Slipways News

Good news, everyone!

While a combination of factors has made work on the game in 2022 a bit slower than I'd like, I wanted to let you all know that the third and final update is well underway and expected to ship by the end of June. Thank you all for your patience - I'm making good progress now and working hard to make this update worth the wait!

To clear up any confusion: this update is still not DLC and will be available for free to all existing and new players of the game.

[h2]What's in the update?[/h2]

Here's a brief list:

• The third act of the campaign, in which we'll conclude the story and see how each of the races approaches the looming crisis
  
• Other gameplay additions, including new technologies, sector quirks, events and council tasks
  
• Modding support, allowing you to use the same tools I'm using to make your own stuff: from small mods adding a few technologies to big ones introducing a whole new campaign or game mode
  
• Quality-of-life improvements, for example allowing picking sector quirks directly, or quickly rerolling another sector with a different tech setup
  
• As always, smaller fixes and UI improvements
  

This batch of campaign missions is the most complicated one yet. It took a few false starts and lots of iterations to get them working to my satisfaction, but I feel like we're on the right track now and these last five missions will be a worthy ending to the Slipways story. I can't wait to see you play them.

Making this game has been a long journey, but we're almost at its conclusion now! I'm not ruling out smaller updates or ports to other platforms in the future, but in terms of gameplay, this will be the final, definitive edition of Slipways.

That doesn't necessarily mean the end of new content - with the upcoming modding support, the ball will be firmly in your court! I expect the community will be able to make new stuff for the game faster than I ever could. I for one can't wait to see what shiny new things you all come up with once the update hits.

Until that happens, see you around the galaxy!

This is a bugfix update fixing the following issues:

- Campaign - Hard Truths: If you completed consecutive stages of the archive year after year, the event moving the story forward would not trigger correctly. This is no longer the case.
- Savefiles: An obsolete trade route that was undone would sometimes get saved to the savefile, especially in endless games, causing the save to no longer load. This should no longer be the case.
- Mac: Pressing caps lock during the game would break UI due to how weirdly Macs implement caps lock and a few strange decisions on Unity's part. This has been worked around so pressing caps lock is safe for the universe again.
- Tech - Economic zones: This technology used to not work correctly with information and izzium as a resource. It should be okay now.
- Tech - Void synthesizer: If you connected the synthesizer first, and only then upgraded a planet with a new need, the synthesizer would miss this and would not supply the need. This should now work correctly.
- Building structures: It is no longer possible to build structures at the very edge of known space, since this could cause them to end up too close to objects that haven't yet been discovered.
- Performance: Undo should now be a bit faster by avoiding empire updates after undoing actions that shouldn't change the world state.
- Localization: One perk description got accidentally "untranslated" due to translated strings being incorrectly overriden by their English "fallback".
- Localization - German: Grammar mistakes fixed in industry descriptions.

EDIT (2022-04-03): One of the fixes in this update introduced a new problem that caused some runs to fail to end properly after 25 years. This should now be fixed through a hotfix update.

This update brings the version numbers up to v1.2(b935) on Windows and v1.2(b936) on Mac.

Profits from the next seven days of sales from This War Of Mine and Slipways will be donated to the Red Cross to support people affected by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Both developers posted the announcement on Twitter today, with GOG joining in by saying that their share of sales of both games will also be donated.

Read more

For the next seven days (February 25 to March 3, midnight PST), 100% of Beetlewing's profit from sales of Slipways will be decidated to supporting the Ukrainian people. At the end of next week, this money will be donated to the Polish Red Cross #naPomocUkrainie fund ("help Ukraine fund"). The Polish Red Cross will use this money to secure food, medical supplies and other necessities for the victims of the war in Ukraine, in coordination with the Ukrainian Red Cross.

Slipways paints a world free of war and military conflict, and I sincerely hope that one day our descendants can live in such a world. We're unfortunately not there yet, so all we can do is try to alleviate some of the horror of war and help those affected by it. This is the intent behind my decision.

Please remain respectful here on Steam and refrain from incendiary comments on this topic. Thank you.

Sincerely,
--
Jakub Wasilewski

Wouldn't you know, this is another bugfix update that has traveled through time from Thursday to arrive today. Maybe I should start calling them "Wednesday somethings"? No good word for "fix" that starts with a "w" comes to mind, though, so we'd have to lose the alliterative title.

This one fixes the following issues:

- Crash: Culture: There is an edge case with Culture Exchange and Culture Hubs when building the hub causes the last produced unit of people to disappear from the planet, turning off Culture Exchange. This is a problem if the culture was already used, causing a crash. There is no good way to fix this while being 100% consistent with the rules as stated, but it no longer crashes. Instead, Culture Exchange and similar technologies now also work with planets that "used to" make people, even if they no longer do. So there you go, a useful trick just for reading the patch notes carefully!
- Crash: Quirks: Some quirk combinations together with certain empire structures would cause a crash on game reload. The game tried to update the state of your empire before quirks were fully loaded, putting it in an inconsistent state. This state update now waits until quirks are ready.
- Xenotourism vs Machine Sentience: When you had both techs, sentient bots would get rather confused when asked to both rest and work at the tourist planet, preventing it from being upgraded to prosperous. Maybe they didn't like the classist implications. In any case, the xenotourism planets now have new upgrade rules that should make the final prosperous upgrade possible in these cases.
- Monoliths: Monoliths would accept energy and then proceed to do absolutely nothing with it. They no longer accept it.

This update brings the version numbers up to v1.2(b929) on Windows and v1.2(b930) on Mac.