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Herbal Medicine Update - Coming Soon!

This is the first major content update, and it introduces some new challenges.

Viruses are a new threat, which can be introduced by some visiting sapiens, especially if you recruit them. You can help stop the spread by isolating infected sapiens, but this will become a lot easier to manage once you have researched medicine.

You can now allow sapiens to eat raw meat, however there is a high risk of food poisoning, which they can get in other ways too. They can also get burned around fires, so you might want to find some aloe and keep some burn medicine stored.

To create medicine, you'll want to investigate the new plants. They can be hard to find, so you might need to explore further out.

There are also many other significant improvements to the AI, graphics, performance, and a bunch of other new features and fixes too.

The update will go out next week, but if you don't mind helping to find any remaining bugs, you can try it out now on the public-beta-unstable branch. Please keep the feedback and bug reports coming, thank you!

- Dave

[h2]Full Release Notes:[/h2]

Herbal Medicine

Adds viruses which can be introduced by visiting sapiens, and spread through your tribe
Adds food poisoning, which can occur if you allow them to eat raw meat, or store raw and cooked meat together
Adds a risk of getting burned while delivering fuel or crafting at kilns or campfires
Injuries can now occur while doing more activities like chopping trees or mining
New medicine skill, research, and craftable items
Adds 6 new plants and the elderberry tree
Adds fired and unfired bowls
Sapiens can now die from starvation or hypothermia, and these systems have been rebalanced
Sapiens will seek fire when they are very cold, and stay there until they warm up
Campfires and kilns now melt the snow near by
Many craftable items must now be researched individually
Adds a new immunity trait

AI improvements

Sapiens now interact with each other more, and talk to each other while seated
Many improvements to the AI with how they prioritize and choose tasks
Sapiens will now run when hunting, and for urgent tasks like treating with medicine
As running makes mammoths easier and safer to hunt, they now take more spears and provide a little less meat
Improved pathfinding, with smoother movements and walking animations
Improves a number of other sapien animations
Mouth movements while talking
Injured and sick sapiens will now go to bed, and their outcomes will be better if they sleep

Graphics and Performance

Significant optimizations in many areas
Many improvements to shaders and rendering quality, including more vibrant colors
Adds new options to toggle bloom and ambient occlusion, and adds a lower quality water option
Improvements to a number of models, especially thatch buildings, which also have a slightly larger window allowing you to fly through
Newly crafted log drums and balafons will now display the correct wood type

Other Changes

Decorative items will no longer go rotten or despawn, until they become usable with "allow use"
You can now dig and fill steeper slopes
New notification text when you move too far from your tribe
Notifications are now color coded
Some status effects like injuries can now be more severe, and are colored red/orange to indicate this
Notifications now stay up when the game is paused
You can now build anything out of split logs to complete the tutorial goal, not just a split log wall
The tech tree has been redesigned to make more sense
Balafon crafting now requires wood working instead of tool assembly
Playing any musical instrument will complete the music tutorial task
Undiscovered items now don't show what they are in the resources panel

Bug Fixes

Named objects will now preserve and display their name when carried and moved around
Fixes bug where bamboo didn't grow back
Fixes issues with selecting paths
Fixes bug with issuing orders in multi-select
Fixes bug where mammoths could become invisible after a successful hunt
Fixes bug where the order of sapiens changed when you changed their role assignments
No longer follows symlinks when deleting worlds
Many other minor fixes

Update b20 - Bed assignment, difficulty guide, and bug fixes

Beta 20 contains a number of tweaks, bug fixes and new features. I'm still catching up with launch issues, so there is no major new content just yet. But you can expect to see more updates with more content within the next few weeks.

Features/Changes:
- Adds ability to assign sapiens to beds, by clicking a sapien, selecting move, and then clicking on a bed
- Adds a difficulty guide when selecting your tribe
- When knapping a large rock into small rocks, you can now also use another large rock as the tool
- Sapiens can now sit on split logs
- Move & Wait has been removed from the radial menu, as it was a trap for new players. This functionality will likely be added again soon using a modifier key instead
- Reduces frequency and volume of bird sounds
- Bamboo now only drops 2 when gathering, saving 2 for when it is chopped down
- Adds option to invert the mouse wheel zoom direction
- Adds a total time played in game days to the world load menu
- More fonts and characters added for localization mods, especially Japanese and Turkish
- You can now add, remove, and update world mods for existing worlds
- Mod lists are now scrolling views, to allow more installed mods
- Exposes more variables for mods
- Adds buttons to open the world save directory, and mod directories

Bug Fixes:
- Fixes issues where they would get stuck far away, and not return home in time to get to sleep
- Fixes crashing bugs
- Fixes an issue where you could get stuck unable to build a kiln due to a research order on stored mudbricks
- Fixes pathfinding issue that could cause them to run very slowly over long distances
- Fixes AI issues relating to choosing where to store items
- Fixes AI issues where two sapiens would attempt to sit on the same seat, or seats became unusable
- Fixes issue where it displayed the incorrect craft count for split logs, small rocks
- Fixes issue where digging discovery was assignable before you had discovered rock knapping
- Now warns if Steam overlay is not enabled, if you do something that requires it

The Making Of Sapiens

In this video I look back at the entire creation process. From right at the beginning with early sketches and ideas, to creating the custom engine and huge world of Sapiens, the refinement of the design, content, and game-play, and then finally pushing that green button and sending it out to the world.

It's been a long, and at times difficult process, filled with many obstacles to overcome. The development of Sapiens has changed my life. I've learned so much, and grown both as a developer and a person.

But there is still a lot of work to do, and I'm looking forward to leading Sapiens to its full potential, through Early Access and beyond.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1060230/Sapiens/

Small update b19 - Bug fixes

Beta 19 is a small update which mostly focuses on bugs and contains the following fixes:

  • Fixes various crashing bugs.
  • Fixes issue allowing both research and fill orders to be queued on the same hex
  • Automatic pausing when the app window loses focus is now optional in the settings, and turned off by default
  • Fixes AI issue that caused them to occasionally wander away near the end of the day for no apparent reason
  • If a wait order has been issued, it is now removed automatically when you issue a standard move order
  • Fixes issue where they couldn't build 4x4 floors from adjacent floors, and needed closer access
  • When starting a new world, burning large pine cones as fuel is now disabled by default
  • There is now a chance of receiving a small rock when digging soil
  • Adds Cyrillic and Korean fonts for better localization mod support. More fonts to come soon.
  • Fixes crash when using international fonts at low resolutions


It might be a little longer until the next update now, as I want to tackle a few larger tasks. But it should still be ready within the next week or two.

Thanks again for all of the feedback and bug reports.

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