Survivalist: Invisible Strain News

In order to make the map for Story Mode I felt it was necessary to do a bit of a visual pass on the towns and vehicles, so that's what I've been up to recently. I've improved the house models and added more variation to them, I've added much more variation to the stores, restaurants and gas stations, and I've added strip malls! There is now color variation on most of the cars and town buildings, so it doesn't feel so much like you keep encountering the same white house and red pickup over and over again. I've also added utility poles, lamp posts, mail boxes and traffic signs to the road sides, so it looks more like a real cohesive place.

















Almost looks like a new game! I should mention that the size footprint of some of the houses has changed slightly with the new models, so if you had a fence adjoining them you might need to add an extra post. As a side note, I've tried to make them so they line up better so if you put a fence next to them, in most cases it should join on visually, except on the more elaborate fronts with balconies etc. I do recommend starting a new game with this patch so you'll generate a new map with all the new types of buildings and props in it.

Gameplay-wise all this doesn't change much of course, but I've also added the ability to use those chunks of meat you can cut out of zombies to infect arrows and sharp melee weapons (dependent on medical skill). Which adds a whole new tactic to assassination missions. And there's few more tweaks and bug fixes, here's the full list:

• Visual pass on town buildings and vehicles, replaced house models with more detailed ones, added strip malls, randomly varying colors and signs, new gas station pumps and roofs, motel signs and ice boxes, utility poles, lamp posts and road signs
  
• You can infect sharp melee weapons and arrows with zombie meat. Dependant on medical skill.
  
• If someone set to be a chef is hungry, they will try to cook food rather than walking to other communities looking for it
  
• Increased time between extortion squads, and made mercs have less armor and weapons when your presence is low
  
• Fix for buildings in towns not being capturable if they are near another building that you already captured
  
• Fix for getting stuck in fisticuffs state if you get into a war with the community of the person you were fighting
  
• Fix for salad crafters who are set to auto deposit sealed containers getting stuck in a loop taking them in and out of chests
  
• Fix for slowdown in mod where you can destroy graves with pipe bombs
  
• Fix for memory leak that caused slowdowns, particularly after generating a new map
  
• Updated French, Hungarian, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Ukrainian, Brazilian Portuguese and Lithuanian translations
  

That's all in v183, which is in the publicbeta branch right now. The previous patch that was in publicbeta, v182, has now been moved to the main branch for everyone.

Lastly - I mentioned earlier I was planning to raise the price soon. I'm intending do that next week, probably Friday the 26th of May (unless something happens to delay it), so fair warning if you were thinking about buying and want to do so at the current price - you've got a week! The new price will be $9.99 USD (that's ¥42, or €9,75, £8.50, according to Steam's pricing tool). There will of course continue to be sales pretty regularly.

The reasons for this are: (1) people keep saying it's too cheap, (2) inflation, and (3) Sandbox mode has evolved enormously since launch and now feels like a full game in itself. But I will continue to make new additions and tweaks to Sandbox mode, as I work on Story mode, though. I'm also going to adjust the price of the original Survivalist game in some currencies (but not USD), as it hasn't changed since launch and some of the recommended prices have gone wildly askew since then.

[h3]What's this publicbeta thing?[/h3]
v183 will be in the "publicbeta" branch for a while, before pushing it to the main game. If you want to try the latest features as they come out (and help test them!) it's a good idea to start using this branch. But keep in mind:

• Because it's the bleeding edge it could be less stable
  
• If you want to be able to play online co-op with someone you'll need to be on the same version as them
  
• If you go back from the "publicbeta" branch to the main branch you may not be able to load savegames created on "publicbeta".

To use publicbeta, just right-click on Survivalist: Invisible Strain in your Steam library and go to Properties, then Betas and in the drop-down select "publicbeta".

Hello, here's another patch that's mainly bug fixing but with a nice new feature: on the equipment policy settings box, you can tell people the number of something you want them to carry. For example, carry 40 iron arrows, or 2 bandages. You can tell everyone you want them to carry 1 axe, 1 hunting knife, and a plastic bottle (which helps when new people join your community in the later game and you tend to find you are always handing out the same stuff to people).



