Hello everyone!
The year is quickly nearing its end, and it’s time to release the final update of 2021. Here are the highlights, with the complete list of changes at the end of this post.
The holiday update
- Several new bot orders: “Prepare for Expedition”, “Find Weapon”, and “Load Items”, which commands the bot to either recharge battery cells, refill oxygen tanks, or reload ammo.
- Other bot improvements: ability to access a bot’s inventory and changes to the medic bot’s behavior.
- Improved campaign submarine selection and sub visibility in the lobby.
- Multiplayer stability improvements and several related fixes.
- Talent fixes and improvements.
- Adjustments to gardening and monster spawns.
- Orca 2, a new sub.
”The Europan” third issue
In addition to the game update, we’ve also released an update for the Barotrauma Supporter Pack – a brand new issue of the fictional newspaper “The Europan”. We hope you enjoy reading it!
Happy holidays!
Last but not least we want to thank all of you for joining us in 2021. Both Barotrauma and our player community have grown by leaps and bounds this year, and we look forward to returning to work… after a much-needed holiday break. So now we wish you all a beautiful holiday season and happy new year – see you in 2022!
P.S. Find some more greetings on our blog.
v0.15.21.0 changelog
Changes:
- New submarine: Orca 2.
- Improved monster spawning: different monsters spawn in different biomes and tougher monsters are introduced gradually during the course of the campaign. WIP, probably requires balancing and adjusting. Feedback is welcome.
- Adjusted gardening: the plants now require less continuous attention, making gardening a more viable "downtime activity" that you can focus on when there's nothing else to do, and ignore when you're busy without killing the plants.
- Readded GameAnalytics, a library that allows us to collect gameplay statistics and error reports automatically. Sending statistics is completely optional: when you launch the game, you're asked whether you want to allow the game to send us data or not. If you decline, no data of any kind is collected. The collected data is completely anonymous and doesn't contain any personal information, but only things such as error reports and statistics about the selected game mode, submarine, missions and mods.
- Added a simple QTE "minigame" to the repair interface. Allows speeding up the repairs slightly and hopefully makes repairing feel a little more engaging.
- Characters can climb up ladders faster by holding the sprint key.
- Changed the way purchasable submarines for the multiplayer campaign are selected: instead of choosing them when creating the campaign, all of the server's visible submarines are made available for purchase.
- Diving suits play a different warning sound when low on oxygen (<5% left in tank).
- PUCS doesn't consume oxygen tanks in rooms with oxygen.
- Added "Pump In" option to the contextual "Pump Water" order.
- Added "fuel_percentage_left" output to reactors. Outputs the sum of the fuel rods' condition percentage, as opposed to the total "heating power" of the rods like the "fuel_out" output.
- Powered down reactors don't zap the user when repairing.
- Improved weapon indicators on the status monitor (they now indicate the rotation of the turrets).
- Damaging outpost NPCs when there's a monster or an instigator nearby doesn't turn the outpost NPCs hostile (i.e. accidentally damaging one of the NPCs when you're fighting a hostile NPC doesn't trigger the guards).
- Damaging outpost NPCs when there's a monster or an instigator nearby doesn't lower outpost reputation.
- Adjustments to job gear and diving suit sprites and inventory icons.
- New depth charge tube sprite.
- Added a verification prompt when saving and quitting a campaign round (mp or sp).
- Added options to adjust karma penalty for containing dangerous items in the server settings.
- Made it a bit more viable to take out enemy humans stealthily: if an attack immediately kills/incapacitates the character, others won't be alerted unless they witness the attack.
- Option to end outpost rounds without saving.
- Made sonar transducer consume less power when the sonar is running in passive mode (or when the transducer isn't connected to anything).
- Treatment suggestions in the health interface take items in subinventories into account as well.
- Added tooltips to treatment suggestions to make it more clear the treatments can be applied by clicking on the suggestions.
- Added "condition_out" pin to fabricators, deconstructors and blank loader.
- Added "set_delay" input to delay component.
- Tagged boarding axe and assault rifle as medium items to allow storing them in cabinets.
