Following a successful week on the beta branch, Update 8 is now available on the main branch for all players to enjoy. As mentioned, this update bring the new Leader’s family system, for you to take on the challenge of having a spouse and heir, many vital bug fixes, and a lot of smaller improvements.
Patch notes are repeated below. Thanks to everybody who took the time to try the game during the beta.
We’re hopeful we’ve caught all the serious bugs, but we’ll continue to monitor bug reports and forum feedback of course.
New Development Roadmap
Our old feature roadmap was a bit out of date and I’ve now updated it to show what our core focus is for finishing Atomic Society:
You can read it here, on the discussion forum.
Comments, ideas and suggestions are welcome as always. We’re really trying to shape the core of Atomic Society around what players do and don’t enjoy (as best we can with our tiny team and day jobs) so the more we get the better! Thanks for helping to make the game better.
Coming Next
Work has already started on Update 9 with new little improvements already being added. The main goal of this update is polish and stability before we carry on adding major new content to make sure everything is working as intended. The good news is this means it shouldn’t take so long to get out (by our standards) as there isn’t any scary epic new feature for us to tear our (remaining) hair out over!
I promise to keep in touch with dev blogs even if the blog is just me basically saying “everything is on fire” as one thing I learnt from my last blog is that players just want to know what’s going on, even if things aren’t going well, that's part of the Early Access journey. However we've really changed a lot about how we work this summer, so I'm hoping we can get better updates out faster. That's the plan.
Update 8 - Family - Patch Notes (Final)
New Content and Improvements:
- New Feature – Leader’s Mansion & Family After your town has survived 3 years, your people will award you the Leader’s Mansion structure. Building this impressive new structure lets you tackle a new goal – to have a life partner and pass on your unique genetic code to an heir. After choosing who to be with, you can see your spouse (you have up to 3 if that suits you) getting up to mischief in town as you play, and worry about whether or not your children will survive (or be murderers – family members can commit the same traits as ordinary citizens). You can choose to make your family immune from arrest, or let them be locked up like regular criminals but this makes people harder to convert. Laws you set will impact who you can be with in the first place.
- The Scavenger’s Hut now passively harvests lumber from any nearby trees at a slow rate. This change makes the placement of the Scavenger’s Hut a lot more strategic. You must now consider how close it is to ruins while trying to get the most from any nearby trees. This change also means forest maps play differently to desert and snow maps.
- In response to player feedback, the bonus Raider Story Event can now be enabled or disabled whenever you start a new game for those who just want to build in peace (though you still need guard towers to make people feel safe). However, because the Raiders are now optional, their impact has been scaled up (it varies by difficulty) making the Story Event a lot more damaging if you do switch it on. We have also changed the wording around the Raiders to make it clear they're simply a text-based story event.
- The Town Leader will now automatically keep salvaging after finding a bag upgrade, until that new bag is full.
- A new guitar-based song (“Safe”) has been added to the soundtrack. This song will play after all the in-game goals have been completed.
- The Canteen building is now upgradeable with electricity, allowing more people to visit it simultaneously.
- Added a new “ultra” graphical preset that has increased shadow distance and resolution. You can switch to it in video options.
- Several new sound effects added for various actions.
- Countless UI tweaks implemented. To list a few: buildings with an radius effect (AoE) now display icons on the ground to help players understand what the effect does. The Town Hall stats screen has been made a lot more readable. The Courthouse and Trader UI has been improved. A quick way to access the menu button has been added to the top left. Extra shortcut buttons have been added to the main panel. Almost every menu has had a little touch-up.
- Several new alert messages added. These will explain what certain features do, or alert you to problems in the town that players were previously overlooking.
- Several text improvements and adjustments. For example, the opening story now implies the (super-speedy) Town Leader may not necessarily be an ordinary human being but created to rebuild society for the humans - which is interesting when it comes to raising an heir. New game tips have also been added to cover new features and hazards players often fall into. The tutorial has been streamlined and refined. Building descriptions have been made clearer, etc.
Bug Fixes:
This version comes with many important bug fixes…
- Fixed: A bug that could cause saving to freeze permanently on certain maps with certain ruins. Thanks to our players for finding this and sending us the vital game info to solve it! We are monitoring this one on the beta branch to make sure it's fixed for everyone, but hopefully we've found the cause.
- Fixed: A bug that let the player try and save while saving, or delete a save while saving thus causing the save process to break.
- Fixed: A bug where guard tower workers would stop collecting weapons if one of them lost their job while coming back with weapons.
- Fixed: A bug that meant upgraded guard towers were not protecting structures in the extra radius.
- Fixed: A bug that could sometimes cause your Town Leader or engineers to teleport across the map if you were following them with the camera as a building was converted.
- Fixed: The Research Center can no longer be destroyed by raiders or collapse due to lack of repairs in order to prevent a rare and unrepeatable bug where researching could get stuck (you can still manually blow it up).
- Fixed: A very rare memory leak that could cause the game to crash when loading a saved game under specific circumstances.
- Fixed: A bug that was letting citizen builders leave work whenever they wanted, thus making them frustratingly ineffective even if they were even slightly unhappy.
- Fixed: A bug that could sometimes cause the repair building icon to get stuck on the screen if the building collapsed.
- Fixed: Fixed a bug that caused several sound effects to be unaffected by the volume slider.
- Fixed: A bug where Enforcers could get confused if Raiders changed a law while they were working on it. Also improved the Enforcer code in general to make them more reliable.
- Fixed: A bug that caused the food and drink statistics on the Town Hall stats menu to be linked, showing identical numbers. They now show accurate numbers.
- Fixed: A bug where the leader could get stuck behind the fence after helping to build the Research Center and only moved out by using mouse clicks.
- Fixed: We’ve reduced the size of the output_log file the game creates while you’re playing to save on hard drive space (and make it easier to email to us if needed).
- Fixed: A cosmetic bug where construction areas were rotated at a different angle to the way the player had put the building down.
- Fixed: A few alert messages were spamming the player too frequently (like a Courthouse Lacks Workers, etc). These will appear less often.
Balance Changes:
Here are the latest balance changes in response to player feedback…
- The beginning of the game has been re-balanced to make the initial citizens survive longer, letting new players get their bearings before people drop dead. This change does not affect hard mode.
- The canteen has been made a little less thirsty for lumber to encourage players to use it.
- Guard towers now only need 2 workers so players have more staff to spare.
- Wind turbines have been re-balanced so that you can only build 1 per 100 citizens, to avoid people exploiting them batteries for trade.
- The Luxury Tower now takes longer to research, meaning the other houses are suddenly more useful.
- Citizens are twice as likely to belong to your belief system passively (without needing conversion) so you can spend less time torturing or educating in the Info Station. This should result seeing more convictions in the early game.
- Tundra is now shrouded in fog of a nuclear winter, making it harder to scavenge as you can’t see as far ahead.
- As mentioned, if this story event is enabled, the “Raiders have arrived” alert now appears when you hit 200 citizens, not 250. Their chances to kill, destroy, or damage buildings have been slightly increased. The Raiders can still be completely neutralised by upgraded guard towers.