Winter Survival News

[h2]New & Improvements[/h2]

• The Combat System has been reworked to offer a smoother and more dynamic experience when fighting using a spear. We also tweaked a lot of the damage values to be in-line with all these changes (see Balance section).
  
  • Block has been added to combat allowing you to block attacks and mitigate damage. Blocking drains stamina. By default, hold the Right Mouse Button to block.
    
  • With the addition of Block, the Throw mechanic has been tweaked, too. Use the V key to change to throwing and charge the throw with the Left Mouse Button as before. If you don’t like V as the key to do so, please remap it to a key of your liking in the Options.
    
  • We got rid of the disorienting animation when impaling.
    
  • Impaling can now stun a target and the stunned state is now shown with a new Stunned marker on the animal. Dealing damage to the animal interrupts the stun.
    
  • Wolves regained the ability to make the player bleed with a bite attack!
    
  • 15% change to apply a bleed effect with bite attack and 10% with knockdown on Survivalist difficulty.
    
  • 10% change to apply a bleed effect with bite attack and 5% with knockdown on Explorer difficulty.
    

• Trolley has seen various improvements. Apart from various smaller fixes and tweaks, we reworked the Trolley Switches and Levers. You now need a lever in order to activate a rail switch. Your previous switch settings have been reset with this update. Don’t worry though, you’ll find the levers close to the corresponding switch. The switches also have new visuals and they now show the direction they have been switched to.
  
  • Trolley Torch Holder Upgrade - we added an additional upgrade to the Trolley, now you’ll have a source of light to ride through tunnels and in the night without the need to drain batteries on your flashlight..
    
  • Trolley Storage Chest - another upgrade for the Trolley allowing you to have a mobile storage with 600 storage capacity.
    
  • Both upgrades are available in the Trolley Upgrade station in Endless mode upon reaching Adaptation level 25.
    
• Compass and Compass Markers - now you can use compass markers to navigate around the environment. In Endless mode you can find the compass hidden in the environment, but in Story mode you’ll get it along with your other equipment in the backpack. Recipes for Compass Marker are available on Adaptation level 10 in Endless mode and immediately after finding the Compass in the Story.
  Wooden and Stone Markers can be crafted, so no matter where you are, the necessary resources should be easily available. Interact with the crafted and placed Compass Markers to select icons and colors that will indicate this location on your compass and make your navigation easier.
  
• Foxes - we added a new inhabitant to the Fox Glade which is the area in Endless that you can find behind a Trolley Gate. It may be hard to hunt it with a spear, but try to use the newly added Fox Snack to lure it into a trap. The Fox Snack is craftable on Adaptation level 9 in Endless mode.
  
• Added a schematic for a small Spear Holder and plugged it into the ending of False Dawn quest as well as first pickup of the item. Just in case you somehow manage to lose your basic spear holder.
  
• Added a schematic for a Stone Basket to the Adaptation System at Level 14 in Endless mode. As the name suggests, it allows you to store stones like the branch holders allow you to store branches.
  
• Empty alcohol bottles, wild flowers, broken boar tusks, leaky cans, old needles and rabbit feet made stackable.
  
• Improved the movement of the deer so it gets stuck less often in various world objects.
  
  

[h2]Balance[/h2]

• Removed some Pete's Meat/Marko’s Beans on Trolley Station near the Hot Springs in the Story Act I area and the ruined house next to the bridge in the Story Act I area.
  
• Changed Rabbit’s rear detection distance to 750 (from 400).
  
• Changed Boar's rear detection distance to 700 (from 400).
  
• Changed Wolf's rear detection distance to 900 (from 400).
  
• Changed Deer’s rear detection distance to 1000 (from 400).
  
• Added wolf damage multiplier (120%) to the Survivalist difficulty.
  
• Adjusted the base damage on the Wolf’s bite from 5 to 10.
  
• Tweaked damage values for spears to better fit the new changes to combat. Please keep in mind that melee and thrown attacks offer a damage range and the actual damage depends on how much you charged that attacks.
  
  Sharpened Softwood Stick:
  Melee attack: 6-12
  Throw: 6-12
  Impale: 18
  Stone Tipped Spear:
  Melee attack: 10-18
  Throw: 10-18
  Impale: 22
  Bone Tipped Spear:
  Melee attack: 14-26
  Throw: 14-26
  Impale: 30
  

[h2]Bugfixes[/h2]

• Removed white border visual bug that was visible on some small icons.
  
• Added collision for the top part of Trolley.
  
• Fixed a bug with the amount of spears in Spear Holder.
  
• Fixed a bug with spears hitting Hiding Bushes.
  