- Removed "weapon" and "gun" tags from the bike horn and the syringe gun.
- Added a menu to hide submarines in the server lobby, allowing hosts to remove vanilla submarines from the list without replacing the content package.
- Added LOS effect to the server settings.
- Added line break support to the server message.
- Connected the diving suit lockers on the vanilla submarines to the power grid so that they refill the contained oxygen tanks.
- Connected the oxygen shelves on Humpback to the power grid.
- Allowed in-game editing of lamps in R-29.
- Mudraptor shell shields block projectiles and can be destroyed by firing at them.
- Prototype Steam Cannon can damage ballast flora.
- Water detectors treat minuscule amounts (< 1.0 water volume) as 0.
- Improvements to the "infiltration" outpost event: you can talk to any of the clowns to progress, not just the one that spawned 1st, and the clowns head to the airlock when told to leave.
- Medical curtains can be opened and closed.
- Restricted the amount of additional cargo you can choose in multiplayer: max 10 items of a type, max 20 types of items.
- Allow editing item quality in the sub editor.
- Removed stun tools from riot officer loadout, replaced with riot shotgun.
- Burns slowly heal by themselves, adjusted radiation poisoning accordingly.
- Shotguns now spawn with 6 shells, autoshotguns with 8 (a full stack).
Multiplayer fixes:
- Fixed campaign character resetting if the client, disconnects, rejoins and respawns on the same round after their character has gotten killed.
- Fixed skill penalties not getting applied when respawning during the same round.
- Fixed several issues (namely mission/submarine mismatches and desyncs) when clients take too long to receive an up-to-date campaign save at the start of a new round.
- Fixed "received data without a transfer initiation message" errors when a client disconnects and reconnects while a file transfer is in progress.
- Fixed respawn not triggering during multiplayer rounds if a client disconnects and rejoins after dying. Happened because the server was expecting the client to answer the "respawn with penalty?" prompt, which wouldn't be shown when the client rejoins mid-round.
- Fixed server making Client A switch their character to Client B's when Client B disconnects if the clients have the same connection endpoint (Steam ID or IP, for example when the players are using the same wifi connection), and Client B's character was created after Client A's.
- Fixed items sometimes teleporting from monster to another or dropping when trying to pick them up by double-clicking. Happened when the monster had selected (= grabbed, started to eat) another monster when they were still alive.
- Fixed crashing if you start the round as a spectator, take control of someone with console commands and try to access the tab menu's character tab.
- Fixed empty exploding coilgun ammo boxes exploding client-side when deconstructed.
- Fixed disabling friendly fire preventing buffs from being applied to crewmates, while allowing harmful afflictions to be applied (= the setting basically worked the wrong way around).
- Fixed other clients' characters sometimes appearing to teleport outside the sub for 1 frame when moving from sub to another, leading to further issues if the client has water-sensitive items in their inventory.
- Fixed whitelist controls getting disabled when adding new players to the list if whitelist wasn't enabled when opening the server settings.
- Fixed bots losing their items if you quit the 1st MP campaign round without saving, continue, and repeat that again.
- Fixed playstyle always being displayed as Serious in the server lobby unless you're hosting yourself.
- Reduced the severity and frequency of the "Maximum packet size exceeded" error in the server lobby.
- Fixed context menus not opening when right-clicking player names in the chat and server log.
- Improved the error message shown when a Steam lobby could not be created.
Talent improvements and fixes:
- Overall balancing to the stats boots from talents.
- Adjustments to some of the ability descriptions to address some inaccuracies/ambiguities.
- Reworked "implacable": now allows the character to stay conscious for 15 seconds after falling below 0 health.
- Reworked "field medic": if you complete a mission and all crew members survived, you gain medical skill.
- Reworked "beat cop": now gives 25% repair speed and increases inflicted stuns by 25% (and the tackle).
- Reworked "reverse engineer": whenever you deconstruct an alien artifact, you have a 50% chance to gain double output from it and gain 8 to a random skill. Small alien artifacts, when deconstructed, give 4 skill instead.
