Hello Elders!
Winter is coming to an end, and as the (barely visible) snow melts I have completed work on a big quality of life patch, containing many of the requests I have received in these first months post release!
The changelog is quite big, so here are some highlights about this patch.
Upgrades to Buildings Actions
First of all, I made sure to address some annoying situations that would come up regarding special actions, making the game more streamlined. So, you can now directly rebuild buildings, train Pips inside Tasks, pause and/or rollback Upgrade and Task actions, and rollback Training actions. Also, Chefs will now work inside Large Kitchens even if hungry, and Pips will prioritize higher-yield plants when they complete harvests,
Pips will also be a lot smarter with automatic reassignment of professionals and when using forced assignment (CTRL key by default), with the feature now working with all special actions too (that was quite a lot of work, but it was worth it!)
Finally, Fisherpips will be able to swim up to two tiles, as too many people were reporting it as a bug! :)
Various UI updates
You know now very well that working on UI is my secret passion, so I did several addition to the game! I did several changes to the UI, adding a Pippins counter in the main UI, adding current actions and working buildings to Pip details, adding a radial menu to Pips,
The Shaman now handles on the UI all the bonuses and maluses, as well as showing a triggered bonus / malus when needed. This will make her a bit easier to handle!
There is a new panel that lists all buildings (altough I'll probably do some more edits to that), and you can now SHIFT + click on any building in the building menu to find it in the world. Also, a feedback is now shown if a building is going to become abandoned next turn due to a dismante.
A new "Global Actions" panel in the lower-right part of the screen adds a couple of actions that can be performed: unassign all Pips from their current work, and make a baby in a random free dwelling. I want to add more to that, so expect more buttons to come!
Pip Picking feature
For players that want to have complete control, I added a Pip Picking feature. By holding the Picking key (default: left ALT) you are asked to select a Pip when performing any action!
Use this to make sure you pick the correct Pip to cure, for example!
This new mode also comes with some updates to the cursor, which will now show whether you are in "Picking" mode (ALT), "Force" mode (CTRL), or Pip-selection mode (SHIFT).
More settings!
You will find that the settings menu has been completely revised to have more space, and I added many more settings based on player requests!
- New flow options for those that hate all of my animations: Instant Popups, instant Tooltips, cutscene skips,
- An ever improving SUPER fast pass turn option, with even faster turns and reduced waits (keep telling me whether some event is too slow, so I can add it to the list!)
- Option to turn off the Retro audio filter you hear on voices and SFXs, for a cleaner (but not so retro) audio
- New accessibility options: Hardware Cursor, Disable Edge Panning, Gamma and Saturation sliders,
- Option to see compound resource modifiers instead of gains and losses (i.e. +4 instead of +6 -2)
More... more!!!!!
Ok, ok! Sheesh! Here is some more stuff!
- Enhanced Rich Presence, make sure everybody knows that you are fighting the Apocalypse as Randolph so they know they'd better not write to you!
- An opt-in system to track gameplay data, which I will use for balance purpose (I need to know how many times events actually land on you!)
- *Major* optimizations!
This is not all, of course, as the list of QoL requests never ends, and more will come down the line. It is time however to focus a bit on other parts of the game!
Next up is some balancing tweaks and then... some cool things I am prototyping!
Until then, have fun!
- Michele
Here is the full changelog:
V 1.1.10
Balance: Actions
- Village size now counts Children Pips too
- You can now train Pips inside Tasks
- You can now pause Upgrade and Task actions
- You can now stop Upgrade and Task actions by selecting the action in the right click menu, but a warning will tell you that you will lose your resources
- Training can now be rolled back like similar actions, by losing the resources. It cannot be paused, however.
- Chefs can now work inside Large Kitchens even if hungry (as they will feed themselves right away)
- When a Pip finishes harvesting a Plant, they will now prioritize plants with the best yield at their next turn
Balance: Buildings
- Water no longer blocks traits (i.e. Fisherpips can now get to fish two tiles into the water), effectively reducing bug reports by at least 40%
- You can now Rebuild ruined buildings
- Ruined buildings can be rebuilt even if outside of the village extents
- Quarry now requires any Stone-producing building closeby instead of the specific Stonecutter
- Thinker's Post and its upgrades cannot be placed anymore where output is zero
- Curing ailments cannot be performed on abandoned buildings anymore
Balance: Difficulty
- Challenge mode now rises up to 600% (mastery level 8)
UX: Pips
- Added new hint that explains how to untrain Pips
- Special actions on Pips are now available on a radial menu on Pips themselves
- Revised Pip and Building pulsing behaviour: all items now work the same: a single click pulses all element, SHIFT + click cycles, and holding the button will instead desaturate everything to help you locate the item
- You can now see where a Pip is working in the Side UI and the Pip Recap menu
- You can now unassign any action from the Side UI
- Clicking on the name of a Creature or Building on the side UI will now focus on them
- Added Children counter to the main Pip numbers UI
- Redrawn Child icon
- Handymen are now shown in the Jobs panel even if zero are available
- Pip Recap menu is a bit more condensed
- Multi-Pip buildings will now warn about the number of Pips required
- Implemented delta preview for Shaman 'death on animal' and 'plant growth' triggers
- Triggered gem generation now shows an icon popup on the creature / building that triggers it
- Triggered elder traits are now shown alongside other traits in the Side UI
UX: Pip Forced Reassignment
