Fellow Dwarves, it's here! We've been working tirelessly to deliver this update, and now proudly present the long-awaited: Chapter 2!
As mentioned in our previous announcement, the release of Chapter 2 unlocks the next 6 levels of the Campaign, which take you to the mysterious underground Ruins of Heckler! A new region unlocks for Skirmish Mode, as well as a myriad of final improvements to the user interface, AI, quality of life and performance! For more details see the patch notes below.
Also, if you want a summary of everything that's changed since The Dwarves of Glistenveld first released in Early Access, we wrote about that in our previous announcement: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/805520/view/7132068756348695686
Now without further ado, let's look at what's changed since the last patch:
Patch Notes
The big stuff:
- Campaign: Chapter 2 - You now have access to Chapter 2 of the campaign, featuring the defence of My Fort and 5 new unique maps!
- Skirmish mode: Ruins region - A new region is unlocked for skirmish mode, taking you amidst some abandoned ruins. Mind your step, you never know what you might reawaken in those old tombs!
- Caverns mode - Caverns mode is now a bit more guided early on and polished. Your first objectives now have markers pointing to the nearest spring, roots and mushrooms, and some intermediary objectives now appear to help you to find your second spring and schematic!
- In-game tutorial improvements - A new button now appears next to objective-list tutorials that allow you to ignore/skip them. You can always reset the tutorials in the options menu if you want to revisit them. New tutorials have been added and some wording has been revised to try to better explain the mechanics of the game. We'll be adding to these in future patches to explain some of the later mechanics such as the farming techs.
- Game-speed control - You can now right-click the cog in the bottom-right to fast-forward as an alternative to holding down the left button or space-bar.
- Smooth camera panning - The camera now 'moves' rather than snaps to focus on units or locations, for example during dialog. This can be toggled in the options menu, for those of you who might get motion sickness from this change.
- UI & general performance - Hovering over UI buttons should no longer feel laggy/jittery, and panning the camera should appear smoother (for best results, you can try switching off the FPS cap). Also a small performance boost for cave-ins and reduced the occasional lag spikes. There will still be some reduced FPS as a game is first loaded since some elements are still being generated.
- Crash fixes - Fixed 2 independent causes of game freezes, both of which seemed to have obscure conditions. Hopefully they're the only ones!
The small stuff:
- Low-health behaviour - You can now set your dwarves to persevere / flee when low health from their selection UI. Originally this was only adjustable after unlocking the By-laws tech.
- Stone-chipper Ability - The miner's level 5 ability Heavy-hauler has been replaced by the new ability Stone-chipper, which grants bonus stone when mining cave walls. Heavy-hauler's effect was very similar to Rock-tosser, meanwhile stone would sometimes be in short supply.
- New passive buffs - Sound-asleep and Well-fed are two new buffs that your dwarves can have. Sound-asleep speeds up regeneration and applies if you have at least one bed per dwarf. Well-fed further increases movement speed as long as your dwarf's hunger bar is completely full!
- Buff / debuff FX - Visual particles now appear when your dwarves are experiencing certain buffs or debuffs, such as exhaustion, hunger or the two listed above.
- Frenzied dwarves - The dwarf-list now shows any dwarves you have that have become frenzied along with their last known locations.
- More responsive dwarves - While a dwarf was selected, they wouldn't carry out any actions for a few seconds to give the player time to give manual orders if they wanted to. This was an unintuitive behaviour however, and has been limited to specifically move and pick-up actions.
- Class descriptions - The class-change UI now shows descriptions of what each class can do.
- Doors - When setting to team-only, doors will have a distinguished outline around them making it more obvious what their setting is.
- Blood trails - When a unit is low on health, they leave a subtle trail of blood behind them as they move around. You can use this to your advantage for example to follow an injured goblin back to their base.
- Stubborn trait - Stubborn dwarves that reach level 10 will be able to finally switch class. Note however that if they reach level 3 in another class they will remain in that class until they reach level 10 again.
- New ability icons - Similar to the level 2 abilities, the level 5 abilities now have upgraded icons when you reach tier 2 and 3 of that ability.
- One-button mode improvements - Clicking and dragging while an instruction was selected would place multiple of that instruction, but this did not match the normal behaviour of one-button mode. Instead, dragging now pans the camera as it should do, and a new button was added to toggle dragging instructions.
- Cracks indicating cave-ins - Cracks have been made more obvious to make it easier to tell when a wall is going to cave-in, and fixed an issue of them sometimes not appearing.
- Skirmish mode: Objectives - Skirmish mode now has some starter objectives to help remind players what is needed to build their initial base!
- Skirmish mode: Ordered teams - When you choose camps of different sizes, the larger camps will spawn further away from you, and the smaller camps closer by. This should create more of a build-up as you progress through the map and should feel less unfair.
- Fishing - Fixed an issue where fishing in shallow water would never yield fish, since the fish couldn't swim to shallower waters. They can now.
- Equipment - There is now an option specifically to drop the equipped item in storage, instead of having to set to 'None'.
- UI positioning - Class change and interaction UI will no longer be hidden under the selection UI at the bottom of the screen.
- More & improved tooltips - Made some tooltips more understandable and added tooltips to more buttons.
- Various bug fixes - Fixed various issues including mobbits' flee behaviour, dwarves getting stuck instead of moving out of the way, and streamlined the sound-system to exclusively use OpenAL.
This release also coincides with halloween mode, which appears this time of year to help get you in the spooky mood! If you choose to enable Halloween Mode, you will also experience the following changes to the game:
Halloween Mode
- Atmosphere - The atmosphere of the game is more dramatic with fog and a change in colour palette!
- Pumpkins - You will find random pumpkins in each level. You can harvest these to get a tasty pumpkin stew, which dwarves treat as equipable meals!
- Webs - You will find random webs that stick to units and slow them down, or feed the spiders!
- Bats - When you start a new skirmish mode game, you'll find a few more bats roaming the tunnels!
- Bubbling waters - Water has turned greenish and bubbles.
- Green blood - Units and creatures flash green when injured, instead of red.
So what's next?
Onward to Chapter 3! Does this mean we're done with working on Chapter 2? While we need to keep moving forward with the content we produce, we will continue to refine and improve as we go along. Sharing your feedback and experience will help guide us with any revisions that need to be made to existing content!
We'll also be working on the learning and on-boarding experience of the game, and trying to better streamline it. We're going to continue working on visibility and create an internal plan for producing Chapter 3's content and release in good time.
That's all for this update. As always, feel free to give us your thoughts and feedback, we read it all even if we don't reply! Until next time, stay safe out there, and we hope you enjoy the new chapter!