- Reworked "curiosity": whenever you deconstruct an alien artifact, you and another random allied crewmember gains 125 experience. Small alien artifacts, when deconstructed, give 50 experience instead.
- Reworked "expert commando": now gives, to ranged weapons, 70% spread reduction, 40% attack multiplier and 30% attack speed reduction while crouched.
- Reworked "gene therapist": now gives an additional 25% medical item potency, correctly displays as adding a flat 10% to each refined genetic material.
- Reworked "genetic stability": no longer gives 25% repair speed, and instead gives 15 to all skills. Probability of tainting genetic material reduced to 50%.
- Reworked "still kicking": now rapidly heals over a short duration instead.
- Reworked "stand and deliver": assistant skillbook can no longer be used on another character, instead the nearest ally gains 5 to all skills when the book is read by the talent owner.
- Reworked "first aid training": Now gives a flat 35% increase to medical item potency when applied to the character.
- Reworked "evasive maneuvers": now gives 15% more money for nest/swarm missions instead of giving attack bonus inside submarine.
- Reworked "expanded research": whenever you or another allied crewmember deconstructs depleted fuel, they gain 400 experience. This effect can only occur up to 3 times until you finish another mission.
- "Scrap savant" and "scrounger" only spawn the scrap in items with the tag "container" and only if the container can hold scrap. Fixes ability to generate free scrap by placing containers like detonators and portable pumps in the wrecks.
- "Advanced splicing", "optimized power-flow" and "elbow grease" can now only give up to 100 skill bonus.
- Fixed "canned heat" not increasing the quality of fabricated oxygenite tanks.
- Fixed "pyromaniac" applying the buff to the enemy you're damaging instead of your character.
- Fixed server ending the round if the last player alive is an assistant with the "still kicking" talent and said assistant falls unconscious.
- Electrochemist talent doesn't stun the attacker if the attack doesn't apply any harmful afflictions (e.g. if it only applies buffs or gives experience).
- Fixed autofill not working on the new talent items.
- Fixed "crew layabout" applying stat boosts to enemies as well.
- Fixed "expert commando" talent affecting turrets.
- Fixed hardened/dementonite crowbars not opening doors faster than normal ones.
- Fixed unlocking "all seeing eye" preventing you from unlocking further talents until you've gained enough EXP to compensate for the 3 "free" talents.
- Fixed high-quality items with whose max condition is above 100% not being accepted as fabrication ingredients.
- Fixed "tandem fire" crashing the game if there are no other crewmates present.
- Fixed "safety first" talent giving you mechanical skill when you gain electrical skill instead of the other way around.
- Added PreferredContainers to the new talent items to allow the bots to clean them up.
- Rebalanced combat stimulant: now applies faster, but less in total per dose. Healing reduced.
- Dropped type "poison" from chem addiction, making it non-healable (only chem withdrawal can be healed).
AI:
- New order: Find Weapon
- New order: Prepare for Expedition.
- New order: "Load Items", with options "Recharge battery cells", "Refill oxygen tanks", and "Reload ammo". Bots will take battery cells to be recharged, take oxygen tanks to be refilled, or place more ammo to loaders depending on the order option.
- Added an option to pump in water. Only applicable to pumps that are not automatically controlled.
- Orders that cannot be completed should now be dismissed automatically instead of keeping active but doing nothing.
- The bots should now tell you when they can't follow an order, instead of always replying positively.
- Changes to the default order assignment priorities, which determine the initial order of the orders when multiple is issued. You can still alter the order manually by dragging the order icons.
- Fixed bots getting stuck with invalid paths for too long.
- Fixed AIObjectiveGetItem not working properly when we try to ignore the items that already are in the inventory. In practice, only affects the find better weapons behavior in the combat objective (Fight Intruders).
- Bots don't automatically unequip PUCS when they don't need diving gear.
- Don't allow bots to heal pets (because they are likely to just kill them).
- Fixed bots trying to equip diving gear when they have spliced genes that give pressure immunity and/or remove the need for oxygen.