They'll get the items from your community buildings, and other members if they have an excess. If you set auto-deposit on, they'll deposit any more of those items that they get over that amount. If you set auto-collect from corpses on then they'll continue to do that even if it makes them exceed the limit, since they might auto-deposit them or give them to someone else later.

Oh, and on that same dialog, there's also a new "Can Add to Campfire" option for charcoal and wood, so you can tell people not to waste charcoal on campfires. Here's the rest of the change list:

• Added field to equipment policy where you can specify how much of something you want people to try to carry, e.g. for ammo or bandages
  
• Added 'Can Add to Campfire' field to equipment policy for wood and charcoal
  
• You don't have to hold down the Brain Scan key if using a keyboard connected to a Steam Deck
  
• Made it possible to vault over a fence while carrying a chicken or human body
  
• Fix for overlapping text on inventory when scavenging a building with a long name
  
• Show icons for raiders who have surrendered as gray on the map
  
• Added a Can Repair Armor flag to workbenches in the prop editor so modders can make workbench types that don't repair armor
  
• Updated Brazilian Portuguese, French, Italian, Korean, Latin American Spanish, Lithuanian, Simplified Chinese and Ukrainian
  
• Fix for exploit where you can use a skill book to start crafting something, then give it to someone else and keep crafting even if you lack the skill
  
• Some fixes for overlapping text in different languages
  
• Fix for bug where switching between characters on the community screen doesn't change the one shown on the tab above
  
• Fix for gates not closing when someone is sitting near them
  
• Fix for scenario where a crafter with multiple roles would sit in front of a kiln for a while before moving to the next task
  
• Crash fixes
  
• Out of sync fixes
  

EDIT - Small follow-up patch, v182:

• Made selection highlights around sorting icons red to be more visible
  
• Fix for characters picking up items with their personal carry amount set to zero but the community carry amount set to non-zero
  
• Crash fixes
  

[h3]What's this publicbeta thing?[/h3]
v182 will be in the "publicbeta" branch for a while, before pushing it to the main game. If you want to try the latest features as they come out (and help test them!) it's a good idea to start using this branch. But keep in mind:

• Because it's the bleeding edge it could be less stable
  
• If you want to be able to play online co-op with someone you'll need to be on the same version as them
  
• If you go back from the "publicbeta" branch to the main branch you may not be able to load savegames created on "publicbeta".

To use publicbeta, just right-click on Survivalist: Invisible Strain in your Steam library and go to Properties, then Betas and in the drop-down select "publicbeta".

This is mainly just a follow-up patch to fix some bugs reported in v178, but there's a new feature too - you can now specify, for a particular bottle or sealed container, what kind of liquid or substance you want people to put in it. So you can set one bucket to be your saltpeter bucket, one to be your gunpowder bucket, and so on. And you can set bottles to be for water only, so people don't go filling them up with pee from the outhouse.



The rest of the patch is fixes and tweaks from the previous patch - here's the full changelist:

• Option to designate what liquid you want a particular container to be storing
  
• Auto-collect will pick up arrows
  
• Increased tolerance for building on slopey ground
  
• Made chicken wire more common
  
• Fix for mouse not working to switch targets or target body parts on Steam Deck
  
• Fix for crash if a memory type is removed from a mod
  
• Fix for crash on loading some savegames
  
• Fix for occasional crash when confirming a trade in multiplayer
  

EDIT - Released a small follow up patch, v180 with some fixes for the above:

• Setting Roles and Equipment Policy will always be available immediately if you have hints turned off. Otherwise they appear once you have multiple community members.
  
• Fix for characters filling bottles designated for water with snow
  
• Fix for crash when auto collecting items
  

[h3]What's this publicbeta thing?[/h3]
v179 will be in the "publicbeta" branch for a while, before pushing it to the main game. If you want to try the latest features as they come out (and help test them!) it's a good idea to start using this branch. But keep in mind:

• Because it's the bleeding edge it could be less stable
  
• If you want to be able to play online co-op with someone you'll need to be on the same version as them
  
• If you go back from the "publicbeta" branch to the main branch you may not be able to load savegames created on "publicbeta".

