🎄Christmas Mode🎄
Glistenveld is getting wintery as Christmas Mode is enabled (until Jan. 7th)!
In Christmas Mode, you will experience the following changes to the game:
- Atmosphere - The place is looking wintery with a change of colour palette and mist!
- Christmas Roots - Roots have now been decorated with Christmas lights! Unfortunately there are no blink patterns you can change...
- Presents - Random presents will appear in each map, some buried in cave walls to be mined out, others in water to be fished for and some just laying around! Each contains one of six small random gifts!
- Chests - Chests are now decorated as 'locked' presents!
- Snowprints - All units will leave prints in the frosty dirt, giving you insight into their habits!
Patch Notes
The big stuff:
- Iron Weapons - For now these reside in the Iron Armour tech, but you will be able to craft Battleaxes, Warhammers and Halberds for your warriors! The battleaxe deals bonus bleeding damage, the warhammer stuns and knocks enemies back, and the halberd has a 2 tile reach! We have yet to decide where to put these in the tech tree, so enjoy the overpowered Iron Armour tech until then!
- Caverns Mode - A new version has been released featuring: Lava caves! Complete with a new enemy, new resources, and various fixes and improvements for the mode. We want to keep the lava caves mysterious, so no further details will be provided!
- Configurable beds - Beds can now be configured to disallow particular dwarves from resting in them, based on class or trait. Want to separate those noisy-nostrils from the group? Well now you can!
- Dwarf-list UI - To help you manage your clan, instead of only being able to see levels & abilities, there are now 2 new views: Equipment & Traits! Also improved description of current activity in Abilities view, and selected dwarves will now be highlighted here as well!
- Battles - Besides fixing a number of bugs relating to dealing crits and damage in general, the icons for block, parry, dodge & fumble have been improved and other icons like 'hold' or stat labels have been made less intrusive during combat.
- Skirmish - Various improvements including more fish in regions like Mines, and a fix for the chaotic pathing style occasionally getting stuck.
- Instruction panel UI - Minecarts and tracks have been moved into the Resources tab, since their role is to cart resources around. Infrastructure buildings have been better lined up so alternate or similar buildings appear in the same place on the next page.
- Resistances - There are many types of damage or effects in the game: bleed, frenzy, fire, knockback, and we've finalised our design on enemy resistances. Currently you'll have to use trial and error to identify them, but we'll work on making this clearer in a future patch. If you guys like how another game conveys this information, feel free to share!
- Map Tables - You can now inspect the traits of any enemies within the radius of your map tables, allowing you to take more strategic action against them!
- Ruins Music - New music has been added for ruins regions in all modes and during waves in Stronghold Defence!
The small stuff:
- Items - More picking up & dropping item animations. Fun fact: this uses the same code that enables NPC dwarves to jump gaps in the campaign. We spawn item particles that jump to the Dwarf's location!
- Prioritising instructions - Until now dwarves that were hungry would ignore you when you tell them to prioritise a build and go eat instead. Although this behaviour makes sense, we felt it would be better if they performed the build anyway, but received the Aggravated trait instead.
- Storage arrangements - Any storage you own with arrangements set now have little signposts with an asterisk, to help distinguish between global and specialised storage.
- UI improvements - The recipe popup when hovering over items to craft now features a description of what that item is for. Stats & Accomplishments UI now have icons for each of the statistics. Dwarf-list and other scroll-type UI, as well as the tech-tree, now have a subtle opening animation and SFX. When any building is claimed a dashed border will now appear around it; this used to only happen with items. Double clicking a building that is being claimed will centre view and highlight the dwarf that is claiming it.
- Sneaky goblins - Some goblins will feature a new trait which makes them a little stealthy!
- Item piles - Some items in storage will now appear in a more organised, sensible manner.
- Antidote Potion - This wasn't being consumed automatically when encountering green gas or draugr frenzy cry.
- AI logic improvements - Engineers were claiming entire piles of items for crafting, preventing other engineers from working similar jobs if items were not well distributed. Dwarves with nothing to do were still holding onto items instead of putting them away. Held units when told to interact with something would invariably stand on top of it, rather than next to it. Dwarves will now search for meals within a larger radius between jobs. When assigning equipment to dwarves, they will now search across a much larger radius.
- AI performance - AI for mobbits, spiders and goblins were doing some naughty things and overloading the pathfinder in some circumstances!
- Rendering performance - We've been finding various areas to improve performance, such as unnecessary animation changes off-screen, piles of items being rendered one item at a time etc, though still more work needs doing on this front!
- Various other fixes & improvements, including mushrooms not responding to changes in moisture until harvested, and improved rendering of the save/load previews.
That's all for now, stay safe and Happy Holidays!