- Improved the bots door interaction so that they don't slam the door at your face, nor bump into closed doors so often, or keep "smashing the select key" as frequently. There's now a three second cooldown after succesfully pressing a button before next attempt.
- Bots now hold still while waiting a door to open instead of moving towards it.
- Bots now only put oxygen tanks into oxygen generators with the "Refill Oxygen Tanks" order option.
- Bots take previous heals into account when determining when to react to attacks. Fixes deusizine and liquid oxygenite aggroing the bots when using them to treat oxygen loss.
- Bots now treat handcuffed targets as neutralized, unless they are hostiles spawned from events. Fixes e.g. bots killing captured prisoners, but also allows you to submit to the outpost guards by handcuffing yourself.
- Prevent bots from healing the targets that have recently attacked them. Fixes bots healing and shooting you at the same time.
- Fixed rescue order (healing) not working outside of the sub.
- Fixed bots not knowing how to use the Rapid Fissile Accelerator. Also improves on how they use smg, assault rifle, and autoshotgun.
- Fixed unconscious NPCs being able to see you steal.
- Fixed bots sometimes repathing too eagerly while they are on ladders, sometimes causing them to get stuck in places where they should switch from a ladder to another one nearby.
- Fixed hostages in the abandoned outpost rescue mission refusing to follow a player that has some diving gear on they don't have access to.
- Fixed pirates giving redundant orders and consequently talking too much in the chat.
- Fixed pirates not always shooting monsters if there's only a few of them.
- Fixed bots not always trying to press the right button to interact with a door.
- Fixed bots getting stuck when trying to follow a target with some diving gear they don't have access to. Now they should self-dismiss the order instead.
- Fixed bots sometimes deploying Kastrull's drone for no reason.
- Improvements to cave waypoints: should fix bots getting stuck next to destructible ice chunks even if there's a way past them.
- Husks now remain neutral towards characters that are late in the husk transformation, unless they act offensively.
- Reduced Husk and Humanhusk sight from 1 to 0.5.
- Oxygenite shards are no longer oxygen sources and can't be inserted into diving gear or tools directly. They are still a source of liquid oxygenite, which can be used to craft oxygenite tanks.
- Added some dialog for the bots when they are getting attacked outside a friendly sub to tell the player why they are fleeing from an enemy and that they don't have a weapon.
- Fixed combat objective overriding the priority of find safety objective when the combat objective shouldn't even be active, leading to bots sometimes suffocating after combat if they don't have enough oxygen in the currently equipped tank.
Misc fixes:
- Exploding the abandoned outpost reactor doesn't damage the player sub in missions that require destroying it.
- Hopefully occasional fixed fires/meltdowns at the start of a round. Was caused by the "warm start" logic that simulates 10 seconds of power grid updates at the start of a round: if the reactor wasn't running on auto or was controlled by some custom circuit, it wouldn't adapt to the changes in the grid load during those simulated 10 seconds, which could lead to overloads.
- Fixed blips not disappearing from the sonar when it's been repaired above 100% condition by using talents.
- Fixed Security Officer Uniform's and Gunner Uniform's icons being swapped.
- Fixed RegExFindComponent handling some inputs incorrectly.
- Fixed sprite bleed in the harmonica inventory icon.
- Fixed crashing when equipping a handheld status monitor that spawned outside subs.
- Fixed ruins sometimes extending above the top of the level.
- Fixed submarine editor failing to generate waypoints on stairs.
- Fixed submarine editor failing to connect some of the waypoints around the sub.
- Fixed non-localized list formatting in the "I need [treatment1], [treatment2] or [treatment3]" bot dialog.
- Fixed crashing if a mineral mission fails to find a long enough edge to spawn the resources on.
- Fixed one of the hulls not covering the whole room in the "Alien_MaintenanceTunnels1" module.
- Widen a gap in the "Alien_Entrance2" module to cover the full width of the hole in the wall.
- Removed non-interactable black wire from inside one of the terminals in Alien_Chasm2.
- Fixed pirate subs sometimes not withstanding the pressure in the level in the deeper biomes.