To use publicbeta, just right-click on Survivalist: Invisible Strain in your Steam library and go to Properties, then Betas and in the drop-down select "publicbeta".

Hey everyone, I have a done a patch :) This one is such a mishmash but I guess the biggest new feature is there can be multiple ammo types for the same weapon. For bows you have flint arrows (which are easiest to make), iron arrows (which do more damage), and steel arrows (which do more damage and are better at piercing armor). For assault rifles and sniper rifles I've also added armor piercing ammo. You need both lead and steel to make them, so there's more incentive now to get one of each of the different types of mines.



There's a lot of quality of life stuff, like you can demolish picnic tables and barricades, you can press Tab to switch to the person you're talking to, you can see who is currently assigned to a crafting prop, you can assign one person to make charcoal in multiple kilns, you can stop the minimap from rotating. I gave the character boxes more space on the community screen so it's easier to see people's roles now:



Besides that there's a bunch of bug fixes, and just doing stuff that felt unfinished, like making snowballs and snowmen melt, allowing multiple characters to occupy fire lookout towers, fixing glitches in the way terrain is modified and resetting it if you demolish a trap.

Several translations have been updated. There has been a longstanding effort to translate the game into Russian, which is now finished, so I've added it. I'm going to be sending any income I get from Russian Federation to the National Bank of Ukraine though.

Here's the full list of updates in v178:

• Make it possible to demolish props like picnic tables or barricades using the toolbox
  
• If you take over a defeated community's gate, or build a new one connected to their fences, the fences will become yours too
  
• Some fixes to how buildings modify the terrain underneath them
  
• Reset terrain height when you demolish a pit trap, or a building that construction hasn't started on
  
• Looters can blow up uncovered traps, otherwise it's an exploit as you could surround your base with them and stop anyone from getting in
  
• Allow up to 4 characters to occupy the fire lookout tower and weather radar, facing in 4 directions
  
• Option to stop minimap from rotating
  
• Stop your character from walking off while you're scrolling the action menu
  
• Made the character icons on the community screen bigger with their roles always shown on a bottom row
  
• Put cooking and crafting options for campfires, workbenches, etc on a submenu
  
• On the action menu for a crafting prop, show all the workers currently assigned to it and allow you to select them
  
• Allow you to assign someone to craft the same recipe at different crafting stations - e.g. make charcoal using 2 different kilns
  
• Allow you to click Craft on crafting stations that someone is already using
  
• Gunpowder is now made at a workbench, not a campfire
  
• Disabled sunflowers and corrugated iron as they weren't serving much purpose
  
• If you are facing someone in your own community, pressing Tab (or right stick click) switches control to them. Moved Brain Scan/Notes to RT on gamepads.
  
• Support multiple ammo types for guns and bows, including armor piercing varieties
  
• Blunt melee weapons do some damage to armor, some to body. Sharp ones mostly get absorbed by armor but do some damage to body
  
• Different melee weapons have a different fatigue penalty when attacking, and bows cost some fatigue to aim
  
• Recipes only become visible once their ingredients have been discovered, and/or you have someone with high enough skill and the required crafting station. You get notifications when this happens.
  
• Made eating, drinking and opening gate sounds fall off more quickly with distance, so they're less obtrusive in large communities
  
• Added sounds for planting, watering and harvesting crops
  
• White markings on edges of roads
  
• If you leave your damp clothes in a building they will dry over time
  
• Snowmen, snowballs and snow in containers all melt
  
• Added Russian, updated French, Italian, Latin American Spanish, Lithuanian, Turkish and Ukrainian
  
• If you die and replace community leader with someone who is already married, sleeping with or friends with someone, you can trigger the satphone quest with them
  
• NPCs won't abandon their settlement while their leader is still conscious, as doing so breaks Rebellion/Turf War/Intimidation quests that require you to kill the leader
  
• Added a Spared Life memory type for when someone surrenders and you let them go without further consequences
  
• Added a Started Fight memory so people will remember a feud even if they get restrained from hurting anyone
  
• Added a Died memory type for when someone dies of zombie bites or natural causes like thirst etc
  
• If you give someone a gift and they like/don't like it, you learn that aspect of their personality
  
