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Survivalist: Invisible Strain News

New patch in publicbeta (v143), and older patch moved to main branch (v142)

Hello, patch time again! This patch focuses on a few different things. Firstly I've always thought molotovs and the throwing code needed some love - it used to be impossible to throw them over walls, for example. Now you can, and you can see a graphic showing the arc of your throw when you do so:



I've also always thought it looked silly that you can throw a molotov or pipe bomb at someone directly in front of you, and any enemies nearby would die while you and any friendlies would be completely unaffected. This game has never had friendly fire for bullets because when I first got shooting working on the original Survivalist I immediately realised it was too chaotic to have to worry about not shooting your allies. And I think it looks okay when you shoot bullets through your friends, but for area of effect weapons it just looks a bit crap.

So I've added friendly fire for splash damage - you can however turn it off in the difficulty settings, and it's off by default on the easiest setting. Also, your community members will generally jump out of the way if you throw a molotov or pipe bomb at them. But they might not be able to if they're grappling with a zombie, or something. The hud will show the area of effect for the damage, and will go red if there are friendlies in it, or yellow for friendly buildings.



The other new feature is when you click Set Policy on an item of equipment, you can assign people to Auto Collect that type of equipment from bodies, so for example you can make them automatically collect gold from nearby corpses.



And on the crafting screen I've made it possible to assign someone to rip up clothes to make rags on a recurring basis (i.e. they'll go looking for clothes from corpses). This should make the process of making bandages or molotovs less labor intensive.

Lastly I've increased the amount you can carry without a backpack! That amount dates back from the original Survivalist, but in that game you never had to make campfires. As many people have pointed out, it's weird that you need a backpack to make a campfire, so this fixes that. (I also decreased the weight of a unit of wood slightly).

All of the above may need some refinement so let me know how it goes. It'll be in publicbeta for now. Here's the full list:
  • When throwing something you see a parabolic path displaying where it will go, and if not targeting someone you can aim the camera up to throw over walls. If targeting someone a higher angle will be used if the lower angle is blocked.
  • Molotovs and pipe bombs can deal damage to friendly characters and structures (if set by a difficulty setting). Characters will try to dodge out the way.
  • Increased the amount you can carry without a backpack and reduced the weight of wood a bit, so you can more easily make a fire without a backpack. Removed wood from the recipe for rabbit traps and tripwires.
  • You can now assign someone to rip up clothes without manually doing each one, same as other types of crafting
  • Added Auto Collect from bodies option to equipment policy dialog
  • Reduced the frequency of raider bands and hordes a little
  • If you destroy equipment that is stacked, you get a dialog asking how many you want to destroy
  • Fix for satphones being spawned in long-dead bodies whose graves have disappeared
  • Fix for character highlights not working in online co-op
  • Fix for deer taking too long to respawn
  • Fix for savegame screenshot sometimes being incorrect
  • Turkish translation (still work in progress)
  • Sledgehammer


Meanwhile I'm moving the previous patch, v142, to the main branch. This contains the friendship quests.

[h3]What's this publicbeta thing?[/h3]
v143 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".

New patch in publicbeta (v142)

Hello, I've released a new patch in publicbeta. This is one of those "fixing bugs in the previous patch" patches, along with other miscellanea:
  • Stop graves with satphones in them from being deleted
  • Fix for hugs not working through locked gates when trying to bribe a guard with them
  • Don't say such and such are a great couple if one is dead. Say they
  • were* a great couple.
  • You have to hold the button when kicking someone from your community
  • Limit approval/disapproval gained from cannibalism
  • Fix for breakup speech triggering with the wrong people
  • Fix for farmers depositing gifted stew in buildings
  • Error message if you try to cook manually without emptying your pot first
  • Some tweaks and fixes to the friendship quests
  • Default to High graphics quality setting
  • Another action menu optimization
  • Gender option on equipment, for languages with gendered nouns
  • Korean and Brazilian Portuguese translation updates
  • Crash fix


[h3]What's this publicbeta thing?[/h3]
v142 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".

New patch in publicbeta - Friendship Quests!

