Cutscenes & Carroots (Patch Notes 26)

Fellow Dwarves! It's been a while, but there's a lot to cover on this one...

Patch Notes

Features & Design Changes:

1. Cutscenes - Should now play in-game, instead of directing you to a youtube video. Note to linux users: you will have to install VLC for this to work.
2. Carroots - A new harvestable food that grows out of special type of roots! Unlike the other 3 food types, carroots cannot be cooked into a meal, nor replanted, but they do provide a steady supply.
3. Defend Zone -> Combat - What used to be the Defend Zone instruction has now become a new sub-panel called 'Combat' currently with 2 instructions: Defend Zone has been renamed to Patrol Regions for clarity, and a new instruction called Battle-Lines can be used to make warriors form a line and wait there, rather than patrol around.
4. Ally/enemy base AI - Many improvements have been made for ally/enemy AI in terms of base-building, defending and attacking, expanding on the existing wall-building update.
5. Pressure-plate Buttons - The signage on floor buttons in-game has been updated to be more clearly distinguishable between the different types: hold, toggle and lock.
6. Mushrooms - New placement variants for mushrooms. It was bothering us that every patch of mushrooms looked identical, now they'll look a bit more natural! We also plan on introducing different species of mushrooms eventually, but that's for a later update.
7. Gem Crystals - Can now appear protruded out of cave walls.
8. 'New Game' Menu - Now when choosing which mode to play, it shows a breakdown of what to expect. Since each mode differs in style, they are rated out of 5 in the following: Challenge, Adventure, Colony-sim, Story/lore and Game length.
9. Spiders & Webs - Spiders' behaviour has been improved, and they now spawn strewn webs on the ground all around their nest. This type of web has a smaller movement penalty, breaks after a few steps, and also dictates where spiders will place their eggs.
10. Abilities Selection UI - The UI to choose new abilities for your dwarves has been revamped.
11. Level Up UI - Any time a dwarf levels up and their notification clicked, you are now presented with a UI that shows the precise improvements of their abilities, so you can see what's changed!
12. Fish - Fish are now lured by ripples, which are made when the Forager arrives at their spot, by cave-ins near water and when the player clicks the water.
13. Caverns Mode - Various design updates including chest loot-tables & special item spawns, and the introduction of carroots.
14. Campaign - Tweaked dialog, added more interjections and reduced confusion around Floody Hell's floating barrels.
15. Skirmish Mode - Controlling teaming in skirmish mode has been revamped and now features 3 presets: teams by kin, teams by neighbour, or all vs all. Teams by kin means dwarves team with other dwarves, goblins with goblins. Teams by neighbour means dwarves will only team with other dwarves if they are also neighbours. All vs all means there are no teams. Teams can still be configured manually. Also various fixes & improvements to this mode.
16. Root-puller Ability - This ability has been buffed and now reveals 3 tiles each harvest, and at higher levels can also reveal roots that aren't connected but close by. The description also clarifies that the minerals on those tiles are revealed at the same time.
17. Low Health - Added a new option in By-laws to set your dwarves to automatically flee and rest when they reach low health. This is also in effect by default in Dwarfling difficulty.
18. Main Menu - While no item is highlighted, one of your statistics shows, such as Spiders Defeated or Gems Mined.

Fixes & Improvements:

1. AI for Dropping items - The previous system for when units decided to drop items was too aggressive. Engineers would return dwarf hearts back to storage instead of spawning a dwarf right away, and other classes would return prematurely when they could have continued their work. This has been almost completely redesigned. The new system is not as 'catch-all' robust and may need some tweaks going forward, but is now much more logical in terms of when to drop items off. Units now start an internal clock once carrying items and won't return them unless full inventory, switching jobs or the clock reaches a certain job-dependant threshold.
2. Tutorials - Various updates and refinements for the 5 tutorial levels. Dialog has been reduced in places to improve pace, and the clickable sign that explains the game-speed control has been replaced with a prompt in the tutorial itself. Also added guide & notifications optional tutorials that appear in the objective list.
3. First-time usage tips - When certain items such as tomes are first interacted with, a dialog pops up explaining what they do. Also when entering skirmish or caverns mode for the first time, a dialog pops up explaining some of the unique features of that mode.
4. Harvesting rocks - No longer adds foraging experience to miners.
5. Combat Abilities - Fixed a bug with their proximities not updating the ability stats correctly!
6. Eat & Rest - Fixed some logical flaws in how dwarves decide to eat & rest when you tell them to via the associated buttons.
7. Guide to Glistenveld - Updated some information in the guide.
8. Goblins - Updated some goblin recipes to improve gameplay balance, such as in skirmish mode.
9. General AI Improvements - Units will now flee more sensibly, for example only when they're low health and there is a threat nearby. Both goblins & dwarves base-building AI has been significantly improved, and made more competitive.
10. Scenery - Fixed some rendering-order graphical bugs.
11. UI Panes - Improved the gradient on many of the UI windows for text to be more readable at the bottom.
12. Unit Movement - When the player changes a unit's movement they will now switch directions immediately if the target is behind them, instead of waiting until they've reached the next tile.
13. Instructions - The Patrol Regions (formerly Defend Zone) instruction now has better logic for when to rest, and was ignoring a particular by-law option. Warriors will now go rest at a higher health, but otherwise only if their stamina reaches 0. Foragers will no longer try to harvest tougher roots (i.e. iron roots) if they lack an iron tool. Also minor fixes to building, crafting & mining, and claims on jobs not being cleaned up.
14. Warriors - Warriors will no longer go to rest or eat until they are both hungry and tired or one of those stats is completely drained. When changing a dwarf to Warrior, they will now stand still for an extended period of time, waiting for you to give them something to do.
15. End of Level Stats - Amended some missing icons in the end of level statistics window.
16. Map Editor - Added missing icons and made various improvements to the map editor, including all item types are now available in the quick panel at the bottom.
17. Various other fixes including tooltips not displaying for certain highlighted objects, and removed all unneeded libraries from the executables, reducing their filesize.

We'd like to apologise for the lack of updates this year. We've had some major hurdles to overcome in preparation for Chapter 2, including finally getting cutscenes working in-game and finishing the new trailer. These took priority over releasing more regular patches, though hopefully we can balance this better in future. We'd set our bar high for the Chapter 2 release in terms of polish and robustness, since we want people to have a great experience with it. Most of these improvements are present in this patch (the last significant patch before Chapter 2 releases), so we hope you enjoy!

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