• Allow bunny feeding quest to be finished if either participant feeds the bunny
  
• Fix for clothes getting wetter than they should while walking across frozen rivers
  
• Fix for winter food stocks mission paying you too much for food
  
• Fix for NPCs thanking you for bringing unconscious strangers to their base
  
• Fix for controlled character often being slow to do things (like rip up clothes) when indoors
  
• Fix for camouflage icon taking ages to go green when you move away from an AI settlement
  
• Fix for your characters instantly joining an allied community if you declare war on them
  
• Fix for biggest looter community extortion squad sometimes getting stuck trying to force other communities to ally with it
  
• Fix for issue where people kept picking up and dropping bodies in older savegames with square bases, possible fix for bug where the bodies sometimes teleported to the edge of the map in multiplayer
  
• Fix for situation where someone exited a watchtower surrounded by zombie, also if someone surrenders to you when you are in a watchtower you can answer them without leaving it
  
• Fixes for opinion graph showing incorrectly on some speeches
  
• Prevent player from starting war by accidentally punching a chicken to death during fisticuffs
  
• Crash fixes
  

That will be in the publicbeta branch, meanwhile I've moved v177 to the main branch so everyone will have diagonal fences and polygonal AI settlements, the Log page and Steam Deck support, the Basket and Checkout on the trading screen, the Character Notes/Brain Scan screen and relationships matter when recruiting, etc.

About six months ago I made myself a list of all the stuff I felt Sandbox mode really needed if it wasn't to feel "unfinished". It wasn't the most glamorous new features, more like a lot of stuff I'd just been putting off like the Log screen, a lot of Quality of Life stuff and so on. Well, with this update I'd say I've now - pretty much - got through that list!

What that means is it's time for a new phase of Survivalist: Invisible Strain development. I need to start focusing more on Story Mode. I always said there'd be a Story Mode and the game won't get out of Early Access without it. It will serve as an introduction to the game (which is still pretty challenging for newcomers) as well as being the best showcase for the role-playing elements and letting me build some more clearly defined environments and characters. Sandbox Mode kind of grew to accommodate its own loose story and I think some of the missions I added (such as relationship quests) will also be side quests in Story Mode. Over the course of making it, I became a lot more interested in procedural story generation. But the intention was always to use Sandbox Mode to get the game mechanics straight and then use that accumulated knowledge to make Story Mode.

Now I say I "pretty much" got through the list, because I've been doing some playthroughs and there are still things that bug me, like the way your crafters can still sometimes end up full of unwanted containers and you have to sort their inventory out for them. The morale system needs some more tweaking, and I feel that your community members ought to do more emergent stuff, like start relationships and friendships with each other as well as "you", the player. I'll be working on those as I go.

There will probably always be more stuff like that cropping up. I haven't got Story Mode all planned out and I think as I work on it, I'm likely to still be adding more features that will be part of Sandbox Mode too. So you'll keep getting updates but they might be a bit further apart.

I also think once this v178 update has bedded down I'm going to be raising the price to $9.99 USD (that's ¥42, or €9,75, £8.50, according to Steam's pricing tool). People keep telling me it's too cheap, and we're living in inflationary times. And as I alluded earlier, Sandbox Mode has come a long way since launch. I'll give some more warning before I do though, so there'll be plenty of chance to buy it before that happens, if you haven't already. And of course there will always be Steam Sales and Weeklong Deals.

[h3]What's this publicbeta thing?[/h3]
v178 will be in the "publicbeta" branch for a while, before pushing it to the main game. If you want to try the latest features as they come out (and help test them!) it's a good idea to start using this branch. But keep in mind:

• Because it's the bleeding edge it could be less stable
  
• If you want to be able to play online co-op with someone you'll need to be on the same version as them
  
• If you go back from the "publicbeta" branch to the main branch you may not be able to load savegames created on "publicbeta".

To use publicbeta, just right-click on Survivalist: Invisible Strain in your Steam library and go to Properties, then Betas and in the drop-down select "publicbeta".