- Improved Pip Forced Reassignment to work intuitively in most cases
- Forced Pip assignment now works with buildings that require multiple Pips
- Forced Pip assignment now works with Special Actinso (you can now CTRL + click on a Special Action to force sending a Pip there)
- Added new icon for when a Pip is force removed from a Building
- Pip forced removal will now prioritize handymen Pips working in single-Pip buildings performing a basic action
- Reassignment now prioritizes closer Pips, if possible
UX: Buildings
- Tilled Soil is now part of the Terraforming items instead of being among Fields
- Added Building recap tab to see all Buildings inside the village separated by their Subtype, separated by buildings that are not ready yet, available buildings, and disabled/abandoned/unreachable buildings
- Buildings that increase village extents now highlight the tiles they add to the village
- You can now SHIFT + click on a building to find it in the building menu
- The Thinker's post now highlights with a *red* color instead of *green* the tiles that are blocking it
- Traits that require just one tile to satisfy their condition will now highligh all tiles that satisfy it, instead
- Added feedback when a building will become abandoned next turn
UX: Pip Picking
- Implemented Pip Picking: hold Picking (ALT key) to select a Pip when performing any action
- Pip Picking can also be used for curing: hold ALT to pick the Patient, and either keep it held to get the Worker too, or let the worker be automatically selected
UX: Global Actions
- Added a new toggleable Global Actions panel where global actions and view toggles are kept
- Added a new "Make a Baby in a random dwelling" button to global actions
- Adde a new "unassign all" button to unassign all Pips from their current jobs
UX: Agepedia
- Resources in Agepedia now tell which Tasks can generate them inside the "Produced by" section
- New icons for Tools, Farm animal, Wild animal
UX: Miscellaneous
- Added Analytics Opt In
- Various minor graphical changes for consistency
- The cursor now has small icons that highlight whether we are forcing an action (CTRL), picking a pip (ALT), or using the Pip-selection mode (SHIFT)
- Added Domain on the pass turn UI if an event is coming next turn
- Added saving phase with specific UI that does not block the game animations
UX: Controller
- Implemented Native XBOX controller support
- Added glyphs support for native controller
- Added a Native Xbox controller setting to enable it manually
- Added new mouse 3, 4, 5, 6 icons for keybindings
- Controller can now reach the View Toggles by pressing 'down' twice
- Controller can now access the event log by pressing 'down' twice
- Pressing 'Up' now makes you get out of the new advanced toggle UI area
- Improved controller use for new features
Settings
- Revised Settings menu to be easier to navigate
- Video and UI settings are now local to the current machine
- Added "Instant Popups" setting
- Added option to turn off the Retro audio filter
- Added Tooltip Delay value of zero for instant tooltips
- Added Hardware Cursor option
- Added Disable Edge Panning option
- Added Gamma and Saturation Slider options
- Added option to skip all cutscenes
- Added option to see compound resource modifiers instead of gains and losses (i.e. +4 instead of +6 -2)
- Added option to turn off the Retro audio filter
- SUPER Fast Pass Turn: Removed more waits during events
- SUPER Fast Pass Turn: Multi-target events now apply all effects at once on all game elements
System
- Added hidden function to upload data to the cloud from the main menu by pressing CTRL + SHIFT + C
- Implemented Enhanced Rich Presence
- Added some more analytics event to detect gameplay choices
- Revised versioning number (getting rid of too many zeroes)
- Major optimizations
Bugfixes
- Upgrade action now shows the correct number of turns
- Fixed bug with random phase Y being randomized all the time during map generation
- Fixed Jobs panel sometimes not appearing on load
- Fixed VIPs being considered Handymen in the Jobs panel
- Fixed Memories gauge showing the "!" warning even if all is completed
- Removed some weird resolutions erroneously appearing in the settings
- Fixed food panel visually moving weirdingly behind the resource panel
- Fixed resource overflow warning tooltips not being shown with a controller
- Fixed plants sometimes not growing correctly after a reload
- Fixed disabling "Zoom out on pass turn" not working in some cases
- Fixed cursor sometimes not updating correctly on top of buildings
- Fixed Keyboard bindings showing some unused bindings
- Fixed bug with post-Apocalypse not reverting the Spring if playing Relax mode
- Fixed camera edge checks for Captain being too strict
- Fixed rare bug with seeking position being wrong for music
- Fixed bug with tasks not consuming resources if you reload at the first stage
- Fixed food UI disappearing on a load if a food is both zeroed and disabled
- Fixed wrong icon being shown for Curing actions on load
- Fixed highlighting of "busy" icon even if you had zero busy pips
- Fixed bug with score retrieval not showing whether the doomsday was called or not
- Fixed rebuilding a sheep pen sometimes requiring a wrong unused resource
- Fixed bug with Agepedia interaction triggering on release while dragging even if you were not hodling over the element from the start
- Fixed Agepedia for jobs sometimes triggering if you hovered over a job and kept moving your cursor
- Disabled unused "TurnX" achievement
- Fixed being able to get the game stuck when dismantling just after having selected a Cure action
- Fixed bug with saving the game automatically sometimes making Pips not move to their work at load
- Fixed resources sometimes appearing black in the resource pool UI
- Fixed bug with placing multiple Bivoauc at the start of the game through shift-click
- Fixed Thinker's Post becoming abandoned the moment you placed a planned building closeby
- Fixed super speedup option sometimes refunding building costs
- Fixed demoting a Pip not removing them from the current action
- Fixed Burning Sun event animation sometimes getting stuck above
- Fixed being able to open the research tree with hotkeys while not playing
- Fixed being able to access the building menu with a controller while not inside a game
- Localization updates