Dear survivors,
as an early Christmas present we now release the last update of Endzone for the year. Thanks to every one of you for the dedicated support, love and all the important feedback. We are humbled and truly grateful for that. Additional thanks to everyone who took the time to report feedback or bugs via email, STOMT or as part of the discussions on the Steam forums or our Discord server. This is super helpful to us.
Have the best possible Christmas in the current situation and stay safe!
Cheers,
Gentlymad
The last update for this year focuses on some requests that have been floating around the community for a long time, coupled with some fixes and changes to existing systems.
As you probably know by now, we take your feedback and suggestions to heart. Since this update comes a bit earlier than usual due to the winter break, we obviously couldn't include as much content as usual. So we focused on extending existing systems and crafting a so-called "quality of life" patch, so that the short development time is balanced by long-wanted features.
- Tutorial: Extended main tutorial with a new mission for the Water Point building.
- Tutorial: Added 3 new tutorial modules: ‘Research’, ‘Radiation’ and ‘Water’.
- Buildings: Added the Electric Water Pump. This is an upgrade to the Well and doesn’t require any manual labor.
- Buildings: Added Water Point, a small building used to act as a place where settlers can go, to stock up on water. It’s similar to the Food Station. This building is useful if you have water production facilities far away from other workplaces and need to reduce the walking distances for your settlers.
- Buildings: Added tool restrictions to the Town Center. You can now select what kind of tools your settlers are allowed to use.
- Research: Added research utensils to the game. These utensils can be found when sending expeditions to ruins and other interesting places. Utensils are mandatory to progress in the technology tree. Look out especially for large and big ruins, as they are most likely to house these precious artifacts!
- Research: Added overhauled research window. The new window features several usability improvements, makes better use of the overall screen space and displays your current research tier and the amount of collected research utensils.
- General: Added 29 new potential village names, when creating a new session.
- Side Missions: Added Electric Water Pump and Loitering Ban research missions.
- Sounds: Added one new music track.
- Settlers: Fixed bug related to settlers when choosing a workplace near their home.
- Settlers: Fixing settlers flagged as homeless after loading a game.
- Settlers: Fixed settlers not being distributed during or after pausing the game.
- Settlers: Increase Builder Profession Button is now no longer interactable if there are no free workers left.
- Settlers: Fixed builders being removed as inhabitant from their own house while repairing it.
- Settlers: Added periodical check and correction for settlers with invalid homes.
- Settlers: Fixed a wrong profession distribution on savegames.
- Settlers: Fixed performance lag in repair logic if needed resources were reserved and not available.
- Settlers: Fixed started repair tasks not being properly finished.
- Settlers: Several fixes to the workplace assignment behavior.
- Settlers: Fixed builders being blocked by buildings that haven’t got all required resources.
- UI: Fixed broken tooltip in construction info.
- UI: End Screens are now triggered correctly in scenarios and tutorials.
- UI: Fixed several broken hover highlights.
- UI: Fixed incorrect settler selection in settler dialog.
- UI: Save Game Menu now empties the description field every time it’s opened.
- UI: Seed selection now highlights the seed and displays the tooltip correctly.
- UI: Fixed missing text caused by the typewriting effect in settler dialogs.
- UI: Fixed graphic of loading screen radiation sign.
- UI: Fixed post pro effects and bad scaling of particle systems in the main menu.
- UI: Fixed vanishing pie charts in Statistics.
- UI: Tooltips for changing production limits no longer overlap with the actual values.
- UI: Fixed wrong display of negative resource amounts.
- Pasture: Fixing wrong animal herd types stored in savegame in case the herd types on the map change for some reason.
- Pasture: Fixed error related to the Pasture and statistics.
- Pasture: Fixed a problem with dying animals: when one animal died, another animal left the Pasture and a third one came in.
- Pasture: Fixed dead animals not being removed from Pastures when no species was set.
- Pasture: Fixed error when dismantling a Pasture.
- Pasture: Fixing animal slaughtering when clearing Pasture.
- Buildings: Fixed wrong button label in Water Tower.
- Buildings: Fixed error in electricity networks.
- Buildings: Fixed broken visuals on construction site ruin.
- Buildings: Fixed visuals of tomato seed.
- General: Fixed possible error when loading a savegame, related to the load system.
- General: Fixed error with empty resource piles not being removed correctly.
- Sounds: Fixed shelter click sound.
- Tutorial: Fixed an error that caused tutorial missions to show wrong goals, when loading older, uncompleted tutorial savegames.
- Wildlife: Wildlife is not spawned in a straight line anymore.
- Wildlife: Added a minimum spawn distance for wildlife to the town center, to avoid spawning herds into the bus.
- Expeditions: Fixed wrong advantage in gas station expedition.
- Settlers: Builders now grab ongoing tasks when clearing construction sites.
- Settlers: Adjusted builders to get hunger/thirst slower and work longer.
- Settlers: Tweaked spawning behavior of repair tasks to be building dependent.
- Settlers: Restrict the amount of spawned worker tasks to 20 per building/world task, to avoid scenarios, where a lot of workers would try to do the same task which was not very efficient.
