Hey!
Here's the new small week-end patch for ATC. As explained in a previous post, after the last massive 0.8.5 release, I'm now going to focus on smaller scale things like getting rid of long standing bugs, dealing with player/modder requests, and general UI and balancing issues for at least a few more weeks. You can expect roughly a small patch each weekend.
The full changelog is at the bottom, but there are 3 improvements I want to explain in more details:
Razing / Disassembling / Mining
Until now, razing something would yield 100% of the resources. To a point that it was more economical to destroy and remake a damaged wall or turret than to repair it. This is no longer the case.
The amount of recovered resources is, roughly, proportional to the survivor's disassembling (or mining) skill. With the occasional lucky/unlucky dice roll causing all or very little of resources to be retrieved.
Objects using a Furniture type item (like most of the electrical stuff, solar panels, generators, batteries...) can still be safely disassembled independently of that skill.
It means that, at least in the early/mid game, you'll get a lot less bang for your buck when razing stuff. On the plus side, disassembling tiles (pavement, wooden planks...) can now yield resources, which wasn't the case before.
Population Menu improvements
As requested, the population menu can now sort people by wounds/sicknesses.
It also got a small makeover, and many oddities while using the drop down menus have been fixed. Additionally, by default (when no sorting is applied) people are sorted alphabetically.
UI Feedback about common problems
It seems that many new players get into a sort of death loop for which the game doesn't provide any useful feedback.
The problem in question occurs when there's no room to store something that the base produces in great quantities (dirty water and wood are very common culprits). It leads to survivors storing the surplus in their inventory until it's, in turn, full. And when their inventory gets completely full, they can no longer pickup food or water or move other stuff around. This is probably something the player should be made aware of! :)
As a result, if for a reason or another, a survivors is unable to empty their inventory, a message in the log will be posted, highlighting the item(s) and the incriminated survivor. So the player knows that it would be a good idea to build more depots. Additionally, the inventory tab in the individual survivor info panel now displays how much cargo they are carrying (and the total capacity).
There will be more things done to deal with this issue (like the ability for settlers to always be able to pickup food/water that they plan on consuming) in the next patch.
Full Changelog
- AI: In combat, NPC under fire are better at selecting who to attack when multiple people are attacking them
- Balance: Disassembling clutter/walls is no longer always returning 100% of resources, it depends on the mining or disassembling skill (whichever applies)
- Balance: Disassembling tiles can recover resources now (same restrictions as above)
- Balance: Boosted HP and armor values of Abominations (especially the melee variants)
- Modding: Traders' money can be modded (Added MinMoney and MaxMoney to the trader events)
- UI: Settlers are sorted by name in the population screen (default / no filter)
- UI: Added ability to sort people by illness / wound in the Population menu
- UI: Drop down menus used to sort people in population screen work better
- UI: Added feedback when survivors can't store something from their inventory because there is no storage space in the base
- UI: Added feedback when a survivor can't equip a piece of equipment due to lack of inventory space (or item grabbed by someone else)
- UI: Added cargo space information to survivor's inventory panel
- UI: New difficulty setting/cheat to disable death of pets by aging in New Game menu / Difficulty [user request]
- Fixed: Melee enemies/settlers would stop whatever they are doing each time they get shot at, rendering them a lot less dangerous than intended
- Fixed: Need values in population screen shown as raw values instead of percentages
- Fixed: Issue with calculations of weight in individual tiles' cargo. Not sure what issue it might have caused (if any), but it's fixed nonetheless.
- Fixed: Agents' needs going into negative values (after consuming something or when disabled by trait, job, or something else)
- Fixed: Loading a save-game with missing mods will no longer spam the same messages, it'll just post one message for each different missing item
- Fixed: You couldn't toggle active pause on/off or jump to a different layer when placing constructions or zones