- Fixed diving gear not affecting the depth at which huskified humans' get crushed by pressure.
- Fixed characters with husk genes + husk infection becoming huskified when they die.
- Fixed the ragdolls breaking when characters with a harpoon/guardian spear (or any other projectile) attached to their body exits a submarine/ruin.
- Fixed harpoon rope pulling with excessive forces when the target is on a platform.
- Always snap the rope between the harpoon and the harpoon gun when the harpoon is detached from the target. Possibly fixes cases where physics forces from the rope are still applied when the projectile has dropped. Also applies to fractal guardians.
- Fixed physics glitches with guardian's tail when it switches subs or goes outside.
- Fixed characters sometimes getting teleported to an invalid position when they are exiting/entering the sub and have more than one swarm feeder latched on them.
- Fixed Kastrull and Typhon 2 using different id card tags than the rest of the vanilla sub ("idjob" instead of "id_job").
- Fixed artifact transport cases not reliably suppressing thermal artifact fires.
- Fixed ability to stack batteries in wrecked charging docks.
- Fixed certain signal components (boolean operators, artihmetic, equals, trigonometric, string) triggering at the start of a round when they're set to a timeframe larger than 0.1 s.
- Fabricator drops the items inside the fabrication materials instead of consuming them (e.g. fabricating a combat suit from a normal one with a tank inside doesn't make the tank disappear).
- Fixed deconstructor destroying items contained in the deconstructed item if they can't fit in the output slots.
- Fixed lights becoming full-brightness for one frame when their color is set using the "set_color" input.
- Fixed turret lights' rotation being wrong for one frame when the light is toggled on
- Fixed shuttles docked to a shuttle docked to the main sub appearing on sonar in PvP.
- Fixed detonator's contained item position.
- Fixed Jovian Radiation bypassing all damage modifiers, including wearable items that protect from radiation.
- Fixed outpost reactors not accepting volatile fulgurium rods as fuel.
- Fixed some ugly first frames when populating certain listboxes (e.g. server list).
- Fixed spineling spikes given by spineling genes launching in an incorrect direction when the character is mirrored (= facing left) in multiplayer.
- Characters don't consume hull oxygen when their need for oxygen has been removed with thresher genes or pressure stabilizer.
- Fixed cigar and captain's pipe giving practically no psychosis resistance.
- Fixed being able to sell items from inventories of characters who are on the player's sub.
- Fixed occasional "Attempted to set the anchor B of a limb's pull joint to an invalid value" errors when dragging someone underwater.
- Fixed oxygenite tanks not being affected by gas vents in caves.
- Fixed items disappearing when trying to combine stacks of partially consumed items.
- Fixed upgrading devices' max condition causing issues with repairing: the repair thresholds were being treated as condition values instead of percentages, meaning that the devices would need to deteriorate more before they become repairable.
- Fixed ability to combine genetic materials in normal deconstructors.
- Fixed harpoon guns spawning with only 5 harpoons and stun guns with 1 dart.
- Fixed "bombscare" outpost event giving the characters xp for a non-existent "engineering" skill.
- Restrict downwards movement when a character has reached the bottom of a ladder to fix phasing through the floor.
- Fixed characters' feet dangling in the air when moving from a ladder to another (e.g. when climbing from the sub to the outpost).
- Adjusted flamethrower and prototype steam cannon particles to get them to match the range of the weapons more closely.
- Fixed most outpost modules being named as airlock and consequently defined as "wet rooms". Fixes bots still slamming doors and hatches on each others face while moving around in the outposts.
- Fixed portable pump consuming batteries when it's not pumping in/out.
- Fixed waypoint connections on Remora drone causing navigation issues for the bots.
- Fixed undocking a drone (e.g. on Remora/Kastrull) permanently breaking the navigation between the shuttle and the main sub.
- Fixed mudraptors and crawlers trying to swim to the bottom of the ocean.
- Fixed structures without a collider not being taken into account when determining which submarines are visible, causing them to vanish if there are only structures without a collider on the screen.
- Fixed Round and Ceil components returning -0 when rounding a negative value to 0.
