Survivalist: Invisible Strain News

One thing I've been feeling in my playthroughs is there isn't a lot of strategy to the mining system - you generally just plonk down a mine in your base and you've got everything you need. This patch aims to make it more interesting by making the mineral deposits much more scarce and having a lot of them owned by friendly NPC settlements. You have a dialog option to buy (or sometimes acquire by force) rights to use their mines.

There are still patches of mineral deposits in the world outside of NPCs bases, so look out for the rocks with ore in them. You can also use the geological maps to find them. However, the world map and geological map items always felt overpowered to me as well, so I've split them into 4 quadrants - you need to collect 4 maps with different quadrants to see the whole world. (This only applies to the Large map size though btw).

In case it's a bit too scarce now, there are sliders in the world creation screen to make ore more common. Also btw this system only applies to newly started games, old savegames will continue to use their old geological map.

Here's the full changelist:

• Made rich mineral deposits much more scarce and often owned by an NPC settlement - added mines to the settlements, and dialogue to negotiate mining rights
  
• Various crafting tweaks - get less wood from trees, less minerals from 'poor' mines, can make arrows from steel as well as flint, iron ore and steel weigh less
  
• Tweaks to the envy formula to make it slightly less likely NPCs will start fighting purely over gifts. Also when you give people gifts they will comment if others are getting jealous.
  
• When feuding, characters will say the things they're angry about
  
• Your community members will warn you as a group of raiders or zombies is approaching
  
• Split world maps and geological maps into 4 quadrants, so you have to collect all 4 to see the whole area (on the Large map size only)
  
• Fix for chef not fetching rabbits from traps if they're far away
  
• Fix for being able to pour stew out of other community's pots without them detecting that you are stealing from them
  
• Fix for characters sometimes getting into a loop of continually exchanging items with each other
  
• Fix for characters sometimes getting into a loop of continually jumping over a tree stump
  

[h3]What's this publicbeta thing?[/h3]
v126 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 primarily a quick patch to fix some bugs people have reported, but it also adds one sort-of new feature - the number of fences you can queue up while building has been increased to 32 (it used to be 8). It also makes them passable while under construction, i.e. you can walk through them, so you can't use it as an exploit, which was the original reason the limit was so low.

Ultimately the goal is to be able to queue up different types of buildings, so you could queue up some fencing and a gate and a shack or suchlike in one go and then leave them to it - this is just a stepping stone to that.

Here's the change list:

• Fix to make it possible for modders to add bows
  
• Increased maximum number of fences builders can queue up, made props under construction only become obstacles when resources start being used in them
  
• Fix for community buildings being deleted after a dead community is re-occupied, and then that community also dies
  
• Fix for rabbits and zombies saying 'hey!' when you throw a snowball at them
  
• Fix for crash after using a mod with a story that contain the same asset bundle
  
• Updated Chinese translation
  

EDIT - I've released another quick patch with a few more things, after someone reported a crash. So it's now v125:

• Fix for zombies jittering sometimes when a pack of them is attacking you in online multiplayer
  
• Updated Korean translation
  
• Crash fix
  

[h3]What's this publicbeta thing?[/h3]
v125 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! This patch is mainly all about jealousy. You can flirt with more than one person (and they'll get angry with each other), you can dump the person you started a relationship with. When you give gifts to some people, others will wonder why they didn't get any. When you give out green passes among your community members, they'll try and take them from each other. Hopefully it should all help create a bit more drama!



There's also the usual sort of bug fixes and such. I realized there was a pretty major one that stopped you from progressing to the next romance stage with certain personality types, which therefore would have locked off the new endgame stuff for a lot of people - that's fixed.

I've also made it easier to cook human meat - you can just do it over a fire now instead of needing to put it in stew with some vegetables. That should help in the earlier stages when you're often short of food... though of course, most of your community members won't be happy about it!

Here's the full change list:

• You can flirt with multiple people at once, and they won't appreciate it
  
• You can now dump people
  
• Giving gifts to a person will often cause resentment among others who haven't gotten any, particularly if they didn't much like that person
  
• Your community members will get angry with you if they haven't gotten a green pass yet, and may steal them from each other
  
• Fix for snowman quest (and others) not failing properly, also explained more how to scoop snow
  
• Drinking game quest ignores any drink policy you might have set
  
• Resume All Roles button on Community Page
  
• Disable bleeding from feuds to make them less deadly
  
• Made F8 debug menus translatable
  
• Made human meat cookable on a spit
  
• Fix for characters sometimes thinking they can't go to a nearby river to get a drink
  
• Fix for role icons not appearing on all icons on character switching bar
  
• Fix for relationships not being possible with some personality types
  
• Fix for out of sync error when trying to trade with someone, if you have a different language set from another co-op player
  

[h3]What's this publicbeta thing?[/h3]
v123 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".

I've put another patch out in publicbeta, this one's mostly me updating translations and just catching up with some bug reports that people sent me over the last few months while I was deep in the sandbox progression work:

• Updated Korean and Chinese translations
  
• Fix for NPC getting stuck in a loop telling someone to leave their community
  
• Possible fix for gunpowder crafters filling up their inventory with containers of curry etc
  
• Changed default limit of wandering groups on Medium maps to 4 instead of 2
  
• Make it harder to kite looters away from their base and then assassinate them when they are shaking you down
  
• Better handling when a mod or story fails to load a dll
  
• Fix for crash if you kill some fake FEMA teams
  
• Fix for crash if mods have a dependency loop
  
• Rare crash fixes
  

[h3]What's this publicbeta thing?[/h3]
v122 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 week I've been working on optimizations for online co-op. This was a particular problem when you had built up your base and there were a lot of characters around.

To get a bit technical, there were two main problems. Firstly the prediction code for nearby characters was a major bottleneck (which doesn't exist in single player). Secondly the fog of war calculations were causing framerate spikes, because unlike in single-player I was performing them on the main thread (for reasons relating to the need for determinism in multiplayer). In both cases the solution is I've offloaded them to different threads. PCs with 8 cores should benefit most from this, but I would guess most people have at least 4 physical cores, but 8 virtual cores with hyperthreading, so will probably be okay.

Anyway that was the most glaring performance problem, but I am of course aware there are other optimization needs besides this. Multiplayer will still be a little worse than single player, and even in single player it doesn't always run at a solid 60 fps on my reasonably high end PC. So I will come back to this again. (I think the main culprit is the renderer.)

Here's the changelist:

• Optimizations, mainly for online co-op when a large number of characters are nearby
  
• Fix for being able to activate Dark Past quest twice for the same person
  

EDIT - I've released another patch, v121, which mostly just fixes an error message introduced in v120.

[h3]What's this publicbeta thing?[/h3]
v120 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".