That's right, monsters can have activated skills now too!
Here's some new sink-hole worms tossing around my away team:
Every few turns they can reach out and pull you in from a distance.
But most of this week was spent on interface improvements and debugging.
On the salvage screen, you now get icons for everything, tooltips about what items disassemble into, and the screen can now be scrolled if you have that much stuff. The icons for crafting parts have finally been matched to their pictures (what, you didn't notice?), and the way crafting parts are picked up is new...
Scroll the pawn shop!
Did you ever have so much to sell at the space station, that it wouldn't fit on one screen? Now you can easily scroll the pawn shop screen to sell whatever treasure horde you've amassed.
Races have tool-tips too...
And so do artifacts!
Information in the artifacts screen is now color coded, giving you better information at a glance. Unidentified artifacts are bright yellow. Artifacts with known bad effects are red. And artifacts that are temporarily causing problems are a rusty orange.
What makes artifacts go bad? Never seen that? Well, if you get too many at once, strange things start to happen...
And while I was going through all this artifact code, I discovered a surprising number of display and calculation bugs. I fixed them.
Other fixes and changes:
- Introduced "sinkhole" planetary terrain feature. There are 2 ways to destroy a sinkhole, and a third one in the works.
- Introduced "holeworm" monster, which can live in sinkholes.
- Introduced monster power "Pull" and gave it to holeworms. If you get within 2 tiles of them, they pull you next to them and get a free melee attack.
- Gave "deep sleepers" the ability to pull you in from a distance of 3 tiles, but with no free attack.
- Fixed a bug where officer cooldown skills would get "lost" when an officer died or was dismissed. It's still not perfect, but work will continue until it is.
- Added "slime" environment effect, which makes you (and monsters) unable to move if you walk into it.
- Gave "slime trail" power giant snail monster. It now leaves a trail of slime. Flying creatures won't get stuck in it, but most others will!
- Added "Ultra-Lichen" monster, with a 3-stage life cycle (and some unique behaviors).
- More monster skills and powers are in the works for the coming week.
- Limited "shuttle ace" skill to only be able to land in relatively wide-open areas. It has been suggested that higher levels of shuttle ace reduce those limits. Sounds like a good idea, right?
- Fixed a bug that made certain items not save their special descriptions and damages, resulting in blank tool-tips.
- I Started keeping a real-time development log in the Discord, which you can join here.
...and...
David recently sent me 110 updated images (mostly loot) that are much *sharper* than the previous versions. Those are in the current version, enjoy!
Alien Plants
Last time, I asked for some names of alien plants, and the Steam community did *not* disappoint! I ended up using almost every single one that was submitted. (There are a total of 135 of these "unique and valuable specimens".)
There are a few that still don't have names.
So this time, just pick a few and name those. I can't use several hundred more names, and I really hate to throw out good ones. But everyone should take a stab at #119.
Name them in the comments as before ;)