- Settlers: Settlers now only get food or water after completing a job.
- UI: Left side of the statistics tab is now scrollable when needed.
- UI: Game Overlays now (un-)pause the game when they are (de-)activated.
- UI: Some adjustments to the main menu item selection.
- UI: Improved several checkboxes for better readability.
- UI: Map Seed and Village name are now randomized each time the session menu is opened.
- UI: Reduced sandstorm damage to medium on ‘Hard Mode’ preset.
- UI: Added settlers to the main menu, to make it feel more alive.
- UI: Player can no longer change game speed while in “destroy resources” prompt.
- UI: Slices of Pie Charts in statistics are now highlighted more prominently.
- UI: Improved click detection for placing buildings. This should avoid accidental misplacement of buildings.
- UI: Changed keyboard mapping for toggling through analytic view/heat maps to avoid issues with standard mappings for game overlays.
- Buildings: UI entries in the building inspector are now hidden, if the corresponding building hasn’t been unlocked yet.
- Buildings: Set all harvest cycles for plantation trees to 8 cycles.
- Buildings: Irrigation Plant no longer resets its irrigation level to None if paused.
- Buildings: Fill level of the water gauge now shows the amount of ‘reserved’ water.
- Buildings: Removed ambience sounds from Fields and Plantations.
- Buildings: Kitchen now correctly shows ‘Missing Raw Food’ as a warning.
- Buildings: Added coal as a potential resource in the market.
- Buildings: Pub now uses any kind of fruit for ‘Hard Liquor’ instead of only berries.
- Pasture: Pasture inspector now outputs correct value for stored water if there is no water in the inventory yet.
- Pasture: Animals marked for slaughter now wait for the herder before they leave the pasture after clearing the pasture or changing the species.
- Pasture: Added two more working paths and made the existing ones blocking.
- Pasture: Animal selection now stays with the last selected animal instead of switching to the next available.
- Pasture: Meat and produced goods on pastures can now be radiated. Radiation is based on the supplied water and its radiation value.
- Expeditions: Removed resource label from Expedition Rewards as the text clipped in several languages and the new approach is more streamlined.
- Expeditions: Improved layout of expedition inventory during expeditions.
- Expeditions: Added a settlement inventory to the loot screen at expeditions.
- Research: Required knowledge points are now colored in red if there are not enough points available in the tech tree window.
- Savegame: In the savegame slots in the Load Game screen you can now double-click on the screenshot in order to load the corresponding savegame.
- Tutorial: Changed tutorial map.
New Tutorial starting point. Every part of the tutorial features a new, specially created Map.
- Environment: Optimized the tree system to gain more overall performance.
- Sounds: Tweaked global ambience volumes.
- Side Missions: Technology side missions now respect the amount of collected research utensils before triggering.
- Trading: Traders now no longer bring special resources with them when they have only medium reputation.
Two new buildings have been added with this update. The Electric Water Pump and the Water Point both serve to optimize and ensure the water supply within the settlement. Together with the new settler behavior, these buildings should complement the gameplay and make it more logical. Settlers now only walk away from the work site to satisfy one need at a time, such as food or drink. The Food Station previously allowed the need for food to be logistically moved to work locations already. The Water Point now serves the same purpose, only for water. The Water Point also needs logisticians to move water from any source to the desired building.
In connection with this, the Electric Water Pump represents an upgrade to the Well, through which automatic and above all permanent delivery of clear water is possible. Although the pump must be connected to the power grid in order to operate, it acts autonomously and without labor. A combination of both buildings is especially suitable for the lategame and can therefore not be built easily, but needs to be unlocked through research first.
Water Point
You can decide from which sources logisticians collect water to put it into the Water Point
Electric Water Pump
Research has been part of the game for some updates now and continues to be constantly added to with new content and equally restructured to give direction to the game speed and natural progression. Due to the great feedback on the expedition system and its "simplicity", we are now combining both systems. Expeditions were rarely used by many players nowadays or were mainly used to get new seeds. By introducing progress stages in the technology tree, research can now only be done if a certain prerequisite is met. This is the collection of so-called Research Utensils. This fictitious resource can only be obtained through expeditions and can be thought of as finding a blueprint for new technologies. To get to the advanced buildings in the technology tree, expeditions have to be mastered successfully and thoughtfully. After new Research Utensils have been found, a new research level is unlocked. So always be on the lookout for big ruins if you want to reach a new technological level. Side Note: The Electric Water Pump is hidden on the highest technology level!
Please be aware, that for existing save games, the maximum number of utensils will already be unlocked.
The new Research Window
Progressing technology levels
Research Utensils
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjO_lSdMCgg
We know that there are a few more things we need to address, and we are listening to your feedback. We're trying to address all the important issues in a timely manner and make the game as a whole more understandable and fair. However, it is important to remember that Endzone - A World Apart is a survival game, so we have made it challenging with full intention.
- Your Team from Gentlymad & Assemble Entertainment
Changelog Version 0.7.7654.27777