It's patch day! Say goodbye to those perfectly square AI settlements, because (if you start a new game in v176) the AI communities in the world will all be different randomized polygonal shapes. The game now supports diagonal fences as well - whereas previously if you put two fences on diagonally adjacent tiles they would technically block pathfinding, but would just be rendered as single fence posts and look a bit silly - now a fence will be drawn between them. I've also added some sloping fence pieces so they look a bit more natural on hillsides. And you can build fences (but not other buildings) over rivers, which is really useful.



Aside from the fence stuff I've also done some work on the combat AI, trying to make your followers stick with you better if you run away from a fight or into a building. I've made NPCs a bit less likely to all run away in situations where they outnumber you. And when they do abandon their bases, they'll be less likely to keep returning after a minute or so - instead, they can become vagrants who wander the map looking for a new base. Also I did a playthrough to test all these changes and basically ended up fixing a lot of other things along the way (as always happens).

Finally, there's now a Ukrainian translation by youtuber Survager! And Simplified Chinese has been updated with all the latest dialog.

Here's the full change list:

• Diagonal and sloping fences
  
• Give AI settlements varied shapes instead of all being square
  
• Player can build fences over rivers
  
• If everyone in an AI settlement under attack runs away from their base, they will form a new nomadic community and wander around, trying to occupy a new base if there is one, instead of continually running back home and getting killed
  
• If you run away from a fight, people following you should run to catch up with you instead of backing slowly away
  
• Made NPCs less likely to run away from a fight if they outnumber you
  
• Don't gossip with nearby characters if crouching
  
• Added a hint that you can surrender to people you started a war with
  
• Show morale on brain scan screen (if you have the brain scanner), some tweaks to how it is calculated
  
• Reduced likelihood of earlier game raiders having guns, which I accidentally increased in v171
  
• Made toolboxes more common in vehicles and axes more common in stores
  
• If a builder doesn't have the right tool (e.g. shovel or toolbox) for some buildings in the queue, work first on buildings they do have the tool for
  
• Ukrainian translation added, and Simplified Chinese updated
  
• Fix for rifle animation not holding the gun in their left hand properly
  
• Fix for Dark Past quest not progressing sometimes when the ex dies
  
• Fix for guard duty taking priority over organizer for NPC that you gave winter food stocks to, so they don't put the food away
  
• Fix for repairers trying to repair damaged crops
  
• Fix for characters sitting round an unlit fire with half-cooked food on it, waiting for it to be finished, with no one attempting to light it
  
• Fix for NPCs sometimes not blaming anyone if a friend was recently murdered
  
• Fix for cursor jumping around when adding/removing things to basket on trade screen when using a gamepad
  
• Fix for mercenaries showing on the map sidebar if they've been deactivated and killed, but bodies not yet deleted
  
• Fix for crafter giving up because they couldn't fit a cooking pot in their inventory, when they should have been able to dump some food to make space
  
• Fix for gunpowder crafter filling up their inventory with un-needed containers
  
• Several fixes for extorters speech sometimes not triggering correctly
  
• Some fixes for relationships being set up incorrectly
  
• Optimization for slowdown when you have lots of guns in your inventory
  
• Crash fixes
  

EDIT - I released a quick follow-up patch to fix a crash, v177:

• Show options on the action menu (when not aiming) for both assassinate and choke hold if you have a knife in your inventory, but not equipped
  
• You have to hold the button to assassinate or bludgeon an unconscious person
  
• Latin American Spanish, Italian, Lithuanian, Korean and Hungarian updated
  
• Fix for people sometimes not following you when they first join you
  
• Fix for chickens sometimes not keeping warm in a nearby chicken coop
  
• Fix for occasional crash when miners don't have enough space in their backpack
  

[h3]What's this publicbeta thing?[/h3]
v177 will be in the "publicbeta" branch for a while, before pushing it to the main game. If you want to try the latest features as they come out (and help test them!) it's a good idea to start using this branch. But keep in mind:

• Because it's the bleeding edge it could be less stable
  
• If you want to be able to play online co-op with someone you'll need to be on the same version as them
  
• If you go back from the "publicbeta" branch to the main branch you may not be able to load savegames created on "publicbeta".

To use publicbeta, just right-click on Survivalist: Invisible Strain in your Steam library and go to Properties, then Betas and in the drop-down select "publicbeta".