• Fixed an issue with wrong camera position in spear animation states when camera sway is disabled.
  
• Fixed the issue with input loss after getting hit by an animal while having inventory open.
  
• Fixed a bug with Trolley not aligning to the terrain on slopes.
  
• Fixed a bug with text not fitting in the booklet [Polish version only].
  
• Fixed a visual bug with recipes not aligning properly.
  
• Fixed Movable Box sound loop after release during movement.
  
• Fixed a bug with filtering the skill section.
  
• Fixed a bug causing the camera to clipp through the cave near the waterfall.
  
• Fixed a bug with the bush cut event triggering during wolf attack and not ending afterwards.
  
• Fixed a bug with Mike’s model appearing after loading a save game near the exit of the Wolf’s Cave.
  
• Fixed a bug with the disappearing Adaptation System widget.
  
• Fixed a bug with displaying incorrect amount of items in tooltips.
  
• Fixed a bug with RRI death not fitting into the screen in some languages.
  
• Fixed a non-depleted battery having the icon of a depleted battery.
  
• Fixed volume on Bear attack.
  
• Fixed Walkie-Talkie sound on begin play when loading "Backpack" save.
  
• Increased volume on some problematic Voice Overs.
  

[h2]Visuals[/h2]

• Implemented hit reactions for Rabbits.
  
• Added new meshes for deer and boar hides, both raw and dried versions.
  
• New grass coloring in various locations.
  
• Changed mesh for Broken Bridge near Gate.
  
• Added Mining Company flag to mark important locations in the environment.
  
• Now the cargo in the Cargo Drop event is dropped by an actual helicopter instead of just an invisible plane.
  
• Fixed a visual bug with aligning icons in the talent tree.
  
• Multiple adjustments and fixes to the visuals of various surfaces.
  

There will not be an update for the weekend today as we are working on larger updates for the end of next week and the following week. And we’d like to take a moment to give you a preview of the things that you can expect in terms of game updates over the next few weeks:

Combat Rework
We have reworked the combat system quite significantly. The aim was to make combat smoother and slightly more dynamic. A good example is impaling with the spear. While it made some sense for your character to fall on his butt when impaling a wolf, the recovery time and looking sideways while falling turned out to be rather disorienting.
We have thus reworked combat starting with the spear as it is currently the primary weapon. It is much smoother now, we added block, made tweaks to throwing and also stats.
Axe will be next. We never intended for the axe to be a weapon as such, but will now lean more in that direction.

Trolley
Trolley is intended to take on a more important part of the game in the future, to become the basis of a mobile base. Apart of more fixes and tweaks, we are adding new functionality and mechanics to the trolley. Storage is one such thing so you can have mobile storage. We are even adding a holder for a torch to the trolley so you don’t have to relay on batteries when it gets dark (that’s why we increased torch duration in update #5).
There is also a mechanics coming where your trolley might suffer damage or break, along with new items to loot in order to perform the necessary repairs.

Side Quests
Side quests are coming to the game and will either lead you to explore some special places or add new smaller locations. The idea is also for side quests to provide some unique rewards.
Side Quests will be available both in Story and Endless Mode.

Survival Adventure
Speaking of Endless mode, we will rename it to Survival Adventure since the name Endless was a really bad choice. We also make it the first selection and Story the second one. In the future (after Story Act II) we will be adding more scenarios to this mode to have more interesting choices than Sickness and House scenarios. The idea here is to add scenarios that introduce players to different ways to survive and play the game.

New Animals
We know we need a better variety when it comes to animals and we will be adding new ones, starting with foxes and mountain goats. While some will not have any special behaviours, some others will be more complex. Case in point the fox. It will react to wolves in the vicinity and the fox will be different when hunting it. You can’t trap it by placing a trap and put some bait in it. It’s a cunning animal and it will steal the bait. You will however be able to attract it with a special bait in your hand and for example place a trap in front of you.

Those are the highlights of what’s coming next week and the week after. Some smaller things not explicitly mentioned above build upon the changes to combat, so we can't release them before releasing the combat changes first. Hence the decision to roll them out later and in one update.

This hotfix should fix the issue of some players being unable to load certain saved games caused by an item that got corrupted with game update #9.

Should you still encounter the problem of not being able to load your saved game or crashing upon loading it, please send us your saved games to [email protected]
You saved games are located in the %LOCALAPPDATA%\WSS\Saved\SaveGames\Survivor\ folder.

[h2]New & Improvements[/h2]

• You can now mark your Favorite Schematic in the Crafting Tab.
  
• Added Leather Patch recipe at adaptation level 31 allowing you to repair the 4th tier of clothes.
  
