Greetings, survivors!
In the ninth update for Endzone it is possible for the first time not only to hunt animals in the wild, but also to catch them and keep them in pastures implemented for this purpose. Four completely new species of animals now roam the radioactive forests of Endzone, offering a much wider range of food than just their meat. In addition, the settler behavior has been reworked again and allows to understand their actions much easier and to better integrate them into the natural flow of the game. Players should not only notice a boost in efficiency, but also be "rewarded" by a logical settlement structure, leading to a well balanced settlement.
- Buildings: Added a Pasture, allowing you to raise and keep animals as another steady food source. Animals on the pasture need water to survive, which is supplied by herders. You can control and customize the behavior of the Pasture to your liking, deciding to butcher animals or only harvest their produce.
- Buildings: Added 2 new work modes to the Hunting Lodge. Wild animals can now be caught by the Hunter. Be aware that only 2 different species of animals will appear on the map, but you can find animals of other species by trading.
- Buildings: Added a Food Counter. This building is part of the logistic buildings and it lets you redistribute food to places, where it is really needed or not readily available. A logistician assigned to the Food Counter will look for food inside the working area, fetching and storing it in the building’s inventory. You can also decide which food types should be stored.
- Buildings: Added new visuals for the normal school building to relate better to the Advanced School.
- Buildings: Added new settler badge for herder.
- Animals: Added sounds to all animal species.
- Animals: Added 4 new animal species: Buffaloes, Hares, Chickens, and Goats. Every new map seed features 2 randomly picked animals from all available species including deer and boars.
- Animals: Added different properties for all animal species. All animals provide different types of meat. Some species also produce additional resources like Milk or Eggs. Furthermore, every species yields different amounts of meat and has its own reproduction rate.
- Trading: Added animals to the special goods inventory of several traders. Traders will only carry animals that you can’t find on the map.
- Resources: Added 2 new recipes to the kitchen: Cake and Stew. Both resources offer different effects when consumed. Eating a cake will give a bonus in confidence, while consuming Stew will regenerate your settlers’ health.
- Tutorial: Added a new Tutorial for food production. This tutorial offers a comprehensive overview of all the different ways of producing and distributing food.
- Settlers: Added prioritization options for settlers to prioritize certain types of tasks: Build, Build Streets and Repair. This can be adjusted in the Town Center, using Drag and Drop.
- Music: Added another music track, which plays back in “normal” gameplay situations.
- Decrees: Added a new decree: “Loitering Ban”. With this decree, your settlers will stop visiting their homes to gain confidence and avoid any leisure activities, making them very efficient but also unhappy.
- UI: Added new popup window to easily solve conflicts when the player tries to prioritize the construction or repair of multiple buildings.
- UI: Added 2D avatars for roaming animals.
- Fields: Added a new seed: Black Salsify. This seed replaces the roots resource, which could not be acquired by any production building.
Black Salsify on a cultivated field
- Buildings: Fixed Scrap Totem click sound, which used a wrong sound file.
- Buildings: Fixed a bug in the Hunting Lodge that could result in hunters still killing animals, when the production limit for food was already reached.
- Buildings: Lowered volume of Fields ambience sound.
- Buildings: Fixed bug in field-of-influence-check for several buildings like the Market.
- Buildings: Several fixes that prevented building of streets.
- Buildings: Gatherer Hut is no longer looking for roots.
- Buildings: Fixed source selection of irrigation plants not being available on old savegames.
- Tutorial: Game is now paused if the endscreen of a scenario is opened.
- Tutorial: Fixed that players can go back into the game by pressing ESC in the Main Menu when they have a completed tutorial session in the background.
- UI: Fixed missing sound cue when starting a new game session.
- UI: Removed misleading UI sound when clicking on buttons.
- UI: Toggling Repair on/off using the keyboard shortcut now only works ingame and not e.g. while typing the savegame name in the main menu.
- Trading: Only paying with food now also changes the reputation with traders.
- Trading: Fixed “Start Trade” button being interactable, even if the deal is considered as unfair.
- Trading: Fixed food not removed correctly if traded with a specific food resource.
- Environment: Fixed issues with first plants still stacking on top of each other under certain conditions.
- Environment: Forest Plants without a parent tree will slowly shrink and vanish, fixing save games that experienced the first plant stacking bug.
- Savegames: A new game id is now created when clicking “restart” in the main menu. This way, new savegames receive their own game slot.
- Localization: Several grammar and typo fixes for German localization.
- Settlers: Fixed wrong labeling when settlers are idling in certain cases.
- Settlers: Settlers are no longer visiting their home for food and water. Instead, settlers satisfy their needs for food and water by searching for the nearest collection point or storage. This boosts the overall efficiency of settlers, as it reduces time spent walking back and forth between homes and workplaces.
- Settlers: Settlers will now visit their homes periodically to relax and chill, gaining a boost in confidence for a certain amount of time.
- Settlers: Settlers now use a more complex system when assigning themselves to workplaces and homes. This should result in less job switching and shorter walking distances.
- Settlers: Changed behavior of Repair and Build Next button. Tasks are no longer stacked and should be executed faster. If your streets are built too slow, please use the prioritization in the Town Center instead.
- Settlers: Settlers now try to get all resources they need in one go if the building they are visiting has several resources they need. Before, settlers would visit the same building several times to acquire their resources one by one.
- Expeditions: Reworked filtering options when setting up an expedition.
