Micromanagement Improvements (Patch Notes 23)

Fellow Dwarves! Assign dwarves to jobs, and equipment to dwarves with greater ease, and use sprinklers to farm almost anywhere!

Patch Notes

Features & Design Changes:

1. Assignment UI - When selecting an instruction zone such as a Defend Zone, a new UI will be attached which displays anyone already working on that instruction, as well as a button to immediately assign the next nearest unit to that instruction. Also the UI will now become a scrollpane if there are a lot of units in the list.
2. Warriors - Switching class to warrior will now automatically hold that unit, to make it easier to give them further instructions.
3. Equipment - The slots for Weapon/Tool, Armour and Meal can now be clicked to add available items to them, instead of having to manually tell the dwarf to pick up that item from storage. When the dwarf is next free, they will look for that item in storage and equip it automatically.
4. Mineral Clumps - The way in which minerals spawn has been revamped. Minerals like gold ore and coal will now be found (usually) in groups, instead of scattered as single tiles. This makes them harder to find, but more rewarding as the overall quantity remains the same.
5. Soil - Planting mushrooms using the Farming tech generates a soil tile. This soil tile now provides a small amount of moisture.
6. Allies - In caverns mode, if an ally is in your base, you can now interact with them (select your dwarf and right click) to tell them to return to their own base.
7. Sprinklers - The Farming II tech now also unlocks sprinklers, which allow you to create radiuses of moisture anywhere by building them within a range of either water or another sprinkler. As a side-note, since sprinklers generate moisture, they can be used to activate the Power-Slider combat ability.
8. Quick-Save - Added quick-save keybind to the game (F5 by default).
9. Skirmish Mode - Now provided the option to specify a random spawn-size for a team, which determines both number of units and starting buildings.
10. Farming Plots - Will now only place instructions for roughly one third of available mushrooms, so that they don't stunt growth.
11. Thinker - Dwarves with the Thinker trait will now feel 'motivated' rather than gain random exp, which improves the speed at which most tasks are completed.
12. Caverns Mode v0.62 - Added 'The Vault' start option which sets you up with an abandoned vault surrounded by stone walls. Also features the first version of hordes, which will spawn periodically from tunnels (except with Dwarfling difficulty set, they do not feature). Tunnel spawns are already a mechanic, but spawn fewer enemies. Despite the name, hordes will currently only spawn ~3 times the usual number of enemies, as we do not wish to elevate the difficulty of this mode too much in a single patch. We'll keep an eye on gameplay balance moving forward and adjust accordingly.

Fixes & Improvements:

1. AI Performance Improvement - Tracked down and fixed a performance issue relating to updating a unit's memory map too aggressively. Larger maps with many units should now perform better.
2. Mushroom Farming - Multiple foragers would sometimes attempt to farm the same patch of mushrooms.
3. Behaviour AI - General improvements to idle behaviour. Dwarves equipping items now improved & apply in more circumstances. Also improved logic for when a unit should be able to walk through another unit, or when a unit decides to rest in a bed.
4. Attacking Enemies - Fixed several bugs in circumstances where units decided to attack enemies when they shouldn't have, and one bug where they should have but didn't.
5. Vehicles - Attempting to enter a floating barrel should now succeed first time even when issuing the order from a distance.
6. Assembling Animation - Foragers and worker goblins had no assembling animation.
7. Building HP Bar - Sometimes displayed the wrong colour until selected.
8. Skirmish Mode - The quick-start option now provides more resources and buildings at the start.
9. Saving - Now shows "Saving" at the top of the screen when the game is autosaving, instead of "Paused".
10. Objectives List - When 10 or more objectives have been added to the list, the list will automatically hide completed objectives. This only happens once per session.
11. Tile Rendering - Potentially fixed a rare bug where the wrong texture would be matched to a tile, for example gold ore instead of stone.
12. Resurrection - Fixed bug where a resurrected dwarf could immediately die again.
13. Sound FX - Different items now have more varied sound FX when dropped.

That's all for now, stay safe out there!