Ahoy drifters!
We have another update ready to test for you all: The Crew Update.
This update brings Drifter Attributes and Backstories, a daily Captain's Log and a Day/Night cycle.
As part of working on the next Major Update (0.4) we took a good look at the Crew, a.k.a your drifters.
After fleshing them out with Attributes, backstories and a rework of their Vitals we felt this patch could stand well on it's own and be pushed as 0.35.
This comes with a Day/Night cycle, where your drifter's schedules will revolve around.
Internally, we worked on our animation system and character clothing system to enable more variations in the future. Unfortunately, that will cause previous saves to break.
We invite you all to test this update and find any issues before we upload it to the main branch.
When bugs occur, provide as much information as possible to help us resolve these faster!
Read here how to submit and track the current bugs in the game.
This patch is still in development and can be tested on the experimental branch to give feedback.
This is how you can enable the experimental branch of Flotsam. This will only work when you're not in a game:
1. Open Steam Library
2. Right click Flotsam
3. Select Properties
4. Go to tab 'Betas' at the top.
5. Select 'Experimental' in the drop-down.
Enjoy the new update!
Change Notes
General
- Drifters now have attributes that will affect the speed at which they do things: * Construction: Determines a drifter’s building speed. * Athletics: Determines a drifter’s walking and swimming speed. * Nautics: Determines a drifter’s boat travelling speed. * Desalination: Determines a drifter’s desalination speed. * Crafting: Determines a drifter’s crafting speed. * Research: Determines a drifter’s research speed. * Cooking: Determines a drifter’s cooking speed. * Fishing: Determines a drifter’s fishing speed. * Salvaging: Determines a drifter’s salvaging speed
- Quirks have been replaced (for the time being) with Drifter Backgrounds. Every drifter now has 2 backgrounds to describe their life story. These backgrounds will determine the starting attributes of the drifters.
- The game now starts with a crew selection window where you can see the looks of your new crew, combined with their backstory. You can re-roll characters here in case you're not happy with one of your crew members.
- Added a day / night cycle to the game. * Your drifters will now go sleep at the same time, once the night hits. * They will eat and drink at the same time, when the day starts.
- Introduced debuffs.
- Reworked the way drifters handle their vitals. Health is no longer a statistic. Instead, drifters will perish after not being able to eat or drink for the 4th time. * Not eating, drinking or sleeping in a bed will impose a debuff to your drifters. These debuffs depend on which vital is low, and they will lower the attributes of the specific drifter.
- A daily report is now available to track how many items your colony has collected and produced. This is always available, but a notification is sent at the start of each night.
- Added additional drifter names.
- Added construction: * Buoy Lamp: A decorative building to make your town more de-LIGHT-ful at night.
Visuals
- Added a variety of new looks for the drifters.
- Increased size of drifters by 35%.
- Added animations depicting each drifter attribute.
- The character portrait shown on drifter select will now show an animation related to one of their highest attributes.
- Added night-time visuals.
- Added a rotating sun.
UI
- The house panel has been reworked to be more in line with the birdhouse panel.
- The boat panel has been reworked to be more in line with the birdhouse panel.
- Added a drifter overview with the heads of all your drifters. This also shows their current activity and debuffs. Clicking on the head will select the drifter.
- Removed the drifter portrait from the drifter, boat and house panel.
- Disabled the warning bubbles for drifters when a project could not be run.
- Added a clock to the screen to show which time of day it is. This has been removed from the birdhouse panel.
- Reworked the vitals section in the drifter panel to show the amount of days have passed without food, water and rest.
- Added drifter backgrounds to the drifter panel.
- Removed drifter diet from drifter panel.
- Assignment panel now shows the drifter's respective bonusses.
- Added a decorative buildings category.
Balance
- A day is 15 minutes, with the night lasting 10% of that time.
- Drifters now drink far less, as they only drink once per day. This means the drifters drink 3 times less. We've reduced the amount of water gained accordingly.
- Attributes can now speed up the production process. As such, the default time for production on all producers that require drifters has increased.
Fixes
- Fixed issue where auto-saves could exceed the max amount set in the settings.
- Fixed issue where storage wouldn't get checked when salvaging landmarks.