Hey everyone, it's March - my first month of working full time on this! In this patch I'm introducing friendship quests. When you ask your community members "What's up?", and if they like you, they'll ask you to go on these little side missions with them. There's 3 types of quest so far, and once you've done them you'll become friends next time you ask what's up, and the time after that they'll suggest some future plans, the same as your romantic partners would. This means it's a bit easier to reach the end of the game (as you can do it either by 'romance' or 'friendship'), and also there's just more stuff to do that lets you get to know your community members :)



Here's the full change list:
  • Friendship quests
  • Some fixes for crafters saying they don't have enough space in their inventory to carry something, when they really do
  • Fix for traders starting a war by attacking our walls when trying to attack a passing enemy
  • Fix for crash that occurred when a remembered speech got deleted from a mod
  • Some usability improvements to the script editor - e.g. made different object types different colors, and use names like Speaker and Quest Giver depending on context instead of Actor, Target etc.
  • Some small fixes to the flirt quests
  • Show ellipses instead of going to more than 2 rows on Take All
  • Make Take All require hold if there's a large amount of stuff, as can be annoying if you take them all by accident
  • Some menu optimizations
  • Some new menu sounds
  • Hungarian translation update


[h3]What's this publicbeta thing?[/h3]
v141 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".

Moved v140 to the main branch

Just a quick note to say I've now moved my latest patch, v140, from publicbeta to the main branch, so everyone now has the latest fixes. Here are the change lists again:

v140:
  • Fix for crash when trader asked to be let into gates in online co-op
  • Fix for character getting stuck inside gates
  • Updated Japanese and Chinese translations

v139:
  • Fix for NPCs coming in gates without permission, if the gates are open
  • Fix for military zombies not spawning with armor or helmets
  • Fix for characters waiting 10 seconds to bandage themselves after an injury, if the player stops controlling them
  • Fix for watchtowers not counting towards Presence even though it says they are
  • If you selected multiple characters in Command Mode, deselect them on returning to Direct Control mode (it was too easy to forget you had selected them and order them all to do something by mistake)
  • Updated translations
  • Action menu text optimization
  • Memory leak fix!

v138:
  • Dialog options to set whether characters from other communities can come into your base (by default they won't enter gates now)
  • Fix for traders not moving on when you tell them to
  • More dialog variations when interrogating people to try and find out if they have invisible strain
  • Graves deteriorate and disappear over time, but you can keep them around by "paying respects" to them from time to time
  • AI communities bury bodies from other communities that die near their base (not zombies etc as those disappear anyway)
  • Make feuding less likely if people fear each other
  • Don't plummet morale because fences got destroyed
  • Some deer spawning fixes
  • Moss Effect on cars, rocks, old buildings etc
  • Hungarian and Brazilian Portuguese Updated
  • Fix for characters sometimes stealing stuff in non critical situations
  • Fix for crash when deer became infected (which isn't supposed to happen)
  • Fix for character circling around someone forever in MoveAdjacentTo goal
  • Fix for surrender dialog not working because the Alert goal was taking higher priority than the conversation goal
  • Fix for some towns being set to no infection when they should have been white strain
  • Fix for people being able to slide around when getting up after being depressed
  • Fix for dark past speech not playing after hug because another queued speech about approaching invaders was blocking it
  • Fix for zombies grappling with someone not being visible in pip
  • Fix for "subgoal not possible" error in FleeFromAllEnemies

New patch in publicbeta (v139)

Yo, it's time for another update. This one is fixing a bunch of bugs, most importantly a memory leak that I introduced a few patches ago (which means over time the game uses up more and more memory and I suppose would probably crash if you played it for long enough). As with all new patches this is in publicbeta to start with but I'll aim to get it onto the main branch quickly, along with v138, because of the memory leak. Here's the full changelist:
  • Fix for NPCs coming in gates without permission, if the gates are open
  • Fix for military zombies not spawning with armor or helmets
  • Fix for characters waiting 10 seconds to bandage themselves after an injury, if the player stops controlling them
  • Fix for watchtowers not counting towards Presence even though it says they are
  • If you selected multiple characters in Command Mode, deselect them on returning to Direct Control mode (it was too easy to forget you had selected them and order them all to do something by mistake)
  • Updated translations
  • Action menu text optimization
  • Memory leak fix!


EDIT - someone reported a crash in the gates code so I've released another patch with a fix for that, plus some translation updates (v140). Here's that change list:
  • Fix for crash when trader asked to be let into gates in online co-op
  • Fix for character getting stuck inside gates
  • Updated Japanese and Chinese translations


[h3]What's this publicbeta thing?[/h3]
v139 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".