Hello and happiest of Fridays to you!
I was hoping that today I would be switching the beta branch over to the live branch. Sadly, I ran into a lot of tuning/progression stuff that I wasn't comfortable pushing live just yet. Today's patch should fix a few things that stood out to me, and I'm sure they stand out for you too.
Threat Tuning
I've altered how bandits, and other threats get activated. Previously, I activated threats based on how much time had passed. As well, to get certain threats such as bandits, you'd have to settle a 'bandit' tile, or some such. I felt that this was rather tough to tune, and didn't seem that organic. Plus, it doesn't quite align with how I want interactions in the world to play out in the future. Now, to move the design in that direction, threats will activate more often as you acquire wealth. For now, I'm only looking at Ren, but, later, I will factor in other items, especially rare unique artifacts. I know some of you don't want ANY threats to appear, so I've also added a setting in the settings menu to change the threat frequency to 'never, low, normal, or high.'
In addition to that, I've done some work to improve the loadout generation of baddies. Items and attributes NPC's start out with will now be generated based on the player's average settler level. Before, the entities would pull from a pool of items that were predefined. This wasn't terribly accurate to the player's progression. With items/attributes generating based on settler level, the threats should be much more challenging while still being fair.
Progression Tuning
You'll notice a few new things to build in the patch notes. I definitely didn't want to add new content to this patch as I only want to move beta to live, however, there's a bit of a gap in the early game content, that I felt needed addressing. Without unlocking the wood research, you were pretty limited to in what you could build. I've gone ahead and added some new things to build with wood and plant fiber, to help fix this. There's no end of things to add, but I think this should be a good small addition.
Merchant Tuning
This patch also has a significant merchant item value change. I noticed that you could quite easily acquire Ren, so I'm making things much more expensive in addition to lowering the price things can be sold for. Wealth should be slowly acquired, and your settlement should earn it by working hard to fabricate and find valuable items. Please let me know if you find ways to easily acquire Ren by cheesing the game. I'd love to know, so I can tune things.
Notes:
-Fixed a bug where changing priority on a started job might remove it.
-Added extra tooltip info for block traps. Entity capture size (for cages), and general trap functions are now displayed.
-Tuned research costs to be a bit cheaper.
-Added blueprints to recycle tomes back into paper.
-Tuned lighting color overlay back a bit to make things easier to see.
-Fixed a bug where tree leaves weren't changing color on season change.
-Tuned merchant prices.
-Enemies will drop their items in a stoneleaf bag upon death. This bag will disappear when emptied.
-Wood Plank block now drops 1 wood plank instead of 1 wood log.
-Added a wood log block to make with wood logs.
-Added a thatch roof platform to make with plant fiber.
-Added a wood beam block to make with wood logs.
-Added a Threat Difficulty setting in the settings menu.
-Dangerous events ("Threats") will now use the player's settlement value to determine frequency. The higher a settlement's value, the more often the player will encounter threats like bandits. The threat frequency can be changed from the settings menu.
-Entity threats will now use the average player settler level to determine item and attribute loadouts.
-Fixed a pathing bug where entities could get stuck after logging trees.
-Added entity size to entity overlay.
-Natural plant growth will no longer happen in rooms.
-Auto job blueprints are now ordered with those that can be built at the top.
-More optimizations to improve FPS.
Ok, I'm going to let this new patch test over the weekend to see how things play out. I'll probably have some small fixes and tuning changes to patch in early next week, but the build is just about ready to be live. I will update you all next week! :)
Thanks!
W