- Fixed inability to swim up through a small hull on top of another one (e.g. the upper airlock in R-29).
- Fixed skillbooks, oxygenite shards and sulphurite shards not spawning in crates.
- Fixed name of the currently installed turret not being displayed in the submarine upgrade menu.
- Fixed AI gunners not shooting at visible enemies inside the enemy submarine.
- Fixed status monitor's electrical view not showing the power/load values in Korean.
- Fixed bots trying to equip a scooter when their hands are occupied by something that can't be put in the inventory (e.g. a crate), leading to weird twitching when they drop and immediately pick up the carried item.
- Bots stop moving before starting to repair a device. Fixes bots "flying away" when the repair fails, because they'd start the repair while still running at full speed and would keep the momentum if they get stunned because of the failed repair.
- Fixed looking at the sonar sometimes causing a significant performance hit (most often in the abyss). If a path to a marker couldn't be found when determining the distance to the marker, the game would keep trying to find a path every frame.
- Fixed Alien_Entrance3's left opening getting connected to other modules instead of being used as an entrance.
- Fixed coilgun draining ammo boxes at the same rate regardless of the number of linked loaders.
- Fixed some of the artifacts still playing sounds when inside a transport case.
- Fixed inability to put genetic materials into a container inside another container.
- Fixed characters' legs sometimes bending the wrong way around when climbing (seems to happen most often when trying to get on ladders while swimming up-side down).
- Fixed borked "Front E P2" collider.
- Fixed certain wires in vanilla subs being impossible to remove.
- Fixed gaps sometimes getting connected to incorrect hulls between docking ports, preventing water from flowing down from the space between the ports.
- Fixed mudraptor shell armor's sprite depth getting messed up when climbing ladders.
- Fixed drunkenness, opiate withdrawal and chem withdrawal not causing nausea.
- Fixed wire nodes getting misplaced in the sub editor when loading mirrored wires.
- Fixed campaign setup menu going crazy if you try to scroll it with arrow keys.
- Fixed handheld status monitor drawing the water levels and character icons of the previous sub when it's taken outside.
- Fixed spawnitem command not working in the sub editor.
- Fixed alien pistol not having a crosshair.
- Fixed weapon skill above 100 making weapons less accurate.
- Fixed cargo sometimes spawning inside the floor. Happened because the spawn position was determined based on the purchased item's size, instead of the crate the item spawns in.
- Fixed campaign getting "locked" if the submarine undocks immediately at the start of the round (on the first frame, e.g. as a result of some custom docking circuit).
- Fixed deconstructor being unable to combine the output items if they're inside a container in the output slots.
- Fixed misaligned outpost reactor meters.
- Fixed sprite bleed in the outpost computer terminal sprite.
Modding:
- Fixed inability to override talent trees.
- Item variants try to load sprites from the base item's directory if the path isn't specified.
- Fixed crashing when trying to fire a projectile with no Attack configured with a turret.
- Made memory component's "writeable" field editable in the sub editor.
- Fixed all ruin generation params displaying "RuinGenerationParams" as their name in the level editor.
- Fixed PropertyConditionals with comparison type "And" that check a parent container's tags being very unintuitive to use because they checked the components of the item as well, not just the item object.
- Made several outpost store parameters editable separately for each location type (see locationTypes.xml).
- Fixed crashing when trying to create a non-humanoid that can walk in the character editor.
- Added a randomize button for level editor seed.
- Fixed fabricators without a repairable component crashing the game when activated.
- Fixed overriding a Controller component (e.g. button) resetting its Toggle and State settings.
- Fixed ParticleEmitter's angle not getting mirrored when spawned by a mirrored item.
- Fixed certain explosion flashduration values causing the light to flicker/loop.
- Allow the enemy AI to target using groups in addition to species names.
- Moved the turret ammo box definitions from containers.xml to where the gun and the ammo are defined.
- Fixed hulls' "hidden in game" setting doing nothing.
- Fixed certain items causing the "analyzeitem" and "deconstructvalue" console commands to crash.