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Hi friends!
Our final upgrade in the Quality of Life series has arrived… presenting: QoL Mk III! As always, we're extremely grateful for all the detailed feedback and intense support you’ve given us. We've got some big improvements for you this time:
First off, we've overhauled the Disease system. Overall, Duplicant sickness is simpler and more frequent, and can be successfully managed with adequate medicine infrastructure and doctoring time. Germs still work pretty much how you remember them, although Duplicants’ sickness has since been streamlined. Dupes no longer have an “immune system”, but instead simply have a chance to get sick each time they encounter germs of different types. Actually being sick is also a much simpler affair: Infected Duplicants will continue performing their duties in the colony, but the side effects from the disease will reduce their efficiency until cured.
Next, we've turned Jobs into Skills. Although we liked the "job" metaphor, it didn't really match the mechanics of the system, so we renamed it to "Skills" and tweaked many of the surrounding features to be more consistent with the idea of awarding new skills to your Duplicants. Morale Expectation is now accumulated per skill earned, so you’ll get to make a meaningful choice between how specialized or general a particular Dupe's skill set will be as your colony grows!
There have also been a bunch of fixes and additions to fill gaps and correct balance issues: The Steam Turbine has had an overhaul (it condenses the steam internally now!), there is a new Ice-E Fan which replaces the Hydro Fan (with an associated Ice Maker for producing ice!) and new structures for moving solid materials around both by Duplicant-power and with conveyor buildings. Additionally, we've added some new overlays, tweaked tool filters, and fixed a whole bunch of bugs and UI issues.
And with this Upgrade now in your hands, we're full steam ahead towards release! Further details can be found in our roadmap, but rest assured we're not done with this game yet, and will continue absorbing your feedback and making the best mad science experiment urine-powered rocket factory colony management game that we can!
What's New and Improved?
Major Disease rebalance
- Sicknesses are more frequent but less deadly
- Immune System removed, germs have direct chance to infect
- New Medical skills and hats
- New Sick Bay and Disease Clinic buildings
- Medicine redesigned
- Food Poisoning and Slime Lung tweaked
- Allergies and Zombie Spore germs and sicknesses added
Jobs/Skills Overhaul
- Jobs system is now the Skills system
- Experience is now gained up front and then spent on Skills
- Skills Screen (formerly Jobs Screen) displays acquired skills per-Dupe
- Morale Expectation is cumulative per skill learned, rather than tiered
- Freely assign a Duplicant's hat from all the hats they've earned
Major Building Changes
- Steam Turbine total rebuild, it now condenses steam internally, and port and power behavior is much more consistent
- New Sporechid flower appears in the Oil biome, and releases harmful germs
- New Skill Scrubber building to reset skill points
- New Ice Maker to create ice from water
- Cooling Fan replaced with Ice-E Fan, the Dupe-powered method of cooling an area
- New Conveyor Shutoff Valve
- New Conveyor Chute
- New Automatic Dispenser
- New Material Overlay screen
New Integrated Mods System
- Publish and download all mods from the Steam Workshop, or install locally in your Documents folder
- Support DLL, worldgen, element, codex, and strings mods
- Translations still supported, with no changes to existing mods necessary
- In-game menu for enabling and reordering mods
For the full patch notes, please view the full update page!
HOTFIX - 326830
- Swapped in the new artwork for the Early Access message screen
- Mods can now overwrite all the remaining files in worldgen (biomes, features, subworlds, etc.)
- Hooked up proper animations for the Automatic Dispenser
- Fixed Duplicant scaling on the new game mode selection screen
- Dupes printed from the portal (not starter dupes) come with 1 skill point
- Tooltips on the skills screen should no longer go off the bottom of the screen
- Deprecated buildings can no longer be copied
- QOL2 saves which were upgraded to QOL3 will no longer show hearts on every skill
- Door state is copied when copying settings between doors
- Medical hat variants show correctly on the Skills screen
- Logic timing should scale properly with game speed now
- Skill Scrubber sounds added
- Sneezing no longer interrupts errands, they will resume after the sneeze completes. (A few more emotes are underway to be fixed too!)
- Duplicants who were in rockets in a QOL2 save will have their skill points properly upgraded. (If the colony has been loaded and saved in QOL3, the points can no longer be restored.)
- Highly germ-susceptible Duplicants will no longer get other Duplicants sick when they are exposed to germs.
- Selected hat displays correctly in the Skills screen