Hi everyone! With many of the game's upcoming features temporarily on hold, this has been a good opportunity to get some real bug-fixing done and review some of the existing designs.
This update includes improvements to performance, soft-locks, black screens, saving & loading, gameplay, AI and UI fixes, but also a bunch of quality of life features and design changes to better suit how the game has evolved over the past few months.
Features & Design Changes:
- Caltrops - These little spikes will no longer damage your units! After some revision, we decided your dwarves should be smart enough to tiptoe over them. Instead of damaging allies, caltrops will just slow them down.
- Careless Trait - In light of the change of design to caltrops, this trait has been changed to: 'Takes double damage from enemy traps & defences'.
- Mining - Units will now prefer mining through the mining-zone you've placed, instead of through walls that haven't been selected for mining. Also, miners should no longer mine owned walls unless they were specifically instructed to.
- All Items UI - Clicking items will now show you where they are in storage. You can click these items in the storage UI for a description.
- Right-click Actions - With a unit selected, when you right click one of their instruction zones, an option now appears to prioritise that instruction (except when the result would be no different than the default action). With multiple units selected, all possible interactions (from each unit type selected) are now included in the list.
- Beds - Now have 6 rotations. Before you place a bed, scroll the mouse wheel to rotate them the same way you would a wooden door!
- Tech Tree - Spaced out the tech UI and added flavour-text to each technology.
- Minecarts - Various improvements to how these behave, tracks not joining, and fixed some issues with saving & loading. See the blog (link below) for more info on minecarts.
- Workers Assignment UI - Left clicking an instruction zone presents the assignment UI. This UI has been revamped and has new functionality, including 'set as default'. This new option allows you to customise what units are automatically assigned to any new instructions of the same type.
- Fish - Rebalanced to last longer, reach further but provide one less fish per harvest. The total amount of fish you get from a shoal is more or less the same as before, but fishing instructions should take a fair bit longer to deplete.
- Bones - More flavourful descriptions for how those units met their makers. Will now fade over time.
- Cave-ins - Will no longer spawn tiles that can cause further cave-ins. Cave-ins further away now have a more subtle screen-shake effect.
- Frenzy - Frenzied ally dwarves will stop attacking one another once the frenzy effect has been lifted.
- Battles - Units will no longer clump up in battle. Your warriors will now actively attack enemies within a radius, and other classes will also attack if they're adjacent.
- Doors - Spiders, bats and other enemies will no longer find a way through these... Goblins can still break them down or mine around them.
- Auto-pickup - Resetting a mobbit trap will now also pick-up the left-over items on the same tile. The same applies to opening chests and breaking barrels.
- Various QoL Improvements - For example, when queuing crafts, the number you have queued also appears in the mouse-over tooltip.
- Caverns Mode V0.40 - The reputation objectives now have counters, some fixes with clan interactions, more generation variety and some resources are now easier to find, including springs and roots.
Fixes & Improvements:
- Cutscenes - Fixed the intermittent black-screen issue with playing cutscenes. Cutscenes no longer switch the game to windowed mode for the cutscene.
- Flickering UI - Fixed some issues in full-screen where certain UI elements such as instruction zones would flicker. The steam overlay will no longer flicker in windowed-mode.
- Performance - Optimised code to make large, busy maps run a little better. Still more we can do in this area.
- Mouse-panning - Moving the mouse to the edges of the screen would sometimes stop panning the camera.
- Recipe Info UI - Fixed bug where this UI would no longer show after interacting with the tech tree.
- Engineering Instructions - Engineers would give up too easily when building walls or moving buildings. Fixed some bugs involving multiple engineers attempting the same job at the same time.
- Crafting - Fixed some bugs where certain crafts would get confused and the wrong version of the craft is performed.
- Cobblestone - Fixed bug where engineers would refuse to build cobblestone where there's a full pile of items.
- Voice-Overs - Added a few more voice-overs for switching classes etc..
- Saving & Loading - Minecarts no longer soft-lock after a load. Various unit information was being lost. The effects of certain traits were stacking after a load. Mushrooms were losing growth data, and sculptures their sculpture data. Choosing a unit's level abilities was sometimes broken on a load. Caverns mode was losing cave generation data on a load. A bunch of these issues have been retro-patched so that existing saves should be ok again, though we weren't able to do this for everything.
- Autosaves - No longer autosaves when you have no more units, and will autosave to an 'Unnamed' folder if you haven't named your playthrough yet.
- Pathfinding - Units weren't using the most optimised paths to reach places. There was a flaw in the heuristic. Units should stick to cobblestone paths a little more now.
- Defend Zones - Warriors will now be much more pro-active about patrolling around defend zones.
- Instruction Placement - Certain instructions like mining or building bridges wouldn't highlight the right tiles in certain places. Build instructions in caverns mode wouldn't always let you build where an ally or enemy has also decided to build something.
- Low Health Notification - Now appears a little sooner, before it's too late to do something about it!
- Enemy/Ally AI - Various improvements to AI teams, including their base-building design and dealing with cave-ins.
- All Items - The UI for items that only exist on the HUD wasn't properly aligned with the other items. These HUD items are now also clickable to explain how they're used.
- Various buildings, scenery and items were missing descriptions. Using tab to cycle units or buildings wasn't always working.
We've also released a blog post discussing the recent addition 'minecarts' and how to make the most of them: Minecarts in TDoG.
That's all for now. If you have any ideas, feedback or recommendations, don't hesitate to let us know!