.
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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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.
Profession System
Tired of every survivor having the same 7 skills? Well, they don't anymore!
Every survivor now starts with a profession and some skills from that profession. As they perform tasks, they gain experience and earn levels in their profession. For every level you can select one of several new skills, depending on the profession.
This is the main change of this update, as it touches almost every aspect of the game, and took a lot of work to implement, test and balance. 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.
These 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.
New 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
Other than the tens of new skills and professions, there's also a brand new Industrial Area scavenge biome, and a new enemy creature.
Performance Improvements
We solved all of the performance issues we could locate, and all of those that were reported to us. If you encounter any more performance problems, even with large colonies, please let us know ASAP.
Steam Workshop Support
We implemented support for steam workshop. The workshop will be in beta for now, but anyone may join the beta program. We will provide more information about this in the near future.
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 will be updated in the next couple of days to describe these changes and the new modding possibilities of alpha 10.