- Expeditions: Added a new notification when a ruin was scouted.
- Expeditions: Big performance boost for the expeditions' setup window.
- Animals: Animal species spawned on the map are now bound to the map seed.
- Tutorial: Changed the tutorial map to use a specific savegame instead of a seed.
- Graveyard: Bumped up the number of maximum morticians from 3 to 10.
- Decrees: Removed the graveyard decree, as it was misleading and often misused and did not offer the expected benefit.
- Diseases: Randomized settler selection when a disease breaks out.
- Buildings: The Irrigation Plant now highlights its worker paths.
- Buildings: Street building tasks are now broken down to chunks of tasks, to make building streets more efficient.
- Buildings: Rain Collectors now show the Turnover Tab.
- Buildings: Production buildings now give additional information about the settlers working in it, such as showing the tools they are using, their educational status, and so on.
- Trading: Generating a fair trade now takes reputation into account.
- Trading: Trading Window now displays the available inventory of the trading post and warns the player if a trade cannot be concluded when there’s not enough inventory space.
- Trading: Improved layout of Trade Window.
- UI: ‘Quit Game’ button now only prompts the player if he really wants to quit, if the session was not previously saved in the main menu.
- UI: Re-enabled hotkey to (de-)activate repairs.
- UI: Changed sorting of several buildings in the Buildings Tab.
- UI: Added a warning to the “Repair Next” button if repair is currently disabled.
- UI: Changed Start Button Sound to a more rewarding one.
- Achievements: Reduced achievement progression intervals, so that achievement progress isn’t triggered as often, which was especially noticeable in the main tutorial.
- Buildings: The new school visuals require you to destroy and build a new school, if you want it to connect to the power grid correctly.
- Savegame: Some savegames made during the Community Preview might throw an error related to the Pasture. We’ll try to address this in an upcoming Hotfix.
- Settlers: Pausing a building while it is under construction (all resources have already been brought to the building) and then re-enabling the construction, the building is not constructed any further. We’ll try to address this in an upcoming Hotfix.
Through the pasture, roaming animals can now finally be kept and raised in the Endzone. The hunter is now able not only to hunt animals, but also to capture them as needed and store them in the Hunter's Lodge until a Herder picks them up and brings them to the pasture.
Held animals naturally need a certain amount of food and water to survive and reproduce on the pasture.
Animals can be slaughtered inside the pasture and thus be processed into meat. How many animals are to be slaughtered can be set in the building UI of the pasture. In order to avoid having to catch animals again, a minimum limit can be set for the number of animals to be slaughtered. Buffalo, goats and chickens can also provide eggs and milk for further processing in addition to meat.
Individual animal species take up different amounts of space on a pasture, which results in the following maximum numbers for keeping animals:
- Hares and chickens: 10 units
- Goats and wild boars: 7 units
- Buffalo and deer: 5 units
Reproduction time and yield differ for individual animal species similarly to different seeds in the fields and therefore require the player to find an optimal balance. In addition to catching them in the wild, Traders can now also bring a new type of animal if the reputation is high enough, so keep an eye out for that!
The pasture and some boars
UI window of the pasture showing the possibilities you have in the building
Buffaloes, Chickens, Goats and Hares
The Food Counter in action
The new Food Counter complements the revised behavior of the settlers. They generally prefer the shortest distance to a building where they can get food. The Food Counter can now be built near production facilities and gives food to hungry settlers. Inside the building, the player can choose what kind of food should be provided. Logisticians are responsible for collecting food from the specified area of influence and bringing it to the Food Counter. With the new recipes in the kitchen, it is also possible to determine more precisely what effect a Food Counter will have at the desired location.
- Stew saturates settlers and gives them a little buff on their health if it is not completely filled.
- Cake also saturates settlers, but makes them a little happier.
UI window of the Food Counter showing the different options
The behavior of the settlers is elementary for a functioning settlement and is therefore regularly examined and permanently optimized by us. Among other things, your feedback made it clear that there were no technical errors in the behavior of the settlers, but logical ones. The adapted behavior not only makes it more obvious to the player when which decisions are made, but these decisions now have a much more positive effect on the growth and preservation of the settlement.
Previously, settlers stopped their current tasks as soon as a vital need had to be met. This is still the case, but settlers now use the path they have travelled to satisfy all needs at once. In this sense, water supply and food intake no longer function separately, thus halving the number of ways they take to sustain life. Additionally, settlers now visit their homes in their spare time to get a small boost to their confidence and use it for reproduction. Also the autonomous allocation of jobs now works more precisely, so that fewer job changes take place overall without negatively affecting efficiency.
The priorities of the settlers in their building behavior have also been adjusted. In the Towncenter, the construction method that should be prioritized over the others can now be determined by drag & drop. This means that the expansion or maintenance of the settlement can now be sensitively controlled.
Road construction has also changed fundamentally. While settlers used to like to build just one piece of a road and then do other things, they now work through so-called "chunks". These are pre-defined "blocks" or areas of a road, which means that they are built faster and more reliably overall.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lhMAH6Dz3g
We know that there are still some things we need to fix, and we are listening to your feedback. We try to address all important issues in a timely manner and make the game as a whole more understandable and fair. However, it is important to note that Endzone - A World Apart is a survival game. Challenging gameplay, as well as a difficult learning curve, are intended and are designed to provide the player with a difficult task.
- Your team from Gentlymad & Assemble Entertainment
Changelog Version 0.7.7639.27501