• Added detailed description for ‘RRI’ in the Journal.
  
• Improved UI hints for repairing damaged clothing with repair patches.
  
• Chicken of the Forest Tea recipe is now added to the booklet when you pick up the mushroom for the first time. This change does not work retroactively, yet.
  
• Added ‘Other’ tag to the list of displayed death causes.
  
• Added a loot table to "road kill" wolves, meaning wolves killed by the trolley.
  
• Added new checkpoint and clear reset point to the “Footsteps of a Friend” quest.
  
• The path to the Overgrown Village has been reworked to make it more visible.
  

[h2]Balance[/h2]

• Stone throw damage has been reduced [from 5 to 1.33].
  
• Changed rabbit HP, so it’s still killable with single stone throw [HP from 5 to 1], but the stone not being overpowered for unintended purposes.
  
• Added the correct weight for the foundation item for the endless home scenario [0 to 8].
  
• Adjusted weight of various items:
  
  • rabbit skin [0.5 to 1]
    
  • dried rabbit skin [0.3 to 0.6]
    
  • rabbit foot [1 to 0.3]
    
  • boar skin [0.5 to 2.5]
    
  • dried boar skin [0.25 to 1.5]
    
  • broken boar tusk [1 to 0.8]
    
  • deer skin [1.5 to 4]
    
  • dried deer skin [1 to 2.5]
    
  • deer antlers [1 to 3]
    
  • broken antlers [1 to 2]
    
  • wolf skin [1 to 3]
    
  • dried wolf skin [0.5 to 2]
    
  • animal bone [0.7 to 0.9]
    
  • small animal bone [0.5 to 0.4]
    
  • fur pieces [0.5 to 0.8]
    

[h2]Bugfixes[/h2]

• Blocked possibility of starting Cold Wave with the use of keyboard shortcuts.
  
• You don’t need to click twice to close the end screen at the end of Story.
  
• Fixed a bug that could cause you get under the game world when sliding down the rope near the first hot springs.
  
• Fixed secondary interaction problem with character picking up the snow.
  
• Fixed issue with exploration music after Mike jumped off the cliff.
  

[h2]New & Improvements[/h2]

• You should now be able to track clothes durability in the Status screen.
  
• Drinking "Hot Water" will now remove "Core Coldness".
  
• You will now receive a message when trying to place a campfire on a foundation that is not supported.
  
• Added option in the menu to disable screen prompts (eg. "Not enough resources") - by default it is disabled, so screen prompts show.
  
• Mushrooms and Salt Crystals now are consistent with other gathered resources and have an interaction time rather than being instant pickup. Note: there might be some cases where old crystals / mushrooms will still appear in the same place once you had them respawned in the save game. After you pick them up again they should no longer respawn and only the new ones should exist from there on.
  
• We did a bit of work on the Trolley in Endless mode, overhauled a few systems in order to prepare the Trolley for future updates as there is quite a bit to come for our Trolley both in Endless and later in Story Act II. While you can’t see most of it in the game in this update, while reworking the states for the rail switches, these are now handled differently so their state should now save and load correctly.
  
  In Endless mode all levers have been set to always work and be unlocked from the start - for the time being. Upon release of Story Act II is released, the functionality of levers will change.
  
  Also, the pieces of destructible objects smashed up by the Trolley (like the tunnel entrance barricades) should now disappear after a while and no longer block the trolley movement if unfortunately positioned.
  

[h2]Balance[/h2]

• Cargo drop event duration has been adjusted and now lasts 50% longer, so you have more time to head out and search for the cargo drop.
  
• Adjusted weight of various items:
  
  • Cave Moss [1.0 to 0.4]
    
  • Animal Bone [1.0 to 0.7]
    
  • Small Animal Bone [1.0 to 0.5]
    
  • Fur Pieces [1.0 to 0.5]
    
  • Bone Needle [1.0 to 0.2]
    
  • Fabric [0.7 to 0.35]
    
  • Metal Wire [2.5 to 2.0]
    

[h2]Bugfixes[/h2]

• Blocked the Unstuck feature while driving a trolley, climbing a rope, pulling a box or climbing a ladder to prevent unexpected issues and unwanted behaviour.
  
• Fixed wrong mesh and name for cargo chest.
  
• Cloth Path description changed - describing that it can be used for specific subset of clothes.
  
• Pieces of destructible objects smashed up by the Trolley (like the tunnel entrance barricades) should now disappear after a while and no longer block the trolley movement if unfortunately positioned.
  

[h2]Visuals[/h2]

• Minor visual fixes along the riverbanks.
  
• Fixed a hole in Act I cave.
  
• New icons for bandage and wolf meat.